I want to see this movie rather badly. Bollywood remakes Reservoir Dogs? Yeah.

Having trouble with Joyce’s Ulysses? There’s hope.

It’s up! Adventure Strips went live today with Mike Barr’s Sorcerer of Fortune — set, of course, in the city of Fortune. What a great title. Also debuting is Ted Stampyak’s Jazz Age. Comics are always free on the day they go up (but subscribe anyhow, cause it’s cheap). Check it out. Athena Voltaire debuts tomorrow. Seriously cool looking stuff.

A California company has been authorized to make the first private moon landing. I have to admit I’m a bit puzzled by this, since the last time I looked it wasn’t illegal to land on the moon. At worst it ought to be necessary to get permits for the launch; why does the U.S. government care where they’re going? And how does the rest of the world feel about the U.S. claiming the right to decide who makes Moon landings? ...

I have moved over to spamprobe for all my spam filtering needs. It’s an implementation of Paul Graham’s Bayesian spam detection algorithm, which detects spam based on word frequency analysis. It requires some training before it works well; you have to feed it a collection of a couple of hundred good messages and a couple of hundred spam messages so that it can build a table of spam words. Or, alternatively, you can train it over time and put up with false negatives and positives for a little while. But once you get those few hundred messages classified, you’re golden. ...

It looks like is getting made into a movie (original). (If I were on the ball I’d hit the extras casting session tomorrow, but time prevents.) The book is excellent and highly recommended; Dennis Lehane has a knack for writing the dark side of Boston while still caring about the city deeply. And I adore his characters. Mystic River departs from his earlier series work, probably (from his interviews) because he didn’t want to get typecast. I think it was a good choice. Kenzie and Genarro are compelling characters, but at some point they’ll get overused. Their relationship is core to the series; how many changes can he ring before it grows stale? ...

Copplestone Casting (original) has several very cool lines of miniatures — the historicals would be great for pulp action. I particularly dig the Back of Beyond (original) line, which covers Central Asia in the 1920s. Read the Web pages at the link back there; the historical information rocks.

Major geeking out, here. This is a test of my hacked up Movable Type to LiveJournal bridge. I’m using blagg (a good RSS aggregator) with an LJ plugin to do the dirty work; the hacked up part is a) a modification of the default MT RSS .91 template so that the description field includes the entire entry, and b) a modification of the LJ plugin so that it sends the entry to LJ as pre-formatted text. ...

Dave Barry, of all people, made me tear up this morning.

Landed in Boston successfully, and currently tapping away at the keys of my iBook in my brand-new apartment. Well. New to me, anyhow. Earthlink came to my aid in time of need, thus the connection. Later I expect pizza. Could be worse! Pictures of the new place may come at some later date. Updates will continue to be sporadic until I get the real network in here, mmm mmm good.