I enjoyed Mockingjay, Part 1.

It wasn’t nearly as good as Catching Fire – which was truly a great movie – but it was entertaining and like the rest of the Hunger Games films nearly singular in its commitment to seriously examine and deal with iconography and propaganda, political power and political choices in a constrained environment, and other issues that are just glossed over even in so-called “serious” films.

I am surprised so many people in their eagerness to express derision completely miss this and rob themselves of some ideas they probably won’t see in any other films.

However, I have to say that I’d watch any and every episode of a TV show where Natalie Dormer as Cressida and Jena Malone as Johanna and of course Katniss Everdeen team up to fight for justice.

It would be like The A Team except, you know, actually good.

I’ve taken eleven technical certification exams in the past 4 months without failing one.

The last one I passed — the RHCE — has a first-time failure rate in the 50% range. Here’s a list of the progressive and the cumulative certifications I’ve earned.

Microsoft Certified Professional–>Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate–>Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (Server Infrastructure 2012). (four exams total)

Cisco Certified Networking Associate(R&S)–>Cisco Certified Networking Professional (R&S). (four exams total)

VMWare Certified Professional. (one exam)

Red Hat Certified System Administrator–>Red Hat Certified Engineer. (two exams total, all practical on live system)

I think I’ll stop now. I might go for the PMP next, in a few months. Or maybe one of the security certifications after I recover for a bit.

When I think about torrenting, The Pirate Bay, and all of that I am amazed that movie studios find it easier to spend billions destroying competition rather than a few dozen million making something better for their customers.

That’s not just stupid, that’s powerful stupid.

All you people who use Facebook, how do you put up with this? And why?

Think of a world in which your phone constantly checked in with the central phone company to decide which of your relatives it should allow you to call, and to jumble their sentences around in any order it deemed “better” (to keep you “engaged” and on the phone longer) — and served you ads in the middle? That’s many of your platforms today. We no longer truly own our intermediaries; instead they are guided by an invisible, algorithmic layer that neither answers to nor is accountable to us.

Humans puzzle me, and I allegedly am one.

Oh god, yes, please.

Ellen Page will be taking on the part of Han Solo in director Jason Reitman’s live stage-reading of The Empire Strikes Back Thursday night, and Jessica Alba has been cast as Princess Leia.

Ellen Page as Han Solo would really, really work. The Empire Strikes Back is the only Star Wars movie with any real heft. Ellen Page as Han and Brit Marling as Luke, please, though.

Yep, yep. So true.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.)

Most art historically speaking is fanfiction.

I suspect we disdain that form now because much of it is produced by minorities and women. If our distaste equaled its prevalence, 95% of Western art would have to be thrown in the trash.

Obamacare defenders make me cry with laughter.

What is this? I like Kevin Drum, but is he living in reality? It’s odd how people will twist themselves into rhetorical knots to justify a mediocre to terrible system.

And anyway, this is mostly due to the fact that the structure of American health care is historically dependent on private insurance, and it’s just not possible to completely overhaul that overnight. In this case, Democrats caved in to special interests as much because they had to as because they wanted to.

Oh, the Democrats “had to” sell out. Sure. Absolutely no choice in the matter. Couldn’t have been any other way than to roll over with nary a fight to the insurance industry.

Had to. Nothing coulda been done.

This is something I’ve written about before, about how human reasoning is incredibly, powerfully susceptible to false dichotomies.

Such as, TARP or the economy crashes.

Or, invade Iraq or WMDs will kill us all.

Such a huge cognitive flaw that is also easy to exploit (I’m deft at using at it in work environments to get my way as it short-circuits 99% of humans easily).

The false dichotomy is so powerful that I deliberately ignore and avoid paying attention to other types of reasoning failures to make sure I don’t fall prey to that one.

I am now a Red Hat Certified Engineer.

This is one of the most difficult and intensive certifications in IT to earn, and along with the CCIE arguably the most respected.

I’m tired of studying but very happy and proud.

This is a good take on something I’d thought about in other terms.

Many tech and media-savvy people live in a bubble. They believe implicitly that their experiences encompass the majority of humans, but in reality it’s a small minority.

Here’s an example.

The last IT department I worked in had about two dozen people in it. I use “IT department” because that is usually full of pretty tech-savvy people, and this one was no exception.

However even in this bastion of tech-savvy people, only a few of them had a Facebook account. I don’t think anyone had a Twitter account. Most of them — save one app addict — didn’t really use any apps on their phones that I ever saw (and I spent a lot of time with many of them).

Obviously many people use Facebook and Twitter, of course. But not in the ways and not in the contexts that I suspect many of the media elite use it, and are expecting others to use those platforms.

They are all looking for views and customers in a place that’s easy to determine if you’ve found them, meanwhile ignoring the 90% of your possible customer base — like me and all of my co-workers — who aren’t into that sort of brain hijacking.

The most dangerous thing to happen in a long while is happening now.

And that would be Russia’s economy cratering.

Yes, Russians in general are used to hardship as many of them have lived through so much of it. But with some taste of prosperity now being wrenched from them, this will create a backlash much different from the type exhibited when conditions go from bad to worse.

It will put Putin in a tough spot.

And putting someone with several thousand nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them in a tough spot is not, you know, ideal.

Oh, shut up, hipster cockbag.

No one gives a shit that you’re so cool that you don’t even like what everyone else – all those Babbits braying about things they actually like, and not ironically – enjoys and has fun bonding over and dissecting.

If you don’t like something, don’t fucking watch it. Don’t read it.

It don’t need to be a Salon column.

Advice I could also heed more often: sometimes it’s better to just. Shut. Up.

The first time I remember disagreeing fundamentally with my family is the PATCO strike in 1981.

I was six.

I didn’t yet have the political vocabulary or even much understanding of the strike itself. I was precocious, of course, far more than most even very intelligent kids, but not some sort of superhero.

I just remember thinking that if that many people were willing to walk off the job and risk their livelihoods, there must be some meat of substance to their claims. Of course I had no working experience and no real way to identify how much merit their action had, but it seemed in its extremity to warrant some sort of attention.

What I thought was no more sophisticated than that. (And yes, I was paying attention to politics to some extent at that age; I could read fairly well at ~3 and could type at ~4, and started reading newspapers around ~5, and National Geographic from cover to cover with nearly-full understanding at ~6. As I said, I was precocious.)

But as my family – in particular my father and grandfather – ranted and raved about how evil and terrible the strikers were, and how they were loathsome liberals and everything that was wrong with America, it just didn’t seem right to me. As I said, I didn’t really understand why I thought that. I had no idea of class analysis, or even any understanding that I was in fact poor, but just that it seemed wrong to fire 11,000 people because they wanted better working conditions.

That wasn’t my first hint that I was really different from my family, but it’s one I remember pretty well.

There is a very high chance if any of the lit crit types describes a writer’s sentences as “shimmering,” I won’t like their works.

Even though when I was callow and far more arrogant I used to read more for this sort of “shimmery sentence” experience than for plot, these days I far prefer plot.

As I can craft those allegedly “shimmering” sentences myself, I just don’t think they are that difficult or remarkable.

Plot is much more difficult. At least having a cogent, intelligent and comprehensible one that hews somewhat close to verisimilitude.

This is why very few literary novels have even a semblance of a plot that a two-year-old couldn’t have thought up, and even outside of the literary sphere decent plots are pretty damn rare.

I just wish more writers could do both. The only one I’ve seen come close recently is Jeff VanDerMeer with his Southern Reach trilogy.

Close, but not quite there. The writing is really good. Expressive without being showy. But the plot tapers off toward the end.

That trilogy is still worth reading, though. The “biologist” character is one of my favorites from any novels I’ve read in the past few years.

I’m going to step into a minefield here, but as usual I don’t really give a fuck.

This is a good example of taking something out of its cultural context.

The song does sound rape-y today – to us. And I agree with Amanda that any reason a woman says no is a good reason.

However, it was widely understood at the time the song was released (as a commenter also points out) that the woman in the piece was saying “no” but meaning yes.

Again – please read this carefully (and before you comment, read it again) – this song existed in a completely different cultural context, where many of our assumptions were not present, and where many completely different ones were present.

Here’s how we hear the song today: the woman is about to be raped, OMG!

Here’s how people in 1943 (accurately) heard and understood the song: the woman really, really wants to fuck and is looking for every excuse imaginable to do so without social penalty. Yep, even the part about, “Hey, what’s in this drink?” At the time, being “drunk” (aka “not really drunk”) was seen as valid excuse for all sorts of allegedly licentious behavior on the part of a woman, and women were permitted socially to use that as a reason for why they’d “fallen.”

If you listen to the original and how it is sung this is completely, completely clear. It would take a damn idiot to think anything else. But alas, there are many of those around.

I am surprised when even “educated” people like Amanda Marcotte cannot accurately evaluate historical context and understand how much that can change over time.

Again, I am not endorsing the song. Speaking as a person today, I listen to this song and cringe. But then I recognize that I am a creature of my time, so of course I do. Decent people today if there is even a hint of reluctance stop immediately. But again – understand just how much cultural context has changed.

Can people not step outside of themselves for one moment in time? Is that just not possible? I guess not.

If people like Marcotte and 90% of the commenters cannot do this, what fucking good is all this education I’ve been told is paramount? For most people, it appears to not do even one little bit of good.

It’d be interesting to come back to earth in 50 million years after humans are long extinct and life in all its diversity has had some chance to recover.

What would be here then? Would cats and dogs, being so widespread now, evolve into myriad forms on every continent to fill ecological niches where we’ve caused animals to go extinct?

Would avians one again evolve fill ecological niches as they did after the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago?

Maybe oxygen would increase greatly  due to lack of human influence and we’d have dragonflies with meter-long wingspans once more.