Bits and piece o' my weekend
Mood: hopeful
Posted on 2006-03-06 11:52:00
Tags: computer
Words: 458

The weekend: all in all, not bad. Watched Beetlejuice Friday night with a few people - good stuff! Very campy and whatnot, but I enjoyed it. Also watched the last 4 episodes of Arrested Development again - while they are good, it puts me in the mood to rewatch season 2 (and I haven't seen most of season 3, either).

Saturday djedi and I did our taxes. That was...fun. It actually wasn't as bad as I had thought, but I ended up owing a fair bit, which I kinda expected. That's a little irritating, but I also feel like I'm doing my civic duty and whatnot. (speaking of which, I'd like to serve on a jury at some point!) But I'll be sending in my check in early April...

Sunday was a busy day - we and wildrice13 helped onefishclappin and krikwennavd (man, I can't spell backwards!) move some stuff to their new house. Got to see the place and took some pictures which I'll put up at some point. Then we went to the Zilker Kite Festival - unfortunately by the time we got there things were winding down, but it was nice to walk around outside and see the kites and whatnot. I took pictures there, too (apparently 25000 people attended!)

We then went to Fry's and got me a new motherboard (details below), had dinner at Fuddrucker's, then wildrice13 went home and we played WoW.

As previously detailed, my computer is not terribly happy. The freezing 1-3 times when playing WoW is, well, livable, but I tried playing some Civ 4 this weekend and it would freeze up every 15 turns or so, with no signs of stopping. Not to mention it freezes sometimes just in X, without either of the two running. So djedi convinced me to get a new motherboard, since mine is pretty old and it's really the only part of the computer I haven't upgraded since I built it almost 4 years ago. Serendipitously, onefishclappin had a spare Athlon 64 3200 lying around at home, so I'll be using that with the motherboard I bought. Hopefully I'll get a chance to put it together tonight or tomorrow night, and we'll see how things go. I'm not expecting too many problems because I'm just going to take my existing Debian i386 install and run it on there (so the processor will run in 32-bit compatibility mode, which will be a little slower, but oh well). It'll just take a while to disconnect everything from my motherboard and swap the new guy in.

On an unrelated note, I'm irritated Brokeback Mountain didn't win Best Picture. I haven't actually seen Crash, but djedi wasn't impressed by it (although I'm not sure how impressed he was by Brokeback...). Grr.

7 comments

Comment from omega697:
2006-03-06T13:11:03+00:00
Crash was really great IMO. I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain, though.

Comment from gregstoll:
2006-03-06T13:11:50+00:00
Fair enough. I should probably watch it at some point to "compare"...

Comment from djedi:
2006-03-06T13:44:42+00:00
I found Crash pretentious and artificial. Let's not even go into the Go-like, awfully convenient plot. I think the after-school "lessons" it teaches are pretty demeaning: It's ok to be racist against black people provided you would risk your life to save a black person's life. Everyone's a little bit racist. Some thieves won't stoop to murder or slavery. Even horrible people can love someone.

I think the fact that everything in the entire movie was all about race and how we are all racist in some form or fashion really bothered me. I think the movie just tried too hard to be "nuanced" and show the grey areas of life.

I can see it scoring really well at the Oscars. It avoids the unpleasant gay-factor but still seems 'different', 'edgy' and 'race-conscious'.

Comment from tehfanboi:
2006-03-06T15:01:09+00:00
See I didn't get the "It's ok to be racist against black people provided you would risk your life to save a black person's life." lesson. When I saw it, when it first came out, I was struck by the question of "am I racist"? It seems to me that it did a really good job of showing how things that seem so slight, can be taken the wrong way as a racial slight. My chief complaint, besides the whole everything is a big connected web cliche, was that it failed to provide any solutions. It isn't like racism is a new problem, and just because you make a movie showing that racism exists isn't oscar worthy unless you go one step further and start showing how we could possiblyheal those divides. But that is just me.

Comment from destroyerj:
2006-03-06T15:04:09+00:00
Perhaps it merits a re-watch?

It's been a while since I saw Crash, but I don't think it tried to teach any lessons, and definitely not 'after-school' ones. Rather I thought the movie set out specifically to *avoid* teaching any lesson but rather to just force you to confront yourself and make you think about what you think about the issues. I know it made me introspect.

Comment from bobacita:
2006-03-06T15:48:36+00:00
I liked how confrontational some of the scenes were and how uncomfortable it made me, and I found some of the scenes gripping BUT I was annoyed and insulted that its depiction of Asian people was limited to boat people. As always, it's "black and white, with a little bit of brown," not "black, white, brown, pink, and yellow." Either do what you usually do and leave Asians out of it or include us and actually say something interesting about the issues we face.

Comment from djedi:
2006-03-07T13:00:11+00:00
First, the movie was ok. Im' not saying it was terrible - I just don't think it deserved an Oscar. Sadly, upon watching it however, my first impulse was "Someone really wanted an Oscar so they sat down and tried to write something that woudl win" and it did.

I didn't really find it made me introspective (not in a good way). The cases were too stereotypical. The little bit of background they tried to give wasn't enough (and was too stereotypical itself). In fact, for a movie about racism, I found the stereotypes and movie itself rather racist.

I agree with you a lot fanboi. It just showed some complex examples of racism without showing any charater advancement or resolvement. I didn't identify with or attach myself to any character. I didnt feel like any of them were real people and I had little sympathy for them (which is saying a lot for me - I always identify with movie characters).

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