Graduation season is upon us, which means we’ve seen the end of another session of indoctrination of college students by Marxist feminist liberal college professors. Keep up the good work, ladies and gentlemen! This brainwashing program has been completely successful, as demonstrated by the Rockford College graduating class of 2003. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges delivered the commencement speech there and was booed off the stage by a mind-controlled audience steeped with ideological propaganda. If colleges are turning out liberals like these, no wonder we need so many books railing against the Left! The text of his speech can be read here, and it’s worth reading. A sample:

For war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.

In related news, apparently those college professors are so busy poisoning the minds of youth with anti-Americanism that they don’t have time to teach some basic math skills. Let’s look at some numbers. I promise this won’t get too hard.

Lee, Harvey, and Oswald are all workers. Oswald and Harvey each make $20,000 a year. Lee is their boss, and makes $1,500,000 a year. What’s their average salary? To find the average, add the salaries together and then divide by three, the number of salaries. 20,000 + 20,000 + 1,500,000 = 1,540,000. Divide that by three and you get an average salary of about $513,333.33. So if you’re looking to work for Lee’s company, and he tells you the average salary is about $500,000, is Lee lying? Well, not really. But nor should you be thinking you’ll be collecting a half million. If he hires you at Harvey and Oswald’s salary, he can still tell the next applicant, truthfully, that the average salary at LeeCo is $390,000.

The point of this is that while Lee isn’t lying per se, he’s not exactly presenting the whole truth. And that brings us to Bush’s dividend tax cut. Bush says, “92 million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money when this tax plan goes through…” Applying what you just learned about averages, does that mean you, personally are going to get a thousand bucks back? Not necessarily. In fact, you won’t. Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, explains more here. The language is hairy at points, but what it boils down to is this:

Bush is giving a dividend tax cut. That is, a break on shareholding dividends. Who mostly has stock shares? Not the average Joe, but all of Bush’s rich friends do. They have a LOT of stock shares. Bush is back to Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics, where somehow giving rich people more money makes things better for poor people. Same barn, not even a new coat of paint. Bush is selling this to the masses by touting the “average” benefit amount, knowing full well that the average American won’t see anywhere near the “average” amount. In other words, he’s still playing the population for a bunch of suckers, mainly because he’s constantly rewarded for doing so. Please wise up, people.

Well, like a good geek, we went and saw The Matrix Reloaded last night (I said a good geek. A true geek would have been there on opening day, wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses.) Now, I should say right off the bat that I’m not a Matrix fanboy. I liked the first movie okay, but it didn’t change my life. In my opinion, the best thing it did was give people something new to obsess over, finally making it safe to say aloud that you thought Highlander was a load of cack.

I liked the original Matrix but didn’t think it was quite as deep as many people seem to believe. Was it a good action flick with some impressive special effects? It was indeed. A philosophical treatise? Not quite. Granted, its tepid, Westernized Buddhist leanings (waking up from the illusory world to become empowered in reality) appealed to my own tepid, Westernized Buddhist leanings, but I didn’t see it as a religious parable (despite throwing around words like Zion, Trinity, and such) so much as a Geek Empowerment fable. Sure, it might seem like you’re just a husky nobody schlub with an encyclopedic knowledge of Babylon 5 and White Wolf games, but all the people who see you as such don’t know that they are all prisoners in a false world, and in the real world your computer skills and anime experience will make you a superhero fighting to save all their ungrateful, undeserving asses, plus you’ll be super cool and be the master of any weapon.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to The Matrix Reloaded. I suppose I should say that there will probably be spoilers here, but this is a movie that it’s not overly easy to spoil, for reasons that might be considered spoilers. If you don’t want to know too much, here’s a summary: I felt it was way too long, alternated between action sequences that didn’t know when to end and yack yack yack talking sequences that seemed interminable. The movie would be 20 minutes shorter if we didn’t have to freeze-frame so often. The script is fairly straightforward until one point, where it totally dives into opacity, which will certainly fuel the fanboys’ ideas of how deep this series is. Keanu did a much better job than I thought he would, and I still think Carrie-Anne Moss has the dramatic presence of a serving of milk in a shiny leather glass.

Read more if you want to know details.

Okay, here’s what I meant about spoilers above. Can you truly spoil a movie that has no ending or resolution? What could I possibly say that would give anything away? Neo goes from Resurrection of himself to raising others from the dead? The Oracle is a program? Agent Smith can clone himself? The Architect tells Neo that something something something what time is it? Most of that information is obvious, pointless, already known, or confusing anyway.

Let’s go to basics. The action sequences, the raison d’etre for this series, were impressive, to a point, but just went on too long. Nearly all of them dragged themselves out to the point where they became parodies of themselves. The highly touted ‘burly brawl’ sequence where Neo fights a hundred Agent Smiths ceased to be interesting once (a) there were so many Agent Smiths that it became absurd and (b) you realized that there is no possible resolution to this sequence other than Neo flying away, so why didn’t he just do that from the get-go? For my money, I like for there to be a point to such a scene, and there was none for that other than “look at what we can do with CGI.” If I’d paid for an effects test reel, that would be another thing. Similarly, with the freeway chase, I figured at any moment people would start picking up moving cars and throwing them at each other, and that vehicles would just start flipping and exploding when looked at crosseyed. So the effects would have gotten an 8 or 9 out of ten, if they’d had something of a point and had known when to exit the stage. The worst thing you can do when it comes to action, is make people tired of looking at it.

For the acting, well, you knew what you were going to get, and you got it. Laurence Fishburne does his “I am talking slow and using no contractions so you know what I am saying is important and original even if it is just a string of cliches” bit. Keanu Reeves is surprisingly competent as a reluctant hero, but not so competent at a just plain hero. As for Carrie-Anne Moss, I am clearly missing some kind of geek chromosome, because she does absolutely nothing for me. I don’t think she’s attractive, I don’t think she’s interesting, and I don’t think she’s a particularly good actress. This is a problem because a large chunk of the movie revolves around the love between Trinity and Neo, and the two have absolutely zero chemistry. In the first movie, the romance sub-plot seemed silly and tacked-on, but could be overlooked. Here it’s a major portion of the plot, and I just didn’t buy it.

This is the root of a problem with both Matrix movies for me - I don’t give even half a damn about any of these people. The only one I would like to be in a room with (assuming I wasn’t being attacked by robotic ninjas) would be Link. He was the only one bringing any kind of human element to the party. All the others seem to be even more programmed and machine-like than the machines they’re fighting, which might be part of the point or an eventual plot revelation. I don’t care about this epic battle between man and machine because they all look like machines to me. Gamers often talk about doing a role-playing game set in the Matrix world and I just don’t see it. I’ve never been convinced that anything is going on more than fifteen feet from wherever the camera is pointing at the moment. None of it seems overly compelling to me.

What was most disappointing, though, was the endless parade of cliches. There were so many points when I knew exactly what was going to happen (such as the pointless fight with Seraph) simply because we were just pulling out a pre-written bit from the geek pantheon. Oh, what do you know, the Architect is an old white guy in a white suit with a beard! The Merovingian is a suave French aristocrat! Weird looking people are evil!

So what did I like? The action sequences, up to a point. I liked that when we first see the Keymaker, he’s sitting down, making keys. For some reason, I appreciated that, and I thought the character was neat (though I could have done without him being another coal in the geek obsession with All Things Japanese boiler.) I liked a lot of the machinery look — the giant gears of Zion appealed to my steampunk fetish. It was nice to finally get a good view of the ’ships’ the good guys travel in. Some of the new ideas were fairly interesting (though it was odd to me when I realized how much of it was ripped from Tron, of all things!) but the core idea of the Matrix itself still seems half-baked. I liked Keanu’s outfit, only because it’ll be fun to watch the geeks at Comicon strutting around in kaftans.

If I were a star-giving man, I’d give it two out of five. If the action sequences had been shorter it might’ve gotten three. It’s hard for me to highly praise a movie with no real beginning or end, though. It’s got the tough task of being the middle of a trilogy, and that’s never an easy job. But on the other hand, if you’re going to see it, you probably already saw it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because the movie is review-proof. Either you liked it, didn’t get it, or are being nitpicky about a mindless action movie. Your results, of course, may vary.

UPDATE:
Anarkey has a different take here.
Scott Kurtz, creator if the online comic PVP, has a Matrix rant here.
Dave T. has his opinion of it here.

What a relief! We won’t have to live in a box on July 1. This weekend we barnstormed into Massachusetts to find a new abode for us, and thanks to our tenacity and our realtor, we were able to find a new house for us!

It’s a three-bedroom, 2.5 bath victorian home celebrating its 100th birthday this year. The neighborhood is quite nice, and it’s only ten minutes from Becky’s college and five from a comic book store.

Interestingly, it didn’t show up when we or our realtor were looking at potential houses. We were actually on the street to look at a different house, which turned out to be pink. Ugh! But this one was right down the street, and so we stopped to investigate. The owner was there, so we were able to go inside and look around. We liked what we saw, and after some deliberations, made an offer, which was accepted.

It’s big and beautiful and has a lot to offer, but there’s still some things we’ll miss. The basement is more of a typical basement: dark and dirty, only suitable for storage. We may end up sharing an office. And we won’t have the entertainment value of Lois and Johnny. But what we gain - a jacuzzi tub, fenced backyard, settin’ porch (suitable for rocking on with a shotgun, yelling “get off my lawn!”), huge attic (possibly convertible to a geek room eventually), nifty new kitchen with dishwasher, location in the same state as Becky’s work, guest bedroom - the list goes on. It’s really great. We’re fairly sure we can afford it.

We looked at a lot of good houses - some better than others - and think we picked the best of the bunch for us. Many thanks go to Beth for putting us up while we were there and to Marcia for being very helpful and giving up her weekend for us.

Oh…other good news is that I’ll be able to stay on at my current job and work remotely, so even the potential headache of me finding a new job is removed, or at least postponed.

Massachusetts is beautiful. We’ll be close to the ocean, mountains, and lakes. We’re within driving distance of Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Canada, Maine, and environs. There’s skiing within a half hour of our house, if we ever want to break our legs. Plus there’s all the small communities surrounding us: Hartford, Northampton, Amherst, Holyoke. With so many colleges around, I’m sure I’ll be able to hook up with a gaming group. We’ll both have a lot of opportunities there.

As you can see, we’re very excited, even though it’s going to be a busy six weeks!

A few stories to document the glorious War in Iraq:

Iraqis uncover thousands in mass graves via CNN.

The head of an Iraqi forensic team said Wednesday he expects to find as many as 11,000 bodies buried at mass graves about 55 miles (90 kilometers) south of Baghdad.

The bodies are mostly of Iraqi Shiites who died in an uprising against Saddam Hussein following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, according to Human Rights Watch spokesman Peter Bouckaert and local officials.

Touring the site Wednesday, Ahmad Chalabi, head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, said the mass grave was evidence supporting the U.S.-led military action to remove Saddam from power.

Of course, the piece of information that CNN decided wasn’t relevant was that this uprising happened because George Bush Senior encouraged it and then, when it happened, not only did nothing to help the Shiites, but also made their situation even worse. Perhaps lying about Iraq is a genetic condition.

New Policy in Iraq to Authorize G.I.’s to Shoot Looters via the New York Times.
(Note: If you don’t wish to register there, use “slashbot” without quotes as the username and password.)

United States military forces in Iraq will have the authority to shoot looters on sight under a tough new security setup that will include hiring more police officers and banning ranking members of the Baath Party from public service, American officials said today.

Asked what this meant, the official replied, “They are going to start shooting a few looters so that the word gets around” that assaults on property, the hijacking of automobiles and violent crimes will be dealt with using deadly force.

I’ve been thinking that what Iraq needed was a thuggish leader who wasn’t afraid to kill Iraqi citizens to instill fear among them. Thank goodness we rescued this country from a violent and oppressive regime and opened it up to freedom and democracy. The paranoid liberal in me sees this as a vision of how the Bush organization would like America to work. You know, with the state-sponsored religion and morality, benefits to those friendly with the people in power, and quick discipline to those who step out of line or question the rules.

Shoulder to shoulder, Blair and Bush nominated for peace prize from The Guardian.

Tony Blair and George Bush have received international recognition for their unswerving willingness to use force: a nomination for the 2002 Nobel peace prize.

The prime minister and US president have been jointly nominated for the accolade by a rightwing Norwegian politician who believes their military campaign against terrorism meets Alfred Nobel’s criteria that the winner “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

Fortunately, this seems to be the work of a lone kook. Next week he’ll reveal how Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.

By the way, CNN’s poll topic for the day is, “Has Saudi Arabia done enough to combat terrorism?” 95% say “no”. Apparently the other 5% feel that the Saudis did their share by only providing 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers, instead of more. And we should never forget that those bastards in Iraq provided none! Of course, Saudi Arabia doesn’t have to worry about getting the crap bombed out of it — not by us, at least — because they’re our friends.

On a lighter note, Get Your War On has updated!

And here ends “No Politics Week”.

I don’t have a polling module installed here (yet, I’m thinking about it) so we’ll have to do this poll the old fashioned way.

Which of these things things would be the worst that a President could do?

[ ] A. Turn the Oval Office staff into his own cadre of goons and thugs, designed to intimidate and harass his enemies, including burglarizing his opponents’ political headquarters.

[ ] B. Start his own shadow government so that he can subvert the Constitution and perform tasks forbidden by Congress, and then lie about those tasks to Congress and the American people.

[ ] C. Receive oral sex in the oval office from an intern, and then deny doing so to Congress.

[ ] D. Lie to Congress, the U.N., and the American people about the reasons justifying an immediate war against a foreign nation, send U.S. troops to die under that pretense, and punish nations that don’t go along with the pretense, all the time allowing businesses with shady ties to him to benefit from said war.

How did you vote? For fun, let’s change choice “C” to “Receive oral sex from THREE interns and a pig.” Does that change your vote any?

Molly Ivins has a nice editorial on the bizarre fact that the Administration is happily admitting it lied about nuclear and chemical weapons and nobody seems to care. I could have sworn that a few years ago it was wrong wrong wrong to lie to Congress and the public, and that Bush was going to finally bring some integrity to the White House. I thought that this was the sort of thing that once would get you impeached, or at the very least lambasted on talk radio for years (even to the present). If only Clinton had had the foresight to claim that the blowjobs were necessary to fight terrorism!

Also, I got inspired to do this last week. This guy totally creeps me out.

Blair Hornstine is an unhappy person:

Blair Hornstine’s latest report card had four A-plus grades in five courses. She scored a 1570 out of 1600 on the SAT and is deciding whether to attend Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Princeton or Cornell — all of which have accepted her.

But despite her best-in-her-class grades, her school district wants to name her co-valedictorian with two other students.

Hornstine, the 18-year-old daughter of a state Superior Court judge, has asked a federal judge to intervene, saying that being forced to share with students with lesser grades would detract from what she has accomplished.

She has also filed a notice saying she plans to sue the school district in state court claiming the dispute has humiliated her. She said she would be asking for $200,000 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages.

Yep, she’s part of that special group of people for whom It’s Never Enough. No matter what you’ve got, no matter how much it is, it’s not enough. What good is valedictorianship if she has to share the stage? How will she be able to face her peers at the Ivy League school of her choice, knowing that all of them got to stand on the stage by themselves? It’s more shame than any one person should have to bear, really!

Fortunately, the perpetrators of this outrage will be punished. Those villains will learn that Ms. Hornstine is not a person to be humiliated! She wants them to pony up over $2.5 million in damages to her pristine reputation.

Well I passed the hat here at legomancer.net and came up with about 58 cents. It’s not two million bucks, but maybe it’s enough to buy me a little time to humiliate this whiny kid. Ms. Hornstine, whether or not you were humiliated at graduation is now a moot point, because now you’re the spoiled brat who whined about having to share the stage. Good thing you’re going to be a lawyer, because you’re apparently going to be spending a lot of time suing people who humiliate you. It’s laughable not just that you think having to share your achievement with others damages your reputation, but that that reputation is worth so much money. Har Har Har. Maybe you should read this book. Look out, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Princeton or Cornell, you’re about to play host to Miss Crabbypants. She’s going to demand that anyone not as qualified as her be dropped from the school rolls, as they diminish her diploma from your institution. She’s already working on an alternative word for “woman” to distinguish herself from people not as pretty as she is, and I heard that –

Crap, used up my 58 cents. Ah well. I didn’t even get to mention how funny it was that her name is the same as the rich snob on “The Facts of Life”. I guess it’s for the best that I was unable to find a picture of a clown wearing a mortarboard to illustrate this story.

Edit - Anna has her own take on this story, which you can read here!

UPDATE!

Hooray! Whining and money wins again! Blair won! These things make me so proud to be an American! Though it seems like some people don’t recognize a true hero when they see one.

A couple years ago, comics wunderkind Alan Moore put out a six-part series called “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”. The idea behind it is that the characters from various Victorian sci-fi novels were real, and it details the exploits of a team consisting of Alain Quatermain, Mina Murray, Dr. Jekyll, Captain Nemo, and the Invisible Man. It was a great, fun comic, largely due to its Victorian and British flavorings.

It’s now a movie: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, abbreviated “LXG”, because every summer movie needs a cool abbreviation. (After all, we needed to trim down the unweildly five characters of “X-Men 2″ into the far shorter “X2″.) As you can imagine, some slight changes have taken place. First, we added two members to the team: Tom Sawyer (as a sort of proto James Bond, it seems), and Dorian Grey. I actually have little problem with that - I think those are perfectly fine choices. Second, they adjusted some of the existing characters. Mina Murray, the non-vampire, is now Mina Harker, the vampire. I’m not sure about this decision - I liked Mina as a strong, smart woman whose role as team leader simply required her to be a strong, smart woman. (I don’t know if it was intentional - probably so, since Alan Moore is way smarter than me - but I thought it was interesting because, to the Victorian mind, a strong, smart independent woman is as much of a frightening, inhuman creature as Mr. Hyde or the Invisible Man.) Having her actually be a vampire seems kind of silly, but I suppose it’s necessary since we changed Alain Quatermain from a washed-up, opium-addicted has-been to Sean Connery, and we made him the team leader. I can’t blame them for that - no point in getting Connery if you’re just going to push him aside.

The final change, which does bug me, is that they seem to have taken a lot of the Victorian (and British) flavor out of it, instead turning it into yet another generic people-doing-Matrix-wirefu-in-leather movie set in leftover Gotham City sets from Tim Burton’s Batman (notorious for taking fake buildings on a soundstage and expertly making them look like fake buildings on a soundstage.) Part of this is because we have to assume Americans are too stupid and insular to accept anything overly British, and part of it is because Hollywood’s decided that all action movies now have to look exactly alike.

Now, I don’t get paid fat money by movie studios, and there’s probably a reason for that, so maybe my opinions are worthless. But it seems to me that if you have a movie coming out the same summer are X-Men and Matrix Sequels, and you’re debuting after both, you’d be advised not to just go ahead and invite unfavorable comparisons to both by aping both of them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to retain the old-fashioned qualities of the comic to distinguish your product from the (probably superior) competition? Still, don’t listen to me: I think calling it “LXG” is equally stupid.

I guess it comes down to the fact that I’m tired of action movies in general. How many leather-suited people flipping around punching bad guys do I need to see? How many gunfights - in slow-motion, sped up and choppy, or a combination - do we have to have? Are we really breaking new ground in special effects if we’re just using them to show the same tired fight scenes as before? The League is probably going to bomb anyway, why not bomb because you were unique instead of because you were exactly the same? I suppose if you really go for jumping and kicking and shooting, it really doesn’t matter what context it’s wrapped in, and I think most moviegoers feel that way, though I suspect it’s due more to a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything else. And we all know I’m not a big fan of most movies these days — especially those catering to the geek crowd — so it’s not like I don’t have preconceived notions of my own. After all, I’m probably one of the few “Hellboy” fans who isn’t excited that there’s going to be a Hellboy movie directed by the guy that did Blade. Shudder.

I’ll still probably see LXG. I’m just curious enough, and I do like the source material (unlike, say, the X-Men, neither of which movie I’ve seen because I don’t really care about the X-Men, either on-screen or off.) If you’d like to know more about “LXG” check out the trailer or, better yet, check out the original comic series.

I’m seriously tempted to do this entry sans capital letters. My shift key (the weird-assed way I type has me using just the right one) is starting to go bad, and when I hit it, I get this loud “KLAK” that is bugging me. Sigh, we all must bear our crosses.

Anyway, yesterday I hit the comic/game store. There was a promo brochure for Monte Cook’s “alternative player’s handbook,” Arcana Unearthed. It sounds really interesting and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. You can see more about the whole project at Malhavoc Press, where you can download a PDF of the brochure. Monte’s got some really good ideas in gaming, and I’m sure this is going to be a quality item. After all, this is the same genius who brought us the Orc and Pie adventure!

With things looking like we’ll be out of Champaign by the end of June, it’s not looking good for Arnheim. Forces have conspired to rob us of good gaming time. I’m really hoping to get the adventure I’ve been working on run, and possibly one other as well. If I can do both of those, I can end on a “season finale” type ending. I’m then hoping that we can get some more players and maybe Dave T. will take over the campaign as GM. Then I can keep helping him work on it, even in Massachusetts, which would be fun!

Some other game related projects I have in mind for after the move are Fallout d20 (or, if not ‘Fallout’ per se, something post-apocalyptic); a sort of alternate ‘fantasy’ campaign set in a world where the dominant race evolved along a more insectoid line, and technology evolved along a more magical line; and a science-fiction d20 campaign set on a world solely populated by intelligent machines. These are just a couple of ideas rolling around in my head. I’d eventually also like to work on ‘Steam-Fu’, the Feng-Shui based, action-oriented, Victorian sci-fi game.

Only slightly related to gaming is this fascinating article. It comes to me courtesy of Shas, and it’s about interesting folktales circulating among the homeless children of Miami. It’s a really interesting read:
Myths Over Miami