It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Kevin over at funmurphys.com has more thoughts on media, following up on his comments here. He’s got an excellent point, which in my book touches on the true value of the Internet: you can get more information faster. Context is what’s valuable, and information provides context.
This is one reason I link to conservative blogs as well as liberal blogs. The other reason is because I’ll link anywhere if I get good writing out of it.
Warren Ellis is writing a novel on the Internet. Using LiveJournal. It starts here. You also get occasional comments on LiveJournal itself:
Sometimes I think of LiveJournal as the world’s biggest technogoth community. LJ has been both lauded and derided as a space for people with black clothes and strange hair to work out their alienation and disaffection in electronic public. That hasn’t stopped it being successful, and it hasn’t stopped it being a tool for national and international networking. As a piece of “social software,” it’s not flawless, but its influence and effect has been huge.
The first thing we all do when we find out about this: we link to it. The second thing we do, those of us who have LiveJournal accounts: we add him to our friends list.
Stop and think about that one for a second. On LiveJournal, adding someone to your friends list doesn’t just mean you can read their entries easily. It also means that they’re on the list of people who can read your private entries, unless you’ve customized things a little.
At the moment, 332 people have added Warren Ellis to their friends list. He has access to the private entries of, well, most of those people. He can read them talking about things they don’t mean to show to anyone they don’t know — let alone a writer who’s always searching for new material for his perverted comic books.
In my universe, I’m going to believe that he did this on purpose, knowing full well what access he would be granted.
John Tynes claims, accurately, that Dirty Pretty Things is the “best damn film of the year.” So far, true. Stephen Frears has turned out another little gem. He paints the story using the edges of society, creating art with the conventions of the dark thriller genre. It’s not just a thriller, and it’s not just one of his social pieces; it’s an elegant braid of both.
Audrey Tautou kind of slips into the impish Amelie persona once or twice, which is a little odd for someone playing a Turkish immigrant, but it more or less works. The rest of the acting was superb. Benedict Wong was especially good, and got the best line in the movie in the best scene of the movie. Lucky guy.
I kind of want to be more descriptive, but it’d be a shame to rob anyone of the pleasure of letting the movie unfold. The setting is great, and the art direction is very evocative. There are moments, when the lead is suffering from nasty sleep deprivation, when Frears captures that feeling without falling back on the grainy filmstock and heightened contrast that’s already become a cliche.
It makes me want to go back to The Hit (mmm, Tim Roth) and watch all the Frears in order, excepting maybe the one with Julia Roberts.
Don’t let anyone tell you affirmative action is only for minorities these days. I’m thinking Bishop Caldwell is crazy like a fox — he’s picking up a fair amount of attention, which easily assists with both his stated objectives and any yearning for publicity he might feel.
There are worse ways to spend a Saturday than browsing through the Dead Media Working Notes. Don’t miss the uncategorized notes, either. I regard this as a museum of ways in which human beings have tried to touch one another; it strikes me as deeply Cronenbergian.
And what goes around, comes around.
I had an interesting discussion with Jere about the whole flash mob thing, with some random musing on dada. I wound up saying:
I’m not sure that there’s not a paradox inherent in the concept. The need to draw in a lot of people conflicts with the need to keep the details under wraps. Once People Magazine does a story on it (which will be next week, I understand), it’s no longer mysterious.
Another effect of cheap communication. But you can’t know until you try, so it’s worth trying to see what happens. Failed experiments are still useful.
Regarding spontaneity, I think we had some in Boston. In the absence of specific instructions, I triggered the Happy Birthday whistle on the spur of the moment, and the crowd was willing to pick it up. Someone else (not an organizer) triggered the applause.
That was what was fun for me. The crowd knew it was supposed to do something, but didn’t know what. Supersaturated solution. It was clear from moment one that the surprise and delight aspect wasn’t going to be so strong. But it was interesting getting the crowd to come together on something that wasn’t preplanned.
In the more general sense, I think it’s healthy for the media to be reminded that sometimes fads grow and fade without their help. The phenomenon indicates that the media isn’t the only vector of information anymore.
Which is probably not the final story, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
Pictures of last night’s flash mob are here (mmm, lots of cops), here (mmm, lots of media), and here.
I forgot to mention that the Coop had a bunch of copies of Smart Mobs piled up at one of the registers. Lucky guess on someone’s part.
Tonight was the first Boston flash mob. (The mailing list isn’t hard to find, but I think I won’t link to it; email me if you want to know.) It went OK. I showed up and got instructions around 6:50, and hit the designated spot at the designated time. People were kind of quiet, as per instructions, but not really. Then someone hushed the crowd, and the crowd obeyed. Cool.
A minute passed.
I started whistling Happy Birthday, since we were all there to buy a card for Bill. People picked it up.
I made as if to sing a bit of Happy Birthday, but a woman caught my eye and shook her head. I stopped. We whistled a few more bars of the song.
She caught my eye again and mimed clapping. I nodded back at her. We got the applause started; the entire mob caught it.
We stopped, and the crowd dispersed.
Good mob. Needs more interesting things to do; this one was really a repeat of the rug mob from NYC without quite as much focus. But it’s a nice start.
Larry Niven, you were right.
Kill Bill is just gonna be a big huge sprawling mess. Hopefully in a good way. Over three hours! Tarantino goes wild! Man, the guy doesn’t have any self-restraint as it is.
But I’m gonna see it. I’m even looking forward to it. His lack of self-restraint has led to some amazing things, so what the hell? I’ll think of it as his big unrestrained double album rock opera and see how it sounds.
Last Sunday, I sauntered on down to the Boston Common movie theater, conveniently located on beautiful Boston Common, to see a movie. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see Terminator 3, Pirates of the Caribbean, or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (that last being an outside chance of a choice), but I was in the mood for phat action. As the kids say.
So as I walk into the theater, some woman is trying to give away a Pirates ticket for the show that starts in ten minutes. I say that’s an omen, accept it with good grace, and head up to the theater. On my way out after the show, I note that I can easily catch the next showing of T3 if I’m willing to wait 45 minutes or so, and I had my Game Boy with me, so that was that.
Nothing like an unusually inexpensive double feature. The only problem is that I keep finding myself thinking what an excellently unusual Terminator Johnny Depp was, and I want to write a long essay about how Schwarzenegger is getting a bit old to play a swashbuckling pirate captain but the script did a good job of making that into an asset rather than a liability. The curse and all. And Claire Danes makes a fine a love interest with an athletic and adventurous bent. Wait, that one fits both movies. Well, you see the aftereffects.
I would recommend T3 if only they’d cast Natasha Henstridge as the new model Terminator. Kristanna Loken was so much the budget version. Other than that, good matinee. Pirates rocked just as much as everyone else says, and you don’t need me to tell you that.
I will say that Jack Davenport’s turn as the British naval officer was much more nuanced and subtle than we had any right to expect from such a part in such a movie; it’s been a long time since the boring corner of the love triangle got to play the conflict between duty and empathy. But Davenport’s a hell of an actor. Get Ultraviolet — it’s out on DVD.