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Author: Bryant

I want your

May 17, 2003
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Dylan Kidd came out of nowhere with Roger Dodger, and sometimes it shows. The pacing is off, for example. But man, I’m a sucker for the rhythms of language, and Kidd has ‘em down pat here.

The plot? New York, nightlife, a pretty amazingly cynical copywriter who has only his sense of language to be proud about. Womanizing. Said copywriter’s nephew. Lessons learned.

The acting’s good. The nephew, at sixteen, nails being a tense sixteen year old geek, right down to the expectation of dot-com riches without a college degree. Campbell Scott is very good as Roger; he gives enough to let us care about him, which is pretty crucial if you’re going to be playing an asshole. Oh, and Isabella Rosselini is so very perfect. Worth it for her alone, actually.

The pacing fails in places. It’s sort of episodic, kind of in a made for television spread it out over two nights way. Apparently some cuts and additions were made after the test screening, and I think Kidd just isn’t experienced enough to do a really great job editing post-facto. Not too bad, though, it’s just that you can see the seams.

Worthwhile. I really like this kind of jagged Neil LaBute stuff, though, so if you like your movies less cynical you might want to stay away.

WISH 47

May 16, 2003
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WISH 47 is Learning Your Lesson, as follows:

Name one lesson you learned in gaming that you will (hopefully) never have to learn again.

So mine is “Differentiate.” I had an awful problem early in my gaming career; I tended to see other people doing cool stuff and I wanted to do the same cool stuff. Self-esteem issues, probably. At one point a friend pointed out in no uncertain terms that I was stepping on her character’s schtick.

I think that I don’t do that any longer, in part because I have a fairly strong belief that I can come up with my own cool ideas. I still have a tendency to worry about toe-stepping.

Alanis is proud

May 16, 2003
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I’m not sure if this is ironic or not, but Bush’s appointees have made a strong pro-gun control statement. In Iraq, of course. Gun ownership is, for the nonce, illegal there.

“Rise up against Saddam! Then drop your weapons.” It’s aimed at looters, of course, but I find I’m still amused. Gun ownership is only a sacred right if the people who own guns agree with you, I guess.

More cheerful news: Umm Qasr was turned over to a local council the other day. Good for the Brits. They did have the advantage of working with a relatively small town. I’ve heard that they brought in actual policemen to train a local police force, which seems clever to me.

The territory is the map

May 16, 2003
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Just for reference, this map shows the proposed Texas federal districting, and this map shows the current Texas federal districting. I can see some pretty weird looking districts in the latter (check out 15, for example), but the former certainly doesn’t do any better. In fact, 15 is worse. You can’t see it at this scale, but the proposed district 15 has a mile wide strip along the bottom of the state that connects it to a little bubble of territory under district 23.

Press Enter

May 16, 2003
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Saw it, liked it. In brief:

Visually impressive. Nice to see the Wachowskis showing off their ability to do eroticism again (go see Bound). Clever enough conceptually. Fun villains. Very good car chase scene. Harold Perrineau, who is always a pleasure. Second act of a third act play, which always has problems. But good solid fun and I’m excited for the third one.

Successful project swag

May 15, 2003
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If you’re inclined that way, you may want to buy one of these Killer D’s T-shirts, which commemorate the current Texas Democrat House of Representatives walkout. (See, the last time anyone did this in Texas, they were called the Killer Bees. Get it?)

Did what, right. 50-odd Democrats just walked out of the Texas House of Representatives in order to block a redistricting bill proposed by Tom Delay, which would have gerrymandered Texas federal districts in such a way as to increase the number of Republican Congressmen from that state. By leaving, they deprive the Texas House of quorum and since Thursday is the last day to introduce new bills (edit: not the last day of the session), the redistricting bill will not get passed. (Thanks to Ginger for the correction there; she has a good piece on this too.)

This is, make no mistake, an abrogation of responsibility. Or, to put it somewhat more kindly, it’s an act of civil disobedience. It is not strictly speaking illegal — nobody’s risking jail time — although they could be returned to the House by force if they hadn’t gone to another state.

However, I believe that if we claim that every lawbreaker is in the moral wrong, we become unable to morally work against totalitarian states or tendencies. (Not that the US is one of those; it’s a statement of principle.) Civil disobedience is a valid tool of political action. So what they are doing is not clearly wrong.

They need to be willing to face the consequences, which in this case are probably failure to be re-elected. That’s how the voters can express their opinion on the matter, and in a democratic system, the voters ought to be the ultimate arbiters.

None of that speaks to the moral consistency of the Representatives in question. I don’t think they’d be doing this to protest a Democratic gerrymander, frankly. So I can’t claim they’re moral in motive, but I can claim that the effects of their actions are a net good and I can say that the voters will have the ultimate say as to whether or not they did the desired thing. In the long term, if the voters disapprove, they can elect candidates who will accept the redistricting. Or, for that matter, elect candidates who won’t redistrict like that.

(This all presumes that one buys into the democratic method. Since our winner-takes-all voting system produces unavoidable distortions of preference, best summarized by asking a devoted Democrat about Nader in 2000, the truth is that the voters can’t effectively express a preference on this issue. A pity that the Founding Fathers weren’t much on game theory, huh?)

T-shirt discovery and general information about the walkout from Burnt Orange Report, which is your source for in depth if somewhat partisan reporting about the matter.

Data baseless

May 14, 2003
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Well, that sucked. If anyone cares, I’m running MySQL 3.23.55 on OpenBSD 3.2 running on an old Mac. It is flaky — MySQL, that is. Sometimes database access just fails. This happened big time last night; I couldn’t even load my previous entry for editing. All messed up.

Whenever this gets too annoying, I try and get MySQL 4.0 running; it doesn’t ever work, for reasons that are beyond me. The compile goes OK, I can get the daemon running, but the mysql client can’t connect to it. I’d think I was using an old version of the client but the client straight out of the source tree fails too. Go figure.

This time around the trigger that inspired me to go for the upgrade was a corrupt mt_entries table. As usual, the upgrade failed, so I downgraded and managed to recover the corrupt table. But man.

Yes, this would all be much less painful if I ran RedHat on an old x86 box.