So wait. You're saying carbs AND protein?

Note, this post is going to involve talking about food, and my personal quest to get my weight under control. So proceed with caution if you have a problem with those topics.

While I've got my awesome health insurance, I decided to go in for a visit with the dietitian today. (Dietitians and nutritionists aren't the same, by the way.) I've been kind of stuck on another weight plateau and the last couple of weeks I've been feeling unusually tired. Last night at kung fu I actually became light-headed and couldn't focus, and that's not normally a way I like to feel when kicking things.

So, here's what I learned from the dietitian. It may or may not help you, because my situation is likely different from yours. Take with a grain of salt.

- First off, calorie tracker websites are lying to you when they tell you how many calories you're burning with exercise. The one I use (Sparkpeople) was off by about 50%. So take that into account if you're counting calories. If it's throwing numbers over 1000 at you for an hour and a half of biking, for example, don't trust it.

- Also, you don't get to eat 2000 calories, subtract how much you think you've burned today, and then call that your calorie count. This is not a mistake I was making, but it's apparently a common one and I thought I should mention it. 

- When you're calorie counting, the most common mistake is not entering the right food, or not measuring the portion correctly. That's the first thing to check if you hit a plateau like I have. 

- And sometimes those plateaus happen. The way around them seems to be just making sure you're not cheating, and then cutting back a little bit (50-100) calories more. Then be patient and keep working at it, because it might also be that you've replaced some fat weight with muscle mass.

- You should not feel hungry all the time. If you're constantly hungry, you're doing it wrong.

- Everyone loses lean body mass when they're losing weight, along with actual fat. The reason to take the slow and steady approach is to minimize that loss.

- Eat more snacks and smaller meals. I'm actually really bad at this one, because I really like eating big meals so I can have a giant hamburger, say. But it's better to just have the snacks, and even eat them when you aren't really hungry yet to keep yourself from getting unreasonably hungry. Also, make sure to eat something after working out, and potentially have a snack a bit before doing so if you're planning to be going for several hours. (Heck, for long bike rides you need to take snack breaks in the middle too, just to keep the blood sugar from crashing.)

- Eat protein with your carbs. Protein with your carbs. Did I mention protein with your carbs? This is apparently one of the big mistakes I've been making, particularly with snacks... I tend to eat fruit or veggies, but don't add in protein to actually make them stick, so to speak. So mix protein in with your carbs, even for snacks. 

- If you're still having problems with the weight plateau, you can try doing a couple weeks of meal replacements. (As in, replace everything with things like muscle milk, healthy frozen dinners, protein bars, etc. Things where the portion is strictly controlled and you know exactly how many calories you're getting.) This is a thing that sucks, isn't something you want to do long term, and can be really expensive besides. But it can also help retrain you if you've been losing it on the portion size issue. I'm going to try to avoid this option. 

So that was the advice she gave me. She's going to see if my doctor will be willing to order a blood test, since I've been feeling tired and light headed. She seemed kind of shocked by how little meat I tend to eat (only 2-3 times per week, generally), and thought it might be an issue of anemia. Which is very possible, since in the past I haven't been allowed to donate blood because my hematocrit has been too low. So I may need to get on the multivitamin train again, or do iron supplements. It's also possible that it's a blood sugar issue, which will hopefully be fixed by me (all together now!) mixing protein with my carbs. 

The Coldest War

Well, thanks to Ian Tregillis, I now know that I haven't lost my ability to dive into a book and devour it in a matter of a few days. Apparently I was just trying THAT HARD to avoid The Casual Vacancy, which took me weeks to slog through. Ian's new book, The Coldest War, I finished in less than a week, and this despite the fact that I was trying to design a poster for AGU at the same time.

(Spoiler: I finished the poster and it's covered in strat columns. OH THE HUMANITY.)

The Coldest War is the sequel to Ian's first book, Bitter Seeds. It's alternate history, which I'm normally not that in to, so it's another compliment to him that I liked these books so very much. Bitter Seeds takes place during World War II, and pits psychic Nazis against British warlocks. And trust me, that sentence does no justice to how fucked-up and awesome the entire thing is.

The Coldest War then takes place during the Cold War, following the same characters but years later. And I'll give Ian this, I had absolutely no idea where he was going with it until the end, at which pointed I tweeted excitedly at him about how the third book better be coming out soon because oh my god what a cliffhanger.

My favorite character out of the series is, oddly, perhaps the most evil of them all - Gretel. She's the psychic Nazi experiment that can see the future, and the first two books amount to her playing twelve-dimensional temporal chess with terrifying beings that aren't even human. She's evil, calculating, awful, and utterly fascinating.

Ian's got a writing style that's very clean and readable, and he knows how to keep things very tense. There isn't a lot more that I can say about the story without giving some of the fun twists away, but I really recommend these books. The Coldest War also just won the first semifinal round of Fantastic Reviews' Battle of the Books, and I have great hopes for it.

If women aren't women any more, are we houseplants?

I normally don't curse my eyes with shit from Fox News, but I couldn't quite resist this piece about the "war on men" because there is something I find particularly annoying about assholes that think they get to decide if you are a woman or a man. For example:

And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.
Women aren’t women anymore.

So wait, what are women then, if we aren't women? Houseplants? Evil robots? Corporate flying monkeys? A form of parasitic fungus? Cheap plastic toys? That little bit of popcorn that gets stuck in your teeth that you just know is going to give you an instant cavity?

Because goodness knows, we apparently aren't people. And neither are men, I guess. We're caricatures controlled by our biological natures, which I'd guess is that "poison from the gonads" stuff General Custer mentioned in Little Big Man.

As far as I can tell from this essay, women only get to be women if they want to get married and then let men do their manly man duty of manliness, which is to be the primary breadwinner and "protect their families." I am also going to take a wild guess and say that in order for a woman to be a woman, she must want to have kids too.

The entire basis of this argument seems to be that the author has talked to people. Woo, anecdotes! Well, I have a bunch of anecdotes, too. There are people who want to get married and people who don't. There are people who want to have kids and people who don't. There are men that want to be the breadwinner and others who would like to be stay-at-home dads and the same with women, and some that would even like to split things 50/50. This may come as a shock, but people are a diverse bunch. And incidentally, there are men that want to marry men (or don't) and women who want to marry women (or don't) and it'd be great if they had that choice too.

Oh yeah and:

All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

You know what would be awesome? If people were just allowed to be themselves. I've never bought the idea of their being an essential femininity that comes with possessing a uterus, just like I don't think there is something essentially masculine that people with penises get to have. (Okay, except maybe the part where you get to pee standing up because that's kind of awesome.) I don't feel like I've missed something important in my life because I don't like makeup and dresses and would rather die than be a housewife; but I also think the experiences of my friends who do like and want those things are just as valid because it makes them happy.

Ms. Venker, I'd hazard a guess that a great many people out there aren't angry because evil feminism has caused us to fight against our "natures." We're tired and cranky because we constantly have to fight with assholes like you who think there's only one way to conduct a life.

Also: Eric has some entertaining things to say about this from his naturally manly position of manliness as he tries to parse out just what he's so angry about.

Liveblog of 180

Okay, as promised. You guys are awesome and donated over $200 to the Red Cross, so I'm here to take my punishment. I'm going to watch the Ray Comfort "documentary" 180, a copy of which was left on my buddy David's windshield one day when he was parked near a Planned Parenthood. (That this particular Planned Parenthood is not a location that offers abortion services is neither here nor there.)

If for some perverse and awful reason you would like to play along at home. You can actually watch this entire thing on youtube. Sorry, can't bring myself to embed this one on my blog.

If you want to watch this update live, you'll have to go to the blog page and reload it every few minutes. I'll update entries elsewhere once I'm done with the liveblog.

T-minus seven minutes to suffering time.

This is the cover of the DVD, by the way. I'm thinking there's some false advertisement to the "hottest movie" on the internet thing. I'm pretty sure porn could be characterized as hotter, for example. And any bootleg of a movie that involves Tom Hiddleston will also win on the hot factor.

But apparently my world is going to be rocked for 33 minutes. Come at me, bro.

1300 - The DVD menu music is a dramatic piano riff that sounds like something you'd expect in, say, The Sixth Sense while there's a montage going on, or perhaps Bruce Willis walking around and looking really concerned. It ends with the sound of a heartbeat. Hoo boy.

1302 - I'm hitting play now. I just want it to be noted that I will apparently do anything for the Red Cross. Think of me fondly, farewell cruel world!

1303 - The movie starts with a black haired girl who apparently does not know who Adolf Hitler is. What in the fuck. Where did he find this person?

1303 - Ray Comfort is Jewish and deeply concerned about stock footage of Nazis.

1304 - This man has the most nasal, squeaky Australian accent I have ever heard in my life. He sounds as if he's been huffing helium between takes. Not sure if this is going to make my job more difficult or more palatable.

1305 - Ray Comfort is concerned about people forgetting the Holocaust. He gives some background on Holocaust education in Germany and other countries in Europe.

1306 - Oh look, he's managed to dig up more people who don't know who Hitler is! Seriously? I wonder how many people he had to ambush on the street to find these. Because ffs, anyone who has ever been on the internet knows who the fuck Hitler is.

1307 - I know this is jumping ahead since I know what the video is about, but basically this is a 33-minute-long Godwin, right?

1307 - Steve the Neo-Nazi. He has a startling mohawk, which is blue. I don't think Hitler would have gone for that, to be honest.

1307 - Apparently Christianity is a Jewish trick but Steve the Neo-Nazi is not fooled because he's Greek. This is a quote. But make no mistake, Steve is an awful human being. An awful, awful human being. And I do think Ray Comfort deserves a small salute for pointing out that Steve and people like him are awful, and also completely incoherent hate spewing horrors.

1309 - Okay. Still asking people who Hitler is. Some of them know. Maybe he ran out of people didn't know since he already found like the only twelve on the planet who have been living in a box their entire lives.

1310 - The piano riff starts back up as he talks to another awful human being who believes the world is run by Jews. I assume this is to point out to us that this is both Important and Very Bad. Unlike Steve the Horrible Mohawked Neo-Nazi, this guy's face is blurred out. An awful person with a sense of shame, perhaps?

1311 - I'll give Ray Comfort this. He's figured out that just letting the awful people talk pretty much makes his point for him that they are awful. However, I'm still waiting for this to get around to abortion so I can start beating my head against my desk.

1313 - Okay, next question he's asking people on the street - if you could kill Hitler before WWII, would you? Either by shooting him as an adult or killing his pregnant mom. It's an interesting ethical question, one which I have a feeling will not be done justice in this film. For some strange reason.

1314 - More stock footage showing the dead of the Holocaust. Starting to feel like those awful PETA videos where it's intercut with footage of slaughterhouses.

1315 - Well, at least he's not claiming that Hitler was an Atheist. Ray Comfort touches very lightly on some of Hitler's religious views (which are very complicated and weird and wikipedia can get you started) that he's plainly cherry-picked and then calls him an idolater, which is... different.

1319 - More horrifying stock footage. I'll note that some of it is actually photographs that have had a "old time film effect" run over it. There is also now a quote from a witness to the carnage read in a rather thick, nearly comical German accent, except the content isn't comical so I feel kind of gross about it.

1320 - Back to people on the street and now Ray Comfort asks if the people would comply with Nazi orders to bury Jews alive and aid in the Holocaust. If I pretend I don't know the point of the video, I can find it interesting, though I do have to wonder why he's so stuck on Nazis if he wants to talk about abortion.

1323 - "You value human life? How do you feel about abortion?" OH AND THERE WE GO. Because burying adults and children alive or shooting them is totally the same as a woman having an abortion.

1324 - The music would like you to know this is very sad.

1325 - "Finish this sentence for me - it's okay to kill a baby in the womb when..." Oh Ray Comfort, you are totally gross.

1325 - So apparently having an abortion is equivalent to blowing up a building that may or may not have people inside?  What?

1326 - Wow, a girl that had an abortion and says she doesn't feel bad about it.

1327 - More equating burying Jewish people alive with abortion. Gross, Ray Comfort. Gross.

1327 - The safest place on Earth is in a mother's womb? Maybe we should store jewelry in there!

1328 - So this is the thing Ray Comfort. You don't get to decide for other people. Fuck off.

1329 - Oh boy and now he's saying you can't value human life and believe women have a right to choose. Well, we all know women aren't actually human life, right? Argh I want to punch this man in the face so much.

1330 - Girl with sunglasses, you are awesome.

1330 - Wow Ray Comfort you are a gross human being. So very gross. Wow and then there's shots of people being like oh okay I guess a woman choosing what will be done with her own body is the same as Hitler "choosing" to kill Jews.

1332 - Yes girl on the street, it sounds bad when he puts it in those words because it's a disingenuous false dichotomy pushed on you by a gross person.

1333 - Well, I shouldn't be surprised that suddenly everyone in Ray Comfort's video gets argued around by his amazing logical fallacy skills.

1334 - Whee the American Holocaust! Gross, Ray Comfort. Gross.

1335 - Apparently we have low moral standards because we've freed ourselves from the Ten Commandments what?

1335 - No Ray Comfort, this is not an honest discussion you're having to change people's minds.

1336 - OH HEY GUYS I FOUND THE ATHEIST IN THE VIDEO! It's... STEVE THE NEO-NAZI. Well, glad we got that out of the way.

1337 - "Have you ever looked at a guy with lust?" "Nah, I'm gay." Wow, you are awesome, lesbian lady.

1338 - So apparently people don't want to believe in God because we're afraid of him because we lie and blaspheme and commit adultery by being lustful. Oh my goodness I just rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. Because people who don't believe in Hell are totally afraid of it? LOGIC YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

1341 - There is stuff written on my heart? I think I might need some medical attention.

1342 - Now we're just into sheer proselytizing and I'm falling asleep. Can we just get back to the Nazis?

1343 - When is a raven like a writing desk? When Jesus is like a parachute.

1344 - Aaaaaaaaand we're back to Nazis.

1344 - Talking about people visiting the concentration camps and being horrified. And then he suggests visiting an abortion clinic. Because they are so like in every way. (/sarcasm)

1345 - Ray Comfort would like everyone to see his documentary. And buy his book, Hitler, God, and the Bible. You know. Just putting that out there.

1346 - And we're done with a dramatic string piece. Well, this wasn't so much funny as infuriating, since I just wanted to reach through the screen and shake people. This is a bullshit argument that equates very different things in a false, emotionally manipulative, and disingenuous manner. A woman making a decision about what goes on within her own body is in no way equatable with a crazy, awful person taking power and ordering the death of millions of people who were born and living their lives. And frankly, I think his schtick is a pretty shameful appropriation of the suffering of the Jewish people.

HEY RAY COMFORT WANTS TO TALK ABOUT NAZIS!

Needless to say, 33 minutes later my world is un-rocked. I really could have lived without seeing a bunch of ignorant people get unmercifully Godwinned by a giant Australian weasel with a pouch full of fallacies.

I think I'll do a different liveblog maybe today or next week to cleanse my palate. Maybe Metal Tornado will get a whirl after all.

Turkey day and blog note

So, happy turkey day to my fellow Americans. Happy Thursday to everyone else in the world who is probably once again sighing over the fact that the damn Americans think everything revolves around our holidays. I speak to you from the depths of food torpor to say, hey man, if you were around I would have totally given you a piece of pecan pie because that seems a good way to end a Thursday no matter what.

It was a good, relaxing day and at least I got to put in a 20 mile bike ride before the feasting started, so I'll pretend that counts for something. On the way home from that, wind at my back, I tried to think about what I would say for the traditional Things I Am Thankful For.Thanksgiving thing can be trite at times, but it is good to have a day where you feel obligated to sit down and think about what is good in your life and your world.

Best I can come up with is this:

I am thankful for that blue marble we see there, and the human ingenuity that enabled us to take such a breathtaking picture, and the incredible things we can do with this one life we have. I get all teary-eyed when I look at things like this because I need the reminder that maybe I'm having a shitty day here and there, maybe I'm stressed out, but humanity has fucking walked on the Moon, and put robots on Mars. Even when I wonder if we're going to make it because people are so intent on hurting each other every day, we can still do amazing and beautiful and unimaginable things. And every second when someone out there decides that they would rather love than hate, that we're all in this together on our little blue marble in space, I'm thankful for that too.

On a less serious note, don't forget that I will be watching a Ray Comfort DVD for you guys tomorrow and liveblogging it. Let's say I'll do it at 13:00 MST. Apologies in advance, the DVD is only 33 minutes long, so if I don't get enough snark out of that I'll see if I can grab something else short and do that too.

Reminder: The Red Cross still needs donations and you still want me to watch TWO terrible things!

Well, I'm already going to watch a terrible thing for you but there's 48 hours left to make that into two terrible things.

$209.40 have been donated to the Red Cross since I threw down this gauntlet on November 5th. That means I'm going to liveblog a terrible Ray Comfort anti-abortion DVD that got left on my friend's windshield because he was parked near a Planned Parenthood. I'll liveblog that on November 19th.

But remember! if $40.60 more get donated, I'll liveblog Metal Tornado as well! Or, if we get really crazy and there's $140.60 more out there for the Red Cross, instead I'll watch Dreams From My Real Father, which  is a right-wing birther propaganda movie almost guaranteed to make me blow out a vein in my head.

If you donate money, comment here, tweet at me, etc etc etc.

But trust me, I'm more than happy to get off easy and only have to suffer through one terrible movie. Even if the victims of Hurricane Sandy could still use the help.

Zeno's grant proposal

I've got one last class I have to complete in order to graduate, though at this point it appears I'll be technically graduating in the spring of 2013 rather than this semester, just because I don't think I'll be able to defend until January. But this class will be done at least, and all will be ready to go.

For this class, we had to write a practice NSF proposal, 10-page limit with an additional 1-page summary. Mine ended up being about 3000 words. This is also the most difficult 3000 words I've written in my life. I ended up with a four page reference list containing 36 references, and spent nearly three solid weeks driving myself batty writing it and tweaking it and formatting it and everything else.

So it's come as a major relief for me to hear that the other grad students all hate their proposals just as much as I hate mine, if not more. This thing was starting to feel like Zeno's Proposal, where it was physically impossible to ever quite finish it. But hey, if everyone else loathes their proposals, then I'm probably okay, right? Right?

I'm just glad the damn thing is turned in and out of my reach. I can't imagine having to write these constantly and facing the ugly fact that only 10-25% of them ever get funded. So it's probably a good thing I'm not staying in academia. One day I'd be found dead at my desk, having cut my own throat with a handful of reference pages cunningly fashioned into a blade.

I celebrated finishing the proposal and turning it in by buying a new desk that I can sit or stand at. Maybe this is how adults do things. Ice cream would have been cheaper and potentially more satisfying.

Why haven't you seen Wreck-It Ralph yet?

If you're one of the two people in the entire continental United States that hasn't seen Wreck-It Ralph yet, you really, really should.



It's definitely the best Disney movie I've seen in years. It's cute, it's funny, and it's got a lot of heart, but not in the oh god it's the after-school-special kind of way. You can tell the angle of approach from the bad guy affirmation of Bad-Anon: I am bad, and that's good. I'll never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me. But I really liked the approach taken; within the world of video games, bad guys are obviously a vital part of the ecosystem, and part of the movie is about the good guys learning that.

I've seen it twice already and definitely wouldn't mind seeing it again. (Only there's currently a brazillion movies out right now I want to see, holy shit November what's up with you.) But if you're a gamer nerd like me, the more times you see it, the more fun video game stuff you can pick out. (There's a list of video game character cameos over at the Disney Wiki.)

You don't have to be a big video game nerd to like it. Sure, those of us who have been playing since Atari will get a lot of the cameos and have some good laughs (OMG AERITH LIVES), but the main story takes place in two made-up games (Hero's Duty and Sugar Rush) and you don't even really have to be that familiar with first person shooters or racing games to get what's going on. It's all very evident from the story. (The script writers, by the way, deserve a hearty handshake.)

I loved all the main characters. Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) is definitely my favorite, though. She has the most tragic back story ever! (I'm thinking this might seem extra hilarious if you have a few RPGs under your belt.) Also Felix sounded so very, very familiar - I had to remind myself later that Jack McBrayer is Kenneth in 30 Rock and yes, Felix sounds just like that, to hilarious effect. Also, Alan Tudyk voices King Candy, which I didn't even realize until I got to the credits and was like wait a second, that's Wash?



As a note for people with kids, the movie has a PG rating, and I think it's mostly inoffensive stuff, cartoonish violence and the like. However, the bit of the movie in Hero's Duty could be scary for little kids, since it's got the space-marine-bug-invasion-first-person-shooter thing going on, and at the very end the bad guy looks seriously creepy to the point that my first thought was how much he would probably scare the pants off my niece. So just be aware of that.

There's also an animated short before the movie called Paperman. It's probably the cutest short I've seen in a while, and it's about paper airplanes and love.

Nicely done, Disney.

The Casual Vacancy (review)

So, maybe you heard that JK Rowling wrote a new novel. Maybe you really liked the Harry Potter novels, and you're looking forward to getting another book from the pen that gave you those.

Well, don't get too excited.

The Casual Vacancy is an adult (as in meant for grownups, not as in pornographic) non-genre novel. I read adult fiction all the time. To be honest, I do not read much non-genre fiction. It's entirely possible that this novel is an excellent example of what non-genre fiction should be and plays off its tropes and traditions perfectly. In which case, let me just say that I'm glad I mostly stick to science fiction and fantasy. I was ready to stop reading this book by page 25, but I stuck with it under the principle that it's healthy for writers to read things we don't like, so that we can think about why we don't like them and thus avoid those things in our own writing.

This book is set against a backdrop of small town British politics, where a rather large cast of characters ranging in age from teenaged to 50+ years old are effected by the death of council member and all-around ridiculously popular guy Barry Fairbrother, who spearheaded one side of a raging political debate that divided the town.

Writing that summary was a more interesting experience for me than actually reading the book. It's 420 pages of a bunch of ceaselessly self-centered, entitled people being incredibly petty toward each other. The only characters I liked at all were a few of the teenagers, many of whom were in the process of being abused and destroyed by their utterly awful parents. And at least when the teenagers had moments of being self-centered and terrible, they had the excuse of being teenagers.

And yes, I know that in reality, adults are generally selfish and awful people too. But that really seems to be an argument to not spend my free time reading about what I can easily encounter in my real life.

I didn't care about the characters, which meant that I did not in the least bit care about the minutiae of their lives, their crumbling relationships, or their desires. I spent much of the book asking myself if one scene or the other was really necessary, because for example I already knew that Simon Price was a total bastard, that Stuart Wall was the most unlikable teenager in the entire book, that Gavin was utterly pathetic and that Samantha's marriage with her husband was a total disappointment. The last time I felt like that when reading a novel was when my book club read Under the Dome, which we all agreed could have been about 400 pages shorter because yes we get the point these people are terrible. I really hope JK Rowling hasn't fallen into the Stephen King trap of desperately needing an editor.

Don't run out and get this book if you liked Harry Potter and want more of the same. Harry Potter had a cast with likable characters, and an intensely interesting world - so when the plot lagged, you at least had those to keep you going. This novel has none of those benefits, and JK Rowling doesn't make up for it with memorable or beautiful prose.

Perhaps because it's not a young adult novel, there's apparently even less imperative to keep the plot moving at a snappy pace, and it generally stagnates. Every little thing that happens then seems to require we get the opinion of everyone in the rather large cast, some of whom it took me nearly half the book to get straight because they were so similarly awful. (Naming a woman Shirley and her daughter-in-law Samantha was not a good choice, by the way.) I would have been less frustrated by the slow pace of the plot if I'd actually given even half a crap about any of the characters. Ultimately I only stuck it out for Sukhvinder and Andrew - since Andrew actually manages to grow and change as a character.

(Spoilers, if you care)

The thing that really burns me about this book is that the plot conflicts that get hammered the whole time - what's going to happen to the council housing? what's going to happen to the addiction clinic? - never actually get resolved. Instead the end of the book is an unsubtle statement about children in poverty dying because privileged middle class people are too wrapped up in their own selfish concerns. Which is a point to be made, certainly, but from the standpoint of story structure it leaves the novel unresolved and disappointing.

Also, if that's the point JK Rowling wanted to make, I can't help but feel it could have happened in a lot fewer pages and with greater impact.

(/spoilers)

If you're still curious about it, get the book out from the library and try it that way first. If you like it, buy it then, and feel free to tell me you think I'm full of crap. Tastes differ, after all.

I Snoopy danced through the election in Colorado

Two days late, whatever. So yeah, this happened. 

As you can imagine, I'm pretty pumped about that, because the president of the United States hasn't switched over to being an plastic manbot with a faulty truth chip. I'm pumped there are going to be record number of women in the senate. I'm pumped we have our first openly lesbian Senator in the US.  I'm pumped Elizabeth Warren took down Scott Brown. I'm thrilled beyond words that every single one of the crazy Republican rape guys lost.

But that's not the point of this post. It was an awesome election in Colorado!

First off, in slightly less awesome news, we sent 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats to the federal House. I'm incredibly happy Jared Polis (who once entered The Internet is For Porn into the congressional record) is returning to Washington, even if I'm sad he's no longer my rep due to redistricting. I have Ed Perlmutter instead, who is less mind-blowingly awesome, but is also not Joe Coors thank goodness. Mostly I'm sad that Brandon Shaffer and Joe Miklosi lost (ugh to Mike Coffman) but there's not anything I could have done in those races but crossed my fingers extra hard.

So yeah, you might have heard we legalized recreational pot. Thought I'd put that out there first because apparently everyone I have ever met is planning on couch surfing at my house sometime before I move to Houston. And we legalized it by a 10 point margin, which is not too shabby. What does it actually mean? No idea, since pot is still illegal federally. I'm looking forward to seeing the conservatives that like to talk about states rights when it comes to screwing over women and LGBT people potentially tie themselves in knots over this one. 

But I'm excited about the idea that between Colorado and Washington, maybe we're sending a message to the feds that we've had just about enough of the bullshit "drug war." Here's hoping. I think we have a much better chance of a positive outcome with Obama as president than Romney.

Ah, and for the record? I voted to legalize pot. Duh. I've also never touched the stuff in my life. My vices have been limited to alcohol, and damn little of that. And I have no interest in ever trying pot, either. But I think responsible adults should be able to do it legally if they want, and that our police and courts and prisons have better things to spend their time and money on than a bunch of potheads whose worst crime is bogarting the Fritos.

We also signed off on a collective 'screw you' to Citizens United. Well, this one is a bit weirder. By 48% we amended the Colorado Constitution to direct our federal office holders to push for a Constitutional amendment to get rid of that shit-ass campaign finance decision. Which I have mixed feelings about... because I don't like just amending the Colorado state constitution willy-nilly, but man do I hate Citizens United like a champ. Plus this is actually non-binding... but I think it's something the representatives and senators from Colorado would have to think twice about before ignoring, since... 48% margin. 

We'll see if it actually does anything. I'm not convinced. But I hope Colorado has made its point about how we feel.

Jefferson County, where I lived, approved both of its school budget issues. I'm happy about that. The schools need more money, and it'll help the kids out. And even if I dont have kids of my own, these guys will be in charge of the country when I start thinking about retiring, so I would really prefer they're functional human beings with a reasonable eduction. 

The Democrats have retaken the Colorado state house and kept the senate. I'm excited about this personally because I no longer have Robert Ramirez (whom I have never liked) as my state rep - I have Tracy Kraft-Tharp, and by a comfortable margin. And I got to keep Evie Hudak as my state senator, and I just adore her to bits. But the really exciting thing about this? We almost had civil unions in Colorado this year, and representative McNulty, with the complicity of the Republican majority, kept the bill from going to vote. Well, McNulty is still around, but he no longer has a majority. So he can sit down, shut up, and get out of the way of progress.

Let's do it, Colorado. Civil unions, then let's fix our state constitution, and let's get back to leading.

Silent Hill: Revelation

This will come as no surprise since hey, it's a video game movie, but Silent Hill: Revelation is a bad movie. And it's not even gleefully bad like The Man With the Iron Fists. It's just really... plodding and inadequate and hey look I guess Sean Bean got a paycheck, good for him.

(Spoilers of course, but trust me, you don't care.)

The setting was nice, the monsters mostly well done (though a bit too obviously CGI for my taste, though the mannequin monster feeling up the boob of the newly made plastic lady was nicely creepy), and the musical score was excellent. The room scene with the nurse demons was nicely creepy, even if all of us were left wondering what made the two dumbest cultist foot soldiers ever decide that a room full of nurse demons was the place to go. But that's all I can really say that's positive, and that does not a decent movie make. The makeup on several of the characters, by the way, is utterly awful. And the story itself is completely incoherent, with all of the explanatory scenes a word salad of cultist terms that don't actually make sense even if you have played the games.

Really, the inexplicable scene with the nurse demons points to one of the movie's most major flaws. In these games, you do a lot of running into random places, herded by monsters, and you simply accept that sure I'm going to pick up the wax doll and the horseshoe so I can later make a handle for a trap door because that's how I get to the next area and I want to beat the game. (For the record, that is actually a thing you do in Silent Hill 2.) That doesn't work so well in a movie because you're not participating. Instead you're forced to just watch other people to nonsensical things and wonder just who the hell would even think that was a good idea.

Silent Hill: Revelation is actually an uncomfortable mix of Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Homecoming. It's got a lot of plot elements from SH3, but more of the monsters and setting are straight out of Homecoming, which makes it weird if you're a dedicated fan of the games. There was also a lot of twisting of the SH3 plot, combining elements that it really made no sense to combine, and then the wheels just really come off at the end when suddenly Heather and Alessa basically hug it out as their epic finally battle and Claudia is actually a boss monster called the Missionary.

Also, Victor is inexplicably Heather's teenaged love interest, and Kit Harrington can't figure out what the hell his accent is, which doesn't help matters.

There are a lot of things in this movie that left me wondering why these choices were made. Look, if you want to make Silent Hill 3 into a movie, it had a perfectly serviceable plot that could have worked, I think. If you want to make your own original movie set in Silent Hill because it's an interesting setting with a lot of potential stories, I think that would actually be amazing and way more interesting than just remaking a video game. But trying to combine the two by not quite telling the story of Silent Hill 3 is really not the way to go. It confuses the fans of the series (or out and out pisses them off) and just makes for a story that has no internal logic.

For example, Claudia. She was a scary character on her own. She didn't need to be transformed into the Missionary (one of the boss monsters). It's not a nod to the game that Silent Hill fans would really want, since Claudia was Claudia and the Missionary was the Missionary and they were both very frightening on their own; adding them together does not multiply the scares, trust me. It also means that Heather loses much of her badassery because instead of defeating Claudia and getting closure from that woman's manipulations, she goes on to not personally defeat the Missionary (more on this later).

To be honest, what I disliked most about the movie was what they did with Pyramid Head. I was right to be worried. Suddenly he's been transformed from Sir Not Appearing In This Game (though arguably the monster Valtiel in SH3 has similarities) to Heather's protector. No, really. He shows up twice to save her, once so he can chop off the arms of all the people in the asylum because they're trying to pull Heather's hair and scaring her, and once so he can fight the Missionary for her. The movie ends not with Heather being a badass and saving herself, but with what is basically a clash of the Titans where the audience is put in the strange position of cheering for Pyramid Head.

I'm guessing perhaps this has something to do with Pyramid Head's popularity with the fans, but turning him into something quasi-good is really not the way to reward that.

I will note that I found the ending of the movie the most entertaining part, by the way. After Heather and Victor (sigh) escape Silent Hill (Sean Bean inexplicably decides to stay behind, I guess he just wanted the hell out of this franchise) they get picked up by a trucker... named Travis. And then pass by a prison bus being escorted by the police in the opposite direction. So that was amusing.

If you're a fan of Silent Hill, don't waste your money seeing this in the theater. And if you're not a fan, really don't waste your money.

Not a generic get out the vote post

There's something that I've said for a long, long time. Pretty much since I made the discovery that you could argue with people on the internet: If you have to lie to win an argument, you know in your heart that you've already lost, and that you think victory is more important than having a moral compass.

This is not meant to be a compliment, by the way.

Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, not very long ago, I was a Republican. I voted for George W. Bush both times. And I'm only actually ashamed of the second time, when it became apparent just how much we'd all been lied to a matter of weeks after I cast that vote. 

So I don't think Republicans are, in general, evil. I don't think they're trying to destroy the country. I think a lot of them (the social conservatives) need to examine their own prejudices and mind their own goddamn business, but that's a matter for a different post.

I am, however, starting to have my doubts about the party as a whole. Because if you have to lie to win an argument...

Which could just as easily be: if you have to stop people from voting in order to win an election...¹

If you think that voting shouldn't be easy.

If you tout a voter ID law that makes it harder to vote because it'll deliver the state for your candidate.

If you "don't want everybody to vote." 

If you don't want to accommodate a "voter turn-out machine" because it's "urban - read African-American."

If you think the answer in democracy is less democracy for the people you disagree with instead of more for everyone. 

You have already lost. You have lost any claim to morality you ever had. And you have lost your right to say that you love democracy and wish to defend it. 

You have already lost something far more important than an election. You have lost your soul. 

Stop. Just. Stop.

1 - Large scale in-person voter fraud is a paranoid fantasy. Get the fuck over it and honestly examine who you are really trying to stop.

Okay seriously why do you people hate me. (YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME)

Less than 24 hours after setting out the challenge, the goal of $100 donated to the Red Cross has been reached! Wow, you guys must seriously hate me! (And by that, I mean the people who read my blog are AWESOME.)

Thus, you have bought my tasty, tasty suffering on Black Friday. I will liveblog that Ray Comfort DVD. I will liveblog the shit out of it.

But let's not stop there. The Red Cross needs us! And apparently, you need me to alternately froth and sob over my keyboard!

So I propose this - if you get up to $250 on the donations before November 19, I will throw in Metal Tornado the next week (So probably on November 30 or December 1), because I saw it was available on Netflix and it sure does look like a thing. If you get to $350, instead of Metal Tornado I'll liveblog Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception, which is an anti-Obama birther wingnut DVD my parents have some how gotten hold of (don't ask) and almost guaranteed to make me burst a blood vessel in my eye.

I'll keep up the running money tally on the original post.

Sound good? Help out the victims of Sandy with the Red Cross! MAKE ME SUFFER!

Donate to the Red Cross, Make Rachael Liveblog Something Awful

I've already donated to the Red Cross to help out those who have been caught by Hurricane Sandy. I'd like you to donate as well. And I have a (dubious) reward for you if you do!

I've noticed my blog posts tend to get around 100 hits. I'm hoping that means at least 100 people actually read my little blog. So if you each gave $1 to the Red Cross, that'd make $100, right?

So here's my proposal. If my readers donate $100 in total to the Red Cross between now and November 19, I will liveblog something terrible. Right now, it's looking like it would be the random Ray Comfort DVD that got left on my friend's windshield when he was parked near a Planned Parenthood. Because I would rather hammer nails into my skull than subject myself to Ray Comfort + Anti-abortion bullshit, so it'll likely be hilarious.

Though I am, of course, open to suggestions. Please feel free to leave your thoughts on this topic in comments.

I'd like to operate this on the honor system. If you donate to the Red Cross because you both want me to suffer and want to help out the victims of Hurrican Sandy, leave a comment on this blog post, tweet at me, comment on facebook, plurk at me, something. If $100 has been donated by the 19th of this month, I will liveblog for you on Black Friday so you can exercise off some of your turkey with evil belly laughs.

Deal?

Money thus far: $209.40 (OH GOD NO NOT RAY COMFORT)

Challenge update since you blew away the first goal:
- Get to $250 and I'll liveblog Metal Tornado as well, because that sure looks like a thing.
- Get to $350 and I'll liveblog Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception instead of Metal Tornado. If you haven't heard of it, it's a birther propaganda piece that will probably cause me to rupture a blood vessel in my eye.

Lasted edited at: 06.11.12 14:57

Bad Movie Science (2)

So on Friday, I risked getting my geek card taken away by saying that, for the most part, I don't care if the science in a movie is bad so long as it tells me a sufficiently good story. This was a point I tried to make at one of the Mile Hi Con panels I was on, actually. And at that panel, someone in the audience asked a very pertinent question - but don't you think it's the responsibility of a movie to present good science?

No, actually. I don't.

But people see things in movies and think they're true! What about all of the stupid shit about 2012? And so on!

The responsibility of a movie, as I said before, is to tell me a good story and make sure I don't leave the theater feeling like I just got fucked out of the $10 I paid for my ticket.

Movies are supposed to entertain, not educate. And I think most of us are damn glad for that. While I enjoy a good episode of Nova as much as the next person, you'll notice that's not where my primary consumption of media lies.

If someone goes into a movie and comes out with the misconception that the world is ending in 2012 or geologists wear white labcoats or exposing someone to a lot of gamma radiation is going to do anything but kill them, I frankly do not consider that the fault of the movie. I consider it a fault of the education that person received, and to a lesser extent the fault of media that actually has the responsibility of being truthful rather than entertaining.

Critical thinking skills have always gotten short shrift in education, and in the US that's only become worse with the advent of No Child Left Behind and the emphasis on gross skills such as reading speed uncoupled from the ability to process and critically assess what has been read. (Because those things are much harder to assess with a standardized test, I suppose.) Teaching kids science (something that low income schools particularly struggle to do), how to tell good data from bad, how to tell who is an expert who probably knows what they're talking about and who is just some jackass that the local TV station dug up in the pursuit of false balance would go a long, long way to closing that gap.

And that's not even touching on things like, say, the Texas GOP platform attacking the teaching of critical thinking skills.

The problem is not that a movie includes a ridiculous scene where the spaceships make noise and turn like airplanes instead of spaceships. The problem is that the audience lacks the necessary basis to question the truth of that statement.

And frankly, fixing this problem has nothing to do with requiring those who make their living in the arts to hew to scientific fact and never deviate. (We won't even touch on the question of how the hell you'd begin to enforce that, free speech issues, etc.) Ultimately, enforcing scientific fact through the arts still does nothing to fix the base problem. You are still presenting entertainment as a fact that should be accepted unquestioningly upon its consumption by a passive audience.

The real answer is simple to state and difficult to execute. We need to teach people to think critically and question and understand the difference in data quality depending upon the source. We need to stop pretending that education is only about reciting times tables and reading X number of words per minute.

We need to stop failing the education system and the kids who rely upon it.

Because yes, it is us failing the schools, not the other way around. It's us refusing to pass bond issues, and us obsessing about standardized testing, and us not paying attention to who the hell we're electing to the board of education for our county or state, and us allowing political affiliation to interfere with objective scientific truth, and even some wacky part of us actively fighting against teaching kids how to even think to begin with.

Us. We did this. Not the people who make movies.

The Man With the Iron Fists

This should come as no surprise, but The Man With the Iron Fists is a bad movie. A very, very bad movie. But it revels gleefully in its badness, a hodgepodge of one-liners glued together with endlessly spurting, ruby-red fake blood. This is not a movie that you see because you want martial arts or a decent action flick. This is a movie you see because you went to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and thought well yes, but what this movie needs is more obviously fake gore and bad Elvira wigs.

There's really nothing to this movie but fight scenes that are comedic in their brutality and groan-worthy one-liners that are held together by weirdly laconic exposition by RZA, who informs you periodically what the plot is doing. But let's be clear. There isn't really plot to this movie. It's a fabrication that exists so that characters can move from point A to point B and then throw around a lot of blood. While the movie itself has an impressive color palette (particularly the whore house, where everything is in a highly disturbing shade of pink) everything potentially emotional is flat and muted because feelings are really just there as a reason to punch someone's goddamn head off.

Near the beginning, Yen Zi (the X-blade) gets a note that reads: Your father is dead. The circumstances of this caused everyone in the theater to laugh. This is the kind of experience you have throughout the entire movie.

According to IMDB, the original cut of the movie was 4 hours long, and then it was reduced to 90 minutes. I'm forced to wonder, had it been left at the original, epic length would it:
a) have made sense
b) not been a comedy

The plot, such as it is, is fairly straightforward. I think. There are a bunch of clans, inexplicably named after animals. The Lion Clan (extra hilarious if you've ever played L5R) has a coup occur within it when The Artist Formerly Known a Prince Silver Lion kills daddy Gold Lion and then tries to have his son Yen Zi murdered too. Then kills a lot of other people because... reasons, including at least one other clan. He also seems very concerned about the Hyena Clan which, to my memory, never actually appears so perhaps it's some sort of hallucination on his part. He also steals a shipment of gold from the governor (a stern man with large eyebrows who has no actual lines and just poses on an enormous golden throne) and hides it under the whore house.

Yen Zi thinks all of this is a bad idea and tries to stop it, which means Brass Body (pro wrestler Dave Bautista) beats the snot out of him. The Blacksmith (RZA) who is incidentally the only black guy in the village, saves Yen Zi, nurses him back to health, and gets his arms chopped off for his trouble. Jack Knife (Russell Crowe), who has been hanging around chewing on the scenery and being weird, oversexed and not nearly as fabulous as Silver Lion, then saves the Blacksmith and helps him make some metal arms - and thus the movie gains its title. Together, Yen Zi, Jack, and the Blacksmith team up and kill... everyone. Basically. Well, Ultra Fabulous Lion kills Madam Blossom (Lucy Liu) as she tries to save a child for a reason none of us could figure out. Then Russell Crowe as Jack rides off into the sunset still reminding the audience that yes I am totally a British guy trust me and the Blacksmith swears off making weapons forever because violence is bad, that's why we just sat through 90 minutes of nothing but.

The martial arts scenes are fairly unimpressive. There's a lot of wire work  that's all right, if you're in to wire work. See it if you want a movie that feels like it's having fun with all the tropes of bad martial arts movies. See it if you want to witness Russell Crowe hilariously sneaking around the village in disguise as obviously the only white guy in the entire county (who also has a prominent and easily identified facial scar). See it so you can witness Byron Mann in a bad wig being a fabulous bastard and Daniel Wu with hilariously overdone eyebrows. See it so you can witness Dave Bautista, with apparent seriousness answer the line "I thought all the tiger were dead!" with "Yes, because I killed them!"

I laughed more in this movie than I had in the last comedy I went to. If you're the sort of person that likes MST3K and was willing to pay real money for a ticket to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, go for it, get some popcorn, and enjoy. If you demand that your movies do things like, I don't know, make sense, this is not for you.

If you do go, just wait until you get to the (gasp) Gemini Stance! And then imagine an entire row of students from a kung fu school laughing hysterically. Because that's exactly what happened.

Bad Movie Science (1)

This might get my geek card taken away, I realize. Oh wait, no, you can't take my geek card. John Scalzi says so.

But this is the thing. For the most part, I actually don't care about bad science in movies. Sure, there's the occasional face-clutching howler (red matter? a black hole that's going to destroy an entire galaxy? Wow, Star Trek, just wow.) but outside of that, 98% of the time, I seriously don't care. Spaceships that don't fly like spaceships should fly and make noise in space? Meh.

What I want a movie to do is tell me a good story. Or failing that tell me a really fun one. If the movie is doing its job at that, then I'm probably not even going to notice the shitty excuse for science. I'm going to be too busy watching villains get punched in the face or clutching the edge of my seat because oh god are these people going to make it or grow up or get back together I need to know.

I do think there are times (cough Total Recall cough) when the MacGuffin is too ridiculous to just accept, or when if the writers had actually spent five minutes on the internet and taken a look at the real science, it would have made the story stronger. But for the most part, the point is the story, not a technical lesson in how spaceships should really fly.

And frankly, I think if you or I can spend our entire time complaining bitterly about all the tortured science, that shows that the movie (or television show, etc) has failed at telling us that story and making us care. Because that means we're so bored or annoyed or overwhelmed by the sheer stupidity of the base concept that we'd rather pick apart the technical details than pay attention to what the characters are doing. I'd argue that the problem at the base of those movies isn't the bad science, it's the failure of the story itself to engage.

Prometheus is an excellent example of this, I think. If I'd actually given two shits about any of those characters and hadn't found their decisions inexplicable and stupid, I wouldn't have cared about how grossly ridiculous the more technical details of the story were. (eg: I just had major abdominal surgery and now I'm going to basically run a triathlon. I rolled my eyes until I strained something.) For goodness sake, I loved the hell out of Looper even though if I wanted to I probably could have just gone to town on the way the time travel was handled. But I didn't care at the time and still don't because any mistakes (intentional or not) that were made occurred in the service of a damn good, engaging story.

Remember, you can't take my geek card.

I've often heard Contact held up as a paragon to all nerddom because the science was done right. I know some people that really, really liked that movie. If you're one of them, good on you. I thought it was all right, but I've seen it a grand total of once and have never felt compelled to watch it again, which is a strange thing for me since I'm a compulsive movie re-watcher at my heart. (Don't ask how many times I've watched Avengers. Just. Don't.) I think that highlights that as far as I'm concerned, the correctness of the technical background really has no meaning unless the story grabs me and won't let me go.

I would further argue that, if it is in the service of a good story, rules should be bent and broken.

(Next: yes, but is it the responsibility of a movie to have good science?)