Unstructured

A New Sketchbook

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up a Stillman & Birn 3.5" x 5.5"; small, pocketable, 48 pages.The plan is to do 4 to 6 drawings a week. At that pace, the notebook fills in 8 to 12 weeks. When it's done, I'll post the best 3 here.I'm motivated by what I see on /r/penandink, /r/urbansketchers, and to a limited degree /r/sketchdaily.I'm trying to keep this low stakes. Most of what goes in won't be good, and that's fine. Quantity over quality. Let's make the first 5% of the 1000 that you throw away. Setting an alarm for July 3rd.

The Minimalist Plague in Sci-Fi & Fantasy Covers

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm befuddled by the growing trend of minimalist/abstract book covers within sci-fi and fantasy. Many of these covers give no indication at all to the content of the book.A perusal of my local Barnes & Noble.I suppose the Foundation cover is illustrating psychohistory? Or is it just vaguely supposed to look like an atom with it's orbits? Is it just a sort of association thing because ASIMOV's name kinda looks "atomic" in some way? What is this about?I mean. I guess you have a sky. And I guess the sky looks deep. On the cover. Cool cool.Honestly, I don't know, and I would rather just complain than do any real research. I have some theories:Maybe it just cost less to get a generic cover that looks like an e-vite to a small gallery showing? Are these being generated by AI? It occurs to me that maybe graphic designers are looking for work at this time (see AI), and that they are working at bottom basement prices relative to an artist?Maybe by going minimalist, the publisher feels that they might be able to release a look-and-feel for a book that will better stand the test of time? The less detail provided, the less something can ever look dated, the less it can ever be out of style?I'm not sure I buy this. I have a feeling that these will age just as poorly as, if not more poorly than, any other cover design.Maybe the new covers are being optimized for high visibility on mobile? They know people are unlikely to be in the actual bookstore looking at the book itself. They are probably choosing to purchase it on a mobile device? Maybe minimal detail helps with catching attention in some way? Higher contrast in general?I picked these 3 because I think it is an example of covers that are almost anti minimal, but that still fail. There is too much visual noise on the page, and none of it seems that important. I don't think I could associate any cover with any particular book of James S.A. Corey's Expanse series.You look at Anathem, and you say "Ah, this will be something about monkish people, maybe in a cloister or something?" It is such a minimal amount of information, but whenever I see this cover, even without the author or title, I will still associate it with Anathem. A cover should allow you to recognize the book without any wording on it. Tell me, can you visualize the cover to Hyperion without looking it up? What if I just showed you the image, would you be able to name the novel? I bet you are thinking of a Shrike overlooking a boat on a sea of grass. That is a good cover.Finally, I wanted to pick from at least one contemporary well done cover.Let's set the scene.I'm walking through a bookstore. My sightline is sliding across a book. I see "Gideon The Ninth". What is this? Well, it looks like a woman in kinda "Day of the Dead" facepaint who is holding a sword surrounded by skellies. Oh, and she is wearing aviators. Ok, that looks pretty cool. I then scan down and read "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" Regardless of your taste, you immediately know the ideas, the setting, and probably can infer the vibe from just the cover and a small bit of text. This is a cover that sparks interest, that is immensely recognizable, and that does some job of conveying the content of the book.Why are we giving this up?

Self-Driving Is Closer Than You Think

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: I'm going to genericize any product that lets you pay for a trip in a self-driving car as a "Waymo" for the purpose of this article. As of this writing, Waymo is a division of Alphabet (who also own Google). Although Waymo (the company owned by Alphabet) is clearly leading in self-driving in the US, I am using the term "Waymo" to talk generically about self-summoned self-driving vehicles.I think Waymo is going to become commonplace far faster than people anticipate. These are some quick thoughts I have on it that I would love to be challenged on.The average car in the US is currently $49,000. No US carmaker currently makes a car under $20,000. The average monthly car payment is $772 for new and $570 for used. There were 3 million repossessions and 10.5 million repossession assignments in 2025. This is a country of 350 million.These numbers are just not sustainable. If your car is repossessed, you cannot get credit for the next car. You probably can't even afford to repair your other car. When these things happen, you have the cold calculus of either losing your job or figuring out some other way to get to work.Given this, it is better to use a ride-sharing service and keep your job and benefits than to lose your job. I think American car companies are cannibalizing themselves by targeting the rich and those who aren't good at math by only offering luxury products ($70k trucks!).They will drive people to try out and then acclimatize to self-driving at a rate that is far greater than our "open road" American mentality projects. We associate having our own car as "freedom" in the states, but those romantic notions will quickly fall to the side when you are worried about losing your health insurance.America is getting older. There will be more Americans over 65 than children under 18 by 2034 according to the Census Bureau. Many older people cannot (or do not want to) operate a motor vehicle. A Waymo or Uber is the only non-compromising option for getting around in much of the US. You can theoretically take the bus or some other public transit, but in much of the US this is not a great option for anyone who can afford otherwise. Waymos give the elderly the autonomy and flexibility that they want without requiring them to manually operate the vehicle.A vehicle that can go into self-driving mode (or autonomous directed driving mode) will be able to park a car with a density that only a skilled valet could usually perform. It will be able to avoid the "caterpillar" patterns in road congestion. It will never waste time by being distracted on its phone at the light. It will understand how and when to do a zipper merge... The list just goes on. Even low-level penetration of "polite, law-abiding" Waymos on the road will result in much easier traffic for the rest of us. It will mean that there will always be a car that is obeying the speed limit (which will effectively enforce the speed limit as the lead car). It will mean that some Waymo will end up stopping for the light rather than running the yellow.There is a huge marketing department attempting to convince you of the safety of self-driving. It is somewhat difficult to separate the PR from the truth. With that said, the apparent rate of self-driving accidents seems to be radically lower than average accident rates. As these become regulated and safety measurements come out at scale, it will eventually become evident that having a machine driver is substantially safer than an average human. This will probably result in legislation in multiple settings that encourage the adoption of self-driving for safety reasons (MADD, school dropoff/pickup zones, etc).I am meeting more and more young (20-something year olds) who still do not have driver's licenses. Could just be sampling, but it seems like many younger people do not regard driving as the rite of passage that it once was.A Waymo I-PACE is estimated to be around $120-150k. This cost will drop substantially in the future (it is just tech), but a human being will still need to draw some minimal wage to drive for Uber. I've heard that Waymos run for approximately 22 hours a day in some cases. A Waymo can be paid for over a full and entire day of work. No need for restrooms. No meal breaks. No sick days. No sleep. Nevermind the benefits and profit sharing that an Uber driver needs to exist.I think the economics are such that Uber driving will disappear very quickly when they have to compete with Waymos. The real number is not only amortized vehicle cost, but taking the human out of the equation is going to be a huge savings on the cost in general.At this time, in the United States, Alphabet's Waymo has a substantial lead on all competitors in the self-driving ridesharing space. I hear that China also has impressive ridesharing as well, but it is very hard to get reliable verified news out of China. I think self-driving is immensely challenging, but I don't believe it is insurmountable. I think (Alphabet) Waymo's self-driving technology will be developed by competitors. When this happens the unit economics of offering a self-driving vehicle will just be irresistible. There are going to be a lot of providers offering really cheap self-driving services. Competition will lead to price wars.Tesla just got a TX license in August. Zoox has launched commercially. Plus all these Chinese players.

Babe: Pig in the City

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This film has some truly great setpieces, backgrounds, and design.It is in no way as endearing or charming as the original film. But the thing I appreciated the most is that this is a reflection of the environment, not the pig! Babe is just as moral, kind, and good in this film as he is in the previous. He retains his quiet dignity and kindness (and perhaps even strengthens it) despite the wickedness of "The City".I think "Paddington 2" may have taken inspiration from this film a bit. The main beats of the two plot are rather similar. Though the color scheme in this is closer to "City of Lost Children" or "Dark City".It can be a little dark at times, and the city and its inhabitants are decidedly adult, but this only strengthens the moral character that Babe shows throughout the film.

The Straight Story

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This feels like the American inverse of "Perfect Days".The acting of the main characters is so unassumingly confident. No, that is the wrong word. It is so natural that it genuinely feels like you are watching a hidden camera of the journey. I am really impressed with both the skill of the actors as well as the eye of the director for capturing this.The other thing is the simple way the story stops at moments to capture scenery, interactions, and humor. It is a movie that does not have anywhere to be at this moment, we will get there when we get there. The pacing somehow flows you into feeling like a ride along.Finally, the color scheme on this film was just wonderful. I in no way have the words to express this correctly, but god, some of the yellows and reds and the contrast and the warmth... Beautiful.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

qntm — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is such a cool idea. But dammit, it just does not make any sense when you think about it. Or, to my mind, it only makes sense when physical reality is in some way subordinate to consciousness or something (waves hands). I think I understand that it is supposed to be in the same vibe as for instance the immense (horror?) of Cthulhu. Something that is so vast, so beyond mortal minds, that it can't actually be understood without causing madness. But we keep probing the edge of the antimeme. We keep prodding and boxing it in. We keep defining the negative space it occupies, which just makes it's existence (or ours) seem less and less believable. I kept expecting there to be a explanation for how humanity keeps surviving these completely impossible scenarios. But as near as I understood, it was simply humanities plot armor at play. I found that deeply unsatisfying. I'm partially writing the review in the hopes that someone will correct me, will point out something I missed about what makes this story hold its form. If antimemes have been preying on the stuff of thought for all of eternity, how is it that humanity ever rose in the first place?

Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time, #13)

Robert Jordan — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever watched any of the latest "Fast & Furious" films? They are loud like this book is loud. There is so much more action, so many epic scenes, so many skin of our teeth moments. You become somewhat deafened by the cacophony of it all. Half of you appreciates that this is great cinematography (in book form), but the other half feels that it is all intense first order emotions. The emotions and plot devices are so big and bright that it becomes less clear whether any of these characters have background thoughts or feelings. It is so saturated that subtlety or detail become washed out.I hope that someday we might see the extensive notes left by Jordan to Sanderson. I'm interested in understanding how Jordan initially thought this was going to fit in one final book. I'd also appreciate understanding what Sanderson kept, what he revised, and what he invented in the later books. I'd also very much appreciate knowing if Sanderson would rewrite certain parts of his own work? What parts did he think he nailed, what parts did he wish he did differently?I'm not putting this very well. I lack the skill to even put it clearly, but there is just something subtly wrong about this book. It is the most peculiar feeling. Objectively, I feel that I should like it. It is punchy. Fast paced. Has regular setups and payouts. It is good.I think my dissatisfaction stems from a feeling that this series has switched from a sort of study of characters to an almost visual medium. It took the characters I love and it skillfully marionetted them in ways that are similar, but not quite the same as the characters I knew. Almost feels like the characters have been elided (archetyped?) into their core characteristics; soft edged Playmobile versions of the characters they once were.I wish that Sanderson could have been Jordan's editor for Jordan's last few books. Sanderson has the raw skill and discipline to keep things moving, the theory of mind to recognize flagging attention or exhaustion in the reader. That might have significantly raised the quality of some of Jordan's later books as well as made the switch to the Sanderson books a less jarring transition.

Little Dorrit

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd So, evidently the BBC released this as 14 episodes where the first and last episodes are 60 minutes and the rest are 30 (60, 30*12, 60). Somehow though, the version I watched was condensed down to 8 episodes of 53 minutes each. So, by my math, some things must have been cut (possibly re-arranged) to make this kind of work out. I don't know, the whole thing is just deeply complicated, why would you remix the original series anyway?The story itself was kind of ridiculous. Dickens wrote most of this stuff in serial form, and it kind of shows. The ending is... a bit unexpected. It was well acted and well produced, but the pacing is absurd. I also don't know if it is just this rendition or the original source material, but it is very uneven. Some characters are given half an episode, and then are never heard of again. Sometimes they mention characters late in the series that we have never heard mention before. It is just odd. I would say that the choice of how to cut up this material was (maybe) the most serious failure of this series.Still, it was actually quite enjoyable. We had to pause several times per episode to talk our way through characters and their relationships, as well as make our future predictions about who was what to whom. Imagine what this felt like in serial form, as people waited for the next part of the series. It must have been all people talked about around the water cooler.

Vibecoding a Whole App

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I created BoltRead as a 100% vibecoded app (I've never even looked at the code). The following is a personal retrospective on how this app development felt relative to other LLM assisted development I have done.I have tried vibe coding in at least 3 different ways.At first I wrote a system that had specs (markdown files) where there is a 1 to 1 mapping between each spec to a matching python module. I only ever edited the spec, treating the code itself as opaque. It kind of worked, though I realized how distinct the difference between a spec that communicates intent and a spec that specifies detail really is. I had a nagging suspicion that the amount of code necessary to properly spec software may be greater than or equal to the actual cost of writing the software itself. So what am I doing here?Mental Health: Not Great, Bob (Tedious) (I am a PM now)Productivity: 2x un-augmented productivity (these are guesses)?From this, I felt that maybe I need to stay closer to the code. I decided to use the LLM as an assistant that only helps with filling in boring functions, doing research, remembering libraries for me, or just acting as a rubber ducky. I basically called Clauade from within emacs, having contextual conversations with the LLM about the code I was writing. This worked (though I never wrote anything more then small snippets of Elisp with it). I did do more active and engaged learning doing things this way, though I suspect that I was actually moving slower than I theoretically could have.Mental Health: Actually, quite fun. Probably the most fun I have had with an LLM only partner.Productivity: 1.2x un-augmented productivity (progress is slower, but understanding is greater)?I'm currently experimenting with a 100% vibe coded project https://boltread.com. I drive it through interaction on the terminal, letting it create "specs" that act more as records of decisions than actual specs (like writing your test after you write the code). I find the temptation to get out of the outside critic mode and into just looking at the code is quite strong. I have resisted it to date (I want to experiment with what it feels like to be a vibe coder who cannot program), to judge if I realistically need to be concerned about displacement of Software Engineering. I am trying to see it with the eyes of someone who cannot program. This approach to development is frustrating. Like many, I find getting something 80% right with an LLM is relatively easy, but the last 20% are exponentially challenging. The project seems to get closer and closer to what I want, but it is like shaping mud, you can put detail into something, but it won't stay that way over time; its sharp detail will be reduced to smooth curves as you switch to putting detail elsewhere. I am not 100% sure on how to deal with that issue. I know I could manually fix many of the issues I have with this project, but how do I then stop the project from rewriting that manual work at some future date?Mental Health: Certainly better than spec driven development. It is like pair programming, but with a partner who does not really learn.Productivity: 3x un-augmented productivity (partially reflects the improvement in models)?My current thoughts is that we have failed to actually find a good way of switching from the "macro" (vibbed) to the "micro" (hand coded) process of LLM development. It's almost like we need modules (blast chambers?) for different parts of any software project. Where we can switch to doing things by hand (or at least with more intent) when necessary, and doing things by vibe when not. Striking a balance that nets the greater output is quite challenging, and it may not even be that there is an optimal intersection. I'm floating the belief that vibe coding may be a shortcut that moves development forward, but does so at the cost of future flexibility in the software. I wonder if there may be a future where software teams mix the notion of technical debt and vibe coding as being the same thing? A sort of realization that, yes, we can move faster with LLMs, but the cost of doing so may be that software will become more brittle and inflexible the more we "juice" our development with them. I wonder if there will be roving programmers who come into organizations and rewrite large parts of a system to match what the LLM is doing functionally, but do so in a way that actually reduces the incidental complexity of the sytem?Of course, this is my view of LLM development with current models. It is always possible that future models will be capable of working without slowly (and sometimes quickly) making a mess of the system. We will see.

Anthropic Performance Takehome Writeup

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

tldr; The transcript of my Claude conversation.I did the Anthropic Original Performance Take Home on 2026-02-12 and succeeded in getting a runtime of 1157 cycles. I'm going to assume at this time (roughly a month later) that it is reasonable to talk about solutions to this problem. I am basically a startup-shaped programmer and have never needed to do any real performance programming, so I found this problem rather novel.I'll start with a summary of what Claude says the optimizations were:Tier 1: Order-of-magnitude winsTier 2: Significant wins (100s of cycles each)Tier 3: Smaller refinements (10s of cycles each)The first three (VLIW + SIMD + loops) do ~99% of the work getting from 147K to ~1500. Everything else squeezes out the last 23% from ~1500 to 1157.I am anthropomorphizing here, but I think this provides some guidance about what Claude regards as the major optimizations. I largely think this is correct, but it still somewhat surprises me; it reads more like an archaeological summary than a lived experience.I was going to do a writeup of the optimizations I did. Honestly though, although it seemed exciting to me, it read as pretty boring when I wrote it down. I thought a bit and decided that it would be more interesting to just make a little one-page site that shows my interaction with Claude and how I got to 1157. I think this is actually much better than a "postmortem" on what I did, as it illustrates how to interact with an LLM and provides more direct guidance on what things resulted in bigger and smaller performance changes.So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Claude to get me to 1157.In summary, what was responsible for the largest improvement in performance? Judge for yourself with the transcript, but I think the actual biggest performance differentiators were three things (which Claude barely noted):Strictly speaking, it is true that the majority of the performance comes from VLIW and SIMD instruction packing. However, VLIW and SIMD are seriously hampered by LOAD instructions. Without some sort of optimization, the LOADs will be the limiting factor. You have to optimize away as many LOAD instructions as you can, and then do the packing in order to get the lower performance. It was fun!

The Gathering Storm (The Wheel of Time, #12)

Robert Jordan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Entirely enjoyable, though still a little bittersweet. It would have been wrong to ask Sanderson to continue the "Wheel of Time" in Jordan's style. I appreciate the quickening of the pace and the different renderings of the characters.It does feel different though. I think the best way I can state it is that Jordan feels "Third Person, over the shoulder" while Sanderson is more "First Person" (that was a (weak) video game metaphor). Jordan's books almost feel like a work of historical fiction, where the author is attempting to be as accurate as possible, but maybe some of the details are lost to time and so he does not fill them in. Sanderson's feel more like a ride along on real time events. Jordan is like hearing about someone else from a third party, Sanderson's feel like I am actually present.You would think that this would mean that I would like Sanderson much more as an author, but it is more complex than that. Jordan, in his distant voice, left me to fill in the details about what I felt and thought about the characters. Sanderson, fills in the internal mindset and thoughts of his characters more richly, and a wonderful intimacy and immediacy is gained in Sanderson's approach. However, something is also lost in making me judge someones less by their actions and more by their own headspace. I miss that from Jordan.

Ghost in the Eshell

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have used emacs for ~20 years (currently using spacemacs). Although I am very familiar with it, I have never really plumbed its depths. My "under the hood" usage of emacs does not go much beyond writing a few lines for a function to do some very specific thing I want in my editor. I would say I am one of those emacs users who principally uses emacs not because of its power, but because of its dependability. I know that emacs will quickly (a few years at most) get every feature in every editor that survives the test of time. However, more importantly to me, while all those editors will likely be discarded as people lose interest, emacs will keep plodding on. The Lindy effect applied to editors.With that said, I am not uninterested in getting better at emacs; I am just lazy! I recently hit upon the idea of embedding an LLM in my emacs. Giving an LLM access to my emacs allows the LLM itself to do two things that are kind of neat.Getting this working was surprisingly easy. I basically just spun up a VM and cloned spacemacs within it. I then copied my own .spacemacs file into said VM. I ssh into the VM myself and connect to emacs, with (emacs-server) being part of my startup script. On a separate terminal, I then ssh into the VM with Claude Code and have Claude interact with my (emacs-server) instance with emacsclient.And we are done! I now have an emacs instance that Claude can fully inspect and interact with as I use it.The first thing I did with my new (and very patient) friend was figure out exactly why I was seeing certain warnings and errors when starting emacs. These obviously were not breaking bugs, as I just ignored them previously. But it was really illuminating to have a very knowledgeable but unhurried guide to help me debug the problems. I'm not sure what I'll do next with it, but I think editors like emacs that are almost entirely introspectable will have somewhat of an advantage in an LLM assisted world.

Anthropic Performance Takehome

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I did the Anthropic Original Performance Take Home last Thursday and succeeded in getting a runtime of 1157 cycles. I basically focused on optimizing/pruning the actual instructions initially, and then passed a large set of instructions to an LLM to pack and bit twiddle the actual program. I used Claude Code exclusively as an LLM.For reference, the best solution that an LLM alone is able to do was 1363 cycles, so this is a significant improvement. The github does not really mention an etiquette on when people should disclose solutions, so I will wait a while before revealing any details.I mostly program in Clojure, a language that largely eschews any real concerns about performance in favor of making code simple. Clojurians are lax and hand wave log_32(N) data structures as being "constant", and mostly don't care about memory alignment or things of that nature. I think this is entirely the right set of tradeoffs for > 99.9% of use cases.That is a digressive way of saying that most of this optimization stuff was new to me. I knew about it because I know CS fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms; but I have never concerned myself with it in reality. Probably the closest I ever come to being concerned about it is in optimizing view renderings to make UI's feel responsive and snappy to the user. But this sort of work feels different. It is such a well-defined problem space (make the number go down), and you are free to do any logically equivalent transformation to the program in your pursuit of that goal. It is something that is really easy to get "in the flow" when you do it, and I found myself in that state at many points while working on it. It was fun, and I enjoyed the opportunity.

Jane Street Monthly Challenge (Subtiles 2)

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I did this months Jane Street Puzzle with LLM assistance (my name is on the list). It took just a smidgen more than 2 hours.About 25% of my time was spent just getting Claude to actually understand how to view the table. Vision models still don't seem good enough to make sense of tabular data (especially as an image). I had to hint it that the puzzle was 13x13, and that the example puzzle at the bottom was 5x5. Once it understood that I had to explicitly tell it to use imagemagic to cut the puzzle into cell sized images so that it could more accurately do OCR on the actual cell.I won't mention how to solve it as I am not sure about the etiquet on when it is ok to talk about these puzzles, maybe I will update this section at a later time.Anyway, I am just floored that you can solve something like this in 2 hours even with the parsing difficulties. I am certain that this is a great deal faster than I would have been able to solve it if I had to write the code myself. It is really interesting to instrument a solver like this so that you have a sense of how it is doing.In my particular case, it did not seem like Claude would have necessarily solved the puzzle on its own. With that said, although I could have written the algorithms it used to solve this, there is simply no way I could have implemented a solution in 2 hours. Frankly, it writes code much more quickly and often more accurately than I do.The only real advantage I have over the LLM is the wisdom of what we should do or how we should go about it, it is however better than me at the actual application of my own knowledge. It is interesting that it is an intelligence that knows how to do the output of a specified task, but lacks the judgement to specify the task itself. I find that seeming contradiction remarkable, I think it may point to just how alien this intelligence is compared to human intellect.

Is LLM Code a Natural Monopoly?

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have done two small vibecoding projects recently, and after reviewing the code that was generated for both of them I am struck by a single thought... I've never seen (human) code like this!I feel like LLMs tend to generate code that is locally good but has no coherent narrative or larger abstractions. It (mostly) gets the idea of encapsulating things in functions, but I almost feel like it does not even quite understand why it does that. It will create a 1 line functions. It will repeat a pattern 20 times in a file without bothering to make a function out of it. It will inline code that it explicitly wrote a function to handle, seemingly having forgotten that it did so. I have yet to see an LLM do any sort of architecture or design of a system. I have yet to see an LLM generate even a proto DSL of a problem domain. I have yet to see a LLM even recognize the desire to move up the tree of abstraction.And yet, despite all this. It works sometimes!Now, my philosophy is that working code beats ideal unrealized code any day of the week. However, there are a few things that make LLMs different than human beings in terms of the code artifacts that they generate.I'm reminded of a quote by our "Programmer-at-Arms" hero in "A Deepness in the Sky","Over thousands of years, the machine memories have been filled with programs that can help. But like Brent says, many of those programs are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs."Not a perfect similarity, but I think this may end up being what software in general looks like if LLMs are allowed to write most of it. It will be literally just.. so... much... stuff. It will be impossible for anyone to make sense of; confined as we are by our puny attention, retention, and tendency to boredom. I am not actually convinced that this LLM generated code will be any better than what a skilled human could have written in external functionality, but it will be much more complex in internal complexity than any human being would be able to deal with. Perhaps, we could someday make an LLM with an internal sense of distate for ugliness, with a desire (pride?) to write artful code, with the capacity for boredom. But as it stands, I don't believe they have any of these capabilities.Anyway, my only interesting point here is that once you start letting (current generation) LLMs write your code, you are going to end up in a potential situation where only LLMs can make any sense of your code. This sort of makes LLMs a natural monopoly, in the sense that they make code that is so human unparsable that they necessitate using other LLMs to make sense of their own work. LLMs may displace programmers literally because they write code that only another LLM could reason about, not because they are genius, but simply because they are tireless.

No Other Choice

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd The film itself is great, I just don't care for the characters.The problem is I kind of know this guys shtick. I know that he likes characters that resort or revolve around murder; he just loves the idea. I just don't take any real pleasure watching characters explore "dark impulses" that much, I find it kinda boring.It kind of frustrates me, as I can clearly see that he has the skill to make other genres into great films, but he is always obsessed with exploring things from a "dark psyche" mode. I guess I respect the fact that he just has a thing he seems to like and he will always explore it, but it just isn't that interesting to me.

Shelter

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Train Dreams

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Hiero's Journey (Hiero, #1)

Sterling E. Lanier — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you told me this was one player's attempt to make a single work of fiction out of a few year D&D campaign, I would completely believe you. I'm not sure why it kind of works honestly. Perhaps it is just that it is so earnest and unabashedly straightforward in its definition of good vs evil? In the plot driving power of radiation and the mutations they engender? In the "hidden powers" of the human mind (very 1970s)? It is just so... unabashedly silly and yet genuine at the same time.

Vibe Coding a Warhammer 40k item wiki

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My childhood gaming group has been playing (but has not completed) Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader.We noticed that the items mentioned on public facing wikis often seem outdated or just incorrect. So two of us, Warren and myself, decided to see if we could use a free weekend to vibecode a wiki derived directly from the game.In total, it took us about 5 hours to put together our own item wiki almost entirely through vibecoding.The meat of the problem was getting the item database from the game. As a starting point, we just scanned through the list of files and found a rather likely "blueprint" file (.jbp). A blueprint file is a JSON file that lists all the in game assets, looking at it in a hex editor it seemed like a good place to start.Now, I was convinced that we needed to write a parser to parse this file, put together the uuids to actual art assets, and then go from there. We spent about 30 minutes on that. However, Warren thought it might actually be easier to write a mod using their mod tools that would allow us to parse the running game itself. We were not sure which approach would actually be better, so initially I walked down the path of the parser and he walked down the path of the mod.At some point, he got the mod to at least install correctly. I am eliding over a huge number of times that he basically made some changes to the mod, reloaded the game, and then attempted to load the mod in the game. But it eventually worked! This was a real win as we discovered that 40KRT is a Unity game written in C#. This is wonderful as it means that we can use introspection on most objects. Now I don't really get how the [namespace|object graph|whatever] system in C# actually works, but it allowed us to ask for all the objects at root and then recursively walk down the object graph. There was some confusion about getting the references in objects as we kept getting empty caches, but we did some sort of thing that forced them to be realized (I forgot how), and then we had a tree of all the objects in the system. We then added an http server to our mod so that we could make restful request to our running server from our LLM, which certainly helped in walking the tree (both for us and for it). We then had the LLM just poke around until it found what looked like the items. It was able to capture the items and then we wrote it into a giant json file.Concurrently, we built a site that actually hosts this data. I remember once reading about mcmaster.com and how their site is legendarily fast because they just put everything in a single file. So we did the same thing for our site. You just download the "large" (185k compressed) items.json file at load, and then every interaction (search, filter, ordering) you do afterwards is just client side. You do of course load images dynamically as needed, but I am still impressed by how often the "just give them everything at the start" philosophy of web development works.The final section was taking the texture data for the items and projecting them (I am not clear on all this) so that we could view them as images. I then looped it all together to include the images in the site.I was impressed that we were able to build a working item wiki of a video game based on "live" (running game) information in just half a working day. As an observation, I think that with LLM assisted coding, having a diverse team may be more important than ever. Part of the reason we were able to accomplish what we did is that we both are rather different types of programmers (I am web/CRUD/startups, he is computer graphics). The fact that we had different ideas about how to do different things was actually quite beneficial, as experimentation is cheap when you are using vibecoding, and the LLM is tireless in trying out different paths. LLMs do have endurance, but they don't have much taste. Pairing LLMs with a group of people with "reified" (though perhaps divergent) sensibilities allows for the pairing of their infinite endurance with humans' earned experience. It was fun!

Knife of Dreams (The Wheel of Time, #11)

Robert Jordan — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 rememberNynaeve & LanMy 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 FaileFinally, 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 novicesGood 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 handThis 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.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Sweet Silver Blues (Garrett P.I., #1)

Glen Cook — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It's interesting, because the actual physical detail (characters, surroundings, buildings, etc) are so bare that your mind's eye only visualizes the players most of the time. Kind of like one of those plays with no props, set pieces or character costumes. In a weird way, this let's you focus on just the personalities, without spending too much time thinking about the environment. I appreciate this author's ability to add humor into most situations. Things go from harried to lethal, and yet throughout it all our author keeps the tone light, mostly through (verbal) quips and jabs, and to a lesser degree by the characters sort of having a fatalistic-but-we-are-never-going-to-give-up type ethos.

Batman Returns

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Zootopia 2

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

It's a Wonderful Life

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd In some sense, it is really his wife that is the main driver in this film.I mean, maybe I am making too much of it, but it seems that she is the principal agent of the entire film.

Hamnet

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Meet Me in St. Louis

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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: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.

Crossroads of Twilight (The Wheel of Time, #10)

Robert Jordan — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

A Murder of Mages (Maradaine Saga: Maradaine Constabulary)

Marshall Ryan Maresca — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Serial Experiments Lain

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Her Story

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Winter's Heart (The Wheel of Time, #9)

Robert Jordan — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

TRON: Ares

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

You should write poorly

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Black Bag

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

One Battle After Another

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Path of Daggers (The Wheel of Time, #8)

Robert Jordan — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Yasukuni Jinja Yushukan Museum

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Cafe Culture

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Superman

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Gabriel Over the White House

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

My Dead Friend Zoe

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Mon Oncle

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Earth Lords

Gordon R. Dickson — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Ninotchka

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

A Crown of Swords (The Wheel of Time, #7)

Robert Jordan — Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Road Trip

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Accountant²

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Sinners

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Taking a Break from Interviewing

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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: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.

Romy and Michele's High School Reunion

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Miss Amelia's List (Elemental Masters #17)

Mercedes Lackey — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Caught up on my Anki Deck

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time, #6)

Robert Jordan — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

A Working Man

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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?

The Mark of Zorro

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Mickey 17

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Gangster No. 1

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.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.

Captain America: Brave New World

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Monster

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time, #5)

Robert Jordan — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Love Me Tonight

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Scarlet Empress

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Paddington in Peru

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

A Night in the Lonesome October

Roger Zelazny — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Perfect Days

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Table for Six

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Colors Within

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Lost Horizon

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

One of Them Days

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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: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.

Strange Days

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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

The Beekeeper

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Idiotic fun.Really elevated by three great scenes.Campy fun.Great (terrible) one liners relating to beekeeping, America, et all.

My Link Blog Setup

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Simon Wilson. I decided to try to resurect my long discarded blog. I wrote 2 things that I think are somewhat interesting.Here is the capture templateHere is the code in my .spacemacs that adds the templateNow 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.Humorously, I'll have to look a little harder to figure out how to actually make my title into a link. But I think it is a good start. :]

Better Man

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.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.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Nosferatu

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Fire Inside

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Sitting Pretty

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Flow

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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: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.

Juror #2

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Empire of Ants: The Hidden World and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors

Susanne Foitzik — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Heretic

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

River

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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 (Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, #2)

Nathan Lowell — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

"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.

Conclave

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Venom: The Last Dance

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Shōgun

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Quarter Share (Golden Age of the Solar Clipper, #1)

Nathan Lowell — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Laura

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Look Back

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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).

The Magnificent Ambersons

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Wild Robot

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Still a great film.

And Then There Were None

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Transformers One

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Evil Under the Sun

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Twisters

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

PLUTO

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Longlegs

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hit Man

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd "This is nothing like Buffalo Wild Wings"

A Quiet Place: Day One

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Robot Dreams

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

The Secret World of Arrietty

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Rope

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

The Trouble with Harry

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 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.

Blast from the Past

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Mad God

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Wrong Man

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Sat, 18 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Messy. Too energized. You rarely get a moment to connect with any of the characters. Also, minor quibble, but the Nazi's in this film must have been prescribed Valium or something. They just stand around and stare as they are shot at! Over and over! It is hard to bill yourself as an action movie when your opponents seem to be barely conscious NPCs?

Mars Express

Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I really enjoyed this. So many ideas. So much cool tech. It kind of made me want to watch Aeon Flux.

Rebecca

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd That was a pretty damn good movie. I was charmed by Joan Fontaine at the beginning, there were some shots of her that really captured her beauty. Only real complaint was that it was more of a "uncover the truth" type movie than a "take agency" type of film. So many genuinely great scenes (so Hitchcock), was genuinely surprised after walking out of the theater to realize it was a 130 minute movie.

Abigail

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Honestly, I enjoyed it more than you would expect. I think it started quite strong and I liked the idea a lot, but it overstayed it's runtime a little and lost the thread towards the last 1/3 of the film.This movie definitely played towards the more comedic elements, and I think that was the right call for the cast and skill they had. But it would have been interesting to watch if Abigail was more defined as an actual 300 year old vampire, rather than sort of the caricature of one.Tonally, I would say this one was actually orbiting around "Cabin in the Woods", another movie I quite enjoyed.Lots of dumb scenes where people split up for seemingly no reason at all, but whatever, it is a horror film.

Asteroid City

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Another immaculate Wes Anderson movie. I probably didn't necessarily get it, but just watching the interaction and set pieces was enough for me. I really liked the camera work where they seemed to have the ability to pane across the entire "lot" of the film, providing a sort of parallax effect as they did so.

The 39 Steps

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I saw this at the theater but walked in about 5 minutes late because the popcorn line was running slow. I am wondering if I missed certain queues at the beginning that this is basically a comedy? Until I sort of figured this out I felt that the film was tonally off.Once I realized that it was supposed to be more funny than serious I began enjoying it a good deal more. The idea of having two romantic leads handcuffed together seems kind of lazy by modern standards, but this was 1935 and I wonder if it was one of the first to do this bit?

Contact

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd The most notable thing is how bad Matthew Mcconaughey's character is. Both in terms of the writing and the acting. I really liked him in later films so this comes as a bit of a surprise.I recently watched a few episodes of "True Detective" and had Jodie Foster on my mind. She was still a great actress even this long ago. I also like her character, just completely consumed by this one goal.I felt it's heart was in the right place, and I guess I am behind the idea of doing science purely for the purposes of discovery... But I'm not sure this movie made a very good case for that.

Swing Time

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think this is a good movie, it just isn't entirely my thing. I wish the romance between Fred & Ginger was a little more... something. Felt like two people who honestly wanted to dance more than romance. I know these movies are really more about dance numbers somewhat linked by plot, but I still kinda want more in terms of substance.

Dune: Part Two

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I should preface this by saying that I play a board game called Dune: Imperium (and now Uprising). So I was primed to like this film. Truthfully I have twice failed to finish this book a long time ago as a teenager. Like the book, I am medium warm on the characters and medium on the plot.With that said, I love the world of Dune. I like the set pieces, I like the scenery, I like the scenes as people come and go. The camerawork is fantastic. I love the ships and the buildings. I'm trying to communicate that the plot may be , but the whole film is a visual treat for the eyes.

Labyrinth

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think I last watched this like 25+ years ago. I think a lot of people have a vague memory of how weird this movie was, it is a core memory for a lot of childhoods.This movie plays a bit like a fever dream. Sometimes transitions between scenes occur without there being a clear transition between one and the next. Sometimes characters seem to change without it being entirely clear what the cause was.The buddy I saw it with fell asleep in the last battle (in the goblin town) and I have to admit that that part drags on a bit.

The Gay Divorcee

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd The dance number at the end was pretty fun. I was especially impressed when the gents were (acrobatically) throwing the girls down the stairs.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Watching this film, what I really found myself wishing was that the internet had been active 20 years earlier so I could read 1989 man on the street opinions on this film. I'd love to contrast what I thought of the film to what others thought of it at the time.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd The most interesting thing I can say is that, due to technical issues, I watched this through my sound system but without 5.1 sound or bass (just stereo). So basically I just had the dialog and very very light music. It's interesting to see how odd the pacing on films is when you take out the the music and parts of the audio. Like watching a sitcom without the laugh track.Anyway, movie was fine.

Argylle

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Why PG-13 violence?Also, the editing, scene transitions, lighting, green screens, cg... Not the greatest work here guys.

A Taxing Woman

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd It felt kind of odd to watch everyone be competent at their job. I'm not sure what the point of the film really was, but it was interesting to watch them get wherever they were going with it. Was it a study of character, processes, society? Was it just a story, with no moral purpose at all really? Like I said, odd, but strangely intriguing.

The Wrong Guy

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I was thinking it was enjoyable if not great right until the scene of him "handyman'ing" the fence. I don't know what it was about the shot of him holding the bottle of Elmer's, but it just immediately captured the humor of the movie. Just made the whole thing click for me. From that point onward everything was quite funny. It is such a good natured stupid kind of humor, like some of the better Steve Martin films but with dryer punchlines.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Honestly, I had way to big a meal (+ dessert) while watching this film. I think I may have dozed off in the center. Still, from what I saw it was pretty good.I think it falls in that line of being pretty funny but of limited romantic appeal. I think the real pleasure is in having a gradually sillier and sillier plot that rises to a crescendo at the end. Kinda reminds me a little of midsummer nights dream.Also, I did like the Aunt a whole lot. She was a hoot.

Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd The film itself is not particularly interesting. However, I have a real soft spot for films that capture the ethos of a time or the mannerism of a people. I would love to know how accurate this one was at either of these? I was particularly struck how casual they were about sexuality whilst being much more serious about domestic violence. I also simultaneously felt very bad for the girls environment while also recognizing the mechanisms they had for dealing with it.The whole thing seems weird, but then I start thinking that maybe I am the weird on for thinking that it is weird.

Soul

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think I watched half of this film before. I don't quite remember why, but I just wasn't in the mood for it last time. I think my dropping it had to do with relying on the premise of souls being real being somewhat of the reason that life makes sense.This time through I enjoyed for some reason. There were some genuinely touching moments and great scenes. I loved the flashback of the people in his life as he is playing the piano. Sitting at the piano stool with his father listening to him play.

Godzilla Minus One

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Solidly enjoyable if unchallenging film. SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEONK.I was genuinely annoyed that the mechanic told our pilot that he could pull the handle to live (told as a flashback after the event in question). I kind of think it would have made better thematic sense to tell him "you need to pull this handle one second before collision in order to arm the bomb." Unbeknownst to the pilot, it is not to "set" the bomb, but instead will cause his seat to eject. Pilot thinks he is finally Kamikaziing, breaking his curse of cowardice. Mechanic can now respect the pilot, knowing that he would sacrificed (atoned) himself. Mechanic and pilot end film in outrage > anger > warm manly hug. Pilot then finds reason to live when he discovers his live in girlfriend is still alive.

The Holdovers

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd A solidly warm film. Kind of a combination of "Catcher in the Rye" meets "Dead Poet's Society".

Frankenstein

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I get that this is a classic, but I didn't enjoy it that much.

Bride of Frankenstein

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd A little more fun than Frankenstein, but still basically pretty dull.

The Creator

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd The amount of plot armor and or fortuitous circumstances our protagonist gets is just absurd. I enjoyed certain aspects of the film, but I was just continuously distracted by the above.

Punch-Drunk Love

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This film is mostly a character study. You simultaneously sympathize and shake your head as he works through life.

Shadow of a Doubt

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Uncle Charlie is a great character. His infatuated/disillusioned niece was also masterfully done, though I wish there had been more agency for some of these characters.Feel like this story is more about having a backdrop for these characters to interact, and less about anything in particularly happening.

Strangers on a Train

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I quite enjoyed it until the last act. There were enough plot holes to leave me questioning my own sanity. Masterful scenes and camera work. I did enjoy the idea of a genial and almost good natured murderer.

City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, #1)

Tad Williams — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is an 800 page book that only gets really moving in the last few chapters. I feel that the series may be great, but I am hesitant to proceed on something that has had such a slow payout.

People Will Talk

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Two things really stuck out to me in this film.Anyway, I think the most credit I could give it was that it was a different type of film. The subject matter was actually pretty serious (unwanted pregnancy & murder), but the humor was consistent. I felt it missed opportunities to let us connect more deeply with the characters, but it was still by and large unique and pleasant to watch.

Every Girl Should Be Married

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd It's fun. It's funny. It's charming.

Barbie

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd There is a lot to recommend this film. I had a few complaints. I felt it really pulled it together with the ending.Things I liked:Things I was mixed on:I was solidly enjoying the film throughout, but I felt the ending was what actually brought it home for me. I am not 100% on this, but my personal reading was that perhaps Barbie chose to become human because she wanted to have children (the ultimate act of creation). I thought that was interesting as the film started off with little girls rejecting their baby dolls in favor of Barbie. Barbie being a sort of rejection of the maternal role, and our own Barbie perhaps interested in pursuing it? A bit of a full circle thing? I don't know. Maybe an admission that for most human beings, the act of creating more life is the most significant thing they do? That perhaps we should celebrate that in the same ways we celebrate wealth, success, power, and fame? I thought it was a great dismount for the film.

Sylvia Scarlett

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This was not good. Strange film. It almost felt like a film made by a theater director. There were quite a few plot holes. The male lead that Sylvia falls for is kind of just an ass. The characters were not all that interesting. This is a pretty easy pass if you haven't seen it.

Holiday

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I don't think there is anything particular to recommend this film. This is Grand And Hepburn as you know them from their flirty comedic days.

Past Lives

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This was great cinema. Every scene has detail to read into. The camerawork and framing masterful. I distinctly remember one scene of just a glass of water and a lemon (I think) that I thought "This could be a water painting".Acting was excellent. So much was communicated through the eyes rather than spoken word.I'd say my biggest objection was how perfectly setup the trio was. Nora, her husband Arthur, and her childhood love Hae Sung were almost too contrived. Every one of them had an emotional core that made them perfectly balanced in the group dynamics. Nora was pragmatic and loyal, to the point of almost being cruel to Arthur. Arthur was neurotic and maybe a bit cowardly, but came through in his understanding of Nora. Hae Sung was romantic to the point of what could easily have been regarded as "creepy", but his actual feelings were so pure that it was honestly hard to regard them as such.Anyway, my friend and I spent a solid 2 hours dinner afterwards mostly discussing particulars of the film. It is that level of cinema.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I expected little, I got little. I have only myself to blame.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This was genuinely one of the most fun films I have ever seen. The camera work, the change in styles, the framing. Heartful at its core but with a casing of comedy (appropriate to any spider man film). A few of the plot elements are a little contrived, but this is a comic book film so whatever. This is great cinema.

Fast X

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Better than the last one... I don't think much needs to be said about these films at this point.

Pyramids (Discworld, #7)

Terry Pratchett — Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Enjoyed it. Though it is a bit more of the "funny and almost cartoonish" than the somewhat more biting later novels in this series. A few works by TP have been animated into cartoons, and this would probably be one of the better ones for that treatment.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think it struck pretty true to its form. I've sorta soft boycotted (with no real conviction) most of the Marvel & Star Wars stuff. Not that I think it is bad, just that I think it takes away from the possibility of making new things by putting so much energy into continuing existing things. With that said, I made an exception for this "subplot" series as I did enjoy all the characters quite a bit.Also, the "single shot" fight scene at the end was pretty cool. Got to give them credit.

Spirited Away: Live on Stage

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I really enjoyed this. I think there was a bit in the way of editing to make certain scenes flow more quickly. But it still did an excellent job of giving you a sense of being in the audience.The negatives were small:The good:This was great. I really wish fathom would get more plays. Really made me want to see this live!

Renfield

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd It was actually pretty fun but they kept bringing in a romantic interest (awkwafina) and a support group. I think it would have been better if they played aquafina as a straight man to Renfield's nightly shenanigans. It might also be nice if they actually let the support group end up supporting Renfield in his fight to break co-dependance. I'm overthinking it, but it was a pretty fun movie that got a little bogged down in some of its sidequest.

Air

Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I enjoyed this as it was more of a focused biopic of a particular deal being made than a drama (looking at you Gucci). There were some awkward parts, for instance when all the characters are sitting around the table and he says "All of use will be forgottten, but you will live forever" to MJ. Maybe it was said, maybe it wasn't, still feels like a really weird thing for a grown man to say to a young rookie.Good acting, decent pacing, a little bit of deification (MJ)... What's not to like?

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Honestly, it was so much better than the 2000 film of the same name that I can't really complain.

John Wick: Chapter 4

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I wish they had combined this and the third movie into 1 film. That could easily be a 5 star movie. This felt a little too drawn out at this point. Still, some really great camera work. Fun action. Kind of cool world. It could have gone out better, but it still went out pretty well.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Watched it all. Begins as interesting Jules Vern type story, but episode 23-34 (island & Africa) are awful. Last 5 episodes return you to a great story. Probably the greatest example in drop in quality I have seen to date. Strongly suggest just reading summaries for terrible middle part. You have been warned. Likely 1 to 2 stars higher if it wasn't for the middle.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Exactly what a Fairy Tale should be. Serious themes woven into a fantastical world. Incredible animation. I really love the styling that this movie took upon itself. Every part of this film was good to exceptional.

Love Crazy

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Teenage anime level stupid in that the whole problem could be resolved with one tiny conversation. Solidly entertaining and good natured. No "My Man Godfrey" but it works.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Enjoyable enough. Could have been 45 minutes shorter with very little lost. Plot was mediocre, but effects and scenery were beautiful. Most enjoyed the the robot and vehicles.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Actual "stop motion" is beautiful. Did not enjoy the songs very much and felt they were too densely packed at the beginning. Good messaging on father/child relationships and also universal forgiveness. It was enjoyable, but it just didn't provide an emotional hook for me.

Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This felt like a recipe where some key ingredient was missing. Seems like most of the steps had been followed, I could see that it was put together with care and skill, and yet... it just didn't catch me emotionally. I did enjoy observing human beings through Klara's eyes. I felt that Klara was able to observe some blindsides of human relationships that we often fail to consciously consider. However, she was so alien in her own thoughts that it was difficult to draw anything interesting from her own observations. It was like "hey, isn't this interesting that human beings are like X", but there was no reflection beyond that. It was purposely stilted, leaving you to draw your own thoughts about X.

The Banshees of Inisherin

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Sometimes, stupidity is the winning strategy.Felt like a "larger than life" story pushed into the real world. Beautiful scenery. Captured the quiet despair of many of the townsfolk. Enjoyed it quite a bit.

Secret History (Mistborn, #3.5)

Brandon Sanderson — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have read very little of the Mistborn series (I think only the [b: Alloy of Law|10803121|The Alloy of Law (Mistborn, #4)|Brandon Sanderson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442889632l/10803121.SY75.jpg|15035863]) and something else I can't quite remember). I am assuming that all of the characters I am reading are callouts to other characters from various novels. As an outsider, reading this story was engaging, but probably lacked the emotional punch it might have had if I knew who any of these people were. Anywho, even with that, it was a well written story. I also appreciated that it was a novella with good pacing and a clear ending. So, even if you haven't read any of the Mistborn stuff, I think this will not disappoint you.

The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Hannu Rajaniemi — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I will often forgive a middling book if it has a few great ideas. I felt that the tech in this book was so loosely defined that I had trouble understanding what was within the realm of possibility. Felt like the story might be better set up as a punchy exciting animation rather than within the written word. I enjoyed visualizing the scenes, but when I think about the plot (tangled beyond my keen) or characters (whose motivations are still to be revealed) I was a little less impressed. It might have been 4, but I also read this book over a period of around a month. I think, if you are going to read this, it is better to finish it quickly over a few days. It is that kind of novel.

Black Adam

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd tldr; The rock acting like a stone for 2 hours.This was so badly cast. You have The Rock, and incredibly charming and likable guy, and you cast him as this dour faced zero charisma mega super hero.... Like, wtf were you thinking?I don't care about the original source material. They should have modified the character from being dour grumpy pants to being maybe something closer to The Comedian from Watchmen. Somebody who is deeply cynical and jaded, but maybe underneath it all is actually very hurt that the world isn't better? This would have allowed The Rock to act as "The Rock, but a little evil", perfectly within his range.Oof.

Only Yesterday

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd This was interesting to watch as an older adult. I think I remember seeing this last when I was maybe 21. This is a movie about looking back, and what works in the film also works for the viewer. I think it is a good film to watch every 15 years, see where you are in life relative to the protagonist. What was important to you then, what is important to you now.tldr; Good film for self reflection, both of the character and of yourself.

The Apartment

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Started muted and a bit slow. Every section is slightly better than it's previous. Several genuinely funny moments. Great lines and delivery. Modern man to mensch tale.

Thief

Sat, 04 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Almost insecurely male character. I really enjoyed the technical scenes; the displays of mastery of craft (heisting). A very "trim" film with little in the way of excess plot points, characters, etc.

The Bob's Burgers Movie

Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Never seen the show. Very "low energy" humor. Don't think I entirely get it but I found it fun.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd First Act: Pretty fun, but I was a little concerned. Second Act: Relief at rising action; really finding it's pace. Third Act: Got me emotionally invested enough to get teary eyed.Great film. The central premise is something you have probably discovered and accepted at some point in your teen years, but it is made fresh again through imagination and character unwinding.

The Outfit

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Single location film. A bit too mechanistic, could have used a bit more tension. Some of the side characters seemed to have roles that were beyond their ability to capture. Enjoyable film despite all that.Also, made me want a bespoke suit.

The Lost City

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd First romantic comedy seen in a decade. Better than the schlock that they were making when the genre died. Sometimes you just want something breezy.

Turning Red

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Some of the food animation was gorgeous. Some of the skyline scenes were lovely. Actual story was not very interesting. I felt the warm feelies at some of the "friends" parts, but I don't think I could watch this twice.

The Demolished Man

Alfred Bester — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is his Hugo winner, but I personally feel "The Stars my Destination" is a better book.

The Batman

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I liked the film grain effect and the (literal) darkness of the film. The mood and set pieces were pretty good, music was alright. There were a few pretty unbelievable plot points but whatever. The romance felt a little wedged in. Still, solid tentpole film.

The Great Santini

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd By modern standards Santini (Bull) is a overbearing insecure man who needs to learn to be an adult. I wonder if his way of dealing with the world was ever necessary? World has gotten softer/safer, maybe men like Santini just aren't needed anymore? Maybe that is for the good?

City Lights

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Saw this with an orchestra ensemble. Chaplins movement and motions were so clever; so physically skilled! For some reason pantomime kind of reminds me of 4 panel comics.

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

J.R.R. Tolkien — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tried to read this almost a decade ago and shelved it. This time I finished it. Don't think I am going to say anything new about it so I'll keep it short. I think the reason I was able to finish it this time was perhaps I have aged into it a bit. Bilbo is more relatable as a character as you get older. You grow to appreciate the wisdom of having a good home, hearth and household while understanding the pangs of wanting an occasional adventure. I may have read it with more warmth and humor than I was capable of a decade ago. Probably would have been great had I not read a huge amount of stuff that is derived from this already.

Something Wild

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Some scenes were fantastic. Some scenes fell flat and felt strangely paused (as if a laugh track should have been inserted). I could not connect with any of the characters. I don't get what I don't get about this film. Very strange feeling upon finishing it.

The Man in the Hat

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Makes you think about how much we could connect with each other if we didn't constantly feel the need to fill our interactions with words. In these type of stories I prefer more humor and less sentimentality.

Belle

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Got me a little teary eyed in the theater. I hope this is the future of VR that we end up with. 2D animation was great. 3D animation was good. Songs were beautiful emotional hooks.

The King's Man

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd A serious center surrounds the comedic violent exterior. A bit odd in terms of pacing and tone. I liked it more than the more muddled "Golden Circle" that preceded it. I thought the camerawork (fights especially) was really great.

The Bishop's Wife

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Grant comes off as almost smarmy rather than angelic. Some good scenes, some good acting, but the package as a whole just does not come together.

Riders of Justice

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Enjoyed the camaraderie of a series of "off" men being put together. Could have used a little more tension, a little more depth, but altogether I enjoyed it.

House of Gucci

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think this film would have been better from a "fly on the wall" point of view of the Gucci corporation. Too much focus on the human elements, not enough on the actual company.

An Unkindness of Ghosts

Rivers Solomon — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A rather literal (dry) and difficult book held together by moments of beauty. I think the thing I disliked the most was how "unrealistic" the world felt. All worldships are conjecture at this point, but this one seemed absurdly unlikely. Who would plan a ship in such a way? Does the ship repair itself? Who is doing inspections to ensure safety systems? Do people understand how the baby star works? Are there robots that do maintenance task? Who inspects the maintenance work done? It just didn't hold. I found myself making up additional stories to explain plot holes.I would much rather have had the "worldship" be some sort of large barge at sea (rising sea level plot?). Then I would have found it much easier to suspend my disbelief about the world, giving my full attention to the characters.

Together Together

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I am curious if more movies about older people having children will become more standard? Purposely single father is not a terribly well trodden genre.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think most of my enjoyment of this film centered on Sherlock's performance.

The Spine of Night

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Nihilistically fatalistic death worshiping horseshit.

Raising Arizona

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd It is a odd film. Feels like what you would get if the Cohen Brothers tried to make a Wess Anderson film. It just never really clicked with me.

Dune

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd I think my favorite part of this movie was the ships and (to a lesser degree) the architecture. I am guessing that Dune is set in a declining empire. Every artifact of humanity is so much larger than the number of humans you would expect for something of that scale. I really enjoyed that.

Witness

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Strong characters. Interesting and notable camera work. John acts as a proxy, allowing us to observe Amish culture. I enjoyed the respectful tone of this film. Only part that felt like "too much" was the overuse of the synthesizer.

The Mosquito Coast

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Overbearing mechanical genius father; family caught in the storm of his moods. What happens when an adult never lets go of the absolute self righteousness that the young feel? In other environments might have been a a "Great Man". Ends up being a crank and bully brought down by the "small world".Not an enjoyable film; but might give you something to think about.

The Card Counter

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd William was seeking a redemption arc in a measured and controlled way, not sure that is possible. Probably needed the "river" to come up the way it did, completely trashing his plans (hand). Only by loosing control of the situation could he get closure.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Good beginning, bit bored in the middle, and an above average ending.The cutout scene where they fought in the bus was fun. I wonder if they made it purposely look like a platform game at points? Both the bus and the bamboo scaffolding fight scenes kind of reminded me of similar scenes from "God of Gamblers" (I think).

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd 1996: "Huh-huh, Huh-huh, Huh-huh, Huh-huh" 2021: One "Huh-huh" is sufficient!I think I liked this film more when I saw it in theaters. It was a well placed film at its release; accurately captured the "corporate counterculture" of MTV.

Free Guy

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Funny, but went nowhere with any of its AI premises.

The Game

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd An example of a possibly great movie cut short by a very hard to believe premise.

Jungle Cruise

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd You know exactly what you are getting. Well done, but nothing you are going to think about after walking out of the theater.I thought this fight scenes were a little dark (literally), sometimes had trouble making out who is doing what. The monsters were visually fun but were often difficult to discern from one another.

F9

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Whelp. This was worse than I had hoped for. Everything "fits", it is just kind of getting stale.There was a moment when Roman and Tej were kind of waxing philosophical about how they keep surviving completely absurd things. Like really really really, entirely impossible situations. I was kind of hoping that the plot would go in the direction of:Yeah, I don't know, when I start daydreaming about directions your film could have taken while the movie is playing... we have a problem.

City Hunter

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Letterboxd Eh, you shouldn't watch it. But I had some fried chicken and a beer and skipped through it a bit and it was... passable. Some of the goofy fight choreography kind of grows on you. Memorable scene at end with Jackie playing Chun Li from Street Fighter.

Download all Github projects to a directory

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I made the following script to download all Github projects into a directory. It is fun to see everything you have accumulated over the years. :) is your github username. can be created from here. You only need the repo scope for this.You may need to install jq as it isn't standard.You will need to be authenticated or the git clone X will fail on non public repos.API will only download up to 100 projects. If you have more than that you will have to page.

CAR & CDR system of productivity

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The last 2 months have seen a decline in my output. To combat this, I am implementing a new process that I hereby name the "CAR|CDR" system of productivity. CAR & CDR come from LISP Lore. I picked the name because I like saying CARKIDER phonetically.It is really quite simple. I have a dynamic list of everything that is important to me. From projects to people to ideas to consumption to whatever. I enumerate every alternating day as either being a CAR (Head of the list) or CDR (rest of the list) day. For instance, this week MWFU are CAR (Head) days and TRS are CDR (Rest) days.On CAR day, I shouldn't be doing anything other than the most important task on my list. I purposely choose, and in doing so free myself, to ignore all the other task in life that I deem important. It means that I don't pencil in any other things that day, I don't try to squeeze some other concern in there. I also attempt to limit the number of decisions I need to make on CAR days to only things concerning the CAR item. It is a CAR day, that is its all encompassing purpose.CDR days are for everything other than the head of your list. For this reason I am fairly flexible about what I should do within the rest of the list. Your CDR list should always contain basic things like "exercise", "enjoy life", "have fun", "socialize", as well as directly actionable things like "pay taxes", "study category theory", etc. I really just let whim and urgency dictate what I do on CDR days. CDR days are for inspiration, they should be the opposite of focusing on a singular purpose.There are so many things going on in my own life and in the world as a whole that I don't have a good why. Explaining why is too big a question, and I suspect I could not do it if pressed. All I am sure of is that I am not able to focus on tasks like I once could. I think partially it is my brain rebelling against the monotony of my current life; the constraint of spending almost my entire day in a 13' x 17' room as we wait out this pandemic. Without a clear path forward, I am trying random strategies I think up and seeing if they help.As for the question of why this strategy? I think it has to do with the idea of focused vs diffuse thought. I think my mind/personality is being softened as contact with much of my previous environment diminishes. It isn't just the lose of people, it is also the roles and activities and parts that I previously played. The CAR day gives me time to put my full intellect and focus towards a task, shutting out the outside world. The CDR day gives me time to softly adjust to the new world, without having to think about my most important thing upon that day.I hope it helps me out.

Supernova Era by Cixin Liu

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Supernova Era

Liu Cixin — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This book, I assume, is supposed to be parody? Right?I am not sure at what point speculative fiction becomes parody. Similar to the line between erotica and pornography, it may be one of those "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it" kind of situations.This book has 2 broad halves, the Chinese half and the Chinese + American half.Up to the limits of the Chinese half, I was constantly asking myself questions like "Wait, are children really this selfless? Can children really do these things? Are children really this emotionally stable?" I was constantly asking myself if Chinese children are this exceptional compared to American children. The self reflection, maturity, and insight the Chinese children possessed was incredulous. I felt a vague sense of unease that Chinese children might be so superior to American children (my birthplace). What future can the United States have when the youth of other nations are so superior to our own?The second half (Chinese + American) of the book put those fears to rest... In a big way. I cannot comment on the emotional makeup and resiliency of Chinese children. I can however comment on American children. Yes, I agree, there are broad cultural differences between the two groups. Yes, American culture has its share of problems, same as anybody else. Yes, children are reflections of the culture they were raised in. However, his portrayal of American children paints them as little more than narcissistic conniving psychopaths. It is so over the top that it becomes... I don't know, almost an exploitation of American culture rather than a reflection of it. In short, I felt his generalization of American children were significantly off. So far off that I felt the American children were written as parody.You start the book thinking that there is only one plot element that you must take as a given, that there could be a stellar event with an incredibly specific type of radiation that only kills people over 13. However, about half way through (maybe sooner if you are less naive than I am) you discover that there are actually three such plot elements. The stellar event itself, the characterization of American Children as little monsters, and presumably the characterization of Chinese children as miniature adults.With all that said, it was still an enjoyable read. Prose sometimes felt a little "literal" for lack of a better word. It is a quick read, so I would be comfortable recommending it to most.*** Real Plot spoilers below - Don't continueThings I really liked or noted:The quantum-whatever-star-trek-AI that the Chinese kids had was a bit of a deus ex. Whatever.With that said, I loved the idea of a "real time chat" between millions of people. Where the AI would summarize the message of a large group of people and split them into separate singular "speakers" in real time. Allow any number of people to communicate but limit the expressive speakers to a number that is human understandable. Why can't we have something like that?Prove me wrong, but there are many things that children simply can not do. They require emotional maturity, strength, or intelligence that children do not posses. I found the idea that most jobs could be taken over pretty ludicrous.Maybe, with the help of an all seeing AI and the "best of the best" of China, you could have a functional society as outlined in the book. But I think a big part of this is the AI.The American child society seemed entirely unstable. I had a really hard time believing that the characters on the American side of things could possibly do anything as complicated as launching a battle fleet, hosting a summit, or even keeping themselves fed. With those sort of characters, you would rapidly devolve into tribalism. Nothing of note could be accomplished with such a society.I did enjoy the brutality that the children were allowed to express. I think we can all recognize at some level that empathy is something that develops for many people later in life (often around adolescense) . I did appreciate that it didn't characterize the children as being little angels. With that being said, I don't think that the "natural state" of children is even close to as terrifying as that expressed in this book.I was especially confused why persistent automated monitoring and enforcement was not introduced as a final gift to the children from the adults. If they can build an all powerful AI, why not have the AI monitor what work is being done, chide, scold, punish and eventually exclude children who are negligent. Basically force compliance by pushing out children who choose not to work within the system. Many children would die, but many would choose to work with the AI as it assures stability for them. Seemed like a pretty large blind spot.

Push Blog to Github Hosting using Planck

Mon, 06 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted the opportunity to try out Planck (User Guide) (SDK), which lets you write shell scripts in clojurescript.Wrote a small script to upload my blog into Github hosting.Like the fact that it mixes the clojurescript code with the shell commands (sh ...). One can use simple shell commands and compose them with clojurescript. Loose the value of pipping and shell expansions, but sometimes that is a reasonable trade-off.

Quick Containment in a Arbitrary Depth Map

Fri, 03 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

contains? will check (in the case of a map) for a key within a map. (contains? data v) returns true when v is :a or :f. (contains? data :c) will return false as :c is not a top level key in data.I want to ask "containment" questions about the keys at ALL levels within a map. I want to be able to determine not just that :a and :f are within the map but also that :b, :c, :d, :e, and :g are "contained" as well. Conversely, I want to know that :z is not a key within any map in data.Note that data and contained-data are equal.The difference is that contained-data has the :all-keys key within its metadata.With this metadata, you can ask containment questions about keys at all levels. Each submap within contained-data also contains :all-keys in their metadata.contained-data contains the key :fcontained-data does not contain the key :xKey :a under contained-data has keys :b :c :d and :eThat's it. You can use the :all-keys metadata to either:

This To That

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I need something that converts a particular key/value within a sequence of maps into a single map. this->that will do nicely.Let's create some data for this example.With this->that and our data, we can now create a map of :id to :email.Or :id to :name.Within this->that the arguments this and that are being called. This must mean that keywords (:id, :email, and :name in our case) are callable as functions! this->that actually takes two functions as the this and that arguments. this->that can take a sequence of any type in vs, provided that you can write functions to pull values from every element in vs.Let's illustrate the equivalency of keywords and functions below.

Hellboy (2019)

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to get back into the swing of things in terms of writing. It is a muscle I need to exercise and all that. Start easy by just posting a movie review.I think Hellboy (2019) is the second most frenetic movie I have ever seen (First goes to Crank 2 High Voltage). It is the most "Russian Doll"'ed plot in my recollection; felt like one backstory introduced every 15 minutes. Lots of exposition. Fair share of flashbacks. Narratively, it was a mess.I could spend time ripping it appart on the above, but why waste both our time? You should know that it has a awful review on rotten; if you are looking for fodder to critique the film, it is available. Let's see if there is anything interesting here.Watching a movie sourced from comic book material, one of the biggest questions I have is "Why don't they do animation instead?" Budget on this was ~50 million dollars. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was excellent with a budget of 90 million. How good can an animated movie be with a budget of 50 million? I don't honestly know.But here is the interesting thing. I suspect that the art assets and know how from doing one animated film also transfer to its sequels. This is of course also true for live action film. But live action films have significant cost that animated films do not. Beyond the cost of getting actors, building sets, equipment, post processing, etc, you have the simple fact that most artifacts built for the film will not be used in subsequent films.Animation is different. Once you have worked out the software to do character kinematics, once you have the right textures, once you have figured out the proper lighting, you just keep using it. The cost to store the know-how you have accumulated over previous films is negligible. You need to save your software (and yes, even 2d animation is made with extensive software these days) and you documentation. Maybe the first film in a series cost 100 million because of novel development in your tech stack. But the next film can be made for substantially less because you are just going to use the same software and tweak it for every release to use newer (and cheaper) hardware.I suspect one reason animation is ignored is that animated movies have a low return of a few hundred millions. They rarely generate billion dollar returns. It feels like Hollywood is more interested in making 300M movies that have a 20% chance of making billion than a 50M movies that has a almost 100% chance of making 60M.It is also the case that Hollywood seems to be obsessed about making franchises these days. I get it, you need something that won't just pay the bills today, but might also keep the lights on tomorrow. Comic book material is perfect for franchises. The material is already so malleable and the constraints of the world are so soft that it is easily and endlessly re-mixable for all of eternity.Animation & comic book source material are a match made in heaven for diversified risk. When you can make 6 to 10 NEW animated movies for the cost of a single live action movie, you can take a lot more risk.It is a pretty simple program:

Build a CSV in Clojure

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Converting a vector of values to a CSV in pure clojure. Not actually that interesting, just wanted the chance to try out klipse.

Pagination on Google App Engine Standard

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Datastore (Google App Engine) does not let you lock the database. So how do you map across every element in Datastore? Here is a very rough and tumble solution to that problem.Assume you have a ndb.Model named WidgetBegin pagination using the following (note that Widget is case sensitive)Use to continue pagination across all Widget's

Random crazy

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Him: "Another museum on it's way..."Me: "What?"Him: "I mean, if you had an atomic aircraft, where would you park it?"Me: ... ... "Area 51?"Him: Momentary shock registers on his face, skuddles/crab walks away.Just a random conversation with some of the fairly obviously tweaking tenants in my apartment...

Getting better at Math

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I have never been much of an academic. In high school, all my friends were accelerated 1 year and allowed to test out of algebra 2; my scores were too low to allow me to skip it. Not wanting to be left behind, I resolved to take algebra II over summer.That was a mistake.That Summer I took algebra II with some laughably bad students at an inner city school. It was surreal. We would spend 4 hours a day in class, doing almost no real learning. I believe one kid was actively jerking off in the back of the room. One girl was pregnant and was taking life advice from another teen mother. By the end, we had covered maybe 3 out of 15 chapters. It was a complete failure. Somehow everyone who showed up passed. I later heard that Texas had so many "super seniors" clogging up the system that they created summer classes like this which were guaranteed passes; the goal was not education, the goal was to move people out of the system.Like an idiot, I then took my "pass" in algebra II to my own school. I was happy, I could stay with my friends! Mathematically, things quickly fell apart. I realized that I was in over my head. The prospect of admitting that I couldn't hack it was even worse than my previous fear of being left behind (teen logic at its finest). For the next 3 years, rather than understand anything, I built elaborate workarounds to avoid exposing my ignorance. I didn't know how to actually solve most problems, I did however understand that my TI-83+ calculator could approximate the solution to most everything. With a little bit of flourish I could provide something that looked like I worked through a problem, despite the fact that the only thing I really had was a solution and an understanding of my calculator.I graduated missing around 4 years of high school mathematics.I feel like failing to understand some of the basic concepts in Algebra II substantially retarded my progress in mathematics. I lacked the basics that were necessary to move forward.The plural of anecdote is not data. With that said, this video resonates with me. I like the idea of mathematics being a small graph of deeply connected nodes. Failing to understand one of the axiomatic/deeply-networked nodes can make understanding the interconnected nodes very difficult.Contrast this to history with its much larger number of nodes. These nodes are interconnected, but not as dependent on each other. They might provide context or contrast relative to one another, but they are not required for understanding.I though this was an interesting point.

The Million Habits of Highly Ineffective People

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I found the following intriguing because it unified the notion of habits and the notion of self. I have always viewed my habits as external things, there is me and then then there are my habits. Habits are something external to me. "I am attempting to practice the guitar every day." "I am attempting to give up eating dessert every meal." I view habits as something outside of myself; something I do with willpower.It is a powerful shift in perception to consider that you are a collection of habits. That the emergent notion of you is a complex interweaving of habits; some so fundamental that you have "subsumed" them into your definition of self.I find it comforting to consider that all reactions to the world are just a matter of habits. Skills are habits that help you react properly to the world. Addictions are habits that have become too ingrained and lack nuance. All problems can be tackled by thinking of them as habits that need to be internalized (or broken) to allow you to get to your desired outcome.

The Circle

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A "what if" study of a fully connected world.The central premise of 2017's "The Circle" is that the world has been fully connected through a network of always on, always watching, tiny, cheap, inocuous cameras.It is technically sci-fi, though all the elements I observed are more than reasonable. More a matter of minitiuarization and falling hardware prices than actual technological breakthroughs.I am very forgiving of things that cause me to change my perception, or open me to a new way of thinking. Did this movie have flaws? Absolutely. I'll get to those later. Let's talk about what it did well.Emma Watson went through the stages of acceptance of an omnipotent society in an extremely collapsed timeline. What she did in a matter of months most people in developed nations are still aclimatizing to.At one point Tom Hanks turns to her and gets her to "admit" that having experiences that you do not share with others is a form of theft. A form of emotional hording. At this moment in history, such an idea seems ludicrous. Almost perverse. Only celebrities and politicians have no right to privacy? Right?I don't know.I am not sure people 15 years from now will agree. How would someone from 15 years ago feel about selfie sticks? Snapchats of your dinner? Tweeting by politicians. Sexting. Facebook friends. Online Dating. Etc. Probably seems pretty ludicrous. Inhuman. Disconnected. Shallow. And yet, here we are.Yeah, a lot of great things could occur. From the trivial to the fundamental.Immediate reactions as machines watching our feeds recognize violence, injury, and danger and automatically notify and dispatch emergency responders.Automatically and constantly dealing with fundamental weaknesses in society. Making sure that people don't get too isolated; too lonely. That people who exhibit sighs of mental disorders are regularly visited by health care professionals. Checking in on everyone with the (literal) persistence of a machine.Violent crime does not make sense. Only physical crime that would still exist would be crimes of passion. Crimes that law enforcement was incapable of negating due to being sudden and unexpected. Although tragic, when a violent crime occurs, it would almost always be evident what occured and who was responsible.Ask yourself? How much would you be willing to give up for such a world?Movie makes a big deal about having a open (probably puppet) politician.Here is one that I fully agree with. Prisons should be places that have cameras literally everywhere. In a high risk environment like a prison, I would happily trade my privacy for the knowledge that I am not going to be raped or assaulted.This is already occuring. I forsee that in the next decade, the cost of insuring a police officer who refuses to wear (and use) a full body camera will be so high that departments will require police officers to have them running at all times.Heh, I don't know. It would be interesting. Could most of the goverment be entirely opened? Would we allow "black boxes" like the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc? Would it turn out that backroom negotiations by our nations actually do benefit citizens more than they hurt? Would it cut corruption? Hard to say.Yes, it has some serious flaws. But it gives you things to think about, and it honestly resolved the ending in a rather novel way. Rather than fighting the system, Emma Watson instead fully opens and embraces it. Basically making the case that if such a system exist, it needs to be placed under open rather closed controlers.If you are going to have a system that is going to audit the world, then you must audit everyone in control of that system.

Clojure West 2017

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I went to clojurewest 2017 in Portland, Oregon. Good conference, lots of good information. Here are my observations, my notes, and a few pictures.The conference was well managed. The talks were mosty interesting. The community continues to be friendly, open, and inclusive.I wish there had been a few more "This is something I worked on that is very cool" type presentations, but you can't force those. Maybe there just wasn't as much cool stuff in 2017 compared to previous years. I guess every year can't be a "Clojure now compiles to javascript" or "core.async, use it" kind of year.Portland is an interesting city. I didn't actually realize how small and walkable the core of the city is. In San Francisco, I have practially forgotten what it is to see families with kids on the street. It is certainly a nice place to visit. I liked the eating, the literary/craft tradition, the beer, and the people. It did have a number of younger homeless (kind of reminded me of Berkeley). It did have the feeling of a place that gets a lot of tourist (that can be tiring when you live there). I could see myself being very happy there, but I haven't heard a whole lot about the tech scene there. The public transportation is excellent and the lack of traffic is a pleasure. I don't know if it is a place to "see and be seen" but it certainly felt like a place to "live and let live". Kind of like the kind of "weird" that Austin aspires to. Clojure/West 2017

Trip to Japan!

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I took a 3 week trip to Japan from January 21 from February 12. I didn't have an itinerary, exploring as I saw fit and moving on when the mood struck me. Through the trip, I stayed in Tokyo, Tanabechuo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.I made several purchases before the trip:The Japan Rail Pass (Green) is a Japan Rail (JR) pass that lets you ride most trains in Japan. My most "Japan specific" purchase that I would recommend to anyone. The (Green) designation means that it is business class (effectively), which means better seats and reservations. I bought the 21 day pass for $700.Google Fi worked out normally. When I landed in Japan it told me that I would pay the standard $10/gig data rate and I believe $0.20/minute. Use your Wifi call if at all possible. Coverage seemed pretty good everywhere. Was able to use it on most of the high speed trains, spotty between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.The Tortuga Outbreaker 35L was a altogether worthwhile purchase. Most compeling features is the ability to open it fully (not just from the top) like a conventional suitcase. You don't think about it, but not having to pack and unpack your backpack is a real time saver. I also thought the compartment for the laptop with easy access was convenient, as you will be taking that out on a regular basis throughout the day.Other feature true of the 35L is that it counts as cary on in all airlines (even small planes). It is convenient not having to wait for any lugage after a long day of travel.I used hostelworld.com. Easy to use website. Clean interface. I would book my next hostel 5 days before actually arriving. Never had a single issue. They take I think like 10% as deposit on booking, you then pay the rest upon arrival at the hostel.I recently bought some Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones for work. This is my best product purchase of 2016. They made air travel more pleasant (shut that baby up!). They made watching the landscape flow by on the trains more moody. They gave me a slight taste of home when I am feeling a bit lonely. Seriously. Great. Headphones.And now, without further ado, I present... a silly number of pictures:

Soft Scan on Google App Engine

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Google App Engine does not allow for a SCAN like operation on a kind. Although this is a hard limit, it can be worked around with some thought. This is my generic solution.GAE does not allow locking of the database. GAE does not even allow for locking of a kind. Transactions are the only locking mechanism in GAE, and they are limited to the entity groups within the transaction.The closest GAE has to a scan (a lock of a kind, where every element of that kind is processed) is a GAE Query; which is a filtered iterator. Queries are "best effort" and are not guaranteed to reflect the current state of the database. Still, they are the best you have.Using a iterator would be a O(N) cost, where N is the number of rows of a GAE kind . GAE is all about scaling dynamically. It would be nice if we could divide up the work of processing every row of a kind.I have written a system that lets you (probabilistically) process every entity of a kind. It does not hard guarantee that every entity will be processed, but with a sufficient number of retries it does probabilistically guarantee that they after entity has been processed.The handler-path will be called with the urlsafe() key of every entity of 'kind' . Specifically // will be called for every entity. If handler-path returns 2xx, it is considered a success; otherwise it is a failure. Failure will cause the task to be re-enqueued in retry-fx(retry-count) seconds.Assume there are 3 Dog entities in the database with urlsafekey's of "rottweiler", "poodle", and "dalmation". Then,will cause the following endpoints to be called.This isn't much of a big deal when we are talking about 3 entities. But it is pretty useful when we are talking about thousands or millions of entities. Thanks to this "soft scan" we have the ability to have a function (a endpoint) called on every item of a particular kind in the datastore.

Convert Google Datastore into Elasticsearch

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This week I wrote an addition to gaend that automatically causes every ndb.Model entity to automagically be persisted to Elasticsearch.Datastore (the database technology that powers Google App Engine) has a number of great features.Although datastore is perfect as a Key/Value store that allows transactions and limited queries, it does have its limitations.One effect of these limits is that it can difficult to do things like aggregation on tables. You should use the proper tool for the desired outcome.Datastore is great as a key/value store (with transactions).Elasticsearch is great at doing aggregation.Datastore is structured (typed) data. Everything that goes into Elasticsearch must be JSON data. Structured data can be fairly easily transformed into JSON data. You see where I am going with this?This extension to gaend does successfully convert any Datastore data into Elasticsearch. You should look at your table in Datastore and perhaps consider whether you need to submit a custom mapping for Elasticsearch. If unspecified, Elasticsearch will generate a mapping for you based on the submitted JSON document. For tables made up of "primitive" data, the dynamically generated mapping is usually sufficient. Still, know that you can override the dynamic in the event that you have complex, deeply nested, or large types of data.

Gaend

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

gaend is a easy way to get Restful endpoints on Google App Engine for Python. It builds endpoints directly from your ndb.Model classes.This is my first Open Source Python library. It was fun to write and it helped me internalize some of the driving philosophies behind Python. Though there were many learnings, I think the thing I got the most was that Python favors complexity being hidden even at the cost of understanding. In reality, most Python code is NOT simple. However, most python libraries go to great lengths to hide complexity from the user. At some level, I feel that this is a disservice as it risks keeping the user in a permanently "infantile" state. On the other hand, it means that things "just work" and you probably aren't going to cut yourself on a sharp corner.Contrast this to Clojure. In Clojure, a library should ideally be made of a collection of simple parts. These parts should have no state. It could be bias, but it seems like it is usually easier to understand the internal workings of a random Clojure library vs a random Python library.The difference though comes down to usage. In Python, a library can often be used with one simple function call. Furthermore, there is usually one blessed library for most problems. Clojure however often requires you to put together "found art" from different libraries. Putting together multiple parts of many libraries to get to a solution. This is the ultimate in flexibility and expressiveness, but it also means that it can be comparatively difficult to get started.Beyond the project itself, I also enjoyed writing the documentation. It can be kind of fun to make believe that you are a user of your software with no context. It can be challenging to try to picture what your own software looks like to a complete stranger. It is actually a rather difficult job and I gained some respect for people who spend most of their lives writing technical documentation.

Get a Vault token to your application

Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Your application needs a TOKEN in order to access your Vault server. How do you get the TOKEN to the application server?From here on we will be calling your Vault-server-in-the-cloud simply 'Vault'Vault is a tool for managing secrets. Vault act as a key/value store where the keys are paths and the values are dictionaries written at those paths. Vault allows for auditing, roles, authentication, and much more.Vault application access your secrets through a TOKEN. A TOKEN is built from a tuple of (ROLE_ID, SECRET_NONCE). You likely have a single ROLE_ID per application. Your SECRET_NONCE is a cryptographic nonce that is exchanged with the ROLE_ID to get a TOKEN. As a nonce, your SECRET_NONCE may only be exchanged for a TOKEN at most one time.Once you application has a TOKEN it may then make request to your Vault server. A TOKEN will expire N minutes from its last refresh or initialization. So to keep a TOKEN valid, the application will need to tell Vault at least once every N minutes to refresh (extend) the TOKEN. Your Token will always have a lifetime of (last refresh time) + N. If your server goes down, the TOKEN will soon expire as the application will no longer extend the TOKEN lifetime.We have all done it, it is not a good idea. There definitely should be no secrets in your source code. Secrets in your source code means you cannot share your code without a full audit. UghEnvironment variables are better. It still requires that you ask questions about what secrets exist at what locations when you are considering your infrastructure. Contrast this to having secrets in one place (Vault). If you are considering Vault then you have likely decided that environment variables are not a good enough solution, so I will not spend any more time attacking them.The equivalent of putting ALL your secrets in your application. Anyone who gets access to the TOKEN (through source or environment variables) can access Vault as the application.This is sound under some strictly ordered conditions. We must be certain that the application is the first to exchange (ROLE_ID, SECRET_NONCE) for the TOKEN. Because SECRET_NONCE is a nonce, we don't need to worry about subsequent request, only the first one wins. However, if Alice is able to get the SECRET_NONCE and exchange it for a TOKEN before our application, Alice would now have access to all of the applications secrets. Dependent order in security does not sound like a good idea.After deployment of your app, call an endpoint on it and pass in a (ROLE_ID,SECRET_NONCE). Your application will then exchange your (ROLE_ID,SECRET_NONCE) for a TOKEN. This alleviates the timing concerns of the previous solution while still having zero secrets in code or environment variables. This endpoint can be entirely open. Vault will refuse to provide a TOKEN for a (ROLE_ID, SECRET_NONCE) that it did not issue.I have written a demo project that implements a (ROLE_ID,SECRET_NONCE) endpoint. After the very first deployment of the app, it requires that you "light the pilot light" by posting a (ROLE_ID, SECRET_NONCE) that may be use to access Vault. So, the steps are.Instructions are provided in the README.

Speed is all that Matters

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice. - Donal KnuthI have an addiction to infrastructure. While programing a solution, I eventually find that I am working on things that do not directly contribute to solving the problem. From a rational/detached/post-fact perspective, I know that this is a huge source of waste. Funny, I never seem to notice this at the time.I do not have a problem with motivation. If anything, I do not value my time as much as I should. Let us leave that for another rant.I do not have a problem with my programming skill set. It isn't lack of skill that impedes my ability to deliver. Not to say that I have nothing that needs improvement. My mathematics is weak, I never really got SQL, my Git skill are passable but nothing extroardinary, I am average at using the terminal, I type poorly, etc... There are a huge number of things I could learn and improve on, but non of those things stop me from being able to build solutions.I do spend an embarassing amount of time trying to get things perfect.I do spend far too much energy trying to deal with eventualities that never emerge.I do spend mental focus on vanity features that I hope to someday reveal to the world, blinding it with my genius.Meanwhile, the actual business problem sits untouched.Speed is king. I am beginning to believe that this may be true of most things in life. I think the shortest way to get good at something is to become skilled enough to do it quickly. This seems to be true for artist and craftmen, so why shouldn't it be true for programmers?It seems to me that there are at least 3 elements to speed.Getting seperate works to come together harmoniously. This is one of the main differences between a good cook and a chef. A good cook often does one thing at a time in a linear fashion. A chef is often doing 3 or 4 things concurrently, connecting them so that they are all completed at the right moment.Actual context switching in programming is almost certainly a detriment. However, the ability to know the order that things need to be acomplished to minimize downtime is a real skill. Huge numbers of books have been written on software estimation. I am not going to say anything about that. I am going to say that if you have done a task 10 times and it took an average of 15 minutes, then you can probably estimate that the 11th time will take around 15 minutes. This means that you can probably fit this task in a 20 minute lull in your schedule. This makes you faster.People who have speed aren't always fast. Sometimes they are just more efficient. A good example of this is beginner vs advanced guitarist. Beginner guitarist almost always move significantly more than needed to pick a note. An advanced guitarist does a minimal move. Guess who is going to pick faster (as well as tire more slowly)?A large part of context switching in programming is familiarizing yourself with the codebase. If you are reusing a codebase that you have previously used, you can dramatically reduce the context switch of familiarizing yourself. This makes you faster.A measure of the number of task you can perform per unit time. This mostly has to do with repetition. You can perform a task more quickly if you have done a similar task in recent memory. Examples of this are evident.Programmers may relate to this through the notion of Flow. When you don't have to stop and question how to do something, but can focus simply on what you are doing. This makes you faster as well as less succeptible to distraction.Simple. Don't work on the big until you can quickly do the small. That is all I got.Note: I am picturing a small project being ~10 hours. A medium project being ~50 hours. A large project being 200+ hours.I think it is pretty natural to pick similar projects. Especially if you are trying to get "faster". This should allow you to focus on increasing speed (specifically through Actions Per Minute).Step 3 & 4 are designed to allow you to address persistent difficulties in code by writting infrastructure. This is very different than my current method of writting infrastructure though as:Being able to do something quickly and well increases confidence. Computers don't care about confidence, but humans do. If you are reading this, you are likely human. As a human you should look after your mental well being. Being confident in a skill could open a lot of doors...

Soulmate

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

At the time of this writing, there is exactly one review on Rotten Tomatoes for this film.A gorgeously shot, tear-stained love letter to female friendship that also provides a fascinating look into contemporary, urban China. - Cary DarlingThe above quote was the entirety of my knowledge concerning this film. I think it was "contemporary, urban China" that really capture my interest. I really like movies that might give me some idea of what a foreign country/culture/people are like. Films of this type are harder to find than you would imagine. Very few people capture their own culture in film. Most film captures an idealized version of a culture (for the protagonist), or a lampooned version (for our antagonist).Best recent good example of this was Hell or High Water, which really capture the manerism/desperation/stagnation of some of West Texas.I have no real idea whether it succeeds at capturing "contemporary, urban China". As an outsider, it seemed grounded, though a little dramatic.Soulmate is a Chinese movie that details the lifelong friendship of two women. I liked it. The end.It isn't the velocity, it is the rate of change. It is the fact that the characters actually move and modify through time. I feel like modern cinema is so concerned with having "strong", "noble", everyman characters that we harden them to the point that they are as mechanical as the plot. I really appreciated the fact that, over years, the two main characters diverge, mirror, and recombine in different ways. That is an ambitious thing to try to make a movie about; especially when you limit yourself to two characters.The camera work was also fresh. The shots were consistenly set up in interesting ways. People looking across each other in bed. Slow motion scenes to capture moments of youth (implying memory). There were a number of talking head scenes. Even within those, I felt like I was often getting a sense of the room, of the space, within those scenes. I lack the vocabulary to acurately describe what I was seeing, but I could feel it. Somebody really thought hard about how to set up scenes that fit the on screen action.Reminded me a bit of Our Little Sister, though more maudlin. I thought it was a great movie. It was interesting, I was engaged, and the acting was enchanting.

Fanimecon 2016

Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I like fandom in all forms. There is a good chance that I will attend a conference about anything that you are a fan of. I enjoy being around people who are all interested in the same thing. I am especially attentive when fandom will not yield any status or wealth. This lets me know that these people are actually fans of something. There are no ulterior motives.Fanimecon is a anime convention "by fans, for fans." Something north of 25,000 people descend on San Jose, California for this thing. I rented a Air BnB with 11 other people. The camaraderie of attending together outweighed the annoyance of waiting for showers. I would recommend attending with a group.Fanimecon has a game room that is open for the entire length of the conference. This is where I spent a solid 70% of my time. I played euro board games, made acquaintances, and watched competitive gamers. Oh, also socialized and shot the bull. Lots of that.Cosplay is a big part of these sort of conventions. Some of the costumes were amazing. Myself, I am not that interested in dressing up (though I could be persuaded). I would like to create something to showcase for next years convention. I took real inspiration from Laputa Robot and the Venusaur (below). That is pretty cool.Cosplay is not all anime/manga based. Around 30% of the cosplays are video game characters. Especially popular this year was Overwatch.There was also a Manga section where you can relax and read in a less frenetic environment. This is a real boon to people like me, who get agitated and worked up when surrounded by the press of humanity. I took pictures of some of the titles that looked good.In summary, it was a great time. I met lots of people. I played many games. I even watched a little anime.Tiny arms are no hinderance in DDRThe Robot from Laputa: Castle in the SkyRoomba Venusaur?

Abstinence is Easier than Moderation

Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I don't own a television. That is no boast, it is a reflection of my poor taste. I am the sort of person that will watch things because they are on. If I owned a television, I would likely spend my days going from Judge Judy to Jerry Springer and back.I am just as bad at impulse control on the internet. I need a computer to do most... well... everything. For some parts of my day, I need to be working. For others, it is time to sit back, relax, and browse.I edited my /etc/hosts file so that it redirects sites that are time sinks to localhost. I get a nice This site can’t be reached; no more visiting reddit 3 times an hour!Sometimes though, I want to actually relax and browse. I then need to edit /etc/hosts again to unblock all those performance killing sites.Having to edit a file on a daily basis is painful. I can do better.I am on a Mac, so I use launchd to create two scripts that run at 22:00 and 2:00. The 2:00 script returns my computer to the "focused" state, limiting what sites I can visit. The 22:00 script puts my computer in a "relaxed" state, allowing me to browse until bedtime. Both of these files should be in your /Library/LaunchDaemons directory. The advantage of putting these files in /Library/LaunchDaemons as opposed to ~/Library/LaunchAgents is that they are run whenever the computer is on, rather than just when you are logged in. Also, they will run upon wake, even if the trigger time occured while the computer was asleep.Daemonic Agents - Code example that includes /etc.hosts files that I find useful

Learning Haskell

Sun, 08 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This week I joined a study session / book Club for Haskell. The Book we are covering is Haskell ProgrammingI joined rather late so had to do 6 chapters in one week. Now that I am caught up I can do a leisurely 1 chapter a week. Everyone reads and performs the exercises in each Chapter on their own. We have a weekly meetup where we can talk about any difficulties with the exercises, get a head start on the next chapter, or just socialize.Mostly to just reaffirm my belief that what I have is already the best. I really enjoy Clojure. It is my favorite language to work within. The only aspects I sometimes question are related to testing and correctness. I think the unit/functional/generative testing story is great in Clojure. Test are neccesesities in Clojure in order to generate correct code; is this a universal truth?I have this fantasy though that maybe, just maybe, if I understood type systems well enough I could write code that does not need test at all. Code that is so bulletproof that the fact that it compiles is all the proof we need to know that it works. I suspect that this is a fantasy. Unfortunately, I don't think I can convince myself of this unless I can actually use a strongly typed language and demonstrate this to myself.Less than impressed.I get that they wanted a language that is similar to how mathematical functions are written. This results in some rather complex and ridiculous rules for using operators. Ok. Fine.I also think the fact that I can choose either where or let just makes the code harder to understand as I have to move my eye all over the place to grasp what is going on.The type system is of course a painful thing to bear with, but is probably also the aspect of Clojure that will pay the most dividends. I find it challenging, at the same time I am excited as I begin to understand how it all works.We march on! Haskell is one of those things that I have said I would learn for years. Here is an opportunity to do so. Doesen't come up all that often. I don't care if I am not getting any immediate value out of it. This is a bucket list item and I am completing it.

Hatsune Miku Concert

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Hatsune Miku is a popular vocaloid performer. I heard about vocaloid singing (and Hatsune Miku) a few years ago. I have never listened to vocaloid music previous to this concert. I decided to attend one as I find the concept intriguing. This concert was held at the Warfield.I have not attended many conerts. I am trying to remember the last one I attended; probably more than a decade ago now. I believe the last was either "A Perfect Circle", "Nine Inch Nails", or KMFDM (can't remember which was last). Whenever I am at a concert, I am always struck by how similar concert experiences are to religious ones. People reaching towards the heavens, putting their hands up, sometimes clossing their eyes and letting the feeling of the moment capture them.I am not a religious person. Similarily, at a concert, I have trouble "letting go" and getting worked up with the crowd. I try to, but I often fail. Anyway, enough about me.This concert was similar to any other concerts in that the people in it were experiencing a "spiritual" communion with the singers and with each other. The fact that the singers were entirely artificial, with voices digitally stitched together from (1 or more, not sure) human singers seems to make no real difference. The love of the singers, music, and genre was real.Having said that, the music really takes some getting use to. For the first 10 minutes I was thinking little more than "Jeesus, this shit is atonal and the voice is just horendous". I was putting on a good face because I wanted the people I was with to have a good time (and they did) but I was internally thinking "Gaaaawwwdd, this is awful". The sound grew on me after a half hour or so. I don't think it is music I am going to listen to in a non concert setting, but it does grow in the context of a live showing.I think the whole idea of worshiping Idols that have never existed is probably the next stage of things. Already, most comercial bands are 90% fabrication. Really just companies with a product looking to maximize market share and future earnings. When you see a Katy Perry concert, you are mostly seeing the decisions and work of the huge number of people who go towards fabricating that image. Yes, there is an actual 'Katy Perry', but she is just the human form of the Platonic ideal of a Katy Perry. That ideal is a fiction created by a huge number of people. This is the next logical step; why bother even maintaining the fiction of a real personf?Actually. Yes. Immensely so.At first I was feeling kind of nervous and disoriented about the fact that the singer was artificial. However, you start to tune in on the fact that everyone around you is ecstatic to be here. There are no posers here, nobody looking to make a scene. No pretentious ass from your local theater district. These are people who are embracing something that is, to put it bluntly, rather (totally) dorky. And they love it! They are doing it because they love the music, the character, the sound, whatever. It is refreshing to see people enjoying something so much.It may have been the glow stick "orchestration" (I got pretty good at it). It may have been the screaming crowds that just couldn't get enough of one act after another. It may just have been the chance to see people I know who are usually very reserved belting their hearts and souls to songs that I can't even follow (all Japanese). I don't know, doesen't really matter. I enjoyed myself; would go again.A look at the PuppeteersThis was kind of neat, words superimposed with the PerformersSeizures r'usBest recording I got of what her voice sounds likeMiku directing the crowdAs you can see, it is really 4-5 band members playing with Miku

Embrace the Serpent

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Odd film. It kind of reminded me a bit of "The Fountain", though this one is a bit more subdued.Hah, maybe that creepy Mayan (I forgot) looking guy who keeps saying "Death is the road to Awe" is Karamakate... Just kidding. Didn't even seem like the philosophies were all that compatible.I had vague knowledge about "rubber plantations" and just how poorly native pupulations were treated during those times. Awfull. Things like that really reaffirm my commitment to the idea of a monitoring society that makes easy use of recording technology + encryption. Recording so that you can have an "unbiased" (<- really loose use of the term there) view of something and encryption so that you can share said unbiased evidence anonymously. I can't promise a better world. But it seems to me that a great number of evil is done because not enought people of power are aware of them. Recording + Encryption does not fix the world, but it at least gives a voice to and causes note of it for others.As I watched the film, I was reminded how little "pride" I have in my own culture/race/whatever. Karamakate loves his culture, he wanted his people to continue, barring that, he wanted the knowledge of his culture to endure. Above that, he views the jungle and his gods as being a sort entity that cared for him and whom he cared for. Not that I am in any way ashamed of my culture, it is just rather nebulous; not something I give a great deal of thought. I an American by birth. I am North Western European (British, French, German) by lineage? I have no religion. I have no membership in any permanent organization. Hell, the closest thing I have to an identity is probably that of "programmer". I know that other programmers are going to have similar mindsets to my own. This is a group, I guess it is even a culture, but it is not something I take inherent pride and strength from. I largely see myself as an independent agent exerting smal force upon this world. I don't really see myself connected to anything, I only see the influence of myself upon it. Hard to describe, but Karamakae seemed to see himself as something within a whole, where he and the whole were in a sort of balanced (I wanted to use the word 'homeostatic' here, but that is too fancy) eternal state. I don't have anything like that; anything I want to preserve above myself. It is sometimes an empty feeling, at the same time, it means that I am beholden and owe fealty to nothing.

File Conventions to make Backend Engineers Happy

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A random list of file conventions that make me happy. Although these do not apply to every situation, they are true enough that you should at least consider them when creating an output file format.Don't make up your own format. Please. Just use CSV (note: does not have to be commas, any unused delimiter will work, or use quoting characters within your CSV if you have to).This hurts. If you include slashes in the filename, it makes is look like the file is actually a directory listing. Furthermore, modern storage system like gcs and s3 don't really have directories (they are really just a bunch of objects in a bucket). However, they will logically present these objects as if they are made up of directories if you include slashes in the names. This is odd because when you download individual files they will download as files. When you view them the files within the s3 viewer they will appear as directories. when you (r)sync the buckets the files they will appear as directories... It just gets messy. Just don't use directories. Use a flat bucket of files.I think buckets should basically be treated like typed arrays/vectors/list. You should only have a single type of thing within them. Don't mix multiple different types of things as you are then forcing someone using said bucket to filter on what they need. Really, if you have multiple types of things, use multiple buckets.Let me provide an example.9 should not logically be between 89 and 90. However, most directory listing operations will list things according to logical text order. Ugly. I think it it would be much better to sufficiently pad such a file so that 9 does not show up here, something likeOf course, this involves either:Let me just say how much I appreciate you doing this for me. You have no idea how anoying it is to have to always itertools.groupby(sorted(os.listdir(path), key=key_fx1), key=key_fx2) whenever your filenames does not logically sort. Tiresome.

Renoir: Revered and Reviled

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

On Bovine women, plebian taste, and Renoires non Impressionist work.I was interested to learn that Renoir actually had a fairly major "shift" in drawing style. Many people know Pierre-Auguste Renoir as an Impressionist painter. Few realize that he seems to have tired of this style in his 50's and switched away from Impressionist style art and towards (mostly female) nudes. Although his art from before his 50's (1890's) is commended, the work after is often considered appalling by critics for various reasons.One of the critics in the film commented that Renoir drew "bovine" "empty headed" women. I am going to ignore the "empty headed" part, as hell, I don't know. A lot of classical paintings seem to be of people with queer expressions on their faces, I guess I haven't thought about it enough.Bovine. This struck me as somewhat odd. Foremost, he liked big girls, what is the big deal? Secondly, it is an interesting use of language. In modern times, calling anyone bovine, no matter how fat they are, would be an incredibly rude thing to say. This critic clearly did not like Renoir's work. However, it appears that it is ok to use terms that you would personally find in bad taste if you are using those terms to describe the behavior of someone whom you are casting in a bad light. Interesting. The critic would probably never directly call someone bovine. He would however use the term when describing the output of someone he dislikes. It is a subtle verbal trick, but in doing so it allows one to use a distastfull but powerful word without attributing it to yourself. I thought that was clever.Hell, I liked most of what I saw. The art makes you feel good. It is relaxing. It reminds you how attractive the female form is and makes you want to go lay in a sunny field. What is not to like about that?

Clojure / West 2016

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A recording of all that I saw and hear at Clojure West 2016 in Seattle Washington.GithubThis library lets you navigate and modify deeply nested and deeply repetitive data structures. Fundamently, it raises the barrier before you need to start putting things in a database by making it possible to just reason about data when the data is very deep or very broad. It makes the actionable code look like a DSL in its conciseness; without actually being a DSL. Having said that, it is bringing in a rather large "mini DSL" in order to allow for the data manipulation.This was a walkthrough of a 16,000 line of code Clojure App. Lessons were learned, libraries were used, and discarded. Code is being used on the Boeing 737 MAX; which is evidently a new plane with a focus on efficiency.https://github.com/SparkFund/spec-tacularAn attempt at putting some sort of stronger typing on entities in Datomic. Graded various aspects of her attempt. Did not entirely follow due to lack of familiarity with Typed systems in particular.This was just a deep dive into exactly what a record is and when it is appropriate to use one. A record is just a collection of fields, possibly of different data types, typicially with a fixed number and sequences.Big exception is that = and .equals are NOT the same when comparing Record to a map even with the same value.It can be a bit surprising to see this. Unfortunately, they often still look like records. In fact, this is one of the reason record? exist.Showcased an API for interaction to the Alexa Skill system from the Clojure API. It is called Boomhauer, from the king of the hill character. GITHUBThis might be good for the sales reps. I mean, they are already wearing a headset, it would be cool if they could do things like take voice notes and make calls and all that stuff without even having to touch the screen.I have no use for this, thought it was neat. It is basically a system for doing distributed computation in a peerless system.Refresh the page after performing an action, you should have the same state as you had when you finished. Without tying to a particular thing you have proven that it has been persisted.When you need development, just merge all the systems into one maptldr; Source Code != ProgramUNTANGLEDHonestly, it looks rather complex to me. I do not convinved these new models based on Falcor are actually superior.Yes.No.Some modular web framework that is going to normalize how people do web programming.What if we thought of it less as "request/response" (webdev) programming and more as a game? Where we have to do local level rendering of a segment of the entire world.So, for good caching, also include a timestamp as part of the UUID, this way you don't have to revert data, instead you can just increment the timestamp and this will mean the cache is no longer used. Thi smight actually apply to Elasticsearch for my own uses.Some great Resources at the endAlways code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.Good conference. Met a number of people that we can bring in to work if we need their skills. Learned about new technologies in the Clojure community. Specifically, I think the Alexa system might be something we should look into for Reps. Specter might be good for keeping our system as Data and not needing to put everything in a database. The Data science team might like that; of course, it would involve learning clojure. I think that would be a win win for everyone. :]

The Family Trade (The Merchant Princes, #1)

Charles Stross — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Awful. Just awful. This is a bad Harlequine Romance novel wrapped in the thinnest veneer of Sci-Fi. Let me transcribe some of this crap for you...> "You're beautiful." >> "I bet you say that to every naked woman you wake up in bed with.">> "No", he said in all seriousness. Before he realized what he'd done. Then he turned bright red. "I mean", he was too late!>> [Name Redacted to avoid spoilers], "Got you!" she giggled, holding him down. Then she subsided on top of him.What. The. Fuck. This is some of the more event driven "dialogue" in the book. When our Mary-Sue-Wonder-Bread-Social-Warrior isn't spending most of her day conducting internal monologues about how she feeeeels at every moment, we get the treat of listening to this level of dialogue between herself and her compatriots.Enough about the dialogue, let me get into the parts of the book I really hated. HERE BE SPOILERSUnderstand the culture you are in.I really dislike it when literature treats other races/cultures/peoples by only characterizing them by the mores and beliefs that we disagree with. It is just so one sided, so arrogant; really gets my heckles up. In this case, I was just flummoxed how our heroine is able to just waltz in and start instituting change without anyone being able to touch her because she can outfox them due to her free market understanding of how the world really works.Question your environmentI could not buy that an investigative journalist expressed no real interest in figuring out how the locket/worldwalking worked. It just blew my mind. She didn't even ask if anyone had ever done any research on it! Come on!Hell, I would have given her a pass if she had at least bothered to figure out the parameters, the limits of this thing. Nope, the second she figured out that it could work, we were done. After discovery, she never again bothers to test the limits of the system, to question why there is a mass limit, why do you get headaches, is their conservation of momentum? Nothing. It was just so... I just couldn't believe this. It is a good thing she dropped med school, she would have been a terrible doctor; doubt she could diagnose a cold.Nobody cares about your feeeeeelingsI was so sick of hearing how she "wasn't going to allow them to ...." or "Let them try to get me to ...". As a verbal tick it gets old fast. The forever monologues as she connects her painfully slow reasoning made my eyes water. The book just endsLiterally nothing is resolved at the end. It just ends. Asshole. In terms of interest, it is just dull for about 85%, then you have 10% of rising interest, and then you have a 5% ending where you realize nothing is going to complete. Wow, that made me angry. END OF SPOILERSI really have a hard time believing this is the same guy who wrote "Accelerando", "Rule 34", hell even "Neptunes Brood". Amazingly Bad.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Big idea here is that the Universe is a spectrum of fast to slow zones. In fast zones we have access to "higher" levels of computation, in slower zones the exact same machinery will become buggy or nonfunctional. It was never specified exactly what computations you can do in higher zones that you cannot do in lower zones. The important side effects of this though are that higher zone allows self aware AI and allows ships to jump between the stars. Lower zone have no self aware machinery and requires that you actually travel between the stars at only a small multiple of lightspeed. It is strongly implied that humanity/Earth may have come from a lower zone. That is very rare, as most "higher zone" aliens actually accend by being contacted by a more evolved aliens. Humanity may have actually manually made the voyage to higher zone from lower zone without outside intervention, though most aliens would regard that as unlikely.In the highest zones (the Transcend), there are AI's that are basically Gods. Within their zones they have almost unlimited power. Although ultimately constrained to the higher zones, the projection of their power extends to lower zones. Fortunately, most AI's in the Transcend quickly loose interest in the going on's of life in the lower zones. Metaphors fail in terms of applying lower zone reasoning or emotion to a God, but you might say that it is considered perverse by most AI's to be at all interested in the life of lower real beings. They view us the same way human beings might view insects. Some human beings actually have pity and take interest in insects, but the majority simply leave them alone as they have no real interest in them one way or another. I liked that part of the story. I like the idea of an AI that basically isn't even evil, it just does not care because you are beneath it's notice.I liked the idea of the Zones. I liked the idea of all intelligence (from virus all the way to Artificial Intelligence) basically being some form of computation. The lowest zone, known as the "Unthinking Depths", does not even allow biological species to achieve sentience. I liked the way Intelligence was just quantified as being something that is only limited by physics. It was a neat idea.The other big idea I liked was the Tines. The Tines are an alien species where each "person" is made up of 4 to 8 members. Each of these members looks something like a greyhound (at least in my mind). Each member is a distinct organism, but is usually not capable of any advanced thought. Members communicate at the speed of sound by constantly talking to each other. Once a group of 4+ members forms and acclimatizes they will become sentient. In doing so, the new "person" is a combination of the personality, characteristics, and skills of all its constituent members. Once a member joins, they almost never leave a group; it is not a confederacy of members, it is a person that came to be because of it's constituent members. I really liked this idea. I thought it was a very creative way of thinking about some new type of intelligence. A intelligence that came to be in a different way and for a different reason than human intelligence. It makes me think of split brain patients, how they are one person, but in some (very unscientific) sense of the word have two brains. I really liked how the speed of sound was a limiting factor to their group intelligence. I recollected some of the amazing feats of plasticity that the human brain seems capable of. What would the result be of linking seperate human beings brain-to-brain with radio? It also made me think a good deal about how similar thinking about an experience is to actually experiencing it. Imagine, in a Tines group (person), one member has his nuzzle in a flower, breathing in the pollen. He is communicating the sensation to the other members in his group. For all intents and purposes, they all simultaneously have their nose in that flower. It is a really interesting idea. I think of intelligence as being singular, but must it be? What would it mean to have trully parallel intelligence? Where each "node" is broadcasting and receiving everything it experiences and thinks to every other member in the group? It sounds wonderfull.

Sicaro

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Saw "Sicario" this evening. It was a pretty decent flick. Remined me a bit of the submarine movie I watched a while ago called "Black Sea"; left you with the same tense feeling in your neck. I guess, I guess I enjoy movies like that. I like movies where things are just building up slowly, where tensions are being accrued. I think I also respond to the idea that this is everyday life for the people in these films. I wonder how I would (or if I could) handle those sort of situations.I guess the take home message of the film is that the only way to deal with lawless entities like the Cartels would be to meet them with violence. The state, as a system of laws, is not really capable of inflicting the sort of violence neccessary to check them. The state therefore looks to outside contractors to do their violence for them. Is this acceptable? Is the result actually better? Is the premise even sound?I did enjoy the contrast between the clean cut FBI agents and the result driven CIA agents. I can't honestly decide who is right in these sort of situations. Of course, I don't know whether the movies portrayal of each side correctly personifies reality. It was still an interesting character study.

The Atrocity Archive

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Wasn't bad. As a time saver, I would almost recommend reading it in reverse.This book contains three parts. The first part is 3/4 of the book or so "The Atrocity Archive". The second part is a short story in the same world with the same character within "Atrocity" called "The concrete Jungle". The last part is a reflection by Charles Stross about books of this nature.So the last part of this books waxes philosophical and otherwise about the nature of a book like this in the world. It is probably what you should read first. If what is described within sounds interesting to you, then read from the beginning. If it sounds awful, then read something else.If, however, you aren't sure, then I would recommend reading the second story "The Concrete Jungle" first. Did you like that? Then you will probably like the first (and much longer story) "The Atrocity Archive". There, I made efficient use of your time.Personally, this really wasn't my thing. If felt too much like Star Trek dilithium-crystal-deus-ex-machina kind of mumbo jumbo to me. To be fair, I don't enjoy horror (maybe it is a lack of imagination), so I may have just been skimming when I was supposed to be enthralled.

The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1)

Charles Stross — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Seveneves

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, it isn’t my favorite book of his by any means. Still, it is a Neal Stephenson book, so it is pretty good.There was some neat ideas about spaceships that are basically bollas and whips, and I suppose this book introduced me to the idea of the Lagrange Points; kind of cool. I was also taught about epigenetics, which I figured was made up until I looked it up.My main issue with this book is that it feels at times like he forgot that you need to actually tell interesting stories about people. Seems that as he gets older (Reamde and Seveneves) Stephenson has become more technically obsessed. This is fine, but some segments of his novels are somewhat tedious to read through. I read sci-fi for two reasons. Foremost, I always hope to be exposed to some new idea or thought. Second, I enjoy out of this world stories. Stephenson always delivers on the first, lately I feel that he is not giving his full attention to the second.A large amount of this book reads a bit like a technical manual for getting humanity into space. I seem to be reading more authors in this style. Seems to be a resurgence in the “hard” sci-fi of the past. Most recently I have read the “Bowl of Heaven” by Greggory Bentford and Larry Niven as well as “The Martian” by Andy Weir. My feelings about this “hard” sci-fi genre is always mixed. On one hand, it does seem a little more relevant if the technology mentioned might someday exist and could, to the best of our knowledge, work. However, realistically, I think we are talking about relative things here. In darts, if you miss the board, you missed the board. The fact that you may have hit the wall rather than the floor may mean you are closer to the board, but you still completely missed it. Similarly, I think hard sci-fi may be closer to our actual future than space opera is, but the magnitude between either of them and reality will be so great as to make them both seem equally ridiculous.I think sci-fi is most effective when it takes an idea (the singularity / time travel / gestalt consciousness) and builds a compelling story about it. I don’t think it is of particular importance that the idea be currently feasible according to our current understanding of the world. It is cool when it is, but still, this is fiction, use your imagination.

Seveneves

Neal Stephenson — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Pillars of Eternity

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, it took me about a year and some change to finish this game. Game saves say that I have played 60 hours, so if you include the restarts and other losses, it was probably around 80. That is a massive investment, on the other hand, it is spent among 500+ days.Put simply, it is a great game. Because of the massive amount of time between different plays, I sometimes was a bit sketchy on exactly what was going on. The story is fairly open ended, but is streamlined enough that it gets you back on track fairly often.tldr; you should play itEVERYTHING BELOW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS, LOOK AWAY MORTAL!I played as a chanter, pretty enjoyable class but really not too useful until later in the combat rounds. I imagine the most powerful team would be made up entirely of fighters. Chanters become good as soon as they are able to summon additional monsters, but this can take a while. I played with all the companions but I imagine the best grouping would be something like 4 fighters and 2 chanters. The fighters are there just to soak and deal damage, the chanters are there to summon ogres and fire everyone up. Anywho, it isn't too important, on the difficulty I played upon (normal), none of the fights are so bad that you need to do too much. Adra Dragon is only real challenge.After finishing the game (and then reading the wiki stuff) I was surprised to discover I had completely missed the Pallegina Companion. I remember the interaction, I wonder how I was supposed to get her.As per usual, I attempted to complete everything. I mean every quest. I believe I was almost completely successful except for Durance, who I could not couple therapy talk into sanity. I just couldn't find the dialog options to get him to open up, although evidently they were there. Because of this, he burned himself on a pire made of his own staff. I'll miss him, but by the gods (Magran in his case) he was an annoying ass.Because I received every god's boon I also unleashed terrible suffering on the world when I failed to live up to my agreements with most of them. I did the hunters god's ending, returning the souls to make future generations stronger. I didn't feel bad about breaking my word to the Gods. Gods are the equivalent of large corporations in my mind, you just don't extend the same courtesy to them that you would to a human being. I feel as bad about defrauding or abusing a corporation/god as it would feel about doing the same to me. Not much.I won't say that I was entertained at every moment in the game, but I can say that as a whole I enjoyed every larger segment of it. This was a masterly done game by very skilled and passionate people. Kudos.To be more enjoyed, you really should play the game at a stronger (like an hour a night at least) pace. I think the most ideal way to play this game would be on the trans-siberian rail line. It would be awesome, look out the window and imagine your adventure when you need a break. See the local sites during the day. Evenings and nights progress 2-4 hours in game. Man that would be neat.Finally, I will talk about the ending. I thought the pacing and plot changes at the end were the best part of this game. All through the story, you were seeing this Thaos guy and thinking him some fundamentalist worshiper of an out of favor goddess. At the end, it is revealed that he isn't fundamentalist, in fact, he is one of the few people who actually knows that the gods are a fabrication of man. He isn't empowering his god for her glory, he is doing so for the future of mankind. It was an interesting argument. Would humanity be better served believing in gods? Gods that give their life meaning and purpose? Or is it better to face the simple (though barren) dust to dust truth of existence? I have to say I was somewhat sympathetic to Thaos' cause. That is good writing. I wouldn't myself want to worship any god (real or false), but I feel that many peoples lives might be enriched if they had something more to believe in. Put in sci-fi terms, what if we could program AI's that could act as Gods to humanity, and then told humanity that they were real gods? Would the happiness and fulfillment that a great deal of humanity experiences from this be worth the lie? It is a good question. Ha, wouldn't that be a awesome sequel to PoE? turns out all "souls" are really just computational resources in some simulation. Gods are just assembled by putting together enough computation. I don't think it is going to happen, that would piss of so many fans.Great Game.

Even in the best of Families

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I am in general a sci-fi guy. I would guess I read 70% sci-fi, 10% fantasy, 10% non-fiction, and 10% other. If you don’t count Sherlock Holmes, this is the first Mystery novel I have ever read.What I really like about sci-fi is the ideas. I love when sci-fi gives me some new thought or viewpoint. I also think I probably enjoy sci-fi because of my desire for awe. Billions of stars, millions of aliens, a galaxy spanning civilization, those sort of things. So, given all this, what is there for me in the world of Mystery novels?I guess there is cerebral pursuit. It is hard for me to tell. Can I really predict what is going to happen? Whodunit and how will it go down? Not really. In Science Fiction, you often don’t know what is going to happen because ANYTHING could happen. In mystery, the universe of possibilities is much more constrained, but it is still infinite. Does my ability to guess which of the 7 character is the murderer indicate my high deductive skill (as I would like to believe) or simply my familiarity with the author’s style? Mysteries have a reputation for being cerebral, but I don’t really think it is deserved. This isn’t to say that they are dumb, simply that I suspect your deductive skills have more to do with author/trope familiarity and less to do with actual reasoning.I would like to know of any detective books where it is possible to deduce the resolution before the big reveal without ambiguity. Something that is airtight and closed in resolution. Maybe I have to go back and read things repeatedly, but if I hold it all in mind, and use my facts properly, I end up with the right answer.Anyway, “Best of Families” was a pretty good book. I have no real basis of comparison, it kept me pretty entertained, the last 3rd of the novel was pretty interesting. I would recommend this book for a flight with a layover. I think it would probably be best consumed in a minimal number of sittings.

The Martian

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I told a friend I was reading this and he said this his friend described this book as “You know that scene from the Apollo 13 movie? Where they built a air filter out of duct tape? It is basically that scene repeated through an entire book.”I thought that was funny, and it is a pretty good description of this book. Our intrepid martian is left behind and must use wit, will, and Watney in order to have any chance of a rescue.I thought it was interesting that Watneys story was told with a “Captain’s log” mechanism, where he is narrating his survival for posterity. Foremost, because it is only a log, you are left in suspense about whether he will ultimately succeed or fail. Furthermore, because it is a log, it is his personal/intimate account; he is honestly not certain anyone will ever recover it. It allows him to be free to show self doubt or conflicting emotions. It feels more like a transcript of what happened and less like a packaged story, which I think was a desired effect. To contrast this, the events occurring simultaneously on Earth occurred with normal omniscient narration. It kind of gave the feeling that we were watching Watney at a great distance, only receiving his logs after they were occurring, while on earth things were happening in “real time.” Interesting.I enjoyed the sciency stuff, but am not qualified enough to really critic it one way or the other. Having said that, it seems plausible based on my limited understandings. At least there was no unexplained magic.Anyway, not too much to report here. I enjoyed it, you should read it, I hope the movie coming out soon will be good.

Even in the Best of Families

Rex Stout — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I am in general a sci-fi guy. I would guess I read 70% sci-fi, 10% fantasy, 10% non-fiction, and 10% other. If you don’t count Sherlock Holmes, this is the first Mystery novel I have ever read.What I really like about sci-fi is the ideas. I love when sci-fi gives me some new thought or viewpoint. I also think I probably enjoy sci-fi because of my desire for awe. Billions of stars, millions of aliens, a galaxy spanning civilization, those sort of things. So, given all this, what is there for me in the world of Mystery novels? I guess there is cerebral pursuit. It is hard for me to tell. Can I really predict what is going to happen? Whodunit and how will it go down? Not really. In Science Fiction, you often don’t know what is going to happen because ANYTHING could happen. In mystery, the universe of possibilities is much more constrained, but it is still infinite. Does my ability to guess which of the 7 character is the murderer indicate my high deductive skill (as I would like to believe) or simply my familiarity with the author’s style? Mysteries have a reputation for being cerebral, but I don’t really think it is deserved. This isn’t to say that they are dumb, simply that I suspect your deductive skills have more to do with author/trope familiarity and less to do with actual reasoning. I would like to know of any detective books where it is possible to deduce the resolution before the big reveal without ambiguity. Something that is airtight and closed in resolution. Maybe I have to go back and read things repeatedly, but if I hold it all in mind, and use my facts properly, I end up with the right answer.Anyway, “Best of Families” was a pretty good book. I have no real basis of comparison, it kept me pretty entertained, the last 3rd of the novel was pretty interesting. I would recommend this book for a flight with a layover. I think it would probably be best consumed in a minimal number of sittings.

The Martian

Andy Weir — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Mad Max: Fury Road

Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Damn good movie, you should see it, lots of fun. You know that feeling you had as a kid when the circus performer jumps from one trapeze to another? This movie is like that through most of the running time. The bar for action movies has been raised.There are a number of interesting topics to consider in this movie. The apparent rationality of seemingly irrational behavior given fundamentalist religious belief. The true nature of mankind when resources are scarce. The inclusion of strong female characters who are not trope bounded feminist. The kinematics of putting a ladder on the back of a truck and jumping onto another truck from it... while moving. All important topics worth considering.However, I am not going to focus on any of those things. Instead, I will be an ass and focus on the one part of the movie that I didn't quite enjoy. The lack of appreciation for Immortan Joe from the film.Don't get me wrong, Joe is clearly a really bad guy. Slavery. Violence. Rule by Force. Deception. Deification. This guy is no Saint. I am not going to defend him as a man. Morally, he is repulsive.But so is every other Great Man in history whom we now worship. Caesar, Ghenghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, you can just go on all day. Most of these men supported slavery. All of them were willing to force the sacrifice of other lives for their own ideals. Many of them either believed in or encouraged their own deification. By the modern measures of a moral human being, these people were all rather awful. And yet, the net benefit of the actions of most of these men ended up having disproportionate effects on our world. Truth be told, we are probably all better off because of the things they did.I am not saying that the movie should have let Joe "win" (whatever that may be). I am just saying that it would have been interesting if he at least got to make his case for his own rule at least once.I mean really, it is amazing that anything short of an actual god could perform some of the miracle he maintains on a regular basis. He has built an empire out of nothing but poverty, want and need. He keeps the vehicles running. He keeps the water flowing. He has raised and cultivated hydroponic fields in the freaking dessert. They have a limited but stable food supply. He was evidently able to pump water from below the earth. Joe obviously knows and values good engineering. Joe obviously understands the value of putting the right person in the right job. Joe evidently allows men and women to rise equally up to at least Imperator. There is large, complex, and maintained engineering at the Citadel. Joe has enough control over his society to maintain blood pools for aenemics for gods sake! I mean that is some high level administration. This is thanks to a charismatic and bloody ruthless tyrant like Joe. No arguments about the morality of it; these miracles have a high cost in human suffering (I assume slave labor for fields, raids for fuel), but by God (Joe), he keeps the damn trains running!Without people like him, without the collective will of empire/civilization, humanity would just slowly dwindle unto death. It takes monsters like Joe to actually unite factious human beings into forces for effective change. Think about it. Every other clan in the film seemed to be just scrapping by, making due on less every year, all are clearly in decline. The Citadel was growing. It was gaining and centralizing power. In a world of dwindling resources, without people like Joe, humanity is doomed.They never let Joe make an argument in his own defense. It would have been nice if Max had been able to truly see all that Joe had accomplished and asked himself it this was really worth destroying. I also thought it would be interesting if Imperator Furiosa originally worked with Joe because he brought stability and peace (after the violence of conquest), but eventually had come to feel the ends don't justify the means. Maybe the parallels between a character like Joe and Saddam Hussein were a little too close for comfort; so that entire story was scrapped. Still, I think it would have been neat.Given the choice between a monstrous tyrant who provides stability and a slow death in isolated freedom, I would choose the tyrant every time. Tyrants are only human, they die, but the legacies and foundations they establish can last for thousands of years.tldr; "Vote for Joe. Everything else is slow death."

The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)

Patrick Rothfuss — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

GM: Character name?PLAYER: Kvothe.GM: Kvothe, I like it. Sounds rural and strong. So where were you raised Kvothe? Where you a blacksmith? Farmer? Shepperd? Squire? What skills have you developed?KVOTHE: I have skills at just about everything as I was raised by traveling performers. Since traveling performers have such a wide assortment of skills I have become expert at all of them.GM: Huh. Um, ok. Alright, I will grant that as a travel you probably have woodcraft, lore, performance, and many other skills, but you can’t really be a master of all skills. What about social and abstract skills like court etiquette or mathematics?KVOTHE: My mother was royalty. She taught me all social and educational skills. My parents are both highly intelligent and well learned, I have had an education that surpasses that of kings.GM: Huh… Ok. Well, at least you don’t know magic. There is magic in the world I am building, so there will always be more to learn.KVOTHE: Nope, at one point we picked up a traveling magic guy and he taught me all the basic principles of magic.GM: Ok. Now listen. Role playing is about discovery, learning, camaraderie. It is the declaration of the characters nature through his actions and choices. But mostly, it is about overcoming adversity through limited resources. It sounds like you have more skills than the next 100 people combined. This really isn’t going to be very interesting if you already have all the skills necessary to handle any real situation. Besides, no one is smart enough to learn every skill they are even slightly exposed to?KVOTHE: My Intelligence is basically immeasurable. I can learn a new language in half a day. I will pick up new skills in hours that might take others months to master. I can split my mind and think about multiple things at once. I can make intuitive leaps that Sherlock Holmes would envy. I have the mental plasticity of silly putty and the mental strength of steel. Oh, also I have eidetic memory. Furthermore, my will is limitless.GM: Ok, I hav no idea how I am going to write an adventure for you. I mean, to even start, you would have to have some crazy disadvantages to put you within the realms of the mere mortals around you. No legs and blind for starters, we will have to think of some additional ones.KVOTHE: No disadvantages, I am perfect in every way.GM: No, I don’t think you get it. If you have a perfect character, unless you do something really clever, you end up with really boring “Mary Sue” type adventures. I need disadvantages so that your perfect character can face diversity.KVOTHE: Ok fine. I will take a physical disadvantage.GM: Glad you are on board! What is it? Leprosy? No arms? Brain in a vat? KVOTHE: I am only a teenager.GM: Ok, I was thinking a little bigger than that. The thing about being a teenager is that you don’t stay that way for long. You are still going to grow up and become the greatest man to ever live, it is rather pre-ordained with the characteristics you have given yourself. Lets add some social disadvantages.KVOTHE: (After some though) I am arrogant and hotheaded.GM: Damnit Kvothe! Wait, sorry. Sorry. I apologize for that outburst. Ok. Ok. I was kind of just including that by default under the teenager thing. Maybe something a little more defining, an actual fault that can’t be played off as a virtue in many situations. Maybe you have bloodlust? Or are neurotic and paranoid? Oh, maybe you are a coward!KVOTHE: Nope, I have no social faults. GM: Are you sure? Ok… I mean maybe it isn’t a social thing, you need more disadvantages.KVOTHE: (reluctant) OK, fine. I can’t hold on to money. Anytime I amass any amount of funds, I will loose it rather quickly.GM: Seriously? That’s it?KVOTHE: That’s it.GM: This is going nowhere… Ok, lets shelve the mental/skills stuff, lets talk about you physically.KVOTHE: I am the strongest. I am taller than almost anyone I meet. I have the highest dexterity and coordination possible. I have the endurance of a marathon runner. I am so attractive it hurts. My hands are strong and powerful. I would like you to mention that very often in this adventure, mention my strong hands over and over again, so the other players know just how strong I am. I have a gaze that can stop a man in his tracks. Also, never fail to mention my fair and beautiful skin. Don’t forget my piercing green eyes, which turn gold when I am passionate. My penis is so big that…GM: By the gods you are an ass.

Pandora's Star

Fri, 24 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

2 stars? Who does this guy think he is?Three reasons.One, this book ends on several different interleaving plots. Having said that, one of the larger plots contains one giant Deux ex machina ending Mellanie Rescorai being a super agent of the SI. I hate these sort of endings. It is almost silly when the Deux in this case are so ambiguously powerful that you don't know if any of this matters. Is anything here really at stake? Is it just a question of whether our Deux will rescue us, not actually a question of whether they can? Substantially less tension because of that.Two, the whole aspect of immortality and immortal human psychology just seemed forced. In this series humans are effectively immortals as long as they can get body rejuvenation every few decades. Furthermore, they also have digital backups in their heads that they can resurrect from even in the event of body death. So, first of all, seriously, why are there no wireless networks for these backups. Why aren't they backing up every millisecond? It seems like the device of only being able to periodically backup was introduced only to make death more "real" than it would have been otherwise. I didn't like that. Also, maybe it is just me, but although it would be traumatic to be killed, it does not seem it would take me an entire life to get over it when I am restored. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I felt this was sort of forced on as a way of giving death (even temporary death) some gravity. Again, the whole thing was kind of forced.Third, and this is the worst offender, you have to consider these things from a pleasure / time viewpoint. This book is like 900 pages long. It was 27 hours on the audiobook I listened to. I really feel like this book could have been 600 pages and contained the exact same core of ideas. If this book had been 2/3 the size, I would have raised its score at least 50%; it is now a densely pleasurable book. But if you drag everything out like this, it makes too many parts of the book a bit dull.So yeah, loose 1 or 2 stars for the first two points and a division of the remaining score because the book just wasn't delivering enough per unit time. 2 Stars. Good book, good characters, mostly good ideas, too damn long.Everything below this line is super spoilers:DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT TO READ THE BOOK UNSPOILED!LAST WARNING!I couldn't believe that Justine Burnelli actually got the Navy involved with shadowing Kazimir McFoster. I mean, ok, I get it, you don't believe in the Starflier. That is understandable, although a more competent or questioning person might have at least questioned that belief. But why, why do you involve the Navy? Why not just involve Paula Myo and your own private security. Paula was willing to work outside of the Navy as she already knew the Navy had a leak and very strongly suspected that the Starflyer exist. You are rich as hell so clearly have your own security force. Your brother was assassinated by someone with government level tech or better. YOUR FATHER LITERALLY LOOKED AT YOU AND TOLD YOU HE THINKS THE STARFLYER EXIST! WHAT THE HELL JUSTINE! I mean.... I just don't get it. It was so incredibly dumb that I ... I am just confused.I did enjoy how some characters fundamental beliefs changed over time. Is anyone really the same person they were 50 years ago? If so, what about 200 years ago? Would it really be reasonable to punish people for crimes they committed two lifetimes ago? What if you edit out your memory of a crime, can you really be punished for it?I also enjoyed that punishment basically involved just taking time from you. No actual "punishment" near as I can tell, you are just deactivated and then reactivated N years later. The real punishment is that life has moved on without you. It is similar to the Greek and Roman idea that the ultimate punishment is being banished.I didn't really understand what the actual purpose of oOCTattoos was. Were they processing circuitry? Batteries? Amplifiers? Receivers? Transmitters? I mean why do we have these goofy tattoos? Why couldn't necessary electronics/devices just be installed sub-dermally? Why tattoos?As near as I could tell there were no actual "direct brain interfaces". Even Gore Burnelli, who was one of the most octatted people ever, appeared to be receiving his inputs primarily as additional senses (sense of smell was most often mentioned) or as just visual overlays. It just seemed weird that with all the advantages they had, and the present day state of mind machine interfaces (cochlear implants and bionic limbs) that this far in the future we wouldn't have much more advanced bridges between the digital and the mind.

Pandora's Star (Commonwealth Saga, #1)

Peter F. Hamilton — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

2 stars? Who does this guy think he is?Three reasons. One, this book ends on several different interleaving plots. Having said that, one of the larger plots contains one giant Deux ex machina ending Mellanie Rescorai being a super agent of the SI. I hate these sort of endings. It is almost silly when the Deux in this case are so ambiguously powerful that you don't know if any of this matters. Is anything here really at stake? Is it just a question of whether our Deux will rescue us, not actually a question of whether they can? Substantially less tension because of that.Two, the whole aspect of immortality and immortal human psychology just seemed forced. In this series humans are effectively immortals as long as they can get body rejuvenation every few decades. Furthermore, they also have digital backups in their heads that they can resurrect from even in the event of body death. So, first of all, seriously, why are there no wireless networks for these backups. Why aren't they backing up every millisecond? It seems like the device of only being able to periodically backup was introduced only to make death more "real" than it would have been otherwise. I didn't like that. Also, maybe it is just me, but although it would be traumatic to be killed, it does not seem it would take me an entire life to get over it when I am restored. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I felt this was sort of forced on as a way of giving death (even temporary death) some gravity. Again, the whole thing was kind of forced.Third, and this is the worst offender, you have to consider these things from a pleasure / time viewpoint. This book is like 900 pages long. It was 27 hours on the audiobook I listened to. I really feel like this book could have been 600 pages and contained the exact same core of ideas. If this book had been 2/3 the size, I would have raised its score at least 50%; it is now a densely pleasurable book. But if you drag everything out like this, it makes too many parts of the book a bit dull.So yeah, loose 1 or 2 stars for the first two points and a division of the remaining score because the book just wasn't delivering enough per unit time. 2 Stars. Good book, good characters, mostly good ideas, too damn long.Everything below this line is super spoilers: DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT TO READ THE BOOK UNSPOILED!LAST WARNING!I couldn't believe that Justine Burnelli actually got the Navy involved with shadowing Kazimir McFoster. I mean, ok, I get it, you don't believe in the Starflier. That is understandable, although a more competent or questioning person might have at least questioned that belief. But why, why do you involve the Navy? Why not just involve Paula Myo and your own private security. Paula was willing to work outside of the Navy as she already knew the Navy had a leak and very strongly suspected that the Starflyer exist. You are rich as hell so clearly have your own security force. Your brother was assassinated by someone with government level tech or better. YOUR FATHER LITERALLY LOOKED AT YOU AND TOLD YOU HE THINKS THE STARFLYER EXIST! WHAT THE HELL JUSTINE! I mean.... I just don't get it. It was so incredibly dumb that I ... I am just confused.I did enjoy how some characters fundamental beliefs changed over time. Is anyone really the same person they were 50 years ago? If so, what about 200 years ago? Would it really be reasonable to punish people for crimes they committed two lifetimes ago? What if you edit out your memory of a crime, can you really be punished for it?I also enjoyed that punishment basically involved just taking time from you. No actual "punishment" near as I can tell, you are just deactivated and then reactivated N years later. The real punishment is that life has moved on without you. It is similar to the Greek and Roman idea that the ultimate punishment is being banished.I didn't really understand what the actual purpose of oOCTattoos was. Were they processing circuitry? Batteries? Amplifiers? Receivers? Transmitters? I mean why do we have these goofy tattoos? Why couldn't necessary electronics/devices just be installed sub-dermally? Why tattoos?As near as I could tell there were no actual "direct brain interfaces". Even Gore Burnelli, who was one of the most octatted people ever, appeared to be receiving his inputs primarily as additional senses (sense of smell was most often mentioned) or as just visual overlays. It just seemed weird that with all the advantages they had, and the present day state of mind machine interfaces (cochlear implants and bionic limbs) that this far in the future we wouldn't have much more advanced bridges between the digital and the mind.

Ex Machina

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoyed 'Ex Machina' as a idea more than as a movie. I enjoyed it specifically because it gave me a narrative framework to understand an idea that I had always previously found difficult to grasp.The movie was a cautionary tale about avoiding the error of anthropomorphizing things.At this moment in human history this isn't really a problem. The thing most commonly anthropomorphized by human beings are other animals. Although it can be individually dangerous to assume human characteristics of a wild animal (a tiger that I feed is also my friend), it is not a danger to society as a whole.But the future is coming. Soon we will have robots who are externally indistinguishable from human beings. Even assuming no advances in AI, we will still soon have machines that can pass a normal exterior examination as human. It will be very tempting for human beings to want to treat these machine servants as human. It will possibly be difficult to teach children that the robot nanny is a machine, not a human being. I think human beings want to anthropomorphize the things around them. The more human something looks, the more difficulty we have in separating human from non human.Caleb mad the mistake of assuming that because he sacrificed for Ava, that she would reciprocate for him. Reciprocation is a fundamental human emotion. I have a hard time screwing someone over in general, I have a really hard time screwing someone over who has done something for me. A machine will not necessarily have those compunctions. Reciprocation is probably something built into our genes. It probably served our ancestors extremely well. You can be fairly sure that anywhere you go, most human being you meet probably have a sense of reciprocation. On the surface, it was extremely foolish for Caleb to assume that a machine will share his genetic hangups.In Caleb's defense, this was a pretty smart machine. That is the real danger. Currently, the only risk we really face is the possibility of machines that look so human that their appearance fools us into pretending that they are human. It may mean awkward changes in society, like men who want to "marry" their robot wives. However, without true AI, there is little danger of these robot wives taking over the world. Without AI, it still takes a willful act of self-deception for a human to convince themselves that a machine is human. If machines are built to look human, that might be a problem for many individuals, maybe even somewhat of a threat to society, but it is not a threat to our species. There will always be some people who simply refuse to anthropomorphize a machine, regardless of how human it looks.Deception, as practice by Ava, requires intelligence. When machines are smart enough to know how to act in order to be perceived as human, then we have a genuine threat to our species. I say threat because these machines would be smart enough to act human when they want to, but quit acting whenever it suits them. Most human societies and social structures depend on the shared underlying genetics of group and interpersonal relationships. Machines will have none of that built in. What is intrinsic to us is just a 0/1 switch to them.I just want to close by saying that I am not suggesting that machines can't be sentient, that they don't have any feelings (they may or they may not), or that they must be immoral/amoral. Simply stating that just because something has the ability to mimic human emotion does not mean that it actually experiences them. I feel that this is something that humanity may have trouble with in the future. Don't attribute human characteristics to something that is not human.

The Name of the Wind

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

GM: Character name?PLAYER: Kvothe.GM: Kvothe, I like it. Sounds rural and strong. So where were you raised Kvothe? Where you a blacksmith? Farmer? Shepperd? Squire? What skills have you developed?KVOTHE: I have skills at just about everything as I was raised by traveling performers. Since traveling performers have such a wide assortment of skills I have become expert at all of them.GM: Huh. Um, ok. Alright, I will grant that as a travel you probably have woodcraft, lore, performance, and many other skills, but you can’t really be a master of all skills. What about social and abstract skills like court etiquette or mathematics?KVOTHE: My mother was royalty. She taught me all social and educational skills. My parents are both highly intelligent and well learned, I have had an education that surpasses that of kings.GM: Huh… Ok. Well, at least you don’t know magic. There is magic in the world I am building, so there will always be more to learn.KVOTHE: Nope, at one point we picked up a traveling magic guy and he taught me all the basic principles of magic.GM: Ok. Now listen. Role playing is about discovery, learning, camaraderie. It is the declaration of the characters nature through his actions and choices. But mostly, it is about overcoming adversity through limited resources. It sounds like you have more skills than the next 100 people combined. This really isn’t going to be very interesting if you already have all the skills necessary to handle any real situation. Besides, no one is smart enough to learn every skill they are even slightly exposed to?KVOTHE: My Intelligence is basically immeasurable. I can learn a new language in half a day. I will pick up new skills in hours that might take others months to master. I can split my mind and think about multiple things at once. I can make intuitive leaps that Sherlock Holmes would envy. I have the mental plasticity of silly putty and the mental strength of steel. Oh, also I have eidetic memory. Furthermore, my will is limitless.GM: Ok, I hav no idea how I am going to write an adventure for you. I mean, to even start, you would have to have some crazy disadvantages to put you within the realms of the mere mortals around you. No legs and blind for starters, we will have to think of some additional ones.KVOTHE: No disadvantages, I am perfect in every way.GM: No, I don’t think you get it. If you have a perfect character, unless you do something really clever, you end up with really boring “Mary Sue” type adventures. I need disadvantages so that your perfect character can face diversity.KVOTHE: Ok fine. I will take a physical disadvantage.GM: Glad you are on board! What is it? Leprosy? No arms? Brain in a vat?KVOTHE: I am only a teenager.GM: Ok, I was thinking a little bigger than that. The thing about being a teenager is that you don’t stay that way for long. You are still going to grow up and become the greatest man to ever live, it is rather pre-ordained with the characteristics you have given yourself. Lets add some social disadvantages.KVOTHE: (After some though) I am arrogant and hotheaded.GM: Damnit Kvothe! Wait, sorry. Sorry. I apologize for that outburst. Ok. Ok. I was kind of just including that by default under the teenager thing. Maybe something a little more defining, an actual fault that can’t be played off as a virtue in many situations. Maybe you have bloodlust? Or are neurotic and paranoid? Oh, maybe you are a coward!KVOTHE: Nope, I have no social faults.GM: Are you sure? Ok… I mean maybe it isn’t a social thing, you need more disadvantages.KVOTHE: (reluctant) OK, fine. I can’t hold on to money. Anytime I amass any amount of funds, I will loose it rather quickly.GM: Seriously? That’s it?KVOTHE: That’s it.GM: This is going nowhere… Ok, lets shelve the mental/skills stuff, lets talk about you physically.KVOTHE: I am the strongest. I am taller than almost anyone I meet. I have the highest dexterity and coordination possible. I have the endurance of a marathon runner. I am so attractive it hurts. My hands are strong and powerful. I would like you to mention that very often in this adventure, mention my strong hands over and over again, so the other players know just how strong I am. I have a gaze that can stop a man in his tracks. Also, never fail to mention my fair and beautiful skin. Don’t forget my piercing green eyes, which turn gold when I am passionate. My penis is so big that…GM: By the gods you are an ass.

Kill La Kill

Wed, 15 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have always maintained that most men have at least one (and probably only one) "tournament" fighting anime in them. I am sure that the Japanese have a name for this sort of anime, where basically almost every single episode really centers on a fight between our protagonist and his enemies (or are they?). The story arc of these series involve out hero getting stuck in some sort of tournament where they have to defeat a sequence of lower baddies in order to face the big bad guy who is .... You get the idea.This genre of anime is extremely repetitive. This genre is repetitive. Repetitive. Often a single fight pairing will take up the entire episode. A tournament will often involve 20 or so of these sequential fights. At the end of the tournament, our hero will usually either discover that this whole fight was just a scam for some even larger tournament he will have to fight in; wash cycle repeat. Over and over.Oh, did I mention the monologues? This genre of anime absolutely-freaking-loves their monologues. People will stop a fight to give 3 or 4 minutes of verbal exchanges. Each contestant daring the other. Revealing some tiny (and usually insignificant) detail of the heroes quest. Baiting the hero with some hint about where the princess is hidden. You get the idea. If Shakespear were alive today, he would shake his head and walk away at the length and pacing of some of these monologues. Hamlet, long winded? My friend, he was an amateur.You might think this repetition and wordiness would mean this genre is unpopular; you would be so very mistaken. It is fantastically popular with teenage boys and young men. I couldn't really put my finger on exactly what these series are tapping, but it is something primal, almost hypnotic in its repetition. It has something to do with a desire to be challenged, to prove yourself to others. I think it may have something to do with the young mans wish that there was a formal way of defining yourself as an adult. It is part of adulthood (at least in modern culture) to realize that there is no "rite of passage" or "trial by fire" to becoming an adult. You become an adult through a gradual process of accepting more responsibilities, not because some villain stole your childhood sweetheart and now you need to gather your friends and go save her. Sad but true.Most people in the West think of Dragon Ball Z as the classic fighting anime. It's 7 year ~300 episode run attest to just how popular this series was. It was a bit before my time so I never watched it. For myself, I was weened on Flame of Recca. I thought it was soooooo coooool. I remember going on #animefiends and #animesync (IRC) and downloading the newest fansubbed episodes every week. I waited with batted breath for those episodes to download off our families slow internet connection. While waiting for the broadcast and subsequent fansub every week, I would sometimes imagine what the next episode would be about. I don't even remember a whole lot about the series anymore, but I remember that I was obsessed about it at the time. I think most men (into anime) experience something like this at least once. Later in my life, as I attended university, everyone around me got into Fullmetal Alchemist and Bleach. This was interesting to me, as I had already experienced a tournament fighting anime and was effectively immune to them. I just couldn't get into them as I would have been able to had I never experienced them before. It is like Chicken Pox, once you have had it you probably won't get it again.Ok, enough amateur psychology and history. How was Kill la Kill? In a word... Excellent.As I said in the beginning, I think every man can get excited at least one time over a tournament fighting series. Most men will experience it once, get incredibly excited about it, eat sleep and dream it, and then slowly but surely move on. Future "tournament" anime series will just not be attractive to them in the same way that their first one was. Eventually, you accept that these sort of series are in fact juvenile. As you get older, the desire for easy answers and clear rites fades, life is nuanced and more complex than that.And then Kill la Kill comes along. Kill la Kill repackages the excitement you experienced with your first tournament series. Tongue firmly in cheek, it turns the dial on this genres attribute to 11. Clearly aware of the ludicrousness and naive simplicity of its inspirational material, it pokes fun at it every chance it gets. To my mind, Kill la Kill would actually make less sense if you have not seen a tournament fighting anime before. It's plot is ridiculous, it just roles with it. Overly talkative characters, other characters comment on monologuing. It pushes the boundaries but never actually breaks the fourth wall. Even the fan service is done in a way that pokes fun at the obsessive amount of fan service in anime, while embracing it completely.Simply put, this is a great anime to watch after you have already experienced on genuine "tournament" anime series. It deconstructs everything that you though was so honest and important in these original series, but does so with such good nature and humor that you don't actually mind.

Eden of the East

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Eden of the East is responsible for introducing me to the notion of NEETs. At many points in my life, I guess I would qualify as a NEET myself. NEET is a person who is "Not in Education, Employment, or Training". The term evidently originated in the United Kingdoms, but really took off as a talking point in Japanese culture and politics.Anyway, the anime.Overall, it was enjoyable enough. The plot is basically that a young man has a "genie" phone that grants wishes. The thing is, he is supposed to be using this power to make Japan Great Again. There are a total of 12 characters with said phones. The series is basically a pretty obvious mystery concerning who is doing what, and why did I do it.The art is of high quality, with an interesting character design that bordered on making people look like "comic strip" characters. I mean seriously, one of the characters had these pink flaps where his cheeks were supposed to be. Made me think of Charlie Brown.SPOILERS I thought it was interesting to have imply say that the best way to revitalize Japan would be to put it through another calamity. One of the 12 characters is just obsessed with bombing japan back to the point that japan would have to pull off another "Japanese miracle" similar to the rebuilding post WW2.As an American, it is similar to the question some ask of "Can we continue to be a leading nation without the expenditures and expeditions of our armed forces?" A large military is clearly not a good thing; it cost a lot, it is rather inefficient, it gets us in trouble around the world, and it also sometimes does basically evil things. On the other hand, it drives technology, it drives construction, it consumes huge amounts of resources and services (driving consumption), and it provides us unparalleled soft and hard power around the world. Also, a continuous state of war in America has kept most Americans comparatively patriotic, causing a surprising degree of unity considering how non homogeneous our population is.Too long. My point was that both Japan and the United States have a choice of continuing with the status-quo or embracing radical change. In this anime, it is implied that the change they want to see is a destruction of that which was built and a leveling of the playing field. There belief is that something better may be rebuilt. In the United States, it would probably be a reduction of our Armed Forces as one of the larger drivers of our society. Perhaps the resources saved from doing so might be used more effectively elsewhere. Both ideas are risky propositions. They may very well be misguided. Still, I was impressed that an anime would at least be willing to touch them.I like ideas, even if they are poorly thought out.Silly thoughts:Why did no one just ask the phone to "Make a list of propositions and their price for making Japan Great again, I will select one of them."What did Saki do other than "believe in" Akira?You have a phone app that can identify people visually. I think you should be applying for VC funding, not playing house in your club room.World Computer was a dumb and almost unused concept? Why?So you have a sort of super AI Deux Ex Machina wish grantor.... Alright, I will let that slide. Goofy though.The reasoning for needing to clear his memory was pretty darn weak.

Baccano!

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I really liked the Watchmen movie, I was already a fan of the comic book beforehand. However, post movie, I could definitely see how the movie might not be as appealing had I not read the source material. Baccano! is based on a light novel series that I have not read. The anime felt like it was eliding over the source material. I enjoyed it, but had some real problems with the plot.This anime had more loose threads than I could count. Almost none of the stories had a beginning or end. I get that the anime was going for that exact device, but it isn't personally something I am fond of.Maybe if you read the source material the plot makes more sense. I hope so.I think animes like this may actually illustrate a dividing lines between narrative fandom. People like myself just can't help thinking about things like plot, logical sense, rational behavior, character intelligence, backstory, etc. I am, for lack of a better word, a mechanical/deterministic kind of guy. Things just have to make sense or I feel unease. Baccano! is more about mood, feeling, excitement, connection, emotion; it does not feel that it has to make sense.I have a few recomendations.

Cinderella

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Good Movie, executed well enough, just failed to catch me.I was a bit disappointed in this. I was really looking for something that would catch me on a emotional (maybe even manipulative) level. Instead I got something that felt a little too rounded off, sharp corners removed. I wanted to be fished along by some emotional hook, doing my "Don't cry, that is just a frog in your throat" seat dance.Don't get me wrong, it was a good movie. But too much of it seemed to be appeasing the "I want to be a princess" aspect, which bores me. I never fell in love with the female lead (though she was charming). I couldn't care less about the Prince (though his acting was fine). I wanted something that as I watch I slowly realize that I have been subtly and insidiously manipulated into caring about. No dice.Movie was quite decent, but a few things struck out with me.The cinematography was lazy. I mean not a single really interesting shot. The advanced shots here seemed to be vehicle moving shots and focus switches between foreground and background. Not cool. Also, way way way too many "talking head" shots.The music was unremarkable. I wouldn't usually make a big deal out of this, but this is a Disney film. I should have something to hum afterwards. I couldn't recall a single song after the film.I was also bothered that Cinderella didn't have much trouble sticking to her ideals. Where is the great triumph as she sticks to something against all odds? Where is the drama here?Finally, and this is my patriarchic nature shining through, I didn't like that she had no real effect on the Prince. I am kind of a sucker when a woman is a paragon of some sort of virtue, she meets a man who is perhaps struggling with said virtue, and she strengthens it by associating with him. It is cliched, but I like it. This didn't really have that. Maybe Prince's Father is a commandeering warlord. Prince's association with Cinderella teaches him to value Love and Kindness. Because of her he shows these attributes to the people he conquers; becoming a great King. I don't know, sounds stupid when I say it, but I might have fallen for it.

Run all Night

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Meh.Here is where I feel they really went wrong. They failed to connect me to the characters. Throughout the film, I had to be like "Oh, father/son, that is a relationship template . Oh, thick and thin best friends, I will fill that in for you." It was tiresome because if felt lazy, like your are just relying on relationship conventions rather than SHOWING me the relationships.Here is what they should have done instead.Start the movie from Ed Harris' point of view. He is the hero. He is a crime lord. He is a loving husband and generous with his friends, but also a ruthless bastard. He is hard as nails with everyone, maybe even a little too hard with his son, who is a punk but is only trying to impress him. The only soft spot he has is his looser buddy Liam Neeson, who he will always help out and will never put down. People wonder why he is soft for Liam, everyone knows it has something to do with the past, but no one dares ask. Despite their completely different lifes, lifestyles, and demeanors Ed and Liam are best friends. Their kids played as children together. Ed still visits the bar where Liam drinks; talking for hours. On holidays, Ed still has Liam over as a family guest.Same plot pretty much all the way to the point that Liam shoots Ed's kid. Suddenly we switch Perspectives, this movie is now Liams movie. At this point, we really like Ed, we kinda question the wisdom of the friendship he shows Liam. As the past 30 have shown the one sided history rise of Ed's life, the next 30 minutes show the history of the one sided fall of Liams. The last hour is the point where the two basically have to kill each other, and now we have real drama. We first met Ed. We like Ed. We first saw Liam as a undesirable. Gradually we grew to understand Liam. We know they are both going to die, but will they re-connect before they do? Will they recognize the outcome is unavoidable, but still love each other as brothers?Would have been better, all I am saying.

Ping Pong - The Animation

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, this was good.First, lets get this out of the way. The animation is a turn off initially. You think it is cheap, but it is actually akin to impressionist art. They are opening up options by moving away from realism. Even if you don't like the art style itself, you will start to notice the framing, the transitions, the surrealism, the switches in style. It becomes obvious that it wasn't done this way because it was easier. It is more that the animators chose to forgo realism because they wanted the options that a more limited animation style would open up. This is true of all animations of course, they are abstractions of reality, but this series takes it so much further.The music was also quite good. I don't take much notice of music usually, but this was of high quality and well synched to the different moods of different scenes.The characters are what really makes this a masterpiece. It is rare to see a series that charts the interactions and progress of four to six characters so well. Every single one of these characters is believable. Every single one could walk into the real world without seeming out of place. Every single one of them is interesting in their own right. Every single one, even the ones you sometimes don't like, is worthy of your attention. They make animated characters seem more complete, complex, and real than most live action performances. This is what animation is about.Just. Excellent.

SpongeBob Squarepants: Sponge out of Water

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I know next to nothing about Spongebob et all. Previous to this, the most I had seen of this series was a few minutes at a McDonald's as I was waiting for my order.The movie was funny. Filled with puns, visual site gags, play on words, sometimes just charming idiocy.The movie was innocent and starry eyed, I liked the characters. I liked the world.I think the most impressive thing about the movie is how sharp an edge they kept between the adult humor and the child humor. By adult, I don't mean that the humor was ever crude, I simply mean that it probably isn't something that a child would find funny. I like the idea of a child watching this with an adult, and the adult laughs at something. The child ask what is funny. The adult would explain that it is a play on words or something. The child still wouldn't get why it is funny, but they would probably laugh because children tend to imitate the adults around them. I appreciate children's movies that have adult humor that can always be explained to children without some lame "I will tell you when you are older" nonsense. That sort of thing always bothered me when I was a child. Much better to have humor that can be explained, and kids may still not get it, but at least they grew a little in terms of understanding the adult mindset. It is a shared experience that way, not just a one sided joke.Movie was much better than I expected. I mean, it is still a juvenile movie, but kept me well entertained for its 90 minute running time.

Off to Be the Wizard (Magic 2.0, #1)

Scott Meyer — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Martin is some sort of programmer/hacker. He discovers a file that lets him manipulate reality. We will accept that without question. Fine.I just couldn't accept the characters.I am a programmer, many of my friends are programmers, almost everyone I know is either a programmer or engineer; Martin is no programmer.There are personality traits and characteristics that (broad strokes here) go with being a technical person. Martin seems to exhibit none of these. If I were to pigeonhole the character, I would say he is more of a Gamer than a Programmer. The characteristics he had seemed strange. Indecisiveness, rashness, reactionary nature, a flair for the dramatic, a desire to be the center of attention; none of these tend to be characteristics of technical people. This is forgivable, perhaps he is just a jacked-up-alpha-male version of a technical person. Still, they should have spent some time explaining why he was technical and had all these particular characteristics.The characteristics he had seemed odd, the characteristics he lacked seemed downright bizarre. He spends no real time questioning why the file exist. He just tries things without even setting up controlled experiments first. He never really made any real sense of time travel. Never even trying to go back in time to warn himself not to commit bank fraud. Instead just deciding that because he hadn't been warned that it was impossible ? His lack of curiosity about his own environment was peculiar. I don't need my characters to spend their entire day naval gazing, but even superficial characters should have some level of introspection. It was really disturbing to me how little he though or planned before he acted. Worse was how he never seemed to question the things he observed. It was very peculiar, only the stupid or indoctrinated have so little concern about their surroundings.The remaining characters are so shallow as to be above criticism. How can you fault someone you barely know?Martin felt like a vehicle that needs to be driven by the plot. I can't imagine any part of his history, and I couldn't predict any part of his future. His character was so inert that it seems like he would sit there unchanging if the plot didn't move him along.A great deal of the tech stuff was pure nonsense, even from the magical point of view of the file. I am not going to make a big deal out of it though, as this is really a fantasy magic novel with a technology plating. tldr; Read "Ready Player One" instead.

A Most Violent Year

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Odd. I was actually quite engaged throughout the entire movie. And yet, the lack of a climactic ending left me somewhat unfulfilled. It is funny. You can enjoy every moment, but if it is missing certain pieces, your memory of things will be one of disappointment.SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOILERS The climax of having Elyes Gabel shoot himself was not much of a climax. The real ending was like "Ok, now we have the money because you have been squirlling it away. Thanks dear. Fin." It just wasn't that resolute or interesting an ending. Expectations of gangster movies are that there will be a giant shootout or something at the end. That never happened. Even though it was good, I was a bit of a let down.I think the scene I liked the most was the one of Elyes running down the bridge tower stairs. It filled me with a real sense of dread. As he heaved and lumbered down the stairs, letting momentum carry him more than self force, it was like watching a frightened animal work itself deeper into a trap. I kept thinking that someone was going to be waiting on the next flight. Tense, well done scene.I like the fact that Abel Malores was only able to be as clean as he was because everyone around him was so crooked. I appreciated the fact that he was faced with a fairly clear dilemma at the end. Either take the money from Peter Forente and be in bed with the mob (and all that entails). Or use his own ill gotten money to fund the legitimate business activity he was interested in engaging in. Either way, by his own means or someone else, he is still engaged in a criminal enterprise. Kind of like the universe is sending you a message there.

Focus

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Focus was an 80% in most dimensions. Unfortunately, this leaves you feeling that the movie was worse than the sum of its parts.If a movie has something uniquely good to it, you can often overlook other elements that perhaps fell short. Focus has no obvious shortcomings, it is always on target, it is just that it never hits a bullseye on anything.SPOIILLLLLLLLLLERS:One part of the movie I did like was the betting scene for the "Superbowl" (Note. It wasn't THE Superbowl, it was just a thing involving American Football that looked a lot like the Superbowl, damn trademark protection). It seemed silly at first, he took a double or nothing bet with a ~59% chance of payout. That is dumb. His girl pointed out how dumb that is. Will Smith said something along the lines of (paraphrasing) "then we would double it again and bet on something else. He will always take the bet." I had to think about it for a second, but it is true. As long as you have infinite funds and you know the other party will always accept, you will eventually be able to win any double or nothing bet. Just keep doubling and betting, stopping so that you are the last winner; it's that simple. If you have better than 50% odds, then the average number of times between "wins" on such bets becomes smaller and smaller. Will Smith didn't have infinite funds, but he might have had enough to make it probabilistically impossible that they could actually go bust. I thought that was neat.I also enjoyed (although am skeptical) about the pseudo psychology of priming 55. Or the science of attracting women that Will Smith later espoused. It is a fun idea, but probably isn't nearly as deterministic as presented in the film.

Black Sea

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Saw "Black Sea" this evening. Enjoyed it, but am kind of a sucker for Submarine movies.This movie was a bit shallow (sorry), but it was a fun ride. The story involves recovering lost Nazi gold, Russians, yada yada, you have heard it before. The plot isn't that important.A good sub movie should leave you with a tense neck and shoulders. It is about just how stressful it can be when in such close contact with other human beings. How frightening the cold and pitch black abyss of the ocean is. How disconnected you are from any hope of rescue or aid. This movie delivered on all these fronts, so altogether, as a sub movie, it was a good sub movie.

Off To be the Wizard

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Martin is some sort of programmer/hacker. He discovers a file that lets him manipulate reality. We will accept that without question. Fine.I just couldn't accept the characters.I am a programmer, many of my friends are programmers, almost everyone I know is either a programmer or engineer; Martin is no programmer.There are personality traits and characteristics that (broad strokes here) go with being a technical person. Martin seems to exhibit none of these. If I were to pigeonhole the character, I would say he is more of a Gamer than a Programmer.The characteristics he had seemed strange. Indecisiveness, rashness, reactionary nature, a flair for the dramatic, a desire to be the center of attention; none of these tend to be characteristics of technical people. This is forgivable, perhaps he is just a jacked-up-alpha-male version of a technical person. Still, they should have spent some time explaining why he was technical and had all these particular characteristics.The characteristics he had seemed odd, the characteristics he lacked seemed downright bizarre. He spends no real time questioning why the file exist. He just tries things without even setting up controlled experiments first. He never really made any real sense of time travel. Never even trying to go back in time to warn himself not to commit bank fraud. Instead just deciding that because he hadn't been warned that it was impossible ? His lack of curiosity about his own environment was peculiar. I don't need my characters to spend their entire day naval gazing, but even superficial characters should have some level of introspection. It was really disturbing to me how little he though or planned before he acted. Worse was how he never seemed to question the things he observed. It was very peculiar, only the stupid or indoctrinated have so little concern about their surroundings.The remaining characters are so shallow as to be above criticism. How can you fault someone you barely know?Martin felt like a vehicle that needs to be driven by the plot. I can't imagine any part of his history, and I couldn't predict any part of his future. His character was so inert that it seems like he would sit there unchanging if the plot didn't move him along.A great deal of the tech stuff was pure nonsense, even from the magical point of view of the file. I am not going to make a big deal out of it though, as this is really a fantasy magic novel with a technology plating.tldr; Read "Ready Player One" instead.

Childhood (French) Theme Songs!

Fri, 20 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Goofed around pretty much all day; the post below is pretty much all I have to show for it.Today I looked up all the theme songs of childhood TV shows that I used to like. I lived in France from 6-8 and so the theme songs from that time are of course in French.This show was really popular when I was young. By my recollection, it was basically just Mighty Morphing Power Rangers done on a lower budget (is such a thing possible?). I thought the show itself was pretty stupid, but this is basically what we would spend our time playing as. It was dubbed into French, all the actors were Asian (I assume Japanese). It had something to do with fighting a mad scientist and gengineered humans who could each summon a portion of a fighting robot. The video above isn't actually the opening theme, but it is the one that every kid associated with Bioman. The actual opener wasn't all that great.This show was a phenomena in France. Every boy I knew owned at least a few of the figures from this series. If you accidently broke a piece on the intricate and fragile toy figure, there was going to be waterworks that day. Young boys just flat out loved this series. It was an obsession among my age group. I have vague recollections of the characters fighting older men a lot of the time. By my memory, they just permuted on fight after fight after fight. Again, I don't think this was the actual opener (it is too long) but it is the one I remember from my memory. Also, interestingly enough, it is the same guy who sings the Bioman song. I don't know what is up with that. All I know is that every boy could sing this song.In my memory, he was "The survivor of Earth", but it turns out he survived Hell. Funny how memory works. This was probably the most violent show I would watch as a child. Ken was pretty hardcore, he would get jacked up and stick his fingers into people somehow killing them with (Tai Chi?) pressure points. He also was very fond of making "ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka" noises whenever he rapid fire punched/kicked/whatever. Naturally, whenever any group of boys play fought, we always had to make the noises Ken made when he fought. It must have sounded like a group of birds dying.I have no real memory of Galaxy Express 999 being very popular. I am pretty sure that it was an older series. I don't think that any of my friends were into it that much. I liked it a good deal, as it involved lots of robots and a woman that a young boy is basically in love with. I am not entirely sure, but I think the woman may have looked like a physical education teacher whom I fancied. Anyway, the theme was straight up metal. Whenever I try to remember how numbers work in French, I always humm "Galaxy Express neuf san quatre vingt dix neuve" (9100 "neuf-san" + 420 "quatre-vingt" + "dix" 10 "neuve" 9). Not that it comes up that often, but there it is.

Accelerando

Charles Stross — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I don't remember whether I ever stated it, but I place a lot of value on new ideas. In this sense of the word, Accelerando did fairly well. However, there were problems that I don't feel comfortable going into unless you have already read it. I don't like to ruin books for people, so I will just say read it with the knowledge that every section is probably around 90% as interesting as the section preceding it, but that it is worthwhile book if you enjoy being presented with new ideas.***** SLIGHT PLOT DETAILS FOLLOW *******As I remember, the plot was roughly divided divided into 9 sections, 3 groupings of 3 sections each. The first grouping is our immediate future, the second grouping is our protagonists daughter's story, and the third is their further descendants (and his reincarnation... twice... at least [don't ask]). As you might have guessed, the plot is a accelerating mess. Towards the end, I just didn't know what to do with it anymore. In terms of narrative, flow, character, and story, the first third is pretty good, the second is okay, and the third was frankly dull. I actually thought this was kind of funny, as I my progress in this book was slowing down as the singularity was speeding up. But enough about the book itself, lets talk about the ideas! 1) I though the scene where manx looses his goggles and literally has no idea who he is or what he is doing was very interesting.2) Reason we don't observe, and don't deal with alien races is that singularity just means building smart matter, not conquest or anything like that.3) Economy 2.0 will be about novelty, not power, matter, influence, or anything else.4) Self aware contracts and corporations.5) External brains allow concurrent though.6) External brains allow accelerated though.7) Sea slug is born in a digital realm, does not understand that there is actually a physical one.8) Concept of being able to fully model a human being

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

Philip K. Dick — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I actually read this short story on the same day I saw the new (2012) movie. It is a silly story, makes you laugh at the end. Two days previous to that, I saw the Arnold version of the movie based on this book. If Arnold's version is based on this story, then the 2012 version would at best be "inspired by" Arnolds version. Anyway, that is enough about the movies, they are just fresh on my mind as I just watched them.The story is fun, a review seems kind of pointless since the entire story is less than 30 pages. Go ahead and read it. It isn't the best PKD by any standard, but it will fill a subway ride. I can't really imagine writing any more about this, so I will stop now.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #6)

Arthur Conan Doyle — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I really don't feel like I have that much to contribute to the discussion here. It was a good book, solidly entertaining. Characters are literally the same for every story. I enjoyed the story, but they were episodic: sitcoms. You could basically read the stories in reverse order (except for the first) and it would make no difference. I was a little annoyed that I could often just guess who was guilty, but it wasn't really possible to actually figure it out beforehand, as information is usually withheld until the very end. Anyway, fun read, good story, but just a read, not really a mystery.

Forever Peace (The Forever War, #3)

Joe Haldeman — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, I read this book in 4 days. If you asked me what I was likely to give this book 3/5 through the novel, I would probably have said 5 stars. Unfortunately, the plot sort of bogged down towards the end. It made the resolution phase of the end of the novel less exciting than the discovery phase in the first half of it. I won't ruin anything for you by giving the plot itself away, but things kind of came together in a too tidy fashion for my taste. At some points, our protagonist's group seemed remarkably silly. They allowed variables to run around that could have been very easily controlled with minimal effort. It seemed hard to believe that military people might be so.. well... dumb and trusting. Especially people who can read minds, discover secrets of those they link with, and have a sort of gestalt intelligence.Oh, there were also some anachronisms that of course look silly. Like the lack of tracking through camera systems, the reliance of paper copies of things, the limited use of cryptography, the rarity of wireless networks, blah blah whatever. But, really, these are minor quibbles. The big deal was the idea of linking human beings together into a single intelligence. That is a fascinating idea. I usually read sci-fi because I like to expose myself to new ideas: this book delivered in spades. You could almost say that the plot, characters, and all were simply built around the need to explore one idea. From here on in, I will call it gestalt (I think the book specifically mentioned this was not the correct word, but we will use it anyway).In gestalt, you achieve a immediate intimacy with the person or persons you are gestalted too. You can basically read each others feelings and thoughts, and can also experience each others memories. Lying is impossible in gestalt. It was not clear whether other peoples memories are directly accesible in gestalt, or only the current memory is viewable. It is done with electronics by installing a jack into the back of peoples heads, people connect to a router of sorts, where they enter a gestalt together.It is addictive. This I would believe with minimal justification. One of our most advanced human traits and quite possibly the main reason for our success as a species is that we are ridiculously social animals. Look at people hunched over their phones, checking their facebooks or whatever. All the time, in all places, we love being connected to other people. People will dedicate substantial portions of their lives for fleeting interaction with other people. Imagine if you were able to truly connect with someone, in a way more intimate than anything else. It is not love, it is not sex, it is simply the merging of two or more people for a period of time. You and they can communicate without speech, you would know someones true character, you could probably even see the blind spots they have about their own self. It would be maddeningly addictive. i don't think any metaphor could really communicate how attractive that would be.Lets say that this gestalt thing existed, what would the implications be?Would marriage or even friendship survive? If you can connect in a most intimate (although, to re-iterate not amorous or sexual) way with someone else, would everyone be equally "close" to you? What would a friend mean in that case? I suppose that it might just mean someone who you had been gestalted too a great deal? Or perhaps it would be more like a favorite song? I really don't know.What would it do to the sense of self? Part of having a self involves having the choice to present your inner vs outer self. The gestalt would seem to reduce these two concepts down to self. On one hand, having no ability to have a inner self might be liberating, but what would it mean? Would people follow Caesar if they knew that Caesar was just a man behind those eyes? I think part of the mystic of leaders is that we feel they are somehow more than us. If we could follow their minds like a script, then could they lead? Is the ability to have a inner and outer self necessary for many human endeavors? Moreover, if we lost that ability to the gestalt, could we still rightly be considered human?Would you actually be able to hurt someone else? To judge someone else? If you can understand why someone does something, if you can fully see in their mind, would you actually be able to judge? Similarly, if I know the pain that my hurting someone will cause, would I ever choose to inflict pain on others. Finally, would I still be capable of self sacrifice? Would the group ever expect sacrifice of the individual?Jokes would no longer be funny. I could see the punchline as they are telling the joke.Would we retain language at all? When I think, I don't usually actually verbally state something in my head. I think. If I can "think" a message to someone else, is there any reason to learn to talk? Would the ability to talk just atrophy in humanity? Chomsky says that language is fundamental to the way we think, what would happen if none of us developed a language? Would we must become a collection of idiots who "emotion and ape action" to each other, without the ability to form the metaphors that language allows? Would that make us closer or further from the notion of the autistic individual?How much would we loose? What art, poetry, or just depth of human interaction might we loose by having no barriers? There is something attractive in the two lovers, both wanting each other, but not able to actually literally know that the other wants them as well. It is tenuous, it is faith at some level. If you have immediate knowledge of these things, it makes experiences based on uncertainty impossible.Human beings would probably also rapidly loose the ability to "read" other human beings from their physical appearance. Might forget that tears may mean sadness or rapture, that laugher can be forced, etc.Ok, enough navel gazing. I thought this book was great, really gives you something to think about. As this is the main reason I read sci-fi, I strongly recommend it. The plot, in my mind, was a little messed at the end, but it hardly matters, the ideas were golden.

Master & Commander (Aubrey & Maturin, #1)

Patrick O'Brian — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This was a good book with a solid story, nothing wrong with the narrative, the characters were interesting, the plot was believable. So why only 3 stars?It's complicated. No, I mean literally. This story just jumps right in on the nautical terms. By the end of this book, I had some idea where certain things on a ship might be, and sometimes I even knew vaguely what they did, but it was only vague, as the terms were never formally defined. This is probably well and good, and I don't actually fault the author this. If I knew ANYTHING at all about seamanship, I suppose I would find it very aggravating to have to read through explanations of things that only the most dense land-grubber (<-that term was never used in this book) could possibly be confused about. Unfortunately, I am that land-grubber. I really really wish that my book was annotated in some way, so I could read to the side and figure out what the hell is going on. Lots of the strategy was hard to visualize, as I had no idea what was being manipulated.If such a thing exist, I would really recommend some sort of supplement for this book's concepts. Actually, what I really recommend is getting a digital copy so that you can highlight terms that you are unfamiliar with, and then look them up without interrupting the story.So yeah, not much of a review, I just didn't "get it" like I felt I might have. It was kind of like the feeling of watching a foreign comedian. You figure, they probably are funny, but you would have to be in on the cultural nuances and subtleties that make their act. Without the underpinning cultural context, it just isn't as good to you. Similarly, without being significantly more versed in the British royal navy during the beginning of the 18 century, or knowing anything about seamanship, the book felt a little out of reach to me. Still good, but I was just not "in" on it at too many points.

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Short summary, you should read it, you should read it at any age. It is a book for children, but it respects the reader and its characters enough to not soften reality for them. Reading this book at a young age might be difficult, but the pleasure of having morality, character and goodness outweigh the pain one might experience from the plot events.< SPOILERS BELOW - SERIOUSLY, READ THE BOOK FIRST, IT'S PRETTY SHORT >< YOU SURE YOU READ IT? >< I AM ABOUT TO RUIN THINGS FOR YOU! >< LAST CHANCE! >When I was in 4th grade (almost 20 years ago) our teacher read this book to us aloud. I remember how we all enjoyed it so much, and just how floored we were by the death. Life is funny, I remember being far more disturbed by the death of Leslie in this book than I was by most anything else at the time. For me, this was probably the book that cemented the notion of death. I had read (consumed more like) many books that had deaths in them. Most of them were "bad guys", occasionally it would be someone close to the hero, it didn't really hit you: Leslie's death hit me. I don't really have much to say about it, but I consider that the mark of good writing: allowing the reader to vicariously experience a state of being (emotion?) that they have not yet experienced themselves.As a adult, having known many people who have died, I was actually surprised at just how literal and real Jess's account of the grieving process was. As a child, I wonder if I understood that he was in shock? Did I think he was a psychopath or slow? Perhaps I agreed with his sister and though he was some sort of monster? Until you have experienced death yourself, the way people react to the loss of someone close to them can seem very foreign, very alien. I don't really know if the process can be explained. You can describe it, you can even first person narrate it, but it is difficult to communicate. I liked how the author never specifically said something like "Jess is in shock, this is a state of reduced responsiveness and ...". Instead, she just let Jess be Jess, described him in such a way that his memory and actions seemed disparate, confused, calm, disassociated. She let the narrative speak for itself. Whether a child reading this book can understand these ideas depends on the child, but regardless of whether they "get it" or not, I think it certainly opens their eyes to something deep and true. Gives them something insightful and real to think about.I also enjoyed the relation that Jess had with his father. It was not good. His father was not a bad man, but was not up to the task of raising Jess and supporting him the way he should have. I liked that he and his father became closer at the end, opening up just a little, without it going full blast and fully resolving like daytime television.I liked that Jess was occasionally small and shallow, and was literally taking on the character and mannerisms of his environment. You could almost feel his desire to "leave" his world, but he would never have had the strength to do so without Leslie. I really enjoyed how Leslie was shaping Jess into the person he wanted to be, allowing him to distance himself from his surroundings, both in the form of escape and through discovery. And they were doing all of this by just being good friends to each other.Anyway, good book. It is one of those books that I really hope I have the chance to discuss with a child someday. I think, yes, it could lead to a few nights of troubled sleep, it could scare them a little in the short term. But the knowledge and understanding they get from it, and the depth of discussion they could gather from it, make the cost entirely worthwhile. P.S. There is also a really good 2007 movie based on the book, you should check it out.

The White Company (Dover Literature: Historical Fiction)

Arthur Conan Doyle — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When I read this book, I really thought it could be made into a tv show and then movies. The beginning of the book is written in small scenes, Alleyne has just left the monastery and has entered the world. Observing the different aspects of life, he recognizes the harshness and beauty of life all around him, but still colors everything he sees with his monastic upbringing. Each scene is a small story, you get Alleyne's view (and eventually that of his companions); it is left to us as the reader to determine which view is correct. TV show wise, each scene would take around 20 to 40 minutes.The book makes a roughly linear progression from small scenes to longer stories as it progresses. Even the longest stories, which span multiple chapters, could probably fit in a movie length time budget. I will stop prattling about the episodic nature of this book, it was just a observation.Fundamentally, this book is just a good adventure story. A (monastery) youth is let out on the world. He sees everything for the first time, life is new to him. We observe a change in him as his monastery upbringing confronts the base reality of life. Thanks to his companions, he also begins to question the sanctity of being sinless by removing oneself from sin. A man who removes himself from the world may be sinless, but by his actions, he has removed himself from the world, and thus may not improve it. Lots of fun things to think about there.Then there is the chivalry. A difficult concept to our (well my) western sensibilities. The thought that there was honor to be gained by fighting, by dying, by committing yourself and your men to war is a ... well... for lack of a better word, disturbing idea. Assuming all present agreed to it, and all served voluntary, I suppose there is no evil in groups of people coming together to do war on each other. In this book, in this world, fighting was done by agreement of all present (with the exception of the jacks). Still, you cannot help but think to yourself , "Wouldn't Nigel's time have been better spent guiding the growth of his kingdom, rather than engaging in pointless wars?" I also often thought about the fact that the royalty was of course going to be ransomed if captured, while a ordinary soldiers is probably best off running for his (literally) worthless life. Kind of makes the incentive system for this stuff a little lopsided doesn't it? Chivalry is almost a religion in itself, you take it on faith (or group consensus) that there is this concept of honor to be gained through personal combat and war. I suppose if everyone believe it, then that makes it true? I mean, it is nothing but a social construct, and if we all agree upon it as a society, is it not so?Anyway, this review/commentary/whatever has become too long. This is a fine book, you should give it a read. I think I might have enjoyed it even more had I read it in my early teens, but even as an adult, it held my attention throughout. It does not have a long sweeping story, choosing instead to focus on one distinct scene at a time. This allows most scenes to be read, consumed and reflected on, very similar to a parable.

The Reasoned Schemer

Daniel P. Friedman — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I gave this book 5 stars, but as this book is in a complete category of its own, that is kind of a technicality. The Reasoned Schemer is a book that introduces you to the notion, usage, and application of logic programming. It is entirely structured in a question/answer format, which slowly introduces you to all the base "control" structures you would need in logic programming.Non logic programming basically works from the notion of imperative data flow. This is generally represented by the concept of a function. A function takes a argument and returns a value, it takes input variables and returns output variables. A logic program creates a relation (not a function) between a set of variables. If you had a two input function, with one output, you could represent this as a logic program relation of three variables. Two of those relation variables would be what were the two inputs to the function, the third variable would be the output of the function. Here is the kicker though. You can provide concrete values for any number of those variable in any order and ask the relation what the other variables might be. At the simplest level, this means that you might run your function "backwards" (from the output to the input). But really, it means that you can ask any question relating to those variables (conceptually). Now, realistically, it is not as easy as that. Some relations may never terminate (return a answer), some grow too large and barf (overflow), some may not complete for various other reasons. It can be more complex to actually write a logical relation than a function, this must be balanced against the fact that the relation is far more powerful than the function.If you want a primer for logical programing, this book is probably worth your time. It takes you through writing many of the fundamental parts of a logical relation. The only thing I think it really skips is the actual unification (= x y) primitive itself, which I believe it uses as a given. You can learn quite a bit by reading this code slowly and carefully. Note however, that you must complete every step of the question/answer pairings! Skimming this book will not work (unless you already know it). Really, these concepts build on each other. It is a rather small (page number and physically) book, but it will take far more time to really go through then its size would suggest. Read and work through for the purpose of understanding, and I think you will really get a good backing in logic programming, and probably enjoy yourself as well!

The Minority Report

Philip K. Dick — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Technology wise, this story and "Paycheck" (also by PKD) are very similar. If you read this one, you might want to read Paycheck for contrast. Writing is clean and accessible. In typical PKD fashion, the characters don't have a great deal of backstory, and are not that emotional in general. The strength of this book is not so much even the plot, but the idea.The idea is simple... Oh, you should stop reading right now if you don't like spoilers at all. Seriously, go read the story, you can do so in about a hour, I will wait.Back? Ok, as I was saying, the idea seems pretty simple. TMR relies on the fact that the precogs (as an aggregate) can see the current future. Precrimes stated goal is to look at this tracked future, and derail it a bit by preventing the crime itself. They then take the person that would have committed the crime and put them in a internment camp of sorts.Well, ok. There are some fairly large paradoxes there, but I am not going to argue them as you can get them all by reading a "Back to the future" forum. :]The big idea from this book is that there was no Majority Report this time, there were only 3 separate minority reports. Each minority report was a different snapshot of the current world. In general, the snapshots of the current world do not materially effect the world, as the snapshot information is only known to Precrime, and they only use the information to stop a crime. If Precrime were to publish the list of people who would be murdered the next day in the paper, it would effect those people; they would make changes to their days and probably stay alive. The crime would never have been committed. However, Pre-crime does not taint the current state of the world by revealing information, they only change things right before a crime is to be committed. This allows them to actually assume that the crime was going to be committed, arrest the guilty, save the victims.In this case though, the world was being tainted by the reports. Anderton was implicated in the reports, which he read at various points in the story. Each time he reads a report, he read about a new snapshot of the world. Each time he reads of a snapshot, it causes him to react (derail) from the actual report. Each subsequent report was actually a recursion of the previous state of the world + the state of the world given the reports that Anderton had read. One can see this process going on forever, a new report always creates new information for Anderton to react to, causing the need for another report to actually be generated in order to know what happens. The rub is though, by reading it, you are effecting what should have happened, and the report is now invalid again. Presumably, the best you can do is create a report, never read it, and then let Anderson commit a crime (or not?). You know who did the crime, it will say so on the report, but you have no way of really stopping him. This would be a logical though morally questionable tactic.Anyway, it is the idea of recursion and side effects (tainting) that make this story fun. If you stop and think about it, there are some serious paradoxes going on here, as well as some questions about the nature of crime and punishment that are worth considering. Still, who cares, it is a story that gives you something worthwhile to think about, and does so in about a hours worth of reading. You don't need to know the future to know that is time well spent.

Paycheck

Philip K. Dick — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very short story, so it will be a short review. Paycheck is clear, clean writing. It actually fits in quite comfortably with The Minority Report by PKD as both deal with the ability to see events that have not occurred yet. I suppose the technology in Paycheck exceeds that in Minority as they are also capable of "reaching" into the future, not just observing it from the past. The book was a little dry. Anachronisms littered the story like punchcards in a modern data center (terrible). It also suffers from the Deus Ex Machina problem of having a guy who knows the future providing you tools to deal with the present. Whatever. It is good, very short, and a fun read. Nothing profound, but fun.

City of Illusions

Ursula K. Le Guin — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Odd things this novel. I have also read "The Lathe of Heaven" and "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Le Guin, just for comparisons sake. This one read much more like "Wizard". The book is strange, not a challenging read, no huge word building, strange vocabulary, or anything like that; just nuanced. The story basically reads like a travel narrative. Guy run around, meets native tribes, ends up on a path of self discovery.Anyway, I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about this story. I get the vague impression that the different tribes where supposed to be some sort of representation of different sociological/anthropomorphic though experiments. Hell, I am talking out my side here, but it is what I sorta gleamed. I won't talk about them any more in order to not taint your expectations, but if you like stories where characters interact with socially different types of people, this isn't half bad.Some of the tribes also had different ways of handling the stagnation of society; I thought that was interesting. Fun to think of all the different ways a society can calcify after it looses the ability to advance itself.Ok, the main thing I got from this book, the big idea (at least for me), was the idea that a honest man has strength in a civilization of liars. I don't know if that was the intent of the book, but it is what I thought about after I finished it. I wish I had something really intelligent to say here, but I don't. It is just something you will have to read on your own, and reach your own truths about. It is not just a question of being able to distinguish truth from lie based on what you know to be true, it it also a question of the liar not being able to benefit from your truths, as they expect lies. Bah, those thoughts don't quite stand up on their own, but they are approaching the grain of what I am trying to say. Lying is actually more difficult than simply saying the truth. Reality is in fact complicated, a truthful person is actually better able to face reality, because they don't have to factor the reality + their body of lies into the equation. A liar will inevitably become perverted by their own lies, incapable of distinguishing between their lies and the actual truth. Nothing profound here, just fun to think about, with actual characters.So, quick review. Yes, it was a good book. I like books that give you something to think about afterwards. It is also a short read, so regardless of whether you like it or not, you won't have wasted too much time. If you do like it, it will probably give you something to think about, if you let the ideas percolate a little. If you don't like it, well... read something else!

God's War (Bel Dame Apocrypha, #1)

Kameron Hurley — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I was mixed on this book. I think at some level we all enjoy reading books about characters we can relate to, problem is, these characters are difficult to relate to. Nyx is a pretty one dimensional character, she operates from a position of stubbornly moving forward while doing her best to avoid contemplation of her current actions or her past. This gets tiresome. I couldn't tell whether Rhys was a coward, or just had a aversion to violence. It really made me question why he stuck around with a bounty hunter, seemed kind of dumb.The world was initially interesting, but then I became disappointed that it wasn't really explored or explained. I don't get why people are excited by the bug-tech idea. People keep saying she has built a new world with bugs? The bugs are just a substitution in this book: It appears that it is just a substitute for magic and technology. The bug tech idea was never clarified or elaborated. What does it feel like for Rhys to use bug tech? How did these remarkable bugs come into being. Do people know or is it just not asked, hard to tell since they never explore the question in this book? It was sort of implied that the bugs might be manipulated with pheromones: why can't it be replicated then? I mean, if you are going to have a world where bugs are basically used as scouts, observers, communication antennas, shields, attackers, defenders, cars... well, everything basically: it would be nice to invest a little in explaining them. Spend a little time explaining their characteristics and limitations.I was also annoyed by the organ selling part. What was that about? How can we be capable of doing genetic manipulation, in space flight, genetic force fields, but we are still buying organs wholesale from people? It would be like killing a buffalo in the wild when you could just buy a cattle at the market. It would be orders of magnitude more expensive to harvest organs vs just industrially cloning them. Totally confused me.The fact that people can have their brains blown out and then be reconstituted without brain damage (or at least memory loss) was pretty ridiculous.I also failed to grasp how the world politics stood on its own. How can two countries honestly invest in killing 90% percent of their men in a senseless wars? Why was there no mention of strategy or logistics? The war seemed really forced, like it couldn't exist without some serious players who are willing to strongly sacrifice in order to perpetuate it. It just felt unstable. Why would anyone have a interest in perpetuating this war when it clearly cost so much to everyone involved? I felt that it was implied that it was a self perpetuating war, but such a fragile dynamic system would not seem to end in a stable state like the book implied. It bugged me (no pun intended). Why would people not be rallying in the streets over having to sacrifice their children to a war whose cause no one could remember? Why did they not use birth control to avoid having male sons? The breeders also bugged me, as a artificial womb would seem to be far more cost effective. Finally, lets move out of the world building and "new ideas" review of the book. Some of the plot elements were just ridiculous. **** SPOILER * DON'T * READ * HERE ****Nyx was able to bed Jaks by betting in her favor on a fight? This is evidently a guaranteed thing? Jake is housing her draft age brother who WILL BE KILLED if he is discovered. Jaks brings Nyx to her house and lets Nyx see her brother? Really? That is so dumb it is just beyond belief? It would be like a frenchman inviting random strangers to dine at your place when you are sheltering Jews during WWII.Khos getting to overhear Dahab tell Khos about Nasheem (sp)? I mean really. If you are charged with securely protecting someone in hiding, probably first rule of thumb is don't go blabbing their name in front of perfect strangers.Khos and team twice rescuing Nyx from the bell dames or intergalactic gene splicers. Really, has no one ever heard of posting a sentry? Is Nyx's team just totally badass, because they are implied to be barely scrapping by? However, every time rescue or fighting is needed, they win without any superior strategy or equipment.Why didn't Rain have more muscle when he was trading with Nyx? Seems like he could have afforded it.How did Rain scoop up Rhys so easily? How did Rain know where Rhys had gone to?Isn't it convenient how Khos happens to be some sort of underground railroad hero, and as such has a safe-house everywhere you go? Really, we should be paying him more. :) YOU CAN READ NOW ********************Ultimately, I felt a lot of the characters were rather flat. I also felt the environment felt more like a backdrop than a actual place. Things did not seem very well thought out. If your cup of tea is basically a character that fights, gets their ass kicked, and then kicks more ass in retribution then ... umm... this is your cup of tea. If that is what you want (and you want your protagonist female) then this book rocks. If you like more to your stories than just that, I would skip this one.