George Lucas about why he changed the original Star Wars:
AP: Why did you rework the original trilogy into the special-edition versions in the late 1990s?
To me, the special edition ones are the films I wanted to make. Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It’s abandoned or it’s ripped out of your hands, and it’s thrown into the marketplace, never finished. It’s a very rare experience where you find a filmmaker who says, “That’s exactly what I wanted. I got everything I needed. I made it just perfect. I’m going to put it out there.” And even most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work now. They’ve got a new perspective on it, they’ve got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done. … I wanted to actually finish the film the way it was meant to be when I was originally doing it. At the beginning, people went, “Don’t you like it?” I said, “Well, the film only came out to be 25 or 30 percent of what I wanted it to be.” They said, “What are you talking about?” So finally, I stopped saying that, but if you read any interviews for about an eight- or nine-year period there, it was all about how disappointed I was and how unhappy I was and what a dismal experience it was. You know, it’s too bad you need to get kind of half a job done and never get to finish it. So this was my chance to finish it.
Robert Cringely on remaking the USB port
Tool for diffing PDF’s: DiffDoc
Candid interview about politics with Jay Leno. Sample joke: “Nancy Reagan had won the Humanitarian of the Year award. I?m so glad she beat out that conniving little bitch Mother Teresa. ”
An unrepresentative sample of Iraqi opinions about Americans (translated from a BBC website):
A bizarre (but authentic) video showing George W. Bush rubbing his eyeglasses on a female worker’s blouse.
According to Teleread, Blackmask online has the best collection of ebooks. Now if only we had a decent ebook reader.
Donotgo has a cool rant about why Internet Search Does Suck:
Charles Herod on the Sims2 game. Read more for a longish excerpt:
I spent most of my time getting my Sims to seduce one another. Sims are bisexual, fickle and intensely jealous. After moving Mike, Rachel and Carol in together, I did my best to make them fall in love with one another. But while every Sim is quite ready to take on multiple partners, each demands monogamy. When one of my Sims saw another flirting, the result was fighting and weeping. Eventually, I concluded that the logistics of multiple clandestine affairs in one household were too daunting, so I married Mike to Rachel while Carol took up with an older woman and the grocery delivery boy.
This was not actually enough for Carol; her Romance aspiration gave her the desire for three simultaneous lovers.
Sex in the Sims world takes the form of WooHoo. When your Sim interacts with another Sim, you are given various menu options. With a Sim you have just met, you might chat or brag; when you talk to a Sim you know better, you can also choose to gossip or share common interests. You can flirt with a Sim, then move on to hugging and kissing and eventually to WooHoo in a bed or a hot tub. All that you see on the screen is your Sims disappearing under blankets or in the water, wearing big smiles. WooHoo can lead to pregnancy, with newborn Sims inheriting parental genetics.
It is also possible to become pregnant as the result of an alien abduction; while Sims 2 tries to emulate human behavior, it does not shy away from the fanciful.
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