Rock Star alter egos are growing in numbers "You're forming a fake band -- that's what you do," says Sadri, calling the game "the best part of karaoke, adding in a drummer and guitars."
The Magpie Developer Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer.
Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry. (Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that.
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood.
making vodka pills in 24 hours Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms.
Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz.
I have not been to the movies in a few months. Me and the wife usually wait for DVDs to hit netflix, but every now and then there will be a movie that I have been keeping up with for a few months (sometimes years [aka LOTR]) that I decide needs to get the full theatre experience. V for Vendetta was one of those movies. I still think that the Matrix trilogy was pretty decent film making even though the last ones got hell from people, I still enjoyed them as a movie experience. I personally had not read the graphic novel for Vendetta, but I knew the movie was going to have a large political tint to it because of what I had read about the content of the graphic novel. So I was eager to see if it was going to be overblown or just subtle innuendo. I was wrong on both accounts.
WARNING: I won't really give any spoilers to the movie here, but I will discuss certain scenes, if you don't want to hear ANYTHING about the movie, please don't read. But I am going to try not to give away too much of the storyline to anyone who has not seen the movie.
Let me start off by saying I really enjoyed the movie. It was a good movie pretty much all around in my opinion. I will have to admit that I certainly will need to see it again (and maybe a third time) to get all the jokes of the dialog. It was certainly one of the strong points of the movie for me. I enjoyed the following V's diatribes about as much as the action sequences. Seriously. It was extremely well written. Now do I think that this is the movie that people are going to walk out of the theater come to a new conclusion about where this country is headed when our Gov't wants to invade every aspect of our private lives for the sake of safety and also simultaniously figure out that our President is a colossal failure in pretty much all criteria of normal Presidential judgment? No. They won't. The movie's message, although fairly blatent at parts, still seems to exist only in a world where people are used to biological weapon attacks that kill 80k people. Like I said, I really think I need to see this movie again to catch everything and I think a lot of other people will too. It was a very fast paced movie ( not a bad thing ) and shows the progress over a period of a year in the movie.
The Political message is not that subtle, but does a fairly good job at bringing to light some of the Orwellian places that this country could be headed. A few things I really like about some of the scenes:
The (State Supported) Heavyset TV Anchor's Pill cabinet was stocked. I really enjoyed that.
V's 2 mins of V-dialog when he is introducing himself to Evie.
Portman did a really good job of acting throughout the whole movie, but I especially liked the hair chopping scenes. It actually seemed like it was rough on her.
V's sword fighting/movie watching scenes made him seem much more human.
The Hitler-esque Chancellor at the Pulpit scenes with banners vertically unfurled at his sides.
The slowmo sfx scene towards the end of the movie.
Fire/Water hand Raising Scenes.
And Finally I really enjoyed the one domino starting the chain reaction scene with the one domino left at the end. I thought it was a really good reemphasis on the circular storyline.
All in all I really enjoyed the movie and certainly will be buying it on DVD. I personally don't think it glorified Terrorism, it just gave a more intricate look at a certain terrorist's personal perspective, and how much the attacker's perspective is sometimes just as historically righteous as the victim�s perspective of non-guilt. I am eager to get my hands on the graphic novel to see how much the screenplay differed from the original writing. Do I think avg Joe's will enjoy this movie? Maybe. I think that the fight/sfx scenes will appeal to a certain audience that might not get all the nuances of the political underpinnings, but that is why Artists use Lies.
Brainstorm it:
If this post were a game of scrabble, I would make you take the phony "verbage" off the board.
