You know, it's somehow reassuring to know that Frank Miller is every ounce as much of an asshole as I ever could have guessed. It would have slightly damaged my worldview if I found out that he was a really likeable, civil guy.

and actually, i'll be the one to go ahead and say "all police are bad." the police cannot, by nature of what the word "police" means, ever be an ally to revolution or reform.

The police cannot. The men and women who make up that police force certainly can.

I don't think you're being fair, Thad. The Oakland police are really only trained to deal with black people on PCP. I'm sure they have no idea what a peaceful protest even is.

This. As Derek Kirk Kim recently said on twitter - "To those who have never lived in Oakland: there is no such thing as a peaceful mass gathering of people. A march about cupcakes would end with the same result."

"No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa."

Best thing I've read all week.

Speaking of vim - there was a neat post via Daring Fireball about a fellow who gave up his macbook for an iPad, by (in part) SSHing to vim.

Well, I have friends who complained about the exceptionally misleading trailers, so that may or may not be representative of the actual movie with regards to your specific issue.

PC version comes out in November.

 

"I hope they malloc'd a place for him in heaven."

I wish I could remember where I saw that.

Oh, Drive was fantastic. It was very deliberate, but I really liked that.

Great lighting, too. I don't usually notice lighting, but I really liked it in Drive.

Is it just me, or does the movie have a sort of timeless quality to it? The only real clue to when it was set was the size of the cellphones; otherwise, between the soundtrack, the Dirty Dancing-style hot pink cursive title, and then generally unaging L.A. sprawlscape, it could have been set any time in the past 25 years.

There's a few obvious elements that make The Social Network and Moneyball seem similar. They're adaptations of controversial nonfiction books, each with an Aaron Sorkin writing credit and a traditionally comic actor cast in a serious lead role. The chief difference, I think, is that The Social Network wasn't just of interest to software developers - but Moneyball, I think, is almost certainly of interest only to people who care about baseball.

There's an XKCD about sports narratives that I've always felt was somewhat dismissive and somewhat unjustified. This is fundamentally because I like baseball; I love going to baseball games, and I love baseball narratives. And if you do not love the complex narrative of a baseball season, or even the fundamental narrative of a single baseball game - this movie holds nothing for you. There are scenes which are blatant, unsubtle appeals to emotion - but they worked on me, because they were deployed through the medium of baseball, and like many Americans, baseball holds a deep-seated primal power over me.