Reviews of movies, anime, and the occasional TV show mixed with warnings on Blogger spam. Also to be found are musings on whatever I am thinking about - all from the point of view of being left to watch everything from the sidelines of life.
I knew helping out on a move on Monday would cost me, but I was hoping it would not be most of a week. But here it is, Thursday, and I am struggling mightily. While the brain is working sporadically and well enough to meet minimal requirements on crossword puzzles, the body is doing its own thing. Or more accurately, not doing a thing. Audiosurf was flat out awful today and I am barely keeping my eyes open.
In fact, I need to lie down.
Showing how bad things are in DVD sales, Warner Brothers have decided to milk as much money out of the Harry Potter movies they can in the short term. After December 29th, they will stop producing and shipping all of the movies in the series.
The article mentions Disney has done this with their animated films and I would not be surprised to see this trend expand. Home video sales have cratered and the studios are looking for a way out of the market, in my opinion. It would not be surprising if some in the industry would like things to return to the theater only model, but I cannot see that being viable.
With the death of DVD’s being proclaimed widely and Blu-ray not being very successful, it looks like the digital download format is the only option in the future. Since the studios hate that, it will be a messy transition.
I had thought of getting the last two films to complete my Harry Potter set, but now I do not feel like doing so. This sort of cheap stunt is really irritating, but I suspect it will work. I just do not want to contribute to it succeeding.
Halloween fun goes Universal with a review of James Whale’s subversive masterpiece that frightened audiences and packed the theaters. Return with me to a more innocent time when gore did not exist in movies, television was a science fiction idea, and scared kids still hid behind movie theater seats. Warning: This will be a monster of a review!
1931 was the year that made horror movies popular and proved they could compete for the pennies of Depression era movie goers. Early in the year, Dracula had come out and caused a sensation with its gothic atmosphere featuring an exotic supernatural villain. Known as a B movie studio, Universal Pictures finally had their chance to move up to the big leagues and they had to strike while the iron was hot.
So another adaptation of a classic horror novel was the logical next step. Having bought the rights to Peggy Webling’s stage play interpretation of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, the studio moved ahead at full steam.
The movie begins with a quaint rarity: a warning to the audience. Delivered by Edward Van Sloan, the actor portraying Doctor Waldman, it was added after a test screening in California shocked its audience. In this exceptionally jaded era of lost innocence, the concept of people actually have to be warned about content is alien. But this was a more civilized time and not only were children sheltered, many adults were.
So please watch this movie with that in mind.
The opening credits set an uneasy and creepy mood, with strange and unholy eyes being the focus behind the letters presented on screen. To modern eyes, it looks psychedelic, but it would have been nightmarish—even delirious to the eyes of the time.
One of the beautiful things about life is that while you can never find someone you agree on one hundred percent of things, you also cannot find someone you will disagree on everything.
Those rogue hackers called Anonymous have done a great service to the world recently. There is a shadowy covert world on the Internet where all sorts of malignant activities are carried out with the absolute worst being the creation and dissemination of child pornography. So when they hacked and tracked the members of a large ring involved in this kind of evil, I have to salute them.
I may not agree with them on many things, but this is the kind of vigilante justice I can back.
I remember looking at TOR at one point while pondering whether or not there was a necessity for more privacy in communications between friends and talking about sensitive issues. The cons outweighed the pros, but the idea that this kind of software could be used for truly vile stuff always stuck with me.
Privacy is needed on the Net, but there are lines that have been crossed and pedophiles are so far over the line it isn’t worth arguing about.
So well done, Anonymous, well done.
It has been an interesting week health wise. Starting with the disastrous weekend, things rebounded on Monday. In fact, things went fairly well until Friday, when it fell apart again.
Two factors appear to be involved: overdoing things and tapering off the H2O2 therapy.
For the moment, there seems to be a limit on how many workouts I can get in a week before it negatively affects me. Two can be done and then I degrade in the stamina and upper respiratory areas. Third is simply asking for trouble.
On the hydrogen peroxide end of things, it appears I tapered off too quickly to once a day and will go back to twice a day to see what happens. I do not relish this, as drinking the foul stuff is not fun in the slightest. Hopefully, the innards will go back to being cooperative as they showed signs of rebelling again.
Slept a great deal yesterday and was unable to get very far into a monster review I am writing. The brain simply quit working. I better get that up Monday morning at the latest.
According to the latest news, it really appears to be him. Warning, graphic pictures at the link. The gold plated .45 seems to be a strong identifier to me and it looks like him despite all the damage.
It has been a long time coming for this certifiable lunatic. I remember when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up and the Berlin disco bombing for that matter too. The world is a better place with him and his son gone, but I have a bad feeling about Libya.
After watching Egypt slide following their revolution, this one looks even messier. Islamic extremists will be looking to take power and one way or the other, they will.
For the moment, at least there is the potential of change for the better for the Libyan people. It is up to them now.
As the economic conditions continue to deteriorate to the inevitable collapse, governments at all levels will become obsessed with picking the pockets of the citizen completely clean. There has already been discussion of confiscating private retirement accounts, which has been done in other countries. Pumping up inflation is another way savings are wiped out and that is the plan in the United Kingdom.
But here is an idea that blindsided me and is already law in Louisiana. All secondhand goods are to be paid for by check or plastic from now on. Curiously, pawn shops are exempted. But what about Goodwill and Salvation Army stores? This also effectively outlaws rummage sales and any other private sale, since you would have to have enough money to survive checks bouncing or to have a credit card scanner. Those have fees per transaction to use, by the way.
Asinine barely begins to describe this. Supposedly this is to stop materials thefts and theft in general. Most of the buyers there are shady and doing it off the books anyway, so it will not stop crime. But it will destroy a lot of small businesses.
So why pass this law?
I suspect the real answer is that it is all about taxes. It is easier to keep track of what should be taxed because checks, debit cards, and credit cards are all traceable. They want a chunk of unreported “black market” sales that go on all the time between private citizens. The legitimate businesses already keep track of that and pay their taxes, but there is an attitude among some legislators that there is a huge underground economy that can bring in big revenue streams.
To some degree, they are right and that is why a national sales tax replacing the income tax would be very effective. But an individual state doing this will just encourage legitimate buyers to stop buying and criminals will do one of two things: money laundering and shopping out of state.
I feel assaulted by dangerous waves of stupidity.
