K-Squared Ramblings

SCR at Night

Off to see Putting It Together at South Coast Repertory. #

Wizard World LA & Long Beach: A Tale of Two Convention Centers

So, a few years back (2004?), Wizard World Los Angeles launched at the Long Beach Convention Center. People liked it. After a couple of years it moved to the Los Angeles Convention Center. Consensus is that it went downhill (I only saw it after the move, in 2007 and 2008), and in fact the 2009 convention was abruptly canceled just two months before its scheduled date.

A group decided to step in and fill the void by launching the Long Beach Comic Con. The first convention is this weekend…at the Long Beach Convention Center.

Tonight I drove past a billboard and found out what’s going on this weekend at the LA Convention Center, where Wizard World would have been:

“Adultcon.”

Given some of the opinions I’ve seen expressed about Wizard, I suspect there will be people wondering, “What’s the difference?”

Sylar vs. Sylar?

Possible spoilers for the beginning of Heroes Volume 5: Redemption.

So. Last season, Nathan Petrelli died and Matt Parkman telepathically brainwashed Sylar into believing he was Nathan, and since Sylar can change his appearance, as far as anyone can tell, he may as well be Nathan.

Now, Matt has a version of Sylar living in his head like Harvey, the neural clone of Scorpius living in John Crichton’s head in Farscape. This Sylar seems to be under the impression that he was pulled out of his body and put into Matt’s head. Meanwhile, “Nathan” seems to be exhibiting flashes of Sylar’s personality and powers.

In short, Sylar’s personality exists in two places:

• Matt Parkman’s mind, where he can interact with Matt.
• Sylar’s mind, where the personality is currently suppressed in favor of Nathan Petrelli’s personaility.

While I still think Sylar has long outstayed his welcome and should have been left for dead after the first season finale (they could have brought him back later with much greater impact if he’d been out of the picture for a year or two), I’m kind of intrigued by the possibility that the Sylar in Matt’s head might catch up to his body and find another version of himself occupying it…because I don’t think he’d be interested in sharing.

Share the Road

Cyclists, “Share the Road” goes both ways. Unless you can go 40 MPH, please ride single file instead of blocking a whole lane. #

Leverage: The First Season Job

Finished Leverage Season 1! I don’t think we get TNT, but it looks like it should be possible to catch most of Season 2 on Hulu. #

Driving up the Vertical Horizon

• Listening to new Vertical Horizon. Hope their tour makes it out to SoCal – the last concert we saw was really good. #MusicMonday #
• Got honked at because I actually stopped before turning right at a red light & paused half a second to see if the pedestrian at the corner would step in front of me. #
  

What the Heck is a “Pilule?”

Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)

Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.

It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!

One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:

• An English-language medical text published between 1830 and 1930.
• French.

The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.

So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.

Side Note: Twitterspam

On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:

• From the time that the second post was made, each of them followed both accounts, making it obvious they were automatically following based on a keyword search.
• They all used the same scheme for the user name (first name + first 2 or 3 letters of last name + short number).
• Many of them shared name components, as if a random generator were taking a list of first names and a list of last names and mixing them together.
• None of them had posted a single tweet. I suspect that if I’d been foolish enough to follow any of them back, they would have started spamming me with links via direct message. (I caught a subtle one last week: someone had posted a series of inane tweets for the first couple of weeks, then switched to all tooth-whitening links.)
• Several profile photos appeared on more than one account.
• Many of them were following upwards of 1,000 users. (After the first few, I stopped looking at the numbers.)
• All of them claimed to be women. (A majority? That I could believe. But every single one of them?)

I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.

Nice try, spambots.

Squee!

Apparently, someone’s managed to bottle and sell it. You can now buy Squee! in a tube.

Eye See You

Eye See You, originally uploaded by Kelson.

I think the picture says it all.

I took one other picture that’s framed better, but doesn’t have quite the same creepiness factor.

Seeing Transformers 2

I finally saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen today.

In some ways it wasn’t as awful as I’d heard, and in some ways it was worse. On the plus side, it had giant robots blowing stuff up, and they put more thought into the story than I expected them to. And there were certainly good moments spread throughout the film. On the minus side, the visuals were so complex that they were hard to follow. That’s a problem I had with the Transformers’ designs in the first film, too — they look insanely cool in still shots, but start them moving and you end up with two clouds of shrapnel fighting each other. Plus Michael Bay has a very different sense of humor than I do, which didn’t help. And amazingly enough, the movie was tedious. I don’t know how you can possibly take a movie about giant robots and explosions and make it dull enough that I checked my watch at least five times during the film.

In summary, I’m glad I waited for the second-run showing and only spent $1.75.

Starbuck(’)s Coffee

I found this sign on the day after National Punctuation Day. You can still see the residue from the adhesive where the extra apostrophe was attached.

Someone clearly got Starbucks Coffee confused with Starbuck’s coffee. Of course, in some cases, they could be the same thing:

Flickr photo by amidalasrogue

Line Items for 2009-09-25

• RT @lol_spam: Spam subject: “Your decent watch will upgrade your status.” You mean I won’t need my phone to update Facebook? AWESOME! #
• WTF? Google C&Ds Android modder Cyanogen. Isn’t it supposed to be licensed open-source in the first place? # The cease-and-desist order is about Google’s apps (Maps, Gmail, etc.) that are pre-installed, not about the operating system itself, but still, it feels like a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the license.
• Would you believe I found a postcard for Irvine? It’s a bunch of office buildings with mountains in the background. #
• Odd: it took 3 hours for my shoulder to get sore after the flu shot. Still, NOTHING compared to last year’s tetanus shot. Now THAT hurt! #
• This XKCD comic reminds me of the “uranium-free pizza” joke from some scouting event way back when. #

Flash Forward Premiere was Awesome!

The first episode of Flash Forward is one of the best-constructed pilot episodes I’ve seen in a long time, especially of an arc-driven series. (I’ve been trying to think of the last show I saw where I didn’t feel like it took the cast or story a few episodes to get up to speed, and all I can come up with is Firefly.) In one hour, it managed to introduce a slew of characters, show the major world-changing event that sets the arc in motion, pose serious questions (both story-wise and philosophically), force characters to change, set up conflicting agendas and points of view, establish a mystery or two, and find a thematic conclusion to the episode that doesn’t feel like it’s just the first hour of a two- or three-hour show.

Most shows would take two hours to do all that, or pick and choose to cram it into one. (They even found time for a car chase.)

One of the things that really impressed me was that, just using one episode’s worth of characters, they showed the beginnings of so many totally different ways of looking at humanity’s glimpse of the future, whether through hope, fear, or simply confusion. From what they said at Comic-Con, one of the ideas is to be able to expand this to theoretically anyone in the world.

The extended preview of upcoming episodes (a flash forward to Flashforward!) seemed to be making a great effort to say that yes, they’ll be answering questions, and no, you won’t have to wait 3 years to find out what the heck is going on (unlike that other show with Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan, and Oceanic Airlines).

There were a couple of moments that I thought were forced, though the only one that really stands out was the immediate juxtaposition of the “we’re being punished” and “this is a gift” reactions.

Adaptation

They did a good job of taking the source material, Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flashforward (I’m getting really confused as to whether the TV series has a space in the title or not, but the book definitely doesn’t), and making something that’s recognizably the same idea, but telling a new story with it. It has the benefit of all the thought he put into it:

• What are all the consequences of everyone blacking out for two minutes?
• If everyone experiences his or her own future at the same instant, what about people who are asleep at that time?
• How do you determine whether people are seeing different possible futures or the same future?
• How do you determine whether the future can be changed? (It’s a common enough storytelling trope, but how would you scientifically prove it?)

And so on. But they can tell a larger story, with more characters…and still surprise people who read the book. I don’t know whether they plan on using a similar explanation for what caused the event, or whether the TV version will come down on the side of “The future is not set” or “You can’t fight fate” (though I expect it will be the former, for storytelling reasons). And there was a moment a few minutes before the end that just came out of nowhere and left me thinking, “Wait, what???”

The book is definitely worth reading, especially if you like science fiction of the “what would happen if…?” variety, and it looks like it probably won’t spoil much.

Words, Words, Words

• It’s National Punctuation Day! (via @ThisIsTrue) # In honor of it, check out our collection of sign mistakes.
• This CAPTCHA wants me to type “gosmut” O_o #

New Paper Raincoat Album (and free song!)

The Paper Raincoat opened for Vienna Teng when we saw her at the Roxy back in April. I liked them enough to not only buy their EP, Safe in the Sound, at the concert, but sign up for their mailing list. “Brooklyn Blues” kind of reminds me of Fountains of Wayne in their quieter moments, like “Valley Winter Song,” and “Sympathetic Vibrations” gets stuck in my head on a regular basis. I’m not sure how to classify the style (modern folk rock?), but Katie compares them to Guster.

Now the band has a full album coming out.

Better yet, the preorder page is offering a free song, “Right Angles,” in MP3 format. I’ve only listened to it once (I’ve been playing the new Vertical Horizon album), but I like the sound and there’s some nice wordplay in there. (There’s some nice wordplay in Burning the Days, too, actually.)

And hey, it’s free!