Well, I’ve finally decided to upgrade this site to the latest verison of Drupal. The actual process of migrating to version 7 wasn’t too bad. The majority of issues came from Views and fields not being named or typed the same way they were in Drupal 6. Changing all the views by hand was not that difficult and it allowed me to do a bit of how cleaning withing views. Views in Drupal 7 is sooooo much better!
The biggest challenge has been recreating the site’s theme. Although the general look and feel is more or less the same as before, I have made some visual tweaks here and there. The biggest change has been the fly-out menu and the switch to a responsive, mobile-friendly layout. I’m still working on getting that finished, but for the most part the site looks good on just about any size viewport.
The only downside to the switch to Drupal 7 is that my host, MediaTemple’s Gridserver, has performance issues with the new system. There are a couple of tweaks that help, mainly changing references within the database file from “Innodb” to “MyISAM.” I have no idea what this does, but it helps keep the database from freezing up and timing out on the Gridserver.
Videodrome always seems to turn up on lists of the best horror films of all time. While it was visually and conceptually interesting, I was not that enthralled by it as much as I thought I would be. Whatever appeal it has lies in its art film style. There’s a dreamy and confusing narrative that has more in common with Mulholland Drive or other puzzle movies than with a straight-up fright film. I may revisit this movie again. I suspect it gets better on multiple viewings.
Another yarn about corrupted youth from Vin Packer. This time it’s four disenfranchised teenage boys who become a vigilante squad looking to clean the bums and and degenerates out of the city. They’re lead by Bardo Raleigh, a smart and charming young man who is obsessed with discipline and order. The rest of the crew is made up of a jazz bebopping nut case, a love struck mope and a mentally unstable herpetologist wannabe. You kind of know where the story is going from the beginning and the end falls a little flat, but overall a good tale of hooliganism.
This was a movie that did not need to be made. That said, it’s reasonably entertaining but not at all scary or funny or anything that made the original Evil Dead trilogy so great.
The original BioShock was a great game with an interesting plot and a wonderfully unique setting. I never really understood the bizarre take on Ayn Rand though. It seemed to say that if objectivism is taken to its logical extreme that would mean people who believe in individualism and self-ownership would immediately start modifying and enslaving people against their will? That makes no sense at all, but it was enough to give you a bad guy to pursue. BioShock 2 takes place in a more deteriorated Rapture several years after the fall of Andrew Ryan. This time, however, the collectivists are in charge and, whad-do-ya-know, they suck too. I guess the theme here is it’s cool to be an indecisive, on-the-fence moderate.
This sequel plays about the same as the original but there have been a few improvements such as the removal of those annoying pipe-dream style puzzles that represented hacking. The combat, while fun, was pretty difficult for me and I often felt like I was dying without warning. I eventually got the hang of it once I had enough power-ups. This game felt like it moved along a little better than the first with less back tracking. The story comes to a decent finale and, in the end, I think I liked this game just as much as I did the first one.
I created this print during the height of the anti-Iraq war protests. It’s about being against everything and for nothing. After I finished editioning this print, I created a two-tone reduction print version of it that looks much cooler, but I only manged to make one copy of that.
The Blues Explosion (at least on these earlier recordings) occupies a nice space between the raw, rootsy rock of bands like the Bassholes and the driving rock of Touch and Go bands like The Jesus Lizard. As much as I like this release, I think the follow-up Orange is much better.
This was a good Indonesian action film that has a minimal plot and zero character development. A bunch of cops go in to clean out a drug lord’s apartment complex and everything goes horribly wrong. What it lacks in narrative competence it makes up for in tension-filled and well orchestrated scenes of blazing gun play and brutal fist fights.
I have enjoyed all of Jason Scott’s documentaries. His films tend to be about somewhat niche areas in computing and how those technologies affected the people who use(d) them. This one is about the DEFCON hacking convention. There’s a little bit of history about the convention, but mostly it is interviews with attendees and organizers about what it is they like so much about the gathering. To me, I felt like about quarter of the movie could be interchanged with any film about a group of people with similar interests meeting up in Las Vegas. I’m sure attendees at a shower curtain rod convention would tell you about how shower curtain people are the friendliest of people and how you can just strike a conversation with any other attendee… oh, and the parties are just awesome. No one parties like a shower curtain rod sales professional.
But this all can be forgiven because I think this film is directed more towards people who actually participated in the event. I am sure they will get a kick out of all the nostalgia and reminiscing. The other three-quarters document the various events that take place during the conference. These are the things that make DEFCON unique: stuff like cryptology contests, badge hacking, lock-picking, weird gizmos and, of course, the controversial speakers. A former co-worker of mine from when I was working as an office temp in Bloomington, Ill. makes an appearance. He goes by the name “V1ru5” here and he probably doesn’t remember me, but he was the guy who actually told me what DEFCON was back in 1999 and offered advice when I was contemplating going to the Game Developer’s Conference that year. Anyhow, I’d recommend this documentary to anyone who has a greater than normal interest in technology and wha-do-ya-know, you can watch it on Vimeo for free.
