I‘m going to make a vow right now to never again say in print or in conversation the words: “The book is better.”

Not because the book isn’t better, not because I don’t think the book is better in many cases, and not because I don’t think it’s ever valuable to compare a film adaptation with its literary original. But because the statement “The book is better” is too easy a gut reaction, too simplistic a critical statement, and too cliched a response. It doubles as an elitist phrase, both revealing that you’ve read the book in question and that you, being literary, prefer it to its pop-art cousin the cinema. Now, of course not everyone who uses the phrase intends those elitist connotations and I don’t mean to suggest that they do.

Instead, when dealing with a film adaptation of a book, I will seek to compare how they differ, what specific things the book did better, and what specific things the film did better. Sometimes I can’t be that specific, because the difference is more ephemeral than that, but I will be specific about that, too, as specific as I can.

I already try to do this, recognizing that the film, though based on an existing work, is also its own work of art and ought to be treated as such rather than merely a copy/shadow of the original. But I will make it explicit. Hold me to this. If any time after today, you hear me say the words “The book is better” or see me write them, call me on it. Remind me to think more carefully about the relationship between the two works, and tell me to rewrite or expand what I wrote.

I replaced the normal WordPress comment system with comments powered by Disqus. Disqus is a centralized comment management service that keeps track of all the comments you make on Disqus-enabled blogs – basically providing you an identity that follows you to different sites, making it easy for you to comment and keep up with the threads you’ve contributed to. It also allows threaded comments (I can never decide whether I prefer threaded or non-threaded comments; right now I’m on a threaded kick), video comments powered by Seesmic, and comment voting, which isn’t necessarily a huge thing with as small a blog as I have, but hey. Disqus is also the comment system of choice for Tumblr, which doesn’t have native comment support, and I’ve had it enabled on my Tumblr since I found that out.

If you don’t comment on a lot of different blogs (particularly tech/early adopter ones, which is where Disqus is the most popular so far), don’t worry, you won’t have to sign up for an account on Disqus if you don’t want to. You can continue to just put in your name and e-mail address (and website, optionally) if you want. If you want to sign up for Disqus, just click “verify my comment” when you comment the first time, and it’ll give you the option to log in or sign up. The next time you comment here or on another Disqus-enabled blog, it will remember who you are. The Disqus comments will only replace the comments on new posts and on older ones that didn’t have any comments already; comments that you’ve made here in the past will remain.

We’ll see how it goes; I’ve waffled back and forth on whether I wanted to do this, and I may go back eventually after all. A lot of negative feedback on Disqus has centered on how it removes a certain amount of control from the blogger (I can accept or reject Disqus comments, but I can’t edit them, as I could edit WordPress comments – I never actually did that, though), and also doesn’t support trackbacks when other people link here from their blogs. I do sort of hope Disqus comes up with a solution for the trackback issue, but as far as comment control, the debate seems to center on whether the blog owner or the commenter “owns” the comments and the content in the comments. And I’m feeling very democratic lately, and I think the commenter should own their comments. Moving to Disqus shifts control to the commenter rather than the blog owner. So there you go.

Oh, the other thing I changed was just to put three Twitter entries in the sidebar in text rather than the Twitter widget. It’s just cleaner that way.

We’re coming down to the wire on this semester; only two weeks left to finish up (aka write) those final papers and do those last projects. And we know what that means! Layout change! It’s like a Pavlov’s dog scenario, for serious. Anyway, I’ve actually been messing around with the layouts for a while, but I kept getting roadblocked from what I really wanted to do by my lack of PHP knowledge. But mostly what I wanted was to be able to do was highlight video clips, and I finally found a layout template that had enough space in the sidebar to manage. I can never decide how many columns I need, so this one that lets me sort of have both two and three at the same time is perfect!

Of course, the real reason I needed to move to something with wider sidebars is so I could display my brand spanking new Xbox Live Gamertag. I tell you what, the thing is eating my life. In a good way. Mostly. I’m now addicted to getting achievements, which is encouraging me to replay Call of Duty 2 at the highest difficulty to get more. I never do that. I used to just play games through on Normal difficulty once and then quit; yay for increasing replay value! I also finished Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which was so great I’m very close to naming it my new favorite RPG, even over Knights of the Old Republic. And that’s saying something. It’s saying a lot, actually. Now I’m lusting after Mass Effect, but I’m going to wait and give it to myself as a post-semester reward. In any case, if you have Live and know me, add me! I don’t know very many people on Live, so I need friends.

It also lets me put last.fm‘s radio widget in there instead of the playlist one; I no longer have full control over the songs, but they’re all recommended based on my musical taste and they’re the full songs rather than the 30-second preview. I think that’s better. Plus I don’t have to feel guilty that I haven’t changed the playlist for months.

Let’s see, anything else new and interesting? Or at least new? Nope, not really. Back to last week’s Grey’s Anatomy. It has Seth Green! I swear, I’m getting to the point where I recognize half of the guest stars on TV. Eliza Dushku was on Ugly Betty last week, which was awesome. I miss her. Did I ever post about the show she and Joss Whedon are working on? I don’t think I did. But they’re working on a new show, and I’m so excited. Okay, rambling now.

This post is now out of date. Please see here for more recent information on the site layout and subscription information.

I just moved the RSS Subscription box around on the main page again, putting it closer to the top on the left, and adding fancy orange RSS icons. Yay for figuring out how to modify the code for widgets! (I have a love-hate relationship with the WordPress widget system; don’t even get me started.)

Anyway, I’ve been using Tumblr for a while now to post videos, pictures, quotes and other random stuff I find around on the web that I don’t really want to bother writing a whole post about, but want to share. I tried for a few weeks to redo my whole layout to be able to incorporate a sort of Tumblr-esque sidebar or section within WordPress (so that both regular posts and tumblelog posts would show up in the same RSS feed), but gave up due to my near-complete lack of php knowledge. I have had the RSS feed from Tumblr showing in the sidebar, though. Similarly, I’m getting more into Twitter lately, now that I’ve got my phone set up with it. Twitters show up in my sidebar too, but again with the lack of integration with this blog.

So here’s the current compromise. With the help of FeedJumbler and FeedBurner, I have created individual and combined feeds for these three areas of my online life. You can:

• Subscribe to the blog only. This will get you all the entries you see on this page, as well as the short asides on the top right.
• Subscribe to the tumbleblog only. This will get you everything on this Tumblr page.
• Subscribe to the Twitter feed only. This will get you everything on this Twitter page.
• Subscribe to the blog and the tumblelog. Then you get all the entries here as well as the video and photo posts on Tumblr.
• Subscribe to all three. Then you get it all.
• There is another option, not for the faint of heart. You could subscribe to my Friendfeed, which includes not only the three things above, but also my Flickr feed (photos I post), my del.icio.us bookmarks, and my last.fm listening log, my GoogleReader shared items, and other things. So if you’re trying to stalk me, here ya go.

edited 3/29/08 to include the FriendFeed option