I went to watch the much hyped movie today. I was prepared to be revolted, and I was. Not by the movie, or the story. It was well-told, powerful and moving.

I heard people chat idly about the theme appearing in other movies. I saw them smiling as they exited the theater, talking about the finer points of the plot. I saw them wearing nice clothes ( Read more... )

I went to see Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief with tazfrog today. Ever since I saw the Disney version of Hercules I've been wary of movies that try to adapt greek mythology, so I was very worried that this movie would totally destroy it in the same manner as the aforementioned Disney film do.

Now, some films that seem like they might ( Read more... )

I watched Avatar recently with a friend. And we came away with some very similar opinions and some very different ones. Predictably, it was the difference of opinions that stuck and we had a rather strident discussion about it.

I do not wish to be worried about spoilers, so I'm just putting this whole thing behind a cut and not worrying about ( Read more... )

Wow, that was a fantastic movie. It had one flaw. It was gorier than it needed to be in a few places, especially near the end.

The main character, especially, is completely believable. The society he finds himself in is demonstrably our society. How the various details play out is completely believable.

The movie also uses the interesting story ( Read more... )

It's World of Goo. It's like a mad cross between Fantastic Contraption and Lemmings.

The best part (in my world anyway :-) is that the game is available for Linux. I wish more game companies would start doing this. It isn't that hard, and there is a market for it. Nearly as much of a market as for Mac games.

The game has gotten some fantastic ( Read more... )

All the DIY BIO (Do It Yourself BIOlogy (synthetic biology in particular))
Wow! This stuff was really impressive. The basic idea being that biology is in the same place now as computing was not long before the MITS Altair came out. Sadly, the demonstrations of working code are a little hard to do when your experiment takes a few hours to run.
( Read more... )

I received a complimentary copy of a The Object Caml Programming Language in the mail while my journal was suspended. I received it as a gift because I was one of the reviewers.

I think it's a fairly well done book. And a nicer introduction than many out there, and it goes well beyond being an introduction in later chapters.

OCaml is a language ( Read more... )

My HTC "G1" Android based phone is a nice gadget. I've discovered in doing some searching for a nice LJ client for it that other people have expressed my worries, complaints and hopes about the gadget already and so I can best say what I want to say right now by pointing at what others have said.

• bradfitz expresses very clearly my hopes for an extremely ( Read more... )

I watched a preview of 21 with cooncat, mizemm and luchog. That was a happy thing and I'm glad I got to spend some more time with cooncat before she flies off to Japan.

But the movie was mediocre. It was a not-very-believable dramatization of a real-life event. The dialog was dumb. The main character is somehow supposed to be credibly having a discussion of the Newton- ( Read more... )

I made the mistake of seeing this movie on a whim without reading any reviews. It is an awful movie. Horrible dialog, bad special effects, corny unbelievable plot, tons of historical inaccuracies, just all around a bad movie.

The worst part is, I get the impression that the people putting it together didn't realize it was a bad movie. At every ( Read more... )