The Tory Party

Dear Firefox

Your browser is amusing for developers, but when my PC-using Mom resorts to your product because her Internet Explorer asplode, and each one of her computers manifested a separate bizarre, Google-requiring bug, that makes me mock you on the Interweb.

One was Firefox failing to remember form data because of an add-on she had enabled (something totally obscure like, you know, Flash, or Java). Apparently the solution to that is to disable Add-Ons and turn them on one-by-one to see which one is the problem.

The other — which really made me LoL — is that if you type in a text edit field in Firefox in Vista you can’t successfully enter an apostrophe or navigate with the arrow keys. An apostrophe will throw you into the quick search form at the bottom of the browser.

You would not believe the expressions you cannot use if you do not have apostrophes.

Still working on that one.

FIREFOX YOU ARE SILLY.

Avatar

Do you wanna date my…?

Worth seeing. Troubling in some ways, at once too long and not enough of the good stuff (Zoe Saldana more pls kthx), but worth seeing.

Here there be spoilers.

The race issues in Avatar are addressed here on io9 more eloquently than I could. I will emphasize that I liked Jake Sully (the hero) as a shmoe Na’avi, just barely making the cut, a lot more than I liked him being the Mary Sue Na’avi. He is a shmoe! He has shmoe virtues, like guts and not knowing when to quit! If he had tamed the super-bird with shmoe powers (like, “I figured I had nothing else to lose”) instead of, like, mystical unspeakable awesomeness, then that would be one thing.

But no. It was, like, Na’avi midichloreans in the third act.

I was told there would not be midichloreans

Anyway.

Anything with the Na’avi was pretty freakin’ brilliant. I totally bought what they were selling. The performances broke my brain. The world felt authentic. Totally believable.

Hakuna Matata!

Which is weird, because the human stuff felt like a cartoon.

Company jerkface Giovanni Ribisi out Paul-Reisers Paul Reiser from Aliens, then gets jettisoned at the midpoint, never to speak another line, in favor of Colonel Evil. Colonel Evil is so evil he drinks coffee on the bridge of the helicopters annihilating defenseless “humanards.” Colonel Evil is so evil he can’t wait to abandon diplomacy, though no one makes an effort to justify ‘war.’ Colonel Evil also somehow has the authority to make these decisions, as I suppose General Evil and President Evil had an Evil-Con to get to.

Michelle Rodriguez disobeys orders mid-mission and is yet somehow still in the service the next day.

Plus I have a general big problem with fantasy movies depicting troops getting killed. Hated it in Transformers 2, hated it in G. I. Joe (both of which were my bad for seeing, I know. It was RiffTrax). Yeah, we see the troops getting riled by Colonel Evil, but troops follow orders, so please don’t shoot them or blow them up for my entertainment.

Whoa, they just blew up nine American military analogues. Not cool!

A friend described Avatar as the “world’s most expensive anime,” and when I think about it like that I can make sense of it. It rambles. It drops raisins of real emotion in a pudding of repetitive nonsense. But overall it works.

And Zoe Saldana plays an eight-foot-tall blue woman who kicks monster ass. So you have to like that.

Men!

I made you a present. It’s what I do.

Jeep Memories

I lift my DDP in honor of The Cheat.

Jeep Beats

Found by Random_Tangent. Jeep nostalgia in 3… 2…