Jolies bottes, les gars

La conférence de hackers DefCon qui a lieu chaque année à Las Vegas est souvent « infiltrée » par la présence d’agents du FBI et autres membres des forces de l’ordre. Les organisateurs ont donc créé une tradition: les participants à la convention sont mis au défi de repérer ces agents. S’ils les identifient correctement, ils reçoivent un t-shirt annonçant fièrement: « I spotted the fed ».

Dans l’esprit de cette tradition, voici un t-shirt que les manifestants les plus perspicaces de Montebello pourront porter tout aussi fièrement, de dos comme de face…

Geeky links

–Joybubbles, the famous phone phreak, died earlier this month at age 58. Quite the life story.

-Take a very quick tour of the most famous garage in the world where it all started for Silicon Valley. It’s about the size of my cabanon but it’s worth a lot more…

-CBC did a report on Internet libel, featuring Chris Hand from the now closed Zeke’s gallery. Scary stuff for bloggers. You can check it out on YouTube.

-Jeff Goldsmith of Creative Screenwriting Magazine recently interviewed co-writer/actor Seth Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg about the movie Superbad. You can get the podcast here.

-I don’t know how old this site is and I don’t know how I managed to only find out about it today, but here it is: Shiny Shiny, a girl’s guide to gadgets. *drool* I was particularly impressed by these GPS shoes for prostitutes.

-Yet another version of the screenplay I’ve been writing forever was sent in earlier this week to a place where they fund the production of movies. Sounds like a case of the « last chance », my dears, so keep your fingers crossed. I really want this movie to get made.

Memento mori

Just as it took Katrina to expose the truly sordid, corrupt emptiness at the core of « compassionate conservatism, » we rarely begin to look into our own hearts of darkness until disaster strikes. In the mundane day-to-day, we seem otherwise hardwired to take so much for granted. For writers — whose very business should be about exploring what lurks beneath the quotidian surface of things — such an inability to face our own feelings seems a terrible self-betrayal. Surely we can’t rely on tragedy to be our muse.

Ancients used a memento mori to counter this folly — a visible reminder of mortality, the skull on the desk that said « remember you will die. » Sometimes when I’m teaching a screenwriting class, I wish I could hand out such skulls to each and every student. Maybe with that horrible bony grin sitting by their computer screen, they wouldn’t be so inclined to write for Them — the powers that be who supposedly run the market — and they’d remember to write only what matters to themselves the most.

It’s part of the same problem — this mistaken belief that the uncomfortable truths, frightening feelings and crazy perceptions that make up what’s called « personal » can’t possibly find an audience. But if you think about the works you love — movies, songs, books, or paintings — chances are good that what you love is the rage, the pain, the wild, subversive joy that fueled these things into being. The recognition that we have met the scary and it is us.

From a great post by Billy Mernit (writer, composer, teacher). Go read the whole thing on his blog.