Not so fantastic

We watched the "Fantastic Four" yesterday. Or rather, we watched most of the "Fantastic Four" but didn’t get to really see the ending due to a really bad DVD disk which skipped during certain scenes and then got totally stuck towards the very end. However, it was enough for me to go on a rant – so mission accomplished :p

I normally do not watch live versions of comic book movies because they inevitably ruin the magic of the comic-book and the characters for me. I still have not watched most of the Superman movies, have seen only one Batman movie (and that too because that was the only thing on in the flight I was on) and have not seen X-men or Spider-man. However, I did watch the Hulk movie because Ang Lee directed it and I was rather disappointed with the final result. I’ve also seen all the Blade movies but since I never read the comic, I can’t really comment on it one way or another except to say that I liked the movies.

The Fantastic Four? That’s a different kettle of fish altogether. The Fantastic Four aren’t my favourite Marvel characters, not by a long shot. However, I’ve been reading the Fantastic Four for ages and I feel as if I know them really well and there have been certain periods in the writing of the book that I felt really close to them. The best periods that I remember are the ones from just after the whole pocket universe thing when the FF returned to Earth and there were some brilliant stories which emphasized the family aspect of the Fantastic Four.

The movie actually had some of these elements and I really liked the interaction between the different members of the Fantastic Four – the ribbing, the humour the insults. All of that seemed to be spot on. What I hated was the whole Dr. Doom bit. They ruined Victor Von Doom’s transition into Dr. Doom and in the process they also made some major characterization blunders – at least that’s how I see it. In the comics, Dr. Doom wears the mask and the metal armour because of a laboratory accident – unless of course, the story has been retconned and now it is supposed to be something else :p It makes sense for him to wear the mask because he doesn’t like the horrible appearance of his face. In the movie, Von Doom relishes the powers he gets and he doesn’t have metal armour he becomes a man of metal. Why would somebody who relishes his new "godlike" powers want to hide his metal face behind a metal mask? That just does not make sense to me.

Other than for the whole Dr. Doom bit, I enjoyed the movie and it appeared to stay true to form. Except, for one major alteration – another peeve I have with Marvel and their movies. The change? Alicia Masters is now black. I don’t really care whether a character is black or white or purple or grey. Their colour makes no difference to me. What matters is who they are. However, it annoys me when a company goes and changes a story just to be "politically correct". I don’t remember any other black characters in the story at all – maybe some of the firemen that the FF rescue are black, probably some of the waving people are black. But are any of the major characters black? No. Are any of the supporting characters (like Victor’s assistant) black? No. So why go make Alicia Masters black except as a token gesture and perhaps to say that "black people *get* being different"? Do you mean white people or brown people or yellow people or Martians don’t actually "get" what it is to be different? To me that is more racist than telling a story as it was originally told. That means that you feel guilty about what you did before … But then again, YMMV :p

Father Time takes a step?

The New Year festivities started early here yesterday. Several neighbours were blaring loud music in anticipation of partying on till midnight and fire-crackers and sky-rockets were going off every few minutes all over the place. What did we do? We went to bed early and Laurie put on ear-plugs so that she won’t be kept awake by all the noise :p

Call me a Scrooge (that’s a wonderful thought BTW – what would Scrooge have done for New Year if the ghosts of Christmas hadn’t gone and messed stuff up? :p) but to me there is nothing special about the New Year – it’s just another day. How exactly do we know that it’s a New Year? What makes it a New Year? Is all the hoopla all about the fact that you get to discard the old calendar and put a new one up on the wall? What exactly are we celebrating? Does anyone who celebrates the New Year with such gusto actually know what they are celebrating? Why they are celebrating? Or do they simply do it because everybody else does it – or because they like to have a good time and any excuse is as good as another?

Personally, I’ve never been one to go along with the Joneses :p I like to know why I do something and I really see no reason to celebrate New Year so joyously. It’s just an arbitrary day in the revolution of the Earth around the sun. Heck the Earth might not be in the exact same position each year when we do celebrate the New Year – and I don’t mean "somewhat close" when I say "exact same posistion" :p I don’t mind the good cheer and wishing everybody a happy New Year. We should be cheerful and wish everybody happiness everyday of the year 🙂 But I don’t see the point to all the revelry, the noise, the disturbance you cause to the other people who might really want to stay up till midnight and all the rest goes with it. If that makes me a Scrooge – put me down at the top of the list of Scrooges :p

The incredible changing human …

I talked about careware and people caring less about money and more about people, yesterday. But I find myself wondering, would I behave the same way if I was making money? I know of people who once they start making money, can’t do anything but think of making more money. It seems to be a sort of a disease, or an obsession. Once you start making money, nothing seems to be enough. Is this human nature or just the way some people are? I don’t know enough not having ever made so much money that I never knew what to do with it – but I find myself wondering.

Till the present day, I’ve never wanted money badly. Sure, there are times I’d wish that I had more money so that I could buy a new gadget or a bunch of books or things like that. But I’ve never been driven to try to make money at all costs so that I could have more money. In fact, some of the people close to me disparage my total lack of interest in money. But I find myself wondering if this is who I am or if I am not interested in money because I don’t have any :p If I started making money, would I be like all those other people? Would I stop enjoying life, stop caring about other people and their problems and simply concentrate on making more money? Would I even want such a life? I don’t know …

But what I do know is what I think, feel and believe right now. And what I think is that life isn’t about material stuff. Sure the material possessions and money makes life easier and a lot more comfortable. But the trick is in knowing when you have enough. As human beings, we appear to never be satisfied with what we have. We always want something more, something new. But if we can learn to balance this yearning against appreciation for all that we currently have and to think about those unfortunates who don’t even have what we have, I think our lives will be much fuller and far less unhappy. But can we really do all this as human beings? That is a question that each and every one of us will have to answer for ourselves ….

Show me the care

I’ve been releasing my software as Careware for years now. It’s not freeware – there is a price to pay. The price is that you care about the people around you and lend them a helping hand whenever you can or make somebody’s day just a tiny bit brighter by doing something as simple as smiling. However, I don’t know how many people are actually aware of this and how many actually read the text in the Help dialog in my applications which always talks about Careware. I’ve only heard from a handful of people over the years about the careware concept. They all think it’s a good idea but is anybody actually following through? This is what I wonder at certain times.

I’ve been thinking about that and other stuff recently when I started the search for a cover artist. I spoke to quite a few very talented artists but most of them wanted money, lots of it and up front, before they would do any work. Now considering how talented these people are, I don’t blame them at all for wanting to be paid. But what I question is, do they only care about the money? Or is it that everybody is being hit by scammers left right and center that trust is fast disappearing? People have often told me, even urged me, to sell my software. I don’t want to. As a matter of principle, I don’t feel right about doing that. I enjoyed writing the software, I like using it and I want other people to have the same joy too. So I give it away.

Of course, just because I do that, I can’t expect everybody to give their work away now can, I? I wasn’t though. I was offering to pay as much as I could – just not up front since I don’t have that kind of cash. However, I did offer each artist I contacted, the option to be paid in a share of the profits and I was totally serious. I don’t want to make oodles of money, I just want to be able to make enough to be able to give up working for a living and concentrate on writing full time. So I don’t mind sharing whatever profits I make at all. But then again, when you’re unproven quality, you really can’t blame the other person, can you?

Of course, it’s not all gloomy 🙂 I’ve found a few people who didn’t care about the money as much as the satisfaction of doing the work or who were just all around nice people. They’ve offered to do the work and let me pay them whatever I could. I just wish there were more such people around – not because it benefits me personally but because the world would be a much nicer place if everybody cared just a little bit more about the things that mattered ….

From Ashes …

Laurie and I watched "Cinderella Man" yesterday. I don’t particularly like boxing or movies about boxing. As Laurie put it, "when one man has to knock another man unconscious to win, I don’t like that sport". That’s exactly how I feel – it just has too much of a feel of the old bread and circuses days. And seeing all those people sitting there cheering on two people beating themselves to a bloody pulp does nothing to inspire good feelings about humanity in general – well, at least not for me:

But speaking of blood and circuses, we have General Maximus himself in "Cinderella Man". Actually, for some reason, Russell Crowe looked younger in this movie. I don’t know if anybody else thinks this but he’s got a little Mel Gibson thing going in there. See, all the Aussie actors who make it great in Hollywood have this rugged, unshaven look – think back to Mel Gibson during the Mad Max days and then there was Paul Hogan … not not the wrestler, that’s Hulk Hogan, this is the other guy – remember "Crocodile Dundee"? :p Then there’s Guy Pearce too – even he had that whole unshaven look going on. Anyway don’t know if Crowe calls himself an Aussie or a New Zelander but even when he was shaven, he’s always managed to look menacing and unshaven. Mel Gibson used to be that way and then suddenly he became everybody’s favourite baby-faced boy :p In this one, Crowe too has a completely different personna – he’s got this whole, Irish boyish charm thing going and as I said before, he actually looks younger somehow. So hence the comment about him doing a Mel Gibson.

But getting back to the movie itself, even though I hate boxing, there was the whole underlying thread of one man against all-odds that I always find irresistible. There is something about the victory of human spirit over all adversity that just appeals to me. Then there is the time period – the story is set in depression era New York and the two time periods from American history that I love the most are the pioneer "Westward Ho" days and the depression era 🙂 Add to that the fact that you have a lot of charming characters (and some good actors too – Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Bruce McGill) and then it also has kids, who can resist a movie with kids? :p I loved the scene where Braddock (Crowe’s character) teaches his daughter to spar and gets smacked in the face when he looks away and where he says that he’ll have to buy some turtles if he wins the title because he told his kids that he’d come home with a title and they thought he said "turtle" 🙂 Overall, a pretty good movie to watch!

Much Ado About Narnia

First there was J. K. Rowlings doing a hundred-eighty from loving Narnia so much that she couldn’t put it down even today if she was in a room with the book to saying that she’s never even completed the Narnia series and that there is something about C. S. Lewis’s sentiments that gets on her nerves. Now there is Philip Pullman saying that the Narnia series is everything from "propaganda in the cause of the religion [Lewis] believed in,", misogynistic, racist, sadomasochistically relishing violence and even anti-vegetarian :p (Of course, the last one might not be Pullman – I just read that bit somewhere in reading about all the brouhaha over Narnia and how somebody claimed that the stories were anti-vegetarian or something because Mr. and Mrs. Beaver had sausages for breakfast …but haven’t done the research to see if that was Pullman … yeah, I know, bad journalism :p)

Now, I’ve read Harry Potter (who hasn’t? :p) and I enjoy Rowling’s writing. I haven’t read any of Pullman’s work and I mostly knew of him as the author of the "Northern Lights" series since a friend of mine raved about it and encouraged me to read it. However, Pullman and his "His Dark Materials" is what is touted when anybody talks about Pullman and the Narnia issue. Not having read any of his stuff, I can’t really comment. Quite a few of the commentaries online say that at least in the case of Pullman, this whole Narnia thing is a case of sour grapes. I personally don’t believe so. I think that both Pullman and Rowlings are victims of not being able to perceive something from a different perspective, something written at a time when things were simpler, when everybody didn’t have to conform to what was "politically correct" or have to write within permitted boundaries. In fact, Rowlings and Pullman have done the worst possible thing from both the Narnian children’s perspective and that of Peter Pan – they have grown up :p

See, one of the things that Rowlings has objected to in Narnia is that Susan is condemned to damnation because she was interested in lipstick and being a woman. Of course, she misses the point entirely. What happened with Susan was not that she became interested in being a woman, but that she dismissed all that the wonder they’d experienced as children as "fancies" and wanted to be all adult, grown up and serious. What some people don’t realize is that you don’t have to give up the wonder of childhood to become an adult – you can still have the best of both worlds.

Of course, there is a lot more that people say about Narnia. They say it’s racist. They say that it’s anti-Islamic and that the Calormen, who were the bad guys in "The Last Battle", (well, at least most of them) were patently Muslims. Now I’m a Muslim and I’ve read the Narnia series over and over and over so many times and I’ve never, ever thought of the Calormen as Muslims till all this hullabaloo started in the first place. In fact, even the Christian symbolism passed over me when I first read the books as a child. I understood the goodness in the books and agreed with it – I still do and I wholeheartedly in the principle espoused in "The Last Battle" that it doesn’t matter who you believe in as God, that as long as you do good in the name of God, it means that you always believe in the "right" God. (Yeah, I’m phrasing it badly but hopefully you get the idea :p)

I had this friend of mine, who is the only other Sri Lankan that I’d known till then who’d read Narnia, introduce another friend of his who loved Narnia. Her first question was "How can you like Narnia when it is so heavily Christian?" Fortunately, we were talking online and she couldn’t see my look which said "Are you insane?" :p I’ve never thought of the Narnia books as Christian and I don’t think I ever will. If you want to take everything with Christian symbolism in it, you might as well call "E.T." and "The Matrix" Christian works as well :p I think of the Chronicles of Narnia as a great story with a simple (and true) philosophy behind it. Why can’t we all just leave things at that and go back to our own writing? :p

Entries, Comments and Connections

It’s weird how these things go … Well, not really weird if you stop to think about it for a second but I just like to be amazed … or was that amused? :p I hadn’t received any comments or spam on this site for the longest time and I was beginning to think that my anti-spam measures were finally paying off. Then I made an entry a couple of days ago and then I heard from my friend Edward today – he said that he couldn’t post comments since they don’t appear and that he can’t leave a tag since the tag board tagged anything he posted as spam :p I checked on it and found that there had been a reason for the absence of comments …

Both the comments system and the tagboard have a spam blacklisting feature. Basically, I adapted the WPBlacklist plugin code to work for the tagboard as well. So, they both run off fairly similar blacklists and for some inexplicable reason, the letter "b" had gotten in to the blacklist :p And that meant that you couldn’t post anything with the letter "b" in it without it getting tagged as spam. I fix the problem and what do you know? Barely an hour later, I get my first tagboard spam in ages and I get two comments posted on various entries over the course of the day! I am not even certain if one of the comments is spam or not but the other is not spam. However, it is intriguing that all this happened on the same day because there really were no comments till now for a while – even if the comments had been deleted because they were mis-identified as spam, I would have received a notification, so I know that there were no spam comments 🙂 Anyway, that’s my little bit of wonderment and mystery for the day … Now I’m going back to doing other stuff – like watching the really gory and fairly pointless "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" :p

The Miracles around us

Have you recently sat in the rain and looked up at the lightning playing across the sky? Or, sat on the grass on an early morning, feeling the freshness and the coolness of the grass under you and the warmth of the sun on your face while the birds sang and the fragrance of flowers wafted all around you? I don’t know about you, but I seem to be doing less and less of this kind of thing which actually makes us realize how good life is and all the little miracles that surround us … and this is not a good thing.

It started raining heavily in the morning today just as I got up. I washed, prayed and then sat on my couch for a little while, staring out the window at the rain falling down and the lightning streaking across the sky. I really wanted to go out and just sit in the rain and let it splash all over me like I used to do when I was a child. Why is it that as we get older, we get more and more conservative and so …. dull? :p Why is it that we start thinking about what other people will think/say, whether we’d get sick and so on, instead of just going out and doing something which is fun? I don’t know. But I do know that I didn’t go out and just romp around in the rain. But I did sit there and look at the rain and think about all these things 🙂

It was then that I had the thought that the rain falling outside, the sunshine on our face, all these things are little miracles of God. When something big happens, like a huge storm coming up (I was thinking of "The Day After Tomorrow" at this point but that’s a different discussion :p), we start thinking of God and sometimes even say that it’s an "act of God". But we always disregard the little miracles which are all around us, I guess because we’ve gotten so used to them and they have lost their miraculousness. This is probably why I love a child’s viewpoint of the world much better than I love an adult’s – because children have still not become so blasé about all the little wonders that are all around us and they still look out at the world with innocent eyes. But the truth of the matter is that there is beauty and wonder to be seen, enjoyed and marvelled at, all around us … if we’d just take the time from our daily grind to notice these things. So just take a minute off your day to smell the roses, to stare out your window at the greenery of the trees or how blue the sky is and realize that the world might not be as dreary as it sometimes might seem 🙂

Soul Brothers and other stuff

Do you think people can have soul brothers or sisters? Or at least spiritual brothers/sisters? Actually, that is a throwaway question prompted by the fact that I was going to write about somebody who I consider to be a kindred spirit – or at least of his blog :p I’ve known Tyran for quite a long time now and whether he’s writing about wireless or wagons, Firefox or Frodo, blogs or Barsoom, I know what he’s talking about … Or I can empathize with what he said. I’ve always made it a point to drop by Tyran’s blog first thing in the morning because whatever he writes about, it’s bound to be interesting, if not thought provoking. Which is why it surprised me today when I discovered that I had not been by Tyran’s blog in almost a year! Guess, that’s what marriage, shifting to a new job, going back to your old job again and all the other stuff in between does to you :p

Anyway, I decided to take a day off from coding and scripting and debugging and all the other good stuff that keeps me busy during the day, and catch up on my reading over at the Whinery. Of course, as usual, it was interesting and luckily for me, Tyran seems not to have been too prolific in his own blog output since I was able to get through a full year’s worth of entries in one day. Of course, if you’re interested, you can go over there and read his blog yourself :p

Then there is Nigel with his Red Ferret Journal. I’ve known Nige for almost as long as I’ve known Tyran and Nige also probably has the distinction of the Blog user with the most entries in his database :p I’ve been using Blog longer than anybody (I wrote it after all :p) but I’ve only got around 750 entries when you combine four separate blogs (some of which are no longer active) whereas Nigel has a whopping 4000+ entries in his single blog! Nige (like Tyran) has been a very good friend through the years though I’ve never met either of them in person. And this, probably is the greatest gift that I’ve recieved in the years I’ve been developing freeware applications – the great people I get to know and to make friends with. There are many others that I count as friends but I’ve lost touch with them through the years due to some reason or other but this is in remembering all those people who’ve enriched my life over the years 🙂

And that meandering entry is my excuse for not doing too much in the way of coding today :p Speaking of coding, I seem to have caught my first comment spam with the new and improved WPBlacklist 1.22 plugin 🙂 Unlike the old version, I even got an e-mail notification of the fact that a comment was held for moderation. Now, if I could just add the option to check external spam lists and a mechanism to search existing comments for specific keywords and IP addresses, I should be ready to release WPBlacklist 2.0 🙂 I’m kind of eager to get started on it but I think I should get Blog done first. But if you’re looking for information on Blog, this is not the place to be … DC is :p

The Warrior’ Path

I watched "The Last Samurai" yesterday. Or rather, I actually began watching it on Saturday but couldn’t finish it on Sunday since I had some other stuff to do and so finished watching it yesterday :p I loved the movie. I had not thought I would like it as much as I did when I started watching it but by the time the movie ended, I was loving it. There were moments in the movie which left me pondering about things and that always is a good thing for a movie. What struck me most about the film was the fact that we all have habits, customs or a way of life that we think is the "right" one. It is only when we come face-to-face with something totally alien do we realize that there are other ways than ours and while that might not be the suitable way for us, we must respect the ways of others if we are to ever live in peace on this Earth of ours.

One scene that struck me especially was towards the end when Algren (Tom Cruise) and Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) charge the army of Omura (Masato Harada). While I by no means like violence and would rather find a solution through discussion, I was left with the feeling "this is as it should be, person to person, face to face" when I saw them charging the opposing army. And then … they get cut to pieces by the Gatling gun of Omura and fall in their tracks. I was thinking how low have we fallen, no longer will we even take the honourable way of fighting (if we must fight) by facing our enemy and taking the same risks as s/he does. Instead, we stay far away in safety and fire upon our enemy with weapons that kill without distinction – combatant or non-combatant … there is no difference. Worse yet, our commanders and leaders (the ones who actually order these wars/killings) sit even further away (perhaps even in a different country) safe from all the destruction that they order. I see no honour in such a way.

But then again, was is not about honour any longer, is it? No, wars are fought by the greedy, the opportunistic – people like Omura in "The Last Samurai". People who are only concerned with gaining power or wealth – not about something as transient as honour. Of course, on the other hand, one might say, "What honour is there in killing somebody else?" but that is not my point. My point is that if kill you must, then kill face-to-face, against an opponent who is armed the same as you and has as equal an opportunity of killing you as you them. Perhaps then we would have less wars … but then again, given humanity’s track record so far, that seems unlikely.