Drive was incredible.

Had some serious writer's block this week, but I took a hot shower and it kind of helped.

Something Podcast This Way Comes

For a long time, I have been planning a podcast on movies with my roommate. This has been our intention since the beginning of the summer, but it never really materialized. Then other things got in the way, such as a potential job that would eat up all of my time and only afford me 3-4 hours of sleep a day, during the day. The news came through yesterday that I did not get the job, so I took it as a karmic suggestion that sleep is good and I should take a second crack at the podcast. We are even more excited now to do it. It'll be a few weeks out still while we plan how the segments will be laid out, figure out recording, consider adding a third person, and purchase the necessary equipment, but it's a thing, and it's going to happen. Also, if anyone has any tips on podcasting, please let me know. I was part of a podcast a few years ago but I was not involved in the editing process so I don't know much about that. Any suggestions or advice are much appreciated.

Fucking Badware

Badware is internet slang for anything that can harm your computer, and now, for the second time, mine. If you recall several months ago, my computer was afflicted with a vicious malware virus that ended with me effectively placing a digital shotgun to the proverbial throat of my laptop and pulling the trigger. I wiped that bitch clean, and now I have Linux. I later found out that I could have asked my friend to go into the computer code and delete the malware manually, thus saving my computer. This is what happens when we make rash decisions. Anyway, now I have this awesome dual-monitor computer that I build manually and still don't play any games on. Eventually I'll start using what $1300 got me.

Anyway, I started getting complaints that my emails would always go to spam folders. Mostly this was internal university emails, and the complaints were coming from professors. So I called IT and they got back later that day and said that my computer is embedding an HTML malware into the emails before sending them out, and the spam filters were finding it. Here is where it gets weird, however. This gentleman on the phone said that he looked through the code and found that the source apparently was something called "my dirty hobby". I pulled out the Linux laptop and did a search for it to see if it was a regular adult site or a known worm. It pulled up some German stuff on the first page. I don't speak German, but I know a teensy bit, and since some words are roughly the same in both English and German, I was able to infer some things. I could not imagine how this could have gotten on here, since there is no way in HELL I'm going on anything remotely adult-oriented on a $1300 machine.

Before nuking my hard drive again, I called my computer-savvy friend over, and he immediately brought hell down on my computer with a plethora of antivirus and scanning programs, including a formidable-looking Spybot 2.0 (WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW, MALWARE??). Unfortunately, it did not find anything. At the very least, if worst comes to worst, I have a backup hard drive for my music and documents and I know now to call my friend before going crazy and killing my computer. It might be best if I never had a child, either, mainly because I wouldn't want to have the same reaction if he or she got a virus.

Drive

Holy fucking shit did I love this movie. Drive is now the absolute best movie I've seen theatrically this year, and stands tall alongside I Saw the Devil as the overall best film I've seen this year on any format. It will be interesting taking them both into account at year's end to name my favorite. I was expecting a great movie, and yet it shattered all of those expectations because it was just so much more. I think the biggest factor in surprising me was that the script was so sparse. There is not a lot of dialogue, and a lot of the most important bits occur through a gesture, action, or facial expression. It speaks a lot for the acting and directing chops of everyone involved in the film. I used to do a lot of acting, and this is the stuff that has always been really important to me. I've never felt that dialogue is as important as physicality, so the script for Drive (and the book it was based on by James Sallis) catered very well to my mentality when it comes to acting and characterization. Perhaps that's also why I loved I Saw The Devil so much; the best bits in that film were also devoid of any spoken dialogue. I gushed pretty hard about the film in a review I wrote about it, too. Maybe a bit too much, but considering that Ryan Gosling is on my list of "Top 5 Men I Would Let Have Their Way With Me" (don't lie to yourself, every male has one), it was worth it. And that list? You'll see it eventually (maybe). If you'd like to (you do).