Leviathan's Boring Sorta-Blog

If you have a need to leave me a comment that is not specifically related to a post you see below, just comment on this post. Leave comments, ask questions, post links, whatever.

Enjoy!

( Oh, and one more thing! )

Originally posted by nyxmidnight at Why SOPA is dangerous, an explanation of the bill

A few weeks ago, a post by a friend of mine, about the inconvenience of dealing with "Occupy" protestors, there ended up being a lot of comments by people who really had no understanding of what went wrong that caused the global economy to crash.

HBO films made a truly amazing movie called Too Big To Fail (The title is a link to IMDB, by the way,) which is, given that it's literally an entire movie about middle-aged white guys talking about economics, a stunning, gripping, dramatic film.

And it features a wonderful explanation of what really caused the crash. It's dramatic, it's funny, it features a terrific cast, and it tells you, step-by-step, how and why the economy did the catastrophic Brody it did.

Here's the scene, but, by all means, find and watch the movie. It's pretty terrific.



And that's why we're all fucked.

It shouldn't take a fandom, though. We should be there to support free speech, even when it's not hung from the broad shoulders of a TV hero.

It took me a while to figure this out, but the coin finally dropped last night.

Never mind the crap you're hearing about "Making LJ more like Facebook," "removing clutter" and "improved tools for..."

What LJ is really doing with their site update is this:

They're moving processor load off of their servers and onto our computers. All these kludges with their dancing baloney and visual stuff you see -- ever so slowly -- are scripts that LJ feeds to your computer, so that you are doing the donkey-work of data processing instead of LJ.

They're stealing your CPU cycles, is what they're doing.

A lot of my flist are totally in love with Hawai'i Five O. I haven't seen it in a while, but I find it very enjoyable, and like very much that they updated but stayed true to one of the great opening credit sequences in the history of television.

But many of my Steve-and-Danny-lovin' flisties haven't seen the original series, so I thought you guys might find this fun.

I had memories of this episode floating in my head for decades -- since it originally aired -- and I saw it repeated the yesterday on my local "ME-TV" ("Memorable Entertainment Television," apparently) affiliate, and was surprised how relatively well it held up. (Wednesday's episode depended entirely on Steve McGarrett being a moron.)

So, here you are, my friends: Jack Lord and James MacArthur as Steve McGarrett and Danno Williams in:

Hawai'i Five-O: "Draw Me a Killer"

(If I did this right, the episode will show in two parts, one after the other.)

But this doesn't really apply anywhere but here, so....

http://lj-releases.livejournal.com/71858.html?thread=7970738&style=mine#t7970738

Subject: The "Comment Page Redesign" is a steaming heap of Epic Fail.

The "Comment Page Redesign" is a steaming heap of Epic Fail.

The elimination of subject lines will vastly interfere with how huge numbers of LJ users use LJ, especially in communities, RPGs, and other sorts of threaded discussions. What possible reason is there to simply remove a useful feature?

The new means of selecting userpics is also catastrophic. It's processor-and-bandwidth-heavy, ungainly, and simply ludicrous on mobile devices.

There is nothing whatever about this "redesign" that improves user experience. This is worse than "If it works, don't fix it." This is, "If it works, don't kick it to pieces, pee on the pieces, and then set fire to the dry parts."

ETA: Captcha!?!?!? Are you out of your flaming minds!?!?!?!?

Anyone needing invite codes for Dreamwidth, I has them. From now through the end of the month, I'm pretty sure nobody needs them. http://dreamwidth.org -- This is the only time in several months you'll read an LJ post from me that wasn't actually posted on dreamwidth and crossposted here.

Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Daily Show senior Muslim correspondent Aasif Mandvi uncover an existential threat to the American Way of Life, insidiously dealing the Tools of Terror right in our midsts!

(And at really great prices, too!)








But, you know what? I'm serious. Lowe's pulled its advertising from TLC's "reality" series All American Muslims. If they'd done that because it's yet another tedious excercise in banality and artificial, manipulated drama being foisted on the unsuspecting American public as "reality," hey, IK'd stand up and applaud. But that's not it. They did it because a ragtag nutbag toerag group calling itself -- falsely -- the "Florida Family Association" complained to them because -- and I'm not making this up! -- the series does not depict Muslims as Jihadists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life, and replacing it with Sharia law, including "honor killings" and "female mutilation."

Now, listen up, kiddies, because this is important. "Honor killing" and "female mutilation" -- the latter referring to what's also called "female circumcision" or, more accurately, clitoridectomy, the act of surgically mangling a woman's vagina to make sure she can't actually enjoy sex -- are nowhere to be found in the Koran. Neither God nor Mohammed has anything to do with any of that stuff. It doesn't come from the Prophet, just a bunch of gynophobic assholes who are busily working on a hostile takeover of a peaceful religion.

And Lowe's has just decided to put their financial might into helping them, by withdrawing their support from a TV series that shows that that's all just a lie, and there's not much difference between Muslims in America and Baptists or Catholics or Seventh-Day Adventists, because it shows the lie for what it is!

So, no foolin', I mean this part, and it's likely to cause fights with my wife, who likes the store as a convenient place to buy home improvement products:

BOYCOTT LOWE'S!!!

So, this morning, I dreamed the trailer for an imaginary movie.

The tone of the trailer made it look like a sweet, goofy comedy, the beats very similar to the trailer for the Sarah Jessica Parker/Matthew McConaughey vehicle "Failure to Launch."

The cast, in the dream!trailer, was William Shatner and a very, very young Matthew McConaughey, but he's too old for the part, so let's give that role to Shia LaBeouf.

The premise: Shatner plays a Grey Eminence of journalism, print and television: we're talking a Walter Cronkite-level giant, someone so mighty, so powerful and famous that.... There was a wonderful line in obituaries for Jacques Cousteau: "The sea had a voice, and it spoke with a soft French accent." Well, in this movie, not just news, but Truth has a voice, and it's the voice of William Shatner. Brilliant, groundbreaking though he always has been, he hasn't really kept up with technology, and really doesn't understand the Internet.

This is a problem because his son (McConaughey/LaBeouf) is an up-and-coming, widely respected news blogger, and though the two live in the same house -- a mansion -- they really don't communicate, and have no real visible bond. This is Shatner's youngest child, from his fifth or sixth marriage, and they've just never really connected. There's no ill-will, but there's no real love, either: when they chat over breakfast -- rarely -- they're like colleagues in their office lunchroom, talking about generalities; they don't really share themselves, and don't interact in any really meaningful way.

Perhaps because his son has said something about the Internet being the new News Media, the place where real stories break and are covered with great thoroughness, Shatner starts reading Internet news sites, but, being unfamiliar with the 'net, he doesn't know good from bad, real from fake, reliable from crazy.... And he stumbles across a conspiracy theorist site and grabs what he sees there and runs with it.

Without talking about it to pretty much anybody else, he puts together, and broadcasts a story that Muammar Khaddafi (at this point in my dream, I thought, Oh, crap! The poor bastards got overtaken by events, too bad they didn't have time to fix it so it's not somebody who's been removed from power and killed! so obviously, we'll need a new Nutbag Crazy National Leader, perhaps Kim Jong-il or his apparently-equally-crazy son) has launched an orbital laser weapon capable of destroying large targets on the ground. There's even footage of a test-firing of the weapon, which turns out to be footage from the James Bond movie Die Another Day.

Of course, the first reporter to see that this legend of journalism has fallen so completely for a nutty web conspiracy theory is the son, who must break the story that his father has made a journalistic error of colossal, even epic, proportions.

The Shatner character is, of course, ruined, his journalistic career now the butt of Jay Leno's monologues, his legacy, rather than being blowing the whistle on organized crime and corporate and government corruption, and explaining international crises and scientific discoveries to the world, is now a punch-line.

And the drama and warmth of the movie comes from the conflict and resolution between father and son, both discovering and rediscovering their pride in one another, and somehow building a new career for Shatner, that stands on the lessons he's learned in the destruction of the old.

I post this so that some enterprising screenwriter will steal it. Go ahead, I won't tell. I just think I'd enjoy seeing this movie, and now you know as much about it as I do!

So, I do a Google search for the upcoming HBO series, More As The Story Develops, Aaron Sorkin's return to TV, and, judging by reading the leaked pilot script, a triumphant one, and Google's first suggestion is "hbogo.com." HBO Go wants me to log in with my online account login from Charter Cable. Now, Charter has a web-based log-in for billing, account changes, and so on, and based on HBO Go's login page, it would seem that was what they wanted.

So I went to try to recover that information, and was told I had to deal with Charter's online support "Live Chat."

I explain there, and the Chat rep, "Ria," asks me for a temp password to use on HBO Go's site. So I give her one. I then log into the site, find that they have no information on the series, and log out.

And suddenly my computer makes the "Oops, I can't get your e-mail" beep. This is not infrequent, Charter being the incompetent morons that they are, and usually, a second attempt logs right in and gets the mail. So I go to my e-mail, click "Check Mail," and immediately get the beep again, and the error message says, "Incorrect username or password."

Yes, that's right, Ria, the dipshit, has changed my e-mail password. So I go back to live chat, and this time get a different rep, and I explain that Ria has changed my e-mail password, and I need it changed back. I give the password that has retrieved my mail every five minutes since I moved to Pepperell, Massachusetts in 2003.

"Oh, no, sir," I'm told. "Our passwords require a minimum of {two more characters than my password has.} That password won't work on our system."

"It's worked fine on your system since 2003 until your doofus changed it. Just put it back."

I end up in chat with this one for over 45 minutes, while she says useless stuff like, "I understand your frustration" and "I apologize for your inconvenience." (No, you don't. You know how I know you don't? Because you're not doing what it takes to fix the problem.)

She tried to direct me to call the call center, and I did, but didn't let her go while I was at it. So I had about twenty minutes there of having smoke blown at me by the call center doofus and call center supervising doofus. Charter's out sourced call center is in, I think, Guatamala, but the reps are taught "unaccented English" with the thick nasal twang you get from from call centers in Central Asia, but, like the outsourced call center for Dell, they're in a box, with two levels of excalation, none of whom are empowered to actually fix their fuckups.

Although they claim to be "Very knowledgable" about how their servers work, they aren't: they don't know the difference between a policy that prevents reps from setting a password below a certain number of characters, and the server's ability to work with such a password. (I had to tell their "Supervisor" that if it were the latter, my password would have stopped working on its own years ago about six times.)

Both the phone call and the chat ended with a promise that I would receive a call-back from a manager. That was (I was interrupted while writing this) four hours ago, and no call-back yet.

So, yeah: If one of your choices for high-speed Internet is Charter, and you have another? Choose the other. I don't care if it's Three Stooges Internet, they're bound to be more competent.

These two clips are my permanent, annual Thanksgiving tradition.






Enjoy.

Jail for Food Stamp Fraud; Bailouts for Wall Street Fraud

From Matt Taibbi's blog at Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/woman-gets-jail-for-food-stamp-fraud-wall-street-fraudsters-get-bailouts-20111117



( If you don't want to follow the link, read after the cut. )

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/class-war-2011-10/

The Class War Has Begun
And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

By Frank Rich

( Read the article under the cut )

Stolen from my facebook friend Steve Olle:

Man, dig that Hammond organ! It doesn't get much better than this!

I am sitting, all alone, in Cinema 1 of the West Boylston Cinemas, in West Boylston, Massachusetts. In a little less than 15 minutes, HPDH2 will start, and, unless something very unexpected happens, it's the last time I'll watch a Potter movie on the big screen.

Harry, Ron, Hermione, I'll miss you. We'll revisit frequently, on TV and elsewhere, but that will never be the same.

This is Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev all gussied up for Hallowe'en:



The best part of this? Over the late spring and early summer, Ms. Dobrev filmed a movie: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in which she co-stars with Emma Watson.

Now that is made of awesome!

4-6 inches on the ground, and power's gone out as of 8:00 pm. Yay.

Y'know, it's kind of dispiriting when you like someone in a fandom who almost everybody in that fandom hates. So it's nice when the creator of the fandom has your back.

Behind the cut, you'll find a very NSFW dance from the Argentinian version of "DwtS," Bailando por un Sueño, featuring Cinthia Fernandez and Gabriel Usandivaras.

( Now, THIS is some quality entertainment! )

Now that's worth watching vapid reality TV for!

HAGIOGRAPHY 
1: biography of saints or venerated persons
2: idealizing or idolizing biography

 I'm stunned by the hagiography being devoted to Steve Jobs, both in the media and among the general public.

 Yes, the guy was a canny businessman, and created an aesthetic for his company that was very successful. His brilliance is unquestioned and unquestonable, and, he brought into the world of mainstream computing common use of the GUI concept invented at Bell Labs, which was what taught consumers you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work a computer, and that was a Good Thing.

 But he also seemed to view his company as a government unto itself, and his business model in which Apple continued to have active control -- essentially, ownership! -- over the hardware they had already sold to the consumer, is frankly nothing short of sleazy: iPhones bricked, police accompanying and acting at the direction of company security to retrieve prototypes that were stupidly lost in bars, it goes on and on.

 The GUI existed before Apple. PDAs could carry and play MP3s before the iPod, and there were plenty of internet-and-multimedia-capable touch-screen smartphones before the iPad. Kindles and Nooks were there for e-reading, and every computer manufacturer in existence has been trying to sell tablet PCs for years before the iPad. Again, Steve Jobs brought to Apple Computer Corporation a fierce aesthetic sensibility, a wedding of form and function that led to an elegant and consistent "Branding" for their products. Well done and all that.

 A good, solid engineer, and a talented businessman. But to listen the news coverage, he was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ!

 I own no Apple hardware and the only Apple software I have is Safari, just because I love having extra web browsers, to see how stubborn pages render in different software, and quicktime. No iTunes, no nuthin' but those two programs. (And I may actually have Quicktime Alternative, I'm not sure.) I still do all the smartphone calling and e-book reading and MP3 listening and mobile computing and video viewing I could want on my HTC Evo Shift 4G Android smartphone, and it all works wonderfully.

 In fact, after a day's thought, I can think of only one way I've benefited more-or-less directly from Steve Jobs: Were it not for him, and thus the iPhone, I never would have seen Blake Lively and Scarlett Johanson naked! An expensive, high-prestige smartphone with a high-quality digital camera built in? Starlets taking naked pictures of themselves was an almost inevitable consequence.

Thank you, Steve Jobs!