Notes of Chaos 2: The Revengening

OK, I’m not sure if this is really worth writing about, but hey, I feel like doing it anyway.

A lot of people are lauding The Dark Knight as an amazing film, something that’s transcendent. I don’t see it that way, so turn away now if you’re uninterested in a bit of rain on your parade. (Also turn away if you want to avoid spoilers.)

I feel about The Dark Knight the way Katt told me she felt about Brokeback Mountain: I was expecting to be overwhelmed, but I was merely whelmed. To me, it was another entertaining Batman movie, and certainly one that was more flawed that the preceding one.

On the radio, I heard Christopher Nolan say that what he wanted in this movie was something very gritty and realistic. This might be part of the problem: Batman is gritty, but by design, he can’t be all that realistic.

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“A kick in the nads, school, Free Willy - those things are all free. And they all suck.

“On the other hand, it costs like, $1500 or something to buy a car, or take a chick out to dinner, or have someone killed.”

– Butt-Head

This really cocky new kid showed up at judo last night, at the fundamentals class. That doesn’t happen very often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone come in with ‘tude.

I don’t think he’s brand new, or he’d be working on his breakfalls and rolls with his own instructor instead of working out with rest of the class. However, he hadn’t been around long enough to lose his inflated sense of his abilities. The kid, who I’d guess was eighteen or nineteen, went on about how he was a natural, talked up all the high school wrestling he did, and generally screwed around a lot. He kept trying wacky moves instead of working on what was being taught.

The head instructor of the judo club happened to be teaching that night, and he noticed. The sensei’s a friendly guy, so I wondered how he’d deal with this. He teaches a lot of classes, so I should have been able to guess that this was not really a new situation for him.

First, he agreed to roll with the kid during a water break. He ran over him, but while he stopped to talk to someone, the kid jumped on his back. The sensei took it with good humor and turned around and choked the kid, with what looked like ryote jime.

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The original Notes of Chaos met its demise a couple of weeks ago.

It was hosted on a server that, unbeknownst to me, had changed hands a couple of years. It went from my reliable friend Dan to a guy that runs a popular webcomic. Dan had been running the server for this guy, and since the guy generated most of the traffic for the server, he started paying for it and took ownership from Dan.

Recently, some other users’ processes on the server had been bringing it down. The webcomic guy got irritated that these guys that were using his server for free were interfering with his livelihood and didn’t want to figure out whose process it was, so he locked all of the users out. He didn’t give any notice but did later at least send Dan the other users’ files. It was basically an eviction - we were locked out, and our stuff was at the door. He was all EVERYBODY GET OUT NOW THIS IS MY SERVER YOU ARE TAKING FOOD OUT OF MY MOUTH AND I ALREADY STARTED CHEWING IT

It’s understandable, but I’d like to think I wouldn’t do it that way. Who knows, though. Maybe he was losing thousands of dollars a day and couldn’t give people a couple of weeks.

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