Why I will no longer do business with Wachovia Bank
So yesterday I received a letter from Wachovia Bank. The envelope stated “It feels good to be PREFERRED…”, which warned me that this was another one of those pre-screened credit offers. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was:
$1,200.00 check from Wachovia bank - what's the catch?
Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. If banks handed out $1,200 to random people all the time, they’d soon go out of business. There must be a catch. So I looked at the accompanying letter, and saw this:
Header of the Wachovia letter
Sure enough, this wasn’t a gift, but a loan. And what were the finance terms? I turned the letter over and looked at the other side:
$600 interest on a $1,200 loan? Do they think I'm stupid?
An APR of more than 50%? Almost $600 in interest… on a $1,200 loan? Do they think I’m stupid? Those are finance terms more commonly associated with loan sharks than with respectable financial institutions. I can only conclude that Wachovia Bank has decided they no longer want to be a respectable financial institution.
Furthermore, who do they think is going to fall for this? The answer, clearly, “people with more greed than sense.” And do they really believe such people are going to repay their loans? I mean, come on, this is the subprime mortgage fiasco all over again! It would seem that the Wachovia Bank lending people have not learned from history.
Finally, it’s my opinion that a bank that has so little respect for people as to offer loan-shark interest rates wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of them in other ways as well. Therefore, I will avoid doing any business with Wachovia Bank, and would urge you to follow my example.
Recursively walking all a widget’s descendants in PyGTK
The other day, I had a need to walk through all the descendants of a dialog box in PyGTK, so that I could save the contents of each text-entry field to the appropriate database record. After a bit of poking around in the PyGTK manual and not finding the recursive get_children() function that I wanted, I decided to write my own.
def walk_descendants(root):
"""
Walk through a tree of this object's children, their own children,
and so on, yielding each object in depth-first order.
"""
yield root
if not hasattr(root, 'get_children'):
return # No children, so we're done
children = root.get_children()
if not children:
return # No children, so we're done
for child in children:
for widget in walk_descendants(child):
yield widget
I use this function to build a dict listing all the widgets in my dialog box, keyed by their names. Then when I need to do something with the OK button, I can use something like self.widgets['button_OK'] and no matter where it is in the hierarchy, even nested inside several VBoxes and HBoxes, it’s easy to use.
In case others might find this useful, I hereby release this function into the public domain. Use it however you like.
Learning to create Debian/Ubuntu packages
I’m starting to learn to create .deb packages for Debian or Ubuntu. A quick breadcrumb trail for myself, to remind me of where I’ve found useful information:
- Packaging session from Ubuntu Open Week (and part 2)
- PackagingBasics from Ubuntu wiki
- PbuilderHowto from Ubuntu wiki
Making SVN trust a new root CA certificate
If you’re using Subversion to connect to an HTTPS repository that’s signed by a non-standard root certificate — such as a CACert.org certificate, for example — here’s how to do it on Linux or OS X. (Windows users: sorry, you’re out of luck. I haven’t developed on Windows since 1999, and I don’t ever want to go back. So the only way this post will ever be updated with Windows instructions is if someone else figures out how to do it and leaves a comment.)
- First, download the certificate you’re interested in, e.g. “wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/class1.crt”. I suggest storing it in /etc/ssl/certs with an appropriate name, such as “cacert-root-ca.crt”. You’ll need to have root privileges (use “sudo”) to get write access to the /etc/ssl/certs directory.
- Run “openssl md5 /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” and/or “openssl sha1 /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” and compare the results against the certificate fingerprint given on the website. The website you’re downloading this certificate from does give you its MD5 and/or SHA1 fingerprints, right? (If not, what the heck are you doing trusting a certificate you haven’t verified?!?)
- Run “openssl x509 -text -in /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt” to verify that the certificate’s data (company name and so on) looks correct.
- If the above fails, add “-inform der” to the command above: maybe you accidentally downloaded the DER-encoded certificate instead of the PEM-encoded certificate.
- If you have the DER version, you’ll need to convert it to PEM. Run “sudo openssl x509 -inform der -outform pem -in /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt -out /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.pem”. Note the “sudo” in front of that command: you’re writing to the /etc/ssl/certs directory, so you need to be root.
- Now that you’ve got a certificate in PEM format and verified it, it’s time to edit your “~/.subversion/servers” file. In the “[globals]” section, add the line “ssl-authority-files = /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt”. The “ssl-authority-files” option is a colon-delimited list, so if you already have something there and are adding the second certificate to it, use a colon to separate the two paths. If you’re adding a third certificate to the list, then you should already see the colon and be able to figure it out. :-)
I mostly figured this out from the “SSL Certificate Management” section of the Subversion book. Which I highly recommend reading, BTW.
I hope this helps someone else spend a little less time on Google figuring out how to trust a new root CA.
Interesting ideas for human-computer interaction
There’s a research project at University of Toronto that’s exploring different ideas for how people interact with computers. Here’s an interesting new way of looking at the “desktop” metaphor. There’s some rather clever ideas there.
A step-by-step SQLAlchemy tutorial
SQLAlchemy is a very useful database-access library for Python. It’s got excellent documentation; but what it was missing until recently was a tutorial. I wrote a step-by-step SQLAlchemy tutorial to fill in the gap. Of course, the day after I wrote it, SQLAlchemy’s author posted the tutorial that he’d been working on, so I just duplicated his efforts. :-)
Nevertheless, it might be useful to someone, so I put it up anyway.
He is risen!
Today is the day of Pascha, more commonly known in English as Easter. (At least in the Western tradition — the Eastern tradition will celebrate it one week later this year). It is, bar none, the most important celebration of the year for Christians, more important even than Christmas. Christmas is when we celebrate Christ’s birth, but Pascha is when we celebrate His resurrection! Christ’s birth was the beginning of His time on Earth, but His death and resurrection were culminating point of His ministry, the whole purpose of His coming.
This makes Christianity a very interesting thing indeed, because it’s a faith that could be utterly destroyed if one specific event was proven to have never taken place. If someone could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jesus was not raised from the dead, if archaeologists found a two-thousand-year-old body in a tomb near Jerusalem that could somehow be proven to be Jesus’ body, then the foundation on which the entire edifice of Christian doctrine rests would be destroyed. Because if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead as He promised He would, then He cannot truly be God, and thus cannot save anyone from their sins. Even the Bible even says so — look at 1 Corinthians 15:12-19.
But Jesus Christ did rise from the dead, and therefore we do have a hope that does not deceive us (1 Corinthians 15:20-22). We do not simply follow the teachings of a great religious leader, passed on after his death. Rather, we worship the Lord Jesus, who is alive today and forever! He has promised never to leave us nor forsake us, and that He will be with us always, even to the end of time. (Matthew 28:18-20).
Halleluyah! He is risen!
If the ball hits the turtle, it’s still in play.
Life in Africa can be quite interesting sometimes.
Just down the street from where I work, there’s an American Recreation Center that, among other things, has a softball field, and hosts a weekly game of softball on Saturday afternoons. So on my first weekend here, I went down to the “Rec” to join in the game. Midway through the game, a large turtle stumped onto the field, heading for the grassy infield. When I called attention to it, someone said, “Oh, that’s just George. He shows up often enough that he’s been written into the field rules — if the ball hits the turtle, it’s still considered in play.”
Where else would you find a baseball field with a turtle (actually it’s a tortoise, but everyone here seems to call it a turtle) that pays a visit regularly enough to have a local rule devoted to him?
Picking up the keyboard again
This blog has been languishing on the vine lately. I’ve hardly updated it at all for months, and when I have updated it, it’s usually been with a “Hey, here’s some extremely geeky stuff that I may want to remember later but nobody else would be interested in.”
That’s not what I want this blog to be about. I want it to be a place where I can record my thoughts, write interesting tidbits about my life, and talk about what it’s like living one’s life for God.
So I’m picking up the keyboard again. I’ll be posting a lot more frequently now, and on a wider variety of subjects. I have a lot of good stories waiting to be written, so stay tuned.
PCI ID viewer for Windows
I often end up working on Windows machines that don’t have the right drivers installed for this or that piece of hardware. And since Windows makes it difficult to get at the actual PCI ID’s for its devices, all you have to go on is the “Unknown Device” entry in the Device Manager control panel. Thanks, Microsoft, that’s real helpful.
What I need is a tool to list the PCI ID’s for all devices, and one (preferably) that’s free. I found such a tool at http://members.datafast.net.au/dft0802/. Craig Hart has written a program called PCI32 (for Win2000, NT, XP, etc) and PCI (for Win 9x/ME) that can list the PCI ID’s of all your devices, along with the manufacturer name and model name. Very useful for grabbing exactly the right driver.
Comment policy
I just deleted my first blogspam comment, so I think it’s time to write up a comment policy, before I actually start needing it. So, without further ado, here are The Rules:
1. This is my blog. Nothing obliges me to let you comment here. I do so because I’m interested in discussion, but commenting is a privilege, not a right. If you abuse that privilege, I may take it away, either with or without warning.
2. Civilized behavior only. That means no ad hominem attacks, no insults, no name-calling, no profanity, etc.
3. Any comments that break rule #2 will be removed and replaced with the text “This comment has been removed by the site administrator for (insert reason here).” I may, at my option, place such comments under this post instead of deleting them entirely, so that anyone can see why the post was removed. If I do so, I may also censor the post involved by editing out profanity or any other offensive content, replacing it with a marker such as “
4. I will summarily delete, without notice, any comment that is nothing but blogspam (e.g., lots of links to unrelated sites like online casinos and the like).
5. Having said all that, if you can keep your comments civil and your tone polite, I welcome disagreement with my ideas, or with other commenters’ ideas. I’m not interested in this blog becoming nothing but an “echo chamber” — go ahead and disagree with me. All I ask is that you behave like a reasonable adult.
Hawaii Supreme Court takes the logical next step
A woman, days away from giving birth, smokes crystal meth. It gets into her bloodstream and, naturally, into the bloodtream of her baby, who’s still in her womb. The baby is born alive, but with a lethal concentration of methamphetamine in his body; he dies two days later. The mother is prosecuted for manslaughter in the death of her baby, and is convicted. Her appeal goes to the Hawaii Supreme Court, which overturns the conviction on the grounds that — are you ready for this? — her baby “was not a person” at the time of the offense.
So even days before birth, a baby is not yet a person and therefore has no rights.
Pardon me while I throw up.
Just one question: what does this do to the question of prescription drugs taken during pregnancy? If you read the warning labels of the drugs you get from the pharmacy, you’ll see that many of them have warnings like “If you are pregnant, or think you might become pregnant, do not take this medication.” But if an unborn baby is not yet considered a person in the eyes of the law, and has no rights, then why would those warning labels be necessary?
If you take this out to its logical conclusion, as the court seems to have done, it goes in some really terrifying directions.
Update: After careful reading of the article, I have to say that the blame lies not with the Hawaii Supreme Court, but with the authors of the Hawaii Penal Code. The manslaughter law defines a person as “a human being who has been born and is alive,” according to the article’s summary of the court’s decision. So the court was properly interpreting a bad law, rather than pulling a judgment out of their hat.
Some light geekery for a change
The original Star Wars trilogy holds a special place in the heart of many geeks. It has grandiose space battles, a rip-roaring plot full of daring escapes and noble sacrifices, and memorable lines (C-3PO: “Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!” Han: “Never tell me the odds.”) The movie is clearly not meant to be taken as realistic — after all, it’s got planets being blown up by lasers — but it can be great fun to take it at face value.
One article that does exactly that is “Endor Holocaust“, which asks, “What happens when you detonate a spherical metal honeycomb over five hundred miles wide just above the atmosphere of a habitable world? Regardless of specifics, the world won’t remain habitable for long.” The Rebels may have saved the galaxy, but it seems they doomed the Ewoks in the process.
Another such article is “On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor“. What was that thing doing in the cell block, anyway?
Finally, there’s the ultimate in geekery: the article entitled “How Lightsabers Work“. Filled with handy safety tips (”NEVER point the blade emitter of a lightsaber toward your own body. NEVER look down the “barrel” of a lightsaber, even if you are “sure” it is in safe mode.”), this article also contains photos of other handy uses for a lightsaber, such as hedge trimming or slicing bagels (”The big advantage of using a lightsaber, of course, is that you can both cut and toast the bagel in one stroke.”) A must-read for anyone considering purchasing this handy device.
If you have a particular favorite Star Wars article that I didn’t mention, let me know and I’ll update this post.
Gas prices slowly coming back down
I just paid less than $2.50 at the gas pump today, for the first time since Katrina hit.
Gas prices have been inching down recently, but today felt like a milestone of sorts.
Dating - is it right for Christians?
Some of my best blog posts seem to start as comments on someone else’s blog. This one was a comment I posted over at The Happy Husband, in his post titled Courtship is now in session. Here’s what I said:
Josh Harris certainly started a whirlwind of discussion with his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, didn’t he? I think you’re [The Happy Husband is] perfectly right that much of the heated argument is coming from mutual confusion over definitions, especially about the word dating.
I think to Harris, and many other people, dating means “what the secular world calls dating”; in other words, a euphemism for shallow relationships built around premarital sex. No wonder they’re against it — we all should be! It’s not surprising, then, that they swing around to the other extreme and say, “Christians just plain shouldn’t date; they should find other methods of courting potential spouses”.
There’s also the fact that when people write books on dating, the first audience they think of to address (it seems to me) is high school and junior high students, who are either just going through puberty or only a few short years past it, and still in the middle of an onslaught of hormones. They’re noticing for the first time in their lives that the opposite sex looks really, REALLY good, and trying to figure out what to do about it. But most of them are years away from having the emotional, spiritual, or social maturity for marriage. For that audience, a book that says, “Don’t date, there are better ways of relating to the opposite sex” may be very good advice.
But I think there’s another segment of the Christian population middle ground that these authors are missing: adult Christians. People with the social, emotional, and spiritual maturity necessary to make a good marriage work. And that, I think, is the group of people who are probably saying to Harris and other “Christians shouldn’t date” proponents, “What are you talking about? You’re just plain wrong.” And again, it probably boils down to different definitions.
When I think of dating, I think of spending some time alone with a Christian woman I’m interested in getting to know better. We’d go out to dinner, or on a walk, or ice-skating, or some other activity that allows for plenty of time to talk. And we’d ask questions, find out about each other’s families, each other’s relationship with God, and each other’s interests, dreams, and passions. All the while, the question would be at the back of my mind, “Could she make a good wife for me?” And she’d be thinking the same thing: “Could he make a good husband for me?” If the first date was enough for a clear “No” for either one of us, the right thing to do would be to share that, politely of course, at the end of the date. “Thanks for a fun evening. I probably won’t ask you out again, but I’ll see you around at church.” Or, when I drop her off and say, “Let’s get together again sometime,” she might say, “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll pass. I appreciate the compliment, but I just don’t think it would work.”
(Incidentally, it’s a lot kinder to let someone down, gently but firmly, sooner rather than later. If you’re wanting to avoid hurting their feelings, consider this: they’ll be hurt, at least a little, no matter when you tell them, “Thanks, but no thanks” — but if you tell them as soon as you’re sure, you’re sparing them the pain of having the “What if…?” drag on, and on, and on.)
Christian dating, as I see it, should be all about evaluating the other person as a potential marriage partner. It should only be undertaken by those who are themselves ready for marriage, and it should be undertaken with the greatest of respect for the other person as a fellow child of God. That means, among other things, back off on the physical. Don’t kiss on the first date, or even on the second. Only kiss when you mean something by it, when there’s already some level of emotional commitment and you both know you’re getting serious about each other. Exactly what level of commitment is something you’ll have to decide for yourself, but you should at least have known each other for a while and know what you’re getting into. For myself, I’ve decided that I only want to kiss a woman after I’ve asked her to marry me. I’m not saying that everyone should follow that rule, but you should at least know that you plan to date only this woman for a while. In other words, you should be “going steady” before you kiss. (Now there’s a useful phrase that should be brought back into the language!)
I’ve come to this opinion gradually, though reading books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot, Boundaries in Dating by Cloud & Townsend, and A Return to Modesty by Wendy Shalit. I’ve also had long conversations with other Christian guys, some married and some not, about their dating relationships, mistakes they’d made in the past, and pain they’d suffered. One thing I was surprised to learn is just how much of an emotional bond is established just by kissing. But when I thought about it, I realized that I shouldn’t have been so surprised. The process of becoming one flesh isn’t just about sex and physical intimacy, it’s also about emotional, mental, and spiritual intimacy. They’re all connected. One married friend of mine (male) put it this way: “Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual intimacy in a relationship are like four sliders tied together with a rubber band. If one of them gets too far ahead of the others, the rubber band is stretched. And if it’s stretched too far, it’s in danger of breaking. The thing is, the other sliders have to be pushed, but the physical-intimacy one has a motor driving it forward.”
There are many ways of dealing with that motor that tries to drive physical intimacy forward. Some of them involve putting very careful limits — chaperones and the like — on opportunities for any physical involvement at all. Others involve setting limits for yourself, and then getting good friends to check up on you every once in a while: “How are you doing with your boundaries?” Ultimately, though, the goal is that once you get married, you know your soon-to-be-spouse well enough on all levels — mental, emotional, spiritual, and yes, physical too. The physical should be held back some, but I think it would be a mistake to hold it back all the way down to “No physical intimacy whatsoever,” the way I’ve seen some people suggest. Shalit, in A Return to Modesty, mentions people who don’t even kiss until their wedding day — the kiss at the altar is their first kiss. Shalit makes that sound like an ideal to live up to, but another married friend of mine (actually, the wife of the person I mentioned in the previous paragraph) said, “That sounds like a supremely bad idea to me. Unless you want to wait a few weeks before you have sex, that is.” Expanding on her husband’s analogy of the sliders and rubber band, she explained that holding the physical back so much is going to put a lot of tension on your relationship, and pushing it forward all the way from “no kissing” to “sex is OK” in one day is also far too much change at once, and would put its own kind of stress on the relationship.
So that’s what I think of courtship and dating. Basically, understand that physical intimacy will pretty much drive itself forward, and concentrate on pushing the other three — mental, emotional, and spiritual intimacy — forward in your time together. And figure out how you’re going to hold physical intimacy back to a proper pace: slow, but not completely stalled. Talk about your physical boundaries with each other, agree to respect each other and hold each other accountable for them, and then (because you’re both going to be strongly tempted at much the same time, so just holding each other accountable won’t always work) find a few good friends who can help. And then spend lots of time together, and talk a lot. And the last thing, which I haven’t mentioned yet although I really should have said so from the beginning, bathe the whole process in lots of prayer. If you do that, you probably won’t go too far wrong.
Desires of the heart
My friend Andrew writes about the desire to be great — to leave one’s mark on the world, so that one will be remembered, that one’s name will not be forgotten. I know exactly what he’s talking about, although for me it’s slightly different.
When I was in high school, I was on my school’s Science Bowl team. One evening, as we were driving back from the regional competition, my teammates were joking around about what each of us would be famous for later in life: Lars would discover a new element, Eric would find a cure for cancer, and so on. Then someone mentioned me, and said something I’ve never forgotten: “Robin? Robin won’t be famous.” (pause). “But everybody will know him.”
It says something profound about me that that statement made such a mark on my memory. It articulated so well one of my fundamental desires: to be known. Not to be famous — there’s a difference. Famous people get tabloid articles written about them everytime they so much as sneeze. I’ll pass on that one, thanks. But what my Science Bowl teammate said about me sounded like the best of both worlds — if that were true, then I’d avoid all the downsides of being famous, while still getting what I consider to be the only real advantage: to be known. To be recognized. Not to be a nameless face in the crowd. To have others greet you by name and be glad to see you when you visit them, when you go to church, when you meet them by chance in the grocery store.
That desire interacts in some very interesting ways with the other great desire of my heart, to serve. To serve God, and to serve His servants. That’s why I’m heading off to Africa — to put my computer skills to good use in His service, by making my skills available to the other missionaries there. But as I mentioned, one of the things I love to receive is recognition from others. And I certainly get that when I help fix someone’s computer — they remember me years later. I’ve been out of college for over four years now, yet I keep on running into people who remember me rescuing their term paper off a dying floppy disk or some such thing. And I have to admit that it gives me a bit of pleasure to find out that I’ve been remembered for being helpful. As far as ego-boosts go, that’s a pretty healthy one, but nevertheless, am I helping people just so that they’ll remember me? Is that the reward I’m working for? Jesus had a few things to say about that sort of thing, after all.
Fortunately, I don’t think I’m really doing all this just for the praise of others. When I take the time to examine my motives, I find that I really am just wanting to help. It’s nice that people remember me kindly for helping them, but I’d still help them even if they wouldn’t remember me at all. That’s a relief.
But there’s something else, something to which I fall victim much more often. And again, my friend Andrew has it nailed. (Thanks, Andrew!) In the second half of his post, he goes on to talk about how the desire to be great can twist even our desire to serve God into something perverted, a kind of “servanthood contest” where one is trying, not to serve God to the best of one’s ability, but to somehow be a “better” servant than everyone else. Once you actually look at that desire, of course it’s ridiculous. But it got me thinking — the other great desire of my heart, as I mentioned, is service. And I’m heading off — to Africa, no less! — as a missionary. It would be far too easy to get sucked into the “more spiritual than thou” game. Have I ever been tempted to play it?
And suddenly as I phrased the question, I had my answer. Yes, from time to time, I certainly have been. I get tempted to look down on those whose calling is not to the mission field, but to a “comfortable” life in the United States — forgetting, of course, that God has called them to service, too. In fact, some of those very same people, that I’m tempted to look down on, are people whose shoelaces I’m not even worthy to tie. True prayer warriors, whose daily prayers for hundreds and hundreds of missionaries are only known to God — for now. In heaven, though, we’ll find out. We’ll see a saint, covered in the glory so bright it almost hurts our eyes — and when we peer into their face, we’ll recognize that small, unassuming elderly woman who always showed up at the prayer meetings, or the man we only knew as the church janitor. And then we’ll hear about the thousands upon thousands of lives their prayers touched, and we’ll be amazed.
No, there’s nothing inherently special or spiritual about being a missionary. It’s just another way to serve God.
Pork futures look strong in the Senate
Well, the Coburn amendment (to kill a $220 million pork project in Alaska and redirect the money towards hurricane relief in Louisiana) failed by an 82-15 vote (3 not voting). The good guys:
Allard (R-CO), Yea
Allen (R-VA), Yea
Bayh (D-IN), Yea
Burr (R-NC), Yea
Coburn (R-OK), Yea
Conrad (D-ND), Yea
DeMint (R-SC), Yea
DeWine (R-OH), Yea
Feingold (D-WI), Yea
Kyl (R-AZ), Yea
Landrieu (D-LA), Yea
Sessions (R-AL), Yea
Sununu (R-NH), Yea
Vitter (R-LA), Yea
11 R’s, 4 D’s.
Landrieu and Vitter are from Louisiana, so it’s no surprise they voted for it. Their vote can’t be taken one way or the other as to whether they’d be in favor of getting rid of pork or not. So there are only 13 Senators, ten Republicans and 3 Democrats, who can be really counted on to fight against pork-barrel projects in Congress.
Discouraging, but it just means that if you care about pork, you’d better contact your Senators and let them know your disapproval. Tell them, “Unless something drastically changes in the next year or so, you just lost my vote.” Especially if your Senator is one of those running for re-election in 2006 — they’ll be especially attentive to what you say.
Do your part to restore some measure of spending sanity to Congress: contact your Senators today!
Politics test - my results
| You are a Social Moderate (43% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (70% permissive) You are best described as a:
Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid |
The best movie I never want to see again
I just saw Serenity, the movie based on Joss Whedon’s TV show Firefly. Nearly everyone who’s seen it so far has loved it. My reaction was more complex. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I’d have to say something like “that was the best movie that I never want to see again.”
I think it was the excellent writing and the familiar characters that did it. This was the first movie where I didn’t have that subtle disconnect, the sense that I was watching a movie. Instead, I was caught up in the reality of it — it really felt like I was watching real people deal with a real situation.
And normally, that would be a really good thing in a movie. A REALLY good thing. But… that meant my sense of reality was also engaged at other moments during the movie. Like the scene that’s still haunting me, two hours after the movie’s over. No spoilers here, but if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know which scene I’m talking about. It’s the one where they’re on a planet, and they find a holographic recording of a woman describing something that happened on that planet. I really, really needed my normal “I’m watching a movie, this isn’t real” detachment for that scene. Especially the end of it. And because the writing was so good, the scene just slipped underneath my normal emotional “armor”.
It’s three in the morning right now. Two and a half hours after I walked out of the movie theater. And I’m still desperately looking for distractions, trying to forget what I heard in that one scene. I don’t intend to go to bed anytime soon.
It’s been a very long time since a movie did that to me. On the one hand, that’s some really good writing. On the other hand, I never ever want to see this movie again, and I almost wish I hadn’t seen it in the first place. Not that it was bad — as I said, it was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. If it hadn’t been such a good movie, it wouldn’t have left me this profoundly disturbed.
Make of that what you will.
