Solo-nerding

I feel like I'm a weird sort of geek/nerd/weirdo/whatever you want to call it.
I've listened to a lot of famous geeks talk about loving stuff and how it doesn't matter what you love, but if you have a passion for it, that's what you're a geek for. And that's cool. But they also talk about finding other people interested in the same things you like and talking about them and sharing and being excited together.
And that's where I veer away from the standard. I really hate talking about things I'm interested in with people. A friend of mine just discovered Craig Ferguson and is telling me his opinions on him. Like, in detail, analyzing his skills as a comedian. "I watched this one special and he's definitely a good comedian with some holes in his set." I don't want to get into it. I don't think about it like that. I like someone or I don't. I really am not that involved analytically with stuff. That sort of ruins it all for me. Over-thinking it, like. I don't want to talk about why I like something. I just do.
Granted, when I have a tv show or movie I'm watching, I will certainly sometimes get into thinking about it, discussing it with Paul or writing a blog post about something, but often that's so I can figure out how I feel about something new or because I have a thought that I need to share with someone to see if it makes sense.
Anyway, that struck me today.

Bad Marketing

So...despite having a release date listed literally everywhere as yesterday, apparently The Imitation Game is actually only out in limited release? And no one seems to know it's full release date?  I am so confused by their marketing. You could have...y'know...mentioned that...ever? IMDb doesn't even know about it. They just have yesterday listed as the release date.
Also, theater websites like Cinemark have it listed neither under current films or coming attractions so...that's baffling.

After more digging: The website for the film even had a countdown to yesterday as the big opening! IN ONLY FOUR THEATERS IN TWO CITIES! That's not even the standard limited release anymore. It's like they were trying the super old Hollywood version of limited release. Like....1920's old Hollywood. This is ludicrous.

Edit: Today an article was published talking about the weekend's take. Apparently the plan is and has always been to run in those 4 theaters this weekend and next and then go wide on Dec 12. Except that no one heard about that plan and I'm still grumpy. 

...but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

 So I just took this Sporcle quiz:

http://www.sporcle.com/games/Mimbleton/fictional-races-clickable/results

and *spoilers* one of the fictional races was martians, from War of the Worlds.

Now...I know that there aren't martians. (As far as science is aware) But it seemed odd to me to put them in the same category of "made up creatures" as say, Daleks and Ewoks. Clearly, they are all fictional, in that no such thing exists. But it seemed bizarre to me to call "martians" made up, because it seems to me that if there were creatures living on Mars, we'd call them martians.

Maybe it's just a name thing. Marvin the Martian is clearly made up. And I guess that, since in War of the Worlds these creatures have some characterization that is imagined by H.G. Welles* they are also to be considered made up. I think it's just the name. "Martians." This word has existed for centuries and feels far more "real"


*Note: When I was younger, H.G. Welles and Orson Welles were interchangeable in my brain. I'd feel worse about this, but they were both obviously connected to War of the Worlds, so I feel like it's an easy mistake to make.

Life-chanigng (or not) musicals

I love the musical as a form. The singing, dancing, gorgeous sets, etc. Movie musicals too (especially?) but I would not describe any of the ones I've seen as "life-changing." Sondheim's "Company" is the only one that comes close.

Jeff said that, for him, "South Pacific" at Lincoln Center was life-altering, which I can believe. But I haven't seen "South Pacific." I guess I'll put it on the list. I realized thinking about it that there is a whole corner of the musical world I hadn't seen. Quite a bit of the Rogers and Hammerstein, as it turns out. I probably ought to fix that, since stuff like "Oklahoma!" is said to be genre-altering.

Anyway, not a whole lot to say on this one, but it was an interesting insight to realize that for something I love so much, I wouldn't say any one piece was really influential for me.

Knowing things

So the new CBS show Scorpion is a cute concept: A team of geniuses that help the FBI and have become surrogate family to a woman with a "mentally enabled" son. Great. Fine. Except that in every episode so far, they have flubbed the technology details so horrifically that the shows make no sense if you have any clue about how computers and the internet work. Not deep knowledge, just basics, like the idea that if you can access a data center remotely, you don't need to have your team physically drive to said data center to grab the drive. (Nevermind the knowledge that your backup cannot possibly be overwriting itself every few hours or that in a "cloud storage" data center, there isn't one specific drive with your shit on it.) (That episode was particularly difficult to watch)

This week's was at least a little subtle: The badguys have a plot to game the stock market system by making trades on prices that have changed but haven't been posted publicly yet. This sounds like a great badguy plot, right? Sneaking information, using it to make money, like that ticker tape delay ploy they use in "The Sting"!

Except that this is the underlying strategy in something called High Frequency Trading, and it's completely legal. (Skeevy as hell, perhaps, but totally legal) There are folks out there doing this now, constantly trading, making minute gains on each transaction billions of times. Making millions of dollars fractions of a penny at a time.

I admit that this one is not nearly as terrible as the others technologically speaking. The thing they are talking about is, in fact, a real thing that can be (and is) done by real people with real computer skills. It's just totally not illegal at all.