AgPerson

I’ve now received two cool birthday presents — the wonderful gift from Sally and UPN’s decision to run the Buffy musical episode on my birthday! Best. Television. Ever. Yay!!!

The best thing about DVDs has got to be the director’s commentary tracks. I absoultely love getting into the head of the people who put a film together, and to find out why they did what they did. Sometimes you can hear a bit of animosity on the tracks, sometimes things don’t come out the way they should, sometimes people make decisions that are not necessarily artistically sound.

I was watching The Glass House (don’t ask how I ended up with it) and I saw a movie with a lot of potential and some absolutely beautiful and stunning cinematography and artistic aspects, but lacking a lot in terms of a real story.

Basically we have a psychological thriller about this very very interesting and powerful idea — if parents die and leave their children behind, what happens to the children? What if there are no close family members? What if they live on the other side of the country? The parents might find close friends of the family and designate them as caretakers, not necessarily knowing everything they should about the other people.

Listening to the director and the writer talk about the film, I could feel a lot of what it should have been, with intricate backstory and important subplots. But the demands of a major motion picture are for profit, and in this case the markets have shown that teen thrillers need to run one hour fourty or a bit below, not over two hours. And stories have to be easy to grasp. And thrills have to be gotten to with a minimum of extraneous backstory. And, with this movie, it had to be rated PG-13 for a wider audience, and that meant kicking out a lot of the very effective morphine addiction subplot (and some of the more grisly violent scenes, which really didn’t detract anything).

Being in a motorhome on the highway I have no idea how this movie was received ( I can’t even remember hearing of it, and I don’t have IMDb at my disposal at present), but I’m sure that it was somewhat disappoiting at the box office. And I can see that a third of the scenes in the trailer are not actually in the final cut of the movie.

Its sad when you see a movie like this, a movie that intellectual snobs like myself can brush off as stupid and formulaic and mainstream, and you see that real thought and work and sweat and tears went into the making of it, and the end result, while beautiful, was only a mediocre piece of film. Because it could have been a lot more.

Another thought to file away in my cultural analysis of Hollywood. And now back to writing my script, which has gotten no further in my week of vacation.

Picture a 31 foot motor home…err…”coach” with an attached 21 foot boat on a trailer a few feet longer. Luckily, I don’t have to drive the thing. But it means that any day-to-day activity, say, going to eat, becomes a bit of an ordeal. That and there are five people to satisfy.

Anyway, we end up at this restaurant that we had gone to on our previous sojurn to Lake Havasu City, and we get this nice waitress who has a day job of teaching fourth graders and spends nights waiting tables. And on the television, which I’ve decided I have to start calling the “telly,” there is this karate match. Two people, a kid and an adult man, swing little sickles around and do all kinds of cool flips. They finish and leave me in awe, then a girl and a boy come up to do another routine with staffs. Which leads to an exchange that slightly demonstrates my wit and that I shall therefore record in perpetuity here on my shrine of narcissism.

Danny: “What a nice story. Boy meets girl, boy attacks girl with stick, girl beats up boy, everyone is happy.”
Stu: “It looks like Iron Chef.”
Danny: “Yeah. Iron Chef Kung Fu versus Iron Chef Jujitsu…your mystery ingredient – a wooden stick. Begin!”
Jessica: “That’s not very funny.”
Danny: “Sure it is. I think I’ll put it on my blog.”
etc.

So I got my new motherboard today, so right about now my Power Mac should be back online, right? Um, so, I plug it all in and nothing happens…no power. Now the old mobo would light up and the fans would start, I just wouldn’t get into bootup. So this is odd…so I pull out the old board and stick it back in, and now it gives me nothing as well. Maybe it’s the switch? I try an iMac keyboard on both boards and get the same. So I take my old board down to our Dell PC and try it with that power supply. Nothing.

Giving up on that, I remove my 60GB hard drive full of music and such and plug it into the nice ClubMac enclosure I’m borrowing from Maintex. This thing takes an IDE hard drive and outputs to FireWire so I can plug it into my laptop and get all of the data off of it. Except that doesn’t work either. The lights light up, the drive spins, the read light blinks, but nothing comes up on the laptop. So I try my OTHER hard drive, the 40 GB one that I formatted just before the death of the motherboard. Still no go.

So what can it be? The new mobo from ebay could be bad, but the old one won’t light up either. It could be a power cord, but the power on the ClubMac unit lights up…it could be the power supply but it doesn’t work with the PC supply either…so what the heck is it? One thing I do know — I’m not dumping my old motherboard as a dud until this is all resolved. And tomorrow we go to the river, so I guess it has to wait a week. And I have to be puzzled and confused and upset for a week…because I’ve built computers, damnit, and if I’m such a Mac expert I should be able to figure this one out.

Next I’ll have to take it to MicroCenter and pay them $80 so they can diagnose the problem wrong… Grrrrr.

The photo thingy is basically fixed (yeah, I know there are still a few problems), so announcing the first New Gallery In A While. Enjoy! And by all means caption!

I pledged to myself that I would write my own review before I read any others, as I often find reviews changing how I perceive a film. Well, now that I’m done I’ve read the Salon review and have found, as is often the case, that Salon writers have expressed something much better then I can hope to.

WARNING: Major Spoilers
If you have any plans to see this movie please do so FIRST, before reading this entry.

Tom Cruise plays a guy named Anderton, which is weird because this morning that is what I decided to name the main character in the short film I am writing. In the movie the world is one in which everyone is profiled and marketed to by interactive ads at every turn, same as mine. Strange. Third, their world is one in which crime no longer exists, same as mine. No, just kidding, not same as mine. The entire movie bears no resemblance at all to mine. But those two coincidences are kinda fun, huh?

Okay, so, Tom had a son who got kidnapped. Now he runs this division of pre-crime that stops murders before they happen. Usually they can predict ’em a few days early, when it is a murder of passion they often have a lot less time, maybe 12 hours, for example. Meanwhile they have this awesome computer interface that is motion guided and allows you to fly through information. A lot of this is stuff similar to things made up by sci-fi writers and/or envisioned at the MIT Media Lab, my favorite place and one of the places that receives a shout-out in the credits.

So Tom shoots by all this info in these fuzzy future pictures, searching for clues to figure out who is doing what where, and then they go and stop it, and arrest the person before they commit the crime.

So Tom sees he’s the next killer, of some guy he’s never heard of. And now it gets interesting…can the system be wrong? We go on this notion for much of the movie, and it is a very very cool plot twist that they system turns out to be right, that was just a dead-end tunnel, that isn’t what went wrong. What went wrong is Tom was set up, and the dynamic of how he was is what I find most troubling about this movie.

The idea is that you have these three people who have been genetically mutated and can somehow sense the future. They exist in this little hive mind and figure out who will be murdering whom. So is the system foolproof? Sometimes the dominant seer (or, as they call them, precog) sees a different version of events, an alternate reality. This can lead you to all sorts of cool thoughts about the mailability of the future and pre-ordained actions and on and on, but that one that the movie focuses on is the question of whether once you know the future you can change it.

I think this makes sense. The precogs are seeing a future based on the events of the present — this is the chain of events that will happen. But, like with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, by seeing the future it ceases to be. Once someone knows what will happen, their actions will be different, and thus it won’t happen exactly the same way. In Minority Report their movie science requires that a non-participatory third-party knowing about a future event will not change that event (eg, no strange butterfly effect-like phenomena) but someone who knows about the action and goes to stop it will change the future. So here we get Tom finding out that he is to kill a man, and by knowing that he will do so he can make a choice, take things into his (now more educated) hands, and, in the words of The X-Files, fight the future.

We don’t know what will happen, of course. For every book or show or movie or story about time travel there is a different explanation of how the paradoxes of time will work. This movie generally stays true to a logically valid premise, even if it may not be the “right” premise or one that the viewer necessarily believes. So, in this respect, it is “good” SF. It is logical science fiction, and I can’t fault them on that.

The notion of a minority report is, in fact, a good way of explaining the possibility for fluctuations in time and the idea that events are not necessarily fixed. If there were 5 precogs instead of 3 there would probably be even more minority reports. So again, this is all good.

Similarly, the future is very plausible. Retinal scanners ID-ing people everywhere does not seem unlikely. A pointless war on non-harmful drugs will likely continue. Marketing will become ever more pervasive. Computer interfaces and memory storage devices will improve greatly. Prostitution will change in form to computer programs that let people live in fantasy worlds of their own devising (“I want to kill my boss.” “I’m sure you brought pictures?” “Yeah.” “Okay, we can do that.”) So the movie is really really good in this respect — it creates a plausible and palatable backdrop.

So we finally get to the meat, which is Tom’s future murder. Ignore all of the fun chase scenes and the various measures he takes to avoid identification and get right to the heart of it — why would he kill this guy? Well, the guy is apparently the abductor and murderer of his son, so he has reason. Similarly, having seen himself kill the man at the hotel he knows how to go about it. But what I don’t ever see explained is how he killed the guy in the first place?

Here is the most spoilish section of my post, the major plot giveaway…don’t read this if the previous bits have intrigued you. Turn off your computer, come back later, this review will still be here…

Okay, so it emerges that Tom has been set up, framed, by the old guy. Old guy has hired a man to pose as the child killer, fabricated evidence, planted the clues, doing all this elaborate scheming to bring Tom down because he knows too much. So Tom sees himself killing the guy. But why? Why would he have killed the guy? Except that he saw himself doing so he wouldn’t have known of the man’s existence. This paradox doesn’t fit in with the well-crafted world. Let’s even ignore the whole setup and take this in its simplest possible form.

1. A sees himself killing B.
   
2. A wonders who B is, finds him.
   
3. A realizes B is evil, kills him.

Step three takes place only because of the implicit validity of step 1. But step 1 COULD NOT have occurred without step 3. We have a classic time paradox here…a guy goes back in time to tell himself some vital info he knows in the future, then he saves the day because of it only to go back in time and warn himself of this vital info that he picked up from warning himself. In short, there is no beginning! And if this time pattern doesn’t have a non-patterned beginning point, then there is no way to change it! Because once you change step 3, if step 3 is implicitly linked to step 1, you have changed step 1 and invalidated the whole process. This cannot work! The other murder, the murder of the precog’s mother, is brilliant. The way they figured it out is great. The misleading storys, the deception, the pacing is all really great. But this very important piece doesn’t make sense. Or perhaps I am missing something?

Let us move on.

Item: Tom Cruise has his own focus puller. He has his own guy to come on and make sure that he stays in focus. Wow. That was a weird credit.

Steven Spieldberg is moving to a darker tone with his latest movies. First there was A.I. with its scary future world, and now Minority Report. But Spieldberg is still afraid to go whole hog, to give up the happy ending completely. So with A. I. we have the strange section I have always called the “third half” in which David ends his life happy. Same here, as we have a closing narration in which the precog program is shut down, everyone finds peace, everyone is happy, blah blah blah futurecakes. And this happens again here, and that somewhat kills the journey by resolving in a matter that leaves me dissatisfied.

I really felt for the precogs, and their ending is weird. Their ability to see the future leaves them on the brink of sanity, a sanity carefully regulated by drugs and hormones and controlled environments. Once they are set free, their story of survival could be a movie in and of itself, not just a nice fade out on a home on the range where three kids live surrounded by books.

Tom getting back together with his wife? Nice, but again, doesn’t make sense. I thought she left him because he reminded her too much of her son. But then they get back together…and have another kid.

The poor Assistant AG. I really liked him.

The program — six years of stopping murders. Not a single death in all that time. This is amazing. And then we find one minor flaw, a flaw that could be worked around, and we shut the whole project down? What about the people we’ve saved?

Like it or not, right now the US is holding prisoners in countries where civil liberties are not to the level they are now. They are doing this because they want to fight the war on terror and in order to do so they are employing torture to get secrets out of powerful evil people. They are arguably saving thousands of lives. And the cost is only the horrible suffering of a few known evildoers. So keeping three mutants on ice for an indeterminate amount of time for the good of humanity is a much more difficult choice then simply shutting down the program because one of them, god forbid, feels pain.

The ending is cheap, and it really hurts the excellent potential of the movie. Really that is what this movie is — a great story, a wonderful backdrop, but the major storytelling is just not of a high enough moral caliber to fit the incredible fact pattern. The pieces are just not connected carefully enough.

So here is my review: a wonderful future world, a great idea, a good script (with a few bad moments), a story that, while not completely unique, is very compelling. A bad cop-out. A logic flaw. But a very good movie very well executed. A very intriguing scenario. A good detective mystery. A movie that truly kept me guessing for at least the first half. I liked it. I liked it a lot. 4/5 stars. Go see it!

At first you might laugh at the following:
Rosenberg has also openly speculated that the anthrax mailer is a contract worker for the CIA, and that the letters were some kind of CIA-approved experiment to test how the United States would react to a biological attack.

Laugh all you want, then read this:
“People need to take her seriously. Her arguments are reasoned. She has had an excellent reputation and has certainly made a name for herself in this area before any of the anthrax attacks. She is by no means a crackpot or a kook, nor is she a conspiracy theorist.”

Now read the whole article (warning: requires Salon Premium membership)

On Thursday I wrote another hardware review for Andrew Christy, manager of GetMusic.com and MP3.com hardware guy. Today, Tuesday, Andrew is gone, axed, bagged, cut, let go. On Friday they had another round of layoffs in order to keep their burn rate at $0, which it got down to after the last few rounds, from $22 million a month, down from $43 million a month before the layoffs six sets ago. So Andrew is gone. Wow. But at least he got six weeks severance, last round they got only two.

What do you say when someone offers you drugs? Here is a novel one: “Well, I don’t want to, but there really aren’t very many creative ways to say no to drugs, and those that I’ve heard just sounded cheesy and contrived.” So, yeah, okay.

Farscape doesn’t yet cease to amaze me in its provocative and powerful stories, its wonderful dialogue, and its amazing characters. I shall share this dialogue, by John Crichton, as the last seconds of his life slip away, consequences of massive radiation poisoning as a result of his noble sacrifice to save the world from a deadly threat. He sits with Aeryn, the true love of his life, who only hours earlier had pledged to follow him across the universe, back to his home of Earth whatever the consequences, so that they could be together. Crichton takes his final breaths and says:

They say…
it’s a lucky or an unambitious man
who goes when he’s ready.

That said–
Scorpius is gone.
I’m at peace.
I don’t hurt.

I… I did some good things.
I’m proud of my life.
And I’m with you.

Don’t worry about me. I’ve never felt better.

When I die I want to die humble but proud of my life. I want to die at peace, with people I love, feeling that I have lived productively, that it has been worth it. And not worth it in the typical 9-5 routine of life, but worth it because I have truly experienced wonders, I have felt true happiness, and I have done noble deeds.

Some can die content that they lived a life of good service, and this I find comforting, but it is not enough for me. I need not die with a legacy, but I must die in a world that is a better place than the one I entered. And so my quest need be only this: to make the world, in some small way, a better place.

Even if no one knows it but me.

I finally recognized That Girl from Cheaters! She was Young Ellie in Contact. Why didn’t I figure this out sooner?! That’s my favorite movie!

Children frequently bullied at school were at risk of developing clinical levels of depression and anxiety, a child psychology conference heard today.

Things to write about

1. OCHSA Show and Cineplex
   
2. Death of the AgBox and the continuing saga
   
3. Rant on MP3.com culture
   
4. Visit to UCSD
   
5. Car troubles

and my site is back online, somewhat. No authentication, no pictures, but these things I will figure out in due time. Does anyone happen to know what to use instead of $PHP_AUTH_USER and $PHP_AUTH_PW in PHP 4.2, since those seem to be dead? I figured maybe $_AUTH[‘pw’] or something, but its not documented anywhere. Grr.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but in line with my earlier post, Nina, a PC user on 24, WAS the mole. All the Mac users stayed good. 🙂

Jane Gross was struggling for the right words, the words that would make her essay stand out from a crowded pack. The competition was fierce this year. In a high-pressure field where judgments often seem arbitrary, she was determined to distinguish herself.

Welcome to the fast-paced world of articles about college admissions.

Looks like Clear Channel Communications just keeps losing money. Read this article and watch for the humorous (and very telling) conclusion. Oh, poor massive company with their Top-40 garbage and nationwide syndicated format, with no local content or care for the community…

I really, really, really hope that a mainstream press source takes notice of a recent NewsForge story on how a recent Reuters article may violate the DMCA. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it illegal to publish or disseminate any method to circument copy-protection, no matter how flimsy that protection may be, or how damaging it is to fair use.

While many in the computer science and education communities have seen great faults in the legislation, most mainstream people (and the press that represents them) simply sees the DMCA as a legitimate way to prevent illegal use of commercial products.

So where did Reuters go long? They published a story detailing exactly how to circumvent Sony’s CD protection technology. The circumvention device: a 99 cent magic marker. The distribution of this story: everywhere. At least a dozen mainstream sites, newspapers, and television networks, including CNN and Yahoo!, distributed this story — all of them are responsible for spreading information about circumvention Sony music CDs and allowing a customer to play them in his or her computer for less than a dollar.

I certainly wouldn’t want to post how to do it here, as I follow the law and wouldn’t want to violate the DMCA, a law with very stiff penalties (max $500,000 fine and 5 years in jail). So while Reuters may be a scoff-law, I certainly will not. I respect our recording industry, and the government that allows them to violate the fundamental rights of Americans for some short-term capital gain. No sir, not me. I say the record companies are using their FREEDOMS to create protectionist legislation to perpetrate their LEGAL monopolist practices and LEGITIMATELY destroy the notion of fair use, which hurts their business. I mean, who listens to music on their computer (or MP3 player, or portable, or car player, or cell-phone player) anyway? And why should they have the RIGHT to listen to music?

Seeing as at this point I am abusing sarcasm, I’ll stop.

People talk about time, and taking advantage of what you have, and enjoying the moment, and planning for the future, and hurrying up, and slowing down, and you’re gonna be late, and its too early to be up, go back to bed, and is it Christmas yet?

I agree with all of it.

I believe that we should all take advantage of moments of beauty and happiness. I believe we should try to be on-time to our appointments, to not make other people wait, but I also recognize that things happen, and waiting half an hour doesn’t much upset me, as long as I have something to think about, look at, or listen to. I like waking up early, watching the sun rise. I like staying up late, looking at the stars and typing away, knowing that most of the people around me are in a deep slumber. I hate being sick, and wish it would end more quickly. I both love and loathe the strange non-ability of humans to remember physical touch — we can’t recall pain, which is good, but we also can’t recall softness, freshness, roughness, smoothness, the touch of skin, the feel of water, the coolness of beach sand.

I try to live every day as if it were my last. I don’t do this, but I try. I try to look at pain and annoyances as silliness. When it took me over two hours today to get from MP3.com to meet my grandma, and it usually takes me only 90 minutes to go 35 miles past her house to my home, I was upset, and I drove recklessly, and then I was calm, and listening to Les Miserables, and singing along, and looking at the pretty hillsides, and smiling.

I will never say “if I live to be 100.” Because I don’t want to have that obligation. And I don’t want to limit myself. I was just watching Scientific American Frontiers, a great series that I rarely get to see, and a guy was talking about artificial organs. 2000 years ago the average life expectancy was 30 years. One hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was 47. Today, the average lifespan is 75 years, and there are plenty of people at 75 who are still of sound mind, with only a messed up muscle or bone, a hip, say, or a leg, or a heart, which is really just a complicated pumping mechanism.

I expect medical science to extend life remarkably. It is already happening, and it will continue to happen. We can regrow retinas. We can make artificial hearts. Once stem cells are re-legalized (and they will be), we will be able to regrow body parts that are genetically compatible, if not identical. You lost your hand in a light saber duel? No problem, we can make you a new one, and the cells, with their millions of years of evolution, will figure out how to connect together and talk to each other and flex and bend and join up with your wrist and start working again.

The body is amazing. The advances in biotechnology are astounding. And I have no idea how long I will live. Can I die tomorrow? I can. Can I live to 150, 200, 300? Anything is possible, and I don’t plan on setting any cut-off dates for myself.

If I live to be 100, then that will be that, and perhaps I’ll just keep on living some more.