The Secret of Roan Inish (1993)

Every once in a while we put a movie in the netflix queue for the kids.  Invariably they initially rebel, and sometimes, like with the Black Stallion, they come around and end up loving it.  Not so, here, and we finally admitted defeat 40 minutes in and did something else with the rest of the evening.  After the kids were put to bed, we finished watching.  There's a lot of film of people telling stories, and the cute little girl running around shrieking "JIMMY!", and one very cool special effect of a selkie transformation.  So, no, I can't really recommend it, and am not sure why netflix thought we'd like it.


On the other hand, the current Bad Machinery storyline (which started, I think, here, back in January) features selkies, and even though I only get a single strip at a time, I'm still engaged in the story and want to know what will happen.

For the Win; Cory Doctorow; 2010

As I mentioned on G+ earlier this week, For the Win is, at its core, Stephenson's The Diamond Age, but featuring present-day MMORPG gold farming instead of near-future nanotech.  Loosely, both books are about educating and organizing people, but The Diamond Age is a lot less didactic and, eerily enough, less prone to Stephensonian digressions about all the research he did in order to write the novel.  


Interestingly, Doctorow's Little Brother is also about organizing people.  That novel has a much tighter plot than either The Diamond Age or For the Win, and I think I liked it best of the three, though For the Win is the "grittiest" and perhaps most realistic in pondering the kinds of bad things that can happen in this world to good people.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)

About four years ago, I wrote to my brother, asking:

I've been meaning to see this for a while because Forest Whitaker kicks ass, but have now seen two other Jim Jarmusch films (Down by Law and, actually, am halfway through Dead Man) that did nothing for me. Is Ghost Dog good?

...and Gmail has no record of a response.  So as of earlier this month I'd been meaning to see this for about a decade.  It has always been low enough on the priority list to not get around to it, but high enough that I've never culled it from the queue.  The premise is quite promising, but what could have been Reservoir Dogs**-meets-Léon is largely a mess.  The gangsters are such overly comic caricaturish idiots that they detract from the dignity with which Ghost Dog carries himself.


So now I can whack any other Jarmusch films from the queue, and maybe I can trust the Last King of Scotland to be good?  It also looks like one of those movies where the main character is compelling, but the actual movie isn't so great.

** or pick your choice of films about semi-competent thugs in a situation they can't handle

Audiosurf

I've been playing Audiosurf semi-regularly for close to 3.5 years now, which is a long time for any game to hold your interest, and also makes it even more of an incredible bargain than I thought 3 years ago.  


It also means that I've played just about all my mp3's in that time, and because I'm me, I've recorded my scores and the highest score of other players on (just about) every song I've played.  What's useful about this is that since I've now completed a nearly full circuit of my mp3's, it can help me decide what to replay in order to maximize the number of "thrones" I hold.  For example, the spreadsheet is currently sorted so that:

1. songs where I'm not the leader show up first, then
2. songs where I didn't get the "Clean Finish" bonus (this is a 25% bonus, so getting it is a relatively easy way to boost your score), then 
3. it's finally sorted by the ratio of the "other" highest score to my high score

So, clearly I should go after "Only the Lonely" and "Gumboots" next.

Gender balance on social networking sites

Information is beautiful presents a visualization of gender balance on social networking sites.  I have to agree with the comments that it's a bad graph.  Heck a spreadsheet of the data conveys the results more clearly, which is that, overall, women account for about 52% of the traffic on social networking sites, and this is largely because of their dominant presence on facebook and twitter.  These, plus Pinterest, youtube, Google+, and badoo are the only sites of interest in terms of differences, the rest are just noise.  (this is me eyeballing the numbers; I could do some multiple comparisons tests with appropriate adjustments, but really, it's not necessary) 

More on the proposed 20-year age limit for the NBA

Lemme tell you a story about this kid who could've gone to play college ball as Steve Kerr believes everyone should, but chose instead to jump straight to the NBA, where he carried otherwise crappy teams into the playoffs for years, winning a couple of MVP awards along the way, but otherwise couldn't win a championship (causing folks to question whether he was truly great) before jumping to a loaded team in free agency**.  He won a 3rd MVP award and his first NBA championship in the same year, his 9th in the league.


Sounds a lot like LeBron James***, but I'm talking about Moses Malone.


** Okay, technically the Rockets traded him, but only after Malone had signed an offer sheet with the 76ers and the Rockets then presumably bargained for more than they'd get if Malone left via free agency.


*** If he wins that championship this year; also note, though, that the 1983 76ers w/o Malone are considerably better than the 2012 Heat w/o James.

Carnage (2011)

I'm a strong believer in the notion that a "dark comedy" should actually have humorous elements to it.  Unfortunately, there is very little about these four characters that is remotely amusing (with all apologies to Christoph Waltz, who comes off the best, but only because he has the least horrible character to play).  Thirteen minutes into the movie, we couldn't understand why Winslet and Waltz hadn't yet left, and spent the remaining hour annoyed by the devices which kept them there -- an elevator outage, while trite, would at least have been believable.


I feel like there's been a sore lack of good Jodie Foster roles lately; was her supporting role in Inside Man 6 years ago the last good one?

Steve Kerr wrote an opinion piece on why the NBA should adopt a 20-year-old age limit for Grantland**.  Even if you don't care about professional basketball, this is a textbook example of someone you'd initially think should have a good handle on the subject, but makes such an insane series of arguments that you're forced to conclude that he's blinded by his own success into thinking that the NCAA isn't a broken system.  The most amazing statement he makes is:

Why should NBA franchises assume the responsibility and financial burden of player development when, once upon a time, colleges happily assumed that role for them? 

Wow.  Just... Wow.


To be fair, maybe Kerr believes that the NCAA should cease the fiction of "amateur" college athletics, and allow athletes to be paid for playing in the same way that any other work-study student is paid for rendering services to the university, but since that's not how it was done "once upon a time" Kerr's fairy tale memory, I won't bet on it.



** Back in the dark ages, I went to ESPN.com for box scores, and then I discovered Ralph Wiley, and then Bill Simmons started writing for them; and then Wiley died.  So for lack of anything else to do when I'm done looking at box scores, I at least glance at whatever's on Grantland.