nikhil.io

I get around 8-10 calls from 1-8xx numbers every single day, most of them pertaining to financial scams (I get as many text messages as well). A few leave voicemail and the GIF at the end of this note shows about two weeks’ worth. I’ve taken to silencing unknown numbers on my iPhone. The Do Not Call Registry is on a quick little break right now.

Americans have received 4.1 billion robocalls so far this year, or around 135 million each day. A recent survey by Talker Research of 10,500 general population adults indicates that Americans get twice as many scam calls and texts as any other country (and even more than countries that have passed useful consumer protection laws and have functional regulators).

Actually doing something about a problem everyone agrees is awful would be antithetical to Free Market principles, a blot on the idea of Freedom itself, and would precipitate the demise of our thriving republic. Because all regulation is evil, I’ll just sack up and wait for The Market to sort it all out 🥰

A Sample of Laissez-Faire Blessings, Delivered Daily #

Spoilers!

A most odd thing. Can’t find who recommended it to me. It’s only around 70 pages and is a magical realist retelling of Stalin’s ascent to power and his horrible and bloody legacy due to his involvement with a very licentious¹ and decently interesting vampire coven². There’s this Dorian Gray angle to the story that was rather confusing and I think unnnecessary. I really didn’t understand the ending (or maybe just don’t want to accept it).

Régis Penet captures the hopelessness, danger, and decrepitude very well.

Pretty average cop infiltrates crime boss’ family story. Like enjoying a Burger King double (with large fries and a coke) instead of a gourmet The Wire. Nice cinematography, great performance by Maria Cordsen as Ashley. There might be a second season.

Whoever did the soundtrack deserves a giant raise. Here’s the opening track.

Short film by a young Villeneuve. One of the nicer gifts of The Almighty Algorithm. You can watch it here:

Spoilers!

I’m glad I saw it on a projector. Not sure if it’s a political statement (e.g. the chandeleir being their elite privilege (a ridiculous idea, untethered to anything ‘real’ or ‘permanent’) following them or one about the human condition and our fraught, parasitic relationationship with nature or just both. We never know how tall the building is: greed is a bottomless pit. This was years before Sicario and Dune and you can just see Villeneuve’s ease with and penchant for creating huge atmospheres and settings¹.

Spoilers!

I sincerely hope that we’re not as abjectly unprepared for some apocalyptic geopolitical event as depicted in the movie, strategically or temperamentally. People just yell at each other, crumble at the smallest setback, and don’t project the kind of professionalism and nerves of steel we assume they’d have in their position, particularly, and dismayingly, those in leadership.

It’s totally, totally different in real life.

The most shocking part of the movie was when an analyst mentions that China was experimenting with AI to manage their defense. I know nothing but hope we continue to stick to Boring Software™ (and floppy disks) in this department.

It’s trying to say something profound or drop a very challenging ‘exercise left up to reader/viewer’ but fails spectacularly with how scattered it is and how much it’s up its own ‘somber’ and ‘meditative’ arse. Tension, TENSION, tension, tension leading up to… nothing at all! And my complaint isn’t the lack of resolution. Like the tension, the monotonous and super-ominous background score befits the script by getting pretty annoying after the first 150 loops.

At least got to see Jared Harris being excellent as usual. “INCLINATION HAS FLATTENED” is a weird sentence.

Saving some snippets here but Dave Snyder’s article is worth reading, bookmarking, and meditating over (cached).

Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid. The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behavior do the work.

[. . .] The hardest part isn’t identifying what to build, it’s identifying what not to build.

[. . .] This is design as compound interest, not just the financial kind, but the human kind. Good foundational choices create returns that multiply over time. They generate the kind of interest that keeps users coming back, digging deeper, telling friends. Most teams think compound interest means building features that stack on top of each other. But I’ve learned it actually means investing in the foundational details that make users want to return.

[. . .] Every guess you make upfront is a liability. Every deliberate act of restraint is an investment. The things that matter take time, which is exactly why nobody wants to invest in them. But twenty-five years of watching products succeed and fail has taught me this: don’t be clever, don’t be greedy. Pick the thing that matters, do it well, and let evolution beat prediction.

Sorry you’re too stupid for Monads bro #

This reminds me of one of the worst design decisions in React: useEffect¹. I’ve worked with it for a long while and find that I’m always doing it wrong and worse thinking about it wrong. It’s so simple! You’re just syncing side-effects bro!

Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform’s dashboard and many of its APIs.

The outage was on September 12, lasted for over an hour, and was triggered by a bug in the dashboard, which caused “repeated, unnecessary calls to the Tenant Service API,” according to VP of engineering Tom Lianza. This API is part of the API request authorization logic and therefore affected other APIs.

It would’ve taken the kind of restraint Dave talks about for an Engineering Leader/Manager to say “I’m glad you’re high on your Functional Programming classes and ambient hype but we’re not doing it, at least not this way. It may be clever, it may simple, but it’s not easy. People who use what we make have a job to do.”

Anyway. All hail jQuery.

The words that came to mind when I saw this poster were exquisite and breathtaking. Wow.

I would be very dismayed if I spent my creative and professional energies on a half-baked abjectly unnecessary UI and UX abomination that neither adds to nor improves my users’ lives, causes confusion and squinting in many, elicits "meh"s from the rest, and leads to lengthy articles on how to disable my disruptive work so the people I purport to serve can get theirs done.

Via DaringFireball with the observation:

A useful guide for today  –  and, I bet, a useful look back at the first versions of Liquid Glass for the future.

Indeed. Looking forward to when Apple admits to making good things worse for no reason and doesn’t double-down on bullshit visions borne of arrogance, fart-sniffing, and desperation.

“iOS 26.1 Beta 4 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency with New Toggle” (MacRumors). I still think they should’ve had an option (perhaps a slider) that allowed me to turn off translucency entirely.

I saw this with my Dad twenty-nine years ago. He thought it was Hitchcock’s greatest movie. I’d forgotten all about it until Catherine and I were trying to find something to watch and consulted the AFI’s 10 Top 10 list for the best mysteries (of course). I’ve read that people love rewatching it and I can totally see why. Some assorted notes and spoilers. I’ll watch this again in a year.

Boo #

Wouldn’t have any reservations calling this a ghost story. It’s at least a reverie (to the point I was wondering if Mr. Alfred would pull a “And then he woke up” towards the end) and I’m sure this was intentional. I am 51% sure that Scottie’s actually dead or in a coma in the second half.

Scottie The Alpha #

Scottie is pathetic, weak, creepy, overconfident, and domineering and would make millions on YouTube and/or the podcast circuit.

He pines after a mirage of a woman even when he has a chance to appreciate her in her literal colorful exuberance and cannot brook her as a partner¹ just as she is. He must ‘reset’ her and turn her into a bland object, this canvas he can project himself onto that absorbs all his insecurities and faults.

Now while Judy is pliant, Midge is a strong independent woman who need no man (almost) and has this vibrant and cool apartment full of art. She has several interests, tries different careers, is funny, and likes our boy and cares a lot for him. But nope: He needs her to be devoid of color and personality and ambition to return her affections.

Even my dog appreciated Hitchcock’s self-examination as the Man Who Must Control Women in the belltower scene. Maybe the scope was “as a director” 🤷‍♂️

Falling #

There’s a lot of ‘falling’ here (well duh): in love, off buildings, into graves, into darkness, into madness. I can’t remember a single scene of our hero driving uphill and don’t know what this means but wonder if this is why they picked hilly San Francisco. Speaking of, I love me a good then-and-now and wanted to see what Scottie’s apartment looks like today. That led me to this lovely website called Reels SF maintained by someone who’s been “movie location hunting” in San Francisco for over twenty years! Here’s the Vertigo page.

Disorientation #

Quite a few to pick from but this might be my favorite shot in the movie. I’m trying to learn perspective drawing and this one’s a fantastic exercise.

The writing is beyond excellent and the show is perfection. Reminds me of a perfectly built and tuned watch movement. Goes through a lot of hands but each person handling it knows their place in the overall scheme and is world-class at what they do. Consider, for example, how much you learn about the Ghorman people and their pride and persuasions in just a few episodes. Consider how much is embedded in this important exchange:

MOTHMA
You realize what you’ve set in motion?

LUTHEN
It’s time for that as well.

MOTHMA
Palpatine won’t hesitate now.

LUTHEN
Exactly! We need it, we need the fear, we need them to overreact.

MOTHMA
You can’t be serious.

LUTHEN
The Empire has been choking us so slowly we’re starting not to notice. The time has come to force
their hand.

MOTHMA
People will suffer.

LUTHEN
That’s the plan. You’re not angry with me. I’m just saying out loud what you already know. There will
be no rules going forward. If you’re not willing to risk your conscience then surrender and be done with it.

The show’s fierce with its experimentation and appears to have no regard for political neutrality and corporate oversight (even in spite of a staggering budget of $650M); it’s an examination of of how authoritarian regimes evolve and behave, and how they need to destroy our humanity to survive, including that of the people who uphold them because of blind ambition, greed, or rent money. Anyone who kvetches about getting politics out of Star Wars (or Sci-Fi in general) is a prize idiot.

I wonder how many years we’ll have to wait for something like this.

By Alan Lightman, from the very lovely documentary A Trip to Infinity.

I fog up every time I start seeing this. His smile towards the end is an emotional nuke and I’m a blubbery teary happy mess. I think of the Love I have in my life and am so very grateful. Here’s a transcript.

I was looking up at the sky one night when I was about ten years old. And I felt like my life didn’t matter. And I guess it was converting large space to large time. One star after another star after another star and wondering whether that would keep going forever.

I had this sense that the universe existed a long time before I was born, and it would exist a long time after I was dead. And I was just a speck that didn’t matter. I don’t matter. My parents don’t matter. Nothing matters. We’re all just specks. We’re just living in this brief moment.

None of us were here a million years ago. None of us will be here a million years from now. And the Universe doesn’t care. It just goes on and on and on. So, why are we wasting time, you know, going to school, having dentist appointments? All of that.

Why are we wasting our time? Because none of it matters.

And then I fell in love. And that changed everything. That mattered. Even though we might both be specks in the cosmos.

I found this short story on my laptop and have no idea who sent it to me or where I might have downloaded it from. It’s funny and I imagine it would make for a nice children’s book and/or cartoon adaptation.

The document says it’s by Kyr Bylychev. The only search result I get is a Russian sci-fi and fantasy author. It was translated by Seva Gunitsky, who appears to be an American politican scientist.

🤷‍♂️

I had a lot of work to do so decided to watch both episodes back-to-back.

Star Trek, unbridled TechBro arrogance, rapid and unchecked technological progress, meditations on ancient questions of consciousness, identity, and dynamics of power, gamer culture, very satisfying comeuppance for the baddies… all folded into a funny and whip-smart script, executed with fantastic production value and brought to life by phenomenal acting (Jimmi Simpson, Cristin Milioti, and Jesse Plemons especially).

What else could one want? I’d put these on my Top Ten Black Mirror episode list¹ too. I hope they make a third but the second had a pretty conclusive and satisfying ending. Fantastic stuff.

Like if you picked some familiar tropes and asked an AI to write a screenplay.

• Weary master who’s really, really good at something.
• Master is aloof, introverted, irascible. Nobody’s interesting enough.
• Enter precocious, young, raw apprentice. They meet by random chance.
• Cue training montage.
• Apprentice surpasses Master.
• Master deals with the defeat/affront poorly. Substance abuse is triggered. May be brief but must be intense.
• Reconciliation and Wisdom. May occur at Master’s deathbed.

These are all covered in this movie, which is about a Go master and his genius pupil. Based on real-life pair Cho Hun-Hyun and Lee Chang-ho. I know absolutely nothing about the game so thoroughly enjoyed the “Hmmm, his opening gambit is unconventional and rabbit-like” dialogue. In the movie, players in Go world append rank to others’ names. Not sure if that’s the case in real life.

Browsing Wikipedia led me to these quotes by world champion Lee Sedol who turned pro at age 12 (!) and retired after he felt his “world collapsing” due to AI:

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

Indeed.

He famously played AlphaGo and was defeated 4-1. Here’s the whole documentary. I liked it better than this movie and you may, too.

Solo act of Norwegian musician Helge Sten. Dark, like you’re witnessing an occult or preternatural thing, like a coven assembling. You can work to this or just meditate with it.

Like a lot of kids I loved cutaway books (if that’s what they’re called). I would pester my parents for these and had quite a collection. Couldn’t and still can’t imagine the skill it takes to make them. So when I came by these high-res images by an illustrator from the 30s named Fred Freeman, I explored them posthaste on my iPad and saved them here to savor again at a later time.

Might be a tenuous connection but I think my deep love of miniatures might be related to my love of cutaways as 2D/flat dollhouses.

That blog’s a trove of cutaways. The folks who author it run a design agency and have published their own book on such illustrations called Look Inside.

I did like the mood (and soft-spoken narration) of the introduction but I absolutely loved that background music. It’s called Lambent Rag by Clark and is worth a listen and a watch¹.

The Air looks nice² but I’ll baby my iPhone 13 Mini, perfection as far as smartphones go, for as long as I can. It was released around this time four years ago and is still going strong.

I was completely mesmerized by the poster for the upcoming movie Bugonia, a “satirical absurdist science fiction dark comedy” (Wikipedia). It was designed by Vasilis Marmatakis who collaborates frequently with the movie’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos. The only film I’ve seen (and twice) by the latter is the eerie Killing of a Sacred Deer.

I went looking for Marmatakis’ other work because I had pressing and important things bearing down upon me and was delighted with my excursion. Thought I’d collect some favorites (could be his entire oeuvre down there). Other favorites are his posters for Nimic and Bleat.

Here’s an interview with him about his process and work on Poor Things¹. Here are his Top Ten favorite posters.

Was getting to know a fellow graduate student.

HIM: I found a cockroach in my apartment.

ME: Me too! Mine is named George. You?

HIM: Mine is Dead.

I ♥️ NY 🪳

Six-episode historically fictive miniseries about how nameless and faceless officers with India’s intelligence agency thwarted the development of The Bomb by Pakistan (at least for a little while).

I didn’t bother to fact-check the show but I was rather surprised at the relative lack of jingoism and mostly measured portrayal of Pakistani characters as normal people. Let’s just say I didn’t hear as much highbrow and/or phlegm-y Urdu. I also didn’t see as many prayer beads, skullcaps, henna’d beards, or sinister-looking people as I’d expected. Indian productions tend to tell you who the Bad Guys are by deploying unreasonable amounts of eyeliner/kohl onto unpleasant countenances. Didn’t see much of that either.

Excellent work by Sunny Hinduja as intelligence honcho Ali Murtaza and Suhail Nayyar as Rafiq, with a really standout performance by Kapil Radha as Rizwan. Wish they gave Rajat Kapoor more screen-time but he did play a highly private and secretive character.

Nice set design. Average, enjoyable.

My buddy GT is reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey (“easy reading, accurate translation, and iambic pentameter throughout”). He noted that Christopher Nolan is making a film about it and worried about the Gods getting excised from the adaptation. Here’s a poster.

Noting the subtitle, he continues:

No, Chris. Don’t “Defy the gods.”

Athena, Hermes, and Zeus actively help him throughout. Sure, Helios and Poseidon try to kill him but, well, that was because “Odysseus had the dumbest fucking crew of anyone who ever sailed the goddamn ocean” (to quote one of my professors).

adding that he wished he could communicate the “total venom” the Professor injected into “dumbest fucking crew”. I find mediocrity, innate or exercised, exceedingly funny. My friend knows this and goes on to make my afternoon.

"Hey, guys. This bag is a gift from those magic people. It holds every possible wind that would oppose our trip home. We’ll be home in a few hours. Don’t fuck with it.”

Later: “He’s sleeping. Maybe there’s treasure in the bag.”

*Ship is blown disastrously off course. Two hours of sailing becomes ten years.*

“Hey, guys. Athena says don’t slaughter and eat those cattle. They belong to the fucking god who controls the goddamn sun. Look, I also have a shitload of fruit and nuts to tide us over.”

Later: “He’s sleeping. Let’s eat them cows.”

*They all get murdered by a hot, angry sun god and their ship gets destroyed.*

Dumbest. Fucking. Crew. That professor also pointed out that every single horrible thing happens when Odysseus falls asleep.

“I’m gonna take a nap.”

Later: “What did you dumbasses do now?”

It’s like King Agamemnon said, “Alright, everyone, let’s pack up our shit and take our fleets home. Hey, Odysseus, a word: you’re the smartest guy I’ve ever met. Let’s, uh, balance out the fleets’ IQs. You take these guys.”

*Odysseus looks over and sees them bending over and devouring sand from the beach.*

“Oh, Athena, help me.”

I imagine this is what that last scene looked like.

“Do you take reservations?”
“How many?"
“Two"
“Just come in. Bye.” *Click*

I ♥️ NY

My friend ML adds “That or it’s ‘earliest booking we have is 2028’.”

Last night, I told the bartender that I needed to step out for a bit and if he needed my card. He said “If you fuck off I’ll just have a Guinness won’t I?” and walked away. I ♥️ NY

Here’s one way to recycle batteries (via). I remember BestBuy having a battery dropoff but they don’t appear to accept them anymore.

I’ve used Panasonic’s Eneloop rechargeable batteries for a long while with very few complaints. The last ‘regular’ battery I purchased was an Energizer Ultimate Lithium for a 10-year AirTag in my traveling suitcase.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

A short meditation my friend Greg Bal. The very first one is of the Pedestrian Mall in Iowa City and I absolutely love it.

Easy-peasy, thoroughly enjoyable Agatha Christie story. Charles Laughton is an unforgettable powerhouse and is perfectly cast for his character. You can’t get your eyes off him. He plays Sir Wilfrid, an upper-class twit version of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses. Made me wish Christie wrote more stories with his character.

It’s also a big, indulgent celebration of Britishness and the country’s Justice System (just noting; feature, not bug).

After many years of searching, I finally found the make and model of my childhood typewriter and am beside myself with joy. Anthropic’s free-tier Claude was of tremendous help and I am much obliged.

Behold, and in cursive!

I spent many hours taking it apart (as much as I could), studying it (as much I could), getting scolded by my Dad, and helping him put it back together. I spent untold hours writing stories and letters on this thing. One of the last things I remember authoring was a Sherlock Holmes short story, a thrilling three-pager, double-sided, written in furious haste after I found out that I’d read the entire canon¹.

It was a beautiful machine. I don’t remember what happened to it and wish I still had it. Here are a few more gorgeous glamour shots.

Elsewhere #

Here’s a Reddit post on the Typewriter, and its entry on the Typewriter Database.

Came out in 2006 and was re-released as a Kosher Edition in 2013¹ which is when I found it after looking for “mystery games” on Steam. Been on my list since then and I finally finished it.

Haven’t played a good point-and-click adventure/mystery game in a long while and this one brought back a flood of memories of my sister and I playing the excellent Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Made me wonder if there’s an open-source engine one could use to make games like these (e.g. the SCUMM engine used in the Monkey Island games) and found out that the creators use the free Adventure Game Studio Engine for their titles.

This is a short and clever game. You can finish it, with all its alternate endings, in about an hour. Like Gabriel Knight and Monkey Island, the emphasis is more on the storytelling than anything flashy. And this is a fantastic and short story that’s serious and funny at the same time: deep spiritual questions and conundrums, Talmudic combat, Rabbinical banter, small business struggles, life in NYC, and so on.

Here’s the plot:

A former member of his congregation has died and left the Rabbi a significant amount of money. A blessing? Or the start of something far more sinister? Can Rabbi Stone just accept the money and move on? His conscience says no. Step into his shoes as he travels all over Manhattan in his attempt to uncover the truth.

I’ll be playing a lot more games by Wadjet Eye, perhaps starting with this one. They’re a two-person studio in Brooklyn and appear to be cool people.

Screenshots #

Some Yiddish Words from The Game #

I accidentally committed the faux pas of hitting reply-all on a message yesterday. One of the affected participants replied-to-all starting with a “Dear Nikhil: Thank you for connecting all of us over this issue.”

I was chided but smiled in awe of how wonderfully and delicately she handled this egregious breach of decorum 🤌 A masterclass in civility.

In German so I needed a translation.

I have spent a lot of time trying to kill a tube of toothpaste and am now convinced that the last 10% of the tube hosts 90% of its payload. The Pareto Principle in action, in defiance of physical laws.

What I say each time I engage with the cornucopia of paste:

My personal record is nine bills for the same, minor urgentcare visit.

Things I’ve learned: It’s not your provider’s job to deal with insurance, it’s yours. Don’t pay outright¹. You’ll keep getting clobbered until every single service provider has billed you. Call them whenever you get billed. Be polite. Request a proper itemized statement with as much detail as possible. Takes a while for things to catch up.

This is what you are to do with the limited time you have on this planet. Make sure you enjoy the Free Market ♥️

Behold this stunning 3D model of some of the activity around the really massive Black Hole at the center of our lovely galaxy. It’s called Sagittarius A* and is some 4 million times more massive than our Sun.

Humanity banded together to take a ‘photo’ of it in 2017. This video’s from that year. The data involved in making it¹ was proof-positive that there’s a Black Hole at the center of our galaxy. Professors Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared a Nobel Prize (with Roger Penrose) in 2020 for their work leading up to this discovery.

Each second of this is two years and it’s happening ~25,000 light years away from us. Young stars are in green, old ones are in orange. We do not know the age of the stars in magenta.

S2 #

At the end of the video, you see “Orbits extrapolated from 1893 - 2013”. There are two star orbits that they did not extrapolate and actually observed completely. These stars are named S2, which makes a full loop in ~16 years, and S102, which does this is ~12 years. Here’s a video showing S2 (note the top right!)

This is space and the numbers are always crazy so here goes: S2 has a highly egg-shaped orbit and gets to ~120 times the distance between us and the Sun² at its closest approach where, this enormous thing that’s ~14 times the mass of our Sun is moving at 3% the speed of light (~5,600 miles/second, ~9,000 km/second). At highway speeds, it would take you 10 million years to complete its orbit.

I wonder if we’ll ever truly comprehend the truly staggering scales involved in the architecture of existence. Electrons, atoms, galaxies, Black Holes. Like teaching a gnat calculus. Oh well. Here’s a guy driving to the nearest star:

Update #

Here’s a video from the European Southern Observatory that zooms in to the Giant Black Hole at The Center of Our Galaxy that shows the aforementioned star (S2) looping around it.

Inveterate mystery movie addict so decided to watch this immediately after seeing the word in the description. Nana Patekar’s a phenomenal actor. How bad could it be?

Pretty bad.

Not issuing a spoiler warning will save you time. The writers might as well have ended this limping and interminable whodunnit with “And then he woke up” to the same effect. It’s adapted from a play which I haven’t read.

What it really is, however, is a (many times hectoring) ultra-conservative commentary on parent-child relationships. The normative here is unhealthy and lopsided: parents and elders are to have no limits or boundaries in speech or action, and are to be obeyed and served immediately and without protest. Your plans for your life and career are inextricably tied to their whims and sanction, even when they’re a model of health. Pursuing your goals is tantamount to egregious neglect. At least in this universe, personal space, phone and video calls, regular visits, and healthy and respectful communication are poor substitutes to the obedience and groveling mandated by culture and tradition.

It’s an abandonment fantasy for affluent 65+ Indian parents, essentially that curse of a movie Baghban wrapped in a threadbare and dogshit ‘mystery’.

Patekar’s still got it though 💯

I’d never seen anything like the first season. A supremely well-crafted nailbiter when it was not a meditation on the human condition and gross socioeconomic disparities (and their brazen exploitation). Grim magnificence. Stood very well by itself.

Never really understood the protagonist’s motivation in the second season. There were several ways in which he could’ve achieved his objectives without resorting to the stupidest course of action possible. But then again, the show was a global sensation and needed to be milked for every ounce of shareholder value it could generate. There needed to be an entire new season. So let’s pepper some sense of justice and moral immediacy over the moronic masterplan our jaded boy chooses to resolve his trauma from Season One and pull more episodes. People are here for the rollercoaster, they won’t care. I certainly didn’t.

(Spoiler below)

The third season was as unnecessary as it was terrible. A self-indulgent, nonsensical plotline afraid of a terminus (Steven Moffat pulled the same garbage at the finale of Sherlock). It’s abundantly clear that they blew the budget by the time it came to hiring actors for the sadistic “VIPs”. Also features the calmest CGI baby ever¹. His highly likely dimwittedness aside, there was zero logical need for our hero to sacrifice himself. Even within the improbable world of the show, very little of the plot made sense in this season.

There’s talk of a prequel (of course). I’m getting off this rollercoaster. Enough’s enough 🎢

Old Dutch Ripples All-Dressed (left) are the best potato chips you can and should eat. Exquisite texture, volume, and flavor. The peer Ketchup chips (right) are a worthy second.

I am truly in awe of Old Dutch’s brazen (gluten-free) commitment and execution: when they say “savory”, they’re not messing around. These are assertive, not meant to be consumed absent-mindedly, and will demand your attention. Every other chip you’ve had is a bland and greasy wisp compared to what I’m talking about here.

Fat claim but I remain firm. You may disagree but you’d be as wrong as you’d be unsatisfied.

An electron is a particular type of regularity that appears among measurements and observations that we make. It is more pattern than a substance. It is order…

Thus we arrive at a strange place. We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but then the pieces, when examined, are not there. Just the arrangements of them are. What then, are things, like the boat, or its sails, or your fingernails? What are they? If things are forms of forms of forms of forms, and if forms are order, and order is defined by us… they exist, it would appear, only as created by, and in relation to, us and the Universe. They are, the Buddha might say, emptiness.

Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel;
yet it is its center that makes it useful.

You can mould clay into a vessel;
yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house;
but the ultimate use of the house
will depend on that part where nothing exists.

Therefore, something is shaped into what is;
but its usefulness comes from what is not.

Based on a real story. Should’ve been a 45-minute episode of a “True Stories of Marital Horror” show than a full 2-hour movie. I last saw Ivana Baquero in Pan’s Labyrinth.

Spoilers! #

Tristan Ulloa is dismayingly excellent as the vulnerable, love-struck, randy, manipulated, and jilted lover Salva, who finally confesses to the plot after finding out that his paramour, the “Black Widow of Patraix”, started a relationship with another inmate (because of course). There’s also this unfortunate turn of events:

In July 2023, she gave birth at the General Hospital of Alicante under police custody. After the delivery, she was transferred to the mother-child unit at Fontcalent prison, where she can stay with her baby until the child turns three years old.

The baby’s father is David, a prisoner convicted of a 2008 murder. Maje and David met during her previous time at Picassent prison, where they began a relationship.

Found this after typing a clever “nice short films” into YouTube. I had no idea that The New Yorker released short films and have nineteen Academy Award nominations (here’s a playlist). This one’s the second film to win¹ (“Best Live Action Short”).

The setup is pretty funny. I love the director’s style. Ellen Parren is excellent as Lara. Nothing particularly remarkable or original about the story: “What if machines were sapient?” is a pretty old question to explore. The kind of intelligence you see in movies and stories like these is far, far away, regardless of TechBro promises. I am more interested in the behaviour of the humans towards these artificial beings. Tends to be pretty shitty most of the time and I do wonder why (there are exceptions).

Here it is on YouTube:

I played the very first one in 2014 on a lovely little iPad Mini and finished it in about an hour or so. It was so beautiful an MC Escher-esque puzzler. I remember taking so many screenshots, just marveling at the art and sound work. Got my Mum, who still maintains that video games are a waste of time, to play it as well. She liked it (“Very Pretty”).

This installment is a lot more flow-y and organic and twisty than the first one (still haven’t played the second) and it’s still exceedingly beautiful. There’s also this delightful animated short they released to whet appetites before launch. And that’s really the word: This series continues to be a delightful work.

I was told that I should play the 2008 Echochrome next. It looks like if you crossed Monument Valley and Antichamber.

Netflix #

Was rather surprised to see Netflix branding. The TL;DR as far as I can tell (and in order): They got Netflix money, didn’t want to pay the Apple tax, and state that they wanted to avoid making creative compromises to be visible in a horribly curated, spam and garbage-filled App Store. That may be the case but, given the original and its sequel’s immense success, I do not find that last part believable. Good on them for getting paid though 💸

Screenshots etc because I couldn’t help myself #

My brain issued lots of happy chemicals when I saw this illustration by Kevin Eric Raymundo AKA Kalbo.

Could be a popular setup for 90s kids but he might as well have found an old photo of our family computer setup: that entire frame, wheels, dot-matrix printer, 14" monitor, tower, mouse (with trackball), mouse pad with the edges lifted off slightly, a keyboard you could kill a wild boar with, boxy underpowered speakers, single CD-ROM and 3.5" disk drives.

Uncanny.

I love that the kid just turned it on and it’s the boot screen¹. Hours of fun and exploration are to follow. What a lovely time.

Unrelated but I also love this illustration of the Late Pope by the same artist 😇

Featuring several seasoned negotiators listening in on the master class.

So you might think, why bother solving this problem? Why not work on some big problem that we know is important?

But I think that misses the point. What if the Goldbach Conjecture, turns out it is opening up a whole new part of the multiverse of mathematical ideas. We don’t really know 'cause we don’t have the bird’s eye view, or the God’s eye view, of math. […] So, I tend to dislike this picture of certain things are central and other things are peripheral.

People should do what fires them up. Because if you do that, you’ll be passionate, you’ll think about it all the time. You’ll do it when you’re in the shower. You’ll think about it when you’re driving. And you might do something remarkable because of that passion. And if you’re just doing something 'cause you think it’s important, I think you’ll tend to be second rate, honestly.

I like the modest view that we don’t know what’s necessarily important, but we do know what we love. So work on that.

Forget where I saw this illustration but I love it and had a lovely time drawing some versions of it myself, experimenting with various shadings.

It’s from a book called Géologie by Marcel Oria, published by Hatier press in 1958. This is what its cover looks like.

This is one of many adaptations of the classic tragedy by Euripedes. I highly recommend this treatment¹ to anyone as a first appreciation.

And it’s quite the story: love, lust, betrayal, spirituality, filicide, redemption, wisdom, general chicanery, geopolitics, racism. The artwork is fantastic and hypnotic².

In a thousand years, I’ve heard of hundreds of wars and massacres, most of which have been forgotten. An evil force is at work in the world, a terrible law that requires the weak, the dreamers, and the gentle souls to disappear to benefit the powerful. In the end, there will be nothing left but a hardened, greedy race, drunk on the power it has acquired over the centuries. An iron-fisted race, a thousand times more violent than it is today. And I’m glad to know I won’t be here to see it.

I mean… silly stories, right?

Saw with the family. Well-produced and mostly predictable. Nice to see actors who’re at and outside the edge of nepotism for a change. Nani is fantastic and steals the show. Got to listen to music Amit Trivedi might have knocked out over a single trip to the restroom.

SPOILERS (SORT OF) #

“I don’t think you’re a killer. You seem like the kind of guy who’d willingly donate blood to a mosquito.”

and

“I don’t have a good feeling about him. He’s overcompensating like a Telugu movie comedian in his debut film. Tap his phone and have him tailed.”

I love these drawings by Matt Decker. I saw a an entire sheet of them at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (the artist’s from Rochester) and am glad to note they’re available through his Etsy page. They’re all giclée fine art prints, signed by the artist.

Here are a few favorites. Three dames and two very Minnesotan bros.