Category: general

Back to bed with me.

Horrible headache. It’s the kind that feels like a tree is growing into my brain. It starts at the base of my skull on the right hand side and extends up behind my ear and right eye. There’s a dull throbbing on the right side of the back of my head. It’s so bad I feel nauseous.

I took three Advil, but they don’t seem to be kicking in. Can’t sleep like this. Going to watch some FMP? Fumoffu and hope the pain stops soon.

I fear upcoming scenes that don’t involve Malachite. Even Keith is funnier with that crazy fae around!

So I just watched the new Batman Begins trailer. Things were just dandy until the brief shot of Ra’s Al Ghul, who intoned, “Gotham must be destroyed.” I happened to dream about Ra’s Al Ghul last night, and let me tell you it was not a pleasant dream. After that, this cliche little tagline is laughable and disappointing.

Al Ghul is mad. But his madness is so much more than the madness of, say, Batman Forever‘s Riddler. The man has lived for centuries. He’s had plenty of time to perfect his madness.

It hadn’t occurred to me before that Al Ghul might not be fully developed in the film. It makes sense, though–the focal point is Bruce Wayne’s metamorphosis into Batman, after all. Maybe they don’t have enough screen time for Al Ghul’s own transformations.

Or maybe I shouldn’t base my opinion on a scary dream and a two second clip.

Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped into Marshall Junior High [in Clovis, New Mexico].

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

School Mistakes Huge Burrito for a Weapon

It was hella fun, too!

I feel like I have a better understanding of how to structure story after immersing myself in the world of Sluggy for almost three full days. I also have a better appreciation for the current storyline, which had seemed to be dragging somewhat, but upon comparison with the rest of the archives isn’t all that bad. (It’s easier when you can just click past the filler strips to get to the next installment!) So while I’ve unhappily shared Eric Burns’ growing trepidations about Pete Abrams’ possible burnout, I have to say that after plowing through all the archives, I no longer feel that Pete is slipping, or off the mark, or burned out. The only real problem I’m seeing is a lack of time to actually produce strips–the story, it seems to me, is sound.

Which is a relief. Sluggy Freelance was the first webcomic I ever read, and I hope I can continue to enjoy reading it for as long as it lasts. It’s looking like I don’t have anything to worry about.

There’s an interesting post on Global Voices Online called Brainstorming for a more global conversation. Global Voices was at BlogNashville (which just wrapped yesterday), trying to get its message of world awareness out to more people. The session had the following question as one of its main foci:

Why don’t American bloggers link very much to bloggers around the world? People in the room suggested there are 2 main reasons: One reason is that they don’t know where to find the good blogs from other countries – unless Instapundit or somebody has linked to them. Another reason is that people don’t have enough context or knowledge about events going on in foreign countries to blog about them.

The Global Voices project, with our Index and Aggregator, is trying to provide a solution to the first problem. The other problem has to do with lack of context. How do you get people linking to fascinating posts on Armenian or Bahraini blogs when they have no context about the situations in Armenia and Bahrain? This is more difficult and there are no clear solutions.

A few solutions are mentioned in the post, including a fascinating “blog tours” idea, but as indicated by the title, all of this is still in the brainstorming phase.

I know that I personally feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of blogs and news sources currently in my aggregator (yet I keep subscribing to more, like Japundit and the Human Rights Watch), and I’m not even a “professional” blogger. There is just so much to take in out in the world. Tagging helps with relevancy, but not everyone is doing that yet (including myself ;_;).

I hope everyone can find a way to sort the important stuff out of the deluge–other than by simply shutting the deluge off.

Miss Em has had two neat posts worth linking recently. The first, “notes from the brand you 50 from a few years ago” (okay, I am really unclear on what that title means), is kind of a rockstar anthem for following your dreams. I personally think it’s quite inspiring.

The second, “Prep“, is a more personal discussion of class difference, and how they manifested themselves in Miss Em’s private school experience. That’s the kind of post I truly enjoy reading–more people should write them!–and I found it quite thoughtful. While I haven’t had the experience of attending an expensive private school with millionaire children, I do know what it’s like to feel apart, separate, and to admire people for what they were rather than who they were. I think that in any social system, the people who feel like outsiders are the ones who lack the confidence of the people they think are cool–regardless of what other attributes those “cool” people might possess.

It happens that money can give a person a whole hell of a lot of confidence.

In a dark corollary to the vein of the Adventures in Kyoto post I linked concerning the translation of bushido into modern Japanese life, here’s a discussion of the behavior of JR West employees after the train crash in Amagasaki that killed over 100 people. Japundit draws this depressing conclusion:

Anyone who has lived in Japan for any length of time will easily recognize the “manual” mindset of Japanese workers. Following the “manual” frees one from the need to think. Not thinking frees one from the need to accept responsibility. And there are times when I think avoiding responsibility is the overriding concern in Japanese business.

Modern harakiri usually takes the form of quitting one’s job in disgrace (though actual suicide is still a viable option). We may see a rash of these stack up soon. I’m not sure I would be as quick as Japundit to dismiss the bushido-esque devotion to one’s vocation, because good things, like innovative products and insane jumprope performances, can come from it. I would argue that the response of JR West’s employees constitutes a perversion; it doesn’t represent the standard.

But then again, I don’t live there.

The air is clearer! Which, apparently, means the atmosphere is hotter. Hooray!

I can’t even begin to imagine, let alone comprehend, the trauma these children have gone through. Via Global Voices Online:

In February 2005, Human Rights Watch sent researchers Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault to Chad to talk with refugees who’d fled from the bombings and Janjawid militia attacks in Darfur. A pediatrician, Dr. Sparrow usually gives crayons and paper to children to entertain them while she interviews their parents. When she gave crayons to children who’ve fled Darfur, the results were harrowing and powerful.

Without prompting, the children drew scenes of horse-mounted militiamen riding into villages, large airplanes dropping bombs, and gun-wielding men raping women. The children’s drawings are a visual record of the atrocities committed in Darfur that aren’t available through any other medium. Human rights workers have received extensive testimony about bombing of villages and rape as a weapon, but these drawings provide visual evidence that international media organizations have not been able to provide, as they’ve been blocked by the Sudanese government from travelling in Darfur.

Here is more information and commentary about the situation in Darfur. Here are some suggestions from Human Rights Watch of what you can do if you want to help.

From Yahoo! News:

“We heard Bush carries a nuclear suitcase and can push the red button at any time to set off atomic weapons. We find this extremely shocking,” said Leo de Groot, a spokesman for the activist group.

Well, I know I’m shocked…

Hey, I’m on the Internet, with reams of information literally at my fingertips…but I can’t be bothered to look up a name, so instead I’ll just call it “Atlanta airport”.

Simon sez, “Here’s a photo of a vending machine selling iPods that I spotted in concourse A of Atlanta airport earlier this week.”

I mean, Atlanta airport. Sheesh.

Here’s a link to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, just in case my readers are also too lazy to type “atlanta airport” into Google.

I just finished reading a Wired article about George Lucas. It’s pretty interesting!

Here’s a snippet (complete with cliched reference coopted from Alice in Wonderland by The Matrix):

But like a programmer sneaking Tolkien lines into his code, Lucas has planted stealth references to 21-87 throughout his films. The events in the student-film version of THX took place in the year 2187, and the numerical title itself was an homage. In the feature-length version, Duvall’s character makes his run from a subterranean city when he learns that the love of his life was murdered by the authorities on the date “21/87.” And in the first Star Wars, when Luke and Han Solo blast into the detention center to rescue Princess Leia, they discover that the stormtroopers are holding her as a prisoner in cell 2187.

The rabbit hole goes even deeper: One of the audio sources Lipsett sampled for 21-87 was a conversation between artificial intelligence pioneer Warren S. McCulloch and Roman Kroitor, a cinematographer who went on to develop Imax. In the face of McCulloch’s arguments that living beings are nothing but highly complex machines, Kroitor insists that there is something more: “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God.”

When asked if this was the source of “the Force,” Lucas confirms that his use of the term in Star Wars was “an echo of that phrase in 21-87.” The idea behind it, however, was universal: “Similar phrases have been used extensively by many different people for the last 13,000 years to describe the ‘life force,'” he says.

I knew Leia’s cell number, but I didn’t know it had any significance. This article is pretty neat, filling in some holes and letting us see Lucas as a person, and his life as a journey.

I imagine that most people will be shocked and offended by the idea that Star Wars “sidetracked” Lucas from his true film calling, but I can see how he might think that. There’s an interesting quote at the end of the first page:

“I’ve earned the right to just make things that I find provocative in my own way,” he says. “I’ve earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see.”

This is proof-positive that his claim that he is making the Star Wars movies for himself and not gearing them towards an audience is total BS. I think that once he found himself with an audience, he felt extreme pressure to keep that audience satisfied. I think that’s why Return of the Jedi wasn’t quite as good as its two predecessors, and why the prequels were so disappointing. Rather than telling his own story in a unique way, Lucas simply copycatted himself stylistically, for fear of losing his audience. (I don’t need to point out the irony here.) Now, looking back on the prequel stories, I can see what Lucas was trying to do. And honestly, I think he could have done it. But the fact is that he didn’t.

There is hope. Lucas has always been a pioneer. Here’s a striking image from the article:

“If you want to know what editing was like before George came along, visualize that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” says Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, which will be published this fall. “If you shot a movie like Star Wars, you had 300,000 feet of film and sound rolls that had to be code-numbered and matched by hand. If you wanted to cut the scene where Luke was doing this and Han Solo was doing that, some poor schmuck had to find those pieces so you could fit them together with tape. It was like the Library of Congress with no librarian.”

EditDroid, the digital-editing system that Lucas’ team of engineers invented in the 1980s, replaced this Sisyphean task with film scanners, a searchable archive, and a drag-and-drop interface. Sold to Avid, it has become the core of the technology used to edit most major-studio releases and nearly all prime-time TV programs today.

The list of Lucas’s achievements goes on, and then culminates with this intriguing point:

“Everything George has done has been to reduce the distance between what’s in his skull and the pixels on the screen,” Rubin observes. “He’s really a painter.”

I believe that. I believe that Lucas is very talented. And now that he’s got the Star Wars maguffin off his back (supposedly), I’m excited to see what projects he’ll undertake. How he’ll “fail” and make “really great movies that no one wants to see”.

The article veers into a discussion about how pretty much everyone who is interested in film as art is waiting for George Lucas to make the groundbreaking films he is capable of.

By the time Lucas got around to making The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, however, even longtime fans and colleagues started asking if his focus on technology had become, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end. While the original film had the scruffy vitality of a garage band making its big break, the recent episodes can seem like a whirlwind tour of Industrial Light & Magic’s interplanetary showroom.

“For me, those films pummel you into submission,” Murch says. “You say, OK, OK, there are 20,000 robots walking across the field. If you told me a 14-year-old had done them on his home computer, I would get very excited, but if you tell me it’s George Lucas – with all of the resources available to him – I know it’s amazing, but I don’t feel it’s amazing. I think if George were here and we could wrestle him onto the carpet, he’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ve gotten into that box, and now I want to get out of that box.'”

It concludes with–I’m not joking–the horribly cheesy line, “Lucas, trust your feelings.”

:>

All in all, the article’s fun. If the author is a bit too idealistic and hero-worshipping, treating Lucas like a god who’s simply lost his way, well, then, so am I. No harm, no foul.

There’s a list of Lucas’s film influences at the end of the article, as well as a link to a Q&A. All interesting stuff.

(I guess some people are freaking out about Lucas’s comments in the Q&A about Fahrenheit 9/11. And BoingBoing is freaking out about that. So, in other words, it’s just another day here on the Intarweb. Personally, I like Lucas’s take: “History is fiction, but people seem to think otherwise.”)

As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a new blog by Justin Klein called Adventures in Kyoto. (You also may have noticed that I have a separate “Japan Blogs” section in my blogroll now. I decided to stop denying the truth.)

Today he’s got a cool post up called Bushido and Jump-Rope, and I wanted to spotlight it. It’s got nice pictures and interesting commentary on the way the Japanese strive for excellence. It’s also got the following picture caption, which cracked me up:

You want to look as hardcore as this guy? Just follow my step-by-step instructions: 1) Get a friend to kick you in the balls. 2) That is all.

This actually brings me to a comment about his site design, which I think is unique and clever, but also somewhat problematic. In Bloglines, the pictures come in full-size, and the captions appear beneath them as hyperlinks. This must be how they are rendered in the HTML. But the site’s stylesheet shrinks the images into thumbnails and hides the captions until you mouseover the thumbnail, at which point the image expands to fit the window (or until it is at full size, I assume. My monitor isn’t quite big enough to check), and the caption appears. I think this is really, really cool. However, something in the way this is accomplished causes the caption to only be given one viewable line, and, unfortunately, that hilarious caption is too long. I wouldn’t have been able to read it if I hadn’t been using Bloglines.

Still, the site is very cool. I like that it’s not using blog software that I’m accustomed to. And it’s got a “kanji of the day” box in the sidebar!

But back to today’s entry…it’s insightful, and I think any student of Japanese culture would be interested. If you still need a reason to check it out, he’s got a crazy jumprope video you might enjoy :>