Pictures on Ubuntu, update

I've been playing around with Picasa. It's missing some features I really liked about iPhoto.

1. I can't import my albums from iPhoto. This fact is still incredibly irksome, and will continue to be so for as long as it persists.
   
2. I can't make folders of albums. This means that if I have more than 20 albums, they clutter up my sidebar and I have to scroll through the entire list to find the one I want.
3. There's no way to scroll through ALL the pictures in full-screen mode; photos are sorted by year, then month, then day. And full-screen mode will only allow for scrolling through a single day's pictures -- then to jump to the next day, I have to exit full-screen mode, pick the next day, and re-enter full-screen mode. Yuck.
4. Although Picasa is set to recognize .avi files, it doesn't.
   

The struggle continues. On the positive side, Picasa is not terribly slow. And lets me see my photos. That's nice. Standards lowering... lowering...


This post's theme word: moue, "pout or grimace."

District 9

"District 9" came out this past weekend, to many accolades. My inputs have been overflowing with praise -- oodles of positive tweets, the question "District 9 best sci-fi movie of 09?", reccommendations from friends -- and I'd like to add my two cents:

Don't watch it.

It's sad.

Really sad.

It's the saddest movie I've ever seen with that many explosions and aliens.

The preview, and the word-of-mouth praise, set up my expectations for a well-done science fiction/action movie: I expected aliens, guns, and explosions. The ad campaign (which started four or five months ago with "humans only" signs posted on bus stops) made me expect a little bit of alien/human segregation, you know, as a light topic in an otherwise science-fiction film. Let me clear up your confusion if you have similar ideas:

This is a movie about apartheid, racism, and humanity's (and individual human beings') limitless abillity for xenophobia, racism-based murder (think: holocaust) and even genocide.

Sound like heavy topics? They're given a heavy-handed treatment, too. Set in Johannesburg, the aliens are confined to a slum surrounded with barbed wire. I don't think anyone ever said "ghetto," but the words "concentration camp" were used.

This has been widely discussed online:

• troubling metaphors via Tor
• behind the scenes via Gizmodo
  
• xenophobia for dummies via Tor
  

The CG was good, and interesting -- they have figured out a way to insert digital characters into Blair-Witch-style shaky-cam footage. But so depressing. Boo.



This post's theme word: abrogate, "to put aside or treat as nonexistent, especially by an authoritative act."