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This Thursday, Eric and I are heading to Austin, TX to attend Linucon 2.0. Linucon 1.0 was a great convention and we had a wonderful time, both at the con and visiting our various Austin friends (including cmat, landley, fadethecat, brandyeileen, and others. We plan to stay in Austin the week after the con so that we can manage to see as many of our friends as possible.

This year's Linucon runs from September 30 to October 2, 2005 and will be at the Austin Ambassador Hotel (located at the corner of I-35 and Highway 183). It will have tons of Linux, SF, anime, and related events, a dealer's room, gaming, cosplay, and many other ways to have a lot of fun. If anyone reading this lives in or near Austin, and is free next weekend, I urge you to come on out and support a great, fledgling con. If anyone who's reading this can't get to Austin but knows someone who can, tell them about the con! And if you're reading this and can't be at Linucon even if you live close enough, I'm sorry you'll miss it, and hope you can come next year!

Last night, for a change of pace, Eric and I caught Terry Gilliam's latest movie, "The Brothers Grimm." I wasn't too optimistic, since I didn't like Brazil, the last Terry Gilliam movie I'd seen, but the preview looked good enough that it seemed worth a try.

I was glad we went. Gilliam's premise, in case you have missed the previews, is that the brothers of the title are really con men. Their game is to use fireworks, pulleys, dummies and other pre-Victorian gadgetry to embody the "witches", "trolls" and other supernatural menaces that the peasants still believe in. Then they ask the town fathers for gold so that they can vanquish the monsters. The movie takes off when our heroes are forced to confront the supernatural for real.

Believe me, none of this counts as spoiler material.

The rest of the story interweaves our heroes' interactions with real-world political authorities (the story is set in French-occupied Germany in the 1820s) with their interactions with the supernatural visitants. Gilliam takes delight in shoehorning in references to just about every single Grimm's Fairy Tale and recombining the bits in ways the real-world tellers of fairy tales probably never imagined. The acting is reasonably good, and there is a surprising amount of psychological depth to the story. Dark comedy, too. But like most of the Grimm's tales, it has a happy ending. The only drawback to the movie from my point of view is that some of the scenes, without being noticeably gory at all, are pretty gross. (No, I won't explain that here.)

The movie is nearly gone from the theaters, but I recommend that you go see it if you can, before "Serenity", "Wallace and Gromit", "Narnia" and the better films expected this winter start coming out. It's a fine bit of fun to start the fall with.