Two Slashes

A few days ago, I was sifting through my referrer logs in a bored attempt to see which sites were bringing in readers, and which were nothing more than blogspam. In the course of this work, I naturally happened upon a cache of hits from sites like Plurk and Twitter, places where I’ve previously plugged my site. One of the referrers stood out to me, inherently different from the others; this one had not been posted by me, but in fact by someone I had never met (and probably never will), and had started a short but legitimate discussion about my writing here at Two Slashes.

The source: A post on Plurk linking to my thoughts on the service.

When I saw the thread, I practically fell out of my seat laughing, partly in celebration and partly at myself. No, there’s nothing particularly comedic about being linked to; it’s cool, but not humorous in any respect I can think of. No, my humor came mostly from realizing the primary shortcomings in my post.

I’ve always berided MySpace as being the collective “emo” scourge of the Internet, and apparently I’m not alone as the very first response notes my failure to mention MySpace in the usual (or the blogosphere equivalent of “politically-correct”) manner. Perhaps part of the reason I failed in this respect is because I’ve all but let MySpace fall from my thoughts anymore; it takes direct mention to even let me know that the site exists anymore as I’ve tuned it out almost completely from my thoughts. (I have my account still, but I can’t even tell you the last time I logged into it, and they don’t bother me with notifications because I registered with an e-mail address at a domain I no longer have.)

While Twitter’s had some ups and downs as far as availability, overall it’s been more than accessible enough for my taste (especially when I seem to miss their outages by not being around to experience them), and I don’t find the interface as wasteful as I do Plurk’s. To me (and I’ll throw in the obvious-but-mandatory opinion warning for safety), I find Plurk’s timeline idea to be novel, but not as efficient at using screen space as Twitter’s uniform list layout. Plurk’s timeline requires a lot of scrolling to be useful, and while the timeline gives you a more visual idea of the time spacing between peoples’updates, it can also be a nuisance if that person (a la myself) has a lot of free space between two updates. Plurk’s idea to include threading was definitely a smart move, though.

Perhaps a directed post at the people from that Plurk link might be suitable here, so I’ll try this:

• Ecin: Thanks for noticing my faults in reviewing Plurk, and helping to point out that I might have been a little biased in my review, but remember that it’s more of my personal opinion than a professional review. All the same, I don’t find the timeline conducive to the way I would use the site as it leaves too much empty space for my liking.  I also don’t think you’re defending Plurk outright so much as simply offering the idea that you seem to be more of a Plurk than a Twitter fan. There’s nothing wrong with Plurk or Twitter, really; it’s more of a matter of preference, and I’ve chosen Twitter for reasons that may be completely different from the reasons for which you chose Plurk.
• Daicoden: I appreciate that you like the design of my site, even if my content isn’t up to your desired level. If you have any suggestions as far as design, pass them along.

To the both of you, if you’re reading, you’re welcome to leave comments (as is anyone else).

I’m not normally one for movie reviews, but I’m bored enough that just about anything is fair game for the moment.  And I need to stop with the multi-meaning post titles, I think.

During the course of this weekend, it came to be that I was stuck in a movie theater, once again (involuntarily) subjecting myself to overpriced/underperforming excuses for Hollywood creativity.  This weekend, the excuse was called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and for starters, this is probably one franchise they could have gone in a completely different direction with.

The writing is probably the biggest issue this movie has going for it.  Not only is it a rehash of everything already seen (with a backdrop in China this time), but they’ve taken anything that might have made the characters interesting and spun it into their most annoying attributes, with some off-brand sci-fi added in for kicks.  This combination means that not only is there absolutely nothing that holds your attention for long, you can see the clear transitions where action X happened in one or both of the previous movies.  The movie additionally suffers from some emotional compass issues that for all the world look like someone put a magnet next to the compass about halfway through the writing process, making the end result look inhuman enough to ruin the experience.

The special effects weren’t the worst, and took a bit of work (that much is apparent), but the storyline is too much of a black hole for them to save anything (in my opinion).  Anyone who has seen the movie should get what I mean when I say ‘avalanche,’for example.

I’m not stopping you from seeing this (Warning: clichéd adjective) monstrosity, but I’m extremely curious how something with such poor reviews (more about my interpretations of them in a moment) managed to barely succomb to The Dark Knight, especially considering the showing I went to had no more than twenty-five people in a theater for several hundred.  At the least, you should be prepared for disappointment and a lack of new content, though.

Now, I’m sure someone’s going to call me out for mentioning reviews, since of course the reviewers are not me and probably don’t have the same biases or any of that other related baggage.  However, I’ve generally trusted Rotten Tomatoes (to an extent), with the rule of thumb that anything with an exceedingly low score (to compensate for their experiences) tends to suck as much for me as it did for them, anything with a middling score or above is probably something that will be at least watchable.

While The Mummy is not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, it certainly does nothing to make me want to watch it repeatedly.  Personally, I’ll go back to watching whatever movies the rest of my family has watched to death over Tomb again.

Note to Hollywood:  Care to stop ruining any more watchable movie franchises while you’re ahead?  My movie money may very well end up spent on my college textbooks if you keep this up.  And I promise to quit writing reviews if you follow through.