Wednesday, August 31, 2005
SCUM: Everyone who is looting pointless crap like clothes and jewelery from stores in New Orleans should be caught and executed. It's one thing to steal food to keep you alive because there's no one there to sell it to you. It's another just to take things because nobody's watching. Those people are the lowest scum and I hope the pictures taken by various news organizations are used to catch them when things calm down. To take advantage of people at a time like this shows that you have forfeited your right to exist.
tags: grommes, katrina links, katrina discussions
Monday, August 29, 2005
FRIENDS: I was looking around on google for my friends from high school, spurred on by my upcoming 10 year anninversary I mentioned below. In the course of looking I found that one of my 2 best friends growing up died in 2001 from an infection he got shooting heroin. The first thing I think is 'Well you obviously weren't too great of a friend if you're only finding this out 4 years later' which is true. I don't think I was a very good friend. I hadn't had any contact with him for 10+ years now. When I moved after my sophmore year, I didn't write one letter or call any of my friends. People I grew up with since 3rd grade in some cases. These guys were like my brothers. I don't know why I never kept in touch, thinking back on it. I think it made me too sad or I was embarrased. Now I just feel like an asshole. I know I probably couldn't have helped him out but god damn, I wish I had tried. Who knows what might have happened.
I hesitate to put his name up here in public but it's hard finding only a couple of references to his death on the net and no contact info for anybody. So if you knew Jesse Raftery from Santee, CA (near San Diego) and you happen to find this, please email me. I'd like to know how his life went after I left California.
And if you're the person who got him on that shit, I hope you die a horrible and agonizing death and no one mourns for you. If I ever meet you you better run away.
tags: grommes, death, jesse raftery
Friday, August 26, 2005
SCHOOL: So I go to Feedster the other day to try out their blog search and as I always do, I put in my name for the search. What comes up? This page, a blog about the 10 year reunion of my first high school, Santana High in Santee, CA. I've been wondering about that reunion because I only went there for 2 years but all the friends I grew up with since the 3rd grade went there. Unfortunately I see some of my people on the list of 'Missing Classmates' but hopefully that will change. Now I just need to find some info about my other high school reunion. I love the internets.
tags: grommes, school, high+school
Thursday, August 18, 2005
SPACE: This is an awesome article in Wired about how the Russian space agency is using old components and tourists to fund their program. If they can find some people to pay $100 million, they'll get to go into space and around the Moon. Then landings are next, if they can pay for them. Instead of waiting for new breakthroughs and technology that's 15 years away like NASA, they're doing it with what they've got and proving it can work.
Of course who knows what would happen if some American millionaire is killed by an accident on one of these Russian space flights. We're not exactly the most rational people recently so I couldn't even guess what kind of reaction we'd have.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
BLOGS: I was reading an article in the NY Times by the guys who wrote Freakonomics and at the bottom of the article I see this:
These 'Related Articles' links are all 1 1/2 years old. And this article is about drugs, something that I'm sure they should have reported on in the last 18 months. This illustrates something cool about blogs. If I do a search on Technorati on crack, or drugs, I'm pretty confident that I'll find something written in the last 18 months. More than likely I'll find something written yesterday. Now it could just be that this 'Related Articles' box just sucks but how do I know? All I see is that the only other thing the NY Times has on drugs is from 2-1-2004.
To see an illustration of this, click on the Technorati tags below to see more blogs about the same topics.
CREATIVITY: Here's a review of the cheapest HDTV camcorder around. The cool thing, besides the price ($1750), that apparently it's a really good camera to boot. This is cool for many reasons. The fact that you can now make a movie in high-definition for less than $2000 is extremely exciting. Now, I could care less about watching somebody's birthday in HD. What I care about is that a group of people can get together, make an HD movie (or a series of short films) and release them on the internet for essentially nothing.
I've been thinking it would be very cool for a group of people to get together and make a series of short movies and release them once a month or something. The movies would be a sort of portfolio of their work. A writer, a director, some actors. Shoot the thing guerilla style, getting only neccessary permits and such, no effects or only ones that can be done on a PC or Mac. Just getting it out there would be a big deal. A guy who made a fan Batman movie a year or 2 ago is now a name, people know who he is. People like to see that you can get things done on a schedule. Putting out a 15 minute section of a serial movie every 2 weeks for 6 months would show a lot of skill and you'd have made a 3 hour movie at the end. Imagine going to a deal with a movie or TV person and saying "You saw what I could do with no money, imagine what I could do with some of your cash?" Instead of saying "Hey, I know your only exposure to my work is my school project film but can I have some money?"
I'm probably overly idealistic and ignorant of the movie process but one of my favorite quotes is "The biggest things have been done by those who didn't know they were impossible." Nobody's going to convince me it's impossible until I've done my best and it didn't work.
Monday, August 08, 2005
SECURITY: If you're interested at all in security, I urge you to check out Bruce Schneier's website and even subscribe to his feed (if you have no idea what that means, check out Bloglines.com). He's got another great commentary today about the airlines' plan to have a 'verified' line at the airport with less security. Of course, the business travellers love this idea but everybody else should hate it.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
BOOKS: Man, I'm trying to listen to the audiobook of The Butlerian Jihad, one of the Dune prequel books and I'm having a hard time with it. On the one hand, the book is horrible. I'm talking "Oh my god, my ears! GAH!" bad. It's like they ripped off some first-semester creative writing student's bad fan fiction and because it's Dune and it's Frank Herbert's son, nobody dared edit it. It's this kind of science fiction that turns me off of the genre for months or years at a time. There's actually a line to the effect of "They were drawn to kiss each other as if pulled by a magnetic field."
The bad part is that I love the original Dune books so I'm very interested in seeing how things played out before the first book. This thing is so weighed down by damnable scifi cliches and crap though that it's hard to think they took very much from Frank Herbert's notes, no matter how much they say they're being faithful. I seriously doubt I'll be able to get through this first of the 3 prequels so I might just have to read about what happened on the web.
The main book I'm reading right now (Deadhouse Gates) is kind of the opposite. It's the sequel to a book (Gardens of the Moon) that had every single hallmark of being generic Extruded Fantasy Product but in the end turned out better than I expected. Gardens was no masterpiece but it was compelling enough to remind me of the fun I had reading all the Dragonlance books when I was a kid, but combined with a very adult sensibility. If I enjoy Deadhouse Gates I'll probably continue reading the series (up to book 5 in England I believe, out of a projected 10 books!). It's been a long time since I thought I'd read a 10 book fantasy series. Between this and my love of the His Dark Materials series, I'll have to hand in my "Fantasy? Bah!" club card. And that's before I say anything about my plan to read all the Harry Potter books in order once it gets closer to the release of the 7th book.
Technorati Tags: grommes, books, fantasy, science fiction