09 June 2008

This is mostly whining

A Phish Tale

After doing so well with the updating, I missed a whole weekend, a fact I attribute in part to the sons of bitches pulling the phishing scam from my saru-san domain. It seems that my initial attempt to extricate their malignant code from my site only partially succeeded, and, like a cancer, it grew back. There were no fewer than 5 different bank websites (Halifax, HSBC, NatWest, Citibank, Barclays...) being counterfeited there, and all making me look like the bad guy.

For a while, my site was shut down by the Powers That Be, and when it came back up - everything was shot to hell. My gallery, containing over 4000 photos, was reduced to an error message. The front page website was redirected to a list of Japanese-themed sites featuring anime, sushi, and school girls in short skirts and knee socks. (So it wasn't all bad, then.) I went into their code and rewrote a couple of their pages so that instead of looking like a real bank website, it said things like, "This is a fraudulent page. Do not log in. In fact, fuck off!" Unfortunately, as soon as I uploaded the pages with my modifications, that's when the system crashed.

I worked late into the night trying to restore some semblance of order, but to no avail. This time, it seems as though the terrorists have won. This time, there is no happy ending.

But fuck that melodrama shit. It was just a website, after all. I will end up rebuilding it all from scratch, which is fine because everybody needs a hobby. Idle hands are the devil's workshop and all that jazz. At least the villains have been thwarted for now. The battle may have been theirs, but the war shall be mine!

Intercourse and the Metropolis

On another subject, Zeeba and I went to see Sex and the City on Friday night. Wow. Maybe they should have called it Sucks and is Shitty because, dude, WTF? Did they even try to write a script for that thing? It's like the Reader's Digest decided to get into the movie biz - the Reader's Digest Condensed Sex and the City. Ever hear of character development?

Okay, granted the characters were well developed over the run of the television show, so there's a certain amount of history that is to be taken for granted, but the characterizations in the movie were flat. The women didn't necessarily act out of character... it was more like they were caricatures of themselves. And the men might as well have been shampoo bottles, because they were nothing more than props - little off-screen plot devices made so the women characters would have something to react to. Badly. The men were two-dimensional; the characterizations that were carefully constructed for them over the course of the show were discarded in favor of these depressing stereotypes.

And what the hell was with that Louise character? The movie, as it was, consisted of four disjointed and barely related stories revolving around each of the main characters. The plot was weak, and made even weaker by the fact that we had to divide our attention between four subplots that never really meshed with each other. So someone in marketing sat down and said, "You know, these women are getting up in years. We need a character all up in here who is hip and young and can bring down that younger demographic. And, while we're at it, let's make her black." So to the pool of four stories we really don't give a damn about, they add one more that we really don't give a damn about. Nice.

In short, I give it two thumbs up - up my ass.

First there was the Indiana Jones movie, and now this? Don't get me wrong - I liked Indiana Jones through the first part of the film. I mean, come on - it had bugs and monkeys? What's not to love?

But right in the beginning they basically told you the answer to their little mystery, and instead of switching it up and making it clever and good in the end, it ended just as one might expect, leaving nothing to the imagination. This isn't the worst crime in film, perhaps, but if I go to a movie and it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, the last thing I want to see in the final reel is that it had been a duck all along. And it isn't enough to lead me to believe that the duck is a mallard but then it turns out to be a rosybill. Insufficient!!! I want to walk out of the theater having discovered that it wasn't a duck at all; it was Nazi Germany! Hooray!

Movies suck. I will stick with porn from now on.

The Last Five:
I heard it on the radio - 27 July 2008
Happiness is... - 26 July 2008
Do bears shit in the woods? - 21 July 2008
Politics schmoliticks - 14 July 2008
words and pictures - 14 July 2008

This is mostly whining

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