Monthly Archives: August 2010

40′s movies marathon – part 115

Oliver Twist (1948, UK, Lean)

There’s no need for monsters in alternate, Dickensian England, because the place is full of humans.  They’re all rotten, all except the plucky hero, and some nice people he meets along the way who give false hope that maybe life isn’t so awful after all.  But it is, and requires nothing short of a miracle to set things right.  Watched it all.

Good Sam (1948, USA, McCary)

Gary Cooper wants to be nice to everybody, but his wife knows better: Helping people makes you look silly in front of your neighbors, and it’s really expensive too. Watched: 13 minutes. I find myself wanting to watch an evil version of this movie written by Ayn Rand, where Gary Cooper’s wife teaches him to be a selfish asshole uninhibited by altruism, and not the other way around.

Act of Violence (1948, USA, Zinnemann)

Hey this is almost that Viggo Mortensen movie, A History of Violence.  Only here, the violent past that comes back to haunt the nice suburban dad is the War, where there was no such thing as nice suburban dads.  Watched it all. This is the darkest veteran movie yet.  Surviving the war is portrayed as a cruel joke: It just makes the pain last longer, the pain of knowing what you’ve become.

The Snake Pit (1948, USA, Litvak)

It has always been a reliable ticket to the Oscars: Play a mad person.  Watched: 13 minutes.

Listened to on vacation: Ratatat, Shiina Ringo, Deep Purple, Misstrip, Eero Johannes

I don’t know how I ever managed to travel without a 160GB mp3 player.  The people, they are annoying, and they talk all the time!  Gah!  The optimal solution would be to make it socially obligatory to use sign language when you talk on the bus, train etc., but I guess it’s .. easier to just turn on some music if you’re the kind of asshole who is annoyed by that sort of thing.  So here’s what my mp3 player dug up for me this vacation:

Ratatat – Wildcat, from the 2006 album Classics

Shiina Ringo – Ishiki, from the 2003 album Karuki Zamen Kuri no Hana

Deep Purple – Listen, Learn, Read On, from the 1968 album The Book of Taliesyn

Misstrip – Lilly White, from the 2009 album Sibylline

Eero Johannes – HAL Manifesto, from the 2008 album Eero Johannes

They were dressed like children who’d been interrupted while ransacking a theater’s costume closet

Tim Powers - On Stranger Tides

I picked up Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides because someone said it was one of the few novels that had gotten the whole pirrrrate thing right.  It even inspired the Monkey Island games and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Pirates are inherently ridiculous, especially when they’re dressed like they’ve been “ransacking a theater’s costume closet”, and are led by a voodoo pirate captain who, in the first chapters, abducts a fair maiden and a swashbuckling hero.  But I’m all for pretending to be twelve years old if it will help me enjoy a story.  So I gave it a try.

It didn’t work.  But that actually had nothing to do with the pirate theme.  I liked the pirate theme.  It’s the author I don’t like.  His characters have as much soul as a voodoo pirate captain.

I tried to read another Tim Powers novel once, The Anubis Gates, and it had the same problem.  Plenty of fun concepts, including, if I remember correctly, some sort of evil clown running the underworld of 19th century London.  Fun fun fun.  But no magic.  I mean: No story magic.  The magic that makes you want to know what the characters will do next, because they have their hooks in your psyche and refuse to let go.

So, no more Tim Powers for me.  Ever.  But thar be plenty of voodoo pirate captains ahead for me anyway: Monkey Island 2 has just been rereleased with new graphics.  It’s out on PC and iPhone etc.  Go play it.

New essay: How software is made – a tour of the sausage factory

I have a new essay site up, where I’ll post or link to anything I write that is longer than 256 words.  There’s an archive there of old essays that may still be worth reading, and there may a new one once in a while.  New posts will also be linked to from here, of course.

First new essay: How software is made – a tour of the sausage factor.

Did your computer ever crash on you?  That was my fault.  Not literally, of course.  You’re probably not a user of the software I’m working on.  But it was the fault of someone very much like me – another programmer.

When it happened, you may have thought: This always happens. Why can’t they get it right?  What kind of incompetent morons make software that doesn’t work?  Well, it’s incompetent morons like myself, and now I’m going to explain how we do it.  I want to explain it in a way that can be understood by non-programmers, or, as we programmers secretly refer to you: Those stupid users who crash our programs all the time.  I want you to understand what software development is actually all about, what the challenges are, why it’s a difficult and even downright ugly process. Because it’s different from what you probably imagine.

Read the rest here.