While Terminator: Salvation also has the unenviable task of being both a sequel and a prequel at the same time, it manages to at least distinguish itself by going off in a new direction in terms of story. Yes, it’s the story of a prototype Terminator, how John Connor met Kyle Reese, and how John Connor became leader of the resistance, but it takes those elements as starting points and tells a story, rather than following a connect-the-dots path. (Though they did repeat a few stunts, and there are plot holes you could fly an H-K through.)

That, and T3 really annoyed me because it rejected the core theme of T2: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Whether that theme is actually supportable in the first two movies is debatable (especially considering that the first film appears to present a stable time loop), but this complete reversal is a bit of a slap in the face.*

Surrogates, Terminators and Borg

I actually don’t know much about Surrogates other than the fact that it’s based on a comic book, but I saw this poster the other day and was instantly reminded of the original posters advertising Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

It’s not a direct reference, of course, simply a similar concept — and the image of a partially-assembled Cameron (Summer Glau) was clearly inspired by the first appearance of the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) in Star Trek: First Contact.

Of course, as I was reminded while looking for pictures, the Borg Queen had her own antecedents as well.

Back to the Surrogates poster, it turns out that Bleeding Cool spotted a much closer reference in the form of an entry in a Celebrity Cyborgs photo alteration contest, featuring model Kate Moss.

Appropriately enough, the entry was apparently inspired by an article that mentioned an upcoming movie adaptation of Surrogates…

*Regarding the “slap in the face” — that’s not really the phrase I want to use, since it implies deliberate offense and is really overused in entitled fandom. What I’m getting at is that it’s sudden and shocking, like preparing to wade out slowly into a very cold pool, then getting pushed in and doing a belly flop.

I recently [edit: August 2006] discovered exactly how the Wayback Machine deals with changes to robots.txt.

First, some background. I have a weblog I’ve been running since 2002, switching from B2 to WordPress and changing the permalink structure twice (with appropriate HTTP redirects each time) as nicer structures became available. Unfortunately, some spiders kept hitting the old URLs over and over again, despite the fact that they forwarded with a 301 permanent redirect to the new locations. So, foolishly, I added the old links to robots.txt to get the spiders to stop.

Flash forward to earlier this week. I’ve made a post on Slashdot, which reminds me of a review I did of Might and Magic IX nearly four years ago. I head to my blog, pull up the post… and to my horror, discover that it’s missing half a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and I don’t remember the sense of what I originally wrote!

My backups are too recent (ironic, that), so I hit the Wayback Machine. They only have the post going back to 2004, which is still missing the chunk of text. Then I remember that the link structure was different, so I try hitting the oldest archived copies of the main page, and I’m able to pull up the summary with a link to the original location. I click on it… and I see:

Excluded by robots.txt (or words to that effect).

Now this is a page that was not blocked at the time that ia_archiver spidered it, but that was later blocked. The Wayback machine retroactively blocked access to the page based on the robots.txt content. I searched through the documentation and couldn’t determine whether the data had actually been removed or just blocked, so I decided to alter my site’s robots.txt file, fire off a request for clarification, and see what happened.

As it turns out, several days later, they unblocked the file, and I was able to restore the missing text.

In summary, the Wayback Machine will block end-users from accessing anything that is in your current robots.txt file. If you remove the restriction from your robots.txt, it will re-enable access, but only if it had archived the page in the first place.

(Originally posted as a Slashdot comment.)

But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.

It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.

Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave.

They have this Cybertronian artifact that everyone is after. It’s at Hoover Dam. Megatron’s a few rooms away, waking up from cryo. The Decepticons have infiltrated the base, and more are on their way. So they come up with this plan to smuggle the cube out and take it somewhere—I didn’t quite catch where, but I thought I heard something along the lines of “X city is 10 miles away”—and call in air support to get it to a secured location.

Now, Hoover Dam is at the edge of Nevada, in the middle of the desert. Las Vegas and Henderson are fairly close, but you can easily go out in the middle of nowhere.

So why would you instead drive 4-5 hours to Los Angeles? A major population center with millions of people you can endanger? And make your stand in the middle of downtown, in the middle of the day?

And how did the Decepticons manage not to catch up with them during the 3-hour drive through the desert, or the 1-hour drive through the Inland Empire and eastern Los Angeles County?

It only makes sense from a thematic standpoint—the outcome of this battle will determine the fate of humanity, after all, so let’s show them being endangered—or from a visual action standpoint. It’s a lot “cooler” and more intense to show giant robots knocking buildings around than fighting in the middle of the desert, and besides, they did that already in act 1. Strategically, though? Grade-A stupid.

And that leads to the second big gap in logic: the epilogue in which they’re dumping the Decepticon corpses at the bottom of the ocean so that there’s no evidence. What, so the thousands of people who saw them duking it out in downtown LA, not to mention the dozens (or probably hundreds) of deaths, are all going to keep quiet? Video taken on cell phones? Photos? You can bet there would have been news crews on hand, and even if they couldn’t transmit, they would have at least been recording.

Covering up the fact that giant robots were battling each other, special forces units with heavy artillery, and a freaking air force wing, would have been like covering up the fact that airplanes were involved in 9/11.

Well, the effects were good, and I had fun identifying scenery (flying around LA was nice, because the managed to get a really clear day to shoot, and you could actually see clear to Orange County in one shot). Some of the humor was good (I particularly liked zapping the Nokia, and attendant comments), but too much of it was forced, and some of it was just plain crude. I’m sorry, but Bumblebee “leaking lubricant” over someone was past the line.

Anyway, I’m glad I saw it on the big screen. There were a lot of great moments in it, but a lot of the film was just kind of tedious. It felt like they worked so hard on the details that they managed to miss the big picture. Which is kind of ironic for, well, a big picture.

Of course, the domain registrar has to share that info with the DNS system at large, and this morning, both sites were hit by SurveyBot/2.3 (Whois Source). As near as I can tell, they just check the home page of every registered domain once a week to grab the title and see whether the site is active.

And just eight hours later, Ask Jeeves/Teoma showed up. I assume they got the info from Whois Source, or maybe they’re plugged directly into the DNS registrar system.

It’s just amazing that the robots have arrived first—even before the content!

On the other end of the spectrum, the Roomba cleans up the living room and, in all likelihood, could not be used by a mad scientist to take over the Earth.

It sounds like someone’s been reading recent Sluggy Freelance comics!