:: Omnia Mutantur ::

:: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 ::

An aikido-fighting William Shatner

I'm hesitant about admitting this on the web, where it will be available for the world to stare agape and wonder what was I thinking, but ...

well... hmm... er...

here it goes: I went to see Exit Wounds with my wife. Yes, a Steven Seagal movie.

Now, I know that paying for a Seagal movie is its own punishment, but this one was specially boring and predictable. I'm not against Seagal per se (I mean, I sort-of enjoyed The Gimmer Man and thought Above The Law was good), but this movie was just too much. Seagal is the only person able to make William Shatner seem Gary Oldman, the jokes were lame and predictable when not toilet humor (literally!) and there weren't even any good or original fight sequences, a must in this post-Matrix after-Face/Off world.

I won't even go into the plot since, in all fairness, most action movies nowadays are the equivalent of porn flicks: the plot is there just to provide thematic cohesion for the wardrobe.

Watch it only if you wish to have the pleasure to point and laugh at his pot-bellied, double-chinned stone-statue-of-a-hero's feeble attempts at comedy.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 5:05 PM [+] ::
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ReactOS (Geeks only)

Some years ago I would have filed this under wishful thinking, but after Linux's blooming I'm almost certain that it would come back to haunt me.

What's the unbelievable news? A group of volunteers are creating an open-source operating system called ReactOS. No big deal there, right? Wrong. They plan it to be both application- and driver-compatible with Windows NT.

The fact that they're focusing on NT alone shows that they've got a clear vision, since it is likely that by the time they have a working Kernel in beta Microsoft will have dumped the Windows 3.1-patched-up-to-95 codebase and will be working only with their NT codebase. Let's wish them well and, of course, stop by if you think you can help.

(Don't look at me that way. I told you it was geeks only.)

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 10:39 AM [+] ::
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Lao Tsu would have been proud...

I had almost reached a state where didn't look for things to want for, where I wanted nothing. But then my partner sent me a link to Jedi Knight II: Outcast, Raven Software's sequel to the brilliant and fun Jedi Knight - which is perhaps the most exciting and immersive 3D game I've played, Half Life's great story and AI notwithstanding - and I started coveting again.

The worst part is that the damned thing doesn't come out until sometime next year. So much for my peace of mind.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 11:09 AM [+] ::
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There I am, thinking that this is the first smart comedy about romance that I've seen...

... and then the writers of Somebody Like You had to go and glue onto it a phony romantic ending and screw things up by turning it into that most overdone of genres: the romantic comedy.

You see, the movie was already a great comedy about relationships, but somewhere along those last 15 minutes someone decided that it had to provide something more than closure for the character, that it couldn't just end in a note where she has worked out all her issues but that she also had to get the guy (Hugh Jackman doing an incredible job, but with whom Ashley Judd shows shows no chemistry whatsoever throughout the film) to get some sort of validation.

A coward's choice and a terrible way to ruin what had until then been an intelligent and funny movie.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 3:51 AM [+] ::
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Weee!

We bought some 200MHz FSB Athlons at Outpost.com to substitute the 26MHz FSB we weren't able to take advantage of due to Egghead.com's screw-up with the GA-7ZXR revision thingie and not only we received better service and faster shipping times but - surprise! - what we paid for was actually what we received. We are now running at 1.3GHz !!!

Yup, Egghead is getting the hardware back on Monday and I'm talking to our credit card company.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 8:48 PM [+] ::
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Motherboard buyers beware

A small public service for motherboard buyers.

Egghead.com has among the products they sell the excellent Gigabyte GA-7ZXR motherboard, which Egghead advertises support 133MHz of FSB (thus being usable with 266MHz FSB Athlon processors). The motherboards they sent us when we ordered, however, ended up being the oldest, very first version of said motherboard - which is up to Revision 3 by now - which only supported 100MHz FSB. Indeed, this qualifies as false advertising and so Egghead are apparently more than glad to take the motherboards back for a refund, but this doesn't change the fact that you'll have to go through the trouble of a full-blown hardware installation twice, not to mention all the delays involved.

I'm currently in talks with their customer service people to find out if they'll take the Athlons (which we ordered from them as well in that very same order) back instead, which would at least save us the pain of removing all cards, buses, etc. and putting them back in later on. It was their screw-up, after all.

I'll let you know how it goes but if you're considering a GA-7ZXR, I'd recommend that you look for a store where they actually know what they're stocking.

(Kudos, btw, to the Gigabyte people who were most helpful in the process of finding out why our 1.1GHz Athlons were being identified as 850MHz processors).

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 1:48 AM [+] ::
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The aftermath of the browser wars

My wife Hellen just reported a possible problem with the site. Does anyone else have trouble reading it due to colors or something? Please do let me know, since I believe it might be a Netscape incompatibility with IE (looks fine to me!).

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 8:34 PM [+] ::
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Not a single cute alien in sight

I know that at times it may seem that the only thing I do is bitch about movies but that's just because lately so many of them stink. So with that in mind, it feels downright weird that the first film I'm going to recommend in months is an Ivan Reitman film.

You see, Evolution has got to be the first decent Reitman movie since the hilarious Dave eight years ago, and while (a) the humor gets too adolescent at times and (b) you probably already saw all the best jokes in the trailer, it still worth a lot of laughs.

Evolution can best be described as Ghostbusters meets Delta Green with my Call of Cthulhu group playing while stumbling drunk. It has some familiar pulp CoC characters: the scientists who are strangely familiar with shotguns, the character with low EDU who actually brags about it, and the biologist with low DEX that keeps stumbling but can drive a fire truck like nobody else. You can actually see them progress from the usual investigation-oriented approach to the later shoot-'em-up stages, fumble their idea rolls and then roll a 01 in luck that makes two NPCs give them world-saving clues; or hear them grumble about being dead anyway and mumble about things beyond comprehension. Hell, it even has our heroes running from shoggots in a crumbling cave and something that looks like a prototypical Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath.

Oh, it also earns extra points for being the first movie where the characters have to insist that the just-discovered alien entities need to be wiped out and moped up, over the Army's wishes to preserve them.

Watch it with your Delta Green group and have fun looking for the Phenomenon-X cameo.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 10:57 AM [+] ::
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Interesting note on stats: I'm getting about 7 times as many hits from China than from my own country, Costa Rica. Hell, I even have more people stop by from Sweeden. If anyone cares to tell me what they come here looking for, be my guest (I do find it interesting that one of the search strings is Anchorage historical hauntings.)

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 11:52 AM [+] ::
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I didn't much want to see Sweet November, but my wife insisted. I was pleasantly surprised when it first started as a psyched-out Jerry Maguire on caffeine, but towards the middle it becomes clear that the writers have neither Cameron Crowe's gift for subtle manipulation nor his style. It turns too sirupy for my taste, though they have to be commended for not doing things as ham-handedly as they could have.

Jason Isaac, though, does give a great subtle performance as the neighbor from downstairs; and Charlize Theron's character - a sort of pink-furred cute and cuddly Tyler Durden - is fun to watch.

Completely out of topic: just got wind that Episode II (you know which one) is going to be called not The Clone Wars but Attack of the Clones. Anyone else getting some serious B-Movie vibe? After Attack of the Abominable Screenplay (aka, Episode I) does anyone care? Here's hoping that they don't waste Christopher Lee as they wasted Terence Stamp.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 10:47 PM [+] ::
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Just what I needed: in the middle of an urgent hardware upgrade and Egghead screws up the motherboard order, sending us an older revision of the GA-7ZXR motherboard that actually doesn't support the Athlon processors that we ordered from them as well. Let's see how their customer support stacks up.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 10:36 AM [+] ::
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Robin: if you're reading this, Muchacha, my computer is currenty with its guts hanging out and I can't even answer e-mail. I'll write as soon as this monster of an upgrade has been put down.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 3:32 PM [+] ::
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Why would you make Danny Elfman change the soundtrack for Planet of the Apes from the dark tribal sounds we heard on the preview to something so much more standard? And why in Cthulhu's name would you hire the writers of Superman IV and The Beverly Hillbillies for the script?

Tim Burton may be a genius, but there's only so much he can do with such an inept, shoddy and incomplete screnplay.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 2:23 PM [+] ::
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Sad news for fans of occult RPGs: Chaosium has decided to discontinue Nephilim, a great occult game originally created by Multisim. Here's hoping that Multisim decides to do an update of their latest Third-Edition Nephilim for the English (or Spanish!) languages.

The good news is that Multisim's Agone, recently published in English, is a great fantasy game which I expect will do well enough to make Multisim seriously consider entering the market. That site, by the way, is flash only (maybe they don't expect Linux users to have the time to roleplay).

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 2:09 AM [+] ::
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I'm in the process of moving the comments to Blogger. You can find the old posts here.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 1:40 AM [+] ::
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