Just another nerd.
For a personal project, I needed a program that would track daily bandwidth utilization on a few Windows laptops I use. So far, Bandwidth Monitor seems to be the best choice with one caveat — it does cost $19.95 to register after the 30 day trial period.
There are freeware bandwidth monitors for Windows available and I tried a few of them, but they tended to be wildly inaccurate in their reporting of bandwidth usage.
This is teh awesome.
Ran across this essay by Daniel Donahoo at Wired’s Geek Dad which goes on at length speculating upon the best age to let kids watch ‘Star Wars’. The author apparently has decided that he won’t let his kids watch ‘Star Wars’ until they are 10, and then only under special conditions. My son has not only already seen ‘Star Wars’ but he’s also beaten ‘Star Wars Lego’ on the XBOX 360 — he’s 6.
Donahoo offers up two objections to letting his kids watch ‘Star Wars’ before they are 10, one of which I don’t agree with but can understand, and another which I find unfathomable.
Star Wars Is Violent
The first reason is the obvious violence in ‘Star Wars.’ Parents are all over the place on appropriate levels of sex and violence in movies that they let their kids watch. Frankly, the violence in ‘Star Wars’ is nothing compared to the average Tom and Jerry or Roadrunner cartoon, both of which my son and I both experienced well before we were old enough to read (and the violence in the cartoons is, IMO, much worse since there is no heroic context — its largely violence for its own sake. Still hilarious, but not as meaningful).
I think violence in movies like ‘Star Wars’ is one of those things where as we grow up we start to forget how we perceived and acted upon violent fantasies when we were kids or we discount our experience with the “well, of course, I watched Star Wars when I was seven, but I’m not sure my kid would be ready for it at that age.”
Again, I completely understand concerns about violence, but would really suggest anyone interested in exploring the positive side of fantasy violence read Gerard Jones’ excellent book on the topic, Killing Monsters.
Star Wars Is Special
The second reason Donahoo offers is one that really grates on me but seems to be common across fandom — to his view, Star Wars is a special movie that one has to be ready for in order to appreciate.
. . . we also do our children a disservice if we simply use seminal movies like Star Wars as just another DVD to distract the kids while we go about the business of daily life.
Yet, it feels to me like this is happening.
Now, I may be romanticizing my own pop culture experiences here, but surely movies like the Star Wars Trilogy, Indiana Jones, The Princess Bride and others are core texts in geek development and should be treated differently to your standard Disney or Pixar animation (though Toy Story might reach a new level in the future).
This reminds me of that poll some British newspaper did a few years ago to ask people what the best novel of the 20th century was and Lord of the Rings came out on top. Seriously?
Look, I first saw Star Wars when I was 9 and have seen IV-VI probably more than any other set of movies, but I’d hardly call them great or even seminal movies. Frankly, I find a cartoon series like Ben 10 much more complex and subtle than anything that ever emerged from George Lucas’ lens. Part of that is simply that what Lucas did was so different that he’s been superceded by those kids who were enamored of Star Wars and went into the various arts.
But beyond that, I hope as much as I love Star Wars, Star Trek, Buffy, etc., I hope I never think those are the movies that I need to make certain my kids really engage. Personally I’m awaiting the day I can sit down with my son and watch ‘La Strada’ or ‘The Seventh Seal’.