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This is no beekeeper.

My main issue with this is the sound design was weak and the action just lacked kinetic energy. It tried to kind of do the nightclub scene from collateral, but just wasn't up to it.

I'd say the biggest miss here is that no one acted as the straight man in our two main character's relationship. It might have been slightly more interesting if the young girl gets to act as a proxy for the audience, commenting on the insanity of the situation or the violence, but she is just oddly quite when not being addressed.

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I think I may have overhyped this in my head upon seeing the preview, but I still enjoyed it. It was good, but it was kind of more of a reflection on Enlightenment than Grace, and I though this might be a film about the later.

I really want to support small vignette stories like this. Some of the scenery was great.

Ok, not really 5 stars (I rate that as "nothing could be improved", and this isn't perfect), but 5 stars if you have been following along and largely enjoying the series.

The last 2 books have been a bit rough in my mind. I was simply floored by just how little happened in the previous book. Contrasted with this book, which had so many great scenes... it is just weird. I wish he had largely elided the previous book and just combined it into it's two adjacent books.... Anyway.

This book is just so many great scenes. I am just reiterating them form myself so I remember

Nynaeve & Lan

My name is Nynaeve ti al'Meara Mandragoran. The message I want sent is this. My husband rides from World's End toward Tarwin's Gap, toward Tarmon Gai'don. Will he ride alone?

So freaking great! You know he will never fly the Golden Crane on his own. You know that he is a great man that could lead but is honor bound not to. You trick him into taking the long route home, and you seed news of his coming to everyone on his way. Damn. She knows he is going to be furious with her, but she does it anyway because she loves him. Just. Freaking. Great.

Mat & Tuon

“Matrim Cauthon is my husband,”the High Lady said in a loud, clear voice. Everyone froze where they stood. “Matrim Cauthon is my husband.”
Karede felt as if Hartha had kicked him again. No, not Hartha. Aldazar. What madness was this? Cauthon looked like a man watching an arrow fly toward his face, knowing he had no chance to dodge.
“Bloody Matrim Cauthon is my husband. That is the wording you used, is it not?”

I mean, it is good that it finally happened. I never felt that strongly about Tuon and Mat, but I really enjoyed their sorta 1940's screwball comedy romance.

Perrin and Faile
Finally, this captive story is resolved. I mean, yes, it is tragic that he killed the man who in multiple situations saved Fail (though also abducted her in the first place). But honestly this whole thing was kind of a boring sidequest the entire time. I feel like this story was supposed to temper Perrin, who is largely more sensitive than either Matt or Rand. In that regard, I guess it succeeded (he cut off a guys hand), but it was just a little dull. Also, I just find Faile kind of annoying as a character. I remember telling someone more than 20 years ago that I thought she was going to die as a character (and I still don't know), but that may just reflect my exasperation with her.

Egwene gets accepted by a bunch of novices
Good for Egwene. I find the whole idea that the White Tower literally chose to keep her alive so preposterous that I am just whatever on her whole plot at this time. This whole arch feels a little on the "Yes Mr. Bond, but before I kill you, first let me tell you what I am trying to accomplish, and also give you plenty of time to potentially escape from this trap" level of plot line. I am just having a real hard time understanding why she wasn't just dissapeared, stilled, and killed. She is instead allowed to run around and become a possible martyr (or, to her credit, a coup-leader) in the actual white tower. It just... I try to make allowances for the will of the pattern sometimes. :]

Rand looses a hand
This was boneheaded move number 2 by Rand (admitedly, he is under pressure). But damn man, you literally walk into what is so obviously a trap. You have become so high strung that you literally have no one to rely upon. And you are so arrogant that you didn't just like, slow the role down so that you could wrestle the power before walking into obvious danger... Dude.

Taim reveals himself

"What would you have me say? Fair is fair? Equal shares? Accept 'very well' and ask who will let you bond them. Besides, you must remember the old saying. Let the lord of chaos rule." The chamber erupted with men's laughter.
Pevara had never heard any saying like that. The laughter made the hair on the back of her neck try to stand.

Ok, the setup and scene is kinda cliche. Feels like the end of a serial that is designed to get you to read the next one. But damn, I don't know why, it really hit pretty strong. It was actually a pretty great end to the book.


Anyway, having captured all that for my future self, my suggestion to you (if you ever need to re-read these), would be basically to just skip the previous book "Crossroads of Twilight" (read the online summaries) and go directly to this one.

This is peak Jordan.

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I left after the first act. Wasn't terrible, but I felt that I had effectively read the first 100 pages and decided I didn't want to finish this book.

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It is just so dreadfully dark and dull. And the last act seems to last forever. I love the idea of focusing on the villains rather than batman, but although the acting is inspired, the actual character's core feels hollow.

Have to give it credit to the sound design for including the labored breathing of the Penguing though, that was inspired.

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Disney is really scraping bottom here. The writing in this film is just bad. This remind me of late term Daniel Craig Bond films, where he just goes from one random setpiece to another because some flimsy evidence connects the two.

I think I (and I assume most of the audience) predicted basically the entire plot of this film in the first 5 minutes of it's runtime. Maybe they revealed too much in the trailer?

What are the major feelings I am supposed to take from this? She overcompensates and he has trouble showing his affection? Ok, so we have an adventure and then we literally state our weaknesses and our confessions to each other verbatim? This is storytelling?

Altogether just kinda dull.

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In some sense, it is really his wife that is the main driver in this film.

1. She is the one who makes a wish that keeps him in town.
2. She is the one who pulls out the honeymoon money to keep the bank run at bay.
3. She is the one who rallies her friends and family to save the bank while he goes off on a bender/suicide.

I mean, maybe I am making too much of it, but it seems that she is the principal agent of the entire film.

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I couldn't quite say why, but this movie felt a whole lot like "The Tree of Life (2011)". I guess it is another exploration (to some degree) of the notion of Grace. Interestingly, Grace in this film is embodied in a sort of naturalism/witchcraft.

I also thought the mixing of a sort of magical surrealism into the story was well done.

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I'm currently in St. Louis and so thought it would be fun to watch this. The musical numbers were good, and I was surprised that both "Clang Clang Clang goes the Trolley" (The Trolley Song) and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (of the same name) were from this film. Which I thought was fun.

Weirdest parts:

• whatever the hell those kids were doing for Halloween.
• The complete disregard for life and limb in allowing a child to pursue a very dangerous prank; I was a little weirded out that they didn't even attempt to correct that behavior.
• Tootie... Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we should get her checked out?

Also, Grandpa seemed to be the only fully functional/formed adult in the entire family, so props to him.

I think I most wanted to see this film to try to place the optimism and pride that people had in Saint Louis at the beginning of the 19th century. Saint Louis at the time had almost twice the number of people as it does today. Saint Louis was central and growing city at the time. It is interesting to see that even in the fictionalized wonder of this film. I imagine the population collapse of modern Saint Louis would quite surprise someone from 1903.

I just finished an entire book and I genuinely think almost nothing happened in it. I am now reading the reviews and noticing that many people say it is best to just skip this one entirely. I am too much of a completionist to do so, but in recommending this series I would advise anyone else to skip this and just read the online summaries for this one. It is almost entirely a book of just world building and characters. Honestly, I am kinda impressed by the pure audacity of the whole thing.

This book perfectly hits what it aims for. It is a bit too "let's take a 90's New York cop show and set it fantasyland" for my taste, but you have to admit, it did a pretty damn good job of it.

The packaging was very familiar to anyone watching broadcast tv in the 90's. Clean, efficient writing. Pacing was good. I was genuinely entertained and would certainly consider reading the next in this series.

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I wish I had someone with me who deeply appreciated this series. Watching it solo, I thought it had some surprisingly prescient things to say about the disconnect from reality, the multiple versions of yourself online, and the loss of humanity that might occur as people join the Wired (internet).

I got these insights through my own experience, but I have been told that to (really) get lain, you might need to read more about it online. I am not sure that I will, and I am always a little hesitant to recommend something that can only be truly appreciated with further context.

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This is one of those movies that I largely enjoyed because I think it might be reflective of a culture or lifestyle (Shanghai, single mother) that is very foreign to me.

China, more than many places, is a country that is very difficult to get a "everyman on the street" read on. I think maybe something comes through in works like this, though maybe that is like judging American culture via the Barbie film.

I genuinely wonder how Robert Jordan sketched out this book? The next book evidently runs concurrently to this one. So when he wrote this one did he do so as a basic "background material" for the next book? Did he plan to do this ahead of time or did he make the decision to do so when he realized he had a bunch of B plots that he needed to partially resolve before he got to the "big action" end of this book.

Anyway, two major events happen in this book, and it feels like it should be a bigger deal, but you are so sort of overwhelmed by the amount of background noise going on that it is hard to even place them in perspective.

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The soundtrack and some of the special effects are the only redeeming thing about this film. If I had to point a finger I would say the editor/cinematographer are most to blame. It's hard to describe a visual medium as noisy, but it is all I can think to describe this. Slow motion scenes to excess, character arcs that just occur with no explanation, plot holes that you could drive a Recognizer through. Just... subpar.

I notice how much cleaner and professional most writing is becoming on the internet. I've also noticed that the average articles seems to have ballooned in size. Seems like every writer suddenly fell in love with emojied bulleted list.

I suspect that the reason for this is that more and more people are using AI to guide their writting. I'm not criticing anyone for doing so, the LLM can almost certainly write better than you ever could.

My own writing is weak. Stylistially I constantly put things in parentheses that should be better expressed as separate thoughts. I loose the tense of the paragraph all the time. I wander around ideas without finishing them. Sometimes I don't even bother to spellcheck. Tons of problems.

But I think that I am going to stick to writing without LLMs. For three principal reasons:

1. It is more fun. I feel something bigger when I write something poorly on my own than something better with an LLM.
2. It seems to me that it is a better expression of who I am. Most of my writting is simply cataloging (not even reviewing) things that I consume. I enjoy viewing and contrasting past versions of myself against the person who I am today (as someone familiar with the author). If some stranger were to read what I write, I think a poorly penned paragraph of my own is more illustrative of who I am than a better written article enhanced by an LLM.
3. It is a small (perhaps token) resistance against the normalization of the world. I'm concerned that the prevalence of LLMs will groupthink us into thinking the same way, acting the same way, believing the same way. Writing (poorly) on my own is a small way to resist that.

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A tight 90 minute thriller with no car chases and minimal action. Actually, there weren't even necessarily any "bad guys" in this film, depending on how much your adhere to Realpolitiks. Not to say that there weren't abhorrent characters, but they seemed to all be guided by differerrent interpretations of their reality.

And the movie, despite being very short, actually gave you enough time to at least begin to gather what those different interpretations were.

Honestly a pretty impressive feat in such a compact film.

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Felt like Napoleon Dynamite meets Sicario. Also kind of reminded me of Taken in the sense that things are being done that are so high visibility, and yet the world as a whole does not seem to react to them (just like in Taken's evidently lawless France).

A kind of gross movie about boring people doing nonsensical things.

I think the only character I actually liked was Benicio Del Toro's, he had a cool vibe to him.

If I did not love these characters like family, I would admit to myself that this is just not a very good book.

For one thing, it is Mat'less, which is weak.

We spend a whole whole lot of time in Egwen's power struggle as Amyrlin, which has it's moments. And I wonder if the notion of a ruler taking extraordinary wartime powers felt like a fresh idea at the time? I don't know, seems so common these days that it feels kinda hackneyed. I raised a serious eyebrow when supposedly only 1 Aes Sedai was aware of the implications of what they were doing. That seemed kinda forced.

Anywho, a little happens in this book, the weather gets better, and then there is a big boom at the end. Fin.

I went to the Yasukuni Jinja Yushukan museum in Chiyoda City, Tokyo. Roughly (if I remember correctly) 1/2 of the exhibit is on pre WWI excursions, with the last 2 being WW1 and WW2.

It is also a rather interesting museum if you want to hear the "other" view on the geopolitics leading to WWII. Unfortunately, these are not the sorts of conversations that are even remotely worth having on the internet, so I will leave it there.

Interesting museum, recommend.

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I was in a bit of a mood in Shinjuku and just wanted something to relax to. I saw it at the 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku, which was a luxury theater on I believe the 17th floor of a tower. It was an interesting experience as people actually seemed to be hanging out in the lounge before the film. Popcorn and drinks were included (with refills) up to the start of the movie. I'm curious if this luxury film model will work out any better here than it has in the United States. Still, it was enjoyable.

The film was pretty cool in terms of animation. I have seen one previous in this serious (I think the train one?) and other than a brief recap from my friend know nothing about this series. I always think it is interesting how often Japanese animes tend to like to humanize even the "bad" characters, this one was no exception.

I've read this before (twice), but this is genuinely a great book. I think few authors are as observant, critical, and yet still forgiving of human foibles as Jane Austen was.

I probably last read this something like 15 years ago. One thing that I didn't remember from the book (relative to the film) was how long the scene at the end where Darcy and Elizabeth discuss their misunderstandings is. I guess the film had replaced my memory of it.

Actually, on the subject of lost memory, I feel that when I saw the film in theaters 20 years ago it literally ended on Keith Sutherland saying "... send them in, I am quite at my leisure". I thought that was just an incredible end to the movie, not showing the love of the characters but implying it instead. However, when I watched it again on home video I was suprised to see that there was an ending past that scene with Elizabeth and Darcy at moonlight I believe, recounting their love and all that. I much prefer the film ending on Sutherland than the scene of the happy couple being the ending, it is just so confident an end to a film. With that said, the actual "couple at moonlight" ending is actually closer to the book (though incredibly compressed).

Anywho, it makes sense not to have the "remembrance" section of the book in the film, as you literally just watched all those scenes less than 2 hours ago. While it does make sense in the book, as you read each of those scenes many hours (wall clock likely days) ago. Just an interesting example of how certain things in literature are not translatable to film.

I am actually relatively new to drinking coffee (I'm a tea man). With that said, I quite enjoyed Austin's coffee culture. I like the energy from having other people around you who are focused. I enjoy the pleasure of listening (ok, evesdropping) when two friends catch up. I appreciate the education of watching two businessman negotiate a preliminary deal.

It has been more than a decade since I regularly worked at coffee shops, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

My only real regret was that in Austin I had to drive myself to each coffee place. It was also not uncommon to drive somewhere and find that I could not find any reasonable parking. Someday self driving will fix this, but it is still a thorn in what is otherwise an almost completely enjoyable outing.

This got me thinking that I should travel somewhere with the intent of partaking in "cafe culture" on the daily. I want to be able to travel (ideally walk) to nearby cafes, roughly 2 a day, and work for several hours at each of them. I am thinking go to the first cafe in the morning for a few, then break for an extended lunch, and then do another extended cafe session in the evening. There are lots of options (Vienna, Melbourne, NYC), but many of those are more money than I am willing to spend at this time. I decided that I will do a sort of limited tour of East Asia, starting in Tokyo, and then moving on to Seoul and then Kuala Lampur. I am planning on spending roughly a month at each of these 3 locations. At this time, I only have Tokyo booked in terms of hotels. I will play the future by ear.

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I.. I did not love this film.

It is odd, I feel like the individual pieces (even up to entire scenes) are quite good. However, the whole is just less than its parts. What was our character's growth here? Who sacrificed what for whom? What big emotions were at play?

I don't know man. I just couldn't figure out what Luthor's motivation even was here? Why was he so bent on this? Something about humanity not having to shine in Superman's beneficent aura? Really? You are going to potentially destroy the world for that?

Superman's transformation was just... kinda vapid. He was good because biological mommy and daddy told him to be good, then he learned they were actually bad, then he was sad, and then he was good because adoptive daddy tells him to be good. Like, you are 30+ years old man. I just don't get it.

As I said, lots of the individual scenes were great, but when you back out and ask "why are we here? What is he trying to accomplish? What is the point of this subplot?" it is just weak. Why are we having a scene where superman white river rafts down a proton stream holding a baby while his dog rescues him?" Why is Lois lane and like 5 other people in Mr. T's baseballmobile like doing something... aren't they reporters? Why do the Green Lantern's splinter at the most opportune time to help him?

What is anyone's motivation here?

It just does not add up to much honestly.

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What an odd duck.

It is sort of an argument for a strong man authoritarianism form of government. I was a little chilled about how prescient it was about the next great war (ok, there were no "death rays" or whatever, and chemical warfare was much less prevalent, and the airplane bomber did not render the battleship obsolete, but still). You sometimes forget how much people worried about the next big war after the first one.

It was also kind of wild to see a prohibition (and pre-code) film. I thought the idea of a "alcohol dispensary" was kinda wild, but it turns out those actually existed! Evidently some states allowed the sale of alcohol (for medicinal purposes). So points to this movie for motivating me into learning about my countries history.

Anyway, I didn't like the premise of a "spirit" taking over the president. I didn't like some of the proposed solutions. I didn't like the strong man arguments. And it wasn't a particularly captivating film.

However, it did give me some insight to some of the mindset that people had after the greatest war the world had every known. And I think that is worth something.

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Wow this was some really strong acting. Well paced and without any unearned moments. I was quite impressed how much was wrung from a fairly simple setup.

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Enjoyed. So many of these scenes felt... I don't know, like 4 panel comics. But where the punchline is visual rather than written gag. Never hilarious, and a little tedious at points. But enjoyable through.

If you look into it, there are messages here about class, modernism, old vs new urbanism, tech fetishism, and more. But I almost feel that to do so is to deconstruct a pleasant film into is more base, constituent parts. It is a bit of a disservice.

I picked it up as the the back cover made it sound quite fun. I think I found this book because I was looking for fantasy books where the fantasy creatures are forced to interact with the modern world. Unfortunately, it didn't capitalize on its back cover premise.

The writing was honestly a bit dull, and our protagonist Bart was a bit of a Mary Sue.

This came off more like a "let me tell you about something I once heard" and less like an actual adventure story. I would have enjoyed it quite a bit more as a 45 minute short film than as a (admittedly thin) book.

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Give her pointed ears and she could be mistaken for a Romulan! I wonder if this influenced the design of them in Star Trek? I know that this was a fairly popular film in its time and it isn't inconceivable that Roddenberry sampled from the film?

Cute movie, main critic is that the transition in her disposition occurs so abruptly that it almost feels like there is a missing scene or something.

I liked the three Russian bunglers, good sense of timing.

Also a little bit of a a love letter to Paris, though more as an excuse for our characters than as an actual study of the city.

This is one of the weaker books in the series. Maybe it should have been divided differently? I'm honestly not sure. I enjoyed parts of the Min/Rand interaction, and I thought the Salidar subplot was alright (too much dreamtime), but the Mat section was just dull until the literal end.

We will never know, but I'm curious what exactly was Robert Jordan thinking when he made this book? Was there a point where he consciously decided to just slow progress? Surely his early readers and editors told him that this was becoming tiresome. Just odd how unhurried this book feels.

Decided to go on a bit of a walkabout (well, road trip) last week. Decided that this is also an Spent about a week packing my stuff out of my (note to future self, always pay other people to pack and move for you). I am not a huge fan of Vegas or Reno, so basically just wanted to get through as much of Nneevada as I could in a day. Ended up staying in Fernley Nevada in a Comfort Suites. I was actually kind of surprised that the room was clean, the continental breakfast was sufficiennt, and the checkin and checkout was easy. It seems strange that a small town would have ammenities of that level.

Minor note: I was kinda impressed by this clock that had the time displayed on three separate faces.

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I kinda enjoyed the first Accountant movie. It was silly fun that obviously romanticized the notion of autism, but, whatever, it was kinda cool.

This jumped the shark. Now he routinely does things like drive his pickup truck into the middle of a detention facility, shooting left and right, no need to plan or anything, just Leeeeroy Jenkins this whole thing.

It felt like a real miss, as I could have really enjoyed a "reunited brothers" film where the accountant and his brother grow to learn from each other and lean on each other.

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Things I really liked in this film:

I liked the voodoo undertones. Voodoo has always been one of my favorite religious/magic systems in fiction as it is the only one that is kind of compatible with the world as we know it. I feel like voodoo works on rituals rather than spells, much less flashy than D&D magic, but equally effective. Spells create changes with "I cast maaaagic missile", voodoo minimally shifts reality to cause a desired side effect. I like that as I feel that it could actually be compatible with reality, it is the magic of coincidence and misdirection (though, I guess, with "modern" post statistics mathematics, it might be detectable as well).

I liked the idea that certain musicians have some sort of connection to the otherworld(ly) that allows them to sort of pierce the veil between here and there.

I though the accents were quite good, I just loved the way "preacher boy" spoke with something like a drawl and something like chew in his cheek. But I believe all of the accents were well done.

I really liked the prolonged setup. I enjoyed how long we spent setting up the perfect day for smoke and stack.

I enjoyed the idea of gestalt vampires. I couldn't quite tell whether it was a hierarchy or what, but at least at some level it felt like they became a bit of a group mind as they became vampires. It was a little less explored, but perhaps there was at least some argument to be made for the vampire point of view.

I think it was implied that vampires are taken out of the ability to "return to our ancestors" and wasn't clear about whether that meant killing them also meant their souls end (no afterlife). I liked that (minor) moral quandry. You can pick an immortal (though obviously not indestructible) life in our world with no afterlife (as a vampire), or you can pick a mortal but infinite afterlife world (rejecting becoming a vampire). Very hedonistic, very material.

I have interviewed for almost 4 months (I was originally going to do 1 quarter, but I thought I had cracked something more on it in March and decided to extend).

In mid March, I kinda figured out that applying is a terrible (3% conversion) numbers game. I started cold calling or directly contacting recruiters, and also asking existing recruiters if they had other roles. My conversion rate went up fairly dramatically (10-15%, not nearly as many data points) once I did that. It seems that at this time the key to even having a chance of getting a job is having a connection to the recruiter or the hiring manager. Every "full round" interview I did was through a direct human reach out (either me to them or a human contacting me). By "conversion", I simmply mean that I succeeeded in talking to a human recruiter or hiring manager. I did not get a single full round interview from filling out an application.

I've also noticed that the number of steps I have to do has gone up a lot. Many companies are like 1 system design, 2 technical, 1 behavioral, then meet onsite to talk about your takehome and do some pairing and talk to our muckity-muck or whatever. FAANGS used to be the high water mark in that there were 4 separate rounds of interview (5 if you count the screener). They now actually seem to be some of the less demanding interview.

My learnings are:

1. If you are going to apply online, you need to do so at an industrial level. I am talking spin up playwright and write things that fill out applications for you level here. There are lots of extensions and tools you can also install to try to automate this stuff. I didn't do any of this, but if you are serious, you should either pay people to fill out these forms for you or write some code to do so automatically. Simply filling out applications is an extremely low rate of return way of spending your time at this juncture.
2. You will have much better outcomes directly contacting the recruiters, it doesn't guarantee anything, but only filling out applications will result in your application most likely never even being passed to a hiring manager (maybe not even a human being). You need the recruiter to pass you up to even have a chance to swing.
3. I did probably 3-5 (depending on how you count it) full round interviews in 4 months. The average interview is 5-8 discreet steps. This is probably an average "talked to a human being" ratio of ~15% when going through a recruiter or hiring manager.
4. I think companies are looking for "perfect fit" candidates at this point. They feel (reasonably?) that it is better to keep looking for the perfect fit candidate than to hire someone who has strengths but also has things they will need to learn on the job.
5. (only applies to me) FullStack development is... it is weird. On one hand there is lots of demand for it, but on the other hand there are just so many people applying that I feel in aggregate it appears to be bad place to be (not even mentioning worries about it being largely replaced by AI).

The Bureau of labor and Statistics says that the current unemployment rate for "Computer & Mathematical Occupations" is 3.5%. Although this is higher than it was in the past, it is still below the 4.2% for the nation as a whole. My lived experience is that getting a job is pretty challenging at this time. I am seeing similar sentiments among my friends.

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I think I may have last seen it as a teenager (a long time ago), but I still enjoyed it enough the second time. It is shallow and a bit vapid, but the characters have enough chemistry with each other that it is just hard to really find fault with it.

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We know relatively little about Marie, but it almost feels like she has a growing presence as the film proceeds. As you grow to observe Charles and the way he interacts with the world, you try to picture the sort of woman that would have fallen for him (and he for her). You wonder what were they like as a couple? Is his inability to stop speaking something he acquired after her death or something he did with her as well.

I also enjoyed the way that the movie walked with you through Herb's eyes, as we grew to see the underlayer of Charles as a character. What starts as a seemingly unhinged super fan becomes something more as you realize that "McGwyer Mortimer" is not just a group that he loves, but a deep connection to his deceased wife.

I especially like the scene were Herb basically watches the sunset with Charles just blathering by his side. Eventually reaching a sort of Zen moment where he recognizes that a world with Herb "ruining" a beautiful sunset is less desirable than one where he gets to fully experience the sunset alone. Not everything in life needs to be met on your own terms.

I am reading (and finishing this time!) the Wheel of Time and I was just all Robert Jordan'd out by book six. I thought I would take a breather between six and seven and asked myself "who is the female equivalent of Robert Jordan?" For some reason Mercedes Lackey came to mind.

I think I have read two of her Elemental novels previously. As a young man I found her pacing to be frustrating and her insistence on detail tiring. I was also annoyed how most of the stories (both those read and from the jacket cover) seemed to involve her finding love in some way while she solves a problem.

Maybe I am just getting old, but I think I enjoyed this book more than I enjoyed her other two novels. I guess I am getting to that Neal Stephenson point in my life were I enjoy going down wikipedia holes when I am exposed to things that I don't recognize. I make no claims to the accuracy of any of it, but I enjoyed looking up all this Regency stuff. "upstairs" and "downstairs". The different type of maids and serving staff. The coupons or whatever they were paying as their form of treasury bonds. 3%, is that a reasonable rate, did this period not have much inflation? Coupons went down to 1/10th their previous value, how thin is this market for that big a spread? How important were calling cards in this time? Did people actually say things like "We are visiting Tuesday and Thursday, we are at home to receive guess Monday and Wednesday?" How much did social status influence business opportunity? Would their behavior (and social status) effect the sort of success that James would have? Did James need them their to cement him socially (necessary for entering business)? There were just so many fun things to kind of look up as you read this, I was genuinely entertained.

A lot of the focus was on dresses and sewing. It is a weird economy if you think about it. It seemed like materials were relatively cheap and most labor was relatively inexpensive. And yet somehow some aspect of dressmaking was expensive enough to potentially beggar some of the lesser nobs. I'm a little nebulous on exactly where the expensive parts of the dressmaking came into play. Amelia and Serena were both quite good with needle and thread, and this was seen as a great economy, but was it? Was the ability to sew and do needlework actually the important thing (a sort of mark of good breeding); maybe it wasn't the economy of being able to do it yourself so much as the distinction of being able to do it that mattered?

It all seems a little ridiculous. But I am currently living in a world where housing has absorbed a ridiculous amount of the world's capital and a Ford F150 can cost more than $60k, so who am I to judge conspicuous consumption?

There was also a cad, a betrayal, an old snake god, a sort of Mr. Darcy character, and a proposal, but that all occurred in the last 8% of the novel, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Anywho, I've been rambling too long. But I enjoyed looking things up as I read this and that's good enough for me.

Small victory, but I finally caught up on my Anki Deck. Anki has been something that I have had for years but I have never actually got to "review zero" cards before. My Anki deck is around 2500 cards at this time. Mostly computer stuff, a few interest, and some study materials. It is a milestone that only matters to me, but it feels good to finally achieve this.

Well, one book closer to getting to book 7 (where I last stopped a long time ago).


I do remember reading the part about the Ashaman churning the Shaido when I was a teenage boy. I remember being struck about how badass it was that he had been tortured for days, methodically unwound the shield holding him while the Aes Sedai were distracted, and then proceeds to explode the container holding him; walks over, grabs the girl, and then coldly ask Taim to show him the result of his training.


As an adult, I can't help chuckle at just how... I don't know, how absurd the whole thing is. But even as a less hormonal (excitable) older man, I still have to give it credit for being a pretty awesome scene.

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Evidently based on a novel. If I had to guess what went wrong here, I would say that it is an adaptation where they took all the characters but then sketched them out so thinly that it was difficult to understand the motivations for any of them.

There were all sorts of lines and scenes that just didn't seem to have a purpose, but that might make sense if you could fill them in by having read the book. Maybe?

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Saw this at the Stanford and it was a pleasure to watch it with a group of people who all seemed to appreciate it. It is a bit campy and a bit too "by the numbers" to really hold me though. It is a slightly annoyed as this could have been a bit more interesting if Zorro had somehow devised a plan that neatly came together in the end. Instead it basically ended up being a "manhandling and skullcracking" resolution. Oh well, still charming.

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Occasionally the word "decent" really summarizes a film.

I have not read the book, but I think it is the story of a bit of a simpleton who gets to act as a "fly on the wall"' narrator to a set of events. By my memory there were only 2 points in the film where 17 actually took a self directed action.

Anyway, even with a dull-normal protagonist, it could have been an interesting movie about individuality, effective immortality, colonialism, theocracies, the-evils-men-do-when-they-regard-someone-as-less-human, just... lots of things.

Instead there was something vague here about "white supremacy", a message about not murdering other sentient species, and I guess ultimately the dismissal of the "Mickey making" tech.

I thought the dismissal of the tech made little sense truthfully. The evil was not that 17 was printed, it was that people were treating him as "less human" because he was. If people would simply treat him with the same respect, a person who could be fabricated would be an incredibly valuable member for any space expedition.

I think a really interesting movie could have been made about the questions of who should be allowed to be the reprinted one. You would want someone who is deeply needy of others, slightly servile in demeanor, and not very ambitious. It would have been an interesting movie to watch 17 reprinted over thousands of generations as the planet was colonized. It raises questions about whether death is part of humanities ability to adapt to change. Is reprinting the same person over and over ultimately stagnating society? Or perhaps the continuation of a single person through all time would act as a stabilizing force? Lots of interesting stories here, not explored in this film.

Anyway, I'm giving it a fairly decent score as at least it made me think of many interesting things, but was disappointment that it failed to explore any of the things I thought were interesting.

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I really enjoyed the first 3/4 of this film. I have a core memory of being 13 or so and reading a book called "The Hollow Man" by Dan Simmons. Our protagonist in this book is telepathic and can always hear the surface thoughts of those around him. I particularly random encounter with a mobster where he is forced to listen to his thoughts.

Fucci was a thief. Bremen caught enough images and shreds of images to glean the difference. In what seemed to be a long career as a thief—Bremen caught an image of Fucci in a mirror with long sideburns and the polyester leisure suit of the seventies—Vanni Fucci had never fired his gun at a person except for that time when Donni Capaletto, his so-called partner, had tried to rip him off after the Glendale Jeweler job and Fucci had taken away the punk’s .45 automatic and shot him in the kneecap with it. His own gun. But Fucci had been angry. That wasn’t a professional thing to do. And Vanni Fucci prided himself on being a professional.

Bremen blinked, fought back nausea at trying to read these flittering shards on the sea of Fucci’s turbulent thoughts, and closed his eyes again.

Bremen learned more than he wanted to know about being a gangster in this last decade of the century. He glimpsed Vanni Fucci’s deep and burning desire to be made, gleaned what “to be made” meant to a petty Italian gangster, and then Bremen shook his head at the mean lowness of it all. The teenage years running messages for Hesso and selling cigarettes out of the back of Big Ernie’s hijacked trucks; the first job—that liquor mart on the south side of Newark—and the slow acceptance into the circle of tough, shrewd, but poorly educated men. Bremen caught glimpses of Fucci’s deep satisfaction at that acceptance by these men, these stupid, mean, violent, selfish, and arrogant men, and Bremen caught deeper glimpses of Vanni Fucci’s ultimate loyalty to himself. In the end, Bremen saw, Fucci was loyal only to himself. All the others—Hesso, Carpezzi, Tutti, Schwarz, Don Leoni, Sal, even Fucci’s live-in girlfriend Cheryl—they all were expendable. As expendable in Fucci’s mind as Chico Tartugian, a Miami nightclub owner and petty thug whom Fucci had met only once at Don Leoni’s supper club in Brooklyn. It had been a favor to Don Leoni that had brought Fucci south; he hated Miami and hated to fly.

Anyway, this movie to me felt like that passage. It is an internal study of the sort of person who would actually be attracted to being a gangster. What would drive them? How might it happen?

In this case it is a bit of a combination of pride, envy, and (maybe) a bit of homosexual desire. I enjoy film that seeks to establish mindsets that is completely alien to me, and this film I think succeeds at that.

I also want to simply give it credit for doing an "internal monologue" character study. Feel like I am not seeing a lot of films that take risk like this lately. It was refreshing.

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This was a bit tangled. I've heard that this movie was extensively re-shot as original test audiences found it confusing and a bit boring. Honestly, I don't think it is that much better or worse than other Marvel movies at this point. Solid popcorn flick, but nothing to think about the moment you walk out of the theater.

Evidently Bucky has become a senator, but that is confusing because then I saw him in a preview before the film and he still seems to be fighting crime. Evidently I would know he is a senator if I watched some show.

I have to appreciate the pair on Disney for actually making an reference to anything relating to the Eternals film. My understanding was that that film was widely panned.

Had to have it explained to me that adamantium is technically new in the MCU universe as Wolverine is evidently not in this universe. Ok. Fair enough.

Anywho, probably pretty easy pass on the next few of these. Solid tentpole entertainment, but too much of these films is callbacks to previous things and advertisements for upcoming things.

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I probably first heard about the walled city 10 years ago, decades after it had been torn down. Obviously, living in that level of density is pretty awful, but I can't deny that the concept holds a certain appeal to me.

Just the idea of packing human beings that closely. Of having a city that basically contains everything (doctors, dentist, butchers, brothels, markets, shops, craftsman, unskilled labor... everything). In such a densely connected region. It is just interesting to think about. You have no real possibility of privacy. You don't even have a choice of being social or not, you are required by proximity to involve yourself with other human beings.

It is one of those "unconscionable experiments" that you would never purposely perform, and yet it is still fascinating.

Anyway, this movie barely touches on that. It is a HK action flick that is pretty great. A lot of big manly emotions. Some cool fights (though I wouldn't say that is the focus). Totally enjoyable simple fun.

I previously read to book 7 roughly 20+ years ago. I am re-reading up to that point with the hope of actually finishing the series this time.

Anyway, not much to say. It is a masterfully done series (even if it is overly long and detailed at times). Some of the "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" stuff seems a bit silly by modern standards. However, I try to remember that this is a 90's author, and that by comparison to the authors of the time, this is a fairly progressive novel in many ways.

I think everyone has it in them to absorb one large epic escapist fantasy in their life, and I think you could do worse than pick the wheel of time as that escape.

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Probably one of the better examples of a "shift of perspective" type film. Takes you through multiple viewpoints of the same event and substantially changes your sympathies through each revisit.

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What a strange film. I genuinely wonder what they were trying to accomplish with this. Was there a strong market for films about Catherine the Great in 1930?

The most positive aspect of it was probably the setting. I especially enjoyed seeing the (russian?) eastern orthodox setpieces. Also, the palace had these weird sort of gargoyle looking men throughout.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty lousy movie. Way way too many scenes of crowds, extended shots of the same scene, and shots of bells ringing.

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I think you would be hard pressed not to find this silly film at least a little charming. I did find the "talking but not quite singing" aspect of it a little distracting. The three old spinsters were a hoot, I really enjoyed them as characters.

Not particularly emotionally gripping, but I watched this after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Empress at a double feature at the Stanford Theater. Compared to that this film is high art.

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Lives up to the rest of the Paddington films, though this one has a different director. I've always appreciated the editing and cinematography in these films. They are a little bit Wes Anderson in some of their shots. I think they do a really great job of capturing the essence of the paddington books. Fidelity wise I think it is clear the people associated with these films appreciate the source material.

I especially want to call out the interplay between the editor and Olivia Colman. Colman could often get a laugh from the audience by using her skill at timing/delivery of her expressions, but that requires a good editor (and director) that can actually capture those sort of pauses correctly.

Minor thing, but I saw it at a theater that also provided subtitles (those seem to be becoming increasingly common). I think they may have also normalized the audio, except for the spoken word, which was always clear and discernible. It isn't bad to always be able to hear the words easily, but it sometimes feels slightly off when the "overpowering hero's journey" music is at a lower level than the characters conversations.

Anyway, good movie.

I'm a little pissed off with myself because I basically started using the stairclimber at the gym. I started and finished this book entirely on that cursed machine at roughly 54 steps per minute. I am pretty sure that this was a good book. Unfortunately, I mostly associate it with an elevated heart rate and exercise.

Anyway, through the haze of physicality, I vaguely remember feeling that the writing was pretty good and that some of the observations of place were well crafted. The setting was cute and fun.

This book deserved better than the treatment I gave it. For that I am sorry. I'll stick to watching lectures and youtube when I exercise.

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It feels almost obscene to talk about this film, as part of the message seems to be that we should focus on the moment's beauty without trying to catalogue (or worse promote) it.

I mostly write with the intent to record my own thoughts for my future self. A sort of letter to the future. But I can't deny that some ape part of my brain hopes that others appreciate the things I write. Even in writing notes to myself, I can't fully shake the desire to be recognized by others.

I wish I had the strength of character/will/enlightenment/connectedness that this cleaner has. I think it may be aspirational in my case, but it hits you hard.

Good cinema.

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Watched this over 2 separate days. I was just in the mood for a Hong Kong comedy. It's fun to see the different cinematic tones and styles that other countries have.

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I thought the central character's synesthesia (had to look up the spelling) was an interesting twist. The art style was gorgeous. I also think I noticed that there were many surprisingly quiet scenes, where you are meant to hear what the character hears from their point of view. I liked that.

There is no real plot to speak of, just a group of high school students finding each other, starting a band, and revealing themselves to the people who love them.

I enjoyed the Christian setting simply because it is novel in film at this time. I enjoyed the pace of life that these characters lived and the setting they grew up in.

Humorous: Also, almost certain that a version of "Born Slippy" plays in a montage scene. I'm old, but I was kinda floored by it's inclusion as it associates so strongly with Trainspotting, heroin, et all. I guess realistically it means nothing to most people these days, but threw me a for a loop when I heard it.

Also, almost all the music sounds like new retro wave to me, which I find somewhat surprising for 17 year olds to be creating. What is old is new again.

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The ideas just seemed kind of childish. Reminded me a bit of the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem, with the cloister of people who are living apart from mankind, protecting and gathering knowledge. Except this time it is a bunch of people who are sitting around waiting for the fall of humanity in order to rebuild, which I consider to be a bit of a cowardly position.

I think the most that I can say of this film is that it is interesting to think about what people were feeling at this time in history. And the sort of hopes they had about the future because of the past they had experienced and the present they were living.

I should re-read Anathem, that was a good book.

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I read the short story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling and figured I would try to find a few movies that are similar. So I watched "Strange Days" (about being able to share memories) last week and "Eternal Sunshine" this week (about being able to delete memories).

It was alright as a story. It seemed kind of obvious that pairing up with a functioning alcoholic would probably lead to tragedy considering his own character. I could see the need for deleting memories for PTSD, but the idea that adults would choose to actually delete a memory rather than face it seems... I don't know, really weird to me. That feels like a form of self harm, a sort of mini suicide.

I did really like some of the scene transitions as he wanders through his own mind. It also did quite a good job of repeatedly catching the sense of realization that "this is a dream". That was artful.

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I actually thought this would be closer to Friday as a film. Opening "cartoon violence" scene where a guy gets thrown into a wall and is completely fine kinda threw me off (I said to my movie buddy "Is this more like 'Blazzing Saddles'?" at that point). In the end I guess it was more like "Dude, where's my car?".

Anyway, a pretty funny movie, with 3 large weaknesses:

1. Some of the side actors were, ugh... limited... in range.
2. A strong editor could have cut the movie to the same runtime and probably put 1 or 2 additional scenes into the film.
3. The pacing became a little more accelerated at the end, but it was not enough to actually give you a sense of glee as things get wild. I want a layer cake built of interlocking plots coming together, instead it just felt like a brief sprint at the end.

Still, I'm a sucker for these sort of journey based (Odysseal?) type of films. It was funny enough, the characters where both good charming people, the story was compactly told.

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Not a perfect film, but damn if it does not have some interesting ideas and just a great sense of place.

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Idiotic fun.

Really elevated by three great scenes.

1. The scene where he squares off against another 80's channeling beekeeper in a gas station.
2. The scene where he takes down an entire scam call center.
3. The closing scene where he takes down some nebulous C corporation.

Campy fun.

Great (terrible) one liners relating to beekeeping, America, et all.

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!

Inspired by Simon Wilson. I decided to try to resurect my long discarded blog. I wrote 2 things that I think are somewhat interesting.

1. A capture template in emacs for quickly capturing urls that I think are worth noting.
2. A script that takes those captures and commits and publishes them to my blog.

Here is the capture template

* %^{Title}
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: %T
:ATTRIBUTION: %^{Who should I attribute this to?}
:QUOTE: %^{Quote for this entry | nil}
:END:
%?

Here is the code in my .spacemacs that adds the template

(defun dotspacemacs/user-config ()
  ;; 2025-01-06 - Trying to setup a easier way to do quick blogs
  (setq org-capture-templates
    '(("f" "Found Blog Entry" entry (file+headline "~/blog/found.org" "Found")
      (file "~/orgs/capture_templates/found.org")))))

Now I can simply type org-capture Enter f to fill in this template and have it added to ~/blog/found.org under the Found root heading.

I then had Claude help me write a small script that basically parses every entry in ~/blog/found.org and adds it as a markdown entry to my static blog. The code is as follows.

import sys
import os
from datetime import datetime
import orgparse

def create_markdown(node):
    """Convert an org node to markdown blog post content."""
    # Extract link and title from heading
    title = node.get_heading().split(']')[1].strip() if '][' in node.get_heading() else node.get_heading()
    link = node.get_heading().split(']')[0].strip() if '][' in node.get_heading() else node.get_heading()

    # Get properties
    created = node.properties.get('CREATED', '').strip('<>')
    quote = node.properties.get('QUOTE', '')
    categories = node.properties.get('CATEGORIES', '')

    # Format date for filename and frontmatter
    date_obj = datetime.strptime(created, '%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M')
    formatted_date = date_obj.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:00')
    filename = date_obj.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') + '-' + title.lower().replace(' ', '-') + '.md'
    categories_formated = [s for s in categories.split(",") if s]

    if link and 'link' not in categories:
        categories_formated.append('link')

    categories_formated = [f'"{s}"' for s in categories_formated]

    # Create frontmatter
    md_content = (
        '{\n'
        ':layout :post\n'
        f':title  "{title}"\n'
        f':date   "{formatted_date}"\n'
        f':categories [{",".join(categories_formated)}]\n'
        '}\n\n'
    )

    # Add quote if exists
    if quote and quote != 'nil':
        md_content += f'<blockquote>{quote}</blockquote>\n\n'

    # Add main content
    md_content += node.get_body()

    return filename, md_content

def process_org_file(org_path, output_dir):
    """Process org file and create markdown files."""
    if not os.path.exists(org_path):
        print(f"Error: Input file '{org_path}' not found.")
        return False

    os.makedirs(output_dir, exist_ok=True)

    try:
        root = orgparse.load(org_path)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error parsing org file: {e}")
        return False

    # Process each node that has the right depth (2 in your case, for ++)
    for node in root[1:]:  # Skip the root node
        if node.level == 2:  # Only process ++ entries
            try:
                filename, md_content = create_markdown(node)
                output_path = os.path.join(output_dir, filename)

                with open(output_path, 'w') as f:
                    f.write(md_content)

                print(f"Created: {output_path}")
            except Exception as e:
                print(f"Error processing entry {node.get_heading()}: {e}")
                continue

    return True

def main():
    if len(sys.argv) != 3:
        print("Usage: ./write_found_to_md.py <org_file> <output_directory>")
        sys.exit(1)

    org_path = sys.argv[1]
    output_dir = sys.argv[2]

    if process_org_file(org_path, output_dir):
        print("Conversion completed successfully.")
    else:
        print("Conversion failed.")
        sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Letterboxd

Based on the preview, I thought this was a complete gimmick and would likely not have seen this film. I saw it as part of Cinemark's Secret Cinema series and am actually glad I did.

Context: I do not know who Robbie Williams is. The songs (this is a very light musical) playing throughout I am assuming are old hits? I am ambivalent about musicals. I generally avoid movies about celebrities.

With all that out of the way, I actually enjoyed this quite a bit. It is the same story you have heard a hundred times. A talented young performer, with a great deal of grit and luck, rises to the top. In doing so they become extremely dependent on alcohol, anti-anxiety drugs, cocaine, and eventually heroin. They either burn out or have some sort of come to Jesus moment and clean their life up. The story is so well trod that it isn't even interesting.

However, 2 choices really elevate this.

1. The choice to make him a anthropomorphized chimpanzee. I mean, it is so simple it is kind of inspired. Because he is a chimpanzee he is always identifiable in a crowd (important to this film). Because he is cg he has a range of expression that are greater than that afforded to a limited-by-physics human. His close-but-not-human range somehow allows him to say and do things that would seem melodramatic (overacted?) in a human, but make sense within his rendered expressiveness.
2. The musicals were actually pretty fun. Especially one of the early boy band group (forgot their name) running through the streets of London. I'm also assuming that the dance choreography between him and a woman on a boat were entirely CG, as they seemed supernaturally skilled. You can do a lot with a film if you just make it fun to look at.

Anyway, this is getting too long for my style of review, which are mostly just notes to my future self. Just wanted to say that I was impressed by the use of computer graphics here as well as the pacing and visuals of this film. I feel confident that the team that did this could have probably elevated any story and look forward to future work.

P.S. I told my movie buddy that I think I have resolved to never look up anything about Robbie Williams, as I am content to think of him as a broad chested 6 foot tall chimpanzee who can sing.

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About an hour after getting my Covid and Flu shots, I saw this on a whim because "boosters" made me think of Sonic as I was driving by the theater. Pretty decent, enough chuckle worthy moments to keep me going. Jim Carrey was easily the best thing in this film.

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A little disappointed. I wanted something weird like https://letterboxd.com/film/bram-stokers-dracula/ . This, was not that.

I've read the book, but have never seen the original https://letterboxd.com/film/nosferatu/.

As I said, I wanted something weird, frightening, sensually disturbing, maybe even something casually violent that really shocked me. I'm not really clear on what I didn't like about this film, but it just didn't catch me at any of the easy hooks that can get me engaged in a vampire flick.

An honest effort, but just not my thing.

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I enjoyed this despite not being much of a sports movie type of person. The film captured that this is a teenager who has drive but was not "on a path". Her home environment was awful, she was not being molded from a young age by a controlling influence, she was obviously completely out of her depth in terms of navigating "the game" of being an Olympic athlete. And yet she makes it happen anyway. The movie argues that she would not be where she was were it not for her coach, who was instrumental in helping her train. However, beyond that, he also seems to have been the "keeper of the flame" of her own internal fire. At many points she likely lacked the discipline or drive to keep going on her own, but her coach consistently reignited her passion to win. A good example in film that a coach not only imparts skills, but also mindset.

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A frequent thought of mine after watching a film is "this should have been an animation." I believe this was the first film I have seen where I thought "this should have been a audio program." The pleasures of this film are conveyed principally through voice and dialog; hearing Lynn Belvedere insult the suburban household he nannies.

I think it might have been interesting to release the entire thing as an audio program (this would require a narrator in parts), and then create a film afterwards that exactly superimposes on top of that.

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I was surprised to be somewhat underwhelmed by this film. I was particularly tired that evening and wonder if maybe I wasn't cogent enough to get it?

Stream of thoughts as I watched this:

• Where are they? Madagascar? South America? Nepal?
• Where did humanity go?
• It appears that humanity only recently left, as paper things are still present.
• Why is there a giant status of a human being? Why an even bigger one for a cat? The scaffolds around construction seem like the scaffold that a man would build (as opposed to, for instance, a golden retriever), what was their purpose?
• Are the bird and the cat long lost lovers or something? The bird keeps going out of its way to help the cat? Should I be reading into this?
• Is the cat the audience and the other animals are the seven deadly sins? Let's see, the capybara is sloth, the lemur is greed, the bird is pride... wait what is the golden retriever?
• Is this the afterlife and this whole thing some sort of transition you take between life and death?
• Wait, are the animals animals in their temperaments but human in their intelligence? I guess if a orangutan can pilot a go cart maybe a cat/capybera/bird can rudder a boat? Is that human level intelligence?
• Why did the bird ascend? Was it because of their earlier empathy to the cat?
• Is this supposed to be somehow related to the story of Babel? Are we supposed to judge each other by our deeds and not our words (assuming animals can't cross species talk)?

I eventually just got a little tired of trying to make sense of it. I still enjoyed the animation and the music, but I found the actual journey a little dull.

I suppose the end message was that a solitary animal (cat) chose to form a pack with a bunch of social animals, and by doing so let go of some of their natural fear and anxiety? I'm not sure.

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I think this is one of those films that probably sounded good in concept, but lacked tension in its actual implementation. Some of the plots points seemed fairly thin as well.

I meant to get [b:Empire of the Ants|837039|Empire of the Ants (La Saga des Fourmis, #1)|Bernard Werber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388806191l/837039.SY75.jpg|123918] on inter-library loan but accidentally picked this up instead. Ended up reading it anyway and it is a quick romp through some of the more interesting breed of ants.

My only real criticism is that the author takes the position that we have to be convinced to take interest in these little critters at several points in the book. I found her insistence that I wasn't interested or that I could "skip ahead" at points to be a little annoying.

This was a solid surface overview of some of the more interesting types of ants accompanied by nice glossy pictures. Works for me.

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Too much of a "ending is open to interpretation" film for my taste. Still, fun throughout and even a little bit scary.

I am not much of a horror buff, but I thought it might be fun to see this Christian film 2 days after seeing https://letterboxd.com/samedhi/film/the-best-christmas-pageant-ever-2024/ . Which was preceeded by https://letterboxd.com/samedhi/film/conclave/ . It was fun to go on a bit of a Christian themed deep dive.

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I have not yet watched a Hallmark or Lifetime movie, though I intend to do so someday. I think this was a good intro to a sort of pro-christian, pro-family genre of film. I felt a sort of cognitive dissonance as I watched it, knowing that life is more complicated than the constraints that this movie allowed. It became fairly obvious fairly quickly that this is the sort of movie that would allow trouble, without allowing genuine problems to rear their ugly head. I think the closest the film may have come to a real problem was the mentioning of the erstwhile mother, who might have been something more dark (addict, prostitute, it is basically left to the imagination).

It is hard to really grade something when the majority of problems that most of humanity has are simply not present here. With that said, it is a cute movie that got me a little teary eyed at the nativity scene and what can I say about that?

It is enjoyable and pleasant to sit through. You will likely feel better walking out of the film than you felt walking into it. It has a few moral messages within it.

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Cute film, does not overstay its welcome. I feel might have been better as an animation than live action. Some of the dynamism of the situation might have been better captured by a skilled animator. Never quite made the jump to being touching for me, but I did enjoy the ending.

I do like how sometimes these Japanese films are ok with having a certain level of unexplained whimsy to them. Like not everything needs a perfectly defined and constrained universe. Internal consistency can sometimes be a bit overdone.

"Half Share" or "The Erotic Adventures of Ishmael Horatio 'Boytoy' Wang"

This book was a huge letdown. Honestly, I feel partly responsible—like I read too much into the first book.

Context: In [b:Quarter Share|2334538|Quarter Share (Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, #1)|Nathan Lowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1273808382l/2334538.SY75.jpg|2341114], I thought we were seeing a shy, "homeschoole-vibed" young man thrown onto a spaceship, forced to grow up fast. The protagonist, Ishmael, has a sharp mind and a knack for deep focus, and he made his first big impact by starting a trading booth during his initial six months on duty.

Expectations: I was looking forward to Ishmael using his focus and intelligence to tackle increasingly complex challenges—each maybe 20% tougher than the last. Sometimes he’d succeed, sometimes he’d stumble, and it would be his growth as an ordinary, decent person in a demanding world. I thought this was the journey.

Reality: This book wildly redefines Ishmael. He’s no longer the quiet, uncertain young man from [b:Quarter Share|2334538|Quarter Share (Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, #1)|Nathan Lowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1273808382l/2334538.SY75.jpg|2341114]—instead, he’s transformed into an implausible Gigachad. The change is just...absurd.

I may have misjudged [b:Quarter Share|2334538|Quarter Share (Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, #1)|Nathan Lowell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1273808382l/2334538.SY75.jpg|2341114]’s intent, imagining a grounded series about a regular guy facing increasingly realistic challenges. Maybe I misread the plain, no-frills world as the author’s challenge to make something interesting out of it. Instead, it turns out this is a pure power fantasy: Ishmael’s a Mary Sue who lucks into insane opportunities at every turn. If this is your thing, enjoy the journey—but I'll be waving from the dock as you sail on.

Bonus: A small sample of things I found particularly absurd:


* Randomly referred from one tailor to another elite tailor.
* Receives “magic pants” that make women swoon.
* Gains a “platonic harem” of women who have a spiritual awakening just from watching him try on clothes.
* Every woman starts swooning whenever he walks by.
* The entire ship becomes inexplicably obsessed with his personal life.
* Turns into a master flirt.
* Revealed to be great in bed, apparently since he was 14.
* Handles his liquor like a pro, as his mom had him drinking for years.
* Acquires a magical talisman with an "energy indicator" that’s brighter than anyone’s ever seen.
* Teams up with a random woman (Sarah) who doubles the value of his goods with her selling skills.
* Sarah largely recovers from an abusive relationship after a single good night's sleep?
* Supernatural ability to walk into any open air market and immediately spot the highest ROI item.
* Completely loses all self-doubt.

Letterboxd

The ending threw me a little, but the acting is just so spectacular. I also knew basically nothing about how a pope is selected and found the details of the process interesting.

I have worked at large companies that have a oddly similar atmosphere to the cardinal's politics. Echoes of "what is best for the church" often sound rather similar to "what is best for the company". I found it an interesting contrast.

Letterboxd

This is a little better than Black Adam, but is on the same scale of screw ups in terms of completely failing to capitalize on the source material. Venom is a 2 man act, with Eddie playing the straight man and the Symbiote as his counterpart. Could have had great scenes with the hippy family as they wax on what they have given up. Could have had great scenes as they go through their own "Fear and Loathing" ark in Vegas. Instead, we got this... noise.

Letterboxd

Pretty interesting interpersonal story within a larger political story. Casting and acting was also perfect. However, like the Dune (modern) movies, for me it is more about the set pieces and characters and settings. I thought it was pretty good at skating the edge between making you sympathetic to a life of loyalty vs. feeling that the characters are overly constrained by their sense of honor.

A book that is almost captivating in just how un-extroardinary it is. It is no exaggeration to say that the most action filled sequences in this book involve opening a booth at an open market. Despite all this, I found myself compelled to finish it.

To play an armchair psychologist, I might say that this book satisfies a similar need to hearing about the day of a close relationship. Nothing they are telling you is particular important or interesting, but you grow to want to just hear about their day because you have grown to care for them. I can't explain a book like this any better than that.

Letterboxd

Noir isn't usually my thing, but this was a genuinely good film. It was a little too much to really make sense of the clues through my first viewing, I think I might enjoy it more on a second pass when I can collect the clues.

Letterboxd

Enjoyable, but honestly didn't give me enough time at each beat to connect emotionally with the characters.

I did however enjoy the after the film section that let me watch more about the movie. I wish more films did those post credit things (even if it was just a QR code that I could scan and watch on my own).

Letterboxd

Golly there was some amazing camerawork during this film. I think the thing I enjoyed the most was matching the archetypes of these characters to people I know in my own life.

Letterboxd

I really like the art style and really appreciated the capture of motion in the wildlife. I think this got me teary eyed 4 or 5 times to be honest. Felt that the scenes off the island could have largely been cut, but other than that a basically perfect film.

Letterboxd

Still a great film.

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Enjoyable, but it just didn't quite catch me.

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I feel like it was genuine enough that I enjoyed it more than it's actual material warrants. Never heard of the creator before, though I suddenly recognized him in the closing credits as the "notice me sempai" guy. It's cool that he is doing his thing.

Letterboxd

This was unexpectedly good. I say this because the animation style I saw in the previews made me think "low budget cash grab". This is easily a tier above any Michael Bay directed film and acts as a solid intro to the Transformer franchise.

I'm curious what their test screenings and research department said about the previews? I had basically dismissed this film as it looked like the sort of cheap aughts animation that 2nd tier shows would get (that didn't have budget for more intensive animation). I would have skipped this entirely were it not for a friend of mine who is a real fan and wanted to see it. I'm just curious how many people are like me and might skip this based entirely on the lackluster preview?

Anywho, don't judge a book by its cover.

Letterboxd

Thoroughly enjoyable Poirot film. There seemed to be a lot of barbs/jabs/inuendos in this one that I don't recognize from other Poirot films. I assume those were added, but I think they actually added to the film.

Letterboxd

This film knew exactly what it wanted to be an executed on that. Can't say I didn't enjoy it.

Letterboxd

It had a lot heart, but honestly I was just a little tired of it by the end. Not "I don't like you" tired, but more "I enjoyed your company, but it is time for everyone to go home" type of tired.

Letterboxd

It was frustrating because I almost felt that this could have been a good film. It was really the way they dolled out information about what was going on that made it frustrating. Felt like 80% of it was just random noise with some very small reveals, and then everything is just connected at the last moment.

This might have been enjoyable if it had been one of those films where at the end you see that all the pieces were in place and you could have pieced it together except you were being misdirected.

Sadly, it was not.

Letterboxd

Acting was decent, I felt like it took a while getting the story rolling. Good, but just didn't connect with me.

Also, I can't help remembering that he specifically mentioned removing bad genes from the gene pool as a potential reason that we have a "dark genetic" (something like that) inclination to murder. Is... Is this movie a defense of eugenics?

Letterboxd

"This is nothing like Buffalo Wild Wings"

Letterboxd

Somehow based on the preview I was convinced that the gimmick was that she was deaf. A solidly fun monster film with a predictable but well executed plot. I saw this in a theater with some sort of "thumper" (or maybe just a really really low bass) that was actually really good for this movie. Really added a bit to the film to be able to feel the vibrations as a giant 4 ton monster careens your way. It was an interesting experience as it actually added a third (tactile) sense to the film.

Letterboxd

This felt like a sequence of 3 panel strips compiled into a film. With a single story threaded through the whole. I really enjoyed some of the attention to detail of some of the animation, some small moments were masterfully captured.

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The most Bruckheimer of Jerry Bruckheimer films. I mean, it ain't a thinking man's movie, but damned if I didn't have a pretty good time along its entire run length. You wouldn't watch it twice, but still a petty entertaining tent pole film.

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Cottage-core taken to the max.

Saw it in theaters today and enjoyed it more the second time than the first. It is definitely one of the more subdued Ghibli films, with quieter emotions, but it is still enjoyable.

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80 minutes, tense, fun. I thought Stewart was almost supernaturally perceptive, and Brandon practically wanted to be caught it seemed like.

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I don't usually watch the double features at the Stanford Theater, but I did this time. I can't say why, but I this just didn't connect with me that much.

With that said, I really liked the character of the Captain. I loved his mannerisms and I liked the squat shape of his body as he moved about. I liked how he narrated things to himself.

Letterboxd

This is one of those films that I have thought about every once in a while but never seen. Well today I finally saw it (free on youtube right now, fyi). It is a rather mediocre film with a still somewhat cute cast. There are so many interesting/fun scenes that could have occurred with this fish out of water setup. Just didn't connect on anything really.

Letterboxd

Rough call. It really was not for me. I could tell that this was not my thing in the first 10 minutes. But I ended up watching the whole thing due to how visually arresting the scenes were. This makes you wish there was a "This wasn't for me, but..." category for film. I strongly respect the work and mastery that must have gone into something this detailed, but it just isn't something I enjoy.

Letterboxd

I wish Hitchcock did more of these type of films. The story in and of itself is actually comparatively low stakes, but Hitchcock's mastery of scene, blocking, etc really get you into how terrifying the situation is on a personal level. Few directors would have the skill to take such a simple story and humanize it enough that it connect with an audience. Not his most exciting film, but sometimes it is interesting to see how much a master can draw out from even the most simple of materials.

Letterboxd

This is a good summer movie. A great deal of well done CG. A little action. Some social questions about whether it is the nature of all organized power structures to subdue/subsume "others". Good times.