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My random book pickup for the weekend was Colours in the Steel by K. J. Parker. It’s an elegant little book, sort of like Swordspoint without the manners aspect and a dose of Glen Cook to liven things up a bit. Bardas Loredan is a fencer-at-law, which is essentially a formalized duellist, who has to save the city of Perimadeia. There is a more or less unexplained system of magic, which isn’t fully understood even by the practitioners. There are horse-riding fantasy tribes. Not really a lot of novel newness. ...

I have achieved very little of the Boston Fantastic Film Festival, to my regret: two weeks of extended brutal workload at work is to blame. I was late to Infernal Affairs on Friday, late enough so that I decided to recover instead of seeing the movie — I was up late Thursday thanks to Saw. and since I didn’t leave work until 11:30 PM on Wednesday I had no reserves. I skipped Appleseed and The Bottled Fool on Saturday in hopes that I’d have some margin left today. I may have been wrong. ...

Gmail tweaks, noted for my own reference — I haven’t tested these. POP3 Gmail access Import existing mail into GMail GMail alerts in your Windows taskbar GMail as your mailto: handler

Saw was passable but not all that and a bag of chips. The setup is brilliant: Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell wake up in a dingy bathroom, chained at opposite sides of the room. They have no idea what they’re doing there. And they soon discover that one of them will need to kill the other, or horrible things will happen to his family. It’s tense as hell. Really good. But then the movie gives up the claustrophobia and tension by going into extended flashbacks that take place outside the room. By the time Danny Glover has shown himself to be an incredibly inept cop, I’d more or less given up on the whole thing. ...

Air America has arrived in Boston (1200 AM and 1430 AM), so like the liberal sheep I am I’ve been listening to it for the last few days. Conclusions: it’s exactly the same as right-wing talk radio, except the bias leans differently. This is probably what the Democratic Party needs; it’s not really what I want, but c’est la vie. When I say exactly, by the by, I mean exactly — down to the ads, which are the same mix of adverts for herbal nostrums, local merchants, and political paraphernalia you get on right-wing talk radio. I suspect Air America will prove to be completely financially viable.

My schedule for the BFFF appears to be something like this: Thursday, 10/14 Saw (9:30) Good buzz on this. (Buzzsaw. Heh.) It’s a low budget horror flick starring Cary Elwes with a claustrophobic one-room setup — the gimmick is a serial killer who always convinces his victims to kill themselves. I was hoping this would drift through Boston sometime. Friday, 10/15 Infernal Affairs (7:30) The hot Hong Kong police thriller of the moment. The premise: both the mob and the cops planted an undercover agent in the opposite ranks. Fifteen years later, violence ensues. This series replaced the Young and Dangerous movies as the top Hong Kong action series, which is kind of unsurprising since they share the same director. I liked Young and Dangerous a lot and I’m gonna like this too. It’s currently being remade by Martin Scorsese with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio; the remake is set in Boston and centers on the Irish mob rather than the triads. You can feel the Boston mob movie trend juggernaut gaining steam, can’t you? ...

I still have a lot of respect for Pat Tillman, and I think that Jake Plummer ought to be able to honor him by wearing a patch on his helmet for as long as he wants. Off Wing Opinion has more (original). (I think this is a general principle — if Tom Brady wants to wear a patch honoring his grandmother, he ought to be able to do so — but one crack in the wall at a time.)

As always, one of the most fascinating things about the Internet is all the little subcommunities that spring up here and there. My latest discovery is Pyroto Mountain (original), which is a fascinating little web game unlike anything else I’ve seen. The framework is an escalating series of trivia questions, but it’s way more complex than that. You start at level 0. It’s really easy to work up to level 6, but then when you try to answer another question you find out that you have to chat a little on the bulletin boards before you can try and climb any more. OK, so you go and post. Sometimes the game tells you that your posts are good — and sometimes it doesn’t. It has standards of spelling and punctuation. Eventually you get to go up some more. ...

Boston mob movie trend juggernaut: The Boondock Saints, Snitch, Southie, Mystic River, and The Departed. It’s a small juggernaut.

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is scheduled (original) and for a second-tier fantastic film festival, this is a very impressive lineup. My thoughts on what’s worth seeing for who will come later, but I do want to note in particular Infernal Affairs and Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. I’m also very intrigued by the Nesbit adaptation, Five Children and It, which stars Kenneth Branagh and features Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.