phywriter.com|Prone to occasional grandiloquence

So my son is 14 going on 15 and has been growing like a fast-growing thing. Every day when I get home, he walks up to me and sketches out the difference between our eye-levels to see if he’s finally as tall as I am (I’ve been telling him for years that he’ll be taller than me). Tonight, he walked up to me in my bedroom, where I have a fan and a window-unit air conditioner going, and he was talking on speaker phone with his friend, so there was a lot of noise. He sort of saluted me and said, “I think I love you.”

I looked at him oddly, not because I had any trouble with the sentiment, but because he’s a teenage boy, a social creature not normally given to such brazen expressions of emotion. But, whatever. I said “I think I love you, too?”

He looked at me like I was crazy and started laughing his head off. Then he stepped closer and said, “No, I think I’M LEVEL WITH YOU.” He sketched the invisible eye-line again, and I realized we were comparing how tall he is to me, and not something else.

So I had to break out the song, “Wild Thing” at which point I said, “I think I love you.” He said, again, “I think I’m level, I think I’m level!” at which point I explained that’s the way the song went. He rolled his eyes in comprehension, said, “aaaahhh,” and went off to his room with his speaker phone and a confused friend, and repeated the whole story.

For the record, he’s still a hair shorter than me. But just a hair.

As a surprisingly content Vista user, I see nothing good coming out of this.

Microsoft’s new $300 million campaign (one of Redmond’s largest ever) is set to launch with a $10 million assist from “key celebrity pitchman” Jerry Seinfeld. Yes, Bill Gates will appear as well — the once maligned, rich corporate nerd turned adorable, rich humanitarian nerd. The campaign is said to be based on the idea of “Windows, Not Walls,” stressing the need to “break down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting.”

I have to think the real Steve Jobs is licking his chops. This campaign plays into his strength.

(Disclaimer: I want a full Mac Pro desktop running OS-X and XP through VMWare, but I have a wedding to pay for in May, so I get what I get, and I what I can afford is Vista preloaded on a cheap rig off-the-shelf from Best Buy.)

As long as there have been Browncoats, there have been rumors of another Firefly film. And as long as there have been rumors, there’s been Joss having to set the record straight.

Well, he’s done it again. Can’t say I blame him. But I’m still disappointed. Can’t say I blame us.

“The rumors are there because people really wish it would happen,” Whedon said.

“It’s an improbable fantasy,” Whedon said. Then again, “so was making ‘Serenity’ [given the cancellation of 'Firefly'], and so is half my career, which is why I never write it off.”

Like Summer, “I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Whedon said, “because I love those people so much.” But that doesn’t change the fact that the rumors are not being circulated “by anyone who owns a studio,” and “nobody’s knocking on our door.”

“There’s been no movement,” he said. “Those rumors are just rumors, and I don’t think they’re going to stop, no matter how many times I say, ‘No, it’s not happening.’ Because somebody will say, ‘He said yes. His eyes said yes. His nose said yes. There was a yes-iness about him.’ Because people want it.”

I’ve been careful not to endorse any specific political party, individual, or cause on this blog, but it’s time to recognize one of our Heroes:

I’ve been hammered this weekend with IM spam on my MSN Messenger account. I started getting IMs from people not on my MSN Messenger contact list using my IM handle using a social engineering tack to try to get me to click links to help them set up webcams or some such dreck. I couldn’t block the users, and I couldn’t stop the messages.

The solution is simple. From your IM client (I use Trillian at home and something else at work) click Tools > Options. Change your Privacy settings to only allow users on your buddy list to contact you. Done and done.

my hero lost his mind last winter
we didn’t understand his words of pain
he was hurting, but we cared not
we called him names, and schemed

we coaxed him to the limb
and then we chopped it off
we threw curses as he fell
and patted ourselves on the back

but as I regard his corpse
I think back to his smile
and I weep for better days
I grab my axe and jump

I fell the tree of whispered promises
and wash my hands of blood
which isn’t green and gold at all
liars

I’ve been thinking about The Dark Knight for three solid weeks, now. This really has got to stop. I’ve got me a new job, a serial novel to finish writing, a monthly magazine to develop and release and publicize, and some grinding to accomplish in Age of Conan–my ranger and conqueror won’t get leveled up by themselves. The problem is, I’ve got something like 6k words written, and I still don’t have an elegant way to approach the things on my mind and in my head. Unfortunately, my experience has been that the only way to rid myself of them is to write them out. Therefore, since I don’t know how to approach this, but I clearly have to do something to work these things out, I’m going to take a stab at writing about these things in a couple of chunks. This is the first one.

In this summer’s biggest blockbuster, The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, and David Goyer have a great deal to say about the will and the character of their vigilante hero.

For one thing, this is no mere superhero movie–it is an epic crime drama of the sort I have never seen before. For another, when they started filming The Dark Knight, it turned out they weren’t done crafting Batman’s origin story. However, by the time the final credits run, they will have finally completed creating the legend we think of as Batman. Read the rest of this entry »