An observation on video games to movies!

Omaha and I went out last night and had a lovely time. Watched The Dark Knight, which was pretty good up until the end speech. While we were at the restaurant, I mentioned that a trailer for the movie Tr2n is out. I said that it looked okay but I thought the video game, Tron 2.0 (which I thought was much better an an "interactive movie" than as a video game) was also a better sequel to Tron than any movie could have been. (I'm disappointed that the game got Bruce Boxleitner to replay Tron, but failed to get Jeff Bridges to play Flynn again).

No, really. Three-D video games have long fought the fact that getting things to look realistic and organic is hard. Tron 2.0 was therefor perfect: everything looked computer generated!

Omaha said, "Yeah, it would have been cool if they'd based the movie on the game."

I said, "Nah, it had better not be. Isn't there some law somewhere that says that if you make a movie based on a video game, Uwe Boll has to direct it?"

What have you done to Southcenter Mall?

For the past year and a half the big shopping mall near my house has been under renovation. Omaha and I went in yesterday to take a look. What have they done to my mall?

It's twice as big as it used to be, completely disorienting anyone familiar with the old straight, linear Southcenter. The new center has gentle curves in the walkway, thus making it hard for you to know how far away you are from any of the exits or entrances. It has one of those bigger foodcourts with distributed cooking kiosks rather than the "in the round" layout it used to have. It's also much more upscale, with faux-marble floors and columns and all that. They apparently attracted higher-end stores to this new section.

The restrooms have these weird air-driven driers for your hands. It's not like those hot-air blowdriers of yesteryear. Instead, you put your hands into the device, and as you slowly pull them out jets of air, so powerful as to feel almost solid, squeegee the air off your hands. Weird. I could feel my skin aging.

Don't they understand that South King County isn't like Bellevue? We're a bit downscale down here. The designers of the new mall apparently don't. This section has been open exactly two days and already one of the no-touch soap dispensors in the restroom has been torn off.

Anyway, I continue to be discouraged.

What a cute couple!

While we were at the restaurant last night, I looked to my left and saw a very cute couple, early 20s, sitting about three tables away. She was tall, thin, with short black hair and wore a tight-fitting blue shirt; he was equally tall, thin, with red hair and a goatee, wearing pale khakis and a blousy linen shirt.

What caught my attention though, were the two bandages on the back of her neck. They were exactly where the neural ports would go on a Ghost in the Shell style implant, where the ports go on the left and right sides of the spine rather than right above it. He, on the other hand, was reading The Illuminati Trilogy: Leviathan!, with the original Carlos Victor cover art.

I wonder if those two observations were related.

Maybe they were tattoos?

Even in defeat, I try to be entertaining

Well, I finally had to give up and install a household filter. Omaha will protest that this was a lot more work than it should have been, and I would be inclined to agree with her if it handn't been a simple matter of installing two pieces of software the old-fashioned way: ./configure && make && sudo make install. I had forgotten just how underpowered the household router is: it's a Pentium M, 286MhZ machine with 32MB of ram and a 4GB drive. Still, it's been an absolute rock for the past six years. But we might have to up it a bit if we're asking it to do filtering.

Part of me is convinced that this is a failure: I haven't taught my kids well enough about what's good to put into their minds, and what isn't. On the other hand, I still can't watch them all the time, even when their computer is in the den where everyone can see it. And using SARG will at least give me an idea if they're trying repeatedly to get into things that I need to talk to them about.

Don't Go There

But you know me. I can't leave well enough alone. I hated the template for the warning, so I pulled it up in emacs and edited it. Omaha and I posed for a photograph. This is what you see if you try to navigate to Fleshbot. Whaddya think?