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What an odd duck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Things I really liked in this film:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My learnings are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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Occasionally the word "decent" really summarizes a film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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