I sort of did a back-from-Pittsburgh linkdump on
Monday, so in lieu of a Thursday linkdump, here are a few notes on what's in my Firefox tabs at this moment...
Tanner from Highgate sent me this link to a great piece about how "true" Star Wars fans actually hate Star Wars. This piece rings extremely true to my nerdy ears. I would have described my relationship with SW as "love/hate" but this piece has convinced me it's really hate/hate...
If you run into somebody who tells you they thought the franchise was quite enjoyable, and they very-much liked the originals as well as the prequels, and even own everything on DVD, and a few of the books, these imposters are not Star Wars Fans.
Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.
The primary fulcrum for the Star Wars fan’s hate (including my own) is George Lucas, creator of Star Wars. Unlike Trekkies/Trekkers who adore Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Star Wars fans hate the father of their obsession. We hate the fact that George Lucas got it wrong from the beginning, creating incest between Luke and Leia. We hate the fact that he wrenched Return of the Jedi off of Kashyyyk and set it on Endor with those tiny, furry Hobbit bitches he called “Ewoks”, which is a syllabic anagram of Wookiee if you’re obsessed enough. We despise the entire existence of literally half of the Star Wars movies, blaming George Lucas’ greed and flawed ‘vision’ for everything.
We believe George Lucas’ ideal death time was 2:07am, 14 November, 1990.
Four Eyed Monsters is a terrific little user-generated indy feature film that was released on YouTube and is being distributed in a very web 2.0 sort of way. Watch it. Buy it from them. Support these awesome artists. It's in my Firefox tab because I'm trying to get them to come up to Vermont in October for the Vermont International Film Festival. I'm waiting to hear back from them.
Matty the Greek (eyyy) has made an iBook mod that's pretty kick ass. He's being very cagey about exactly how he did it for some weird reason, but there are some pictures of the process you can see linked from his site. I guess if you want the whole DIY scoop, you should send him an email and offer him lunch (I know he likes the chicken salad at McDonald's).
Live Free or Die Hard has a rating of 76% at Rotten Tomatoes. That's about right. I saw it last night (needed the AC) and the action set pieces are excellent and the characters are fun but... OMG the technobabble is blisteringly stupid. The whole plot hinges on a bunch of "hackers" wreaking havoc on the US data infrastructure. As with every other movie, the on-screen computer interfaces are completely ridiculous and make lots of annoying beeping & buzzing sounds (does Hollywood not realize that almost every single audience member has lots of first hand computer experience, so they know that's not what they look and sound like???). What's worse is the inane infosec talk. I'm assuming the theater last night was not filled with information security experts, but there were lots of incredulous laughs at unintentionally funny techno-jargon that was patently absurd. The on-screen "experts" even mixed up the uses of "upload" and "download." The film was about as technologically savvy as something made in 1994. Ugh. I feel like my intelligence has not been respected.
