Samsaram (1988) IMDb D

Forgettable. Watched because it was directed by Relangi and I thought I’d enjoy some old-school comedy. Didn’t even deliver on dysfunctional family drama :/

Diatoms

They look like priceless brooches and are tremendously important to our planet. Emphases mine:

Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth’s biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans. The shells of dead diatoms can reach as much as a half-mile (800 m) deep on the ocean floor, and the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from the African Sahara, much of it from the Bodélé Depression, which was once made up of a system of fresh-water lakes.

Wikipedia

A photo of diatoms through a microscope

Solace (2015) IMDb C-

Decent background-watch. Whoever did the ‘visions’ knocked it out of the park. A waste of Anthony Hopkins and Colin Farrell, who play clairvoyants whose powers wax and wane in service of the utterly predictable plot. Like Next1 but slightly better.

  1. Which is a fantastic fucking movie if you love Mr. Cage as sincerely and as much as I do. ↩︎

On Knowing Everything When One is Young

When he was young he had prided himself on being clever. Walking down the street, not even thinking anything, just walking along like every other moron, he’d had a distinct sense of how clever he was. He’d never done anything with that cleverness except write stupid articles and make occasionally clever remarks, most of them not even clever. He just felt clever, and it was a good feeling, feeling clever. Now he felt, with equal conviction (and rather more evidence), that he was entering the stupid years. The stupid years complemented the vague years. They went together. The vague years and the stupid years were the same years and they had already started. Well, bring them on. Forgetting everyone’s names - as those adverts in the newspapers were always reminding you - was embarrassing, but apart from that, being stupid was fine, like a premonition of enlightenment.

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel

On Mullets

People ask me why in 2023 I’m still rocking a mullet. Easy answer. Without the lettuce I’m just a guy that says dumb shit all the time. When I say dumb shit with the mullet, it’s like my face is saying one thing out front, and my mullet is apologizing out back. My mullet is “Dumb shit out front, I’m sorry but I grew up in Oklahoma out back” Getting mad at something someone said with a mullet is like getting mad at a person with no arms for not waving at you at the mall.

Fake Quote by Mike Gundy

Dennis Miller: Fake News, Real Jokes (2018) IMDb C+

Miller claims that he has ‘problems’ with his Orange Overlord. This was filmed in 2018 and there were many, many ‘problems’ with the administration he must have been aware of. The only filthiness he addresses is his non-chalant and charitable admission that separating children from their families might be wrong1. Everything else is lazy pabulum for the most ardent of Combover Caligula’s fans. The cruelty is the point, etc.

But what Miller loves more than his fondness for Mango Mussolini’s ‘outer voice being the same as his inner voice’2 is the fact that the Urinal Cake really winds up liberals. That’s it. There is no more nuance here. The sadistic glee of watching reasonable people lose their minds over a wannabe authoritarian and his sycophants fucking over Constitutional, democratic ideals and hurting immigrants and the marginalized is good American (Christian) fun!

  1. Before whining about Mexico and how it could have stepped up to prevent the abject cruelty of the practice this side of the border. ↩︎

  2. I am unsure of how this is a virtue. ↩︎

Our Crazy Calendar by @foone More Pasta

This reminds me of falsehoods programmers believe about time. See also: Decimal Time.

Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them

“yeah we divide our year into a number of sub units called ‘months’ made up a number of days, and they’re not all the same length”
“I guess that’s unavoidable, if your rotations-count per orbit is a prime number”
“yeah, our’s isn’t prime”
“but surely you have most of these ‘months’ the same length and just make the last one shorter or longer?”
“No… They’re different lengths following no logical pattern”
“what”
“and we further subdivide the months into ‘weeks’, which is 7 days.”
“ahh, so each month is an integer multiple of weeks?”
“that would make sense, but no. Only one is, sometimes”
“SOMETIMES?!”
“yeah our orbit around the sun isn’t an integer number of days, so we have to change the number of days to in a year from time to time”
“oh yes, a similar thing happens on Epsilon Indi 7, where they have to add an extra day every 39 years to keep holidays on track”
“yeah that’s how ours work! Although the ratio doesn’t work out cleanly, so we just do every 4 years, except every 100 years, except except every 400 years”
“oh, you number your years? What’s the epoch?”
“uh, it’s supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it’s off by 4 years, if he existed at all.”
“if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you’re not sure exists?”
“yeah. He’s written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty.”
“interesting. I didn’t realize your planet was one of the ones with a single universal religion, that usually only happens in partial or complete hive minds.”
“uhh, we’re not.”
“You’re not?!”
“yeah we have multiple religions.”
“oh but they all have a common ancestor, which agrees on the existence of that leader, right?”
“uh, no. Two of the big ones do, but most of the others don’t believe in him”
“YOUR CALENDAR IS BASED ON A RELIGIOUS LEADER THAT NOT EVERYONE BELIEVES IN?”
“well, on his birth. And yeah, we got it wrong by a couple years.”
“OK, fine. So, you have somewhat complicated rules about when you change the length of your years, and I’m scared to ask this, but… You definitely just add or subtract that extra day at the end, right?”
“… Nope.”
"At the start of the year? "
“nah. The end of the second month”
“WHY WOULD IT BE THE SECOND MONTH?”
“I’m not sure, really.”
“huh. So at this point I’m dreading asking this, but how do you measure time within each day?”
“oh that’s much simpler. Each day is divided into hours, each hour has minutes, and each minute has seconds.”
“ok. And 10 of each?”
“10 hours? No. There’s 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds”
“… I thought you said you used a base-10 counting system”
“we do! Mostly. But our time system came from some long gone civilization that liked base-60 like 5000 years ago”
“and you haven’t changed it since?”
“No.”
“huh. Okay, so why 24? That’s not a divisor of 60”
“oh because it’s actually 12!”
“what”
“yeah each day is 24 hours but they are divided into two sets of 12.”
“and that’s 5 12s, right, I see the logic here, almost. So like, after hour 12, it becomes the second half, which is 1?”
“No, after 11.”
“oh, you zero-index them! So it’s hours 0-11 in the first half, then 12-23 in the second half?”
“No. 12 to 11 in the first half, and again in the second half”
“please explain that before my brain melts out my mouth”
“the first hour is 12. Then the next one is 1, then it goes back up to 11, then 12 again”
“that is not how numbers work. And how do you tell first 12 apart from second 12?”
“oh we don’t use numbers for that!”
“you don’t number the two halves of your day?”
“nah, we call them AM and PM”
“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN”
“I think it’s ante-meridian and post-meridian? But I’m not sure, I dont know much Latin”
“Latin?”
“yeah it’s an ancient language from an old empire which controlled a lot of the world and we still use some of their terms”
“oh, and that was the civilization that liked base-60 and set up your time system?”
“that would make sense, but… No, completely different one.”
“okay, and what do you do to if you want to measure very short times, shorter than a second?”
“oh we use milliseconds and microseconds”
“ahh, those are a 60th of a second and then 60th of the other?”
“No. Thousandths.”
“so you switch to base-10 at last, but only for subdivisions of the second?”
“yeah.”
“but at thousands, ie, ten tens tens”
“yeah. Technically we have deciseconds and centiseconds, which are 1/10 of a second, and 1/100 of a second, but no one really uses them. We just use milli.”
“that seems more like a base-1000 system than a base-10 system.”
“it kinda is? We do a similar thing with measures of volume and distance and mass.”
“but you still call it base-10?”
“yeah”
“so let me see if I get this right: Your years are divided in 10 months, each of which is some variable number of days, the SECOND of which varies based on a complex formula… and each day is divided into two halves of 12 hours, of 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 1000 milliseconds?”
“12 months, actually.”
“right, because of the ancient civilization that liked base-60, and 12 is a divisor of 60.”
“No, actually, that came from the civilization that used latin. Previously there were 10.”
“what”
“yeah the Latin guys added two months part of the way through their rule, adding two more months. That’s why some are named after the wrong numbers”
“you just said two things I am having trouble understanding. 1. Your months are named, not numbered? 2. THE NAMES ARE WRONG?”
“yep! Our 9th month is named after the number 7, and so on for 10, 11, and 12.”
“your 12th month is named… 10?”
“yeah.”
“what are the other ones named after?!”
“various things. Mainly Gods or rulers”
“oh, from that same religion that your epoch is from?”
“uh… No. Different one.”
“so you have an epoch based on one religion, but name your months based on a different one?”
“yeah! Just wait until you hear about days of the week.”
“WHAT”
“so yeah we group days into 7-day periods-”
“which aren’t an even divisor of your months lengths or year lengths?”
“right. Don’t interrupt”
“sorry”
“but we name the days of the week, rather than numbering them. Funny story with that, actually: there’s disagreement about which day starts the week.”
“you have a period that repeats every 7 days and you don’t agree when it starts?”
“yeah, it’s Monday or Sunday.”
“and those names come from…”
“celestial bodies and gods! The sun and moon are Sunday and Monday, for example”
“but… I looked at your planet’s orbit parameters. Doesn’t the sun come up every day?”
“yeah.”
“oh, do you have one of those odd orbits where your natural satellite is closer or eclipsed every 7 days, like Quagnar 4?”
“no, the sun and moon are the same then as every other day, we just had to name them something.”
“and the other days, those are named after gods?”
“yep!”
“from your largest religion, I imagine?”
“nah. That one (and the second largest, actually) only has one god, and he doesn’t really have a name.”
“huh. So what religion are they from? The Latin one again?”
“nah, they only named one of the God-days”
“only on… SO THE OTHER DAYS ARE FROM A DIFFERENT RELIGON ENTIRELY?”
“Yep!”
“the third or forth biggest, I assume?”
“nah, it’s one that… Kinda doesn’t exist anymore? It mostly died out like 800 years ago, though there are some modern small revivals, of course”
“so, let me get confirm I am understanding this correctly. Your days and hours and seconds and smaller are numbered, in a repeating pattern. But your years are numbered based on a religious epoch, despite it being only one religion amongst several.”
“correct so far”
“and your months and days of the week are instead named, although some are named after numbers, and it’s the wrong numbers”
“exactly”
“and the ones that aren’t numbers or rulers or celestial objects are named after gods, right?”
“yup!”
“but the months and the days of the week are named after gods from different religons from the epoch religion, and indeed, each other?”
“yeah! Except Saturday. That’s the same religion as the month religion”
“and the month/Saturday religion is also from the same culture who gave you the 12 months system, and the names for the two halves of the day, which are also named?”
“right! Well, kinda.”
“please explain, slowly and carefully”
“yeah so cultures before then had a 12 month system, because of the moon. But they had been using a 10 month system, before switching to 12 and giving them the modern names”
“the… Moon? Your celestial body?”
“yeah, it completes an orbit about every 27 days, so which is about 12 times a year, so it is only natural to divide the year into 12 periods, which eventually got called months”
“ok, that makes sense. Wait, no. Your orbital period is approximately 365.25 days, right?”
“yeah. That’s why we do 365 or 366 based on the formula”
“but that doesn’t work. 365 divided by 27 is ~13.5, not 12”
“yeah I’m not sure why 12 was so common then. Maybe it goes back to the base 60 people?”
“okay so one final check before I file this report: Years are numbered based on a religious leader. Years always have 12 months, but the lengths of those months is not consistent between each other or between years.”
“don’t forget the epoch we number our years from is wrong!”
“right, yes. And your months are named, some after a different religion, and some after numbers, but not the number the month is in the year.”
“right. And when we change the month lengths, it’s the second one we change”
“how could I forget? After months you have a repeating ‘week’ of 7 days, which is named after gods from two religons, one of which is the month-naming one, and a nearly extinct one. And you don’t agree when the week starts.”
“nope! My money is on Monday.”
“that’s the Monday that’s named after your moon, which supposedly influenced the commonality of the 12 months in a year cycle, despite it orbiting 13 times in a year?”
“correct!”
“and as for your days, they split into two halves, named after a phrase you don’t really understand in the long dead language of the same culture that named the months and Saturday.”
“Yep. I took some in college but all I remember is like, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stinky’, ‘cocksucker’”
“charming. And then each half is divided into 12 hours, but you start at 12, then go to 1, and up to 11”
“all I can say is that it makes more sense on analog clocks.”
“i don’t know what that is and at this point I would prefer you not elaborate. So each of those hours is divided into 60 minutes and then 60 seconds, and this comes from an ancient civilization, but not the one that gave you the month names”
“yep. Different guys. Different part of the world.”
“ok. And then after seconds, you switch to a ‘base-10’ system, but you only really use multiples of a thousand? Milliseconds and microseconds?”
“right. And there’s smaller ones beyond that, but they all use thousands”
“right. Got it. All written down here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just gotta go make sure I didn’t leave my interociter on, I’ll be right back.”

The tall alien walks back into their saucer without a wave. The landing ramp closes.

The ship gently lifts off as gangly landing legs retract. There’s a beat, then a sudden whooshing sound as air rushes back into the space that previously held the craft, now suddenly vacuum.

NORAD alarms go off briefly as an object is detected leaving the earth’s atmosphere at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

In the years to come, many technological advances are made from what was left behind, a small tablet shaped object made of some kind of artifical stone/neutrino composite material.

The alien message left on screen is eventually translated to read “Untitled Document 1 has not been saved, are you sure you wish to quit? (yes) (no) (cancel)”

Many years have passed, and we await the day the aliens return. They have not.

With our new advancements, we build space-radar systems and can see the many species flying around the galaxy. It’s not long before we realize they’re intentionally giving earth a wide berth.

Drone ships criss-cross the galaxy, but when they get within a lightyear of earth they detour around it.

We finally get a subspace radio working, and start working to decode the noisy traffic of a thousand civilizations talking to each other. We broadcast a message of greetings and peace

Less than a week later, the subspace net goes quiet. Our space radar reports the solar system is now surrounded by small vessels, suspected to be some kind of automated probe, and they’re blocking all radio traffic in or out. Even the pulsars go quiet, all radio waves are gone.

We focus on cracking the secret of FTL travel. The first prototype never makes it off the ground, as before the rocket can even ignite, it’s crushed by a small meteor

Forensic reconstruction suggests it was a sundial, carved from rock dug out of the far side of the moon.

Anyway if anyone wants to, like, draw or animate this or film this (or something inspired by it)? That’d be sweet, you don’t need permission from me, go ahead. I’d do it but I don’t have the time or skills. Just put like “based on a story by Foone” somewhere in the credits.

It’s always weird saying that because it kinda sounds like I’m implying I think this is like A MOVIE SCRIPT THAT’S GOING TO HOLLYWOOD! or something. I don’t, I just want to make sure everyone knows it’s free to adapt and remix and all that.

It amused me to type, I hope it amused you to read, and if it amuses you to make something based on it, go right ahead. I’d love to see it.

On the Tragedy of systemd

Spent a decent portion of my professional life with init.d. Had to deploy a set of Ubuntu servers last week (use FreeBSD at home), which marked my first actual brush with systemd after a long while of sysadmin-ing Linux systems. It’s weird, takes some getting used to, and has a lovely Enterprise™ smell to it1, but I don’t think I mind it too much, especially with a nice cheatsheet. Just ergonomics; no comments on its security and stewardship 🤐

I wanted to know more about it’s history and enjoyed this really excellent talk by Benno Rice. Had no idea that its creator received death threats and various other forms of online abuse over an innocuous set of ideas and piece of software. Unbelievable.

Some select quotes from the talk and about systemd:

People have a complicated relationship with change. I like to say that nerds especially have a really complicated relationship with change. We love it to pieces. Change is awesome when we’re the ones doing it.

Benno Rice

The moral isn’t “Don’t use systemd”, the moral is “Write stuff in better languages than C”. rsyslog doesn’t exactly have an enviable security record either.

@mjg59

and finally,

The moral is “Don’t use systemd. And don’t chain core system functionality to software from teams with a track record of imcompetence.” It’s about better, experienced programmers. Not “better” languages.

@hyc_symas

Word.

  1. I imagine that init.d did too when it was introduced. ↩︎

Poker Face (2012) IMDb B-

Saw with LD. Stylish, great cinematography, good dose of Russell Crowe’s gravitas, and plenty of wealth-porn1 (and gratuitous art history lessons). Huge build-up of suspense (a la “Clue” or “Orient Express”) with a lame resolution towards the end.

Oh and RZA’s in this movie. I continue to be delighted by the random stuff he decides to show up in.

  1. There’s a scene where Russell Crowe opens a case containing at least $2M+ in watches and swaps a Panda Rolex on his wrist for a 5711 (or something like it with a few nice complications). Even though it’s very well-established that our protagonist is a man of means, this scene is absolutely essential to the story being told because… 🤷‍♂️🖕 ↩︎

On Convenience in 2022

Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it’s currently in one of its one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it.

@chasemit

Crinoids!

These are fossilized crinoids found in Western Australia by Tom Kapitany. Crinoids are animals and belong to the phylum Eichinodermata which includes starfish and sea urchins (and they all have “pentameral symmetry”). This is all well and good but these things, in their fossilized state, look like so much like the sentinels from The Matrix I wonder if there was any inspiration here.

Crinoid fossils by Tom Kapitany

Sentinel robots from The Matrix

Here are a few more fossils

Crinoid fossil

Another Crinoid fossil
Source: Fossil Huntress

And their basic anatomy

Crinoid Anatomy

The Mess Britain Is In by Larry the Cat More Pasta

Saving this for a quick TL;DR of the shitshow

For those asking from around the world how Britain has gotten into this mess:

  • The Conservative Party has always been obsessed with Europe
  • This caused divides making the party hard to manage
  • Back in 2015 then Prime Minister David Cameron had an idea
  • He promised a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU if he won the election
  • He won the election
  • The referendum was held; 52% of people voted to leave the EU
  • David Cameron resigned
  • Theresa May became Prime Minister saying that “Brexit means Brexit”
  • It turned out that nobody actually knew what Brexit meant
  • She called an election and lost the majority
  • She couldn’t get the Conservative party to agree on a Brexit deal so she quit
  • Boris Johnson became Prime Minister promising to “Get Brexit done”
  • He called a general election and won a majority
  • The UK left the European Union in January 2020
  • Major Brexit issues remain unresolved and it has negatively impacted the UK economy
  • Boris Johnson was forced to resign in disgrace in July 2022 following a series of scandals
  • Liz Truss was selected to replace Boris Johnson by members of the Conservative Party
  • She announced a raft of unfunded tax cuts to “grow the economy”
  • The economy collapsed
  • She sacked her chancellor
  • She resigned

Fin.

In 1942, Bob Emmett Fletcher agreed to manage 90 acres of farmland for his Japanese neighbors who had been forcibly moved to internment camps.

And because no good deed goes unpunished,

Fletcher claimed to have been harassed by his own community and he also found bullet holes in his barn. Fletcher used the proceeds from farming the land to pay the taxes for the interned Japanese. From 1942 to 1945 he managed the Tsukamoto, Nitta, and Okamoto farms. Fletcher’s wife Teressa Cassieri also worked the farms.

But because he was a good decent human being,

The agreement was for Fletcher to keep profits after paying the taxes on the farms, but instead he returned the money to the Japanese farmers when they were released.

From a New York Times profile (cached):

For the next three years he worked a total of 90 acres on three farms — he had also decided to run Mr. Tsukamoto’s farm. He worked 18-hour days and lived in the bunkhouse Mr. Tsukamoto had reserved for migrant workers. He paid the bills of all three families — the Tsukamotos, the Okamotos and the Nittas. He kept only half of the profits.

Many Japanese-American families lost property while they were in the camps because they could not pay their bills. Most in the Florin area moved elsewhere after the war. When the Tsukamotos returned in 1945, they found that Mr. Fletcher had left them money in the bank and that his new wife, Teresa, had cleaned the Tsukamotos’ house in preparation for their return. She had chosen to join her husband in the bunkhouse instead of accepting the Tsukamotos’ offer to live in the family’s house.

The mensch lived to the ripe old age of 101 🙏 🙌 Here’s a photograph.

A photograph of Bob Fletcher in his later years

Source: The New York Times

A Terrible Typeface on an Expensive Watch

This is the Patek Philippe 5131. It’s a world timer with a lovely hand-painted cloisonné enamel dial, a marvel of engineering and ingenuity from one of the Holy Trinity of watchmaking that will set you back at least $150,0001.

It also features one of the shittiest choices of typeface I’ve seen on a watch of its calibre.

Patek Philippe 5131

I wonder what the design process was at this august company when it came to this watch’s dial. It would appear that someone at Patek opened up Microsoft Word (at the last minute?) and just fell in love with the majesty that is the SHOUTING VARIANT of Lucida Calligraphy. The overall effect is one where you wonder if you’re looking at a knockoff.

A sample of Lucida Calligraphy in ALL-CAPS

I like to imagine they received feedback about this ‘bold’ choice since here’s the next version, the 5231, on the right (with its ghastly older brother on the left).

Patek Philippe 5131 on the left and 5231 on the right
Source: Revolution Watch

I got that picture from this exhaustive history of Patek’s World Timers. It’s well-researched, has a lot of pictures, and is a good read if you can withstand sentences like this written by the same bro who will definitely not teach you anything about after-dinner drinks.

As if, somehow, by losing myself in the beautifully rendered map of the Americas, Africa and Europe, I could remember how interconnected this world once was and hopefully will be again. So, I began to see my World Timer as a chalice of renewed hope to once more live the glorious opiatic maelstrom of transcontinental travel, even if for the time being this is limited only to my imagination as I write these words.

Cool man.

  1. If you’re new to the world of watches, this is a very reasonable price for a piece like this. Consider this Rafa Nadal-endorsed Richard Mille (RM 27-04) that costs well over $2.5M (here’s why). It is, again, a wonder of mechanical engineering and watchmaking. As far as time-telling goes, this legend that is the Casio F91W ($10 or less) is more accurate (and, I imagine, can withstand “12,000 g’s” while lasting more than a decade on its battery). ↩︎

“What we have built together is sad, buggy, quixotic garbage but you have to use it.”

Things are going well with the Metaverse:

In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, [Vishal] Shah1 said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

He went on to call out specific issues with Horizon, writing that “our onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users” and that the team needed to “introduce new users to top-notch worlds that will ensure their first visit is a success.”

Shah said the teams working on Horizon needed to collaborate better together and expect more changes to come. “Today, we are not operating with enough flexibility,” his memo reads. “I want to be clear on this point. We are working on a product that has not found product market fit. If you are on Horizon, I need you to fully embrace ambiguity and change.”

I’m assuming that asking “What the fuck are we spending $70 billion on again?” wouldn’t be a recommended way to embrace ambiguity.

Update

Kate Duffy with Business Insider:

Zuckerberg told employees this year to have their meetings on Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, where people can come together as avatars in virtual workspaces, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.

[…] The source, who remained anonymous, told The Times that many Meta employees didn’t have VR headsets this year or hadn’t gotten around to setting them up. Those staff then had to rush to purchase headsets and register them before their managers realized, the source told The Times.

And the kicker:

Included in the Times report was inside information from two employees who told the newspaper that some workers call important metaverse projects “make Mark happy,” abbreviating it to “MMH.”

Won’t someone think of our mad king? I’m going to return to the office only to be forced to attend meetings virtually. MMH 🥲

Update

Tweet about working at Facebook with employees at work wearing VR headsets while sitting next to each other

  1. VP Metaverse (at Meta, that is. I don’t know how governance works in the Metaverse). ↩︎

Telugu Folk at The Movies

A theater-owner on Telugu moviegoers at RRR:

This fucking shit destroyed my theater opening night. The Telugu crowd specifically wrecked out shit. No issues with the Hindi dub or the Tamil dub.

Confetti cannons, spraying soda everywhere, littering in the parking lot, sneaking in more people than there were seats in our biggest auditoriums, screaming and shouting and chanting constantly.

I get the guy is something of a hero. I get you’re excited for your long awaited movie or whatever. Here’s an interesting thought thought: fuck off. :) Just fuck right off. Don’t be an animal and make my and my employees lives worse to have more fun at our expense.

The janitors saw the insane amount of glitter and newspaper shreddings and confetti explosions and said “hm, actually, second thought, fuck this. Nobody gets paid enough for this.” In-between every seat, every chair, in every row and even where there weren’t rows of seats, on every step, even up by the projector window. We’re lucky they didn’t damage the silver screen in any way, tbh, but that’s about it. Took days to fully clean.

Fuck RRR specifically for this reason. I know it’s probably decent, and a few friends watched it on Netflix, but out of sheer principle I just can’t bring myself to watch even a second of it now. There were some fun scenes for sure, but I think I’d much rather watch War or Baahubali 1 and 2 than RRR on account of the bad time everyone but the Telugu crowd had.

With the usual “not all of us” apologies from other Telugu folk of course.

I have never, ever understood this deeply embarrassing behaviour from my people1. At college, I remember watching a Chiranjeevi movie at some small town in Iowa. The poor folk who ran the theater had no idea what they were in for. Moviegoers littered the entire theater with glitter and torn newspaper and didn’t clean up after the show was done. Some set up an unsanctioned tea and snack station for the intermission (these refreshments were, of course, offered at a price). Chanted, chatted loudly, and generally made a nuisance of themselves.

I’ve been offered quite a few reasons as to why Telugu folk do this and they’re all pretty bullshit. I personally refuse to go to the first screening of any Telugu movie in Des Moines in case I have to deal with “passionate” people who don’t seem to understand that they’re rude, ill-mannered, immature, and annoying pieces of shit to everyone else around them.

  1. Those are things I could find in a few seconds for the recent release of a terrible movie. ↩︎

Black Hole by Charles Burns A

'Black Hole' by Charles Burns

About five minutes in, I felt like I was reading a masterpiece even though I know very little about the graphic novel/comic genre. This is some mesmerizing inking (Burns won a lot of “Best Inker” awards for this work). The panels almost look like woodcuts. It’s about teenagers and adolescence and how we see our bodies during those important formative years, as simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. The world of Black Hole is bleak, boring, and pretty horrifying. And we’re talking moody teenagers so you get to witness a lot of terrible decisions, angst, ennui, despair, friendship, love, sex, camaraderie, depression, grief, humor, violence, acceptance, and hope in a very short span of pages. Lots of yonic imagery. The author published this over a ten-year period starting in 1995 and it looks like these are almost exclusively what he worked on during that timespan. Amazing.

Sample panel from the book 1

Sample panel from the book 1

Gargi (2022) IMDb A-

Saw with LD. Very heavy subject matter loosely inspired by harrowing real-life cases and I skipped watching a few scenes. Sai Pallavi was intense and excellent, of course, but we were very impressed with the raw vulnerability and menace Saravanan brought to his character (also called “Saravanan”, lol). Kaali Venkat was great too.

S Sudha deserves a special mention both for her austere performance and who she is:

One of the places where the movie hits it out of the park is the casting of S Sudha, a transgender person, as a transgender judge in the movie. One of the fewest and rarest moments in Tamil cinema in which a transgender woman is shown to be in a position of power and authority. When she asserted her identity and agency in her reply to the misogyny of the Public Prosecutor (Kavithalaya Krishnan), the audience in the Chennai theatre erupted in applause, signaling a positive change in society.

Siddarth Muralidharan, “‘Gargi’ is special for two reasons: It is bankrolled by a woman and led by Sai Pallavi”, The Print

On Morals versus Ethics

What is the difference between ethics and morality? A morality functions according to principle, while an ethics functions according to experimentation. A morality presupposes a discontinuity between principle and action, while an ethics presupposes a continuity of action and character. A morality tells one what one ought to do, while an ethics asks what one might do.

Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide

According to Britannica, most of us tend to use the terms interchangeably, and we tend to associate “ethical” behaviour with professions (like law, medicine, and engineering).

Ethicists today, however, use the terms interchangeably. If they do want to differentiate morality from ethics, the onus is on the ethicist to state the definitions of both terms. Ultimately, the distinction between the two is as substantial as a line drawn in the sand.

The way I understand it is: We mostly agree that gay marriage is ethical. However, it may be immoral to an adherent of a religion that proscribes it (but would they agree that it is ethical?)

On Living

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

Karl Ove Knausgard, Autumn

“How a Public School in Florida Built America’s Greatest Math Team”

Coached by a former Wall Street bond trader who studied the opposition and set up a pipeline that produces Superstar Mathletes:

“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”

Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.

It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.

Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Others he finds on his own. He tracks down test scores of students in his district, follows the data and recruits high achievers. Some who were discovered by his spreadsheets have since graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with math degrees and landed on Wall Street themselves.

The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.”

On Criminal Nature

The reason republicans get so incredibly huffy when any of the tools of law enforcement are ever turned upon them is they think “criminals” as an inherent class of people (who they of course could never be part of) rather than a descriptor for someone who commits illegal acts.

@opinonhaver

Not too far-fetched an observation. Consider the following:

Under the Banner of Heaven (2022) IMDb B+

Disturbing fictionalization of a real-life tragedy (cached). Based on a book by Jon Krakauer. Andrew Garfield is simply excellent as a devout Mormon, dogged detective, and patriarch (“priesthood holder”) of his family.

Features some quick lessons in the History of the LDS which was not very flattering to the Church. Characters say “I’ve had a revelation” a lot before proceeding to perform all manner of shitty deeds. It’s a meditation over common-sense and rationality, spiritual doubt and loss, and the unbridled power that most religions impress into the hands of men by upholding and sanctifying patriarchy.

It’s all bleak, awful stuff. Moreso when even the heroic Pyre engages in it, which is exactly the point. Under the Banner of Heaven illustrates how no one who grows up in this kind of environment can escape its influences — no matter how kind, progressive, or loving they think they are. That’s why it’s so jarring when Pyre transforms — from the man who says, “I love you,” during every phone call with his wife, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens); tucks his daughters into bed each night; and gently invites his dementia-addled mother, Josie (Sandra Seacat), on daily walks — into a domineering “priesthood holder.” The decisions he makes as the family’s religious authority are ostensibly to protect his family from the doctrine he’s beginning to interrogate, but he still uses its male-exalting infrastructure to get what he wants.

Roxana Hadadi, “Under the Banner of Heaven Was No Mystery”, Vulture

Each episode would start with one of the beautiful title cards I’ve seen for a show:

Title Card for Under the Banner of Heaven with exquisite typography

They should give this young actor an Emmy for the few minutes she’s on screen 💯

Se7en by David Seidman and Ralph Tedesco A

'Se7en' by David Seidman and Ralph Tedesco

Came recommended by HU. I had to borrow them from PG1. A limited, 7-part comic book series based on one of my favorite movies. Told from the perspective of John Doe and provides his backstory which is about as sad and disturbing as you can imagine it would be. About as gory as the movie itself. Most parts have a different style. Plenty of out-of-context Bible quotes. Just really well-executed.

  1. These are hard to find and expensive: anywhere from $250 on eBay to $350 on Amazon. ↩︎

Shorting Things

You predict (or have insider information) that the price of lawnmowers will fall. The current market price of a lawnmower is $1,000. You go to Eddie’s Lawnmower Rental Company and rent a lawnmower from Eddie for $10 a day. He doesn’t care about you returning the same lawnmower; he just wants you to return a lawnmower (assume that all lawnmowers involved in this story are in great working condition).

You sell this lawnmower to your neighbour for $1,000.

Ten days later, and as you predicted, the price of lawnmowers falls to $500. Now you buy another lawnmower for $500 and return a lawnmower to Eddie. So now you have gained: $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $400.

Now say you made a bad prediction and the price of lawnmowers went up to $1,500. So now you have lost $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($1,500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $600.

Theoretically, there is no bottom to your losses. So you have to be very careful when you short things. It’s not for everyone. Stick to Index Funds if you don’t understand what you’re doing.

Finally, here’s some discussion on where the expression ‘going short’ may have come from.

“I Fucking Hate Jira” is a collection of people sharing their feelings about one of the worst pieces of software I continue to use every day.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link)

Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially designated a superfund site. My goddamn ticket tracker shouldn’t spin up my fans when I try to do something as austere as access the backlog, but, as we all know, it’s impossible to display tickets withou 21 MB of JavaScript and 164 HTTP requests. (Yes, those are real numbers.) (link)

and finally,

JIRA makes it dangerously easy to implement overly bureaucratic processes. A certain kind of organization is drawn to it for that reason. Even a healthy organization switching to JIRA can get carried away with the tools now at its disposal. JIRA is a software product but also a social institution, an organizational philosophy. Sure, you can have the software without the attitude or vice versa, but use of JIRA is still a (weak) negative signal about the quality of an employer.

Turns out that the main thing protecting employee autonomy is the logistical difficulty of micromanagement. JIRA “solves” that problem. (link)

Robert Wardhaugh is a Professor of History in Canada who’s run a Dungeons and Dragons Campaign for 40 years.

I know nothing of D&D, wanted to find out more after watching the latest season of Stranger Things, and came by this video. I still don’t understand how the figurines contribute to the gameplay but was amazed by his vast collection of them. Lots of lovely passion and camaraderie here ♥️

Here’s the campaign’s website and Instagram.

The Northman (2022) IMDb B+

Saw with LD. Revenge flick set in Scandinavia in 895 AD. LD thought that the ultraviolence was a bit gratuitous and didn’t serve the plot very well. I don’t know what one would expect from a story about a beefy Viking beserker hell-bent on revenge. Lush, beautiful, amazing visuals from Eggers and crew. I wish I saw this in the theater. This is Eggers’ third movie after The Lighthouse (which we thoroughly enjoyed) and The Witch (which I am too much of a chicken to watch). Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy are simply excellent.