“I can call you Eddie Betty
And Eddie Betty, when you call me,
You can call me Al.”
Have to wonder if me hearing ‘Eddie’ instead of ‘Betty’ in 1986 was one of the first signs of being a gay…
Misheard Lyrics: You Can Call Me Al
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Batman in Justice League film?
Lots of talk this week about the possibility of Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing Batman in the Justice League movie. I don’t know, I’m not thrilled with the idea. I know that the last Nolan film was setting up JGL’s character to take up the cape after Bruce Wayne. But still, he was playing Robin, not Batman. They actually called him Robin at the end! I grew up as a Marvel kid so I don’t have a detailed knowledge of Batman’s history and maybe people with names other than Bruce Wayne acted as Batman but still, Batman = Bruce Wayne. It’s like Superman. Even though there was that time after he died when there were a bunch of different Supermen (Supermans?) there is only one actual Superman and his name is Clark Kent (side note: Nicolas Cage named his son Kal-El. What a wonderful weirdo). Anyway, JGL shouldn’t be allowed to play Batman because his character was named Robin, not Bruce Wayne. He should be Robin, or at least Nightwing, who is basically Robin but not so gay.
Also, physically? JGL doesn’t say Batman to me. He’s too short. OK, apparently only like 2 inches shorter than Christian Bale but still. Batman should be at least 6 feet tall. He doesn’t have any super powers so he needs to be physically imposing AKA taller than me by more than an inch (fine! 1.5 inches). I will say though that JGL is becoming hotter to me recently which is strange because he’s kinda funny looking and as I said, not particularly large. I couldn’t figure it out and then I remembered this:
Password “Protection”
Really great article from Mat Honan on why password just aren’t enough anymore. He was inspired to write the article after his identity was stolen over the summer and the thieves got away with everything.
I kind of knew this already but it takes very little for someone to take control of your online life:
This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day.
Scary shit. My personal security is mixed. For the “important” sites (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter) I’ve got really strong passwords and two-factor authentication wherever possible. For lots of other sites my password are pathetic. And there’s really no excuse with apps like KeyPass and LastPass.
At the minimum you should have a unique (different for every site), strong (check strength here) password and set up two-factor authentication wherever possible. Honan lists four more things you should be doing here.
I must admit though, that while two-factor authentication does make me feel more secure, it can be a real pain in the ass. For example, I changed my Google password recently, which meant I had to re-enter my password on my phone. But because I have two-factor authentication I also had to enter a code generated by the app on my phone. Getting the code was fine but I couldn’t figure out a way to get from the authenticator app back to where I needed to enter it. Instead I had to have a code sent via text so that I wouldn’t be taken away from the login screen. A whole new level of hair-pulling comes into effect if you lose your phone and can’t generate the authentication codes.
But… given the crazy amount of personal information that we are all freely putting online these days I think the frustrations I listed above are well worth the extra protection you get. So go get yourself secure, or else I’m going to hack your phone and put all of your naked pictures on the internet and/or my phone.
(p.s. Fuck you Facebook app for erasing all of my mobile app settings just because I changed my password)
Hurricane Sandy and Me
So, first of all, I know it’s not normal (or flattering) but I’m sitting here looking at photos of NYC and all the flooding etc and my main reaction is, “God, how exciting!!”. Fucked, I know. But I’m also the type of person who prays for a dramatic (but not fatal) plane crash every time I fly. And if I end up on a magical island that holds the fountain of youth and hot Southern men named Sawyer? So much the better!
Anyway, the coverage of Hurricane Sandy has really got me thinking. Mainly about myself and my own life, which hasn’t been directly affected by the storm in any way so far. For example, what needs to change in my life to make me stop thinking, “I could really do with a natural disaster right about now.” You know there are some pretty significant gaps in your life if living in a federal disaster area seems like a grand adventure and not, say, the hellish nightmare that it obviously is.
And to quote Lindsay Lohan, “stop projecting negativity! Think positive and pray for peace!”
Grey’s Anatomy Premiere
Mark dying wasn’t that shocking to me as I had heard he was leaving the show anyway and without Lexie around his character doesn’t have much to do. I did feel really bad for Avery though, losing his mentor/butt buddy. But Arizona at the end was the real “kicker” (hahahahahaha). I did like the fake out where they made it seem like she was dead throughout the episode and then all of a sudden it was like BAM, “you chopped off my leg you big dyke!!” (I’m paraphrasing). I can’t wait to see the wild lesbian fights about this. I guess Grey’s is going to answer that age old question, can a lesbian with one leg still scissor?
Wank London
True Blood is back!
The fifth series of True Blood just premiered and based on the first episode I think (hope) we’re going to get a return to form after the dreck that was series four. Some highlights (spoilers ahead):
Yay!!!
- Evil Eric is back! Thank fuck for that
- Lots of naked Jason
- Naked, thrusty Eric!
- Jason being cute about turning down Rev. Newlin’s romantic advances
- LaLa getting in Alcide’s face and giving him the best crazy eye ever
- Andy gets his swerve on
- Arlene to crazy Terry: “Cut that shit out!”
- Pam being Pam. In Wal-Mart sweats.
Boo!!!
- Sookie being a moron and nearly spilling the beans to Alcide
- I get that Vampire siblings aren’t actual siblings but did Eric really need to keep calling her “sister” while mid-thrust?
- All this Authority business, is it going anywhere?
- Hoyt being a moody dick. And not a very clever one at that. Girlfriend fucker?! Zing! (?)
- Tara is alive. And a vampire. So she’s going to be a miserable bitch for ALL OF ETERNITY
- Where the hell is Russell Edgington??
We’ve Got a Long Way to Go People
Came across this rather depressing Tumblr today which accumulates tweets from people expressing their disappointment that several of the characters in the Hunger Games film are played by black/hispanic actors. The real kicker being these characters are all clearly described as being non-white in the book. From glancing at the Tumblr the most commotion seems to be about the character Rue who is meant to be cute and innocent. Seems like most people skipped the part about her “dark brown skin” and took her innocence to mean she was a little white-skinned, blonde-haired girl! Aside from the fact that they assume good characters = white characters (despite actual descriptions to the contrary in the book) the thing that really gets me is that some of these people are offended that there is a black actor playing a character who they thought should be white.
Also: good article from the New Yorker about the whole mess.
In other bigot news, there’s this collection of 100 tweets from people describing what they would do if they had a gay child. It’s what you would expect… kill them, put them up for adoption and have them raped (?!).
To make up for all this negativity, here is a link to a google image search of puppies.
Rise of the Introverts
Clive Thompson on the Power of Introversion:
But overall the irony here is pretty gorgeous. It suggests we’ve been thinking about the social web the wrong way. We generally assume that it has unleashed an unruly explosion of disclosure, a constant high school of blather. But what it has really done is made our culture more introverted—and productively so.
The Scale of the Universe 2. Whoah.
Here is a really cool continuous scroll Flash thingy showing the relative size of things to other things: The Scale of the Universe 2. From the Planck length all the way up to the estimated size of the whole universe. Warning, do not play with this if you are stoned because either you’ll spend 17 hours on it or your head will explode.