Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Sometime between July 5th and July 8th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Monsignor’s Confessional: Darkness That Exists Just for You: "Once a month, The Vogue would fill with people who joyfully attended the famous party. It provided them sanctuary and freedom, it was a place they could feel safe and comfortable while expressing themselves in any way they saw fit. The outfits ranged from fetish wear to costumes, pony falls to dread falls, bright colored hair to black hair, large amounts of make-up on both women and men. It was not uncommon to see guests dressed in corsets, dog collars, chains, or any variation thereof." I have a few sets of photos I've taken at various confessionals in my Seagoth collection on Flickr, including the final Christmas Confessional at The Vogue mentioned in the article.
• Introducing the Google Chrome OS: "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."
• Sarah Palin’s 10 Most Awkward Media Moments: "If the soon-to-be-former Alaska governor's rambling resignation speech made some viewers wince, it was probably not the first time. Here's a look back at the soon-to-be-former governor's most cringe-inducing moments. And yes—we included the turkey." Listening to her speak makes my head go all asplodey.
• Fiction World Rocked as Woman Claims No Sexual Attraction to Neil Gaiman: "At a recent book signing, Joan Green, 24, stunned her friends when she admitted that upon meeting Neil Gaiman, she did not find him attractive. 'He was nice and all,' she confessed a few minutes after getting a copy of American Gods autographed. 'But, he's not, you know, my type.' One of Green's friends, speaking anonymously, said, 'She's lying. Everyone thinks he's dreamy. Everyone. Even Hillary Clinton.'"
• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday, nearly two years to the day after going to see Michael Bay’s first “Transformers” film, Rick and I once again channelled our inner 12-year olds, did our best to turn off our brains, and headed off to see “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”.

My original summary of the first “Transformers” was:

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

I can quite easily update that for this sequel, with just a couple brief changes:

Mini-review number one: It was incredibly over-the-top, in-your-face, bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of mild amusement buried in a whole mess of WTF.

Admittedly, after seeing the first and reading some of the reviews of this one, I wasn’t laboring under any illusions of what I was walking in to. Mainly, Rick and I wanted to go because we’d gone together to the first one, we new it would be bad…and we knew we’d have a lot of fun suffering through it. Mock me if you wish, but I doubt we’re the only two people out there who’ve done such a thing!

Actual reviews of the movie have been handled far more ably than I’m likely to do. Here’s a few choice quotes from three of my favorites. First, from Roger Ebert’s official review:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Second, and again from Roger Ebert, his blog entry The Fall of the Revengers:

The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.

[…]

The term Assault on the Senses has become a cliché. It would be more accurate to describe the film simply as “painful.” The volume is cranked way up, probably on studio instructions, and the sound track consists largely of steel crashing discordantly against steel. Occasionally a Bot voice will roar thunderingly out of the left-side speakers, (1) reminding us of Surround Sound, or (2) reminding the theater to have the guy take another look at those right-side speakers. Beneath that is boilerplate hard-pounding action music, alternating with deep bass voices intoning what sounds like Gregorian chant without the Latin, or maybe even without the words: Just apprehensive sounds, translating as Oh, no! No! These Decepticons® are going to steal the energy of the sun and destroy the Earth!

Lastly, from io9’s brilliant review by Charlie Jane Anders:

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer’s biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari’s cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I’m still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

If I haven’t bored you enough already, what follows are a few things that stuck out to me during and after the film. Mostly bad, of course, but there were one or two things that I actually liked….

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Just a fun little numerical oddity: at the time of this posting (more or less, as Wordpress doesn’t let me schedule a post time down to the second), the combined date and time (if you drop the leading zero from the two-digit abbreviation for the year) becomes 123456789.

Or, if you prefer not to worry about those silly leading zeros, wait until five minutes and six seconds after four o’clock, at which time it will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.

That’s all, nothing to see here, move along, go about your business….

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

All browsers add it automatically, but I just can’t kill the habit of typing the http:// before every URL I type into the address bar.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Off to CWU Des Moines for my official orientation into the Law and Justice program.