Geeky Joy

so, apparently the rumors are true. there is indeed going to be a movie based on Ender's Game. a fellow fan from school told me that the project was held up due to disagreements between card and the producers over the script. the script is finished, and i assume that casting will soon take place. i truly hope and pray that the horrid child actor from phantom menace does not get to be Ender. for some time he was the front runner for the role, and it seriously pissed me off. hopefully he's too old now. unfortunately, so is haley joel osment.

if they make bean a blond white boy, i'm going to scream. if any of the child actors suck, i will scream. the story depends too on children to have bad actors. if they market it as a kid's movie, i will scream. actually, if any of this shit happens, i will refuse to see it. just as i refused to see any of the star wars prequels after phantom menace.

a new pompeii

In 1936, Camillo Berneri wrote the short essay Madrid, Sublime City; it appeared in the 2 December issue of La Guerra de Class that same year.

What strikes me is how Berneri's commentary of the war in Madrid & his mention of Hitler & Mussolini. Why did America refuse to admit the problems exploding in Europe? How prescient his words seem in hindsight; how similar are his descriptions of war to the situation we see today all over the world.

I'm no catastrophist; I've no religiously-motivated ideal about the End of Civilization. I think Americans are not idiots, despite my constant protestations to the contrary. No, we just have our heads shoved so far up our asses we can't see the world. We're not stupid, we're ignorant. But right now there is a wake-up call; people are seeing the horrors of war in person & they are coming home.

Our news is increasingly formulaic - but there are pirate radio stations with pirate news services where once such an organised revolt would have been unthinkable. The signals are reaching us through direct media: the internet brings us the voices of emilys blogging in Iraq & we hear their voices as individuals.

I see the volcano smoking on that mountain; I think we'd better build our city somewhere else.

Oil

there is something going on with the energy delivery systems in the world these days. from rolling blackouts in california, to the blackout in new york, and now an even bigger blackout in italy. what gives? there are still some questions regarding how 'real' the california energy crisis was. we probably won't know the extent to which that was caused by price gouging until those energy commission papers are pried from vp dick's cold dead fingers.

this guy thinks the end of the oil era is coming soon. it's hard to disbelieve him when all these blackouts keep cropping up. the thing that's scary about them is that they are preview of what will happen if periodic loss of power became a regular occurrence. kunstler thinks that a lot of people in our car-obsessed nation will react like 'vengeful crybabies' at the loss of their comfortable standard of living.

when you hear about people getting violent and looting once the lights go out for a few hours, it gets downright chilling to imagine what they'd do if the lights went out several times a month for days at a time. or if they just went out permanently. civilization is a thin veneer allowed only by the abundance of food, shelter, and other necessary resources. once people begin to view one another as competition for these things, life gets ugly.

are we up to the challenge as a nation to deal with the end of cheap energy? will we riot, smash windows, and crack heads out of an immature need to blame someone for a situation we're all responsible for creating -- a situation we collectively refused to deal with when we had ample time to develop technologies that could have replaced our petroleum global economy?

jimmy carter, i'm sorry your fabulous plan for addressing this problem over twenty years ago didn't work out. i'm sure a lot of other people will feel the same way within ten or fifteen years, if we even have that long.

Bite My Shiny Metal Ass

If you don't already, it may be too late for you.

I'm talking about Adult Swim, which comes on every night in the United States at twenty-three (that's eleven p.m.) and runs until two (that's two a.m.) from sunday to thursday.

O my henrys, o my em'lys, why aren't you turning on Futurama to quell your queasy bellies? & Family Guy, with its rampaging, all-encompassing offensiveness that ensures you can laugh safely knowing you'll ridiculed soon enough? & sunday features the dark, amnesiac Paradigm City in BigO, a Japanese animation so good that Adult Swim bought out the rights so it could get more episodes & faster?

When the whole world is running you down, it takes the best things to get your loins girded for the next day.

yahoo instant messenger sux

[20050509 UPDATE: the current version is fire 1.5.2

today epicware released the latest version of its remarkable multi-chat client, fire 0.32f, which allows mac OSX users to coordinate all of their chat clients from jabber to iChat-AIM to m$n me$$enger into a single program. This latest version fixes a problem caused by yahoo IM's "upgrade" that the 0.32e release didn't as well as including the previous fix for me$$enger that did.

i find the fire coordinated chat client fantastically useful because there is nothing more irritating than to have to run four separate programs simultaneously in order to keep in touch with all your friends online. still, i have to admit i love the iChat front-end so much that i have kept it separate... after all, it has about a dozen great haxies for it alone & is already incorporated into the menu bar. but that's another story...

emily-fucking

what better than to start this blog by talking about harassment of emilys.

an Associated Press report in the 19 septembre edition of the new york times, a piece in the International section entitled "Insurgents Burn Down Afghan Girls School", says,

Suspected Taliban insurgents set fire to two girls' schools in northern Afghanistan, a local official said Monday, in the second such attack in recent days. Two tents housing schools for girls in the Charar Bolak district in Balkh province were destroyed in the blaze late Sunday, said Abdul Sabur Khan, a local military official. It is the first such attack in the Balkh province, considered a stronghold of the anti-Taliban northern alliance that helped a U.S.-led coalition oust the hardline militia and their al-Qaida allies in 2001.

Suspected insurgents also delivered leaflets or 'night letters' in Balkh warning people 'not to send girls to schools', Khan said. The Taliban banned girls from school and barred women from getting jobs. On Saturday, insurgents destroyed a girls' school in eastern Nangarhar province. Earlier this month another school was burned down just a few miles south of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

this is terrorism. can you imagine the kind of life that ems have in countries where simple education - even segregated education - results in threats, bombings & burnings?

or should we instead wonder what is next on the agenda of our own occupation gov't?

most american presidents have been southern baptists in recent history, an organization that passed a resolution during the end period of clinton's reign what stated that emilys must defer to their henrys.

hilary had something to say about that what was quite public; I wonder what condoleeza rice [that lying, incompetent bitch who just publicly denied knowledge of the felony actions of her people regarding a certain CIA agent's cover being blown in retaliation for the criticisms of the o.g. by said agent's husband] or what ms laura b. think of the fact that the men in their circle of governance, the men with whom they are complicit in the illegal seizure of the US government, think they should be subservient?

in other news, the recent republican convention sported tables selling shirts what said things like "no muslims" and unpleasanter things about gay marriage. of course, futurama tonight featured great commentary on gay marriage in the form of a cranky old polygamist lawyer-man who turns out to have seven husbands rather than the mormony wives i expected... i wonder if that is a heinlein crack as well as a gay marriage statement.

on the home front, intolerance continues to rage. i don't believe ems should be veiled because it is not a qur'anic practice. however, i have suffered two attempted stonings while in public when using a scarf to shade my fair skin from the hot southwestern noon sun. i have no parasol, so i figured anything that blocked the light was nice.

given that i was attacked while wearing jeans, a button-down white shirt with short sleeves, and had my neck and ears visible, it is clear my assailants are ignorant; this is also apparent because i hail from a mixed family of native and scots-irish blood, so it's a little stupid to refer to me as a "sand nigger", which usually refers to a person of arab origin, which I clearly am not.

repeated physical assualts suffered in broad daylight in a major city disturbs me, particularly when the assailants are themselves minorities: all of my assailants, who hurled rocks large enough to potentially kill me, spoke with thick mexican accents and were very dark. i pursued them & drove them off on both occasions.

as a result, I have made a point of wearing similar outfits around town in support of the many somali & albanian immigrant emilys who are in hejab.

fuck henrys & henryism; fuck patriotism & jingoism. fuck the flag.

to those who say america is great, i answer with the age-old response: "yeah? what has america done for me lately?" show me the fucking munny, baby; show me the fucking munny for title 9, for women's rights, for international education, for students here, for the poor and disenfranchised.

one more thing, if i may paraphrase a 2-bit actor and a lousy man, i'll put down my bullhorn when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.