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Time is short, so just a few links to things I’ve liked on the internets lately:

• Victorians Smiling – Most old-timey pictures I’ve seen have featured folks with scowls on their faces, but these victorian pictures feature people who are smiling. I particularly like the last sequence of photos.
• Lord of the Tweets – John Scalzi recently watched the Lord of the Rings movies and live-tweeted his thoughts. Some are very amusing…
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Star Wars – Clever. Kottke adds his 7 most egregious changes to the original trilogy (i.e. the greedo shot first complaints), but he leaves out the most recent round of tomfoolery (i.e. “No. Nooooooo…”)
• What the NFL Won’t Show You – I don’t watch a lot of football, but I found this article interesting, as it pertains to a view of the field that consumers don’t actually have access to, but which would be the most clear in illustrating what’s happening in the game and how it works. (via Kottke)
• Overheard in DC: Bike Cops – The bike cop one is good, but my favorite is this one:
  

  Male and female New Jersey Devils fans at the Caps game Saturday night:

  Guy: “That’s icing.”

  Girl: “Icing? Cupcakes!”

  Heh. Brilliant.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for some Holiday horror on Sunday!

I’ll be travelling this week, so there probably won’t be an entry on Wednesday. But! Next week marks the start of the Six Weeks of Halloween, so lots of good stuff coming… For now though, enjoy some links:

• Modern Warfare 2 Player Attempting To Reach Rank 70 Without Killing Anyone: Sometimes, when looking at the video game landscape, it’s easy to see a lot of juvenile power fantasies and become embarrassed by that. For example, games that feature shooting as a primary mechanic seem to be rather dominant (at least, among the big budget stuff). However, unlike passive forms of entertainment (TV, Movies, Books, etc…), games can allow for creativity on the consumer end of things. This means that even a relatively juvenile exercise like Modern Warfare 2 can become something more interesting… but only if you work for it. For example:
  

  In two hours of playing, Glen has reached rank 5 without taking a life. Using pacifist means to earn points, Glen estimates it will take him roughly two months to be the first player to reach rank 70 with zero kills.

  Apparently, he’s up to level 21…

• Fermat’s Last Theorum: Engaging 45 minute documentary about the man who solved Fermat’s Last Theorum. As Kottke notes: ‘The film is not really about math; it’s about all of those movie trailer cliches — “one man!”, “finds the truth!”, “fights the odds!”, etc. — except that this is actually true and poignant.’
• Danish Championships in Rabbit Hopping: I don’t think my brain works anymore. This can’t be what I think it is. Can it? I need to run some diagnostics. Impressive bunnies though.
• How to Make Luke’s Lightsaber: Ridiculously thorough instructions for creating your very own lightsaber.
• Hollywood Producer Fight!: James Cameron rips on Piranha 3D and that illustrious film’s producer overreacts:
  

  What it comes down to, Jim, is – that like most things in life – size doesn’t really matter. Not everyone has the advantage of having endless amounts of money to play in their sandbox and to take ten years using other people’s money to make and market a film….like you do. Why can’t you just count your blessings? Why do you have to drop Marty Scorsese’s or Tim Burton’s names, both gentlemen who I have personally worked with, and who have enjoyed great joy and success with movies of all genres and sizes well before the advent of modern 3D? Then as now, they were like kids in a candy store recognizing, far beyond your imagination, the possibilities of storytelling and originality.

  If I were a producer, my response would have been something along the lines of: “Clearly Jim didn’t see the underwater ballet scene. Also, Avatar sucked.”

That is all for now. Again, probably no post on Wednesday (maybe something on Thursday when I get back). Also, first week of 6WH will kick off with three Italian giallo films. See you then…

Lev Grossman, geek blogger for Time magazine, reports on the plot of Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

Interesting. No mention of other planets or aliens (as originally rumored, though the above doesn’t rule that out either), but a promising plot, I guess. [via io9]

I’m going to attempt to upgrade to the new Movable Type (my blogging software) today, so things are liable to get a bit dicey around here. Or not, but let’s not jinx it. It’s the “release candidate” version of the software, meaning that it’s out of beta, but not quite the final release. In other words, it’s still in beta, but it seems stable enough that I’m going to give it a try. See you on the other side (and soon, I hope).

Update: Upgrade complete. Sorta. Some of my template tags appear to be throwing errors. If you’re reading this, then I’ve figured it out, but it’s annoying that this worked with MT3.3 and is broken now.

Again Update: It appears that the comments popup is no longer supported. Indeed, they deprecated its use a long time ago, and it’s been acting funky ever since, so now when you click on “comments” you go to the individual post page (anchored down to the comments section). To be honest, I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I’ve never gotten around to it. Anyways, I’m still putzing around with the new system. Lots of interface changes make everything seem strange again, but I’m not sure if they’re for the better or not.

Yet Another Update: Lots of breakage in the archives. I still have to switch over the comments to the new style links, and it seems that MT4 and Opera don’t play well together when it comes to the template editor, as I managed to screw up this page (should be fixed now) and some other templates (still working on them). There are a bunch of annoying bugs that only seem to affect Opera, and I’m finding it frustrating.

One More Update: All the archives should be pretty much fixed, but there might still be some issues here or there that I’m not aware of yet.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be travelling a lot. This week, I’ll be attending UPA 2007 in Austin, TX. Next week, I’ll be attending another conference in Boston (insert obligatory Road Trip joke here). I’ll have internet access, so I’ll be around, but the regularly scheduled Wednesday posts may suffer.

Anyway, in anticipation of Robot Chicken’s Star Wars special, here’s one of their previous episodes. Hilarious.

This one’s pretty good too.

I’ve been lazy about the whole Friday is List Day thing, so here are a couple lists:

Random 10:

• Tool – “Eulogy”
• Isaac Hayes – “Run Fay Run”
• Angelo Badalamenti – “Red Bats With Teeth”
• Led Zeppelin – “When the Levee Breaks”
• Fantomas – “Experiment In Terror”
• U2 – “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
• Guster – “Red Oyster Cult”
• Mr. Bungle – “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”
• Radiohead – “Bones”
• Guster – “I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today”

6 Relatively Obscure Bit Characters From 80s Movies That I Love

Can you guess what movies they’re from?

• Clarence Beeks (Hint: Has info regarding frozen concentrated orange juice)
• Enrico Pallazzo (Hint: Famous Italian opera singer)
• Alonzo Mosely (Hint: FBI Agent)
• Ed Traxler (Hint: Police Lieutenant)
• John Cocktoastin (Hint: It’s Scotch-Rumanian)
• Lazlo Hollyfeld (Hint: Lives in a closet)

You know the drill. Time is short, so a few new links to people I’ve never linked to before.

• 10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber: There’s a lot of talk about the echo chamber of bloggers, where like-minded folks only read each other, etc… I don’t especially buy it, in part because a lot of people do the stuff on Chris Pirillo’s list. I particularly like this one:
  

  Make yourself uncomfortable. I don’t do it often enough, but whenever I step outside my comfort zone – I grow. I’m an introvert at heart, and the only way I can overcome this social shortcoming is by being gregarious when my gut reaction is to retreat. When you force yourself to do something that you don’t understand, the results might be messy – but they’ll be genuine. It’s cool to swim alongside the cool kids, but it’s more cool to be in a clique of one.

  This is one of the driving forces behind why I blog, even though I probably don’t do it often enough. I’ve always sorta “blogged to learn” and I probably should be doing it more…

• The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel: I can’t think of a way to describe this. It’s, uh, strange.
• The Criterion Contraption: This blog is written by a guy who wants to watch every DVD in the Criterion Collection (pretty much the first company to load laserdiscs and DVDs up with special features). He’s pretty much going in order, and he’s up to #68 (he’s got a few hundred to go).

That’s all for now…

Opera is my favorite web browser. I started playing around with version 3.x back in the late 1990s, but at the time, Opera was not free (and I was a poor college student), so I generally used the freely distributed IE or Netscape (with the occasional pre-release version of Mozilla thrown in for fun.) At the time, I didn’t see the point of Opera – it was just another browser, and it had its own quirks that made websites render funny (because web developers never bothered to check their code in Opera, a practice that sadly persists to this day) or not work at all. The only real advantage it had was the multi-document interface (aka “tabbed browsing”), a feature that was not present in any other browser. This was great and all, but not enough to make me want to shell out 40 bucks.

In 2001 Opera released version 5. The big news here was that they had a free version of the browser (though it had these large, ugly banner ads attached), so I could download it and start using it on a more regular basis. The other important thing about version 5 was that it incorporated Mouse Gestures. This was, by far, the most important innovation in web browsing I’d ever seen in a browser, and that feature alone has kept me glued to Opera ever since. Several years have passed, the ugly ads have gone away (the full version is now freely downloadable), and many features have been added – some good (the wand, email support, and a few other things) and some not so much (the baffling Widgets). Opera has remained at the forefront of web browsing, which is pretty impressive considering it’s opponents in the web browsing realm. Anyway, last week they released version 9.2, which includes 1 new feature which I think is fantastic. It’s called speed dial, and it looks like this:

The idea is that whenever you open a new tab, they show you a list of your favorite sites (as configured by you). When combined with Mouse Gestures, this works remarkably well. It’s a simple idea, but I love it.

Opera has maintained itself as a commercial company because it has focused on bringing their lightweight browser to the mobile and embedded market. They’ve done pretty well for themselves too (they’re on a lot of phones, and they’re the browser on the Wii as well). But it’s nice to see that they’re still innovating on the desktop.

There is a bigger question here that will have to wait for some other post, and that’s whether or not Firefox is a better browser. That I haven’t switched yet pretty much tells you where I’m at on this, but I am a little conflicted. Each browser has its strengths and weaknesses, but again, this will have to wait for another post.

Roy says that Fridays are list day, but I’m not sure I believe him. I figure I should do it anyway, just in case.

Random 10 Songs

• Tool – “10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)”
• Aphex Twin – “Alberto Balsalm”
• UNKLE – “Nursery Rhyme / Breather”
• David Bowie – “Heroes”
• Eels – “Lone Wolf”
• Franz Ferdinand – “The Fallen”
• Steroid Maximus – “Chain Reaction”
• Peeping Tom (Featuring Amon Tobin) – Don’t Even Trip
• Vince Guaraldi – “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”
• Beck – “Devils Haircut”

Five Signs I’m a Geek

Aside from the obvious and overt ones.

1. Sometimes when I want to find a particular passage in a book, I wish I could just press CTRL + F and search. Alas, most books don’t have a keyboard. (In addition, I wish I could do this to podcasts.)
2. I’m so addicted to mouse gestures that I often find myself attempting to use them in other applications. (Also a sign that I’m a geek: I know what mouse gestures are.)
3. I tend to optimize my walking patterns, especially through areas I have to navigate frequently, like the parking lot at work. (Strangely, it appears that I’m not the only one).
4. The number of times I’ve seen certain movies has reached triple digits. Yes, I said movies, plural. (Bonus points to anyone who can name them. There’s at least one really obvious choice, and they’re all pretty geeky. As such, my knowledge of intricate details in said movies is also pretty geeky.)
5. I can name all of the Colonial Marines in the movie Aliens from memory (see previous bullet, bonus points nullified for this particular movie).

Ok, I guess the fouth item in the list could be classified as “obvious and overt.” Sue me.

Let’s try this again.

Random Ten:

• Faith No More – “Evidence”
• The Beta Band – “Troubles”
• Led Zeppelin – “Bring it on Home”
• The Secret Machines – “Sad and Lonely”
• Propellerheads – “Take California”
• Hotei, Tomoyasu – “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”
• Pink Floyd – “Sheep”
• Pearl Jam – “Present Tense”
• MDFMK – “Get Out of My Head”
• Audioslave – “Doesn’t Remind Me”

Video Games I’ve Played Recently:

• Hitman: Blood Money – A lot of fun for a DIAS game. Of course, you have to figure out what you’re supposed to do first, and that’s not always easy. Seriously, how am I supposed to know that I need to put a sedative in the donut box in the caterer’s van because the caterer will take the donuts to the guys in the surveilance van, who will eat the donuts, pass out, and allow me to steal one of their suits, thus allowing me to enter the guarded house without arousing suspicions. Dammit, I can’t even describe it without taking 4 lines of text! Luckily, after you complete a few missions, you make enough money to stock up on weapons and ammo, thus allowing you to bypass all the sublte trickery in favor of just killing everyone. This actually has a lot of replay value, and I actually kinda like that you can fire the game up and just pick one of your favorite scenarios.
• Half Life 2 and Half Life 2: Episode One: An excellent game, with lots of fun, action-packed sequences, but the story left me a little baffled. As it turns out, they’ve opted to continue the story with a series of “episodes,” but after playing Episode One (which came with the HL2 box I bought), I wasn’t too impressed. I got the same feeling about the storyline that I get from Lost and Heroes. The writers are just making it up as they go, with no real idea how they’re going to end the story (this Writers of Lost spoof sums up why I won’t watch that show again until I know there’s a good ending worth getting to). Anyway, storyline concerns aside, it’s still a fun game and I really enjoyed it.
• Oblivion: A very interesting game. Sorta the Grand Theft Auto of RPGs. I’m not sure I love the FPS fighting system for using swords and other close-quarters combat, but the game is a blast because of it’s open-ended structure. Freedom of movement in the world, and lots of possible side-quests make this a true time-sink. Alas, not much time to play lately, so I haven’t gotten all that far.

Movies from the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival I Definitely Want to See:

• Exiled: I’m a fan of director Johnny To’s The Mission, but his other films are hit and miss (though I’ve only seen a few, and he’s quite prolific). Even still, I’m looking forward to this one, described as Johnny To’s homage to spaghetti westerns. Asian gansters get their own category in this year’s festival (instead of being lumped into “Danger After Dark” like last year) and there are a couple of other films in the series I’d like to see as well.
• Severance: I discovered the emerging British horror scene during last year’s festival (I saw two excellent British horror films, The Descent and Evil Aliens), so I’m looking forward to this movie which is described as: BBC’s “The Office” re-imagined as a horror movie.
• In the Shadow of the Moon: I admit it, I’m a sucker for space race films and documentaries. So a documentary boasting never-before seen footage of space along with humorous first-hand commentary is right up my alley.

I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to devote to the Philly Film Festival this year, but I definitely want to see a few films, so expect some posts in early/mid April. I haven’t gone through the schedule in detail yet, but the above films jumped out at me (my initial impression is that this year isn’t as good as last year, but again, I haven’t gone through this stuff in enough detail).