I’m solarbird on ello.co if you’re into that sort of thing. Mostly I’m camping the name, but if people use it, maybe I will too.

The band site will be offline some today, for security mitigation measures which have actually already started. (Debian backports have not released a patch yet for a particular issue of immediate importance.)

Relatedly, if you haven’t patched any systems you have for this vulnerability, get on that.

Polls are open in Scotland. Good luck from Cascadia – regardless of the outcome.

The CBC did a Cascadia story a couple of months ago, I totally missed it. They got a few things wrong (and are so very not taking it seriously) but it’s not bad.

I got tagged on the 15 Films challenge. Consider yourself tagged, or don’t – I’m not fond of that part, and besides, this goes a zillion places.

But here, my top 15 favourite/personally influential films of all time – don’t consider these in order, or maybe do, if you want. I don’t. Also, I’m leaving out films I love in the ironic sense – the works of Ed Wood, Jr, the original Gamera trilogy, Robot Monster, Radar Secret Service, and so on.

1) Casablanca. How can it not be? It is a perfect film.

2) Brazil. Let’s take 1984 and h́̚a̢ͪ̉͐̽͜͏l̎̃ͪ̀ͨ͌̑͘l̑̇̋ͭ͏uͫ͆̆̂̊̏̚c̸̴ͨ̀ͯ̀̄̈́̀iͣͥ̉ͯ͡ņ̸̂ͯͩ̐ô̸ͦ̊g͆̈̾̎ͫ̚e̴ͤ̇́͐̒̐͏nͯ̈̿͞͡sͤͮ͒́̂ͩ҉ and see what happens. Answer: brilliance.

3) Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し). Transcendent in every way. For years, I was emotionally ready to dump everything and go work at Yubaba’s bath house if the opportunity arose. Magic lessons required, of course.

4) The Manchurian Candidate (1961). I would argue possibly the best cold war film, only matched by Doctor Strangelove. So paranoid, so relentless, so sad. Angela Lansbury is brilliant, perfect evil. I’d like to see her go up against Davros in Doctor Who. (Spoiler: she’d destroy him.)

5) O Brother Where Art Thou? If you don’t feel the gods intervening in the radio station, you aren’t reachable.

6) The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson trilogy), because how do you even realise this? And yet, they did. Astounding.

7) Pacific Rim, because I have never walked out of a theatre in a daze like that before, with my brain still going, what the fuck did I just see and can I see it again?!

8) On the Beach, probably the third- or fourth-best cold war film. (See also the last great one: Threads (1984).) Why this and Manchurian Candidate and not Doctor Strangelove? To be honest, I can’t quite tell you why. Strangelove is fantastic. But I had the unfortunate confluence of seeing that and reading Fail Safe at about the same time, and the mix is… hilarious? But not intentionally. And why not Threads? Different era, different world, I guess. I dunno.

9) Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫). I will possibly never watch this film again, because the first time destroyed me. I think… this is where I learned to love a film about losing.

10) The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. Welcome to my sense of humour. Population: me.

11) Captain Blood (1935). Welcome to my sense of adventure! Population me, and a bunch of pirates. “You speak treason!” “Fluently.”

12) The Lion in Winter. Welcome to my idea about family! Population me, and all my horrible memories. Made beautiful by tremendous acting and actual razor wit. And occasionally, actual razors. Ah, family.

13) The Monolith Monsters. If an alien invasion film could be a procedural, this would be it. A minor film, but Science! and Rationality!

14) The Maltese Falcon (1941, the one with Bogie, the one you know about). The perfect detective film. Often overlooked; Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer, the gunsel. A small part, but watch him barely control – barely control – his crazy rage. There’s one point in particular where he is so angry he can barely move. It’s great.

15) Lilo and Stitch. A film I did not expect out of Disney, a love song to Hawai’i, funny, smart, poignant.

That’s my list right now. It’d probably have different items on it if someone asked again later. What’s yours?

Today is Internet Slowdown day, a mass protest and example of what the cable cartels will do and are doing to the internet with the end of network neutrality. There’s money on both sides of this fight, which means it’s one of those little windows of opportunity where public opinion can actually matter.

Over 99% of comments to the FCC on this were opposed to ending network neutrality. And the count was overwhelming. Now go here to send letters to the American Congress and President.

Go. Now.

SUPERB P0WNERSHIP is the phrase of the day. Zoe Quinn has been dealing with a misogynist campaign against her for months, and, whelp, guess who has been infiltrating 4chan’s chat rooms and logging the shit out of all of the entire campaign’s ops room? Oh yeah. That would be Zoe.

DEMOLITION.

Oh, her angry ex-boyfriend? He’s in the logs too, helping coordinate harassment. Hey, look, a revenge campaign for breaking up with him! SMILE FOR THE CAMERAS, DOUCHEBAGS! There’s even video. This is epic destruction.

If you have no idea what this is about, it’s about misogyny in gaming, and an ongoing campaign to force women out of gaming, focusing on several specific people, one of whom is Zoe Quinn. You can get a bit of a summary here, if you like.

eta: Judging from the h8r reblogs on Tumblr and the anonymous asks I’ve got, it looks like the attempt at “defence” here is, “It’s all out of context!” Hey, pro tip: only cite context when it actually helps your case. Unlike here. Where it doesn’t.

So, yeah, the latest Doctor Who, “Into the Dalek,” tipped the metre into wretched. Seriously, if I wanted to watch people traipsing through a giant robot, I’d watch Lost in Space, so I’m going to talk a little about this episode using stills from the Series 2 Lost in Space episode, “Trip Through the Robot.”

So first, there’s explosions. In media res, and all that. It’s not as good as starting a story, but it works in a pinch. And hey, future setting! I like those. Explosions!

Then there’s more explosions, in case you missed the first ones.

But all that’s more okay than it should be, because The Doctor is watching! And he saves the one that hasn’t completely blown up yet, even though she keeps wanting to shoot him too.

Yay! Saved! The whole crew gets together and thanks The Doctor, but then decides well, we like you, but we still have to kill you. That’s how we show gratitude here in the future!

But that’s not important either, because in fact none of it matters a few seconds later because the The Doctor runs and gets The Companion, which The Crew apparently decided he could do instead of shooting him, because The Crew have serious mood-instability issues have a patient. WHO COULD IT BE? Whups, not yet, time for new credits.

…and then we run about with The Companion for a while, but then The Doctor shows up, and we all go find out who is The Patient. And who is The Patient? Dun dun dunnnnnn A DALEK! O NOES!

This Dalek is very sick – so sick it has turned into a drama queen.

So, whelp, there’s only one thing to be done for it – Let’s Get Small! Now, this makes no damn sense even for Doctor Who, because honestly, have you priced tiny atoms lately? Nobody has the money for that. Even Lost in Space knew better, and just made the Robot Dalek Robot really huge.

But that’s not important either! All that matters is that even at this size, it’s bigger on the inside, because really, who can manage scale. Scale is difficult, who cares, it’s Doctor Who, suspend some goddamn disbelief already. Anyway, The Doctor and The Companion go inside. (And to be fair, this was a visually interesting moment in the actual episode, and I kind of liked that bit. Now, back to the hack job I’m doing here.)

And there’s a bit of wandering around inside, and finding things. None of those bits might be important, could they? Eh. Oh, look, it’s the engine room of the BroTrek Enterprise, a.k.a., a brewery! This would be convenient, except alcohol did not help this episode, and believe me, right about here, I started trying.

But oh no! There are antibodies inside the robot and they’re after us! Anybody got some gum? It won’t help, but hey, gum!

Run! Run some more! Oh good, here, here’s a diode heart food storage area, we’ll be safe there – it’s too important to have defences! (STRATEGY!)

Oh, as an aside, Happy Christmas! Apparently. But I digress.

We need to Fix The Dalek! Because this Dalek is so broken it’s become ‘good,’ which apparently means ranting about killing the things a Dalek doesn’t normally want to kill, and sure, that makes ethical sense, but hey, carry on.

And they get inside the jukebox reactor which powers the Dalek, and weld together the broken bit with… a screwdriver. Fine, whatever. Radiation: It’s Fucking Magic. So is the sonic. I’m kind of okay with that, it’s part of the territory.

YAY! WE FIXED THE DALEK!

YAY! IT WANTS TO KILL EVERYBODY BUT DALEKS AGAIN AND CALLS IN THE FLEET! WHO COULD’VE CALLED THAT?! OH NOES, HERE COMES THE DALEK SAUCER!

OH NOES THE SHIP IS ASPLODES!

Strangely, the Dalek boarding party is really not very large. And they board instead of just blowing up the ship some more. Anyway, then there’s a bunch of running around while The Doctor and The Companion try to re-reboot The Dalek into Good Mode again. Because sure, enough hits on the reboot button has to do something, right?

And The Doctor climbs up into The Dalek’s brain chamber and talks to it for a while.

And The Crew is running around getting shot at and killed sometimes because they don’t run away very well. And who are these jerks, anyway? Mostly people who wanted to kill The Doctor for saving and returning one of their fighter pilots. They must just hate her.

But eventually, they reboot The Dalek again, and this time it comes back up Good! Yay! But that just means it wants to kill Daleks again, which they thought was good before, but now it’s all depressing for some reason, I guess because The Dalek found out that The Doctor really does not like Daleks. And that’s just like The Good Dalek! And that’s bad. So The Doctor is being all mopey about not being better than The Dalek, even though that’s bollocks.

There’s supposed to be a dilemma in there about how The Doctor makes a better Dalek than The Dalek, except we saw that in the new series before already, and frankly, we saw it a lot better and more convincingly.

But in the end it works out kind of okay anyway, because The Companion tells The Doctor hey, you’re trying, and intent – like radiation! – is fucking magic, and matters a lot more than saving the universe a couple of zillion times, and that picks him up a bit. That’s… nice? I guess?

And then The Doctor drops off The Companion and wanders off in television space and time again. l8r l8r don’t be a h8r.

Roll credits while rolling eyes. The moral of the story is, “don’t let the robot run out of power, you morons, you’ll need it later” “rebooting fixes everything” “everybody can be good” “any chance to redeem a murderous psychopathic alien should be taken so I can feel better about myself” “one good dalek who wants to genocide the right aliens because it saw a star being born trumps a couple of hundred other… humanoids… because… yeah I’ll get back to you on that” “Samuel Anderson is kinda hot.”

Or, you know, that’s as much as I gleaned from this mess. Moffet is starting to make me miss Most Hated (6th) Doctor and No Really I’m An American Companion Peri, and goddamn, that takes some work. Is he a secret Colin Baker fan? Is all this about improving the past’s reputation by contrast? Because yeah, which is better, “Twin Dilemma” or “Into the Dalek”? Some questions should not be asked.

Aside from tampering recklessly in god’s domain, and catching up on some media, I spent mine playing with Leannan Sidhe. Thanks to everyone who turned out on such a hot night! If you’re looking for the free downloads, they’re right here. And thank you again to The Dreaming Comics and Games for having us!

Life-Size Spiderman Sold Separately
(photo Angela Korra’ti)

We also watched the new Doctor Who, which was… nowhere near as good as the 50th, but so much better than the awful Christmas Special departure for Matt Smith. I’m with Anna on Moffat’s sexism, but at least Clara’s feeling like a character again, finally. And Peter Capaldi as The Doctor is extremely strong out of the gate.

It’s not up to Legend of Korra levels though. If you bailed out during the sluggish first year, I don’t blame you – but since then, Legend of Korra became pretty awesome. The turnaround happened about halfway through year two, and year three has just been insane. Seriously, start with the run-up to “The First Avatar” and catch up from there, it’s totally worth your time.

So that’s what I did. But I digress – what’d you do this weekend?

Yahoo! broke all the mailing lists in the world. The traditional kind, anyway. Not so much announcement-only lists, but the discussion kind.

Basically, as a result of their changes, Yahoo! people can’t send mail to mailing lists and have it delivered to other Yahoo! addresses. Or Google addresses (tho’ I read conflicting things about that and haven’t tested), or AOL addresses (definitely), and probably a couple of others. Technical details are at Computer World.

And they’re sticking to their goddamn guns. It’s been like this since April.

There’s a patch to mailman, the software which powers our mailing lists, to work around this. It also sticks the sender’s From: address into the Reply-To: field, adding it to whatever else might be there, and you can’t turn that off. So all replies to any message on discussion lists get doubled to the original sender. That’s idiotic.

I’ve written local mods to our mailman installation – thank you, open source – to stop this. And to change the From: line so that it contains a recoverable version of the sender’s email address. So if you had mail from, say:

From: Derpy Herfy <badideas@yahoo.com>

It now gets changed to:

From: Derpy Herfy [badideas at yahoo.com] via My Mailing List <mylist@mylisthost.com>

…and it doesn’t get added to the Reply-To: field, so that doesn’t get broken.

I fought like a rabid dog to stop Microsoft SMTP engines from treating email addresses like this. It was a multi-year fight. I won, in part, because it was someone had a wrong idea about what was good behaviour.

Now I’m doing what I fought against then, because it’s the only way to get the mail through.

I hate you so much right now, Yahoo! – you are BREAKING THE GODDAMN INTERNET, and you’re doing it in ways I kept Microsoft from doing.

There are not enough punchings in the world.

eta: the code changes are trivial. Take ’em if you want ’em. Note the source version information at top!

It won’t have this name on the final album, but listening to it tonight, Run Like Hell seems to me to be a pretty good title for this preview.

Lots of guests on this one now. We welcome Alexander James Adams on percussion, Ellen Eades on hammer dulcimer, and Sunnie Larsen on fiddle. The faux-cello and faux-double-bass are, of course, faux, made by me out of an extra mic on and blasphemy done to Ellen’s dulcimer.

This track – in its entirety, anyway – is a release candidate. While it still sounds pretty good on my laptop speakers in testing, if you have a headset or a subwoofer, use it.

Oh, and me, I’m on irish bouzouki, mandolin, tubular bells, faux bass, and faux cello, the latter two with Ellen Eades.

Alexander James Adams appears courtesy Sea Fire Productions. Production at Supervillain Studios, Kenmore, Washington except for Alexander James Adams recording at PhantaSea Studios, Wisconsin.