Day: November 8, 2003

Rex Mundi is a comic book set in 1930’s France in a world where the Inquisition never ended!
Web link of note: Rex Mundi
(At http://www.shrunkenheadstudios.com/rexmundi/index2.html)

On page 15 of the November 2003 issue of The National Notary, the newsletter of the National Notary Association (NNA), they did a piece on personal bias. The gist is a notary must notarize a document if it is complete, even if the document in question is offensive to the notary.

…which turns out to be a good rule, because from the sound of things, most of the Notaries are serious reactionaries!

Example:

In 1998, Notaries learned about a document being circulated by an anti-capital punishment group based in New York called the “Declaration of Life.” This unofficial document included a request that if the bearer were killed, the murderer would be spared the death penalty. Some people carrying the card wanted their signatures on the document notarized, prompting angry letters to the NNA.

“Even the thought of notarizing something like this is repulsive to me,” Notary Kathleen Clayton of Salt Lake City, Utah, wrote. “I am appalled at the very idea.”

Dorothy Chandler of Redmond, Washington, said, “I refuse to have my name associated with anything this contrary to life as we know it on this planet. To even print such a declaration for people to sign to allow murderers to live is insane.”

So wait… the first person is appalled at the idea of sparing someone’s life, and I will bet you money that person is a Mormon, which yes is a flavor of Christianity, the religion that coined the phrase “turn the other cheek” and says that vengeance is God’s perogative only (Romans 12:19)

Incredibly, the second person calls the document “contrary to life” because it allows someone to live. And wait, you REFUSE? Sorry lady, but you can’t do that and should be disbarred. As a Notary you are an officer of the state and must serve the public, regardless of how wacky their opinions are.

Fortunately the law is behind me on this one, and the article is as well… but since only Notaries will be likely to read it I thought I’d share it with you.

I wrote up my notes on the Group B showing. I wish those fools at the Project would update their website!

Title	genre	team name	notes
Strong Hand	Musical / Western	Single Frame Alliance	Very pretty- I think they may have tweaked the color or something. It wasn’t very true to genre however… a man gets a card reading from a Gyrpsy. I wonder if the director, Angel Vasquez, has other work?
Human Skin	SciFi	Autonomy 16	Many team members in attendance- one of the crappiest movies but also one of the most fun. Aliens who feed off the stolen human bodies they inhabit are sent as part of an invasion force, and they get new hosts at parties.
Face the Music	Noir	DVI	I think this was a real production company of some sort- or maybe not. The story was very poorly developed and basically was this gross saxophone guy abusing the woman who promised him success.
Unhitched	Detective / Cop	Jump Cut Productions	?
Hall of Poetic Justice	Superhero	The Reel McCoys	A superhero gets dumped by his girlfriend and he goes through the stages of getting over it. Cute… a lot of shots around the Church park area.
Waiting for Shuhorne	Romance	Bad Squirrel (Tech TV producers)	three people in a waiting room of a video dating service- a geek, a bitchy artist, and a b-boy. Pretty funny… a lot of pointless swearing. The lighting was one of the best and the editing was very good; there were reaction shots for example which was hard to pull off in the given development time. This team won the Audience award.
Donuts Are Forever	Spy	Shiznit	This one was awesome- a bond movie revolving around donuts in which Bond fights “Dofeld” and his henchman who throws a record. Complete with soundtrack!
Shrink Killer	Mystery	Team Harkavy	A woman hires a PI to find her stalker. Except he’s actually her shrink and she’s just nuts.
The Best Plastic In The World	Fantasy	Zip-Pow (X-Corps ?)	A woman showing off her Tupperware collection and then rolling around on a bed with it. Half-assed but funny in how brazen it was. At one point she seals a record into a large bowl.
Flight of the Icarus			A documentary about an incredibly flawed entry into the Redbull Flügtag, complete with shots of the actual Flügtag. At first I was thinking “How did they do this?!! Did they bet on having ‘Mockumentary’?!?” But no, they never show the team actually participating in the real event.
Fancy Coffee Drinks	Comedy	God Called and He Wants His Talent Back	Cheesey… this is the team the SF Chronicle followed around. It included a Hindi-movie styled dance number, making it a Musical, and had a Romantic plot. Hmmm…. almost as if they wrote a single script ahead of time and hoped they would get one of those three genres!

The photography of Jeff Klagenberg
Web link of note: Jeff Klagenberg photography
(At http://www.klagenberg.net/)

The utility of MTAmazon or ArchiveYear is obvious (guess what “Countdown” does?). But what about all these other, weirder MT plugins that are floating around?

• CategoryFaceted enables facet-based structures; FilterCategories allows us to exclude category when listing the categories. What this is used for is listing the categories of a certain type (facet!) and not others. For example, I have a “Link” category, which I use for my Daily Links bar, and a number (5? 6?) of Amazon categories. Now I can reduce them to combinations of facets and have them archived in a more organised manner.
• I have ranted a lot about trying to make different look & feels for postings of different categories. I have implemented a crazy CSS hack to solve this… CategoryOfArchive makes this process much much easier, and without the crazy use of CSS. To take it one step further, I can now have Topic Icons for each posting, like they do on Slashdot, and even change the whole format of the individual postings on the main index pages themselves with the use of CategoryHeaderFooter which lets you define different macros depending on the category of the entry. BWAHAHAHA!
• I needed Regex to complete my “future-proofing“, but I’m sure it will come in handy later. I added in the EntryNumber plugin for those on my system who just want vanilla, medium-grade future-proofing.
• I am sick to death of MTAmazon breaking my damn build process every time the Amazon site is a little slow. So now we have Exception to catch any problems and save the build.
• …and speaking of things like MTAmazon, finally I can use MT tags insde the damn entry body that I’m typing with the Process Tags plugin. Actually you could put anything in an entry with this thing… including an entire additional generated blog. But that would be dumb. A more practical but no less insane idea would be to use this with the above-mentioned category filtering to generate meta-templates that would generate clusters of like postings, or in conjunction with the RSS templates to publish mini newspapers with self-changing content. With enough of my friends’ feeds I could have a giant blog and never write another article myself!
• We just installed AWStatsReferers for the hell of it. I seriously doubt I’ll be getting so many incoming links that I could make a dynamic list of the most recent ones, but sheeyah why not.