The Oscar nominees have been announced. My reaction is, as usual, lukewarm. From the top (of the page): DiCaprio did not deserve a Best Actor nod. Jude Law might have. Bill Murray might also have, but I didn’t expect anything there — the Academy seemed unlikely to recognize his work twice in a row. You only get one quirky nomination per decade, or something. Paul Giamatti, however, is the big slight. What’s up with that? My choice would be Clint Eastwood, but if Giamatti had been nominated it’d have been a tough choice. ...

Bloodhag (original) is a Seattle speed metal band whose songs are all about science fiction authors. There are MP3s. I can’t possibly embellish on that.

As they may have told you, it is snowing pretty hard in Boston. Out of boredom, I went ahead and set up my web cam to look down on my parking lot. Pictures follow. The first one is current; the following ones go back 15 minutes per picture. If you’ve been watching as much Japanese horror as I have lately, you can join me in studying the images for signs of long-haired girls returning from beyond the grave.

Yeah, someone wrote fanfic about my RPG character. This goes in the hall of fame next to getting asked to autograph one of my books at a con, you betcha. Even if I did have to cajole Ivan into it.

Population: One is now running Movable Type 3.14. It’s almost a mathematical constant! I also upgraded MT Blacklist to match. Let me know if you see any problems.

For the interested: the Whitey’s Boyos character sheet. Comments welcome. Warning: contains language.

They’re not personal blogs. They’re not generalist blogs. Oh, hell, I read enough of ‘em — I guess they’re Historical Blogs. Thus, Bostonia (original), a lovely little series of explorations of Boston’s rich history; Old is the New New, “with a special interest in the history of technology and business in America and the world”; Cliopatria (original), a lot of smart people talking about history together; and Pillow Talk, a blogaptation of Sei Shonagon’s “Pillow Book.” ...

If you keep a blog, this is important (original). You should read it and take heed. If you use Typepad or LiveJournal, you’re covered (or will be soon). If you use Movable Type, see this post (original). If you use Blogger or Blogspot… um, I dunno, but since it’s a Google initiative and Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google, I imagine support will come pretty quickly. Now, this isn’t going to stop spammers from spitting out comments all over your blog. It will make them less likely to benefit from those comments. It would be nice to think that less benefit means less spam, but let’s be serious — the people selling the software that generates this spam aren’t going to tell their customers that it’s a worthless activity. Still, you’re cutting back on whatever money spammers are making, and that’s a good enough reason to do it in my book.

I just installed Brad Choate’s MT-DSBL plugin (original), hacked slightly so that it checks against both the Distributed Sender Blackhole List (original) and the Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor List. (Perhaps I should add SORBS (original)?) Hopefully this’ll cut down on spam. If this interferes with anyone’s commenting, please let me know. Edit: it screws up mine. Off for now. Edit: found the problem (my colo provider’s DNS is somewhat over-zealous). It’s back on.

“Whitey’s Boyos” movies and television shows include the following. There are other obvious candidates; if you haven’t seen every gangster flick Scorcese ever made, well, you’re like me because I haven’t seen Gangs of New York yet either. But you know what I mean. These, however, are the direct influences and recommendations. Mystic River: not as good as the book, but still very very good. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon were on fire. ...