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Robert N. Lee's LiveJournal:
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| Friday, December 21st, 2012 | | 12:00 am |
| | Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | | 9:13 pm |
Oh, the stupid.
Okay, one: even if you can and you're the district IT director and probably nobody's ever going to know, installing SETI @ Home on all the school district's computers is fucking dumb. If any of the lusers you've been counting on not seeing what you're doing does find out you've been using taxpayer-funded equipment to search for aliens nine years later, how is that not going to look like some kind of freakish hacker abuse of equipment and position to Joe or Jane Bureaucrat?
I have to imagine there were many, many attempts to explain why this wasn't actually hurting anything. Glad I wasn't a fly on that wall.
But two: okay, fuck you, public school schmucks. Bad enough you're firing the guy over this, which proves you're both idiots and a raving ones, but now you're making up a bunch of bullshit about how uninstalling SETI @ Home would cost you a million dollars with an eye to suing him.
If he'd run the entire San Francisco Bay Area's schools and put it on every computer? Okay, that might cost a million dollars. This is going to cost a week or so of IT labor, tops. Your whole district's only got 8500 students in it.
 Tweedle me deedles.
Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | | 5:42 am |
Why Tailgunner Joe matters and doesn’t matter…
...and why you're dumb if you listen to Ann Coulter on the subject.
###
Thanks to Ann Coulter, largely, Joseph McCarthy comes up a lot these days in conversations with conservatives in a way he just never used to: as a forgotten hero, his reputation recovered. He never used to come up that way because even conservatives largely remembered him as the embarrassing grandstander and public hysteria ringmaster he actually was.
How this happened – and it just happened over the last decade or so – is sort of interesting and sort of boring, depending on how familiar you are with the kinds of bad amateur research and investigation that feeds populist counterinformation like conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, UFO cultism, paranormal crapola, searches for Noah's Ark, etc.
I don't bring these categories of popular nonsense up to smear Coulter as a Nazi or whatever, she clearly isn't – it's just that people with an extreme bent to prove something whether it's true or not and seem scholarly doing so tend to do the same wrong things. And how the sections on McCarthy in Coulter's book Treason came about and how similar they are to other junk "research" methods is important, if you want to understand this currently popular and utterly false revision of recent history. (Michelle Malkin did the exact same stuff for her book In Defense of Internment, defending a practice the involved North American governments have long since apologized for. I'll get to that a bit later.)
Tweedle me deedles. Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | | 5:11 pm |
| | 6:39 am |
Coffy is the color…
Watching one of Pam Grier's greatest seventies films, recorded off MGMHD last week. It's amazing, how revelatory watching movies in high def you've seen a bunch of times can be, even if you've seen them on a screen previously. And Coffy, I have.
Pam Grier is HUGE in this movie, just this hulking, haunting presence in her vengeance scenes, dominating the screen. How did I forget that, watching the movie on TV?
Of course, I'm waiting to see the movie's Ultimate Male Gaze Girl Fight, in which Grier beats down every woman at a party, and then rips their tops off. Ye gods. That's how I reminded Evonne which movie it was when I recorded it: "It's the one where she rips all the bitches' tops off."
Anyway, NWS language and lots of spoilers follow in the YouTube video for the awesome Coffy theme, so you've been warned.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Monday, November 30th, 2009 | | 6:57 pm |
Muslim & Christian apocalypse: the horrifying similarities and charming differences.
I became aware recently of The Arrivals, one of those religion-specific pieces of counterculture media that gains brief credibility with all kinds of people who practice keeping their minds open all the time, just like you're supposed to do with parachutes. (Think about it.) Like, say, The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know!?, The Arrivals is currently making its way all over pirate boards, passed by the kinds of people who enthuse over Alex Jones, with vague promises that "you'll learn a lot."
The Secret, of course, went mainstream pretty quick,* and all but the diehard "If nobody likes it, it must be true" free thinking/conspiratorial types stopped championing What the Bleep a while ago, outside of the New Agers Ramtha's School of Enlightenment made it for.
They figured out it was somebody else's Sunday School movie, basically – it seemed exotic at first, and then you figure out it's just somebody pushing another religion at you, you could go watch the same stuff on Trinity Broadcasting Network any week, you're just more familiar with that spooky nonsense.
See, if you actually did treat your mind sort of like a parachute – deploy wide open when necessary, maintain and keep it otherwise – you might know a few things that'd keep you from getting sucked into that bullshit at all.
Tweedle me deedles. Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Sunday, November 29th, 2009 | | 6:39 pm |
So yeah, Dance Flick had to be seen. Also good movies.
Since E is addicted to breakdancer-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks movies and all.
A movie in which a black woman gives birth while busting a move and then the baby slides into a pose should be a lot ballsier and funnier than Dance Flick is, but hey: it's another thing by a bunch of Wayans. So it'll be half-funny, at best, you already know that.
Has its moments, contains no Carmen Electra, totally wastes Chris Elliot, makes some decent jokes about dancey movies you've seen and a bunch of lame ones and has a brief Twilight nod that's actually pretty hilarious. And involves a black man in sparkly whiteface, now that I think of it. So you can already see why it would be funny, and you don't have to see the movie.
###
Yesterday, panghule came over and we had a big holiday meal, except we made burgers instead of turkey. And we watched a couple of movies: Chan-wook Park's vampire movie Thirst and what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-the-French-these-days horror movie Martyrs.
I wasn't expecting to see another heartbreakingly romantic and messed-up new take on vampires from another country so soon, but Thirst, unfortunately, fails to disappoint on any level, even held up against the recent likes of Let the Right One In. If you shudder at the memory of turning off Oldboy, you probably won't like Thirst, either. Playing a little off the Anne Rice conflicted new vampire convert model, Park plays a lot more with the older popular model, the vampire-as-satanic-gigolo Stoker/Lugosi Dracula, and plays hard.
Kang-ho Song plays a Catholic priest who volunteers for a high-risk experiment aimed at eradicating a disease sweeping Africa and...you've seen Rabid. Everybody else in the experiment dies, and the good father comes back a Claude Rains Invisible Man-wrapped miracle-working saint. Who is also a vampire.
The priest reenters, via his duties in a hospital (and increasing use of those duties to search for blood), the lives of a wildly dysfunctional family he knew in childhood and in the process, reacquaints himself with his Mina. You can't remain a priest when you're a blood sucking demon headed for Hell, so Sang-hyeon may as well start humping his childhood sweetheart, too. Unfortunately, Tae-joo is nuts. Like "Yeah, she'll totally sleep with you, but she'll probably bite your wang off, too" nuts.
The relationship flips between fantasy and brutal reality as this Drac and his lady fair play out the kind of insanely abusive relationship you'd expect vampires to have regularly, if there were vampires. But it's nothing you've never seen or heard of a couple doing to each other before, fully human and all.
Park paints the doomed arc of this love now in swooshing Superman/Twilight-esque flying FX sequences, then in broad comedic strokes, then in staged, stark dreamy sequences that remind very much of The Red Shoes. And then pain and rage and blood, always.
Not an easy movie (duh), not without flaws (stretches a little sometimes), but how many vampire movies do you get to see based on Zola novels? Absolutely worth seeing, and beautiful beyond belief, if your mind's got a strong stomach.
###
Martyrs is the most fucked in the head French horror movie I've seen in a while, and I've seen some really fucked in the head French horror movies, lately. I'm not even sure if it's a good movie or not or I liked it or not. I don't fucking know what to do with this movie. I don't know how to talk about it or recommend it. Fuck.
This shit is FUCKED UP, though. If that sentence intrigues you, see Martyrs. Otherwise, forget I mentioned the movie.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.
--
Dance Flick
US, 2009
Directed by: Damien Dante Wayans
Thirst
Korea, 2009
Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Martyrs (aka FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK)
France, 2008
Directed by: Pascal Laugier
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 2:05 pm |
I love what total assholes you conservatives are.
It's disturbing, just how much these fuckheads love to mock widows and orphans and sick people and people who lost their kids. People who've lost their loved ones or own lives to war, if they're against the war in Iraq, to sickness, if they're pro-universal healthcare, on 9/11, even, if they're not sufficiently vengeful against the entire planet.
So you get the bizarre spectacle of the people who run around screaming that liberals and "leftists" aren't sufficiently respectful of Those Good Old Timey Things laughing their asses off while Limbaugh roasts a cripple and mocks the way he talks, or Coulter talks shit about a bunch of fireman's widows whose crotches she isn't even worthy of sniffing, or O'Reilly screams at some kid whose dad died in the World Trade Center.
Or this: a bunch of tea party fuckers booing down people at a hearing telling their dead daughter's nightmare health care story.
You know, these apes are copying this behavior. The people leading them do exactly this shit all the time. Remember when Michelle Malkin and her blogger buddies decided that story about the twelve-year-old kid with brain damage was too good to be true, so they just made up some "facts" to support that notion and that got read to the kid in Congress? Fuckers like this in Congress are taking their lead from public figures so bent on dismantling the foundations of our society, they don't even think it's valuable to pay extra respect to a widow or a sick little kid, anymore.
Or somebody whose kid or dad died in a war or because the health care system in the US is fucked. Really, you howl and boo at those people, ever? That's appropriate? Seriously, you people are turning into a bunch of fucking animals. And personally, I think we ought to start treating you like animals.
I hate to do this, as...you know me and religion...but I would like to suggest that today's American conservative investigate Christianity, which is apparently a religion all about taking care of widows and orphans and sick people and comforting the wounded. And it's really good at making stupid beasts like you nicer. Or so I hear.
And if that doesn't work, a cage and a lash might.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Saturday, November 28th, 2009 | | 2:58 pm |
| | 1:34 pm |
That’s what I’ve been sayin’.
How many times do I have to say "You might want to check them out, they just get more and more insane, and pretty clearly, just from the way you're mocking them, you just read part of the first one?"
Total spoilage of the insanity of the last book in "THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: WHY BREAKING DAWN MUST BE MADE INTO A MOVIE" at CHUD.
I have no fucking idea who's going to make that movie or how they're going to do it. Just leave important chunks out of the adaptation or smooth them down so they won't hurt anybody? Chris Weitz, who made New Moon, already did that with The Golden Compass, and...what usually happens, the movie pleased no one, not the Christians ready to snap at the atheist content of the books, not everybody else who, uh, kinda liked those books because of the attacks on religion.
That version of Breaking Dawn would be a big letdown.
Oh, and BTW: you should really go revisit your fairy tales if your jaw's dropping, because absolutely nothing in this book is...novel. You've read stories about monsters mounting women and they have monster babies and men imprinting on infants or children and a betrothal beginning that way. And liked them, even.
Thanks to Julia Sevin, my self in another body with a vagina and boobs, only not really, for pointing this out to me today.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 1:32 pm |
That’s what I’ve been sayin’.
How many times do I have to say "You might want to check them out, they just get more and more insane, and pretty clearly, just from the way you're mocking them, you just read part of the first one?"
Total spoilage of the insanity of the last book in "THE DEVIN'S ADVOCATE: WHY BREAKING DAWN MUST BE MADE INTO A MOVIE" at CHUD.
I have no fucking idea who's going to make that movie or how they're going to do it. Just leave important chunks out of the adaptation or smooth them down so they won't hurt anybody? Chris Weitz, who made New Moon, already did that with The Golden Compass, and...what usually happens, the movie pleased no one, not the Christians ready to snap at the atheist content of the books, not everybody else who, uh, kinda liked those books because of the attacks on religion.
That version of Breaking Dawn would be a big letdown.
Oh, and BTW: you should really go revisit your fairy tales if your jaw's dropping, because absolutely nothing in this book is...novel.
Thanks to Julia Sevin, my self in another body with a vagina and boobs, only not really, for pointing this out to me today.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Friday, November 27th, 2009 | | 3:12 pm |
| | Thursday, November 26th, 2009 | | 10:06 pm |
| | 6:24 pm |
Well, that’s that, I guess.
Evonne's calling everybody and announcing that we're broken up. She can't seem to get straight whether she broke up with me or I broke up with her, but either way, she does know that none of this is her fault. So that's good.
At any rate, I got an answer to my final "Please stop doing this to me," so I'll make the last entry private, there's no point to it being up after that.
Time to dig out the "Getting the hell out of here" plans, again. Sigh.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 2:41 am |
The marching morons speak up about their inarticulate queen.
I swore I wouldn't watch this tonight, but Evonne went to sleep and I can't fall asleep.
You want to see what a parade of Epsilons and Deltas looks like? Here you go.
I've said this since last year, but...Sarah Palin's kind of a great intellectual litmus test. She's right around the middle, a classic Gamma, which is why she was smart enough to sleaze into the job she did, but also why she doesn't have it anymore and and thinks the Vice President runs the Senate and there's a Department of Law in the White House.
Either you get that Sarah Palin's pretty stupid, which means you're on the right side of 100, there, or you don't, and you're over there on the left with the rest of the climate change deniers and intelligent designers.
Sarah Palin: the candidate of choice for Americans who can't tell shit from shinola.
Awesome.
I have to pick some highlights. The old bag who, when asked what federal spending she'd cut, responds "All of it." Yeah...boo...boo to federal spending. Give back your Social Security and Medicare and then get back to me, granny. Also: hope you liked dirt roads and pooping in a hole, back in the Little House On the Prairie days.
I also love the choad who says, all dark and brooding, that Barack Obama wrote two books in which he laid out his plans for America. Dark plans. Dark plans for dark times. When pressed as to what those plans are, he simply blurts "The Marxism...the Leninism..." Yeah, that's what that book Obama wrote about his dad was about, mostly: darkie dark Marxist darkie dark plans for a dark, dark America.
I don't understand that sour-faced idiot who's fixated on not having "czars" at all. I guess maybe she thinks the informal media term for executive branch policy heads is...an actual title? Beats the hell out of me.
The guy who thinks Obama's filling voter rolls with illegal aliens so Palin won't win is precious.
The guy who actually thinks Alaska is "right across the street" from Russia needs about seventy kicks in the nuts.
I really love the lady who's invented a story in her head where the Governor of Alaska is a secret agent with some kind of special clearance, because we are in constant danger of Russian attack via the Bering Strait. (And BTW, if you buy this, go look at a map sometime. There's about ten bazillion miles of mountains between Alaska and the closest place across the strait where any humans live or you could move troops and equipment. Alaska's totally safe from the Stalinist threat, even if a time warp opens up and Stalin actually comes back.)
And oh, the lady who apparently just wants to put drills in the ground wherever polar bears are found.
And then there's this one, that...I think I'll have to type the whole thing.
Interviewer: And what are some of those freedoms that you think have been taken away?
Total Fucking Idiot: Well, I really think the fact that I am a Christian, I think that, um, the government and...the mainstream media has been playing a role in...umm...gosh.
Interviewer: You think that your freedom to be a Christian has been jeopardized?
Total Fucking Idiot: Well, not only (Dumb friend breaks in with something like "I think it's about freedom of speech")...speech, not only Christian, freedom for religion, here, and what the gov-ah...it's a slippery slope."
Why wouldn't these people back Sarah Palin? These people would back a guy in a Mr. Peanut costume if he acted like he hated Mexicans and gay scientists halfway convincingly.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 2:11 am |
So, uh…
...I used to do volunteer work for Free Geek, back in Portland. I did intake on donated equipment, tore down boxes, built boxes, did installs and testing and etc.
I've checked and processed a ton of boxes, monitors, keyboards and mice that sat next to ashtrays for a few years. The issue with them, always, is the outside and whether it's worth the trouble of cleaning them up. The boxes, if the cases are scorched or beyond cleaning up, you recycle the cases and keep the guts.
Because there's nothing wrong with them. Magical cigarette tar does not get all over the components, that's idiotic. You might have some orangey-brownish dust balls instead of the regular grey dust balls, if it's the kind of box that's got dust balls in it, but...please.
Never mind that even if this were true, claiming it as an OSHA health hazard would be bogus, in and of itself.
I wish this were any kind of unusual for Apple, but it ain't. They're notorious for finding any excuse to weasel out of warranty work.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 1:01 am |
Can we take the tasers away from these fucking morons, now?
Clearly, the responsibility is just too much for the average American cop to handle.
Jesus Christ.
An Arkansas cop tasered an unruly 10-year-old girl after her mother called police to report that the child was crying, screaming, and refusing to go to bed. The tased girl, Kiara Medlock, is about 65 pounds and 4' 6", according to her father. Anthony Medlock, a truck driver who does not live with the fifth grader and her mother, provided TSG with a recent photo of his daughter, which can be seen at right. According to the below Ozark Police Department report, when Officer Dustin Bradshaw arrived at the residence last Thursday, he found the girl "screaming, kicking, and resisting every time her mother tried to touch her." Bradshaw added that, "Her mother told me to tase her if I needed to."'
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 | | 3:39 pm |
We have a good time with our blasphemy.
me: You know what was a huge thing for me recently? The invention of those electronic implants that allow some blind people to see in shades. Like an eye spot.
Matthew: I don't know. Maybe I would be happy about it if I were going to Heaven and for everyone else it's tough shit, but I'd keep it to myself and not expect other people to be all over it like I just invented sex or something.
2:58 PM me: So...still waiting for y'all to catch up and make a blind man see.
Matthew: Yeah, Applebee's has had the burning bush thing nailed for a long time now. You just use natural gas.
3:02 PM me: Yeah, we got raising the dead down a while ago, too.
And you say something like that to them, or around them, and they're horrified.
3:03 PM Matthew: Raising the dead?
3:05 PM Well, I guess you can shock someone whose heart is flatlining and sometimes that works.
3:16 PM me: Yeah.
3:17 PM Wouldn't that count as raising the dead in first century Palestine?
Matthew: Well, Jesus did it during stinky time, so that's beyond us for now.
3:18 PM me: Yeah, well, that didn't actually happen, ever.
3:19 PM Matthew: Yeah. But you can't claim that fact has caught up with fiction yet, though. Would be cool.
3:20 PM me: I dunno, the thought of stinky dead people running around...hey, they should make movies about that!
3:23 PM Matthew: I think he made him unstinky, too.
me: How do you know?
It doesn't say.
3:24 PM Matthew: Hmmm. It's possible.
me: Lazarus can be running around in the background of that story tearing small children and beggars apart.
Matthew: Maybe he was stinky like that for the next 30 years of his renewed life.
me: Maybe after Jesus left, they hit him with a rock.
3:25 PM Holy crap, I hate it when Jesus comes over. Do we even have any water to clean this shit up?
No, of course not. It's all fucking wine.
Again.
3:26 PM AND HE CURSED THE FIG TREE AGAIN.
I swear, I am not planting another one.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | 11:32 am |
I love these days.
I went to sleep at eleven or twelve last night and woke up this morning at...probably five, I guess? I don't know because I didn't look, because I didn't want to look. This happens so seldom, I never want to spoil it. I just stayed there until I finally had to pee too bad and was too awake to stay there anymore, and it was six-thirty.
You know how sometimes you wake up early, and ordinarily you'd go back to sleep but you don't for some reason this morning? You're up? But you don't need to get up or want to do things? And you look at your significant other, maybe, and think about your kids or your job or that novel you're writing or want to write or God or why the world is so awful and...you have this rare space to just drift on your thoughts and consider the world and your place in it in a way you almost never get to, otherwise?
Or I don't know, maybe you use that time to plan a giant wall along the Mexican border in your head or something. Anyway: the time is the thing, not what we use it for, that space.
That never happens to me, even sometimes. I'm usually still awake while you're reflecting. I never get that time.
Except today. I don't even remember the last time today happened, because it never happens. I have to think of it that way, or it's not a nice surprise when it comes, it's something I long for all the time.
It never happens.
But it happened today, and that was so nice.
###
Tweedle me deedles. Read the rest of this entry » Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. | | Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | | 7:25 pm |
EMBRACE THE MADNESS.
Just go look. Oh, don't blame me if you go blind. Totally WS, as far as I can tell. I think. It might cause seizures.
Is designing a web site like this a symptom of some specific psychological malady, yet? Or several related ones or something? Because...religious zealots, conspiracy thinkers and political extremists, primarily, all build this same web site, and I'm pretty sure they don't see that layout the way other humans do.
Like design anorexia or something. "My god, it will never be perfect until there is MORE! And more! Wait, is that a sliver of negative space? DID I FORGET TO PUT ANY WORDS ANYPLACE?"
I wish I knew what that Roman baths thing was about.
No I don't.
Tweedle me deedles. Originally published at Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava!. Please leave any comments there. |
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