IHaveNoSoul.diff

Yesterday, along with everything else, I bought myself a new beard trimmer. I had a really old model with a tiny, tiny trimmer on it (it was powered by a single AA battery!), and it was no longer sufficient now that I actually, you know, have a beard.

Unfortunately, I was unfamiliar with how the darned thing worked and, while experimenting with it, set it too low. While I realized the problem quickly enough and figured out how to make the depth control work correctly, I'd trimmed the area right under my lower lip a little too low and now it looks less like beard and more like stubble. Oh, well, it regrows quickly.

SF Movie Reviewers who don't understand SF

The Boston Globe brings us The Top 50 Scary Movies of All Time. I laughed when I read this review of Event Horizon: "The plot is complicated, intelligent, and rewards the viewer who pays close attention to the film."

Seriously? This movie had the single most stupid line ever shot off in a science fiction film: "You break all the laws of physics and you seriously think there wouldn't be a price?" The entire premise, based upon one scriptwriter's excessively limited concept of frame dragging, that the first FTL starship went not across the universe but to Hell and back, had already been done: in the video game Doom, in Warhammer 40K, and in countless novels and short stories. The plot was childish, brain-damaged, and had every science fiction fan in the audience squirming in theirs seats with embarrassment: for Sam Neil, for Lawrence Fishburn, for just about everyone involved.

Well, give the writer this: John Carpenter's The Thing was in his top-ten. Although for true scariness, I think you should re-watch the movie and then read Peter Watt's The Things, to see what that conflict looked like from the monster's point of view.

A brief, but significant, announcement

Storm

Yamaraashi-chan and I had a conversation yesterday evening, and one of the things we decided was that she no longer needs to be protected from the Internet by a psuedonym. She has her own Facebook account, which in true 13-year-old style is full of "OMG!"s, idle worship of idol celebrities, and the occasional shout of "Life is too confusing!", and it is under her own name.

Therefore, she would like me to stop calling her Yamaraashi-chan in print, and refer to her by her given name,