Warning. About three or four paragraphs into this entry, I give up trying to be coherent, and get somewhat stream-of-consciousness. :)

(update)
*Candi* You're right.. you completely lost coherency
*Candi* but you did it long before the 3rd or 4th paragraph :)
*Carlton* After that movie, my brain turned to mush and dribbled out my ear :)
*Candi* apparently it dribbled onto your kb :)
(oh, shush)

I just watched Starship Troopers for the second time. The first time I saw this I watched it on video, there were certain reasons I spent the whole movie distracted by what a manipulative bitch that pilot character is, and my opinion of the film was rather skewed by that observation. But now after a few years of time passing, I've been able to watch it again without such preoccupations getting in the way. On second watching, I must say I wasn't nearly as offended by evil chick. The guy she was using gets over her, so what. So here's my review, unbiased by my own emotional torments.

Boy did this movie suck.

It sucked badly.

On the suck-o-meter, it rates slightly more suckage than "bowling balls through a garden hose".

I've never spent an action movie wishing that all of the lead characters would just die. Not one of them had a single redeeming feature. I wanted to see each of them eviscerated by a CGI monster. This is a movie where the computer-generated aliens were better actors than the humans. If this is the future of the Earth, then for God's sake just let the bugs kill us all.

What really annoyed me, though, was the way that the scriptwriters had made absolutely no attempt to make the plot even vaguely believable. I know action movies require suspension of disbelief. But it's impossible to suspend disbelief in the face of a script that was obviously written by those typewriting monkeys who didn't get lucky enough to write Hamlet.

I'm told the movie is supposed to be a satire. Of what, perchance? Isn't satire supposed to make us think of something real? Sure, it has a few totally unsublte broadsides against wartime propaganda, and the difference between what is advertised, and what it's really like. That takes up all of ten minutes, and it's not exactly breaking new ground, is it?

Back to the plot. Here's an army attacking a planet. They land hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the middle of nowhere, without even bombing the place first, without knocking out any of the ground-to-air defenses. They just turn up and land. There's no supporting equipment, no air support, armoured divisions, artillery, just a bunch of guys with guns. All the soldiers run in random directions, because that seems to be their orders. "Run in random directions and shoot stuff." Hello, I love a good chaotic "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" crowd scene as much as anyone, but credit the audience with some believable context?

They're fighting these giant bugs. All the humans are carrying neat little machine guns. It takes about five people ten seconds to kill one bug, except when the script calls for one person doing it quickly, or three people holding off a whole room of the things in the time it took to kill one of them earlier. I was reminded of Split Second. There's this bit halfway through where the straight-laced cop goes completely mad (or at least as mad as Rutger Hauer's character already is) and walks through the armoury saying "We need bigger guns! We need BIG FUCKING GUNS!" I love that movie. :)

Anyway, back to Starship Troopers again. They're attacking another planet. They know they're expected. Last time they did this, all the ships waiting in orbit got blown up. So what do they do? They leave all their ships waiting in orbit again to be blown up. Believe it or not, they're all blown up. Once again, no support, no artillery, just guys with little guns that take ten minutes (give or take a plot device) to kill one bad guy.

Oh, then nasty bitch chick has this huge spike through her shoulder and is dragged around by it for five minutes. Then she gets up and runs all over the place shooting things.

As for Paul Verhoeven, I thought Robocop and Total Recall were great, but from then on... Basic Instinct sucked. I've never seen Showgirls, but I'm told it sucked. Starship Troopers sucked bowling balls through a straw. Hollow Man was a crappy horror movie wrapped in some nasty rape fantasies. Somebody make sure this guy doesn't make any more movies, please?

On a whim today, I bought Salman Rushdie's new book, Fury. I really should read real books more often, I grew up reading Science Fiction / Fantasy, and never really grew out of it. Anyway, I had to share this paragraph, for everyone who knows far too many people only through electrons.

What is the digital equivalent of lovely? he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-figures that enclose, transform, transmit, decode and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it? Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, passes undiminished through the new machines.

I took the Am I a Goth, Trendy or Alternative? test. The results will not be particularly shocking.

Goth: 30%
Trendy: 10%
Alternative: 60%

Conclusion: Angry *and* arrogant! What a combination. You have just enough knowledge of the world to really resent it properly.

It probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that I've resigned my SorceryNet O:line. Actually, I did it first, I just was too lazy to announce it. So there. The network isn't the place I volunteered for years ago, and I expend too much effort trying to bend it back into the shape it once was, when it obviously is quiet happy (or from my point of view, complacent and navel-gazing) the way it is.

I had this cool idea for a post while I was getting ready for work. I figured I wouldn't write it then because I'd be late. Now I've totally forgotten what it was going to be about.

It worries me that I just told somebody how much easier it is to clean your carpet with Photoshop's blur tool than it is to have it steam-cleaned.

I couldn't see any up there, though.

Perspectives are interesting things. If you've seen me on my webcam, you'll be used to a particular perspective of my apartment. Or at least a shot of the boxes behind my head. If you're curious, this is what it looks like from the other direction.

Read the rest of this entry…

satori:/var/log/apache# egrep '(scripts|cmd.exe|root.exe)' access.log | wc -l
  10195

That's just over a thousand hits per hour from the latest Windows NT / IIS worm. Bloody incompetent NT admins. Grrr.

Proof that I should be barred immediately from the computer section of my local bookshop, for my own good.

Read the rest of this entry…

From the XP Mailing List:

Ya know, that's what this business needs. Groupies. Forget higher salaries, or better perks, or more vacation time. Screw stock options, they're worthless anyway. Just once, I'd like to have three or four beautiful women bat their eyelashes at me and act fascinated when I talk about the cool new hack I invented. I don't need sex, I don't need personal service...I just want them to smile a lot, go "Oooh!" and actively participate in the conversation. -- Dave Storrs

If it wasn't so long, it'd make a great sig quote.

They (this particular "they" being the local council) decided that 8:30 on a Sunday morning would be a great time to inch a huge, noisy truck up my otherwise quiet back-street while swarming workers pruned the trees that line the street with chainsaws, feeding the lopped branches into the truck's built-in woodchipper.

It's nice to know that local government cares.

Since I've come under some criticism for being insensitive to the tragedies in the USA. I'd just like to mention at this point that I did donate a significant amount of money to the Red Cross relief fund some time before I posted the piece below.

I'm listening to Midnight Oil. I don't usually do this, but after a week of the world turning upside-down, it helps to reach back into something that reminds me what Australia is, or at least sometimes what I'd like it to be.

As further proof that this isn't really a journal, this is the only mention you're going to see of my burglary:

[Charles] I'm still reeling over the loss of season 1 of Buffy.
[Candi] *gasp* they took Buffy?
[Charles] They took Buffy! And Crouching Tiger, Fight Club and American Beauty
* Candi thinks.. did they take those shorts, that horrid shirt and that green hat too?
[Charles] Nope :)
[Candi] I just figured.. they stole Buffy and Bjork cd's, their bad taste is obvious and those would be likely targets too.

If you weren't my best friend, you'd be in a lot of trouble now. :P

(Something that interests me... I'd love to see a histogram of the most common "Current Moods" in posts, and how bunched they'd be at the start of the alphabet)

This might offend you.

I watched the terror of the last few days as it unfolded. I am still in shock, the enormity of what happened is too great for my mind to process, the amount of pain that so many people must be going through similarly astounds my ability to appreciate it fully. While this was happening, I was shaking as I tried to process all the horrific information that I was being bombarded with. One of the shocking images to come out of the aftermath was that of the Palestinians cheering in the street. Thousands of innocents dead, and people were cheering in the streets. I was stunned, and I had to understand what would bring people to behave like that. These were people. I wanted to know what was going on in their heads to make this happen.

As much as I dislike George W Bush, he was right about one thing. this was an act of war. But this was not a declaration of war, it's a continuation of a war that already exists. It wasn't the enemy's fault that the USA only now acknowledges the war it has been a part of for decades. As shocking as this may seem to the nation that believes it is at the centre of the universe, this is not an attack on freedom or democracy, it's an attack on America.

Early in the morning, Israeli tanks entered Jenin City and two surrounding villages, said Palestinian sources. The Red Crescent said three Palestinians were killed in Arabe village, one of them a 10-year-old girl. 24 hours after the attack on the USA

There is a war in the Middle-East. There are many wars there, and the USA is involved. They are a vital ally of Israel. They continue to enforce sanctions against Iraq. They put huge resources into Afghanistan - the CIA is among those responsible for the existance and power of the Taliban - three billion US dollars were spent building up Islamic groups in the 80's to fight the invading Soviet Union.

America's illusion has been that all these wars are "over there". They're not really involved, they're just providing aid to their allies. This is not how the other sides see it. This is a war, this has always been a war. When you are at war, you are at war with the enemy's allies. Thus, the USA is a war-time enemy, and has been for a long time. When you are fighting a war, it has always been a tactic to attack civilian targets, to sap the resolve of your enemy, to destroy their essential infrastructure, and in some cases, even to prevent far more deaths elsewhere. The "bloodless wars" that the US has been involved with in the last decade are the result of good propaganda, and the ability to choose exactly which conflicts to be involved with, and when.

Note: The fire-bombing of Tokyo, and other major Japanese cities claimed significantly more lives, just over a longer period of time.

So next time you see Palestinians cheering, try to put yourselves in the mind of a World War Two era US citizen, hearing of the bombing of Tokyo. Here was a fearful war-time enemy and finally they've been hit somewhere that hurts them, an attack that shuts their whole country down, that shows them finally to be vulnerable.

The USA is in a very lucky position geographically. Their enemies are on the other side of the world, over wide seas. They share no land-borders with any enemies, unless you count the mild distaste wafting over the border from Canada. The last serious military attack on their own soil was sixty years ago. Since WW2, they have been able to pick and choose their wars, knowing that if things get too bad, they can just pull back home to their fortress, and their citizens will still be safe. This is part of the source of US power, and the foundation of its foreign policy: "You can never lose more than what you put in" is the dream investment strategy. Other countries at war know that they are putting their citizens, innocent civilians, in the firing line. The USA only really learned today that it has been doing the same thing.

What will come of it, I don't know.

I don't do surveys.

Read the rest of this entry…

Current song playing in my head: Especially for You, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan.

Why does my brain hate me?

One of the cool things about putting pictures in an lj post is that then you can see who's looking at your journal and where from by watching the apache logs. It's so fun that I'm considering embedding a web-bug of some kind in my style.

[CharlesObservations]

Loose change annoys me.

When I come home, one of the first things I do, is take any change that's in my pockets, and empty it into a little wicker bowl that my mother gave me when I moved into my first apartment. The one and two dollar coins don't last long. The fifties usually get salvaged too. Anything smaller spends longer in the basket.

When I started this habit, the bowl would fill up, then near the end of my pay packet I'd run out of money and start having to scrounge. The change situation would self-regulate, until I got a CreditCard?, and then a real job. Now the size of the change bowl doesn't fluctuate, just the size of my PlasticDebt?.

So now, the bowl fills up. When it first filled up, I bought a plastic jar to empty it into. When the bowl filled up again, I emptied it into the plastic jar again.

The jar is now too heavy to carry conveniently, and I'm too lazy to do anything about it. I dare say it will continue to fill up until I have to buy another jar. One day, I'll have to make the effort to take it all to a charity somewhere, to make up for all the people I don't give my spare change to between the office and the train station.

CharlesMiller

Addendum: A week and a half later, the bowl and its change were stolen from my apartment. The big jar remains, however.

If something's bigger than it is, then that's how big it is

-- David Pinn, on estimating software development.

It's only when I see my journal in the context of someone else's webpage that I realise how opaque (and frankly, boring) it must be for anyone else to read this crap. There's all sorts of things I could write about here, but firstly I'm really bad at giving away anything about myself, and secondly, all these things intersect the lives of other people. If I obscured their identities, some of you would guess them, and others (even worse) would assume I was talking about them, or about someone I wasn't. Even if I could expose my own life to the world at large, what right do I have to expose anyone else's?

I spent this evening finally upgrading satori from Red Hat to Debian. Why didn't I do this years ago?