Shape of Things

I'm accustomed to viewing the resolution of a movie as a time where conflicts are wrapped up, but watching The Shape of Things reminded me of another meaning of resolve that I'd learned in some long-ago Bio lab. Viewing through the microscope we would slide the focusing dial which would resolve* the image.
In certain movies, there is this feeling of focusing- of swiftly and sharply turning on something which was once obscured. These tend to be movies made from plays, probably because they are seldom side-tracked by action. Streetcar Named Desire and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, produce this feeling. Memory is failing at extending the list but I think I would add The Boys in the Band, Long days Journey in to Night and Hamlet.
These movies tend to have two other things in common: a feeling of claustrophobia and a climax of drastically higher tension. Partially the claustrophobia may be due to the nature of plays turned into films and all movies tend to have a climax. But an alternate list of movies doesn't have these traits: Angels in America, Romeo and Juliet, 13 Conversations About One Thing.
[the next section is confusing if you haven't seen the movie]
The Shape's resolution is a hat trick not only pulling it off with the appropriate tension and consequences but also cerebral. It creates its own framework for viewing it. But this framework isn't firm, it also calls itself into question. The separating of component parts is, strangely, another meaning of resolve.

*A brief look at dictionary.com does not confirm that my memory of the word has a valid meaning. It does list "to find a solution" and "to change" which if combined indicate this. But perhaps I am only thinking of focus and have gotten this mixed in with the resolution of the magnification.

The Mentatlity of Violence

In an initial scene of The Believer Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling) spots a Jew on the subway and begins to provoke him. This scene provokes physical fear because despite all of the violence in Hollywood this is an element that is not done convincingly.
Ryan shows the provocation and contempt; and the physical energy that this gives him. It rises from his chest and shoulders.

Command Line Interface

A step below porn in the amount of internet content generated is the space devoted to the Mac vs. PC argument. The information contained is largely redundant but in this old essay by Neil Stephenson there are some honest attempts to look at not only the whats but the whys.

Some nice bits. Apple as commune:

But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.

Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.

If the car were invented today.

The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu:

PARK --- REVERSE --- NEUTRAL ---- 3 2 1 --- Help...

A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one.

A number of major assertions are not followed through-

• That Apple is a hardware company. It's a Motorola chip, an Nvidia graphics card, etc. Obviously they are putting a lot of effort into the user experience and part of that is the software.
• That there is an overriding benefit to all the power and transparency that Linux gives you. Many of his experiences tend to indicate the opposite of this- the months he spent working on a problem, the notebooks filled, the massive amount of initial knowledge required.
• That the fact that he lost a document in Microsoft Word causes "metaphor shear"- something where a metaphor he has treasured turns out to be abruptly wrong and makes his brain hurt. He doesn't seem to realize that documents are sometimes lost in the real world.
  

If reading this has made your eyes glaze over the essay won't be any better but if not, if for some reason you need this kind of thing, it's a refreshing change.

Zombie whores make our shirts

American Apparel is a company dedicated to providing fair wages to its workers and keeping all production inside the USA. Unfortunately they are located in L.A. so the workers spend all their money on drugs and forget to put on clothes.





This one thought she was Mia Hamm and was wrong in multiple ways.

Backpack threat alert is orange

Anything... could be a bomb.
Anyone.... a terrorist.