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.

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

On Bovine women, plebian taste, and Renoires non Impressionist work.

A bit of a jump

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.

Bovine women

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.

Plebeian taste

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?

A recording of all that I saw and hear at Clojure West 2016 in Seattle Washington.

Nathan Marz Specter

Github

Navigation is independent abstraction
Navigation dissasociated from the desired transformation
Provides type defined defaults for navigation to nil
Assuming you can write a generic enough function

This 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.

Donevan Dolby

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.

Claire Alvis

https://github.com/SparkFund/spec-tacular

An 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.

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.

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.

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.

Anathem
Snow Crash
Cryptonomicon
The Diamond Age: Or, a young lady’s illustrated primer
Seveneves
Reamde
Quicksilver

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.

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 it

EVERYTHING 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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."

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.

Watch only the first 13 episodes. The last (14-16) are rubbish and practically nonsensical.
Appreciate the art and the style that went into this. I was especially impressed by the attention to details in the set pieces and the characters clothing. I liked the outfits a good deal, as they were clearly inspired from the 1930's but actually morphed to be attractive by modern standards.
The music is catchy, the opening credit scene is actually well done.
Note the fact that somebody built an anime without using most of the conventional tropes of the genre.
Might consider reading the novels beforehand. I have not, but I felt I might enjoy the series more had I done so.
I watched the sub (arrogant purist that I am), but evidently the English dub is actually quite good. Might be worth giving it a shot.
Finally, I watched this series over maybe 10 days, watching an episode or two a day. I would instead recommend watching this over a weekend. There are a lot of characters and interactions all over the place. It can be easier to remember who was what if it is all "fresh" in your head.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Bioman

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.

Le Chevalier du Zodiac

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.

Ken Le Survivant de la Terre l'enfer

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.

Galaxy Express 999

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.

The Outfit

The Lost City

Turning Red

The Batman

The Great Santini

City Lights

Something Wild

The Man in the Hat

Belle

The King's Man

The Bishop's Wife

Riders of Justice

House of Gucci

Together Together

The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Spine of Night

Raising Arizona

Dune

Witness

The Mosquito Coast

The Card Counter

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America

Free Guy

The Game

Jungle Cruise

F9

City Hunter

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