Speaking of Movies I Won’t Be Seeing…

By Evan — — Culture

The trailer for 28 Weeks Later looks incredible. The movie seems all about the scrubbing-down and repopulation of London after the zombie apocalypse. From the trailer, it looks like the movie has a sophisticated take on the politics, sociology, and logistics of how this might happen. I’m really interested in seeing how they’ll do this. One of the reasons I so loved Children of Men is how they handled the setting and the sociology. Somehow it felt like a real apocalypse, not a Hollywood mockup.

Of course the problem is that 28 Weeks Later is a zombie movie, so it all goes horribly wrong and lots of people end up getting eaten by zombies. (And unless I miss my guess, I’m betting the plague spreads to America at the end of the movie, since after all, we can’t end up right back where we started.) This is all bad news for me and my pedagogical interests, because zombie movies scare the crap out of me. Also, retching in the theater is not a good way to endear oneself to the other patrons.

The next best thing is for someone to go see this movie for me and tell me what it’s like. Here I have a secret weapon: my friend Shauna, who knows more about makeup and fashion and whatnot than nearly any of my female friends — and who just a couple of years ago discovered that she loves zombie movies. She’s now seen almost every zombie flick from Night of the Living Dead on up, and she knows the zombie canon far better than I do. Or even you do. Yes you! Really.

So. I’m deploying my friend the ex-cheerleader to see this zombie movie for me because I’m too scared to go. Anyone got a problem with that? The only fly in the ointment is that I’m not sure she’ll be happy with the whole taking-a-notebook thing and the writing-a-book-report thing. Sometimes you’ve just got to call in those friendship chits.

As for the ‘River of Blood’, the Less Said, the Better

By Evan — — Culture

In what can only be described as a colossal marketing oversight, The Reaping is coming out just a little too late for Passover. From the trailer, I gather that the movie is about some poor town in a swampland (somewhere in Florida?) getting pummelled by the Ten Plagues in Full CGI. No doubt The Reaping‘s effects will blow the effects of the original Ten Commandments out of the water, although to be fair, it takes a really long time to render even a simple firestorm scene on a UNIVAC.

Much more interesting is this movie’s theological implications. God sent the Ten Plagues — the gold standard for divine wrath — in order to force the Egyptians to let the Hebrews go. So after three thousand years, the next people to be punished in this horrific manner turns out to be… some poor backwoods community in the swamps? What on earth could these folks have done? Heck, the Nazis didn’t get even so much as Frogs. The movie’s tagline says, “What Hath God Wrought?” but that’s got to be a red herring. My bet is that these new Ten Plagues turn out to actually be Satan’s fault, although that just raises more questions about what Satan is empowered to do, what Satan’s relationship with God might be, and so on. No doubt The Reaping will explore all these issues with great care and insight, in between blowing shit up.

In related news, my sister the rabbinical student moonlights as a teacher at a Jewish high school. To close out a class about Passover, she asked her students to do a short exercise: imagine what the Ten Plagues might be if translated into modern times. My sister was expecting some somber responses, perhaps derived from global warming, nuclear holocaust, prions, etc. Instead, from one group of teenage girls, she got:

  • Boils = OMG Acne!
  • Slaying of the First Born (Males) = OMG what if all the cute boys suddenly died!
  • Hailstorms = well, we’ll keep that one as-is, because OMG frizzy hair!

I think this is proof that the kids are gonna be all right. Happy Pesach!

Like the Apprentice System, But No Mentoring. Or Food.

By Evan — — Tech

Should first-time novelists be paid? (hat tip Mur Lafferty)

Wow, I’m glad my first manager didn’t have this perspective. “Congratulations, you’re hired! Of course, we have little reason to expect big returns on your first job. And hiring someone like you, from an economic perspective, is hardly worth our time. As the party who puts money into the costs of training, a cubicle, a computer, heating and lighting, and a FrameMaker license, we’re the ones who stand to lose the most. Therefore, we’ll start you out at a salary of $0 with no benefits. If things go really well, after twelve months we might revisit your contract. How does that sound, kid?”

Who out there has such poor self-esteem and business sense that they would buy this argument?

And don’t say “graduate students”, that’s not funny.

Potlatch

By Evan — — SF

Oh yeah, I forgot! I have this “web” “log” thingy.

So… Potlatch! Potlatch was great. Several other VP X alumni attended: Bart, Mac, Lucy, and Barbara. This meant I had a safety net of friends in case the other children were mean to me, although it turned out the other children were all perfectly nice. I had drinks with friends, visited Powell’s Books and VooDoo Doughnuts, even attended a panel here and there. And I saw Ursula K. LeGuin in the flesh! I didn’t go so far as to introduce myself, since I didn’t have anything to say to her other than, “I-read-Earthsea-when-I-was-9-and-I-think-you’re-awesome.” No doubt she’s heard quite enough of that.

I also ran into Janelle, who I last saw over a decade ago in college. All Saturday, I kept looking at her out of the corner of my eye, “Geez, that person looks really familiar,” while she was wondering the same thing all day as well. Janelle actually came to her first Potlatch with no safety net of friends, which makes her a heckuva lot braver than me. I also met TexAnne from Making Light, who saw the name on my badge and tapped me on the shoulder. Having a unique first name + last name is awesome. Great for email addresses, User IDs, screen names… thanks, Mom and Dad and Ancestors!

All in all, Potlatch was a great time. It was really fun to be around so many people with such a deep and rich sense of the genre and its history. I hope to come back.

We’re from the Silicon Valley, We’re Here to Help

By Evan — — Tech

Earlier this week, M’ris called me at work to let me know that there was a glitch with the big group dinner she had planned at La Bodeguita del Medio. They couldn’t take reservations for a party our size. “Oh…” I said. And then the little platters in my brain started spinning…

SELECT * FROM Restaurants WHERE Ambience LIKE ...

“No, no,” said Marissa, breaking my concentration. “I’ve found another restaurant that can seat all of us.” Later on at the dinner she told me (paraphrasing), “Even though you hadn’t said anything yet, I could tell you you were going into Helpful Bay Area Mode, and I had to stop you.”

I had always thought that the spinal reflex to leap in and start solving problems (even the ones that don’t necessarily need solving) was more of a engineering thing, or maybe just a plain old male thing. But it could be a Bay Area thing as well. It’s hard for me to see my own culture clearly, since I’ve been marinating in it for thirty years.

Coincidentally, that same night I caught the end of a roundtable discussion on the radio about the valley and solar power companies. The moderator was John Doerr, the panel included folks like T.J. Rodgers and other such big cheeses. And as you might expect, it was a virtuoso performance of valley optimism. Green power is coming! This is the first time we’ve built a new world energy infrastructure in the last 100 years! And when it comes to designing and deploying this new infrastructure, we are gonna make shitloads of money and save the planet and totally kick Europe and China’s ass in this new trillion dollar market! But if for some almost inconceivable reason they beat us, the whole world wins anyway, so let the games begin!

It was pretty awesome. So we’re gonna tech our way out of this mess. Build absurdly cheap and efficient solar panels. Reconfigure the Main Deflector Dish.

The thing about the Bay Area is that we are not only selected for efficient transmission of this virus, but we are also selected for lack of immunity. For a moment even I started thinking, yes! Of course! The World of Tomorrow will be all about this stuff! I will quit my current job right this second and join a solar power startup! And … spend seventy-five hours a week documenting silicon processing and manufacturing techniques. Hmmm. The moment passed.

But still, I couldn’t help smiling on my way home from the restaurant in my 30 MPG carbon-spewing vehicle. Being helpful. This is the Way of my People.

My Perl-Fu is Unbeatable!

By Evan — — Web

I’ve made another tweak to the comment form. Previously, my defense against comment spammers relied upon the Perl operator !. Although this stopped most spammers cold, over the last few weeks the spam has crept up from nonexistent to several a day. This is unacceptable. So after some arduous research, I have added another weapon to my arsenal: the Perl operator ne. Take that, evil spammers!

In all seriousness, adding the “Yes/No” radio button seemed the simplest-stupidest possible change I could make, right after the previous tweak (empty text field, type anything you like). I’m not sure if the radio button will work, but we’ll see over the next few days how well it holds up. According to my logs, the empty text field trick was blocking just about 98% of the comment spam. By that I mean, 98% of the requests that were actually trying to post to my real, active comment form. The standard MT comment script, mt-comments.cgi, is just getting hammered. Or it would be if it existed on this site.

So here’s hoping the radio button trick does a little better than 98%. At the very least, I like the humor value of asking the user explicitly whether he or she (or most likely, it) is a spammer. But if this doesn’t work, I’ll continue to morph the profile of my comment form until it eventually includes a CAPTCHA, a text-message challenge/response, and biometric identification submitted via snail mail. Remember to please seal those plastic bags before sending, people. Thanks.

(Or I could just use Akismet. But that’s kind of a last resort.)

I Miss Liquid Nitrogen

By Evan — — Science

Chad Orzel points to a collection of amusing science “merit badges”. In particular, Chad highlights:

The “has frozen stuff just to see what happens” badge (LEVEL III).
In which the recipient has frozen something in liquid nitrogen for
the sake of scientific curiosity.

Ah, how I miss liquid nitrogen. Back in the day, we had this thing called the Physics Circus, where we’d go out to local elementary schools and give physics demonstrations to the kids. It is amazing how enthusiastic third and fourth graders can be. If you ask a bunch of fourth graders “how do you think this worked?” you get a forest of hands shooting up, and all sorts of wonderful ideas. Of course, you have to catch them at the right age, because just a couple years later, they transform into sullen middle schoolers. But right before that, kids are amazing little scientists.

Anyway, we had a boatload of demonstrations about electricity, Newtonian mechanics (the weighted bicycle wheel in the spinny chair, that sort of thing). But the one the kids really loved was the liquid demonstration. Unlike the other demonstrations, there really wasn’t much scientific content to the liquid nitrogen segment of the show. The message was basically, “freezing things with liquid nitrogen and breaking them is really cool.”

Personally, I was less interested in breaking things with liquid nitrogen and more interested in just playing with the stuff. I used to pour a few drops on my hand and watch the droplets skitter across the surface, like water droplets on a hot stove (in fact, exactly like water droplets on a hot stove). If you were careful, you could also stick your hand directly in a dewar of liquid nitrogen. One professor I knew would pour a little liquid nitrogen in his hand, slurp it up, and shoot steam out of his nostrils. I never dared try that. He had achieved a sort of Liquid Nitrogen Zen Mastery.

Of course the best of all was the liquid nitrogen ice cream. You just get the ingredients for ice cream as if you were going to make it using a traditional ice cream machine, with the rock salt and everything. But instead of turning the crank for an hour, you just pour the ingredients in a bowl, pour in the liquid nitrogen, and stir, stir, stir. Vapor pours out of the bowl like a witches cauldron, and in less than five minutes you have smooth, creamy ice cream. The bubbling during the freezing process aerates the ice cream perfectly, and it all freezes too fast to form any ice crystals. Liquid nitrogen! It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking some up.

It’s Soup Night!

By Evan — — Personal

Tonight I’m heading over to Sam and Pat’s place. It’s one wild Friday night, let me tell you. We’ll be drinking beer and making Sam’s Famous Spicy Cabbage Soup (not to be confused with Sam’s Famous Tom Kha Gai or Sam’s Famous Chicken Marinade Which Is Definitely Not Kerrick’s Famous Chicken Marinade). Also we might play some head-to-head World of Warcraft. Or maybe even watch the director’s cut of Aliens. Perhaps we will have an extended debate about the merits of the M41A Pulse Rifle, and discuss the evil of Burke and his upturned collar — proof positive that he was an evil corporate drone… from the future! Hey man, this is Soup Night. Anything could happen!

Also, we will be celebrating the completion of Pat’s paramedic internship. Congratulations, Pat! I have to say, I’m a little jealous of Pat right now. He saves lives for a living, and he wears a cool uniform. Chicks dig that kind of stuff. Tech writers… well, we don’t have cool uniforms, although there are some tech writers out there that save lives (indirectly). Of course, there are also tech writers out there that kill people (indirectly). You won’t be surprised to learn that the latter group totally sucks at their job. Losers.

Recent Accomplishments

By Evan — — Personal

Did God create the flu to punish the wicked? Or did He just want to make sure that all his earthly servants, even the teetotallers, would understand what a crushing hangover feels like?

Woke up Saturday morning feeling awful. Feeling somewhat better Sunday and today, but not good enough to hike into work and spread around the germs. I hear the flu generally knocks people out of commission for a week, so maybe I didn’t have the flu, just a bad cold. Or maybe one helpful factor in my rapid recovery was having Mom and Dad and Little Sis swing by with chicken soup and tea and old WWII movie DVDs. If you have a Mom and Dad and Little Sis in your area, I strongly recommend you add them to your treatment regimen.

Anyway, aside from sleeping a lot, I’ve accomplished quite a bit, I think.

  • Watched the aforementioned WWII DVDs, including Guadalcanal Diary and Halls of Montezuma. Twentieth Century Fox helpfully ships each DVD with a yellow “Support Our Troops” magnet. Since I don’t own an SUV, I’ve decided to put the magnet on my refrigerator instead.

  • Read Dru‘s collection of Russian fairy tales. Maybe it’s the fever, but man, even by European folk tale standards, the Russian stuff is downright nonlinear.

  • Finished Njal’s Saga. Now the Icelandic sagas, at least, are coherent stories. They’re populated with authentic medieval people, true, but you can at least understand WTF is going on most of the time. Maybe the Icelanders didn’t have access to the same drugs the Russians had.

  • Read the entire His Dark Materials trilogy. Some of the best YA I’ve ever read.

  • Paid some bills. Despaired at the disorganized state of my office. Halfheartedly picked up some papers.

  • Fixed a broken spatula with Krazy Glue. Krazy Glue and duct tape will get you far in life.

  • Nearly sent my broken window fan back to the manufacturer. The fan had mysteriously stopped working a few months ago, and I’d been waffling about whether to toss it or get them to send a replacement under warranty. I bet they didn’t plan on anyone in this throwaway consumer culture taking them up on their “five year warranty”, ha! But then I discovered the fan was… mysteriously working again. Righteous high dudgeon faded, just as mysteriously.

  • Catalogued some recent books in Delicious Library. Looked at books that I have loaned out to other people. “Oh yeah, she’s the one who has my Feynman book. Guess I’m not seeing that one again.”

  • Dropped my 24 Hour Fitness membership — something I should have done a year and a half ago. With the corporate gym, there’s just no reason to be a member of a separate gym. Of course if you have the flu, there’s just no reason to be a member of any gym. Slim that waistline — results guaranteed!