The confused morality of Star Wars

I realized midway through Rogue One that I was actually watching a terrorist hagiography, so let's talk about that. (This post should not be taken anywhere near as seriously as my other rants, but I do intend it to be more serious than the "Alderaan had it coming" mentality some corners of the internet have. I may veer into r/EmpireDidNothingWrong territory here occasionally, and I hope you will take it as inoffensively as possible.)

Some random links

Apparently liberals progressives made a big deal about Trump not having a poet at his inauguration. To which I can only suggest that perhaps Trump himself should have quoted William Shakespeare:

Tickle us, do we not laugh?
Prick us, do we not bleed?
Wrong us, shall we not throw people from helicopters?

Just trying to have a little fun here, folks. But in all seriousness, progressives don't seem to get why this happened, and I'm not holding my breath for them figuring it out by 2020.

Okay. First off... are you sitting down? Okay, good. Get this: there is going to be another Terminator film. "Oh," you're saying, "That's just the studio milking the money tree. I mean, it's not enough to just have a franchise now, there has to be a whole cinematic universe, so you can expect a spinoff starring Lance Henriksen's character from the first film within six years." Yeah, let me stop you there. James Cameron is involved. And it's being called "a reboot and a conclusion." Whatever that means.

Here is TvTropes's page on the new Justice League of America title, noting that the lineup seems to be a massive sop to Arrowverse fans. I can't help but notice this will be the third ongoing title Black Canary's in. (And I stand by my earlier analysis that this is the Dinah Laurel Lance incarnation of the character, which means she was re-integrated into comic continuity the same year her show version was killed off.)

Speaking of the Justice League, here's a Watchmen reference in Justice Leave vs. Suicide Squad #5. Given the whole bloody point of Rebirth, I have to assume this is a deliberate reference... but then, I thought the whole bloody point of Rebirth was that Watchmen is not a how-to rubric for how every comic story since 1986 must be written. So go figure.

Here's another political one: Private Manning should never have made it out of basic.

Nathan "Malcolm Reynolds" Fillion managed to bring some levity to today's events.

Here's a British (I think) guy explaining why Fallout 3 is garbage and, you know, he's not wrong. My problem with the Fallout games - well, to be specific, the Fallout 3 and 4 games - is that... look, Skyrim is basically my baseline for a Bethesda game, because it was the first Bethesda game I played. It had six factions, and you could join five of them (two of them were mutually exclusive), and you had to join zero of them to finish the game. As far as I know, 3 doesn't give you any sidequest-factions to join, and 4 requires you to join one of the three factions and wipe out the other two. It makes the world feel a lot smaller and more forced. Hell, in Skyrim, those two factions that are mutually exclusive? You don't need to join either! You can convince them to set a truce that will last until you, the player character, break it. Incidentally, here's someone who thinks that 3 offered him choices, but 4 did not. (Granted, he obviously had not gotten two-thirds of the way through the plot, but he's right about it just being a shooter.)

Here's a new trailer for Arrow 5.10, which airs Wednesday. Let's just say that Laurel, or whoever she is, does the city a public service. And here's the trailer for Legends 2.09, which airs Tuesday. No trailer for Flash because I'm not caught up yet, but that comes back Tuesday as well.

I will run for president on a single-issue platform.

"Webpages must load their actual content before they load any images or ads."

I will not run for re-election, but I'll get 60% of the vote as a write-in candidate anyway.

Well, that's sad.

Google's changed its policies, and won't allow pr0n.

Now, you may have noticed, this, despite its title, is not a pr0n blog. Still, this troubles me.

Note: We’ll still allow nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.

Oh, good. What, precisely, is an "artistic" context? See, it used to be (and will be until fairly late in March) the case that "adult content" blogs had a little warning screen, and you had to click "I am 18 and I wish to continue to this adult material page." That was good. It allowed consenting adults to see what they wanted to see, and afforded The Children more protection than, say, Tumblr does.

I can't claim to like this "artistic" qualifier. Come on, The Children know where to find the pr0n if they really want it, and adults should be able to decide what they do and do not want to see.

Will I migrate this blog to Wordpress or something? Probably not. But I'm starting to not like Google. I've been frustrated with Chrome in these last few months and will probably start using a different web browser, for all the symbolic good that does.

The Thanksgiving Rant: A re-post

My original Thanksgiving Rant is here. This is the same thing, just with the politics toned down.

How to not suck: a premier for modern bands

I have friends (I question their judgment). They try to get me interested in modern music (I continue to question their judgment). As a result I've been exposed to a lot of awful crap and would like to throw some advice out there to anyone aspiring to play three chords on a guitar and get laid.

     1) learn how to sing. 
This is critical. If you're trying to ape John Lennon's nasal whine, you should be aware that that's far and away my least favorite thing about The Beatles. I am deadly serious: I would rather listen to "Revolution 9" on repeat for eternity than "Tomorrow Never Knows" on repeat for eternity. So, please, learn how to sing.

     2) no, seriously, learn how to sing.
Some of you sorry sacks out there can't even ape John Lennon's nasal whine. If you can't carry a tune, you might be able to get away with shouting backing vocals, provided they're really easy. But for the love of God, stay away from the mic.

     3) be influenced by good classic acts.
Really anything from the Beatles to Iron Maiden to Queen to Black Sabbath to AC/DC to Pink Floyd.

     4) wear those influences on your sleeve.
I'm not going to accuse you of plagiarism: I like Led Zeppelin (mostly).

     5) learn how to sing.
The "(mostly)" comes into play when Robert Plant starts screeching, whether it's reaching for notes he can't hit or just forgetting that he's not a woman.

     6) don't clip your album all to hell.
So you can sing. And you've got at least one other bandmate with cognizable talent. Great! And you've gotten a recording contract. Super! Now, record your album at a volume that will allow your consumers to actually appreciate it.

     7) learn how to sing.

Can't stand io9's new comment feature.

Actually, can't stand io9's pretense at being apolitical, but wah wah troubling right-wing goose-stepping creeping about advancing behavior.

The comments, as redesigned probably six months ago, just don't work well. Used to be clear where the breaks were between topics.

Now... on this article the comments go from talking about The Spy Who Loved Me (starring Roger Moore) straight to a comment that says "I wish Moore would stop bitching." The Moore in the second comment being Alan, not Roger.

Change it baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

I enjoyed the Hunger Games novels, but

 I suspect I'd have enjoyed them more if the author hadn't resorted to "baby-naming." What do I mean by that? Giving things the sort of names a ten-year-old would come up with, either because they can't remember the whole word ("propos" for propaganda) or because it sounds cleverer than it is ("tracker jackers").

This is a series about teenagers murdering each other. We don't call any weapon the Huggerlove 9000, do we?

...okay, unless you're Husky.

Musings

One of the most unintentionally hilarious things I read last week was Ian Fleming describing the nuances of Rock, Paper Scissors in the opening chapter of You Only Live Twice (which is so unlike the film they could probably re-adapt it with Daniel Craig and no-one would notice, although that ship probably sailed when they screwed up Quantum of Solace).  It's a lot like how he describes the card game in Casino Royale, patiently explaining it to you like you've never heard of it before.

One of the most unintentionally hilarious things I read this week was Judge Kozinski's opinion on a case called Micro Star v. FormGen Inc. 154 F.3d 1107 (9th Cir. 1998). No, not the part where I agreed with a 9th Circuit holding, although that in and of itself is cause for a quick sanity check. Rather, his description of a video game, Duke Nukem 3D, is amusing.

"Duke Nukem 3D [is] an immensely popular (and very cool) computer game... [It] is played from the first-person perspective... Players explore a futuristic city infested with evil aliens and other hazards. The goal is to zap them before they zap you."

I don't know why he felt the need to editorialize about the game, although this is still a step up from Justice Brennan, who felt the urge to invoke Godwin's Law in a free speech case I had to read earlier this week (Elrod v. Burns).

"Zap them before they zap you."  Did he think that we'd misunderstand him if he said "kill?"

Random musings

Can't be bothered to do any sort of proper blog today.

I am rapidly becoming convinced that you can tell that a Supreme Court opinion is predicated on utter horsesh*t if:

1. It is written in a manner that makes it damn near impossible to figure out the Justice's line of "reasoning" or, even worse, what the case is actually about.
2. It is written by Justice [redacted].
3. Both of the above.

(I'm apparently not supposed to whine about either specific Justices or the Court in general, but my God, when you base your entire opinion on a reading of a prior case and the author of that prior case dissents, you are doing something wrong.) (Not that I am a huge fan of said Justice-who-wrote-said-prior-case either, given that he circled around the main point for several paragraphs without ever just bothering to outright state it.)

Course evaluations are a f*cking joke

Let me tell you a story. This literally happened in my Business Associations class.

"The statutory supplement is the only thing you're allowed to use on the exam because the statutory supplement is the only thing you'll need."

Asks accounting question worth 1/6th of the entire exam.

Did the statutory supplement include anything on accounting? Am I going to law school because I'm good at math? Hell f*cking no.

You cannot properly evaluate a class until you see what complete and utter bullshit the professor puts on an exam.

And that is why course evaluations are a joke. Because they're due before the exam.

"Oh," you say, "the little brats who think they did poorly on the exam will give the professor a bad mark." Hey guess what, genius, that's the f*cking point. Most of us are taking out crippling loans on top of our crippling loans to pay for bullshit like a bad mark because the professor outright lied about what was going to be on the exam. We're not frat boy slackers here. None of us have football scholarships. We're here so that three years hence we can be stormtroopers for The Man and drive around in expensive convertibles.

So, what's my opinion of course evaluations due before exams?

Hang on, I've got another rant for you

There are these extremely silly security features on websites that ask for your birthdate before letting you see mature content. They serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever provided you're capable of subtracting, say, 30, from the current year.

So that's stupid enough. But then some of these things aren't content to just let you type in the date, because heaven forbid you crash their servers by not understanding the MM/DD/YYYY format and trying to insist that you were born on the third of Fifteenember instead of the Ides of March. (Come to think of it, heaven forbid you use the roman dating system, where dates were determined by counting backwards from three fixed dates of the month. "Yes, Mr. Pointless Mature Content Filter, I was born Ad XVI Kal Jul, MCMLXXXVIII.")

So instead these things make you select the date from these drop-down tabs. Okay, so month, that's easy, day, you probably won't have to scroll so far, year...

Why in the hell is 2013 in the year tab right now? Or 2012? Or 2011? If your two-year-old can use a web browser, navigate to a specific website, and enter his/her date of birth, just let that kid in because by golly a few gory decapitations are the least weird thing that kid is going to encounter on his way to disproving Fermat's Theorem before he graduates from kindergarten!

Yup, I'm petty. Have we met?

I have been neglecting you

and I apologize.

Buffy reviews will continue in the near future (meaning not until Wednesday, and possibly not until Thursday), but in the meantime I have a rant.

iTunes. Why you must update? 

First of all, a disclaimer. I update iTunes approximately once a year, because every update is crappier than the last one.

Now... do you remember a time in the far-off halcyon days of 2010, when you pushed Ctrl+M to switch to the mini-player? I do. What's this three-key nonsense?  It's awkward and uncomfortable.

Oh, and once upon a time I could hit the "shuffle" button and then the number sorter, and it would show me what order the songs would play. There wasn't any of this "upcoming songs hidden in a separate list" bullcrap.

And then for the epitome of just effing stupid...

Where. The hell. Is my minimize button?

Grr. Argh.

Abbreviated rant of the day

So you're a rock band. What do you do when the face of the band dies?

Why, you get back together more than twenty years later as, essentially, an official tribute act. That's what Thin Lizzy did. Okay, fair enough, you have to eat, I get that.

What do you do when some members of the band want to record new music? Well, if you have any respect for what the band was originally, you record the new material under a new name. Hence the Black Star Riders. So far so good.

It's just that now the Thin Lizzy Facebook page is full of Black Star Riders news. What was the point of changing your name if you're still going to take advantage of the old fanbase? You're not fooling anyone here.

If you're trick-or-treating early, you had better be going as The Doctor

I had to take some books back to my local library before heading back to law school.  I figured I could do this on the way. Ha ha, silly me.  Turns out the parking lot was jam-packed with cars and sugar-high suicidal children because apparently there was a trick-or-treat thing going on in town, four days before Halloween.

See, I'm crazy and old-fashioned enough to slave myself to a linear view of time, and I tend to think that holidays should be celebrated on the day on which they fall. I know. Silly me.

Speaking of holiday dates, did you know that Thanksgiving was moved from the final Thursday in November to the fourth one by FDR? See, he thought a longer Christmas shopping season would revitalize the economy.  I want to repeat this for emphasis. FDR, who never met a piece of overreaching legislation he didn't like, thought it would be easier to move the date of Thanksgiving rather than declare that the Christmas shopping season begins before Thanksgiving Day.

Think on that the next time you hear Christmas songs in a shopping mall the day after Halloween.

Addendum to my Yunkai/io9 rant

Two things I missed. One, the author's tag at the bottom indicates he's a stand-up comedian. I don't know if the rant was satire or not. It was neither funny nor a serious critique.

Two, I should explain my "This. Is. Deliberate." comment a bit more. So that's what most of this post is going to be.

When I read, I'm colorblind. Normally a character's skin tone gets mentioned about once, and then that's it. If there's something important about a character's description - say, golden hair - I'm more likely to remember it. How brown is Arianne Martell? I can't remember off the top of my head, and I'm one of the people who likes the Dorne plot. So to me, when I read fairly late in A Storm of Swords that Astapor and Yunkai both went to pot after Dany's revolutions there, my first thought was less "Iraq or Afghanistan" (the novel was published in 2000), and more "The French Revolution." Which, by the way, had a bunch of white people in it.

Now, because a bunch of intellectuals going potty over an unequal class system and losing some heads is basically Occupy Wall Street's wet dream, we're probably going to see more "War on Terror" and less "French Revolution" in the show. (Although again, I'd like to point out: the show equates homosexuality and incest pretty much every opportunity it gets. So either it's hyper-liberal or it's fairly conservative.) Which in turn means that, because the TV audience is stupid and doesn't understand metaphor unless it dances naked in front of them while singing "I am the Walrus," the "liberated" folk have to be brown.

TLDR: Read the frakking books and you'll see what they're doing and why.

What do I mean by "the TV audience is stupid?" Read on.

The most f&cking idiotic thing I've read on io9 in a while

Now, look. Io9 is one of those sites I find myself visiting pretty often despite the fact that its obnoxious liberalism rears its head on a semi-regular basis. They write mostly good stuff about a lot of things that are relevant to me as a sci-fi nerd, but every once in a while they post something so utterly f&cking stupid that I wonder what the hell I'm doing on that site.

Case in point: an article posted today (appropriately tagged as a "Rant") entitled "Daenerys' whole storyline on Game of Thrones is messed up." It's messed up because it's about a white girl going around saving POCs from their own backwards societies. In doing so, Daenerys paradoxically becomes "a liberal white woman who goes around saving and civilising [sic] brown people" in a story that is "at its heart, a neocon wet dream." Got it? A liberal living out a neocon dream.

But let's cut through the semantic gobbledygook (can I still say "gobbledygook?") and get right down to the bone the author wants to pick.

Is it the future already

So there's now a desk-sized tablet. It weighs 15 pounds and is the size of eight iPads stuck together.

And it hacks into the Pentagon and runs fifteen different light-cycle games on the game grid simultaneously.

In all seriousness, go put your iPad down on a flat surface and tell me how comfortable it is to use. I don't know anyone who doesn't prop it up at an angle.

I believe my point is made.

End of line.

Dragon Age

I want to love Dragon Age: Origins. I really do.  The Mass Effect franchise was awesome and I figured BioWare could do it again. Yeah, combat's a royal pain compared to Mass Effect (basically you're SoL if your caster doesn't have enough crowd-control spells, and those same spells have an annoying tendency to inflict friendly fire), but the characters are just as well developed, if not better.

But if this isn't the definition of Guide Dang It, I don't know what is.

...also, I'm a Rogue (which in retrospect was a huge freaking mistake but I'm not about to just junk seven hours of gameplay so I can go back and start all over again as a class that can actually fight). I backstab. Why the hell do they make me solo a massive dungeon? I mean, the classes in Mass Effect are balanced enough for you to solo Arrival, but that's simply not true here, unless I'm building my character entirely wrong, in which case screw them for not making the "right" build more obvious. I've taken the difficulty level down to Easy and I have absolutely no regrets about it.