I've been reading Al Franken's new book. It's very good, and quite amusing. Many right-wing pundits are very damaging to intelligent discourse in how cavalier they are with facts, and with how abrasive and generalizing they can be. Franken singles out the worst offenders and pretty much skewers them. The problems with Democrats and liberals is that they don't really have someone like a Hannity, a Coulter, an O'Reilly, who will try to further liberal interests without regard to how it's done (i.e. lying, slandering, using misinformation, etc). The closest we've come is Michael Moore, whom I'm actually not a huge fan of, largely because he engages in pretty much the same behavior as the right-wing talking heads (grandstanding, lying, blah blah). Franken doesn't really do that, and brings up more grounded points, a bit different from Moore's flights-of-fancy approach.

The only thing that bothers me is how unfailingly supportive he is of Clinton in the book. Yeah, Clinton did a lot to try and counter terrorism and yeah he went after Osama, very prescient now, and yeah he presided over the most expansive economy ever. But his hands are about as bloody as Bush's, if we're talking civilian death tolls. While yes, in comparison to all the presidencies bookending Clinton's he does look like a prodigy, he wasn't perfect. And I'm not talking about getting his cock sucked. If you really cared about that, then I'm sorry, but you are a fucking retard. I tried to be gentle but it didn't work, my apologies.

On that note, I really prefer Clinton's approach to letting off stress (having an affair) to Bush's (taking more time off than any president in nearly 70 years).

But in his defense (Clinton's, not Dubya's), he spent about half of his time in office hamstrung as a lame duck, so arguments could circle forever.

Yeah so check out Franken's book. 
¶ 9:16 AM

  Hi. I've had an interesting couple of days, with regards to my PC.

Yesterday a trojan horse infected my PC. This is because I had downloaded a copy of Halo for the PC, and was looking for a keygen program for same. Look, I figure, I've purchased an XBox and two copies of Halo in my days, I don't need to give Microsoft more money for the same game again.

Anyways the keygen program I got wasn't actually a keygen program. It was a trojan virus.

So anyways someone got adminstrator access to my PC and locked my access to my own registry and started changing shit. In case you are wondering, this is bad.

So I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP. I lost everything I had before and lots of tweaks and whatnot that I'd performed on my system, as well as many programs and media files and blah blah.

Sometime soon I intend to go pick up a copy of Norton Antivirus and install it. Fuck me if this is going to happen again.

I would like to meet whoever did this to me, so I can murder them with a crowbar. I was debating between a tire iron and a crowbar, but decided on a crowbar because it has that one end that is pointy.

My friend Katie is in Montana after much driving with her dog. She has really been a terrific friend over the years and I'm sad to see her go, but I wish her all the happiness on earth. She's been through a lot and deserves it. Hopefully she will come back and visit here and there so I can buy her more flautas, but if she doesn't, that's OK. She will always be my friend.

Master and Commander, that new Russell Crowe jam, is really good. I recommend it. 
¶ 3:47 AM

  Here's what the Wachowskis should have done.

The Matrix should have been two movies. Think about all the dead weight and totally unnecessary sequences that could be cut.

Drop the rave from Reloaded. Drop everything in Reloaded and Revolutions that had anything to do with the Merovingian, except maybe the train station sequence from Revolutions (which was semi-interesting and featured some of the only interesting dialouge in the film). Drop everything involving Bane (the only reason Bane is there at all is to blind Neo so we can have six fucking glowy shots of the machine city's energy. Nice effect, but worth the deadweight setup?). Drop the Seraph/Neo fight from Reloaded, which was totally just eye candy and had nothing to do with anything and lead to one of the poorest lines in the trilogy ("You don't really know someone until you fight them," something like that. Come on now, who wrote that?). Drop the Club Hell fight from Revolutions (an even stupider fight...WOW, I'm upside down, I must be harder to shoot now! Wheeeeee!). Cut Trinity's screentime in Revolutions in half (if you don't know why, you'll see if you watch the film).

OK without thinking about it too much, that's at least an hour of screentime freed up. Maybe more. There are plenty of other things that are smaller that could be edited and cut. But anyways, you then make Revolutions and Reloaded one film. Think about it. You'd have the exact same story, but without all the ballast. In one movie you would have Neo against the agents (Reloaded), Neo against Smith and friends (Reloaded), the freeway chase (Reloaded), Neo flying (Reloaded), the Zion fight (Revolutions), the Hammer flying back to Zion (Revolutions), and Neo against Smith Dragonball-Z style (Revolutions). That's a shitload of great set pieces with the exact same story. Think about it. It could have been so good. Instead we get two really shitty movies that are tolerable because sometimes, they're really pretty.

I finished Dark Tower 5. If you haven't read the Dark Tower series then you should. And if you've read The Gunslinger, Drawing of the Three, Wastelands, and Wizard and Glass, then you should now read Wolves of the Calla. My only misgiving is that it ends like Wastelands ends. With a huge cliffhanger. But then again, I won't have to wait seven years for the resolution this time. My predictions about what would happen were correct.

Sigh. Song of Susannah is out there, somewhere, finished, and I can't read it for half a year.

SvC's ROM has been ripped, for those of you still waiting to experience the joy that is this game.

Send money. 
¶ 12:16 AM

  I just got back from a screening of Matrix: Revolutions, which comes out tomorrow (technically later today, I suppose). It's around one in the morning. Mmm. I've stated before on this blog and elsewhere that I think the Matrix has a pretty dispensable plot that has the appearance of being more than it really is. The second film, Reloaded, was almost bogged down in Intro to Philosophy psychobabble and cute flippant doublespeak (What do I need to do? - Only what you need to do. That sort of thing). I think the first Matrix was a refreshing take on some old ideas and visionary in its effects. I think Reloaded has some terrific set pieces (the freeway, Neo flying, the Super Brawl) but the majority of its acting barely surpasses high school drama class level, the pacing is terrible, and a few editing choices undercut the flow of the film and the dramatic tension. I was hoping Revolutions would be closer to the first film than the second. I didn't go in expecting it to be good or bad, but I did WANT it to be good.

Well, the first half hour, about, of Revolutions does pretty much the same thing as Reloaded (a lot of talking without any actual talking, you'll see) and features more of my least favorite thing about the whole series, the Merovingian, a character who exists solely to be snooty and to seem to be saying intelligent, ponderous, vastly important things which are impenatrable because they mean jack shit. However, at some point Zion starts getting attacked while various characters race back to it in one of those hovercraft ships and it's pretty much gravy from there. The Zion attack is one of the most concentrated exhibitions of visual intensity I've ever seen in a film, stunning enough to be almost emotional. The self-important babbling in this one is mostly contained in the first quarter of the film. And the Neo vs. Smith finale was pretty fantastic, albeit much shorter than I was expecting. All the effects in the series that the Wachowski brothers have cut their teeth on really come together in this fight, and it's a nice bookend to the Neo/Smith fight that ends the first film. In most of their other scenes the tools are almost more impressive than the final product. I was more impressed with Reloaded's freeway chase being mostly real footage (rather than CG) than the actual scene itself. Not so with the final action of Revolutions - I don't care how they made Neo and Smith fly or how they got the rain to look like that or how they did bullet-time in the rain or how they did the lightning effects. I just know that it's pretty rad and the bar for superhero-style fighting has been set pretty fucking high for the upcoming Superman remake.

The acting is still overdone and the plot is ham-handed and neither Reloaded or Revolutions live up to the story set out by their predecessor. But on spectacle alone I recommend this movie. The visuals are truly an accomplishment, and what Joel Silver said about Reloaded being nothing compared to what they do in Revolutions actually ends up being pretty accurate I think. As a movie telling a story I think it fails. But movies are a visual medium and Revolutions is one of the most visually intense movies I've seen. For films as spectacle, Revolutions is what both Star Wars prequels should have been.

Anyways.

I bought Dark Tower 5 um, I guess technically yesterday. If you haven't read the Dark Tower books I think you should. They are pretty great!

I had some other stuff to talk about but I don't really remember right now. 
¶ 11:38 PM