Posts

Movable Type 3.0 won’t have subcategories, and David Raynes’ SubCategories (original) does not screw up the basic database structure, so I took the plunge and put in subcategories on this site. You can see them; they’re the indented smaller categories in the category listing on the right. If you look at the Gaming category, say, you get to see all the entries in Gaming and in the subcategories of Gaming. If you look at Game WISH, you only see the Game WISH entries. This suits my organizational nature. ...

What follows is an untested programmatic method for reducing the flame percentage of any given mailing list. I call it tree-trimming. Since I don’t know Python, I am unlikely to hack this method into Mailman, and since Majordomo is old and grey I’m unlikely to hack it into Majordomo. But one never knows. Basic Assertions/Observations A piece of email sent to a mailing list can be filtered in any way we find useful. We can block it entirely, we can send it on to the list, we can send it to a subsection of the list, or we can send it to a different list. Email is threaded; the In-Reply-To: header usually tells us what a given piece of email is responding to. Not always, but usually. ...

Belatedly: yes, Kill Bill: Volume 2 is a big fat pile of talkative fun. It is not as violence-packed as Volume 1, but it is certainly a tale of bloody revenge and the fight scenes are top-notch. Tarantino’s obsessed with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling, right? So Volume 1 is the action, and Volume 2 is a kind of weird metaflashback that goes back over all the violent impulses and actions of the first volume and explains the motivations behind them. ...

Fifty years from now, the caricatures of Islamic extremism denoted by the term “Islamofascist” is going to look about as bad as the caricature of Japanese militarism displayed in this poster (original) and this poster (original). The parallel extends in all kinds of directions, in my book.

Jay Rosen writes: I will be discussion leader for a session at BloggerCon that we are tentatively calling “What is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About it?” If you plan to attend, (see Dave Winer’s invitation) or follow along by webcast, or if you just have an interest in the subject, here are background notes, some distinctions that might usefully be drawn before discussion starts, and an initial list of questions for the group. There will be no lecture, no speeches, no panel. Dave’s philosophy at BloggerCon (and I agree with it) is that the people in the room are the panel. Keep that in mind as you read this. If you show up, you are a participant. It helps to be on the same page as others, and that’s the purpose of this post. ...

A while back I mentioned the anti-immigration attempt to take over the Sierra Club. Followup: the white supremacists lost (original). Good times.

I didn’t like Five Deadly Venoms as much as I thought I would. The kung fu was awesome, particularly the final battle, which provided a suitable climax to the movie. The DVD transfer was, again, superb. The story didn’t really grab me, though. I think in retrospect I was expecting big kung fu action with all five Venoms from the first minute, which is not what I got. Instead, I got a somewhat complex mystery, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for that. It was a pretty good mystery, and I only figured out who was who five minutes before the revelation. Also, I’ve realized that I like the big sweeping epics like Water Margin better than the close-focus kung fu flicks, on average. ...

I was irked that John Kerry wasn’t releasing his military records, but he fixed that. The difference between Bush’s definition of releasing and Kerry’s definition of releasing (original) is pretty substantial. Kerry put his military records up as PDFs on his web site, and anyone can see them. Bush showed his records to reporters and gave some of them 20 minutes to review some medical exams. In all fairness, I don’t see Kerry’s military medical records on his web site, and I think they should be there. I still believe there’s a difference between handing your records out to a small group of reporters and making them available online for anyone to see. Someone at the Kerry campaign gets the Internet.

“You wanna know what it takes to write mashups? It takes brass balls to write mashups.” Yeah, it’s all about Glengarry Glen Ross this week, and don’t you forget it. It’s a movie about desperation. It’s really brutal. It’s really good. I’m gonna mash it up. It’s not gonna be exactly work-safe.

Mention Count: 2. In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows: Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death. ...