low-budget horror

I just watched this deeply disturbed (and really good) werewolf movie called Ginger Snaps. Very creepy, very good. It had a similar level of twisted werewolf sexual-awakening fu as The Company of Wolves. But it was set in the nightmare that is high school, rather than some surreal Red-Riding-Hood land.

I've seen a couple other good horror movies recently that reminded me a bit of it, in that they were decent horror movies that were also super low budget with actors I hadn't heard of:

  • Cold Hearts was kind of the vampirism-as-eating-disorder take on the topic. It was kind of like The Lost Boys if they were slacker girls, it wasn't a comedy, and there was a complete merciful lack of Coreys.

  • The Forsaken is a vampire-hunting road-trip movie that kind of reminded me of The Hitcher (which was not nearly as good.) Guy gets bit, goes hunting. Good villains. I liked the matter-of-fact approach it took: there was little of that unbelievable beating around the bush that you often get in these movies; the characters were like, "Ok, vampires are real. Check. Now we deal with it."

Anyway, Joe Bob says check 'em out.

Anyone got other independent horror or scifi movies to recommend? The mainstream pickings have been pretty slim lately.

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look ma, I'm quoted in Wired again

AOL Test May Renew Browser War

[...]

But even if AOL keeps Microsoft from taking over the Internet, Steve Case shouldn't expect too many warm fuzzies for it. "I'm all for megacorps making use of open standards and open source," said Mozilla project founder Jamie Zawinski, who resigned after AOL's takeover in 1999. "But I'm supposed to be rooting for (AOL-Time Warner) over Microsoft? What's up next, Union Carbide versus Philip Morris?"

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schadenfreude

I must say, I get a certain perverse pleasure out of conversations that go like this:

They:   So, we've been using some of your code in our program for a while, and someone just noticed that you licensed it under the BSD/X license instead of GPL, so we can't use it. Will you change it?
Me:   Hell no.
They:   But but but, freedom!
Me:   The license I chose says, basically, "do what you want, just give me credit." The license you chose says, "do what you want, so long as you impose this list of restrictions on anyone who uses this code or anything that touches it.") So, because you chose a license that is so much more restrictive than the one I chose, you want me to add restrictions to my license, that is, take away freedoms, to convenience you?
They:   But RMS says we have to force people to do the right thing!
Me:  Screw you, hippie. Go piss up a flagpole.

I hoped to have had my last conversation about licenses in 1996, so I enjoy playing the intransigent hardass about it when someone wastes valuable time that I could be using to pick my nose or look at porn.

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let that be a lesson to you, son: never tattoo your forehead.

Tattooed Listeners Sue KORB/Quad Cities

Two men who had the KORB/Quad Cities logo tattooed on their foreheads are suing station owner Cumulus, saying they were promised $150,000 each for undergoing the permanent markings. In November of 2000, KORB jock Ben Stone (Benjamin Stomberg) announced that the station would provide backstage passes and concert tickets to anyone who put a temporary 93 Rock tattoo on their forehead. Stone then offered $30,000 a year for five years to anyone who got a permanent tattoo of the logo on their forehead, according to the Quad City Times.

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According to the lawsuit, two listeners, Richard Goddard and David Winkleman, called the station to see if the offer was legitimate and subsequently met with station officials. They were then accompanied to a local tattoo parlor by a station representative who paid for their tattoos. Pictures of the two were posted on the KORB Web site. The lawsuit claims the pair were never paid any of the money promised. In addition, Winkleman was fired from his job and the two have been unable to find work.

"Stromberg made the false promise as a practical joke, so that persons who responded to the announcement with the intention of receiving tattoos could be publicly scorned and ridiculed for their greed and lack of common good sense," the lawsuit states. "The defendant had no intentions to pay $30,000 a year for five years."

Cumulus attorney Craig Levien told the paper the company is "vigorously contesting" the lawsuit. KORB management offered no comment when contacted by fmqb.

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RIAA Safety Guide to the Beach!

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Punk Rock Aerobics

oh the humanity...

"We were trying to take moves that people would do in clubs -- like pogo and skank -- and put them into our workout, as well as having it be effective and actually have the heart rate go up, have this be a workout," said Punk Rock Aerobics co-founder Hilken Mancini, who is also a singer and guitarist for Boston's Fuzzy. "So it's sort of this fine line between choreography and chaos."

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today's wheel-reinvention

Today I hacked Emacs-Lisp for the first time in, I think, years. I got tired of editing my LJ posts in emacs, then checking the HTML by writing it to a temp file, then pasting it into the form, so I went looking for an emacs LJ client. (I used to just write my posts in the form's text field directly, but I had the Back button eat the post one too many times, so I gave up on that.) There is an emacs client, but it doesn't work with XEmacs, so it's useless to me. So I wrote my own. It does almost nothing, but it's the superset of nothing that I cared about.

This was largely motivated by wanting to crosspost between a mailing list I use for spamming my friends with URLs that amuse me, and my LJ page here. That's what the previous posts today were: look, it works! I do that with this. It auto-pastes-and-rewraps the selected text, and automatically puts in <lj-cut> tags on long posts and everything.

I mourn lisp.

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"Wantonness and Outrage!"

Jury Finds Monsanto Liable for PCB Pollution

[...] After five hours of deliberations over the course of two days, the jury decided to hold Monsanto and the company that now represents its chemical division liable on six counts: negligence, nuisance, suppression of the truth, trespass, wantonness and outrage.

In Alabama, the claim of outrage - a count almost never claimed or won - requires that the plaintiffs prove conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society." [...]

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Current Music: NIN - The Wretched

you will watch, and enjoy!

BBC hijacks TiVo recorders

By Andrew Smith

Users of the TiVo digital video recorder have reacted angrily to a new sponsorship feature that automatically records certain programmes, adverts and other promotional material.

[...] viewers in the UK were surprised this week to find that the second episode of the little-known BBC sitcom "Dossa and Joe" had been recorded without their knowledge and added to the system's main menu screen.

They were even more surprised to find that they won't be allowed to delete the programme for one week, and that more sponsored recordings are on the way.

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[...] But ironically, due to the BBC's notoriously bad time-keeping and TiVo's strict adherence to schedules, the programme started late and therefore any TiVo viewers watching the recording would have missed the last few minutes.

Advertainment

Meanwhile, TiVo sponsorship in the US has been introduced in a more commercial way this week, as the system automatically recorded a video promoting Sheryl Crow's new album, along with two adverts for TiVo's distribution partner Best Buy.

[...]

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haiku finder!

a program to find haiku in arbitrary text

% haiku -c -s /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL

When we speak of free

software, we are referring

to freedom, not price.

See also www.headlinehaikus.com

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Current Music: Gridlock -- Retina ♬