Hey! If I gave you a Gmail invite, I would like to request that you take a gander at this post from Wil Wheaton. I think it’s a good cause.
Author: Bryant
I seem to have six Gmail invites. There are no good usernames left, but if you still want one, drop me an email. Grovelling is optional.
The last week has seen a couple of interesting developments in the Tenet/Bush conflict. My predictions and thoughts about these will no doubt be as accurate as my predictions and thoughts about the Iraq war. Which is to say “semi.”
Most recently, the Pentagon broke the news that Tenet asked Rumsfeld to illegally hide a prisoner from the Red Cross. It is no accident that the Pentagon made this statement right now; it’s the first salvo in an attempt to reduce Tenet’s standing in the court of public opinion.
Second, earlier this week, the 9/11 commission put the Bush administration into a clever fork by releasing their report on Saddam/Al Qaeda links. The commission stated clearly that there were no such links, only a few days after Cheney reasserted that links existed.
This in and of itself is not really a big deal; the Bush administration can and will claim that the 9/11 commission is simply wrong. However, this puts them in a bind. After criticizing the commission’s reporting on links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, it’s going to be difficult to turn around and embrace the commission when it reports that Tenet was partially at fault for 9/11. While it’s possible to say that the commission got it right in the one instance but wrong in the other, it’s not easy, and I don’t think Bush can pull off that balancing trick right now. Tenet’s utility as a fall guy is thus reduced.
I don’t think this was deliberate on the part of the commission, by the by. It’s just a coincidence that the timing puts Bush in a fork with regard to the Tenet matter.
Six Apart took another crack at Movable Type pricing. It’s a lot simpler. For non-commercial use, you can pay $69.95 to get up to five authors and unlimited blogs, or you can pay $99.95 to get unlimited authors and unlimited blogs. They’ve also fixed most of the license issues.
For me, this license and this pricing scheme work. I’ll be upgrading sometime soonish, most likely. I expect there are still people for whom it won’t work, and I think that’s a perfectly rational decision too.
Our forty-third mashup subject is the NYC subway system — suggested, I believe, by Daniel Martin. So you know who to blame. Gentlepeople, start your blog clients.
The Chronicles of Riddick was not as good as I wanted it to be, but it was also not as bad as I feared it might be. It’s the perfect Warhammer 40K movie; there’s very little pure good in the world, the antagonists have psionic powers, and there’s lots of blood and guts. If you can’t take a guilty pleasure in spiky bitz, it’s not a good movie for you. If you can, then it’s worth the viewing.
As promised, David Twohy created a huge mythology to inform the movie. None of it is particularly explained, because the payoff needs to wait for the rest of the prospective trilogy, but you can tell there are bones beneath the musculature of the story. Sadly, the only real connection to Pitch Black is Riddick — while both movies are interested in questions of faith, I wasn’t ever really convinced they were taking place in the same universe. I kind of liked the non-supernatural universe better.
Vin Diesel is excellent. Alexa Davalos, who plays Jack from Pitch Black all grown up, is really good. Everyone else is pretty much OK.
I’m hoping this makes enough to greenlight the two sequels, but I’m kind of suspecting that it won’t.
Ginger’s last WISH is up:
Tell me your favorite war story. Why is it your favorite? What does it show about your character or the game/campaign you were playing? What does it exemplify about why you like gaming?
My answer (from Carl’s UN PEACE game) is over at 20’ by 20’ Room.
“Two equal horizontal bands of red (top) and black with a centered yellow emblem consisting of a five-pointed star within half a cogwheel crossed by a machete (in the style of a hammer and sickle).”
My personal favorite Reagan tribute is Rob’s. Whose party I will be at soon if this damned file transfer will just finish up.
Would you believe there are no perl modules to perform astrological calculations? It’s true — I can’t find a single one.
(This is a picture of me invoking the LazyWeb.)