A carnival of technology

I bought a hamster. It seems like a bit of an impulse buy, especially since my sister was around when it happened, but I like hamsters and have been sort of wanting to get one for a while. I had intended to name it after a philosopher, since I’m a dork, but, since it’s a Russian something-or-other breed of hamster, I thought I should use the name of a Russian philospher. The only problem there is that I couldn’t think of any, but Dostoevsky says that all Russians are philosophers, so I just gave it a generic Russian name of Boris. There are some pictures up at http://photos.gophernet.org/.

I bought all the hamster accessories, as well, including the wheel, the water bottle with a floating duck level indicator, a car—since one in the pet store had four or five hamsters crammed into it, sleeping, and it looked adorable— some overpriced sticks, and some hamster food that looks like it was made by hippies. For some reason the person at the pet store who grabbed the hamster put on a thick leather glove to do so. He did warn that this particular breed of hamster is bitey, and it has bitten me in the process of wandering around and choosing random objects to chew, but even while it’s trying to devour my finger, it lacks the size and strength to break the skin. Maybe Petsmart just has a single pet handling policy, and they don’t care to draw a line for which pets don’t get the falcon glove.

In other news, I added an RSS feed to the site as /0/rss.xml. It appears to be completely useless, since RSS readers (aggregators? I know what aggregate means, but the Web keeps taking my favorite words and assigning them bizarre new meanings.) expect RSS files to come across with some sort of RSS or XML MIME type, and there’s not a one-to-one mapping between the more basic gopher filetype system and MIME. Enjoy!

Prepare to become obsolete

Rated R for nonstop strong violence, and for language and nudity.
Rated O by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 23 with an influence density of 2.21 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring Michael Jai White standing around a lot in a tight shirt, Bill Goldberg adding his delicate touch to the collective oeuvre of wreslters-cum-actors, and some Belgian guy.

Viewed 2005-06-16 by Susi, Mike, Dane, David, and David.

Although the idea of a third sequel to a Van Damme movie sounds like the perfect film for Golan-Globus/Cannon, it’s not a Golan-Globus movie. Van Damme came on to the scene too late for more than a couple of series starters, like Bloodsport and Cyborg, but it’s good to see that the Golan-Globus ideal of crappy action movie sequels carries on. Universal Soldier: The Return is one of those sequels.

I don’t think that any of us had seen all—or perhaps any—of the previous Universal Soldier movies, or at least we couldn’t remember them, so there were a couple of elements of this movie that, even with the unsubtle recapitulations, were left unexplained due to our ignorance. The key issue was whether or not Van Damme’s character was an undead abomination. I mean, he died in the first one, right? They talked about how he used to be a Universal Soldier, and part of that process involves being dead, so I’m not really sure how the reversal would have worked. I tried to derive the plots of the other three movies from the single sentence plot summaries on IMdb, but all I could gather from that is that Universal Soldier III appears to be the same movie as its successor.

What makes Universal Soldier: The Return a bad movie is the same thing that makes most bad action movies bad: it does a good job of shooting things and blowing things up but at the expense of a coherent story. If you don’t try to keep track of what’s going on, it might be ok. For example, in the beginning of the movie, they can’t blow up the Unisol compound after all the Universal Soldiers are taken over by the evil self-aware computer (when will people learn to stop making self-aware computers?) because it would release all kinds of biochemical weapons into the air, but at the end, after all the soldiers are alreay out anyhow, the only answer is to blow the thing up. I found this a bit confusing. I also found it confusing that no one was ever thrown into the big tanks of acid. I’ll bet that this movie wouldn’t even be on the list if only they had done something with all that acid.

In all, things blew up, which was cool, but I would not call the violence “nonstop,” nor was it always “strong.” Regardless, they should have used the MPAA rating as the tagline.

I wish that fad diets would just go away. I know that this won’t happen as long as there are fat people who want to be less fat with as little effort as possible, but it still disappoints me when I see the diet of the week mentioned on food that I buy, since I would rather that the world let me be fat in peace.

Although Atkins still pops up from time to time, the craze has mostly died out, but, from what I can tell, the South Beach diet has stepped in to take its place. I have no idea what this diet is, but it probably involves fewer carbs or no carbs or no fat or something else along those lines, and the actual details are apparently so complex that it requires the purchase of a book, thus defeating Atkins in terms of required merchandise. I do know that “South Beach” refers to Florida, and nothing good comes out of Florida. Also, I noticed today that the mustard I bought, usually content to be no more than a condiment, mentioned in a small blue circle on the front that it is “South Beach recommended,” so I guess the diet involves a lot of mustard.

Want to see a really killer website? It’s the last site you’ll ever see.

Rated R for violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language.
Given a final score of 9 with an influence density of 3.89 by CAPAlert (link)

Starring some people playing incredibly unmemorable characters.

Viewed 2005-06-09 by David, David, Susi, and Mike.

Horror movies are a bit of a peculiar genre. Most movies attempt to evoke some sort of emotional response, whether that response is sadness, laughter, or fear, but fear seems to be the most difficult of these. You only need to tell a joke to get an audience to laugh, or convince them to care about the characters to make them cry, but to make them truly scared you need to pull the audience fully into the world of the movie. The thrill of the events on the screen is lost if the viewer is not convinced on some level that those events are truly happening before his eyes. People enjoy a good scare, though, so movie producers, responding to the public’s call, have left no shortage of horror movies for both the cinema and television. As a result, many fans of this genre find that low expectations are the best route, instead enjoying the movies for the often formulaic structure, for the poor acting, for the nonsensical plot, and, if the viewer is lucky, for an occasional thrill. The Bottom 100 list has its share of horror movies, and FearDotCom is the first.

I never saw the The Ring, but, since I wasn’t living under a rock in 2002, I’m familiar with at least it’s basic outline: there’s a video tape that, if you watch it, ensures that you will die in a week, and some creepy dead girl is involved. FearDotCom was released first, yet, even though I can’t find the dates for when either movie was originally announced, FearDotCom feels like the ripoff. Instead of a video on an outdated medium that kills you in seven days, somehow involving some dead girl, FearDotCom has a website that kills you in two days, somehow involving some dead woman. I assume the website was supposed to be very hip, since it didn’t look like a website that anyone would be able to actually use: all the shots of the horribly named feardotcom.com had a full-screen animation with a low framerate, and the web browser’s interface involved typing complete sentences, oddly reminiscent of an Infocom text adventure. Whether this website was an attempt to one-up the VHS of The Ring is irrelevant, though; the point is that there’s a website, and, if you visit it, you die.

Beyond those core details I can’t say that I really knew what was going on. There was some guy who I guess was a surgeon running a snuff film website that was maybe different from feardotcomdotcom. There was some creepy ghost girl with a ball that I think was the same as the woman on the killer website. There wasn’t a whole lot of light. I think people were supposed to die of their worst fears, which means that the smoker’s worst fear was cigarettes, and the lead detective character had some issues with hookers and homeless people.

I was somewhat hoping for a Hamlet ending, since that would have at least created an interesting event for a bunch of characters I didn’t care at all about. Checking IMdb to see if the aforementioned lead detective has a name I was supposed to remember (he doesn’t), I noticed that the featured trivia is that one of the characters, Polidori, is named after the guy who wrote The Vampyre, the first English vampire story, written at the same rainy Genevan villa that brought you part of Byron’s “Mazeppa” and the more memorable Frankenstein. I have no idea what significance there is in naming a character after a Victorian physician to idle rich. Also, the name alone was not nearly enough to figure out just which character they were talking about. The description of “doctor” didn’t help, since the only doctors I remember were women and the one guy they called “The Doctor,” who IMdb says was not named Polidori. Even knowing what the actor looks like, I had to use google to find out that it was the guy who gets hit by a train in the beginning. There were no vampires in the movie.

I don’t like roller skates.

Lately, as part of my plan to get in shape or something, I’ve been concentrating on riding my bike, since it’s probably doing more for me than just walking, since it hurts more, and the temptation to just give up and watch TV is significantly lessened when I’m a couple of miles away from my means of transportation. My method so far has been to try to ride near the apartment, cars be damned, feel like I’m about to die about when I hit Windy Hill, go back home, and then take the bike to a more flat trail once I can feel my legs again. I’ve used the Big Creek Greenway in Alpharetta a few times, but today I decided to go to the Silver Comet, which is closer, longer, and somewhat hillier. One of the nice features of the Silver Comet is the dashed yellow line down the middle of the trail, which most people have the sense to interpret as a lane, so no shouting, horn blowing, or violent gesticulation is necessary for a bicycle to easily pass slower pedestrians. And that’s what brings to the people on roller skates.

Perhaps this all goes back to my childhood, to the days at that decaying roller rink in Decatur, when I was just never very good at skating. They really just seem annoying, though. On the trail, while pedestrians don’t usually require much room to get around, people on roller skates manage to take up a portion of the trail significantly larger than the width of the person. Even those who mostly kept their balance and were going in a straight line took up a full half the trail with their wild flailing and zig-zagging paths. Another thing that bugs me is that roller skates just don’t seem very creative. Sure, a bicycle is one of the four simple machines, but at least some thought went into it before it became part of the science books. Skates are just putting wheels on your feet. Everyone’s thought of that. The “inventor” or roller skates was probably just the first person who had the resources to actually build them.

First off, you should know that I own this movie on DVD. When I saw it in the theater I found it relatively entertaining, which just goes to show you how WRONG first impressions can be. I laughed myself silly this time around. I had completely forgotten about the star wipes (btw, doesn’t Lucas have a patent on those things?) It’s unecessarily long, and it’s the kind of length you feel deep down in the pit of your stomach…that queasy, uncomfortable feeling one gets when you watch a movie you know people spent millions of dollars to make and then probably drank themselves to death after it bombed.

At least shit blows up. That gives the movie an automatic 2 points, especially since these are expensive explosions. Unfortunately, the addition of a bloated John Travolta automatically deducts 5 points from ANY movie, so my final verdict is a -3/10.