You might want to stand back, I'm about to yell until spit froths out.

You see, I went to see My Blueberry Nights this evening (it was good, not flawless, but I really liked it warts and all), and before the movie there was the requisite 15 minutes of indie charm offensive.

The first thing I noticed was: oh my god I am being drenched in white privilege.

(I would like to preface the following bit of alligator-like carnivorous mean by saying that I'm just as rabid about women who have kids on purpose, or because it's the right thing for them to do.)

The second thing I noticed was EVERY MOTHER FUCKING MOVIE MADE THAT HAS A FEMALE PROTAGONIST FILLS HER FULL OF EARTH-BOUND BABY.

 Can we PLEEEEEEEEASE have an abortion now? A good one? One like actual women get in the real world?

Yeah, I've heard the arguments from the dicknuckles who splattered out Knocked Up, "it's haaaaaaard to write about abortion. The dramaaaaaaaatic aaaaaaaaaaarc is HAAAAAAARD."

Fuck you. Just, fuck you. The stories are OUT THERE. People do this. WOMEN ARE PEOPLE. It does not have to be a devastating blow. It does not have to be yanked from the jaws of evil totalitarian coathanger police. It does not have to be about how dehumanizing China is. It does not have to be an indicator that the woman in question is a ditz. IS EVERYONE MAKING MOVIES ACTUALLY BRUNDLEFLY GRABBING GEENA DAVIS BEFORE SHE GETS AN ABORTION AND STICKING HER IN HIS CLONE POD FULL OF GOD DAMN BABY MOVIES!? I WANT A FUCKING ABORTION RIGHT FUCKING NOW, HOLLYWOOD!

Maybe I'm just sensitive about this because the idiots were out protesting the local Planned Parenthood (just a couple blocks from my house), and I'd seen them driving there and could tell because they were in a ginormous SUV plastered with four hundred million bumperstickers about how god is a total dick and we should all lay back and think of England or he was going to be really pissed and then we'd all collectively need to tell the doctor that we're stupid clumsy people who fell down the stairs and landing on god's class ring which he accidentally dropped on the landing because we were unfairly asking him to stop brewing meth in the coffee pot again.

That could have been why the preview to whatever that fucking movie was pissed me off. Maybe. Except that Knocked Up sent me into a minor yelling tizzy and that was before the bible-wipers on the corner of Free Condoms and STD Tests were holding up their half-cooked cherry jello baby signs.

No, this has just been pissing me off for a long time and seeing Helen Hunt get milfinated by a nebbitzy Matthew Broderick (who was totally immature and callow because he just couldn't want to have a sprog come out of his dick) just made it explode kind of like Yellowstone will when the supervolcano goes off.

In short, Hollywood? I know you're not listening, but please. Fuck you. Fuck you in both kidney holes. Fuck you in the airtube. Fuck you in every single goddamned sprocket. Fuck you in the avid bay. Fuck you in the Michael Bay. Just fuck you. Fuck you very, very much.

My neat old laptop -- the Toshiba Tecra M4 -- had gotten sufficiently long in the tooth that the time came to get a new laptop, and lo, I did. The Toshiba taught me some things. While it was very nice to have both power and battery life galore it got kind of old lugging around a huge laptop. As a Tablet computer, weighing 6-7 pounds was also decidedly suboptimal. Standing around for a couple hours and holding the thing to draw on was a good workout though.

I'd actually gone back and fixed up my ancient Sony Z505 laptop to use for writing. It had no battery life to speak of, but it was tiny and had enough power to run word processing. So I kind of alternated between the Toshiba and the Sony depending on whether or not I wanted to do graphics things.

I looked around and around and around. I saw that Fujitsu's T2010 had absurdly great battery life (upwards of 8 hours with real world use), was tiny and weighed very little. It also had a lovely, lovely screen. Of course it was also a tablet. I'm kinda hooked on that for using ZBrush. After reading some reviews of it I kept seeing it compared to the Lenovo X61T, so I looked into the Lenovo. It didn't have quite the same quality of battery life but it was higher res, significantly more powerful and built way, way better. Every review I saw of the Fujitsu commented on its flimsy construction. In contrast, every review of the Lenovo commented on its sturdiness.

Then there was a fire at the plant that makes Lenovo's LCD screens which was predicted to raise prices, so I figured I should order Real Soon. Luckily I found the model I wanted on Lenovo's outlet site. That cinched it. It wasn't long until the friendly UPS fella was handing me a box full of new laptop love.

The upside to ordering from their outlet store was that I got very nearly the exact laptop I wanted for $500 less than their regular price (technically nearly a full $1k, but it's hard to take a sale seriously that ends and is immediately followed by another one with a different name and the same discount). The downside to ordering from the outlet was that I had absolutely no choice about the configuration. That wasn't a huge deal though, since I was able to find a model that was very close to what I wanted. The two things that were different were that it came with a Verizon WAN card built in and it had Vista Business installed (with a recovery CD for Tablet PC, curiously enough).

Vista.

Wow does Vista suck. I had to do a registry hack just to get it to reliably connect to wireless networks. It insists on constantly indexing files (help FAQ - Q: Can I turn off Indexing? A: No! This helps Windows Vista pretend to compete with Google applications, so you are forbidden from disliking it). What does constant HD activity plus laptop equal? Shitty battery life. Reboots are glacial and Vista simply adores doing reboots. Mind you, the first thing that I did, before the laptop had even arrived, was to buy 4 gigs of ram for it. Not much help there, nope. There is no central configuration for "who has control of wireless connections", so both Windows and the Intel wireless manager seem to have an equal say in what's going on. I don't see how this improves functionality to have two completely different interfaces that do exactly the same thing. By default Vista protects your sensitive eyes from seeing things like file extensions, 'Operating System' files or hidden files. That's fine, XP did the same thing. It's one of the first things I turn off. In Vista, making all those things visible means you end up with a buttload of previously invisible files that are scattered all over your desktop and it's unwise to delete them. Then there's the joy of Vista's security system. Are you sure you want to use regedit to fix a problem that Microsoft really thinks you should have? Are you sure you want to install that program? Are you sure that the universe actually exists? Are you sure you want to not send Microsoft a rotted sheep's colon full of unmarked bills? Running Vista is like having a toddler for an OS. What's that? What's that? What's that?

I have one more thing to attempt with this piece of crap OS before I scourge it from my laptop (besides getting a larger hard drive -- this fucking OS is taking up 25 goddamn gigs just for its ego). I want to get Vista Business 64 bit and try it. The laptop has 4 gigs of ram. I use a handful of 64bit software (such as ZBrush). It would be very helpful to allocate the full 4 gigs to any given app (that knows how to ask for it). Sadly, the 64bit edition of Windows XP isn't tablet flavored and to the best of my knowledge its not possible to run 64bit Windows apps under Linux (and I'd guess there's a slight overhead for having 2 OS's instead of just one, even if only half of them are Microsoft).

Have I found anything to like in Vista? Amazingly, yes! It's got precisely one feature that I'll be unhappy to lose if (when) I kill it. When you rename a file it automatically keeps the file extension separate from the name. If that isn't worth 5 years of Microsoft development resources, man, I don't know what is.

I mean, I've known for a good long time now that his books were... How to put this delicately... Unimaginatively imaginative? But it has now come to my attention that he is officially the worst writer ever.

You see, a while ago he was criticized by Michael Crowley for his public stance on global warming (he says it's unfounded balderdash). There's a long tradition of writers taking their vengeance through their fiction. It's not usually the brightest move on their part, but they can get away with it if they're sufficiently sly and/or entertaining about it. Crichton is none of that. A quote:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.

It looks like Mick Crichton never left his frat house, or learned how to assemble an insult that rises above the level of high-school put-down. Pathetic. Not only does that horse not run, the glue factory called and said they don't want it because there's not enough there to be worth the transport costs.