Tara asked me to try to do some guest posting. As she gets pulled into conferences and other community catalyst (it’s her title!) type tasks, it’s nice to have some blog posts “in reserve”. I decided to do a small and very basic series on website optimization. You can find the first post here and the second here.

I recently read this book, by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in 1955. Spoilers will follow. If you haven’t read the book and don’t want the plot spoiled for you, don’t continue reading. It’s a really old book, but lately I feel like I’ve been using my blog more just to write stuff I want to get down (and practice writing), so in that vein, here’s the post.

This book is one of the most interesting I’ve read. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a fiction novel more well-written than Lolita. It’s simultaneously witty, funny, horrifying and tragic. The author uses the English language in a wonderfully skilled way, with highly detailed prose and clever use of pacing and timing. On the other hand, the protagonist of the book, Humbert Humbert, is a man of profound evil, willing to go to through many mental contortions to rationalize his obsession with Lolita, a child. You’ll read a sentence, long and winding and indirect, laughing at the intricate connections between the words, and as you finally parse it, you realize it’s Humbert describing his lust for a 12-year-old girl he intends to possess and sexually ravish. This is a man who is willing to go to great lengths to hide from himself how much of a monster he really is, and you will sometimes find yourself forgetting that fact, only to be reminded of it a page or two later. He’s essentially willing to psychologically traumatize a child, who has no real escape, in the pursuit of his fantasy.

In short, the book is phenomenally written and quite disturbing because of it.

To quote from the afterword, taken from Wikipedia:

In response to an American critic who characterized Lolita as the record of Nabokov’s “love affair with the romantic novel,” Nabokov wrote that “the substitution of ‘English language’ for ‘romantic novel’ would make this elegant formula more correct.”

I would recommend it. It’s guaranteed to provoke a few visceral emotional reactions in you.

As Tara kindly put it:

You’re guest posting now?

Yes, yes I am. I tend to write overly sarcastically when I’m trying to be funny. So hopefully you don’t mind sarcasm. Holler at ya boy: Flixflops reviews Zolar: the Extreme Sports Movie. This review is a joint effort by Jay and I. Feedback is always appreciated.

First off, sorry it’s been so long since I posted. I have some good stuff coming up soon, but it’s been a busy few weeks. We’re cranking hard on some nice new features at Lijit, which should be visible to you guys (assuming you’ve heard of Lijit and are users - or employees), and I recently went to Lake Tahoe, NV, to hang out with my friend Nick, scheduled to be married sometime next month.

In the meantime, there’s a huge glut of games to play: the new Smash Bros. game just came out on Wii and there are a few Xbox 360 treats, including Army of Two (who Daniel will get to someday) and Bully: Scholarship Edition, also out for Wii. I never played the original Bully release on PS2, and never knew much about it, but it got consistently high reviews, so I decided to pick it up for 360.

And it’s fun as hell. It’s basically Grand Theft Auto, but set in a school, and without cars, guns, or really brutal violence. Or, at least as brutal as things got in high school, which, looking back, was actually pretty brutal. There are missions, minigames, factions, weapons, vehicles - the whole shebang - backed by a well-executed and very detailed sandbox (Bullworth Academy and the surrounding towns). What’s so fun about Bully, once you pick up the control scheme, is that the game is essentially an endless series of minigames. You can complete quests, make money with side missions, play games or ride rides at the carnival, spend time buying new clothes and outfits for Jimmy, the playable character, attend class for weapon and social skill upgrades, hit on girls, or just prank students with eggs, fire crackers, bottle rockets, etc. There’s a ton of stuff to do, and each individual thing doesn’t take too long, so I can pick it up for a half hour or and hour, have fun, and feel like I’ve accomplished something in-game. There’s big collection quests for people who like those things, and the icing on the cake is a good story with developed characters and consistently high quality voice acting.

There are a few bugs and framerate issues - I’ve had the game freeze on me a few times - but Rockstar says a patch should be out soon. If you’ve already played it, I’m not sure whether the added content is enough to warrant a re-purchase. If you never played Bully, like me, but like the sandbox genre, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s been a blast.

This post is incredibly nerdy. Just putting that out there up front.

Here’s my vimrc file.

Here’s what it looks like in OS X terminal with white text on black.

Here’s some of the things I’ve customized that have proven useful in my workflow:

• ,t (that’s comma-t) for a new tab; ,< for moving to the previous tab, and ,> for moving to the next tab. The comma comes from the mapleader variable, so you can switch it to whatever; I prefer comma because it’s right next to > and sharing the < key which makes tab switching fast.
• F7 toggles paste mode (vim won’t change the formatting or indentation of the text you’re about to type in insert mode; it assumes you’re pasting from a source that already has that).
• CTRL-N in normal mode will toggle highlighting from search on and off.
• I’ve got some template files for common filetypes (.php, .rb, .py, etc) that get inserted for me when I edit a brand new file of that type.
• I work with a few languages in vim and like omni-completion support on some of them, but not others (it’s really wonky in PHP). So I use a function when pressing tab in insert mode: if it’s a filetype that has omni support, omni support is used, unless the filetype is in an exclusion list. If the filetype doesn’t have omni support, or is in the exclusion list, it uses regular keyword completion. If completion doesn’t apply when pressing tab (like you’re in the middle of whitespace), you get a tab.
• ,y “yanks” or copies to the OS X clipboard in visual mode. ,p “puts” or pastes from the OS X clipboard in normal mode. This makes it easy to work with the regular clipboard.
• When working with PHP, :make should tell you about syntax errors and let you move through them with the usual vim error-navigating stuff (:cnext, etc).

If you are also a gigantic nerd and like some of the stuff here or have suggestions, I’d love to hear about it.

Beth Anne and I went to the museum yesterday. Unfortunately, we missed the Titanic/Iceburg exhibit by a couple of days. On the 15th, a new exhibit opened called “Gold”, about the mineral of the same name. Double unfortunately, it wasn’t a very interesting exhibit.

Anyway, I brought my camera with me and I think a few of the pictures turned out really well. I also added a flickr badge to the right sidebar. You can click on the pictures below for bigger sizes.

In the gems and minerals exhibit.

Outside the dinosaur area. Really nice lighting.

I am addicted to caffeine.

Last night I watched The Descent, a British horror film released in 2005. At the time it was released, it got great reviews, but I never got a chance to see it. Still, it stuck in my head, an entry in the jumbled, teetering mental mass that is “movies I should watch someday”. As a side note, I’ve been working on converting this sketchy mental accounting into a more reliable, computer-based process. If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to see spoilers, stop reading now.

The movie was great, and genuinely scary. There were two shots in particular that were extremely well-done, variations on the usual “monster out of nowhere” shots that are commonplace in horror films. First, in case you didn’t know, the Descent involves a group of cavers exploring a supposedly uncharted cave system. Like Alien, this means the movie builds in an extremely creepy environment by its basic premise. Anytime your horror movie plot can reasonably put your characters into dark, enclosed spaces filled with creepy background noises, half your work is done (see also the excellently atmospheric Session 9). As with many horror movies, the most frightening moments are when the monsters are half-glimpsed or otherwise implied, letting your mind fill in the gaps; the movie becomes less scary when the monsters are established and allowed to fully appear on-screen.

Secondly, since the environment the characters are in is so dark, several shots are done through the point of view of an infrared camera; the greenish tinge and property of this light that makes people’s pupils illuminate just adds something to the shot, an extra layer of creepiness. The first time you see a monster on camera is very far away, partially illuminated by a caver’s headlamp, really only glimpsed rather than seen. Totally creepy. The second, and the first full reveal of one of the monsters, is an unanticipated appearance through one of these infrared camera shots. This shot was excellent, a nice slow reveal, and very well framed. I jumped. Best horror movie shot I’ve seen in ages.

From there, the movie maintains good pacing and thrills, although most of the initial fear is gone; we, and the characters, know what they’re up against, and the known is almost always scarier than the unknown in horror movies. Still, it beats the pants off the last few horror movies I’ve seen, and is certainly worth any horror fan’s rental.

I do have a few criticisms. First, some of the other camera work takes a hint from 28 Weeks Later: guys, editing your action scenes so that there is a cut every second is good in small doses. Yes, it helps convey the terrified, frantic feeling the characters must be experiencing fighting cave monsters. But when you start to use it for every action scene, it gets confusing and honestly tiring to follow. I see this in more and more movies and it’s just not a good idea. Camera tricks exist to imply this kind of action without causing epileptic seizures in your viewing audience.

Secondly, the psychological backstory. It seems like so many horror movies these days want to provide depth to their characters by giving them some sort of traumatic past event, and the Descent is no exception. Mostly, it really adds nothing to the film, and doesn’t make me care about the characters more. I don’t really want to care about the characters. I want to see them die in various monster-themed ways, preferably with the stupidest characters going first.

I will say that in the Descent the whole backstory thing does add a little bit of flavor to the ending, perhaps even changing how you’re supposed to interpret it entirely. But still, it doesn’t really add a lot - except for about 40 minutes of screen time.

Here, we sit down together with PhotoBooth to get a cat’s first take on the 3 Presidential frontrunners. Politicians call this a focus group and it is a real and totally serious thing ok?

Since this is very serious, I have decided to encapsulate the responses for you in LiveJournal style.

We start by getting comfy on our Presidential Couch. The kitty is extremely excited to be here, held totally not against her will. I hesitate to even use the word “will”, I mean, she’s a cat - I’m pretty sure they don’t have souls.

mood: psyched

We fire it up with a tasteful picture of Senator Barack Obama kickin’ it with Ludacris. The kitty is mesmerized by the mashup potential.

mood: enthralled (phat beats remix)

Next, we have New York’s own Senator Hillary Clinton. She will devour your soul. However, the kitty seems nonchalant, almost bored, almost immediately distracted by a small, shiny moving object on the television. Feline ADD?

mood: eh

Finally, we cap the evening off with a picture of Arizona Senator, war hero, and World’s Greatest Grandpa, John McCain. The kitty seems actively repulsed.

mood: get me the fuck out of here

She declined to be photographed after this point, but I think the outcome is clear: my cat loves tight rhymes and fat basslines.

It came out earlier in the week for Xbox Live Arcade. I’m really happy to say it’s the same exact game as it was on Dreamcast but better:

• HD resolution = NO JAGGIES
• 5.1 surround sound
• All the same unlockables
• Use extra 360 controllers as trance vibrators
• A really cool replay theater option, where you can download other people’s high-scoring runs and watch them for tips
• A steal at 800 MS points
• Fear is the mind killer^*

So yeah. Download the trial game, at least, or just buy it outright; you will after trying the trial game. Let’s put it this way: if video games were sex, Rez would be tantric. It’s that good.

^* if you played Rez you’d get this

So I watched this movie tonight, having never seen it before. Yes, I know it’s old news, but while the reaction is still fresh in my head, I decided to vent it here, on the internet.

If it helps, I really liked 28 Days Later. I thought it was pretty scary while being somewhat believable (once you get over the whole “the monkeys are infected with RAGE” bit at the beginning).

This movie started off great; a little human drama, some tough moral choices, people turning on each other to survive - all the things that make zombie movies (for the duration of this “review”, I’ll be referring to the runny bitey scary people as zombies) interesting.

About 1/3 of the way in the movie starts on a downhill run that continues on a race to the absolute least plausible ending possible. Let’s detail the comedy/tragedy, shall we?

Oh yeah, spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen this movie and care about it… for… some… reason… well, stop reading.

• They put the rage virus carrier in a room that Joe Irish can access with his keycard. Joe Irish is the carrier’s husband. Joe Irish is a civilian without a gun and full of angsty “oh God I killed my wife” squishy emotions. Bad idea (although I did like him gouging his wife’s eyes out with his thumbs, nice touch).
• After the virus escapes, they shove all the tasty, panicked, non-weapon-carrying civilians into a tightly packed room - let’s call it “human buffet room”. Now, you’d think that as part of the military’s crack last-ditch virus containment plan, they have a room that couldn’t be broken into. By one zombie. Who hits the door… well, I guess it was sort of hard. He is full of rage, after all. Maybe it gave him the power to smack the door with the strength of 10 bad Irish actors.
• Okay, now the virus is loose and streams of blood-vomit are arcing everywhere. By the way, blood vomit? Awesome. So anyway, everyone’s fucked. The military’s plan? Kill everything! Okay, I guess that makes sense somehow. How are we going to kill everything?

  With fucking snipers. With bullets. One at a time.

  This is the U.S. military, right? I mean, these guys should be aching to nuke London. Seriously, we’ve been dreaming about it ever since that tea thing. But no, sniper rifles. Then, firebombing. And then, nerve gas.

• Speaking of which? The movie makes really clear early on that the time from infection to snacking on faces is about 20 to 30 seconds. And yet soldiers are willing to kill our protagonists, who are driving a car. In a field of nerve gas, after surviving a wave of zombie attacks. Whatever - this is actually one of the least stupid plot points of the latter half of the movie, so I’ll give it a pass.
• Finally, there’s super Zombie. Super Zombie is the Dad - Joe Irish - from the beginning of the movie; the one who had the all-access pass that let him get infected by his wife and set off the whole chain of blood vomit (<3 blood vomit). Super Zombie is like the main character of the film. He gets infected, breaks open the door into the human snack room, escapes the fire bombing and the nerve gas, and then at the end happens to wander into the subway where his children just happened to flee, finally chowing down on his son, only to get capped by his daughter, weilding a sniper rifle from the earlier part of the movie (at close range).

  Can Zombies have hubris? If this movie is anything to go by, the answer is a resounding yes. Joe Irish Zombie was fucking arrogant, and he got his zombie just desserts. Blood was involved.

So, yeah. Unfortunately, I failed to be scared, excited, or really, emotionally moved at all by this movie.

The blood fountains were pretty entertaining though. And, the teaser at the end indicates that France got infected, so, there’s always that.