Zack Snyder is an amazing technical director, who is able to make every single frame of his films visually compelling. His lighting is almost unparalleled and his use of the camera is all around excellent. But I hate him. He can't handle any story with any amount of grace greater than if you were wielding a sledge hammer. All subtlety is driven completely out of his films. In a way that makes him a perfect director for a Superman movie. Every superman story devolves into Superman getting beat up for forever and just not dying until he's able to punch everything better. How is this not the perfect movie for Snyder? Because just because that's the way things are, doesn't mean that's the way things have to be.
This movie was hilarious though. "You're just trying to find out where I hang my cape! Well, I'll never let you find that out. I was raised in Kansas and we're smarter than that there." Paraphrasing of course, but not far off.
I've started taking what looks to be a very cool class on Coursera from Stanford. It's a Startup Engineering course run from Stanford that has a lot of cool emphasis. The final project is to develop an HTML5 crowdfunding site that has bitcoin based merchant services. I'm very excited to start working on this and I've already gotten pretty far with the first week's homework. It's going to be some great practice with the command line interface of a Linux box as well as getting started with communities like Github.
My RAT 5 mouse developed a serious drifting issue, so I replaced it. New mouse has same issue. I am really not keen on this. If it's a hardware problem it sucks, and I need to replace the new mouse which is a pain, and if it's a software problem I might need to reinstall windows to fix it? Eff that. If that's the case, then the RAT mice, for all their amazing features and really cool customization maybe be just completely unusable. Nothing even changed on my computer, it happened after I switched desks, but the mousepad is the same awesome mousepad I've had for forever.
And, I just solved the issue while I was typing this post. My new desk has a lot of metal and vibrated very slightly because of my computer's fans. That slight vibration was causing the sensitive mouse laser to move sporadically. Taking my tower off of its storage hole on my desk fixed the issue instantly. Yay. That blows. Seriously, it's only the slightest vibration, it's amazing that it messes up the pointer that much. Well, that's one of life's problems and mysteries solved. Shame the solution sucks.
This is going to be a rambling post. I know it is.
Back to Superman, and the line of dialog that drove me nuts. Morality is the anchor preventing evolution, immorality is the step in evolution that allows moving beyond the constraints of outmoded societies. Know what's wrong with this statement? The idea that immorality is the evolutionary step as opposed to morality?
Immorality came first. When no one cares about anyone else or about doing the right thing, how can anything advance? Literally every major advancement and effort in the evolution of society in almost the last 200 years has ultimately come from working as a society to create level playing fields, cooperation, open communication, hard work, and a certain level of trust, that while not absolute(the world isn't perfect) is more possible than anything before that time period. Morality is the evolution. It's morality that allows so many people to be greater than themselves. The real evolution after that, is an appreciation for that morality and a subtle understanding of when it is making the world better and when it's holding us back. A good guy, the right type of good guy, can be a million times scarier than any villain. The type of good guy that is tinged with dark edges, but understands that sometimes you have to make hard choices. That hero could be terrifying. Could do terrifying things.
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