I read C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books as a child, and have dim memories of enjoying them. Because of this, and because the trailers for the upcoming movie look gorgeous, I have been planning to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when it comes out. As preparation I thought it would be a [...]

Manolo the Shoeblogger writes in The
Paradox of Not Caring: “claiming to not care about the clothes, to
not be concerned about what one wears, it the paradox, for the clothes
worn by one who claims not to care make as much the statement as those
worn by one who dresses with the purpose.” He’s got a point. [...]

The Brussels Journal reports that the
French government has officially declared the banlieu riots over. The
article continues:

Police figures are at exactly 98 cars torched on Wednesday
night. This, the police say, is a normal average. Consequently
the 20th consecutive night of violence was declared the last one.

Yes, you read that correctly. 98 car-torchings a night is
“normal” [...]

Went to see the latest Harry Potter flick last night and got —
no, I won’t say “assaulted”, I’ll say “oozed on” by the infomercials
Regal Cinemas started running earlier this year, some sludge called
“The 2wenty” that tries to be trendy and hip and cool and attractive
and fails miserably on all four counts.
I deduce from the existence [...]

In 1997 I was delighted by Grosse Point Blank, John
Cusack’s masterpiece about a hitman who finds himself (in both senses
of the phrase) at his high-school reunion. I loved that movie for its
action, its dark comedy, and a script that never stopped being
wickedly intelligent for even a second. I’ve been waiting nearly ten
years for [...]

I’ve spent large parts of the last week editing maps for a game
system I’m working on. I’ve been using the GIMP graphics editor, and I’m pretty
impressed with it. I haven’t found anything I can’t easily make it do
— except, oddly enough, draw straight lines between defined
endpoints. (I suspect there’s actually a way [...]

I’ve added a pointer to Peter Norvig’s excellent essay “Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years”.
The HOWTO itself is here.

For all those who have been asking, the Halloween Documents are
available on my website.

A correspondent wrote me to
object to the fact that
that-which-was-Pajamas-Media has launched as “Open Source Media”.

A bit of blogging for the record here. Doc Searls wrote:

“The Commons” and “the public domain” might be legitimate concepts
with deep and relevant histories, but they’re too arcane to most of
us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing
kinda rubs him the wrong way. [...] (Maybe he’ll come in here and
correct [...]

Secularists and leftists enjoy sneering at conservative Christians who believe in the Rapture and other flavors of millenarianism. Reasonably so: it takes either a drooling idiot or somebody who has deliberately shut off most of his brain, reducing himself to an idiotically low level of critical thinking, to believe such things. The draw, of couse, [...]

As I predicted two years ago, in Demographics and the Dustbin of History, Paris is burning. The banlieu riots are so out of control that the French have declared a national state of emergency.