Barkerburgh

Two things.

a> I’m very happy that Showcase (Rogers 39 in my neighbourhood) is now running the third season of the excellent hard science procedural drama ‘Regenesis’ ^{[wikipedia], [imdb]}.

2> I just finished a short story that I really like.

I have to say, after seeing del Toro’s ‘The Devil’s Backbone’, I totally changed my expectation of what this movie would be like.

I now ‘knew’ it would be a dark phantasy (sic deliberately), and nothing like Harry Potter. I now ‘knew’ that it would probably deal with real world issues and events in a phantastical manner.

I did not expect to be so moved by the unfolding story, and definitely did not expect the ending, although I did.
The perfect quality of each actor’s performance within the story was enhanced by the fact that I did not know any of them, by name or reputation. So with no opinions on their skills or abilities to involve me or move me, I was able to immerse myself in the story almost immediately.

Having more than a passing familiarity with folklore and mythology, (and a tendency towards escapism in the real world, truth be told), I was nevertheless moved by an apparent contradiction: his traditional use of traditional motifs, and his sometimes sinister twisting of those same motifs against themselves in the service of the storytelling. (I say sometimes sinister because sometimes it’s not.)
If I am at all ambivalent about whether or not I like a movie, I can always tell I definitely liked it when the imagery keeps floating around my mind or bursting out unexpectedly when I am thinking about or working on something else.

I like this movie.

I wonder what a remake of ‘The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao’ would be like under the direction of Guillermo del Toro…

Many will not miss him.

I’ve had two livejournal accounts for a while. I had a recent one, forgot about it, created another one, then rediscovered the first one. I vaguely remember having an account way back when it first got popular, but it wasn’t easy or straightforward then so I let it lapse, and it’s worse now, years later.

Is navigation and design ever fucked up.

Often, the labels are vague, misleading, or dumb. There are too many steps from Point A to Point 2 and there are things on the page that are unexplained, misleading or pointless, and I don’t just mean the ads.

(If you’ve been at it for a while and everything is second nature, well and good, but it ain’t chess, it’s a blog. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get the brunt of the gist of it. Really. Code geeks shouldn’t design interfaces. Neither should co-ops. Or bosses. Or recent graduates of Devry. Christ.)

Some things just don’t make sense at all, like the fact that when I’m logged into my account, there is no easy or obvious way to view the results of a poll, and you don’t seem to be able to edit the poll itself once it’s posted. Sure, it may be right in front of me, but it sure as hell ain’t right in front of me, if you catch my meaning. (You can edit the actual entry the poll appears in, but you can’t edit the poll itself. And the editing page for the poll entry is just dumb…)

Yeah, if I spend a couple of hours clicking around, I’ll figure it out. But a> I don’t have a couple of hours to do that (I’m not that busy but my online time is very limited), and ii] why the fuck should I have to?

Website designers who think they know best about page design should take Thoreau’s advice: run off into the woods and live by a pond. I mean ’simplify’.

Yeah, LJ’s got more features than Wordpress, but that don’t mean I can forgive the design flaws.

For a nicely designed website for a specific purpose, with lots of information and options, see W3Schools. Yeah, of course I know it’s apples and oranges, but it ain’t apples and octopi.

(But to misquote Matt Damon’s character from ‘Dogma’ in the brief elevator scene at the airport near the beginning of the film; “Oh, I don’t mean you!”)

Coffee even hurts right now.

I have big wide windows that I love. I have them open all the time year round because I crave the fresh air, and I can’t control the heat in the wintertime; it’s forced water and it’s either on or off.

I have a big oscillating floor fan, that is neither oscillating nor on the floor, stuck in one side of the window blowing out, so that there is a nice wide flow of outside air coming in the the other side. Usually this is highly pleasant. Now it is not.

I also have a small desktop fan blowing at me when I sleep, which seized up last night. It probably only needs a little generic WD40, so no real worries - it’s happened before.

I lost a hard-drive (logical not physical) on one of my computers the other night and I thought I’d lost a bunch of important files (including story files and MP3s), but they’re okay - I just can’t use them right now. However, I need to spend a lot of time restoring the OS on that machine and it’s too goddamn hot to do it now. And seriously, Microsoft, what the fuck is wrong with you people? The COPY command in the Recovery Console won’t handle wildcards or directory copies, even if you use the fucking SET command to tell it to? It’s called the Recovery Console, not the “Fuck You, Fuck Your Files And Fuck The Horse You Rode In On Console”. Not “A Recovery Console for Windows 2000, Mr Gates? ‘Fast, Cheap, or Right, Pick Two’ Console”! It’s enough to make a body want to switch to a Mac or Linux. Jesus Christ on a fucking crutch.

Thank all the saints and angels for television. Cable television. And sudoku. And Freecell.

Anyhoo, I hope you’re all having a nice day. Drink plenty of water and don’t leave your children in a parked car with the windows rolled up, unless you really want to encourage Good Samaritans who have hammers and an urge to use them.

1> ‘The Unit’ looks like a good show.

2> So does ‘Boston Legal’.

3> That poor kid in Detroit who the 911 operator told to stop fooling around with the 911 system…

4> I really should have been watching ‘Babylon 5′ years ago.

5> Dean Koontz’es’s book ‘From the Corner of His Eye’ is a good read, nicely constructed, even though hardly anything really plotty happens until about page 600.

6> ‘My Name is Earl’ gets funnier and funnier.

7> Venus Express!

8> I love this weather.

9> The last few episodes of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ have been kickass, except I missed it both times on Space this past weekend through bad TV viewing planning. I guess I need to take a course.

10> ‘Coronation Street’ is getting kinda wacky, but that’s good. It’s a little boring when things are normal.

11> Nancy Grace is a foul human being.

12> If I was taller, I could see farther in a crowd during an emergency.

Go ahead, leave a comment telling what you think pisses me off.

I decided to splurge and treat myself to Serenity at the Rainbow Market Square for $4.25 yesterday.

Can’t say anything about it, except that it was great, a Joss Whedon story (and what a storyteller he is), and that he did a very bad thing. Twice.

He and Russell Davies should get together, I swear to God.

And I still haven’t seen all the episodes of Firefly. And I still don’t know why the TV show was named after the class of the spaceship that Serenity was, and the movie was named after the ship herself.

I should look it up or something.

So I watched the last episode ever of Star Trek:Enterprise last night.

What the irredeemable fuck?

Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, whoever you are (and I know who you are), fuck off, shut up, sit down and go away. “Franchise fatigue”, my ass. You just don’t know how to tell a story. Period. Stop trying. Go try retail instead. Idiots.

To the rabidly irrational fanboys who kept this crap going for way too long, [sarcasm_fyi] thanks a lot [/sarcasm_fyi], and in your face.

To the thirtieth century alien archaeologists reconstructing this period of human history, hello, and I hope things are going well. I owned a significant proportion of everything. I also hope you’ve found evidence of Battlestar Galactica, just so’s you get a balanced picture.

To Majel Barrett, you bear some of the blame for this. Just because a fan means well doesn’t mean - oh, never mind. The damage is done.

To Gene Roddenberry, please, sir, rise from the dead. You couldn’t save the Star Trek universe, but just you - or anybody - rising from the dead would be really cool.