Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Random hits

First off, did you know that Mike Judge (Office Space, King of the Hill) had a new movie out? Yeah, neither did anyone else (okay, except for Digg users). Here's a short little piece on it - it's called Idiocracy, and it sounds pretty awesome:

The plot: in the future, the educated and intelligent will be massively out-bred by moronic A-type prison-fodder and Nascar idiots, to the point that all knowledge of engineering, agriculture, medicine and literature will be lost to misty memory. Luke Wilson plays ordinary Joe Bowers, chosen to be frozen by the military in 2005, who accidentally wakes up in 2505 to find a broken-down, thuggish America where language has become a patois of football chants, hip-hop slang and grunts denoting rage, pleasure and priapic longing, where citizens are obese, violent, ever-horny and narcotised by consumerism, TV and fast food. Everything's branded, and people have names such as BMW, Mountain Dew and Frito. TV features the Violence Channel (its signature show: "Ow, My Balls!") and the Masturbation Channel ("Keepin' America 'batin' for 300 years!"). The President's a Smackdown champ and porno superstar, and there's a mulleted wrestler on the billion-dollar bill. And everyone in the future thinks that Joe Bowers, suddenly the smartest man on earth, "talks like a fag".

There is venomous anti-corporate satire throughout the movie, remarkable mainly because Judge names real corporations. I was astounded - and invigorated - by the sheer vitriol Judge directs at these companies, who surely now regret permitting the use of their licensed trademarks. Like fast-food giant Carl's Jr, which in 2006 sells 6,000-calorie burgers the size of dictionaries under the slogan, "Don't Bother Me, I'm Eating". In Idiocracy, this has devolved into "Fuck You! I'm Eating!" And every commercial transaction has been sexualised: at Starbucks you can get coffee plus a handjob (or a "full body" latte).


Sounds like a winner. Also, I don't know about any of you, but I work with text files quite a bit. LOTS and LOTS of load files for databases, which can be a pain to edit and manipulate. Anyway, I highly recommend downloading UltraEdit if you do anything similar. It does find/replaces SO much faster than Word or WordPad (I just did 250K lines worth of them in under 5 seconds), it uses tabs to keep track of multiple files open (and allows you to do find/replaces across ALL open files if you'd like), and lots more that I haven't even touched yet. I also use another product by the same company called UltraCompare to merge files, and that works pretty slick as well.

I have more to write, but blogger is making me angry right now by not formatting my text the way I want it. I'm just going to post this and then edit it later or something.

EDIT: The answer is: I'm still angry at you, Blogger.com . Fix yer busted AJAXy interface or I'll beat your butt back to Web 1.0!

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