Two things really stuck out to me in this film.

I was quite surprised when he re-revealed that she was pregnant. My full expectation was that he was going to somehow hide it from her in some way (drugs/hypnosis/something)? I kind of feel like a modern film might insist that the noble thing is to keep it to yourself. I can't put my finger on it but it just kind of struck me as one of those "this is a different time with a different set of mores" type things.
Something about his ways annoyed me. Was he a spirit healer? Why did he seem so against book learning? Who was he railing against in the medical industry? What was up with the jibs against paying farmers not to plant crops? It just felt like he had a lot of ideas, but none of them were coherent enough thoughts for me to make sense of them.
The scene of the 3 men playing trains upstairs was very cute. We have all been those guys.
The fact that people would immediately open up their most intimate details to him was a bit supernatural. I mean yes, he is charming, but seriously.

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.

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:

Loved the set pieces for Barbieland. Great design, cool aesthetic. I would love a VR world of Barbie (shouldn't be too hard as its mostly plastic and that is easier to render).
Robbie & Gosling are very well cast here.
Gosling is genuinely funny. The "himbo" is perhaps becoming a bit of a worn joke in film, but it still works.
It was fun, well paced, and funny.

Things I was mixed on:

I don't like the trope of saying something very fast to sound intelligent. It sounds like reciting from a book and I think is a lazy way of conveying a viewpoint without really letting the audience "learn" with you.
For such a meta film, I felt it could have been a little more introspective. At one point Barbies says something along the lines of "I don't know where Ken sleeps". She then later on apologies to Ken for having "girls night" every night, but it would have been interesting if she had really seen some of the characteristics that she disliked in others in herself.
All the Barbie dolls worked together, but I would have loved to watch them fight over their differences. I would have enjoyed seeing nuclear physics Barbie argue with President barbie about public policy.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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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.

Letterboxd

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

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.

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.

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:

I didn't like the "GOOD JOB" or whatever that many of the characters seemed to feel a need to do. I don't know why you would mar a perfectly good screenplay with small modern flourishes like that.
It has always been a bit of an awkward distinction between Yubaba's twin sister as portrayed when she is in the bath house (projected) and in her own house. However, in this play she says something along the lines of "I will slit your smile" or something like that... (not quite sure)... It was weird. Like, it just seemed way to violent for what is supposed to be the "good" character.
Not the films fault, but there was no intermission in my theater (well, like 15 seconds). I am kinda puzzled by that as I feel a 15 minute intermission would result in almost everyone picking up something from concessions? Also just gives you a chance to talk about what you have seen so far, seems like a missed opportunity.

The good:

It was well acted, the set pieces were amazing, the techs were doing a great job, even the "inanimate" objects were given life!
No-Face's dancing movement under his shroud was a great physical flourish.
The scene where they clean the "stink" (turns out to be a river) spirit was just great. I loved how they turned the "heave ho" cast that were pulling the garbage into the exuding garbage.
The scene in the train was simple but very effective use of a projector.
Also, the guy (I think it was 1 person) that was running the paper crane and the river spirit around was great. It was interesting because he is supposed to not be there at some level, but he dances as he moves which causes you to associate his movements with the thing he is animating.

This was great. I really wish fathom would get more plays. Really made me want to see this live!

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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.

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?

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1) cover

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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?

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 cover

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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Nihilistically fatalistic death worshiping horseshit.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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.

Letterboxd

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

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

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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.

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:

St. Elsewhere Snow Globe type scene
Redshirts (novel) type plot
I'll even take a matrix-you-are-plugged-into-the-machines type ending

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.

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.

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. :)

curl -u <USERNAME>:<OAUTH_TOKEN> https://api.github.com/user/repos\?per_page\=100 | jq ".[].git_url" | tr -d '"' | while read in; do git clone $in; done

Notes

<USERNAME> is your github username.

<OAUTH_TOKEN> 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.

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.

How?

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.

Why?

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.

Conclusion

I hope it helps me out.

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 continue

Things 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.

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 continue

Things 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.

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.

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.

Problem

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.

Solution

(defn- add-children-metadata [m]
  (->> m
       vals
       (map (comp :all-keys meta))
       (apply clojure.set/union (-> m keys set))
       (assoc (meta m) :all-keys)
       (with-meta m)))

(defn map->containment-map
  "Sets :all-keys metadata for every map in m; :all-keys holds every key in this map and for all submaps"
  [m]
  (-> (fn [acc k v]
        (assoc acc k (if (map? v)
                       (-> v map->containment-map add-children-metadata)
                       v)))
      (reduce-kv {} m)
      add-children-metadata))

Usage

(def data {:a {:b nil 
               :c {:d nil 
                   :e {}}}
           :f {:g nil}})
           
(def contained-data (map->containment-map data))

Note that data and contained-data are equal.

(= data contained-data)

The difference is that contained-data has the :all-keys key within its metadata.

I need something that converts a particular key/value within a sequence of maps into a single map. this->that will do nicely.

(defn this->that [this that vs]
  "Build a map out of sequence vs; taking `this` as the key and `that` as the value from each"
  (reduce
   (fn [acc v] (assoc acc (this v) (that v)))
   {}
   vs))
;; -> {:key-1 :value-1, :key-2 :value-2}

Let's create some data for this example.

(def data 
  [{:id 1 :email "mouse@hanna-barbera.com" :name "Bullwinkle J. Mouse"}
   {:id 2 :email "squirrel@hanna-barbera.com" :name "Rocky the Flying Squirrel"}
   {:id 3 :email "boris@hanna-barbera.com" :name "Boris Badenov"}
   {:id 4 :email "ffetale@hanna-barbera.com" :name "Natasha Fatale"}
   {:id 5 :email "leader@hanna-barbera.com" :name "Fearless Leader"}])

With this->that and our data, we can now create a map of :id to :email.

(defn id->email [vs]
  (this->that :id :email vs))
(id->email data)

Or :id to :name.

(defn id->name [vs]
  (this->that :id :name vs))
(id->name data)

Interesting

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.

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.

Animate it?

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.

In favor of animation

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.

In favor of "malleable" material

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

(ns example.silly-csv
  (:require 
    [clojure.string :as string]))

(def csv
  [["name" "age" "occupation" "gender"]
   ["Peter Pan" 312 "Lost Boy" "male"]
   ["Wendy Darling" 14 "Older Sister" "female"]
   ["Captain Hook" 330 "Pirate" "male"]
   ["Tinker Bell" nil "Fairy" "female"]])

(defn clean-str [s]
  (pr-str (string/replace s "\n" "")))

(defn build-csv [xs]
  (->> xs 
    (map (fn [xs] (map #(if (string? %) (clean-str %) %) xs))) ;; quote all strings
    (map (partial string/join ",")) ;; seq of seq -> seq of strings
    (string/join "\n"))) ;; seq of string -> string

(println (build-csv csv))

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.

Usage

Assume you have a ndb.Model named Widget

Begin pagination using the following (note that Widget is case sensitive)

curl https://example-domain.appspot.com/paginate/Widget
# => {'keys': [<URLSAFEKEYS>], 'cursor': <CURSOR_VALUE>}`.

Use <CURSOR_VALUE> to continue pagination across all Widget's

curl https://example-domain.appspot.com/paginate/Widget/<CURSOR_VALUE>

Code

Him: "Another museum on it's way..."
Me: "What?"
Him: "I mean, if you had an atomic aircraft, where would you park it?"
Me: ... <few seconds of though> ... "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...

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.

Mathematical Learning

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.

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.

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.

The Good

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.

Use of a character as a proxy for popular culture

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.

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 Good

The conference was well managed. The talks were mosty interesting. The community continues to be friendly, open, and inclusive.

The Bad

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.

The City

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.

The Pictures

Clojure/West 2017

The Notes

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.

Purchases

I made several purchases before the trip:

Japan Rail Pass

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.

You have to buy this pass outside of Japan! It is only available to tourist to Japan. Purchase it before you leave, activate it when you get there.
This pass lets you ride most intercity trains at no cost. Intracity trains probably are not covered, but they are around $2.
You can save a little money by NOT using the pass and instead buying the tickets at the station. You can also of course pay less if you take a slower train or a less desirable route. It is up to you to decide whether this is worth your time.
The pass is the ultimate in flexibility. Just walk up to any JR office and tell them where you want to end up. They book all connecting trains for you then and there. They book you on the next (could be in 5 minutes) train that will get you there as fast as possible. If you have the Green pass they also reserve a seat for you on almost all trains. It is just so easy. You don't need to read local maps, you don't need to plan ahead, just point on your phone where you want to end up.
I think I basically broke even, but you could go wild on this thing and take a JR trip every day. It is really unlimited.

Google Fi

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.

Tortuga Outbreaker

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.

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.

Considerations

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.

Solution

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.

Usage

scan(
  '<kind>', # the Datastore kind that you want to scan
  retries=1, # a non negative integer, default 1
  retry-fx=lambda i: i**2, # i is the retry count, i=0 is always immediate
  max-retries=2, # a non negative integer, default 2
)

The handler-path will be called with the urlsafe() key of every entity of 'kind' <kind>. Specifically /<handler-path>/<urlsafekey> will be called for every <kind> 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.

This week I wrote an addition to gaend that automatically causes every ndb.Model entity to automagically be persisted to Elasticsearch.

Why?

Datastore (the database technology that powers Google App Engine) has a number of great features.

It scales to like forever
With GAE, you can do complex validation on every write
Automatically applied security, upgrades, scaling, partitioning, etc.
It is pretty simple

Although datastore is perfect as a Key/Value store that allows transactions and limited queries, it does have its limitations.

It does not allow SCAN
It does not allow JOIN

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?

Nuance

gaend is a easy way to get Restful endpoints on Google App Engine for Python. It builds endpoints directly from your ndb.Model classes.

Philosophy

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.

Documentation

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.

Your application needs a TOKEN in order to access your Vault server. How do you get the TOKEN to the application server?

Some Background

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.

What solutions do we have for secrets?

Don't use Vault; include secrets in your application

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. Ugh

Environment 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.

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 Knuth

I 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.

The Problem

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.

Observations

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 Darling

The 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.

Review

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.

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 DDR

The Robot from Laputa: Castle in the Sky

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

This week I joined a study session / book Club for Haskell. The Book we are covering is Haskell Programming

History

I 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.

Why?

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.

Impressions

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.

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.

Tent Revival for Nerds?

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.

Glitch Mob Sound

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.

On a Meta Level

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?

Did I enjoy myself?

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.

Recording & Encryption

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.

Pride

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.

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.

If it is a list of things, use CSV

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).

Don't use slashes in the filename

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.

Include everything of a homogenous type within a single directory/bucket

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.

Make it so the names of files are automatically sorted in some usefull way

Let me provide an example.

1946304563_66189429@216.221.154.11-66.228.112.5:27832/callee/89/0/rtp.pcap.wav.ctm
1946304563_66189429@216.221.154.11-66.228.112.5:27832/callee/9/0/rtp.pcap.wav.ctm
1946304563_66189429@216.221.154.11-66.228.112.5:27832/callee/90/0/rtp.pcap.wav.ctm