NYAFF Review

What do you get when you cross Monk with Hong Kong action cinema?

You get Johnnie To's "Mad Detective". Good story, classic HK fare, though perhaps a bit too formulaic.

Coney Island Hunger Strike

The queen of the Mermaid Parade is on a hunger strike to save Coney Island. She's got a live hunger strike cam...

http://community.livejournal.com/coney_freaks/208688.html

http://saveconey.10gbfreehost.com/saveconey.html

Fucking Religion

Religion. Is. Scary.

I saw a guy on my train this morning, a tall bulky guy wearing a jacket zipped all the way up. He stared at me with these piercing and dead bright blue eyes - everything about him read "religious fanatic / kamikaze bomber". He was carrying an issue of the "World Tribune" which I realize is some kind of Bhuddist paper, but the parts of it I caught him reading were talking about the purpose of religion being victory and something about the "four points of victory". I got far away from that dude as fast as I possibly could.

Nothing frightens me more than the ability of religion to hollow out a human mind and replace its contents with complete certainty. It's the kind of thing that makes people brand children with crosses. And man, it is so, so scary to be outnumbered 9 to 1.

Google versus The Universe

I find it interesting that Google is going to start releasing tools that will help home users detect when and how much they are being throttled by their ISPs.

In the absence of real government oversight or regulation, with ISPs taking whatever actions they want to step on consumers and squeeze money from them, it seems that the content providers are picking up the slack and trying to empower people. Assuming the FCC and other government agencies continue their trend of FAIL, it's going to become a more and more interesting world as mega-corporations continue building tools to battle each other for the dollars of consumers. Maybe Google will start providing packet encryption for their services? Or maybe that will become a basic thing available in RIA frameworks?