As directed, I read the first chapter of Bruce Schneier's new book Liars and Outliers (unfortunate title, I thought it was a takedown of Malcolm Gladwell) immedately upon it's arrival and I'm already having thoughts about it.
Schneier is talking about reputation systems and I think a genuine interest and desire for Wuffie (the person to person based reputation system described by Cory Doctorow in Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom). But on the other hand, what Schneier is also saying is that mankind has been able to cooperate and succeed even though it lacks this reputation system. The creation of social norms that promote a societal good seems to be acceptable to most people and thus we can trust them enough to work with them and develop a working relationship.
This of course reminded me of Burning Man and how when people are focused on working together, magic will happen. It's just assumed and a given that at Burning Man no one will mess with your stuff or you. It's very unlikely to see "bar fight" at Burning Man. Everyone is willing to work together. There is something about our transition from human in normal everyday capitalist society to participant in a desert survival gift economy that ads a certain instant trust value to people you've never met before.
How do we create more of this valuable openness that can lead to instant cooperation? How can people who are turned on and ready to create more of this trust help lead to more and more interconnected trust networks? Can Facebook or another such corporate owned social network really connect people in a way they can trust to create these trust networks? Can friend to friend connections connect the whole world and allow us to trust everybody? Can we flip this negative worldview of humanity simply by explaining the natural trust networks that already exist between all humans? Not sure if Schneier will answer these questions in his book, but I certainly hope to find out. It seems he's probably going to explain how this societal trust network functions with the help of people who break negative societal norms and the determint of parasites who break the system.
(if it gets lost in my massive unread book stack, I wanted to get at least this part of the review out, because I was really honored that he sent me a signed copy at a good price for me to review. I really enjoyed reading his classic book Secrets & Lies and it really influenced my thinking about the human aspect of security and trust, and now he's back for more....)
June 14, 2013
Why We Must Remember Rohwer
As I write this, once again the national dialogue turns to defining our enemies, the impulse to smear whole communities or people with the actions of others still too familiar and raw. Places like the museum and Rohwer camp exist to remind us of the dangers and fallibility of our democracy, which is only as strong as the adherence to our constitutional principles renders it. People like myself and those veterans lived through that failure, and we understand how quickly cherished liberties and freedom may slip away or disappear utterly.
Why We Must Remember Rohwer -- George Takei
Amazon Kindle - The Anti-Social Reader, how clipping limits make pirated ebooks better than paid ebooks
via Nitpicking Kindle
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2010
Full disclosure, I've never bought an e-book before. This week I bought Infinite Jest. I figure if you're gonna pay ten dollars for something that isn't real, you should really get your money's worth out of that ten dollars.
I like to highlight things. I like to share them. That's why I got a Kindle. I wanted to become a SOCIAL READER. I wanted to share quotes from the books I'm reading to my social network, I wanted to write about the books I'm reading using quotes from the books. Amazon Kindle seemed like the right way to do this. Boy was I wrong.
While at lunch, reading my Kindle, I attempted to make a highlight. I was greeted with this omniously foul screen:
"Unable to share. You have reached the clipping limit for this item."
WTF! Clipping limit? The book is 1,079 pages. WTF limit! I understand if you had a limit that stopped people from clipping the entire book, or if it was based upon the length of the individual clip, but I only want to share a paragraph. It's not going the ruin the 1,079 pages for anybody. The publisher already has my 10 dollars. I also bought a hardback copy of the book for 15. The publisher has made a full 25 dollars off me, what more do they want?
Can they really stop me from clipping? No.
a footnote from Infinite Jest
But they can ruin Social Reading. They can take away our ability to read and share easily, which was the whole point of the Amazon Kindle.
It was supposted to be a gateway into a new world of social reading. I've always quoted passages in my history papers, footnoted passages with credit to the author and information on how to find the book. This allows others to seek out the source material and read it for themselves. If I quote a passage from Infinite Jest, I'm advertising the book on the internet for you, so that others will hear about it and buy the book. Other than the above mentioned case of someone clipping the entire book, they have nothing to worry about. The only thing they're doing is annoying their paying customers. I've paid. Why fuck me in the mouth when I'm trying to do you a favor and share information about your book? Discussing it on the internet with other readers brings life to the text. That's what social reading is about. Not "clipping limits", which I may add were NOT defined when I purchased this book, NOT negoitable, as though I could expand my clipping limit by paying more and pretty much turns this magical ebook into a rotten piece of shit. Readers of the freely downloadable pdf copy that's floating around out there don't have to deal with this restriction. So basically you've made your paid product less useful than the free version. And you didn't stop me from sharing, you just pissed me off.
Also, please tell me, where on this page does it say this book comes with a "clipping limit"? Seems like false advertising to me. I smell a lawsuit.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2010
Full disclosure, I've never bought an e-book before. This week I bought Infinite Jest. I figure if you're gonna pay ten dollars for something that isn't real, you should really get your money's worth out of that ten dollars.
I like to highlight things. I like to share them. That's why I got a Kindle. I wanted to become a SOCIAL READER. I wanted to share quotes from the books I'm reading to my social network, I wanted to write about the books I'm reading using quotes from the books. Amazon Kindle seemed like the right way to do this. Boy was I wrong.
While at lunch, reading my Kindle, I attempted to make a highlight. I was greeted with this omniously foul screen:
"Unable to share. You have reached the clipping limit for this item."
WTF! Clipping limit? The book is 1,079 pages. WTF limit! I understand if you had a limit that stopped people from clipping the entire book, or if it was based upon the length of the individual clip, but I only want to share a paragraph. It's not going the ruin the 1,079 pages for anybody. The publisher already has my 10 dollars. I also bought a hardback copy of the book for 15. The publisher has made a full 25 dollars off me, what more do they want?
Can they really stop me from clipping? No.
a footnote from Infinite Jest
But they can ruin Social Reading. They can take away our ability to read and share easily, which was the whole point of the Amazon Kindle.
It was supposted to be a gateway into a new world of social reading. I've always quoted passages in my history papers, footnoted passages with credit to the author and information on how to find the book. This allows others to seek out the source material and read it for themselves. If I quote a passage from Infinite Jest, I'm advertising the book on the internet for you, so that others will hear about it and buy the book. Other than the above mentioned case of someone clipping the entire book, they have nothing to worry about. The only thing they're doing is annoying their paying customers. I've paid. Why fuck me in the mouth when I'm trying to do you a favor and share information about your book? Discussing it on the internet with other readers brings life to the text. That's what social reading is about. Not "clipping limits", which I may add were NOT defined when I purchased this book, NOT negoitable, as though I could expand my clipping limit by paying more and pretty much turns this magical ebook into a rotten piece of shit. Readers of the freely downloadable pdf copy that's floating around out there don't have to deal with this restriction. So basically you've made your paid product less useful than the free version. And you didn't stop me from sharing, you just pissed me off.
Also, please tell me, where on this page does it say this book comes with a "clipping limit"? Seems like false advertising to me. I smell a lawsuit.
Google to close Blogger, Reader and Search
via Nitpicking Google
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4, 2012
In more of their ongoing spring cleaning, Google has pledged to close every single part of Google that you currently use, if you do not start using Google+ instead of Facebook. "At Google, we're very serious about our products," said administrix Marissa Miller, "We find out what people are using, design interfaces that they like and then we shutdown the project because it's not related to Google+."
With the closing of Blogger, Reader and Search, Google is making a serious push into Google+. "We know that users love our current offerings, but once we close Blogger, Reader and Search, we feel that users will have nothing else to do but love Google+ as well," said Sergey Brin, CEO. "We've heard your pleas that you'll simply use another search engine or go back to using MyYahoo, but our core focus is not the end user. Our core focus is how many products do we have to close before people will submit and use Google+. We thought that last year's decision to close iGoogle, and throw away all that traffic for no reason, to decouple our google services, disconnect them and make them harder to use would give people the right idea. We at Google don't give a shit about our users, unless they're using Google+."
When asked about plans for the future, Google said they plan to shutdown the popular GoogleNews application. "As we've seen with the growth of apps and appstores, old webpages like Google News that people use everyday to get the news, simply aren't as valuable as they used to be." said Marissa Miller, "In fact, one of our engineers believes that Google could elminate it's entire web presence by 2015. We will exist entirely in the Google Chrome Play App Store." Just don't tell her, that Google plans to close the Chrome Play App Store in 2014, siting a lack of user interest in the Android platform, which they also plan to sunset in 2013. "Basically we don't want anyone to use our products and we will do whatever is neccessary to chase them away. Even if they switched from MyYahoo years ago and prefer iGoogles smooth interface to the jangled mess of MyYahoo, we don't care. We want to send them away, back to what they used for information in the 90s. Ideally old competitors like Alta Vista and Lycos will rise up again to take this web traffic that after all these years and all this work, we really don't want."
WEDNESDAY, JULY 4, 2012
In more of their ongoing spring cleaning, Google has pledged to close every single part of Google that you currently use, if you do not start using Google+ instead of Facebook. "At Google, we're very serious about our products," said administrix Marissa Miller, "We find out what people are using, design interfaces that they like and then we shutdown the project because it's not related to Google+."
With the closing of Blogger, Reader and Search, Google is making a serious push into Google+. "We know that users love our current offerings, but once we close Blogger, Reader and Search, we feel that users will have nothing else to do but love Google+ as well," said Sergey Brin, CEO. "We've heard your pleas that you'll simply use another search engine or go back to using MyYahoo, but our core focus is not the end user. Our core focus is how many products do we have to close before people will submit and use Google+. We thought that last year's decision to close iGoogle, and throw away all that traffic for no reason, to decouple our google services, disconnect them and make them harder to use would give people the right idea. We at Google don't give a shit about our users, unless they're using Google+."
When asked about plans for the future, Google said they plan to shutdown the popular GoogleNews application. "As we've seen with the growth of apps and appstores, old webpages like Google News that people use everyday to get the news, simply aren't as valuable as they used to be." said Marissa Miller, "In fact, one of our engineers believes that Google could elminate it's entire web presence by 2015. We will exist entirely in the Google Chrome Play App Store." Just don't tell her, that Google plans to close the Chrome Play App Store in 2014, siting a lack of user interest in the Android platform, which they also plan to sunset in 2013. "Basically we don't want anyone to use our products and we will do whatever is neccessary to chase them away. Even if they switched from MyYahoo years ago and prefer iGoogles smooth interface to the jangled mess of MyYahoo, we don't care. We want to send them away, back to what they used for information in the 90s. Ideally old competitors like Alta Vista and Lycos will rise up again to take this web traffic that after all these years and all this work, we really don't want."
March 20, 2013
An Open Letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Tomas Young, an American Veteran
source: dangerous minds
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
—Tomas Young
learn more about Tomas Young:
The Crucifixion of Tomas Young
February 8, 2013
Who is John Galt? - Live Blogging Atlas Shrugged Part II
I restart the movie and wonder if I will make it through it all.
Whoa, it's the doctor from Voyager. Examining Galt's engine. Greyer.
"But you built it anyway." Main problem with the films is that they follow the books too closely and the books are mad melodramatic. The cheap music and constant greenscreening doesn't help much either.
"Deactivating Emergency Medical Hologram." Dagney uses scifi to hide the Galt engine when he mentions the State Science Institute.
I'm betting the science guy starts trying to steal the engine right away.
How funny they have to create a rail system for Dagney to run as the original robber barons bought up and destroyed the streetcars and urban rail in America has failed under the rule of the gasoline engine.
Love how they still talk like robots even though they're all modern holding their ipads.
Media exists to explain Ayn's laws and ideas. "Fair Share Act"
It feels like they're reading the book outloud.
"It's as if some destroyer is sweeping up everybody who could dig us out of this mess." this so classic.
Wyatt thinks leaving the oil burning is the same as leaving it when he found it. Asshole.
Trying to remember where we left off. This must be horribly confusing to people who haven't read the book. My only real wonder is, will Galt's speech be in this movie or will it be the entiretity of the second movie. Will they do a director's cut where somebody reads it all?
Love it how Dagney gets all whiney everytime you mention John Galt.
Tagline for the movie is, "Everyone has their breaking point" -- I wonder if it will be the music. Booooring.
Holy shit it's Hannity. CREEEEEEEPY!
Reardon speaks with a creepy smoky voice that sounds awful. His office is obvious fake green screen and looks bad.
"It's the job you chose, I've just never met a looter with such a sense of dedication..." -- I sense a lecture coming from Reardon. Two characters, sitting on couches, lecturing eachother. We're gonna be here a while.
Reardon is lecturing him on why he won't sell the government his metal. With his gravely voice and the way he's lecturing he sounds just like Edward James Olmos from Stand and Deliver.
"try pouring a ton of steel without ridgid principles."
Dagney's brother literally giving cash away on the street and now he's flirting with some shopkeeper. Shades of Citizen Kane. Ever performed in an Opera House?
They went to a concert instead.
Oh sweet. The pianist disapeared. "Who is John Galt?" this is done pretty well and despite the incredbily cheap typography they keep using, helps to build a real sense of drama.
Wish that more people would disapear. Like gravely Reardon and idiot dagney. Love the way cars in the future all drive perfectly flat on green screens.
Two characters in a car reading the book aloud not looking at eachother.
Yup. It's one of the guys from Drew Carey. I can only assume this is a who's who of Republican leaning actors who agreed to be in Atlas Shrugged II on the cheap.
This Guy.
Only the bad music can carry us through these endlessly boring scenes.
I wonder if this is what watching that On the Road movie would be like. Watching pale imitations of characters. Odd scenery that doesn't fit. Romanticism with all the romance taken away.
Safeway says these chips are generic, but I think they taste better than Doritos.
Pause to get some snack food and a banana. Ayn would demand that I do this for myself and not think of you first. It's important for me to eat despite the internet's endless hunger and demand for more Atlas Shrugged II live blogging.
Thinking about why I have absolutely no faith in this movie, despite liking the themes and the characters, the scope and the melodrama and at one time even the philosophy, it's because I know. I know that instead of hiring a screenwriter to recreate this old book as a movie, and rewrite everything, they just took Ayn's word as if it were the gospel, and didn't change anything. That's why everything sounds wooden and stolid, pale and old. Every choice they made, they went with the gospel.
Wow, time passes and he married the girl from the supermarket just like Citizen Kane. Classic Randism, "I'm the woman in this family. -- That's quite alright, I'm the man."
Finally Fransisco, left out of the first movie. Not good enough. None of the actors are good enough. Fransisco, not young or fun enough. Dagney, not pretty enough, too much Amy Poller playing Hillary Clinton, Reardon terrible voice not large enough shoulders, not imposing enough figure. Eddie not wormy enough, no sweater, bald head is too modern, why not let him be a throwback. I can only dread who they got to play Galt.
Big Fransico speech - What is the root of all money?
Shitty actor, he's too short and too old and not rich enough and fun enough, but it's still a big speech and he tried his best. No music, no drama, they underplay the moment. They need to go bigger with the mellodrama. It's very dramatic.
"Money is the root of all evil, so I just got tired of being evil." -- Fransisco, when asked why he destroyed his mines.
3 hours more and we're back to the slow moving music and no talking. Reardon's unhappy wife, life, etc.
Email says not to miss Foreigner. Dunno about that.
I've got double vision.
Reardon and his gravely voice are fucking his shitty wife, or maybe that was Dagney. Who cares. Just waiting for Galt, Galt, Galt.
Oh. So it was Dagney, so quiet and blah. His wife found him and she's mad, blah blah blah.
Galt Galt Galt!
Film is also held back by this panelboard directing. All the shots are wide. When his angry wife is talking I want a close up. A real close up. Where I can see her face, not her face and a curtain. Seems like most of the shots are set up in advance so they can walk in and out of them, with teh room. And there it is face to face with the lighted window behind them and they hold it forever, it looks bad and cheap like two talking fishheads, puppets.
Again, no movement, no extra cameras for closeups, boring.
All the visuals are just so cheap. The redlight and recording button just make it look so old. Why bother doing it if it ruins the perfectly good computer animation behind it.
Reardon's voice is just so bad I can't believe he's one of the major characters in this film.
Coulda sworn that angry guy was Richard Dreyfuss, but IMDB doesn't agree.
Love it when two people get together in a room and talk. Dagney trying to convince the coal guy not to quit. another great speech about Coal being used by steel and rail. value for value trades.
"I can't set my price. Can't decide who to sell it to. I'm just feeding the beast that's trying to destroy me."
"You're just going to let them have your coal?"
(Your coal, that is to say he owns the earth and all that comes from it, not the people or the human race.)
Love it when they use the word looters, moochers!
This part is just as confusing as it was in the book. Why send Fransisco to Reardon, why not just send Galt himself.
Whoa big Atlas speech. Can't believe they left this out of the first one. Fransisco has the best lines.
"I'd tell him to shrug."
Love it how he knows the problem is the low grade ore. Big drama as the rest of the factory is falling apart and he saves Fransisco.
Dagney goes to visit Diedrich Bader and her engine. Yeah right. I'll bet he stuck around. Whoa, he's still here, one final scene I guess.
Looks like Reardon is going with the Flesh and Blood Defense.
Whoa it's the Dad from Family Ties. Gonna fuck your shit up Keaton style now. Awww yeah.
I swear given the quality of these extras they must be selling these parts to rich donors.
I keep trying to make it louder and leaving it on while I leave the room ot get more chips and hoping it will go away.
"Capitalism doesn't work." Big men in suits speech in boardroom. Evil, but just not evil enough and we've lost the music, it's not meant to be melodramatic, but it is, it is. They just don't get it.
Directive 10-2-89 - woooooooo what's that? Wow. People made slaves of their corporations. Another big speech. Government taking all patents and "no new products to be built". Pretty awesome directive. "it's all happening so fast...." (yeah, that's cause it's bad melodrama. one of the best lines so far.
How are they going to explain this. One of the most unexplainable moments of the book. Reardon won't sign his patents away unless you blackmail him. He's already being divorced and his name is ruined, but he does it for Dagney's good name? The very thing that Dagney would love him for is his ability to stand up to these goons, but he signs to save her name from an affair? What would Dagney care about her affairs?
Dagney quits.
It's strange how they've added in a group of conservative protestors acting against the government. Tea Party inpiration I guess.
Reardon bent like a slug. Gravely voice so bad. Wish he would hurry up and disapear. Booooring.
Neat to see conservatives marginalized with their cheap handwritten signs just like liberal protesters.
They put some kid who answers phones in charge of the railroad and said he got no raise thanks to 10-289, that was actually pretty cool. But of course here comes the resulting collision.
Dagney takes her anger out on some wooden furniture.
Ha Ha, bueracrats destroyed by their own collectivism. This scene is actually pretty funny. Too bad they didn't actually collide. Just broke the bottom of the train and now their transportation system is fucked. Trains are such a collectivist thing anyway.
Paused it for a long time, but the movie is still here. Sounds like it's not going to be a collision, but a death train, a smoker run through a tunnel. Not sure though. We'll see.
"To pull, when you've got it, you've got it."
Ah there it is. the collision. How awesome, a passenger can push a button to stop a train? And now the switch jams. Too bad they couldn't have called the driver of the other train on his cell phone and told him to stop. Or a satelite phone. Technology kinda ruins 1940s plots.
Dagney is using a power drill to build her deck. You get my point. Power drills, but no cell phones or Sat navs to tell the other trains to stop. Realtime location tracking, but they can't stop them. Sorry, I can't type well from all the laughing.
Fransisco's back and his lines have never sounded more cheesy. How could this character have seemed so much better on the page? He also slips into the Edward James Olmos gravely voice at time. I wonder, did Olmos direct this film?
They use a cell phone to call Dagney at her cabin to tell her about the train they lost. Even the Army didn't have cell phones to tell the train to stop. It would have made more sense if they'd just had a broken engine on the tracks and couldn't move it and someone else decided to go through anyway not knowing about the train. Eh whatever, no 1940s plots make sense when brought to the future but not updated. Why not just shoot it in the 1940s? If you're gonna go with the script and the melodrama why not just make it old?
If Dagney had been younger and more beautiful I'd believe she was saying these things because she was optmistic and young, rather than old and desperate.
The lines just need to be so much harder than the way she's delivering them. She's just not strong enough. "I'm taking the train."
And now she's holding her old hand up to her old neck and looking whiny and weak on the train. I'm not even sure Ayn Rand would have liked this movie.
Like the Godot that never comes, we spend the entire film looking for Galt. Old Drew Carey guy is working on his engine again and it seems to be working. Maybe Galt will show up now.
Nope. Engine guy gone and Galt only speaks again. Denied Galt. It's just not enough though. Two movies and still no real main character.
Dagney meets the last engineer. The only man working. Another scene of two people talking. Wonder if the train behind them is bluescreen. Ha Ha. He's the guy who started the expression. How perfect.
"best of his ability, paid to his needs." Communism. The heart of the film. Just like being back on Animal Farm with Georgey Orwell.
"I will stop the motor of the world."
so dramatic. but what a dickwad.
John Galt, Major Asshole. Denied at one company, decides to destroy entire world.
Wow. $50 a gallon gasoline. Pretty awesome. Her tank is barely filling and the money meter is going crazy. $500 for 10 gallons. That's crazy.
I just want to say. Finally an actor. Diedrich Bader. "You'll be too late." Delivered perfectly. Melodramatic and closing the computer and leaving. "you'll be too late." excellent.
Saw a shitty old honda on screen. First not new car I've seen in a movie in a long time. Of course it's the scientist's car. Ha ha.
And now Dagney is chasing Galt's plane explaining the opening scene. Guess the movie is about to end. Fingers crossed for a cliffhanger without showing us Galt.
Worst case, they open up Galt's Gulch and he starts speaking and we'll never leave.
Aww sweet. She's gonna fly into the mountain.
It's not just a mirage, but some other crazy shit. Like a Star Trek wormhole. And I don't think they finished rendering the outside of her plane. Musta ran out of money. Big finish! You'd think Galt's plane landed at an airfield and she could have just followed it.
Too bad she didn't have a smaller plane she could have ejected from. Not sure that people usually crawl away from these ones unhurt. Although at least this plane crash has engines, bodies and seats. Even has a big part of the nose. Not like those other planes that vaporized.
Man in the shadows, coming to save her. "I am John Galt." Finally some melodramatic music, must have tipped the composer the leftover animation money. Big dramatic lighting on her face, almost a close up, but still leaving room for the rest of the frame. Gotta get this all in two shots boys. Big slow getting out of plane scene. Incredibly slow. Oh it's cause they're holding hands, and that's it. END.
I did it! Wooo!
Bring on Part 3: Galt's Speech!