And My Opponents Eat Puppies, Too!

To clarify my remarks from last night, here is the relevant passage (taken from the full text here):

We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite. [...] [E]very great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma, and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

OK, "great ideological conflict" = War on Terror, obviously, of which the war in Iraq is ostensibly a part. There are some who advocate pulling out of Iraq now, while President Bush believes we need to "stay the course" and finish what we started. So it seems to me that by drawing parallels with prematurely ending these noble endeavors of history, the President seems to be comparing the war in Iraq with Martin Luther King's march from Selma. He is implying that those who disagree with him about how to conduct the War on Terror, are engaging in the moral equivalent of allowing slavery, segregation, and the Holocaust to continue unimpeded.

Mr. President, just a suggestion: This is why so many people believe you are monstrously arrogant, because you engage in this sort of naked display of monstrous arrogance.

Holy Crap!

Ok, now I only saw about the last minute and a half of the State of the Union speech, but... did President Bush just compare the war in Iraq to Martin Luther King's march from Selma?

Happy Holidays

Yes, we're a little insane. By my estimate, we had a total of about 300 presents under that tree. It took us six hours to open everything. Here we all are preparing to start opening:

Here is my leftist/commie brother Mike playing with the talking Ronald Reagan doll Brenda & I gave him:

Not quite as perfect as the talking Ann Coulter doll he got last year, but that's tough to top.

Here's my other brother David and his wife Diane opening stuff:

Here's David's daughter Julia. She tried, seriously, to watch the entire 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon last year, so we had to get her this shirt:

This is David's son Byron watching my mom open something:

Here's my dad proudly displaying a cookbook we got him:

And this is Byron again wearing the Coolest Christmas Present Ever:

Yes, I did buy myself a Voice-Changing Darth Vader Helmet at the same time I got the one for my nephew. What of it?

As for my own haul, I got one of these. It's probably going to take me a while to fill that 20 GB drive, although I may just be able to do it without buying any more music than I already own.

Between Brenda & I, we also got:
All three of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books (now I need to finish Cryptonomicon...)
A vacuum food-sealer
A deli slicer
The From the Earth to the Moon DVD box set
The Hanzo the Razor DVD box set
An obscure nunsploitation movie.
A whole bunch of rabbit-related books and calendars
And, let's be honest, a whole lot of other stuff

Awww, He Thinks He's People!

Elton John and partner 'tie the knot'

And according to the IMDB report, "The 'newlyweds' left Guildhall at 11:45am..."

Here we see one of the problems with only allowing civil unions, while leaving "marriage" exclusively heterosexual: The patronizing use of quote marks around words and phrases like "tie the knot". It conveys a sense of, "Awwww, look at the cute little gay people, pretending they're married! How precious!"

My preferred solution, by the way, is to remove the word "marriage" from the law books entirely. Those who oppose legalizing gay marriage have a valid point: "Marriage" is not just a civil institution, it is also a religious ceremony. The problem is, to the extent that they are correct about this, it means the government shouldn't be involving itself with marriage at all. So I say separate the parts out: Civil unions for everyone, gay or straight, for the legal/civil/secular reasons and benefits, and let the churches decide which relationships they will bless with the word "marriage". And, incidentally, I have no doubt that if this were the case, there would be churches willing to perform homosexual marriage ceremonies. United Church of Christ, for example.

Incidentally, although CNN couldn't manage to report on Elton and David's wedding without diminishing its status with quote marks, Fox News, those evil right-wing bastards, treated the union as real throughout their version of the story. One might almost accuse them of being fair and balanced...

Also, I'm heading up to Wisconsin for Christmas, so I probably won't be posting anything until I get back next week.

Sweeeeeeeet!

So, my sweetie bought me a Lite-On 5005x DVD-Recorder for my birthday. OK, it didn't exactly involve mind-reading on her part, since I basically sent her a link to the order page on Amazon.com and said, "Gee, one of these would be really nice...hint, hint". Still, check this out: It records on damn near anything - DVDs in all the writeable formats, and CD-R/RW, both VCD and audio CD format. That was actually the main thing I was looking for - I have some old audio tapes I'd like to transfer to CD, and it seemed logical that a DVD recorder ought to also be able to record audio CDs, although this is one of the only models I could find that actually claims to be able to do so.

But that's not even the coolest part. The coolest part is that after finding this and deciding it was the one I wanted, I did a little online research and discovered that there is a simple-to-apply firmware hack that enables an additional (3-hour) LP recording mode, turns it into a region-free DVD player, and disables the Macrovision copy protection. So, I now have the ability to watch DVDs with any region encoding, and copy prerecorded (and copy-protected) VHS tapes or DVDs to a new DVD.

At the moment, I'm unwinding after hooking it up. I need to unwind because, while hooking it up, I decided I needed to dismantle my entire home audio/theater setup and reconnect everything. The cords had simply become far too entangled. Plus, the glass shelves in my component rack had become loose and dangerous, so while I had everything out, I wanted to re-tighten the screws holding them in place. So adding this simple home theater component ended up being a 5-6 hour job. But, everything's hooked up and working again, Tivo was clever enough to reschedule recording the Daily Show/Colbert Report episodes it had been planning to record while everything was unplugged, and I applied the firmware hack and verified that I now have a region-free DVD player. Yes, Chameleon, this does mean I should finally be able to watch that Doctor Who DVD you sent me. I'll let you know how I like it.

For my next trick: I want to work around some of the limitations in the system. Tivo only has one S-Video output, which is currently running to the TV. I'd like to split that so I can run it to both the TV and the new DVD recorder (instead of the icky composite connection it currently has). Likewise, I actually still need to hook the old DVD player up such that I can record DVDs. But these things can wait for another day. For now, I'm well pleased.

Music

I know all the cool kids are using those little ear buds with their MP3 players, but I hate those things: They're uncomfortable, and the sound sucks. So why hasn't someone come out with a decent pair of real headphones with an MP3 player built right into them, so you don't even need a wire running anywhere? Heck, build it into a pair of wireless headphones I can use with my home stereo, so I can use them to listen to CDs/DVDs at home without disturbing the neighbors, and then take them right out with me to work or the gym to listen to the MP3s I've loaded into them. Is there something like this that I've just never seen advertised, or should I start trying to figure out a way to make money with this idea?

Granted: With the player up on your head, you wouldn't be able to see a display screen to select songs. However, an inability to select songs doesn't seem to have kept people from buying those little teeny iPods that only play songs in random shuffle order. Or satellite radio service, either. Hey: I wonder if satellite radio recievers have gotten small enough that you could strap one of them on the other side of these hypothetical MP3 headphones... :-)

Art or porn?

Art or porn?

You scored 10 out of a possible 10
There are two explanations for how you've done so well. 1: You're a devotee of great cinematic art, and recognise key moments in film history when you see them. 2: You have a huge stash of vintage porn.

"Intelligent Design" Theory Is Satanic

1 Corinthians 1:22-23 (NIV):

Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Feel free to follow that link and read the entire chapter, or examine some of the other translations.

To paraphrase this passage (and some of the context): Some people require evidence (signs) proving the message of Christ, others require logic ("wisdom", and remember that Greeks pretty much invented formal logic). But Paul is saying here that you cannot arrive at God through either signs or wisdom, evidence or logic, only through faith.

Now, in order for that to be true, it must be that God's existence cannot be proven through either evidence or logic. After all, if it could, then it would be possible to arrive at God through signs or wisdom. God's message would not be "foolish", as Paul calls it - it would be demonstrable fact. So the Bible itself tells us that God's existence must be taken on faith, that there cannot be either scientific (evidentiary) or logical proof.

Therefore, the "Intelligent Design" theory, to the extent that it is remotely scientific, must be anti-Christian (if it isn't scientific, of course, then it certainly has no place in a high school science class, does it?). The underlying basis of ID is that there are some things which are so "irreducibly complex" that they must have been designed by an intelligence, and could not have come into existence in any other way.

But if that were true, then irreducible complexity would constitute a "miraculous sign" that proves God's existence, which is precisely what Paul says cannot be. In fact, in order for what Paul says to be true, there has to be a complete, coherent scientific explanation for the existence of life that doesn't involve God. If there were no such explanation, then God's existence could be demonstrated through that "miraculous sign", and faith would be unnecessary.

Therefore, ID theory attempts to undermine the Bible; it is against God. Since, by definition, anyone who is against God is serving Satan, ID advocates are Satanists. QED.

"Rape Is No Laughing Matter..."

"...unless you're raping a clown."

I really hate being put in the position of defending these people, but I have to admit: I'm beginning to be a little bit disturbed by the way we're treating sex offenders.

Various places have passed or are preparing to pass ordinances forbidding registered sex offenders from residing within 2500 feet of a school, park or child-care facility. Only some of these ordinances appear to be restricted to offenders who committed crimes against children, despite the fact that I'm not aware of any evidence that those whose victims were adults are likely to attack children as well.

Ohio wants to make them display pink license plates. If that will make our children safer, why not go one step further: Make them sew some sort of symbol on their clothes. After all, the license plates would only allow us to target identify the ones who are driving. Which do you think would be better: A big scarlet letter, or a pink triangle?

Part of the problem here is that not every jurisdiction distinguishes between, say, a man convicted of repeatedly buggering six-year-olds, and an 18-year-old convicted of having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. In some places, both of those people are "registered sex offenders". Also, as I said, someone who raped an adult, while clearly evil, is not necessarily a particular threat to children. But people lately seem to be using the term "sex offender" as if it were synonymous with "child molester" (unfortunately, I can't find the article I read the other day where that was really obvious).

But the problem I have is even more fundamental than that: We're starting to act as if people who commit sex crimes, specifically, have no civil liberties. Whether some crimes are worse than others, or whether we're even defining "sex offense" too broadly, is beside the point. I'm not comfortable with the idea that there is an entire class of crimes, the commission of which means that the offender has forfeited all of his natural rights for the rest of his life. If we can do that to these people, however creepy and nasty they may be, how long before the government begins to treat, say, drug dealers the same way? How about "hate crimes"? Or DUI?

This was kind of the point of the Larry Flynt case: If freedom of speech is to mean anything, then it must especially protect unpopular speech, because that is precisely the speech most likely to be censored by the majority. Likewise, if civil liberties and natural rights are to mean anything, then they must especially protect the most unpopular and reviled people in all society, because they are precisely the people most likely to be abused by the majority.

Yes, it's fun to fantasize about punishing sex criminals by castrating them with piano wire, but back in the real world, you don't really want to live under a government that would actually do something that barbaric, do you?

Incidentally, I suppose one could say very much the same thing about terrorists and those accused of supporting them...

Now that's Christmas spirit!

Go to this snopes.com page. Watch the video from one of the links they give.

I'm sending you to the snopes.com page about it, rather than one of the other multitude of places online that has this video, because they also provide a description of how it was done (and verify that it's real – I've seen it posted other places where people argued back & forth over whether it was live video or just edited together from still photos).

For Crying Out Loud

I recently decided to install the newest version of Apple's Quicktime. Now, first of all, I can't really say I've always had a love-hate relationship with Quicktime. Frankly, it's mostly just hate. I hated the way it used to assign itself as the default application for a bunch of file types without asking permission (and then continually check to make sure you hadn't changed any of them back). I hated the fact that, previously, you could end up with multiple mutually incompatible versions of it on your system, none of them working properly as a result, simply by having several different games installed simultaneously. I hate the way it just never quite fits neatly into a Windows system.

So, I downloaded the latest version. I logged in to my administrator account, installed Quicktime, and played a quick video to verify that it was working. When I logged out and logged back in to my regular limited-user account, Quicktime no longer functioned in this user account. At all. Gives an error message saying "Error 46: Could not find or load activex control". Funny, the previous version worked just fine.

Further investigation revealed it was a problem with some DLL's not being automatically registered for this user. Now, as you may know, you can register DLLs manually using a console command, regsvr32 . Tried that, didn't work. Error message provides no useful information, it just says registration failed. I next tried uninstalling, setting my user account temporarily as an admin account, and installing under that account. Quicktime now functions under this account, but not in the normal administrator account. In other words, Apple's installation package installs Quicktime in such a way that it only functions at all under the actual account you were logged into when you installed it. That's a problem because, following recommended best practices, I do most of my work logged in to my limited-user account, but some games only function when run as administrator, and since games often use Quicktime video, I need to make it work under both accounts.

Here is what I ended up having to do to fix it:

1) Log in as administrator, and temporarily set the limited user account to another admin account.
2) Switch to User account, install Quicktime.
3) Switch to true Admin account, start running a registry monitor program, and attempt to manually register the first DLL.
4) When that fails, examine the registry monitor trace to find where regsvr32 tried to change a registry setting with an "Access Denied" result, to determine what registry key needs to be changed.
5) Switch back to temporarily-admin User account, open the registry editor, find the registry key from step 4. Edit the registry key's permission settings, adding the Administrators group with full read/write permissions.
6) Switch back to the true Admin account. Repeat steps 3-6 until the DLL registers successfully (there may be several registry keys that need to have their permissions changed before it will work).
7) Repeat steps 3-7 for each of the 4 DLL's that need to be registered.
8) Reset the User account back to a limited-user account type.

Here's the problem: Apple seems to have set up their Quicktime installer under the assumption that you, the end user, use a single account for everything you do on your Windows PC. But Windows XP, especially the recent service packs, encourages you to set up a limited-user account for everyday use, and stay out of the administrator account unless truly necessary. This has always been the way serious geeks behaved, and XP now encourages regular folk to adopt the same habits. In this environment, in this day and age, why would Apple apparently not even bother to test Quicktime installation in such a system configuration? It's just baffling.

Now, it's also possible that there was something peculiar to my system that caused the problem. But since the root of the problem was a permissions issue with some registry keys specific to Quicktime, which means the registry keys themselves must have been created by the Quicktime installer, I can't imagine what there could be about my system that would be so different than what they developed/tested the installer on. The registry settings may have been created by the installer for a previous version, but surely they would have tested installing the new version over an existing install, right?

Video Game Proposal

Working title: "Play"
One-line pitch: An FPS based on kids playing with action figures.

In basic play style, this would be mostly a standard FPS - run through corridors blasting monsters, collecting power-ups, opening doors, etc. Visually, the design would be based around the concept that you are an action figure in a kid's game, and, as kids will do, he/they are making use of everything in their collection of toys.

So the environments may look like any kind of toy at all - a Star Wars-like playset, or playsets from any other toy genre for that matter (military, sci-fi, fantasy, etc.), or build from Lego bricks, or even made out of pieces of cardboard masking-taped together into rooms and corridors. Some levels may just take place on the floor and furniture of a kid's room.

Enemies would also be toys drawn from any style. Any moment you may find yourself facing bad-guy action figures, or rubber spiders, or perhaps the occasional Barbie doll (gigantic, in proportion to a standard action figure) or stuffed animal. Or even those rubber monster finger-puppets (complete with a visible finger emerging from the bottom and disappearing into the floor). Most of them should probably move in that peculiar bouncing puppet-gait children playing with toys always use for "walking".

Other than the visual style, the concept allows for some other unique points. One "power-up" possibility would be for the player to be lifted up out of the level, getting a "birds-eye" view of the playing field. Certain enemies might have a special ability, when killed, to come back to life immediately by yelling "Nuh-uh, you missed!" Somewhere in there should probably be a "Christmas" level, in which a bunch of completely new enemies appear, sequentially, accompanied by obstacles of bows and wadded wrapping paper. I have no doubt other such ideas will emerge during development.

If I had the necessary modeling/animation skills, I'd do this myself as a mod for one of the existing FPS's.

This Just Gives Me A Pre-Headache

Two Million U.S. Teens Are Pre-Diabetic
"The average level was 89.7, within the normal range, but 7 percent of the children in the study were in the pre-diabetic range" [100-125].

PRE-diabetic? There weren't enough of them with actual diabetes to frighten people, I guess, so they had to start calling essentially normal kids "pre-diabetic" in order to scare the public.

This could be the start of a whole new trend: Smokers can all be called "pre-cancerous". Anyone whose blood pressure is 125/85 or so is "pre-heart attack". It might be difficult to distinguish between the "pre-anorexic" and the "pre-obese" - probably best to just flip a coin, there.

Or maybe we could save time and just start referring to everyone as "pre-deceased".

The Horror, The Horror! It Burns My Eyes!

First, a dilemma. Or at least, it may be a dilemma for open-source GNU/Linux fanatics with no social lives: "Hmmm. I enjoy masturbating to pictures of Japanese women in bondage, but unfortunately this one is all covered with Windows logos. What am I to do?"

If you're curious as to, um, "what in the hell?" it might help to look over this Wikipedia entry. Make sure you watch the video. The list of characters might come in handy for that.

Oh well, surely it's only a matter of time before someone produces something similar just for Linux geeks, right?

Now, as if all that wasn't already bad enough, in the process of putting together this post, I accidentally ran across a page full of H. P. Lovecraft entities, depicted as cute Japanese anime schoolgirls. Remember, kids: Some things, once seen, can never be unseen.

There Are No 14-Year-Old Girls on the Internet

Xenia nabs No. 82 in sex sting
"McNeal is the 82nd suspect arrested since the part-time Xenia Internet crime unit started in March 2000."

And a Review of a Movie I Haven't Even Seen

Doom - I can tell this movie is, ahem, doomed to be craptacular just by having seen the trailer. A movie based on a first-person shooter videogame, and the trailer includes some shots of carnage from a first-person POV (from what I've read, there is a lengthy first-person segment toward the end of the film). And not just any first-person POV, but a first-person POV that precisely duplicates the first-person POV of the game, with the player's selected weapon sticking out from the right side of the screen. The astounding lack of creativity necessary, the sheer bloody literal-mindedness of duplicating the FPS POV onscreen... well, the only thing I can think of that would be worse would be using actual shots of gameplay in the movie.

Movie Update

Robots - I agree with everything Joe said about it. Pretty, but hollow. I was particularly bemused by the female love-interest character: She seemed to take the main character's side for no reason other than that the "Female Love-Interest" character slot was unfilled, so she slid into it solely in order to fulfill that expected role in the story. Also, the Rube Goldbergian "Crosstown Express" scene at the beginning was cute, but it really needed to have then become a running joke through the whole movie: Off in the background of city scenes, we should have occasionally seen one of those cage-balls whizzing through the air with a faint "aaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaahhhh!" audible. That sort of thing.

Land of the Dead - That's the way to do it! And yes, that's a reference to the Zombie Punch and Judy puppet show briefly visible in one scene. I'd say overall that this is not quite as good as Night or Dawn, probably about on par with Day. Certainly better than the Resident Evil movies, roughly equal or slightly better than the Dawn remake. And Romero demonstrates once again that zombies don't have to run fast to be menacing. Still, I think I'll imagine that this takes place somewhere in the middle of the earlier movies, before the events depicted in Day of the Dead (or perhaps even the start of a completely separate storyline that just happens to share the element of zombies), simply because Day is so wonderfully, bleakly apocalyptic. I like to think of that one as truly being about the very end of the world.

I Love Criterion

Criterion, makers of the best DVDs around, has an edition of Kurosawa's masterpiece, Ran, coming out this fall. Note that when it comes out, it will be the third DVD release of this movie. Yes, I already own the other two, both of which are plagued, to a greater or lesser degree, by problems in the subtitles. Mostly some typos, but there's one other thing that has bugged me about them...

So I recently submitted a comment to Criterion through their website:

Comment: Please tell me that in the subtitles for the upcoming Ran DVD, you'll get the "My...Lord" gag right.

Here's what I mean: In the scene between Kaede and Jiro, after she has seduced him, where he's getting dressed in the background and she's laying down, she starts out by saying (in Japanese) "No-... Tono?" With a significant pause between them. This translates as "My... Lord?", "tono" being the Japanese word for "lord", and "no-" being a prefix meaning "mine".

The way she says it, with that pause, it is as if she is unsure what their relationship is, now that they have made love. "My...Lord?" or "My...Lover?", "My...Husband?" (or, given Kaede's nature, as if she is *pretending* to be unsure...).

The only version I've seen that subtitled that line in a way that preserved that hesitation was an old VHS release. There, it was translated with "My..." on one subtitle, and "...Lord?" on a separate subtitle a moment later. Both DVD releases up to now have just rendered it as "My lord?" which, while technically correct, utterly fails to convey the significance of the line.

I'm just hoping I can count on Criterion to finally get it right.

I just recieved the following response (after an earlier preliminary note that the rep had forwarded the question to the folks working on the subtitles):

Dear Scott,

Our DVD of RAN will include the ellipsis in question.

November 22 seems to be the release date. I can't wait.

Wow. Just, wow.

I've written on the general topic of Jack Thompson before, and given my libertarian politics and love of video games, my opinion of his crusade against them should come as no surprise. Not that I don't understand him: Headline-chasing is so much more profitable than ambulance-chasing if you're a useless hack attorney, isn't it?

But the latest round is something to behold. First, Jack offers $10,000 to charity if any video game company will publish a game based on his proposal. I'm not going to go into great detail about the proposal; suffice to say, it is clearly the lunatic ravings of a disordered mind. I will just point out this, though: His point, such as it is, is apparently that when game publishers refuse to publish a game in which the player massacres game publishers, it'll be evidence that the publishers fear the effects such a game would have:

How about it, video game industry? I've got the check and you've got the tech. It's all a fantasy, right? No harm can come from such a game, right? Go ahead, video game moguls. Target yourselves as you target others. I dare you.

I will simply mention here that such a game not only already exists, but Thompson mentions it by name in his very proposal: In Postal 2, one of the levels is set in the offices of Running With Scissors (the developer of Postal 2), where you are free to slaughter the developers to your heart's content.

So, enter Penny Arcade. Gabe sent Jack an email the other day pointing out that $10,000 was pretty lame compared to the half-million dollars worth of charity gamers had given through their charity, Child's Play. Jack's response, apparently, was to call Gabe and yell at him for a few minutes, including saying that:

He suggested that if Gabe mailed him again, he would be sued so fast that his head would "spin,"

This is a practicing attorney, remember. Threatening to sue someone for the vile, malicious tort of sending him an email.

Now, a conservative and anti-violent-video-game organization, the National Institute on Media and the Family, has asked Jack to kindly stop mentioning their name "in any way that would give the impression that we support your efforts." Jack's response to this bit of news includes statements like:

He is the latest casualty in an escalating war started by a reckless industry whose socipathic [sic] poster child is [Take-Two Interactive president] Paul Eibeler. Dr. Walsh has now cast his [lot] and his efforts, whether wittingly or unwittingly, with him.

At this point, I believe that Jack Thompson could not make himself look any more ridiculous if he started wearing a big red nose and floppy shoes.

Whedon, You Magnificent Bastard

Serenity - First of all: Go see it. If you are already a fan of the show, chances are, you already have. If you aren't already a fan of the show, go see the movie anyway. If possible, spend the 14 hours necessary to watch all the episodes of the show first - you'll appreciate the film even more - but the two friends of ours who had never seen the show before we took them to the movie still loved it. If you like science fiction at all, you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

It's Han Solo done better than George Lucas ever managed, even back when Han still shot first. It's a better depiction of space as "the final frontier" than any of the Treks. And it's all done without resorting to having sound effects in space like everyone else since 2001 has felt the need to do (there is sound during the Big Climactic Space Battle, but their excuse there is that it takes place in the upper atmosphere of a planet, not in full vacuum).

I'm not even going to describe the plot, because ideally you should see the movie without having read any spoilers* first. I will, for that very reason, praise the trailers for the film: All the ones I've seen manage to give a sense of what the movie is like without actually giving away the entire story (as most trailers any more seem wont to do). It includes a bunch of humerous lines of dialogue, most of which occur within the first fifteen minutes of the actual film, thus leaving the rest of the movie to be discovered as you watch it.

A quick aside about the TV show: Prior to a few weeks ago, neither Brenda nor I had ever particularly gotten into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We both thought the movie was kinda cute, and I had gathered that the general consensus was that the TV series was even better, but we'd never bothered to watch it.

As I wrote earlier, the Sci-Fi channel recently started showing Firefly, and I TiVo'd the first few episodes. On the strength of those, Brenda insisted I go out and purchase the DVD set so we could watch the rest of them without delay. On the strength of watching the rest of the episodes, we have since purchased all of the Buffy DVDs, and most of the Angel DVDs, and are working our way through them. Firefly is that good, that I immediately trusted that whatever Whedon had done in the earlier series had to be worth watching (and I haven't been disappointed). Serenity is of similar quality.

*Later on, after you've seen the film, come back here and follow this link if you want to see the inspirational story I suspect Joss Whedon had in mind when he wrote the line, "I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar..." That version doesn't quite use exactly the same words, but the sentiment is certainly there, and it makes sense in context, looked at with hindsight.

And then go read Julan Sanchez's Chock-Full-O-Spoilers review in Reason for a discussion of some of the libertarian themes in the film, as well as references to Sartre and Camus. And this one for more such discussion, and links to even more.