Category Archives: rantrantrant

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Posted by skullbochs on 7 August 2009 – 3:37 pm
Filed under rantrantrant, well this sucks
Tagged as ,

I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie last night with my parents. It was Mom’s birthday, and she’s a die-hard HP fan. We had a good time, especially Mom. She and Dad loved the movie. Me? I thought it was majorly disappointing.

First, for a movie named after him, it tells you almost nothing about the Half-Blood Prince. Even knowing who he is now, I’m still not sure why I should care. So he was a great wizard. So he turned out to be _______. Nifty. Yawn.

The plot was completely rushed, almost to the point of not existing. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not complaining about what they left out from the book. I’m complaining that they didn’t put enough of anything into it to make it look like a story rather than a choppy sequence of scenes. This was especially bad towards the end, which didn’t feel climatic at all. Despite a major character dying at the hands of another major character and Harry learning how to finally defeat Voldemort and deciding not to go back to school the next year, I left the movie feeling like nothing really happened. They should have either expanded the movie to 3 hours or cut some of the annoying myspace-drama between Ron-Lavender-Hermione and used the time to fill in the gaps in the plot.

All in all, it felt like (at best) an overly-long prologue to Deathly Hollows, not like a full episode in the series.

Browser Elitism

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Posted by skullbochs on 16 June 2009 – 2:46 pm
Filed under rantrantrant
Tagged as , , , , ,

I am not a browser elitist. I frequently switch browsers just for the fun of it. When I’m on a Windows machine, I’ll even use Internet Explorer just for kicks (IE7/8 have a great UI, IMO; if only the backend wasn’t a piece of junk…). So it’s always with a heavy heart that I declare my undying hatred for Opera.

I wish it were not so, especially now that they’ve released Opera Unite, which is something I’ve thought should be down for a while. Opera has also been pushing for browser-native audio and video support w/ Ogg. On top of that, their theme system is better than Firefox’s.

The problem comes down to its lack of compatibility with a lot of the sites I use. Not only the occasional site that flat out won’t work (which I don’t actually mind too much), but also the sites that it renders annoyingly wrong, like Twitter.

Now, the general response you get to this around the web is this: Those sites are written using bad HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Opera is highly standards-compliant. So it’s not Opera’s problem.

I really hate this elitism. It may not be Opera’s problem that people write poor HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but Opera should make it their problem. Otherwise, it becomes my problem when I use their browser. Standards be damned, the web needs to work.

I’ve read that Opera labs are working on better compatibility for the next version. I hope so, because I really like what they’re doing with Unite and would like to be able to add Opera to my browser repertoire.