Recent diversions

Switching to letter grades and/or a 5-point scale depending on the angle of the sun..

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A+, now that I've had time to reflect on it. Good stuff, won't discuss the plot yet out of respect for those who haven't had a chance to consume it. (My favorite "spoiler" is from mikewas: "Wow! Who'd have guessed that Harry Potter dies in the FIRST CHAPTER?")

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (movie): 4 out of 5. Solid. I love how they can get all the adult Brit actors back to reprise their characters (except of course for Dumbledore). Great for continuity.

• The Matrix Revolutions: 2 out of 5. Finally got around to watching this... In Potter 7, Rowling does as good a job of explaining her plot as one could hope for. She may well have watched Matrix 3 for examples of what not to do.

  Still love Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith though.

  Seriously, with that level of numeric imbalance between machines & residents of Zion, and the amount of time Neo took to do his thing, there should have been no survivors at all. An army of Atari 2600s could have figured out how to wipe it out given that much time, let alone those sentinels.

More later.

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 Comments back on

Comments are back on, thanks to the Jay Allen's Comment Challenge plugin which should prevent most or all of the comment spam 'round here. (To comment now, there's just one more blank to fill out, and it's easy.) It's been enabled for a couple of days and I have had no comment spam so far.

It's funny, I've long been on the fence about having any comments enabled at all. Not least because of the same sort of observations that Joel Spolsky makes --

[Winer sees blog comments as] a part of the problem, not the solution. You don't have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else's thoughts. That's not freedom of expression, that's an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space..

... When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

(Oddly, I've found that as soon as I shut off the possibility of getting feedback via comments, I immediately develop a desire for it. It's weird.)

Contra Joel, not all comment threads end up in nastiness. Clay Shirky expounds--

..the uselessness of comments it is not the universal truth that Dave or Joel make it out to be, for two reasons. First, posting and conversation are different kinds of things — same keyboard, same text box, same web page, different modes of expression. Second, the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale.

If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any “everyone post to their own blog”.

It's true, the places I know of with comment trouble are the ones with a lot of traffic; that hasn't been the state of things here for some time. So for now, unless and until comment threads here become an ugly place, I will typically leave comments open on a thread.

Related:

• Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad)
• A great Clay Shirky essay/talk from 2003: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (It does not allow comments at the bottom.)

  Meta   3 comment(s)  

Oooo, I'll have to install this myself. I was patiently waiting for MT4 to solve my comment spam issues, but Jay's stuff is always great. And this means I don't have to wait!
      ...posted by Glen Engel-Cox on July 23, 2007 11:21 AM

Look, no image generator doodad with letters I can't read. For me Matrix 3 proved to me that there was ultimately no real depth to this whole Matrix-world-philosophy. After Matrix 2, people were almost ready to sign up for it as a religion. Aside from the serious missteps in Episode I (i.e. midichlorians), Star Wars could be a fine religion! I hope work picks up soon.
      ...posted by Andrew on July 25, 2007 3:05 PM

Matrix 3 was like watching the deleted scenes from the previous two movies--y'know, the stuff not good enough to make it to the screen. It was one of the few movies where I left the theater pissed that I had spent money on a *matinee*. All that time & effort to resolve absolutely NOTHING! Grrr.
      ...posted by Neil on August 2, 2007 9:14 PM

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