Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Another link that deserves more attention than it might get just tossed into the linklog: Dean Emsay’s “Understanding Language” post and the associated discussion thread. As someone who’s long had an (entirely unschooled) interest in language and linguistics, much of what’s in here is absolutely fascinating.
(via Anil)
I’m not really sure when I put The Lion in Winter in my queue, nor what prompted me to do so. When I popped it in tonight, I wasn’t really sure that I was in a mood for a historical drama, either, but I figured that I’d at least give it a shot. In the end, I’m very glad I did — what a wonderful, deliciously wicked film!
It’s Christmas in England, and Henry II (Peter O’Toole) needs to name the heir to his throne. He favors younger son John (Nigel Terry), his wife Eleanor of Aquitane (Katharine Hepburn, in an Oscar-winning performance) — who he releases from imprisonment to join the family for the holiday — favors elder son Richard (Anthony Hopkins, in his first screen role), while middle son Geoffrey (John Castle) stands nearby, nearly ignored. France’s King Philip (Timothy Dalton), whose sister Alais (Jane Merrow) is to be married to the Henry’s successor — and who has become Henry’s mistress in the interim — joins the party to ensure that his interests are looked to. Everyone here is motivated purely in their own interests, however, and the gathering soon devolves into some of the most vicious scheming, plotting, and verbal backstabbing I’ve seen in quite a while.
James Goldman‘s script, adapted from his own play, is a masterpiece, full of clever wordplay and innuendo. Watching the characters tear into each other, I was reminded strongly of two more recent films that I enjoy — The Ref and War of the Roses — only where those movies carry the viciousness beyond the verbal realm and into out and out physical battles, much of the fun in The Lion in Winter is that not only are all the battles fought merely with words, but there’s no need for actual physical violence, and the tale would suffer for it if it were there.
There’s no need for a literal knife in the back when a well-sharpened tongue can cut just as deeply, and often leave a more lasting scar. The pen is mightier than the sword, indeed.
“Menofearthereaper (Concrete No Fee No Fear)” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album Two Fingers My Friends! (1995, 5:54).
I’ve just created a flickr photoset of my favorite photographs from this past year (hey, every news organization on the planet does this, I might as well join in the fun, right?).
Seventy-nine photos culled from a little over four thousand. Some have been featured on this weblog in the past, some were already on flickr, but quite a few of them are being posted publicly for the first time. I had fun picking out which ones to toss up — hopefully you enjoy looking through them.
Thanks to Flickr, I’m becoming more and more of a fan of keywords or ‘tags‘ as categorization tools. Rather than having a set number of categories or sub-categories, tags are an amazingly simple way to categorize items (such as photos on Flickr, or links on del.icio.us [which I really need to look more closely at]) just by tossing whatever descriptive terms you want into the tag field.
What I want now is a way to use tags in my Movable Type installation rather than categories. I have no idea if this is even possible with the current plugin scheme, or if it would take a lot of lower-level source code hacking (seems like it might…I’m guessing you’d need to disable MT’s category system, replace it with the tag system, remove the Category drop-down menu from the MT interface and replace it with a field for inputting tags, incorporate a tag search feature, etc.), but I’d love to see it. Even better would be if enabling the tag system in MT would automatically create a dynamically-generated tags page similar to Flickr‘s, with the top X (50? 100? 150? User-definable?) tags displayed using variable sizes, and a link to a full tag list.
Okay, I want to rip off Flickr’s entire tag system and use it on my MT blog. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? ;)
Of course, I can’t code a “hello world” application (well, maybe in BASIC, but not in anything more complex than that), let alone tackle a project like this. But I can dream.
Barring some kind soul figuring out how to shoehorn such a thing into MT, though, do any of the current weblogging tools support tag-based categorization? I’m not entirely sure if that one feature would be enough to tempt me away from MT, but it’s obviously bouncing around my brain enough to make me ask…
Addendum: Just before posting this, I looked at the ‘Keywords’ field in the MT interface. Hmmm. Maybe all we need is a plugin to parse and interact with the keyword field that’s already there? Damn, I wish I knew more about programming…. Ideas, anyone?
Later tonight I may see what resources I can find to toss this idea into the wider MT community and see if some bigger brains than mine feel like poking around with this.
Update: Ben Hammersly is doing something similar, only rather than being an internal categorization system, it uses keywords to link to del.icio.us tags. Not quite what I’m thinking.
A comment there led me to this directory — which might be close to what I’m thinking of, though as the documentation is little more than “put it in your plugins directory”, it’s a little hard to tell what it would actually do.
No solutions yet, but apparently others have at least started looking this direction, so there’s hope…
Update: Another piece of the puzzle, and this from someone who pokes their head in here from time to time: Dan has PHP code for a weighted keyword list. Now, if those could be linked into some sort of category-like listing…
The actual story itself is mildly amusing, but what really made me laugh was that when I read the summary on Fark — “Mouse causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver’s pants” — I actually read it as “Moose causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver’s pants”.
Big pants. Or tiny moose. Either way, wouldn’t the antlers get rather uncomfortable?
“This One-Eyed Man is King” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 5:12).
Via Mike Whybark: New Earth Time.
Their site goes into more detail, but in brief, timezones are a pain in the butt. As the ‘net connects more and more of us in real-time, perceived distances become smaller and smaller (my Flickr contacts page, for instance, has a few people scattered across the US and others in Luxembourg, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Tunis). Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system.
This isn’t the first time something like this has been put forward, of course. Mike referenced WRLD.time, which I’d not heard of before, and I remember Swatch Internet Time. These projects always interest me, though, and I’d be thrilled if this actually caught on.
Okay, well maybe “thrilled” is a bit much, but it’d at least fall into the “really nifty” category.
The NET site provides a couple different javascript clocks, and pointers to both Windows and Mac clock applications. The Mac software they link to is an old System 9 menu bar extention, so it’s not terribly useful under OS X — but as the JavaScript clocks look fairly simple, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be terribly hard to slap together a Tiger Dashboard widget (and, should such a thing be put together, it seems to be that it would be useful to include a converter, too…). Not that I know the first thing about doing that, aside from the very theoritical basics, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be very difficult.
Then, as long as I’m daydreaming, I wonder how hard it would be to hack around and automatically compute the NET time from the post time of each entry to include that in the dateline of each post on my site…
As long as I did manage to come up with working recordable DVDs, I decided to finally follow through with a project I’d had in mind for a while now. Sometime last year I found a repository of videos from Nine Inch Nails, including the uncensored version of “Closer” and the infamous Broken short film. Most of the videos have been available on VHS for a while now, but the DVD version hasn’t been released yet, so I decided to play with iDVD.
I’ve not really poked around with either iDVD or iMovie in the past, as I don’t have any sort of video input other than my iSight. Home movies aren’t exactly something I’m playing with at the moment, in other words. Still, it was really easy to put this project together: opened iDVD, chose an appropriate background theme, tossed in the videos, added background music from iTunes for the different menus, and burn. Nice and easy, and now I’ve got my own DVD of Nine Inch Nails videos — and even when they are officially released on DVD, I’d lay good money down that the collection won’t include the Broken short film, so I’ve got that, too.
“Closer to God” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Closer to God (1994, 5:05).
According to the Seattle P-I:
As you’re clearing those wine bottles and beer cans from last night, don’t throw them out with the rest of the trash if you live in Seattle. Starting today, recyclables cannot be placed in garbage containers under a new city ordinance.
Good to know, and I’m all for that. Unfortunately, my apartment building doesn’t offer anything in the way of recycling collection bins — all we have is a big trash dumpster in the parking lot that everything goes into. So what are we supposed to do (barring manually hauling our recycling to a collection center — not only do I have no clue where one might be, that’s a little impractical without transportation other than the bus and my feet).
In theory, according to Apple’s promotional literature, iPhoto is supposed to be able to handle up to 25,000 photographs in its library without a hiccup. I’d love to know what kind of hardware they were testing that on, because I’ve got around 7,000 photographs in my iPhoto library and it quite frequently brings my 2.0Ghz G5 to a standstill, if iPhoto doesn’t crash out entirely.
Annoying.
So, part of last weekend’s running around was picking up a small spindle of recordable DVDs so that I could back up the older photos and pull them out of my iPhoto library. Prairie and I hit Best Buy and found a spindle of fifteen recordable DVDs for about ten dollars.
Yesterday, I grabbed all my photos up through 2003 (only about 2.5Gb out of the 4.7Gb available) and told iPhoto to burn the DVD. It asked for a blank disc, I put one in…and it popped it right back out and asked again for a blank disc. “That’s odd,” I thought, and put the disc back in. This time iPhoto went ahead and started chugging away, and I didn’t think more of it.
Until iPhoto finished burning, and the disc never mounted on the desktop. I started trying to figure out what was going wrong, and then some small part of my brain kicked in. “Wait a second…aren’t there a couple different DVD formats?” Sure enough, I’d picked up a spindle of DVD+R discs, and the Superdrive in my G5 uses DVD-R discs. Crud.
I’m just glad the discs weren’t terribly expensive, and I’ll just chalk it up as a learning experience. Thanks to an Office Depot just a few blocks away from my apartment, I now have a spindle of 25 DVD-R discs (for only \$9.99, too — the sale goes through Jan. 8th, and that’s a pretty good deal, as their spindles of 50 DVD-Rs are priced at \$40), all my photos up through 2003 are successfully burned onto one disc, and most of 2004 (Jan-Nov is all that would fit on one DVD) is merrily burning away in the background as I type this.
Boo to the industry for having two competing and incompatible formats, though, especially so similarly named (one is “DVD ‘plus’ R(ecordable)”, and one is “DVD ‘dash’ R(ecordable)”, I guess, though it could just as easily be read as “DVD ‘minus’ R(ecordable)”, which is even more confusing). If I hadn’t had some vague memory of reading about the different formats at some point in the past, I’d probably just have assumed that there was something wrong with my computer or the Superdrive, and been a lot more frustrated and aggravated than necessary.
“I Sit on Acid ’96” by Lords of Acid from the album Lust (1996, 4:31).
A little morbid, but it’s just how my mind works at times.
When all’s said and done, is someone going to have to roll back the World Population Counter by however many hundreds of thousands of people died in the tsunamis and their aftereffects?
“Collapsing New People” by Fad Gadget from the album Pop and Wave Vol. 1 (1984, 4:06).