The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mike Booth:

A different Mike (there are many of us!) at #49 says:

I also didn't like the Dirty-Harrying of a character who revealed so well the inherent horror of a Ditko-inspired purity.

Before I saw this movie I said to my friends: "I used to think that this movie would be insufficiently faithful to the details of the book, but now I hope the movie is different from the book, in the same way that a Batman movie is different from a Batman book." Because the thing about the book that I most admire is that it's simultaneously a compelling superhero comic and a comprehensive deconstruction of the superhero-comic genre and what that genre implies about our society.

But for a movie to aspire to the same role it needs to reference movies. It can't just transpose a literary comic to the screen. That's not what comic-book movies do: Comic-book movies take comics characters and plots and alter them in predictable ways. Certain edges get filed off; literary references are replaced by cinematic references (Doctor Strangelove, David Cronenberg, The Matrix, Cosmos); short sketches take the place of long backstories; the characters get younger and better-looking, and their personalities tend to gravitate toward stock movie roles: Villain, hero, rogue, ingenue, femme fatale. And the costumes get darker (because, if they don't, the whole thing looks like a convention of circus clowns -- those bright colors that work so well on paper look like a riot on the screen). If a Watchmen movie doesn't do some of the same things, it can't be a commentary on the movies from within. It can only be a transplanted comic.

So I thought the obvious references to Dirty Harry were fine. Because Dirty Harry is a movie thing -- from the Cold-War 1980s, even. Meanwhile, some of the movie's biggest mistakes were caused by uncritically following the book (e.g. "All Along the Watchtower").

Kevin at #45: Thanks for the Gaiman/Whedon link. In return, I offer Terry Rossio's "Building the Bomb": his explanation for the suckiness of the "Puppet Masters" movie from 1994.

Screenwriters have a tough deal. When the movie sucks everyone blames the writing. As if every movie project didn't involve dozens of other people, any one of whom might have the power to make the final result suck...

As Daniel Martin @42 points out, just remaining permanently logged in to sites is a security risk. Google is hardly the only site that can leak cookies.

I get around this problem with liberal use of 1Password, a piece of Mac software that I heartily recommend. It remembers and fills in passwords for you. Using it, I'm more willing to just log out of sites when I leave, because I can often log back in with a single press of Command-\

Leva @23: It's worse than that. If folks get your actual gmail login and password -- even if all they can do is read your unencrypted mail as it travels to your machine -- they potentially have access to *anything* you do online, whether on Google or not.

They can go to all the big sites -- PayPal, eBay, Amazon, banks, brokerages, etc -- and enter your email in the "I forgot my password" box. Then the sites will send out helpful emails containing links that can be used to change your password. The attacker can read those emails and use those links.

This will work even if all the attacker can do is read your mail. If the attacker can also log in to Gmail as you, (s)he can delete these emails as they come in, so you won't even notice them in your Inbox. You'll only discover that your PayPal password has changed when you try to log in and find that your old password doesn't work anymore.

As it happens, a lot of big target sites like banks have tried to design their forgotten-password procedures to make this kind of attack more difficult. And I'm not sure this sort of thing happens often -- plain-old phishing attacks probably have higher yield for less effort, and they pay off in the form of credit card numbers which are less difficult to fence. But that doesn't mean that allowing your email to be vulnerable is a good idea. It's a single point of failure for all sorts of other things.

Someone's already recommended Allagash, from Maine. Very good stuff.

The folks at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, NY do a very nice selection of Belgian-inspired beers.

I just tried Long Trail's Belgian White, and that was quite nice.

If you're in the West try New Belgium Brewing Company, out of Fort Collins, CO. Their Trippel was particularly compelling.

The place to go in the Boston area is the Public House on Washington Square in Brookline. They've got all sorts of beer on tap and in bottles, from everywhere. It was there that I discovered my current favorite beer: Aventinus Eisbock, from Bavaria. It's like flavor atop flavor. It's also 12% alcohol, which may help explain why I like it so much: It is hard to drink it slowly enough to avoid staggering around.

I've never heard of crush injury before. Very interesting!

What this implies is that if a pile of bricks has fallen on my victim, I shouldn't move the bricks unless there's an overriding reason (ABCs, more bricks on the way, etc) -- it's better if the pros are there with the saline before the unpiling happens. It also implies that, if a tree falls in the woods and lands on someone in my hiking party, I should error on the side of leaving the person pinned (again, with the caveat that ABCs are primary, hypothermia is bad, etc) until the pros turn up. Most annoying of all, it implies that when I walk into a room and find a collapsed, comatose person compressing one of their own limbs, I need to be concerned that decompressing that limb could trigger a problem. Is this correct?

Is "tea or cola-colored urine" the only observable danger sign of potential crush injury?

Is time a factor? If a person's leg gets trapped under the bricks and we immediately unpile the bricks and reperfuse the leg, is that better than it would be if we unpiled them two hours later? Or worse? Or no different?

Emma @169 asks:

What is it about Doctorow that gets people foaming at the mouth?

Boing Boing gets a lot more hits, I would imagine, than the average author blog. My obscure blog has about five comments... and one of them is a troll. Scale that up and you get the Boing Boing comment section.

Boing Boing doesn't focus strictly on noncontroversial or obscure topics.

Doctorow is not a quiet, unassuming little mousy guy. His cartoon alter ego is a caped superhero. People tend to carelessly assume that he's immune to bullets and that they're free to use him for target practice.

Doctorow is a political activist. Inevitably, speaking out about political issues creates a body of people who will actively seek to flame you every chance they get. Cory is a big enough target that some of his critics may even be professional character assassins -- I certainly wouldn't put that past the folks who are promoting all these lousy copyright bills.

People will say rude things on the web that they would never say to your face. People will say rude things to groups that they would never say to individuals. People will say rude things to your official representative that they would never say directly to you. People enjoy being rude when they're jealous. Boing Boing is a group, on the web, with the kind of traffic and influence that inspires jealousy; a group which (because of limited bandwidth, the need for coordination, and the very important goal of keeping the bloggers' blood pressures within an acceptable range) often speaks through an official representative.

But, ultimately, I don't think there's necessarily anything special about Doctorow or Boing Boing which provoked all this bile... just as I'm not convinced that Kathy Sierra made any particular wrong move that led to her being hounded off the web in a hail of emotional abuse. Rampaging mobs are a sociological phenomenon, not a personal one. The default state of the web provides good conditions for them, so sometimes they form, no matter what you do. Perhaps the next one will be centered on you, or me -- I hope not, for our sakes.

Ask Metafilter has a somewhat more restrictive, more actively moderated commenting culture than Metafilter proper...

Thank you, now I understand. Like duct tape, Metafilter has a light side, and a dark side!

(Okay, okay... With due respect to those of you who cherish the Howling Mob Experience, let's call them the "formal side" and the "wild side".)

I was wondering why this thread was totally unlike any other Metafilter link I'd ever followed...

Thanks, Stephen at #38 -- I hadn't realized that ROFLCon had taken all that video!

I'm hereby declaring open season on anything unfamiliar that comes through the door.

I am somehow reminded of a scene from Sethra Lavode:

"I wonder how many of them there are."

"Let us count them as we go."

"Very well."

---

Incidentally, I've never been a MeFi reader, and a quick scan through the linked thread suggests that I never will be. I'm not sure what kind of Filter the MetaFilter is, but it needs some maintainance, because it seems to be clogged.

As I said in the Boing Boing thread: I cannot believe that Starbucks knew that the cops were going to start forcing their gift cards on people -- and, whether or not it was okayed by some clueless soon-to-be-former Starbucks employee, the company is surely putting a stop to it as I speak.

I cannot imagine a more effective way to kill a brand. It would literally be better (albeit marginally so) to have the Unibomber turn out to be a Starbucks drinker.

Also: how to spot a bad book when you aren’t already familiar with the literature in that field.

Google the book and see if it's mentioned in a thread like this one.

I've essentially stopped reading books that aren't recommended by an author, blogger, or podcaster that I trust. I occasionally read a book based only on its Amazon reviews - but I almost never read books that I haven't Googled first. Even library books.

So, for me, the problem of spotting bad books has been reduced to the problem of choosing which bloggers to trust.

Linkmeister@16:

Perhaps the Republicans in Congress are thinking long-term.

Richard Nixon disgraced the Republican Party. Rumsfeld and Cheney were in the Nixon administration. Twenty years later, they were running the country.

John Poindexter disgraced the Republican Party when he was convicted of multiple felonies in the Iran-Contra affair. Then he got a job in the Bush administration.

It remains to be seen just how long this particular "semi-permanent" disgrace will last. History does not provide many examples of Republicans being punished for their crimes. The last thirty years have been nothing but pardons, bailouts, and amnesia. It's not illogical for Republicans to assume that this will continue.

PJ at #124 op cit,

I recommend Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down. The author was a British materials scientist with a marvelously dry sense of humor.

It's on my short list of the Best Introductory Science Books Ever (along with The Language Instinct, The Blind Watchmaker, and the not-to-be-underestimated Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun.)

Peter @17: I've never had first aid training, yet I've read the phrase "treat the patient for shock" at least a hundred times. It's repeated in every first aid procedure, like a mantra. And the treatment is simple and easy to describe.

But the books I've read (e.g. The Boy Scout Handbook, long ago) never really said why. If they did, they didn't make it stick. (And now I know why they didn't - thinking too hard about the implications of shock is enough to send some people into shock.)

Unfortunately, if you don't know the nature, and the consequences, and the stages of shock, the textbook advice "always treat for shock" can become a boring stock phrase, like "wear sunblock to prevent skin cancer" and "eat five servings of vegetables" and "always wear your seatbelt". Once again, Jim has comprehensively solved the boredom problem.

I've diagnosed your server problem: it was scared to death.

(Not I, however - these posts are awesome. Every time I read one I feel the strange urge to go to EMT school.)

Welcome back!

I thought the act of sending signals through the Particles and Sidelights lent a fine SF flavor to the proceedings. "Help, we're trapped in a parallel universe! Send a PHP hacker through the Gate!"

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