Funny how I can keep reusing this:

A beefy facelift, bringing it up to web2.0 shizzle. Now you can track your posts, quote replies, view profiles with greater ease and keep a closer tab on my comings and goings.

Let me know if you encounter any errors or bugs. I haven't really tested it thoroughly on all browsers, but it should work most of the time on most of them. It's still a beta at this point. I got a lot more features on the backburner to install here, too. Including: POINTS!

....now, about that music guide thing.....

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcsportsbog/2010/04/brooks_laich_changes_a_tire_af.html

To be fair, it's not like he has anything to do tomorrow, or anywhere to go or any important place he needs to be. The #1 team in the NHL just choked a 3-1 series lead in the first round of the playoffs. Something like that can weigh very heavy on an athlete's mind.

He probably wasn't on his way home directly. He probably took the long way, maybe even visited some sites around Washington. Stared at the Lincoln Memorial for awhile, y'know, a little alone time, to think, and contemplate, what this means for him, his future, his team, his family. Heavy sighs, hands in pockets, a serene look of forlorn distance in his eyes, in the declination of admittance, like a classic warrior in defeat, still reluctant, stubborn and strong....but oh so defeated.

A heavy feeling in his throat. Anxiety and frustration tinged with a tarty lemon's squirt of regret. There is a Japanese phrase for this type of emotional state: kimochi warui. Means, roughly, bad emotion or evil feeling. But more directly, in the Shakespearean vernacular as delivered by Beavis & Butthead: "This sucks."

What he needs, most of all, is to get out of this heavy thinking. This mood, that if not escaped, can lead to depression, suicide, or worse. He needs to feel better. He needs to feel validated, to be worthy, to be important to somebody again, and not dwell on this post-traumatic loser mode for too long. He needs, more than anything, a distraction.

And lo, on the side of the road, a test of his fortitude, as if a challenge delivered from the Gods themselves. Somebody in need of assistance and no one there to help them. Very few hockey players are offered a second chance at redemption so readily! This is his moment! This is his chance! This, ladies and gentlemen, is his Stanley Cup, and he is not going to let his team down!!!

The inauguration of the 141st fucking baseball season has made me realize something repetitively mundane about baseball.

The whole sport is nothing but one gigantic If statement. It is the easiest sport in the world to code. There has not been any new strategic approaches to it in damn near 50 years, and no new rule changes or applications since the designated hitter, which was introduced in 1973, and that was only for the American League. Oh, and they also started recently caring about that steroid thing, but not until after all the sacred homerun records had been shattered.

But the point is everything has already been done, everything has already been seen and planned for, the only thing that matters now is execution. Any casual baseball fan can predict all possible outcomes on any given play. And despite the noticeable disparity of talent across the league, the players all make the same choices, with relative degrees of success and failure, based on what previously happened. You can't do that with a fluent sport like hockey, basketball or soccer, which has dynamic and ever-changing conditions, or with an innately strategic sport like football, that relies on inventive field tactics and formations.

Baseball is the only sport in the world where you don't have to watch it to know what's going on. It is the ultimate radio sport. Hell, you don't even need to hear it. You can read the box score in the paper and literally visualize in your mind what happened with startling accuracy. If I say "leadoff short hop single to center-left with nobody on", every baseball fan knows what that looks like. They can draw it on a blackboard as a pretty accurate representation of what happened in the actual game.

Baseball is a mathematical formula. It's nothing but a set of known contingencies and IF/THEN/ELSE conditional statements, one after the other, for 9 innings. 162 times a year. Per team. There are no variables or unknowns. There's no creativity, no strategy, no new approaches to the game (moneyball notwithstanding). Every team and every player plays the exact same way, which makes it excellent for stats geeks. Hell, the game is so predictable that it actually has a statistic used to track how many times the expected outcome does not occur, called the error (which is yet another math/statistics reference).

And the most ironic thing about America's pastime is that, in a country that likes to gorge on individual freedom and personal liberty way past the expiry date, baseball contains precious little of it. It is the multiple choice question of sports.

From:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/16/chatroulette-stats-male-perverts/

# Of the spins showing a single person, 89% were male and 11% were female.
# You are more likely to encounter a webcam featuring no person at all than one featuring a solo female.
# 8% of spins showed multiple people behind the camera. 1 in 3 females appear as part of such a group. That number is 1 in 12 for males.
# 1 in 8 spins yield something R-rated (or worse)
# You are twice as likely to encounter a sign requesting female nudity than you are to encounter actual female nudity

The overall pervert rate in Chatroulette is 13%. This means about 1 in 8 chat sessions will have something decidedly Rated R (or NC-17) on the other end. Of the perverts that were identified, only 8% were female. Combined with the overall female rate, that means less than 1% of chats feature a female pervert.

Like everything else on the internet, something is ruined once the /b/tards get ahold of it. But was Chat Roulette ever a good idea to begin with? It's a perfect example of what people devolve to in a perfect system of complete anonymity and no consequences: Groundhog Day-style anarchic hedonistic pursuits.

If you're a guy, you have no reason to go on there, other than to watch other guys click "next" every 0.5 seconds, and the occasional gay guy masturbating (prepare to see a lot of penises). Good luck trying to find any meaningful conversation. If you're a girl, you're probably already a camwhore but if you're not, prepare to be one. No one's really interested in talking to you either.

So the concept of the site is a misnomer: Despite being named "Chat Roulette", very few people want to chat on it at any length, and the ease by which anyone can anonymously dispatch their partner has limited the capacity for making any meaningful connections. Why bother getting into an engaging discussion with someone if they can turn you off forever at any moment?

In fact, if a trend can be extrapolated from all this, it's that the internet is progressively becoming less of a communications-based medium and more of a visual shock-grabber.

From text-only mailing lists in the early 90s which were thriving with content, to web forums with images and pictures in the mid 90s but still content heavy, to chat clients in the late 90s that are content-based but no substance, to cellphone speak in the 00s, to social networking sites that stunt attention, to myspace and youtube that are audio and video-based, respectively, to Twitter which acknowledges that the average attention span can not exceed 30-40 words, and finally now Chat Roulette, which has absolutely no text or content at all. Just evocative imagery.

Billions of calculations per second being processed at the speed of light through millions of transistors, each one barely a nanometer in size; the culmination of centuries of refinement in science, engineering, mathematics, physics, logic and manufacturing, to produce a mass production device that is the greatest technological achievement in the history of mankind; a powerful tool that harnesses the accumulated information and total knowledge and wisdom of the entire history of the human race, all brought together, today, for the single purpose.....

of this.

Avatar is a movie that will remind you of many other movies.

The protagonist living with natives and learning their ways, falling in love with one of them and ultimately fighting for them will remind you of Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai. Additionally, the big battle at the end is the Empire versus the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. With expectant results.

The respect for nature and its wonders will remind you of Ferngully.

The transference of one's consciousness into another existence to lead a double life will remind you of The Matrix.

The hero's speech to rally the tribes against the human threat will remind you of Braveheart.

The big gunships and missiles and awesome explosions and the tough-as-nails badass marine Colonel with gnarley scars and the raging hard cock war porn will remind you of every Michael Bay movie. More specifically, the robots will remind you of Transformers (btw, that Colonel is simply awesome, and has two memorable scenes -- one where he can't breathe, the other where he's on fire -- and in neither scene is he the slightest bit concerned).

Additionally, the robot suits, and military fetish themes catered to decimating and controlling a planet of technologically inferior life (but with proven natural defenses) will remind you of Starship Troopers.

The blue people will remind you of The Smurfs. If they were Thundercats.

Additionally, their ears and tails will remind you of Hyper Police and every other furry cat-people anime.

The "planet is one interconnected organism" motif will remind you of the video game Alpha Centauri. Especially when it attacks the humans.

Additionally, the use of animals and the planet's indigenous life to attack the humans will remind you of Dune.

The "unobtainium" represents the laziest and most unoriginal mcguffin since the skull in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Sigourney Weaver's "scientist befriends and lives with natives to study their ways" character will remind you of Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist.

Sam Worthington's wooden acting will remind you of his role in Terminator: Salvation and probably every other movie he's done (that includes the forthcoming Clash of the Titans).

When good characters die in slow motion to mournful, middle-eastern chanting and mystical indian music, you will think of Gladiator, and also the introduction to Battlestar Galactica.

The amount of blue in this movie will remind you of The Abyss, Terminator 2, Aliens, and every other James Cameron movie. Blue is his thing. He has a blue tint in every movie he does. Especially night scenes. Go look.

The 3+ hour running time will remind you of The Watchmen. The fact that there are so many naked blue people will also remind you of The Watchmen, but for different reasons.


One thing in this movie that will not remind you of anything else, however, is the visual presentation. The CGI in this film is absolutely breathtaking and life-changing, and boldly affirms that the next era in filmmaking is here, by finally conquering the uncanny valley that had plagued special effects for the past 5-8 years. This makes Transformers, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and all the other previous masterpieces of championship effects-laden extravaganzas, look terrible in comparison. It is gorgeous eye-candy in every conceivable way; a visual and cinematic drug, to the point where movie-goers are experiencing withdrawal pains and severe depression after seeing it. Some have even crept to the depths of suicide upon the horrifying realization that Pandora doesn't actually exist (I wouldn't want to live there, though. It looks very dangerous. Like Australia, it is a foreign ecosystem where anything can kill you).

Speaking of Pandora, the planet is really the star of the movie. It's actually a moon, orbiting a gas giant which, as any science fiction fan can tell you, is advantageous to the evolution and development of indigenous life (shields it from asteroid bombardment, as earth's moon and, to a greater extent, Jupiter does). The level of care and consideration placed in the fauna, the cultural instincts of the animals, and how everything is connected via bio-luminescence and, especially with the Na'vi, sensitive umbilical synapses in their hair that can connect telepathically with other living things like fiber optic USB cables. Some of the animals, however, will remind you of displacer beasts if you've ever played Dungeons & Dragons. And the winged steeds will remind you of the aerial mount Taarna rode in Heavy Metal.

There are very few movies that are benchmarks in visuals. Movies that are so iconic in their post-production values that they spawn copycats trying to reproduce their success. In an age where superhero movies by the dozens are running off an assembly line of Cray Supercomputers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a film that makes you honestly go "WOW!". In the past, there have only been a handful of movies that have earned that collective exclamation, the most important being Star Wars, Jurassic Park and The Matrix. This is a worthy addition to that pantheon. I cannot express this enough: Avatar is visual porn. It must be seen on the big screen -- preferably IMAX -- to achieve the affected result. Some scenes might even make you cry.

Beyond that, however, there is no reason to see this film. The characters are stock and one-dimensional, the plot paper-thin and predictable, the dialogue cringe-worthy, the love story cliche'd, the ham-fisted political message annoying, and the direction, editing and cinematography adequate. But if this movie -- which had been in production for the better part of the last ten years, with a script that was written nearly 20 years ago, and had spent $500 million over that period developing the technology to finally make it -- is playing it safe artistically only to justify being the prototype for the next stage of evolution in filmmaking, then that's excuse enough I suppose. If for no other reason, this is the movie industry throwing the gauntlet down and creating something so spectacular and expensive that it can not be pirated and downloaded. You need special glasses and a special theatre to achieve the full experience. And if that's the case, then, imagine what can be done when this technology is backed by a decent plot! We are about to see some serious serious shit in the next 10-20 years.

BONUS POST-SCRIPT: There is no bad shakey-cam in this movie! It takes its time with each shot, and James Cameron is patient enough to give you the space, time and room you need to take in everything and appreciate it properly. There are no 0.3 second quick cuts, and the camera pans back during fight scenes so you can see everything. As this film is heavily reliant on visuals over plot, it would make sense that it would like you to actually see what's going on, rather than confuse you with pointless blurry things flying around and continuity-conflicting rapid-fire takes and cuts.

POST-POST-SCRIPT (warning: spoilers): This is the only James Cameron science fiction movie that didn't involve or mention nuclear weapons. On the other hand, all the Na'vi really succeeded in doing was kick the comparatively tiny contingent of Company scientists, officers and equipment off the planet. When Earth learns what has happened, you can be rest assured that they'll be back in ten years with a much larger force, and proceed to nuke the stubborn, insolent blue fuckers from orbit in a highly anticipated but much shorter made-for-television sequel Avatar 2: Judgment Day. At least, that's what oughta happen. It's the only way to be sure.