Taiwanese Death Metal, Anyone?

This is Chthonic, an anti-Chinese government band from Taiwan.  Fuck.  Yes.

Avatar Watch: Day Two

I thought a 1% drop per day might be too big... holy crap did I underestimate it.  Today, Avatar's RT ranking dropped 5 points, landing it at 86%.  I have got to get to the bottom of why film review aggregation drops off so predictably as opening night draws close.  At this rate, Avatar will be in the 70s by Friday.

Avatar Watch: Day One

Rotten Tomatoes currently has Avatar ranking at 91%, pretty stellar for any movie.  But early reviews are notoriously overly positive, and as opening night approaches the ranking almost always goes down.  I don't know why that is- presumably, critics have all seen the movie around the same time, so I would assume the rating would stay about the same; but it almost never does.   Is Avatar good enought to resist the trend?  I'll look at it each day to see.  I predict it will go down at least 1% each day until Friday, giving it an opening-night RT ranking of 86%.

If you start forgetting faces…

There is a psychological condition known as Cotard’s syndrome where people are possessed by the idea that they are dead and no longer exist.  To them, they are no longer here or, at the very least, missing important organs. 

The French (who discovered it) called it the “negation delirium”.

This is another thing that makes me uncomfortable--even more than the Wikipedia photo of a White Man.

Your Colorful Past

To those of us who didn't live through it, the Great Depression is a period that evokes little more than a handful of iconic, black and white images. Often haunting, sometimes beautiful, those images are twice removed from us - once by the passage of time, and again by the absence of color.

That's one reason I'm so taken with this collection of images captured on behalf of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Taken during the the late 1930s and early 1940s, these photographs document Depression-Era life as people really experienced it: in color. Check it out.

Ray Manzarek speaks Egyptian

"The Golden Scarab is the story of a young man's journey into the consciousness."

Indeed.  This rolled around in my music library.  And like the picture of the iconic white person, this too made me uncomfortable.

“In Egypt on the Nile in Memphis-Heliopolis
Scarab roll your dung ball
Roll away the night
Push away the sun ball
Golden scarab light”

What white people look like

According to wikipedia's article on the topic. This makes me uncomfortable, but I can't put my finger on why.