The Wolf

These are amazing. The most overwrought, insane, semi-plausible haxxoring through shitty wireless printers. Great production values, reasonably well scripted. I'm always inclined to favor Slater's side in a movie, especially as a prankster/villain. ★★★★½ and I'm excited to watch more of these ads.

Their previous "The Fixer" series with Mike from Breaking Bad was awful, he can't even pronounce half the technology.

Obviously, no sane person would run a wireless printer and expect it to be safe. Also no sane person would run an immune-deficiency Windows box, HP or not, and expect it to be safe. Get a Mac, or install FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or OpenIndiana in lieu of Solaris, or if you really hate yourself, Linux (inevitable comment: "well, actually, it's GNU/Linux ahem may I show you my fedora collection"). At one time HP-UX was good, but that was a long time ago.

Liberation in Art but not in Your Stupid Life: 2112, Real Genius, TRON, and Ready Player One

In which art is not blamed for the problems of the world:

2112

A man in a controlled, music-less dystopia finds a guitar, learns to play, and feels joy. The priests of Syrinx who rule the system in the name of "average" (a la Harrison Bergeron) crush him. The ancients of rock who created the guitar return and liberate the system with a prog rock concert.

Our world could use this beauty
Just think what we might do
Listen to my music
And hear what it can do
There's something here that's as strong as life
I know that it will reach you

Don't annoy us further!
Oh, we have our work to do
Just think about the average
What use have they for you?
Another toy that helped destroy
The elder race of man
Forget about your silly whim
It doesn't fit the plan!

TRON

A game designer dude lives in exile above his arcade, robbed by evil AI & corporate suit. His ex and her dork boyfriend let him into the building, and he goes into the computer world, which the evil AI & corporate suit rule as well. The ancient soul of the machine gives the dork's program access and lets it play Breakout against the AI, and the game designer sacrifices himself, liberating the inner world, deleting the evil AI & firing the corporate suit, restoring the game designer to power in the real world.

Greetings, programs!

Real Genius

A too-young, too-uptight student works for an evil professor, but makes friends with other weirdo students and loosens up. The evil professor and the military trick the weirdos and make a death ray from their work. The ancient student in the closet emerges and the weirdos hack the death ray and turn the evil professor's house into popcorn.

All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

Ready Player One

A boy in a crapsack world, literally in a trailer home on top of trailer homes, finds solace in ancient movies and games from a book by an ancient nerd. The corporation which rules the world and the virtual world crushes him and his friends. The ancient nerd's program runs, and gives the boy power and he liberates the virtual world and the real one.

After a long silence she asked, "So what happens now?"

Just Stories

These stories, they're just stories of their time.

2112 didn't end the "Moral Majority" or censors. The PMRC of Syrinx was founded 6 years later to destroy rock 'n roll and rap; the PMRC is gone but Tipper Gore still lives and hates, and music is still censored; remember Fuck You, by CeeLo Green? You probably only heard the censored radio version "Forget You".

TRON didn't end centralized computing, AI, or thieving corporate assholes. Today EA has ruined large gaming, and Google & Amazon make AIs that will probably kill us all.

Real Genius didn't end all CIA/military weapons. Today the babykillers have unmanned drones that can fly anywhere and assassinate anyone (and any bystanders/witnesses).

Ready Player One didn't make the real Internet a "safe space". Facebook, Twitter, or Google can still track you, filter what you see, and give Nazis access to harass you.

This is not a failing of art, it exists for fun or catharsis, and to give you coping strategies. It is not a magic spell to fix everything.

So, you can do something inspired by art; make art yourself; or, if you are completely useless, just whine unreasonably about art and be held in contempt.

You'll Never Get Me Up in One of Those

I reference this comic regularly and nobody knows what I mean, and now all of you can know what I mean:

You'll never get me up in one of those
(from OMNI 1980-08)

It's so hit and miss. Sometimes there's an article or story that still blows me away. Flip flip flip past the junk. Most of the OMNI articles are rubbish, UFOs, James Lovelock's Gaia nonsense, psionics, cryptozoology, etc. I mean, I love that they serialized Stephen King's Firestarter, but it is a nonsense story about magic mental powers. And the other story in in this issue is a man finds a sarcophagus of the fictional character "Jesus", but melted because a magic sky fairy used energy beams to take him away or some such. Fuck that nonsense.

The archive.org scan is shit, so the pictorials (the Dune pictorial was hugely influential on me, long before I read the books) are hard to view, but I can search for them by title if I want a hi-res copy. The Internet's often bullshit, too, but you can always search for the good stuff, and there'd be more if people weren't such jackasses about old content.

'80s Movie Bundles on iTunes

Just saw iTunes has a bunch of $19.99 bundles. Not all the films are my thing, but the rest fill out a library well, might be worth the few extra bucks over just the "good" movies.

Last one with Angel Heart, Ran, and Manhunter (the good Red Dragon movie) at the artsy end, and fucking Kickboxer and Earth Girls are Easy at the trash end, whiplash. First Blood is not what the uneducated think of as "Rambo", it's a shithead-sheriff vs. PTSD Vietnam vet story.

  • Iconic Films of the '80s
    • Naked Gun
    • Airplane!
    • Footloose
    • Urban Cowboy
    • Clue
    • Pretty in Pink
    • Some Kind of Wonderful
    • Terms of Endearment
    • Crocodile Dundee
    • Ferris Bueller's Day Off
  • Best of the '80s
    • Big
    • Raising Arizona
    • Wall Street
    • Romancing the Stone
    • Big Trouble in Little China
    • 9 to 5
    • Commando
    • Working Girl
    • The Fly
    • The Man From Snowy River
  • Classic '80s Collection
    • Karate Kid
    • Steel Magnolias
    • Gandhi
    • Ghostbusters
    • The Natural
    • Stripes
    • Tootsie
    • The Blue Lagoon
    • Fright Night
    • School Daze
  • 10 Iconic Films of the '80s
    • Endless Love
    • Manhunter
    • Dirty Dancing
    • Earth Girls are Easy
    • Evil Dead 2
    • Drugstore Cowboy
    • Angel Heart
    • Kickboxer
    • Rambo: First Blood
    • Ran

'80s All Sunday Every Sunday Music

Oh look time has reversed itself and we are now back in the '80s! Forget about 2018, that's some dystopian Blade Runner bullshit, we'll all be long dead from nuclear war before that happens! Time to hit the mall to chat up hot chicks with big hair, and buy that new Van Halen album. Then later go see Real Genius and The Goonies, in theatre.

Sleep and dream is all I crave
I travel far across the Milky Way
'Til we meet again some other day
Where silence speaks as loud as words
And the Earth returns to what it was before

Reverse Chronology

A design note you don't notice until you do, and then it'll annoy you forever:

Timelines in chat are usually forward-chronological (oldest at top, newest at bottom). Slack, for instance. And Slack correctly puts reply trees in forward-chron order as well, same as the conversation, but then maliciously doesn't scroll the view to the bottom, or remember where you read last. Typically incompetent but well-meaning for Slack.

Timelines in blogs and microblogs are usually reverse-chronological (newest at top, oldest at bottom). This blog, or Mastodon, or Micro.blog, for instance. I have comments set in the correct order here, but many blogs default to forward-chron when showing comments; it's unreasonable to put comments above the post, but I could see that making sense for "open threads". Mastodon's standard UI and the Amaroq iPhone client both do forward-chron. Icro iPhone app for Micro.blog correctly does reverse-chron, but Manton's Mac and iPhone apps both do forward-chron.

Why does this matter? A conversation is a filtered subset of all posts. It should flow in the same order as the overall feed. If it doesn't, you get whiplash, and avoid looking at conversations. Every time you open these wrong-way conversations, you have to scroll scroll down to the part you care about: New replies.

Maybe we should just make all microblogs read like chat, forward-chron everywhere. But out of habit and experience with chat systems, I frame forward-chron as ephemeral nonsense.

And now you'll be annoyed every time you see old posts at the top of an upside-down conversation view, just like I am.

What I'm Watching: Pi

One of my favorite movies, mainly for that Clint Mansell, Orbital, Autechre, Gus Gus, etc. soundtrack. Really should just set up a CRT and VCR, find the videotape, and play it on loop like I did when I was younger (along with Hardware, The Crow, and the Tim Burton Batman movie; don't judge me, I judge myself).

"Life isn't just mathematics, Max."

What I'm Reading: Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells

Murderbot returns, looking for its origin story and some peace and quiet to watch stupid TV shows in. Along the way, it meets a transport with excess time/intelligence on its… well, no hands… and some dumb kid researchers who need security, and has to pass as something it can't even make eye contact with.

"Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well."

As I was hoping for, there's more background, several mall-like stations are explored even if Murderbot can't do a lot of social interaction. Several nice fights and "how stupid can Humans be?" bits.

Short and SUPER breezy, but exactly what I want more of.

★★★★★