(no subject)

[prog]

The workers outside my window are talking (actually screaming at each other) in Spanish but swearing in English. They must be Firefly fans!

One thing that bothers me about Firefly: for all the Chinese being spoken, where are all the Chinese people? You can give the Niven-ish argument that it's far enough into the future that what we call races now have long since mooshed together and become largely indistinct, but that's clearly not the case here, to look at these guys. There seems to be black folk and white folk and that's about it. I dun geddit? Note I've only watched two episodes and the movie, but still.

---

I have been annoyed that, in order to use my business From: address, I had to send and receive mail from Apple Mail instead of gmail. This not only split my mail across two applications, but also prevented me from organizing my business mail with gmail's tools and techniques, which I've grown to like very much since I started using it in June.

But a duh-obvious idea appeared on BoingBoing yesterday: set up a rule in Mail to redirect all messages to gmail. This results in identical copies in both applications' databases, so I can use gmail to search, tag, and browse my business and non-business mail together, and then switch to Mail to compose new messages under my business identity. Good stuff.

---

Please let me know if you want a gmail invite. I've had 100 queued up here for I don't know how long. (Wasn't it only 50, last time I mentioned it? Yow.)

Comments

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

One thing that bugged me was that in Firefly: all the really bad-ass people are black. Even the preacher had many hints dropped that, while a tame teacher of wisdom then, he was a major ass-kicker in the past. This trend continues into the movie as the head bad-guy is also black. Combined with the whole 'civil war' tie-in, and I actually find myself asking is Joss is a racist or something.
But I'm sure it's just a casting coincidence that he didn't notice...

[prog.livejournal.com]

I bet that the intersection of villainy and race is actually a very tricky topic that film producers are keenly aware of.

I think it takes an odd sort of chutzpah to make cast a black person in the role of a lone villain. It's very un-PC and I can respect it at that level. The Operative was an example of a very well done evil-genius character that made me forget my "yow that's so un-PC" thoughts shortly after his introduction. I'm not sure this was handled as well in, say, "Equilibrium", but that may be because that wasn't all that great a film to start with.

However, I think you'll very rarely ever see a black low-life thug in any movie, unless he's accompanied by some equally scummy white dudes. I assume that studios fear that to do otherwise would exactly depict the very real black-men-are-thugs stereotype, which they want to avoid, and this too I understand. But it leaves you with this artificial constraint that only white guys can be thugs, and it ends up making me squirm for the wrong reasons no matter who they cast. Blah. I think too much, is what it comes down too.