Three completely different items today.
Trust
The webpage for Cyndi’s company should be up within the next day. I’ve worked hard on it, and I’m very happy with how it turned out (not that I made more than cosmetic changes to the existing design.) I’ll announce the official launch when I hit the big publish button.
Sports
A very amusing anecdote by Jason Kottke about watching the Cubs game and the surreal bubble that TiVo can trap you in.
Scopophilia
I like Kill Bill volume 1 quite a lot. I like that it’s not trying to be smart like Pulp Fiction and I like that its chronological displacement seems to be for the sake of storytelling and not for the sake of itself. I like the violence and the swordplay.
Almost all of the movie has stylized cartoon spurting blood. A few scenes have very serious tones to them, though the movie itself doesn’t carry them anywhere. That’s to its benefit I think, because it allows it to remain an exhilirating take on samurai films while still containing the themes. If you were to look at me, tap 3 mana, and cast “Summon Dave’s Inner Film Major,” I’d say that it’s a movie about watching violence. Specifically, there are two scenes in which small children watch gruesome murders. Tarantino is playing with our willingness to allow the level of desentivity neccessary to watch a film as bloody as this. We’re willing to enjoy watching Uma slaugher 88 thugs in a restaurant because we write it off as kickass action, but then there’s the murder of Vernita Green followed by the image of her daughter standing in the doorway, and the murder of O-Ren Ishii’s parents as she hides under the bed. Both scenes are meant to jar us into realizing how terrible violence really is.