Checksum Arcanius

…Facebook is dumb again.

The correct move for Hasbro and Mattel, if they want both control and goodwill, would be to buy out Scrabulous. With their lawsuit, they may gain control, but they will not gain my goodwill. In other news, these forever-long copyrights are out of control.

I hereby state that I will never play the officially sanctioned online game.

I finally got around to cleaning up the Arcanius 2.0 theme a little bit, tweaking some little bits that were bothering me, and trying on moving the menu to the bottom. At some point, if I decide to keep the menu at the bottom of the page, I will divide it into two or three columns.

After the Critical Mass debacle last week, I spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and writing about what went wrong and what I might have been able to do to prevent it. One of the more interesting things I read about was a Critical Mass counterpoint ride that stressed legality while taking over the streets. It has been called various things, from “Courteous Mass” and “Civil Mass” to “Critical Manners.”

It just turns out that there is such a ride in Seattle, and it’s called “Ride Civil.” Not quite as catchy as what we came up with at Amazon before we heard about Ride Civil (C3M2R, see below), but it gets the point across. Ride Civil happens on the second Friday of every month, meeting at Westlake Center at 5:30.

For me, this is mostly an experiment. What will it be like riding with a group (who knows how large?) through an urban environment with lots of traffic, while following all of the rules, and even being extraordinarily courteous to our two-ton brethren? For this ride, I’m even going to wear my helmet. Yuck.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here is a very worthwhile article by Brad Templeton about some of the myths we hold about transit. Seeing empty buses roam around the Eastside most of my childhood, I always suspected that this was the case, even though it flew in the face of “common knowledge.” Its good to see that I wasn’t so far off in my suspicions.

The same guy also does a brief analysis of walking versus driving, with surprising results.

A week ago I saw The Dark Knight, the second of the reinvented Batman series than began, appropriately, with Batman Begins. The movie was well done and enjoyable, but I feel that too much today a movie being excessively dark is a substitute for a stronger story. The Dark Knight was definitely pushing is this unfortunate direction. I think a lot of people think it was better than it was because it was so dark. But really what it needed to make it excellent was a slightly tighter, slightly better written story. Overall, a good movie, but not really a great movie, in my opinion.

The Dark Knight: 4/5

Last night, the plan was to finally watch WALL-E from Pixar, but a late plane arrival from Dallas spoiled those plans. Instead, we ended up watching Wanted, an insolent, unfortunate movie about superhuman assassins. I am as willing as the next guy to suspend my disbelief, but I really don’t like it when, once I have suspended my disbelief, the movie continues to rub my face in the fact that I was willing to do just that. And this movie did that incessantly, along with being overtly obnoxious just because. All that being said, some of the action scenes were fun, just not worth watching the rest of the movie for.

Wanted: 2/5

The Seattle Times has an excellent article that sheds light on the fact that there is more than one account of events on Friday evening. I also did an interview with Kiro TV news that must have been aired because I have heard that some people saw me (I’ll put up a link if the video shows up). The Seattle PI also has a story that mentions the controversy. Its good to know that I had a part in getting out the truth (or at least the truth the best I can recount it). It would have been pretty depressing if everyone remained under the impression that the story they heard yesterday was exactly what happened.

Can anyone record it?