zombies and clones
Gloria and I watched Dawn of the Dead (2004) tonight. It pretty much sucked.
It lost all of the satire of the original, and replaced it with over-the-top sensationalism. There is a difference between horror and shock, and the obsession of bad movie makers with shock does nothing but desensitize the audience. The “horrible things” that the movie showed us did nothing to horrify us, they just made us think, “Wow, someone put that in a movie?” and that just served to remind us we were watching a movie.
There were a few things I liked, most notably the relationship of the mall dwellers with the man living in the shop down the road. Mostly, though, it stank, and it reminded me of another horrible movie, “It’s Alive!”
I’ve been working on my del.icio.us/pasta clone, which I’ve tentatively named Rubric. This replaces the horrible but amusing-to-me working names of Linky (in the code) and rjblicious (on IRC). So far it lets me store links (entries) for multiple users, with tags, and then retrieve entries by user and/or tag. It’s kid stuff, so far, although I think much of del.icio.us is just kid stuff done very, very nicely. That and the idea, which I’ve just outright stolen.
It should be simple to build a CGI query front-end, and I may do that this coming weekend. The more fun step will be turning entries from (user, link, tags) into (user, tags) and then attach the link with a might_have relationship. Then I can add “body” via another might_have and it will be notepad or blog-like. If I want to get really nutty, I can marry Rubric to Bryar and do strange things. I’m going to let that idea simmer for now and just work on my first goal.