What's in the bag?

It's somehow inevitable that as soon as I left Dartmouth, the film series stopped included Marx Brothers Doubleshots and played two movies that I would have loved to see in the first week: Run Lola Run and Sin City. In retaliation, I found Run Lola Run at the local library and watched it last night ‚— a full day before it played at Dartmouth!

It's a very enjoyable movie. The plot is fairly simple: a fiery-haired girl has twenty minutes to find 100,000 marks or her boyfriend will be killed by the gangster who employs him. The movie follows her attempts to find the money, which are complicated by her moped having been stolen earlier in the same day, forcing her to get around Berlin on foot. Parts of the movie are a little strained: for example, several early parts are animated, and while the animation recurs in one particular moment throughout the film, it's never really clear why. Lola also screams when she's feeling particularly pressed by chaos; it's an interesting effect, but largely ignored in the middle o the film to return in a pivotal moment at the end. However, these are minor quibbles, and the majority of the movie is quite successful, as it blends music-video-esque quick scenes and cuts and a frenetic pace with an engaging story.

Hollywood's been in a slump lately: even with the (relatively) critically acclaimed Batman Begins and the LucasArts shit-into-gold machine that was Episode III, ticket sales are at a 20 year low. A number of explanations have been proposed: the growing prevalence of DVDs and DVD rentals, large screen TVs, movie theaters tending to be enormously shitty places to go, etc. While those probably all contribute — particularly the combination of the cost of movie tickets and the stock car experience you get — but I think it's also partly a result of the complete lack of innovation in Hollywood currently. Except for Sin City (and even that was an adaptation of a comic, not an original work), nothing Hollywood has produced recently has been even vaguely interesting, and even the American public is likely to eventually get tired of the same by-the-numbers stories, bland camera work, and uninspired direction. If Hollywood wants to get moviegoers to start going to movies again, it needs to start making movies worth going to, and xXx: State of the Union is not the right place to start.

(world without end)

I'm in a self indulgent mood, so I'm going to post an e-mail I wrote to someone a while ago. It still sums up my feelings pretty well.

I'm sitting here, thesis meeting in twenty-five minutes (thirty a while ago), trying to come up with something to write. I'd send you song lyrics I suppose, but I don't really know very many nice songs, and while

She leaves a trail of honey
To show me where she's been

is catchy, it's not quite the mood I was hoping for. (Sentence ending in preposition: -2.) ... and while I was sitting here, twiddling my thumbs (metaphorically), I noticed that the amber light on the front of my computer was flickering every half second or so. (It's the hard drive activity light. Comes on whenever something uses the hard drive.) Something -- I'm honestly not quite sure what -- was walking my hard drive, looking for something, building search indices, something.

Anthropomorphism of the worst variety; it's a goddamn computer program.

(Thesis meeting in twenty minutes now.)

Still, it bothers me a little. In the grand scheme of things, what am I doing? I've had dreams, I suppose, but they haven't really come to as much as I'd always imagined they would. When I was 8, I was going to be a football star; at 10, I figured I'd be an astronaut; when I was 12, I was going to be the next Bill Gates; nothing changed when I was 14, but by the time I was 16 I was going to be a great lawyer (or maybe philosopher) TOO, and when I was 18 I was going to be a professor (and fencing champion). At 22, I have hopes of being employed.

(The Tucker Dean wants me to know about TUCKER THIS WEEK.)

And maybe, after a year, I'll go back to those other dreams, because they were actually pretty shiny even if they're not all working for me this instant. In the meantime, though, I have to figure I'm just biding time, playing solataire, hoping for time to pass until something happens and my dreams are close again. Gave up on being an astronaut a long time ago, about when I realized that I was afraid of heights, but I still want to drift among the stars.

(Thesis meeting in ten; I should probably draw to a conclusion here.)

Why look! My Windows system has Windows running on it!

A couple of minutes ago, my copy of AOL's AIM client decided that I really wanted a full-motion sound-enhanced ad for some semi-retarded summer blockbuster movie to play in the upper right hand corner of my screen (and slow everything else I was doing down in the process), and I reached my limit with AIM's advertising. I know a lot of people who switched from AIM to one of the open source alternatives some time ago because AOL seemed to be much better at adding advertisements than features, but the ads had never bothered me enough to bother switching. However, the new Flash-enabled crap seemed completely excessive.

Now, half an hour later, I'm back to AOL's AIM client. The sad thing is that the replacement I was playing around with - WinGaim - is not a bad piece of software. It had a number of features AIM doesn't, seems to be more extensible, and doesn't come loaded with advertisements. However, it also came with a couple of other bonuses, like:

• Font handling. Gaim's default font for everything is "sans 8." Never mind that nowhere in my system could I find a font called "sans," and no other Windows applications have any knowledge of this font. As an additional bonus, while there is a way to set a default font (and, conveniently enough, it involves editing a text file somewhere), it's overridden by the "Windows impersonation" theme that makes Gaim look like a Windows application. Finally, even after carefully setting the font in everything to look like Tahoma 10pt, it turned out that it appeared more like Tahoma 14pt on other systems.

• Window controls. Most of the time, Gaim did a decent job of mimicking the normal Windows control behavior. However, it was far from perfect. Scroll bars had a tendency not to really be attached to the text boxes they scrolled, and the mouse cursor seemed to be set completely at random. In some Gaim windows, it used the Windows cursors. In others, it used some variant of the standard Linux cursors, and had an odd belief that the i-beam cursor was the correct thing to use in menus, over buttons, etc.

Neither of these is necessarily a horrible inconvenience, and if I truly needed any of the features that Gaim provided, I would still be using it. However, they indicate a problem that I've run into a couple of times. There is lots of open source software that's quite good, and generally as good as (or better than) the commercial software available on Windows. Unfortunately, there's also a tendency for this software to be very poorly ported to Windows. Sure, it runs, but not in a way that fits in with the standard Windows model, and I find that to be just as annoying as all the ad-laden bloatware that people seem to think we Windows users really like to use.

(Along those lines, it's worth also pointing out that the Firefox and Eclipse teams have done wonderful jobs of making their apps virtually indistinguishable from other Windows applications, while Apple still doesn't seem to get that as ugly as their chrome scheme is on the Mac, it's forty times worse on Windows. Emacs, as final note, has never been ported to Windows and I wish someone would get around to it.)