Exploded Clown

rentzsch.com: *Sob*:*Sob*

It’s sad or wrong or something that I can recognize the obfuscated icon for a program I never even used that hasn’t been updated in eight years.

How I explained REST to my wife…:

Wife: How does it work?

Ryan: The web?

Wife: Yea.

Ryan: Hmmm.. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP - it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

For some reason, my wife never starts conversations by asking who tech luminaries are.

This was one half of one half of a movie, and it was already far, far longer than it needed to be.

Leaving aside the cliffhanger ending and the failure to resolve any of the ten thousand plots, this movie was lacking something that’s a little critical: any type of villain. Davy Jones, while he looked remarkably cool, had zero motivation. What does that guy do all day? Sail around collecting people? He’s got a whole crew, and none of them are leaving for a hundred fricking years. And let’s talk about the crew, shall we? Menacing? Check. CGI coolness? Check. Personality? Big old space where a check should be. This is a problem that I am hereby proclaiming Darth Maul Syndrome. DMS is where the supposedly evil force that should drive the protagonists to greatness is so severely lacking in any animus that they make the heroes pale shadows of what they are supposed to be.

The problem wasn’t that the fight scenes weren’t cool enough (they rocked) or that the characters jumped on and off screen (not too hard to follow), but that you never cared what was going on, since the Flying Dutchman and her crew was about as exciting as Cheese Nips. The solution to this problem is very simple, and very old: it’s called lines. When the badguys “speak,” the audience gets to know them. We understand that Bond Villains want world domination and Silas wants a pure church and Capt. Barbosa wants some juicy apples. It lets us connect with these people, and that means we pay attention to what they’re doing. The first Pirates movie did this wonderfully, but the second movie lost it somewhere between the Blowfish-faced guy and the one with a crab head.

I’m just hoping that, when they’re filming flick three, I hope one of these guys asks “Arr, but whats me motivation, mate?”

Call to Renewal Keynote | U.S. Senator Barack Obama:

But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives — in the lives of the American people — and I think it’s time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

(Via New Donkey)

Edwards and Obama are each in little race cars inside my mind, zooming ever closer to the Presidential races of the future… who will get to the finish line first?