Samuel L. Jackson Isn’t Cool

May 25, 2008 at 12:00 pm · Filed under General

Does anyone who isn’t a Hollywood executive, or Samuel L. Jackson, think that Samuel L. Jackson is cool?  How did he create this cool stigma? Was it by being bald, black and dropping f-bombs? That’s totally his thing that he does; is that what passes for cool these days? I just don’t get it. Honestly, it’s like I’m taking crazy pills here.

Last night I went and saw Iron Man, which was super awesome. On the way in, one of the ladies who worked at the theater said “make sure you watch through the credits, there’s another scene at the end.” The scene, as it turns out, is Tony Stark meeting Nick Fury - the head of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Let’s take a look at Nick Fury:

In Iron Man, Nick Fury is portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson.

Now I get why this decision was made. The producers wanted to make this scene super bad-ass, and get everyone all fired up for Iron Man II, or maybe The Avengers. The problem is that SLJ isn’t BA. And Nick Fury isn’t a sassy black man. So why force it?

In Pulp Fiction SLJ was a bad-ass - but that’s about it. Take a look at his movie credits. Since 1994, when Pulp Fiction came out, SLJ’s entire career has consisted of cameos as a  bad-ass. That’s 14 years of playing the same character over, and over, and over in increasingly bad movies. It’s become a cliche; if you’re making a movie, and you need a bad-ass, hire SLJ. That’s all there is to it. Need a BA Jedi? Hire SLJ. Need a BA cop “on the edge”? Hire SLJ.

I blame Pulp Fiction. Without Pulp Fiction, SLJ would never have become - in massive sarcasm quotes - “ultramegacool“. Neither would John Travolta.  While an awesome movie, Pulp Fiction is totally to blame for making SLJ and John Travolta cool. The number of truly terrible movies spawned by the resurgence of those two actors is staggering. All things considered, movies as a whole would be a lot better had Pulp FictionI never happened, and Iron Man would have been better without SLJ.

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Designed for Firefox

May 7, 2008 at 8:02 pm · Filed under Internet

I have had enough of seeing professional sites which break in IE. I do not care if you hate Microsoft, the people who use Microsoft products, coding for IE, etc. If a site you built does not work in IE, then you are a complete crap developer. Period.

Any solution which doesn’t work for 60-80% of your users isn’t a good solution - whether you like it or not.

The Google Docs widget for iGoogle cannot be logged into from IE7. That is bush league Google, get your act together.

Friend requests on Last.fm display scrollbar hell for IE users. That’s not even hard to fix, they’re just being lazy.

Countless sites can’t be bothered to optimize for IE because “IE sucks,” and you know what? They’re right, IE does suck. I waste loads of time optimizing HTML & CSS so that they will work in IE6 and IE7. I hate doing it, and I strongly Encourage Microsoft to get their acts together (which they claim to be doing with IE8 which passes the ACID test).

What I do not do is say that I can’t be bothered to code for a broken browser. That is lazy, ignorant, and inexcusable. Developers who take that stance are beneath my contempt. Grow up and get to work in the real world.

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