Vote Early, Vote Often

Vote

VoteI’m not really telling you to commit voter fraud. Very little voter fraud is actually committed by the voters – although Republicans would have you believe that all voter fraud can be eliminated by requiring proper identification at the polls. No, most fraud, if there is any, occurs in the counting and tabulating. Boxes of mail-in votes lost or “forgotten”, counting being handled by clearly partisan people, early votes being “invalidated” and the voters not notified or not allowed to re-vote, and so on. Voters don’t really commit fraud, political parties and corporate entities do… you know, the things that don’t actually vote, and thus don’t need an ID.

Beyond the malarkey of voter ID, you should, if at all possible, vote. There is no reason not to.

Don’t like either of the major party candidates? Then consider voting 3rd party to vote “against” the major parties. Sure, those 3rd parties aren’t likely to win, but every vote they can get helps them become more established and maybe next time, in 2016, they’ll actually get invited to the debates unlike this year’s lockout. Even if you don’t agree with the 3rd parties, vote for one against the major parties since you don’t like them either. Right now, the current goal is for one of both of the biggest 3rd Parties, Libertarian and Green, to get 5% of the popular vote. At 5%, a party qualifies for public money in the next election. And if you ignore all the pitfalls of campaign finance, qualifying for public funding is a major step is being accepted as legitimate, or being actually seen by more people, of getting on more ballots, of getting media attention, of changing the way our system works (or doesn’t work). A vote for a 3rd Party isn’t a wasted vote.

No matter how you decide to cast it, vote.

It’s your right. Exercise it.

Fixing Commons Hacks

Just when you think you are safe, you realize that the shared server you have all your web stuff on gives people who also share the server a little more access than you’d like, meaning that you are really only as safe as they are.

With things like WordPress and other CMS, there are files that need to remain writeable, if not for use then for automated updates. It’s these files that are vulnerable to getting edited and slipping malware, site redirects and other problems onto your website.

Well, if you have telnet access to your account, and you should. Here are a couple commands you can use to see if you’ve been hacked and which files you need to clean to fix it. Additionally, you can change the security on these files so that they are not writeable, but you’ll have to remember that and go change them back before taking advantage of some automated updates.

First up, check your PHP files for bad stuff:

grep -lr –include=*.php –exclude-dir=logs “eval(base64_decode” .

Next, do the same thing to your HTML files:

grep -lr –include=*.ht* –exclude-dir=logs “<script>s=” .

In both cases, you’ll get back a list of file names that have matched the patterns (i.e. contain “eval(base64_decode” or “<script>s=”). You should download those files, edit them to remove the hacked code, and upload them. It’s possible, though unlikely, that you may get hits on valid uses of these patterns. So be sure you know what you are doing.

Basically, what each of these is doing is either redirecting your visitors to somewhere else, or pulling code in to be displayed on your website. Of course, the most common files to get hit with these are index.php and index.htm/index.html. If you are infected and visit your own site in Chrome (I don’t know about other browsers) and you haven’t disabled the feature, Chrome will warn you that the page is doing something that might be malicious and ask if you want to proceed anyway. That’s a sure sign that you need to do some cleaning.

Anyway, that’s a quick way to clean your website or two problems. If you don’t modify the file permissions, you should probably run these weekly just to be safe and catch problems as quick as you can.

I’m gonna miss you, October.

I don’t know who Adrian Snell is, but I may have to buy this album just to support such cool cover art.

I logged into the site this morning, to the WordPress dashboard, and saw the graph of my site stats.

For nearly an entire month, the traffic here was triple or more where it usually peaks. Of course, that was due to putting up a post every day about a horror movie with a Halloween tag on them. The biggest draws being the posts about vampires. The Nosferatu post alone doubled the traffic in a day.

On Halloween itself, the traffic dropped to half what it had been. And then yesterday was back to regular levels, where I suspect it will stay until December, when I might go on a Christmas movie reviewing spree.

However, those lofty heights of getting nearly 400 hits per day has strengthened my resolve in one way – I need to post more, and consistently. I may not succeed in daily postings, but I’m going to try very hard to keep October’s posting momentum through November.

At the very least, coming to post here every day this month will give me an opportunity to say things like – Day 1 of NaNoWriMo and I got 2,236 words. Probably my best start ever.

Anyway… post at ya later!

SHOCKtober 2012: Post Mortem

Yesterday I completed the 31 movies in 31 days of Final Girl‘s SHOCKtober event.

It was an interesting experiment, to watch that many movies in that short a time and write about each one. However, it is unlikely I will ever participate again.

There isn’t anything wrong with the concept itself, of doing a movie a day for the whole month, but there is a serious flaw in letting someone else pick the movies. There was a lot of terrible shit in this list, movies that I think I would have preferred never to have seen. Not all of them for the reasons I gave for the final film, Martyrs. Some were just because they were old and boring.

Plus, too many foreign films. There is nothing inherently wrong with foreign films, but reading subtitles means that you have to pay very close attention to the movie, even if it is boring. You can’t browse the Internets and return focus to the film when something exciting happens. Nope, you have to sit there staring at the screen and read the whole damn thing. I don’t mind foreign films, but I have to prepare myself for them, get other stuff done and clear the two hours of time where I can focus on just the movie. I feel like doing that roughly once a month. This selection had 13 films with subtitles. There were 15 foreign films, but the copy of Planet of the Vampires I watched was dubbed as was Tenebre (I had a subtitled copy but the subtitles wouldn’t work on my player).

If I ever attempt anything like this again, I’ll be picking the list myself.

On the other hand, being forced to write every day was good. And I plan to carry it into this month as I participate in NaNoWriMo. In fact, since I wrote this post in advance, there is a decent chance that I’m already writing. I hope so anyway.

Until next time…

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 31: Martyrs (2008)

Martyrs.

Fuck you.

That really should be the entirety of my review. But I don’t want to be so glib. It might encourage people to see this horrific piece of crap.

Basically, you should only watch this if you like love ultra-graphic gore and sadistic torture. If you don’t like love those things, then you should avoid this movie at all costs.

So, this girl, Lucie, escapes from somewhere that she was clearly being kept and tortured. She gets away and gets put in an orphanage where she befriends Anna. Anna learns that Lucie claims to be tormented by a ghoulish monster. Flash forward fifteen years where Lucie busts in on a family eating breakfast and murders them all with a double barrel shotgun. She calls Anna, tells her she killed the people who tortured her as a child and Anna comes to help dispose of the bodies. Lucie keeps being attacked by the ghoul, but, once Anna is there, realizes it is all in her head, is just guilt over the girl she left behind when she escaped, and slits her own throat. All of this is shown in very graphic detail.

Anyway, Anna discovers a secret basement and a tortured girl, who looks a lot like the ghoul Lucie was fighting. Anna frees her and tries to help her.

It was at this point that I first turned the movie off and uttered the phrase, “Fuck you.” The tortured girl, when left alone for a few moments, is found cutting herself with a giant knife, just hacking away at her own wrist. Eventually, when I calmed down, I watched the rest of the movie.

People show up, kill the tortured girl and take Anna prisoner. The people explain that they are torturing girls to learn the secrets of the afterlife. Anna gets tortured. A lot. Time passes, the movie keeps fading in and out and she reappears each time more tortured. Eventually she’s told that she’s almost complete. Then they flay her alive. Flay. At this point Anna reaches some sort of enlightenment and experiences the afterlife. Not a near death experience – she’s in this euphoria state for over two hours. Then she tells the leader lady something, it’s whispered – we don’t get to hear it. The crazy cult people gather to hear the words of Anna, and while they wait the old lady tells another member to “keep doubting” and then shoots herself in the head. A nice title card tells us that “martyr” is Greek for “witness”.

All that torture. All that disgusting shit. All of it, and I get “keep doubting”?

Seriously, Martyrs, fuck you.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants - Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 30: Planet of the Vampires (1965)

Planet of the Vampires is an Italian science fiction horror film where two spaceships respond to a distress call on an unexplored planet. In their attempt to land, both ships become damaged. One loses its meteor deflector and the other takes engine and hull damage.

In their attempts to recover, it is discovered that some of the crews have become possessed by aliens. Those aliens want to hitch a ride off their dying planet and get to a new planet where they can thrive. Several people try to thwart the plans of the aliens, but ultimately the aliens win. However, the ship is still damaged and won’t make the long flight home. So instead, the aliens turn the ship to the nearest inhabited planet: Earth.

Dun dun DUN!!

Man oh man, the 60s!

There is just something about the way the colors look in movies from that era, especially sci-fi, fantasy and horror stuff. So vibrant! And the sets, caught halfway between realism and totally fake. With fog hiding the sound stage floor. And the fashions! Just look at these space outfits!

I want to make one of those, the male version of course, for Dragon*Con. Except, I’d need to figure out how to make it look that good while being made of a material that breathes.

Anyway, movies of this era can’t really be called “good” but they have a quality that makes them a lot of fun to watch.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 29: The Horde (2009)

My second favorite film of SHOCKtober, The Horde is a French zombie apocalypse tale. A group of police are going after a drug lord who is responsible for killing a colleague. They invade the condemned high-rise where the drug lord lives, screw up and get captured. But then zombies happen and they all need to team up to survive.

This movie is sooooo good. Unless you just cannot possibly tolerate subtitles, you must see this film if you like zombie movies. It takes the best elements of an action film and the best elements of a zombie film, and you get a high energy zombie survival action movie that is great from beginning to end.

The Horde is chock full of awesome moments. Bloody deaths, noble sacrifices, stupid people, less stupid people, actual smart people… there is this one moment, that looks a lot like this:

and that the movie reminds me at times of Dead Rising is a huge plus. But it also reminds me of Left 4 Dead as well. In fact, lots of the movie reminds me of a video game, but not in a dumb way like that terrible Doom movie.

It is a crime that I haven’t bought this on Blu-ray yet, but then again, it’s available on Netflix Instant Streaming, where I have watched it three or four times, so maybe I can be forgiven.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 28: Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Rosemary’s Baby is one of those movies I have avoided for years specifically because everyone keeps telling me how great it is. I’ve done this before, and will continue to do it, because when people build up expectations like that the movie rarely ever meets those expectations. I still haven’t seen No Country For Old Men for exactly that reason – I’ll watch it the minute I can go six months without hearing about how it’s the best movie ever made. (It’s actually amazing how many “best movie ever made”s there are…)

Anyway, I’d always heard about how Rosemary’s Baby was so great and so I never watched it. But with SHOCKtober including it on the list, I did. And as expected, I was underwhelmed.

It was okay. It was slow. I’m not a Mia Farrow fan. There were no shocks or surprises. Every step of the way I was one step ahead of the film, and especially after having seen The Haunting of Julia, the end really wasn’t a surprise at all. Of course, since this movie came first, perhaps it’s Julia that shouldn’t have been the surprise…

Like many of the moody thrillers of the era, Rosemary’s Baby is well crafted. And I’d say well acted, but I truly loathe Miss Farrow in these sorts of roles (which is most of the roles that she plays), the wide-eyed innocent with the soft whiny voice. And really there is nothing wrong with the film, it’s good, it’s just not the best movie ever made, so don’t go in expecting it to be and maybe you’ll end up thinking it is…

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants - Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton, nijomu

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 27: Calvaire (2004)

Calvaire… I don’t really know what to say about it.

Crazy people?

It didn’t make any sense.

What a complete waste of time.

I won’t get that time back.

It’s gone now.

Gone.

And what did I fill that time with? A guy singing to the elderly? A man with a missing dog that doesn’t exists? Someone having sex with a calf? An innkeeper who emasculates a guest and pretends he is his wife?

Totally not worth it.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Life Between Frames, Blog @ Rotten Cotton

SHOCKtober 2012 – Day 26: Triangle (2009)

Of all the movies in the SHOCKtober experience, Triangle is easily my favorite. And that’s saying quite a lot when you consider there are zombie films in this list. It is so good that I don’t want to talk about it. I just want you to go see it. You need to see it.

Yes, it’s a bit bloody. And yes, there are points at which you might be confused. But once you are done, and once you’ve thought about what you’ve seen, go check out this thread where some friends and I (as “jason”) discuss the film.

Feel free to come back here and continue discussion in the comments. I’d be happy to chat about this film with anyone. So, I guess that means the comments might eventually be filled with spoilers. See the movie first.

Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.

UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames, nijomu