If I were to make a list of the DVDs I’ve rented that I wish I hadn’t, it would be as long as my arm, and I’d get depressed. After all, not only do these cost me money, but they cost me time.

So I’ll just read off the two most recent: Triple-X: State of the Union, and The Shield: Season 1, Volume 1.

I’ll start with The Shield. I picked this up on the strength of Michael Chiklis’ performance as Ben Grimm/The Thing in The Fantastic Four. And make no mistake, his performance in this series is strong. All the actors, in fact, are putting forth strong performances. It’s a great drama. It’s also depressing. I didn’t want a story of a severely flawed hero who (I assume — I haven’t seen more than the first two episodes, but I know Chiklis appears in at least two seasons of this show) gets away with murdering a fellow officer. So… while it’s a good program, it wasn’t what I wanted to be entertained by. It didn’t “bring the happy” (Sandra’s expression for programs that we enjoy watching together.)

And now, Triple X: State of the Union. Simply put, here is a film that never should have been made. The premise of the first “Triple-X” film was pretty good, and it looked like it could have been the heir to the James Bond franchise. Vin Diesel was great. I would cheerfully have paid to see another Diesel/TripleX film in the theaters.

This film, however, was flawed from the get-go, in that they didn’t have Diesel to work with, so they wrote him out of the story (he dies off-screen), and the NSA chapter for which he was working decides to keep his code-name and slap it on somebody else. Oh, and there’s a huge plot for a coup of the U.S. presidency on the part of the Secretary of Defense, and it gets foiled with the help of the Boyz ‘n the Hood.

I’m not sure who the target audience was supposed to be, and I’m not sure the filmmakers knew that, either. Regardless, it did not include me, in spite of the fact that it had car chases, helicopter chases, boat chases, train chases, explosions, shootings, martial arts, black ops, heaving bosoms, and intrigue. The ability of the director to assemble these elements in such a fashion as to alienate me (and, I’m projecting now, most of the rest of the action-film demographic) is masterful. It’s like he took chocolate syrup, chocolate shavings, chocolate cake, ice cream, cream-cheese frosting, oreo cookies, and whipped cream, and managed to create a lima bean and brussel-sprout salad.

I want CSI Season Five, and I want it NOW.

–Howard

As you may or may not know, spamming is a crime in my fictional universe. This hardly qualifies as predictive or prophetic when juxtaposed with the recent brutal murder of a spammer in Russia. I mean, it was bound to happen sooner or later, right.

I’m fascinated at how people are reacting to this. It reads like one of those “offbeat news” items, or maybe a “Darwin Award,” and those articles are things we’re supposed to be able to laugh at. Lots of us are upset enough at spammers, though, that we’re openly praising the thugs who committed an inarguably horrible crime upon someone whose only crime was that he found legal ways to make money by annoying millions of people.

So rather than just feeling what I’m gonna feel and then moving on, I’ve been THINKING about how I feel about this murder. I’ve been analyzing my reaction to the crime. And the more I think about it, the more I hope that it wasn’t the spamming that got this guy on the wrong side of his killers.

I hope it was something more mundane, like stiffing a pimp, or not paying off a gambling debt on time, or otherwise inappropriately interacting with the seedy, violent side of his society.

See, it does my heart good to think that his spamming gave him a sense of invulnerability that crept into other aspects of his life, and that he then went and did something more routinely fatal.

I’m not sure why I feel this way. Maybe it makes me less likely to identify with the victim, enabling me to more easily de-humanize him so that I can enjoy the news of his death without feeling guilty about it.

–Howard

It’s been a while since my last update. My new PC showed up, and I’ve been migrating everything from one machine to another. Here are the high points:

1) My shoulder has a full range of motion again, but late in the day and early in the morning (around 7:00am and 7:00pm… something about the sevens) it starts to hurt a LOT. Maybe this is because that’s when the drugs I took at midnight or at noon wear off.

2) I’m taking four or five Lortab a day now. They don’t make me quite as loopy as they used to, and they DO seem to kill the pain, as evidenced by the fact that several hours after taking the drugs, my shoulder suddenly hurts like a run on the pain bank.

3) I finally have backup software configured on my PC. The way it’ll work is that every Sunday in the wee hours my machine will be backed up to an external USB drive. Yes, I’ll test the restoration process and make sure it works. Also, I can now burn CDs. The OTHER part of my backup process is the “archive” process, in which I take my most critical source files (PSD files, comic strip scripts, and accounting stuff) and burn them to CD. Given the bloat of Photoshop documents (especially with the rich shading and starfield renders I’m doing more and more of) I’ll be forced to NOT keep those on my PC forever and ever. I think our “Gold” bank account qualifies us for a free safe deposit box — archive CDs will go there. Upshot — in the event of fire, my most critical data is safe off-site. In the event of a PC crash-and-burn, I can be up and running again in short order.

4) The old PC had a combo DVD/CDRW drive, but the machine “destabilized” just over a year ago and I couldn’t watch DVDs, burn CDs, or figure out what was the matter. Now it doesn’t matter. We’ll be reformatting it, reinstalling everything, and then turning it over to Sandra. Then her computer becomes the kidputer, and the kidputer becomes I don’t know what. Maybe I’ll raid it for a disk drive, and add a drive to my PC so that Photoshop has its own scratch disk. Dunno.

5) We rearranged my office, so that the drawing table and the computer desk are now horizontally aligned, instead of being at opposing corners of the room. This should mean more spontaneous sketches while sitting at the computer, and easier sketching-from-reference. There’s still a lot of tidying to do. I ought to post pictures.

6) Gleek took a long, late nap, and will likely be up until 2am. *sigh*

–Howard

King Features just announced their new system for publishing their comics to the web.

For free, you can read one week a month of your favorite King Features strips, but only during the month FOLLOWING the month in question. That’s right, you get a week of comics to last you a month. Then, next month, you get a NEW week… but it’s not sequential to the one you just read.

For $15 per year, you can subscribe to their Daily Ink site, and get to read sequentially, with no delay, and even read several months back in the archives.

What a bargain!

Compare that to what you get with Schlock Mercenary, or any other non-King-Features-syndicated webcomic: For free, you can read in real time, and you can read the archives from the beginning. You don’t have to spend any money, ever.

I hope Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand gives King Features a solid poke in the eye. I’d hate to see good money get spent by consumers who don’t know that a better deal can be found pretty much anywhere else on the web.

–Howard