sawall

Without going into too much detail, I will say that I highly recommend the series as a whole. It had a few stumbles but the final resolution offers a lot of pay off. The last season is emotionally brutal in parts and really some of the best television that I've ever seen. The director also played with some really fun constraints and concepts; in S3 there was a chaotic episode that was a single live shot with a drone, in S4 there was an episode that had no dialogue, and so on.

I think that a lot of people were unfortunately turned off by the twist in S2 and felt gaslit by the show. There aren't really any more big twists after that - the narrator is still unreliable in places but not over the course of many episodes. There is one last twist in the finale that explains some things, but it isn't dumb.

We watched the first episode of Picard and it seemed compelling but we haven't gone back. We're still going through a slow watch of TNG, and it's consistently great midway through S4. The attitude is a nice antidote to these Trumpian times, where the people in charge are slow to react, tend to make decisions based on evidence, and when faced with moral quandaries, make the hard right choices.

This seems like an excellent opportunity for Bono to become relevant again and unite Ireland.

At the end of January I gave my two weeks notice due to an extremely toxic work environment, and one of my plans was to go back to China to study more taiji. Unfortunately, the school that we went to is at ground zero in Hubei province, so that's totally out unless I do something like fly to Australia and then take a boat.

To make up for this, I'm looking forward to catching coronavirus at SXSW 10 days from now. Wish me luck!

I've got two Pis. One of them is a 2 that is basically a random jump system that I use for non-work Slack (via weechat) and other shell connectivity. The other is a Zero that I use at conferences and elsewhere for hardware hacking that's annoying to do with my Mac. I've used the Zero to make NFC stickers to spoof Amiibos for the Switch, for loading firmware onto Eurorack modules, and so on.

I'm eyeing the 4 to replace my Mac Mini as a NAS. It seems like the first one that's fast enough to actually do that well. I'm also curious about getting a few Zeros to learn more hands-on about k8s, but I'm getting deeper into the management track professionally so that would be mostly just for "fun".

Yup, I am voting for Warren this Tuesday. It's a long shot and she definitely won't be a Biden VP pick if he gets in because there's a lot of animosity there. Biden / Klobuchar might not be too terrible. I still don't love the idea of Bernie.

Thanks for the warning on Velocipastor! I saw the trailer the other day and thought that it might be amazing. I'll take it out of the queue.

Fascinating stuff! Has SF been making noises about getting the band back together in light of Brexit?

Here's the Yang talk at SXSW that I liked:

Last March at SXSW I wandered into a Universal Basic Income talk and Yang was the speaker. I had no idea who he was at the time and he really won me over. He's best in long form - his book is a great analysis of how the current technical and regulatory landscape in the U.S. is creating big problems, and his longer interviews are full of numbers and insights. He also is NOT a one trick pony in terms of his policy positions, but most people end up focusing on UBI since it's so unusual. He's got a comprehensive plan that is actually fairly incrementalist and Obama-like in a lot of ways, but he is willing to go totally outside the box so a lot of his ideas fall outside the current conversation.

I'm also worried about Sanders. Trump and Sanders are both ideologues, and I think the country needs to get away from that. I'm way happier with people who seem like pragmatic incrementalists who use metrics to figure out what the real problems are, and Warren and Yang are the two of those who seem to still be standing.

The only real surprise out of impeachment was Romney voting guilty. That creates a potentially powerful narrative that it wasn't along party lines. Of course, Trumpers have been creating a narrative against Romney for years now, so how influential that will be remains to be seen. This is utterly insane in of itself - Romney was a major Presidential candidate in the 2008 primaries (he lost to McCain) and then was the GOP candidate in 2012. 8 years later and now both he and McCain are some kind of pariahs?

My biggest concern coming out of this is that we seem to have two conflicting reality tunnels emerging in America, and I have no idea how it will get fixed, whether or not Trump is around. If you go look at FOX coverage of the impeachment, they slice up quotes out of context and it really does sound like it was the "witch hunt" that Trump has been complaining about all along. Regardless of what it may sound like on the internet, Trump continues to maintain an incredibly consistent and stable base of support: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

I'm curious to see what comes out of the Dem primaries. I actually quite like Andrew Yang, but there is no chance that he'll be the pick. My "real" pick is Elizabeth Warren, but I'll honestly be way happier with any of them than the GOP alternative.

Upon stepping outside the theater it occured to me that 1917 is like Gravity, but instead of plummeting through orbit the protagonists are on a mad dash through trenches and no man's land during World War I.

This may be the most intense war film that I've ever seen, primarily because the (edited) single-shot view gives the impression of being right in there with the main characters. I don't think the camera is ever more than 5 meters from the principals, so you are RIGHT THERE with everything that they experience. It starts out in the allied trenches which feel incredibly cramped and paranoid. At later points it moves into open ground which was even more terrifying because there was unknown danger on all sides. The story is pretty basic - an Allied battalion that's stationed a few miles away, including one of the main character's brother, is about to charge the Germans at dawn, and aerial surveillance has seen that they are about to get massacred by a trap. So the pair is given the mission to dash through the middle of recently vacated territory in order to call off the attack.

The cinematography is gorgeous and juxtaposes beautiful French countryside scenes with blood and mayhem. There are horrible sights everywhere but the camera rarely focuses on any of it, the view slides off of it in the background like a soldier would likely do when presented with the same situation. The field of view was often limited and the sound design played with that - often you'd hear a shot fire completely out of view and then the camera would pivot wildly trying to find where the threat was coming from. It ends up being completely immersive and the audience seemed virtually shellshocked at the end of the showing.

It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking. The story does not say a lot, but I think the primary intention is to teach the audience to empathize with what soldiers experience in real battle, and it does that amazingly well. 4.5/5

Apparently Brexit is official but... nothing has technically changed yet? There is supposed to be some kind of a slow roll happening, now.

I was guessing there would be a financial crisis next year and was wrong. Going to be pretty surprised if there isn't one this year, it feels like it's 2001 and 2008 combined.

That wasn't nearly as awkwardly sexual as I was expecting. On my way out of the theater, I said to my friends, who I had last seen Rise of Skywalker with: "Well at least they didn't retcon The Last Jedi."

The rowdy showing was a ton of fun. I went with a group wearing cat ears that my cosplayer cousin had made for Heather and me at one point. They had themed drinks, all with milk in them. A 'Meow' was a White Russian, a 'Purr' was a dirty horchata with some kind of booze that I drank but couldn't tell what it was, and there was a 'Hiss' which was some kind of an alcoholic milkshake thing. Alamo really hits it out of the park with the way they framed that - you could laugh, sing along, and generally feel free to be a bit noisy but heckling and side conversations weren't allowed. The MC at the start came out in a cat costume and was pretty funny and then reminded the audience "You are not Master Pancake" (which is their local live equivalent of MST3k, occasionally featuring actual MST3k performers).

Pretty sure the uncanny valley is from the ear placement. Also, extremely synchronized tails? They obviously had a big CGI budget but I would guess the director has never done CGI before and was making asks that seemed good in theory but didn't work out in practice. The ears and tails were often really distracting.

Ian McKellen's parts are gold, he is ALL IN on being catlike. Most of the other actors pale in comparison and aren't all that catty.

The close ups also probably didn't help a lot. In the strage production there is a focus on the audience seeing things through Victora's eyes, but she's one of several people on the stage. Here we get gobs of close ups on Victoria with only a person or two in the background a lot of the time. And she doesn't have a lot of lines so I think I saw like a half hour of various shots of Victoria looking at things in awe/confusion/something with her mouth half open. The camera REALLY likes her, often to the detriment of the rest of the action.

Rebel Wilson and James Cordron's parts were just plain weird. If Judi Dench wasn't all CGIed to hell I could barely tell that she was supposed to be a cat.

There were some REALLY weird sound design choices, especially for a musical. I was expecting that there might be cheesey 80s synth work but some of it sounded like they had resurrected Wendy Carlos to come in and get all 70s up in there.

I have been wondering if it might have turned out better if the director had had more time to edit (it sounds like he was down to the wire on a Christmas deadline) but I'm really not sure if that was it or not.

I am going with a small gaggle in a few hours, including three huge musical fans who may be intending to sing along at everything. I've kept myself as spoiler free as possible and I am excited to don my cat ears and experience the experience!

Alamo Drafthouse, our amazing local theater chain here in Austin, has "rowdy screenings" of Cats this weekend. Now I'm intrigued. I've never actually seen Cats in any form before or even listened to the soundtrack, so maybe this would like being a Rocky Horror Picture Show virgin?

I'm wondering what happened to all of LiveJournal's data that ended up bought by a Russian company, myself. Lots of geeks around our age range were willing to put anything and everything on there. Could be a lot of material that's ripe for kompromat now!

We stayed home and had a nice chill Christmas this year. This has also been our third year of having a BURNITATION party on New Year's Eve Day. We are basically the backyard firepit pre-party before people go on to get dressed up for their fancy NYE parties, then we host all the stragglers who didn't have anything else to go to. It's turned into a nice little gathering for some of our neighbors as well and it's helped us get to know them all better as well.

The last two summers in Texas I've had terrible allergies that've been mostly attributed to Saharan dust, which is coming a ridiculous distance to get all up in my sinuses.



You sweet summer child.

In general, I enjoyed the experience of watching the film, but I have gobs of nitpicks.

Saw this trailer on the big screen at Star Wars last night and I'm excited! That's an amazing cover of Blue Monday and I love how they made the video match up with it.

After avoiding this for weeks due to the LOST connection (fuck you, Damon Lindelof), my cousin sat me down and forced me to watch a couple episodes of this after I was stuffed with turkey on Thanksgiving and, I have to say, it's pretty good. I like the music and the modern twist on all the plots. I'll check in after I actually go back and watch the thing in order.

I had gotten >< close to canceling my HBO, the only reason I was keeping it around is for Westworld to come out again someday. This'll do for a little bit, at least.

I've been enjoying Oxygen Not Included, which is basically Starbound done by the Don't Starve people with more brutal survival mechanics that are focused on feeding yourself, managing your gasses (for breathing, plants, etc), and not poisoning your water or food supply inadvertently. So far, my experience has been to think that the first few days of in-game play are easy and then encounter a massive systemic environmental collapse brought about by, say, all of the toilets being dirty at once.

just went back and read the first page of the Minecraft chat on here, full of comparisons with Dwarf Fortress, and then looked at the latest news on the Minecraft site...

none of us expected that, nine years later, it was going to be a major targets to showcase NVIDIA's realtime raytracing capabilities: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/ren...dia-ray-tracing


also, they are apparently releasing a 4 person dungeon crawler soon! I imagine there will be level builders, which might allow for all sorts of awesome new Crystal Mazes: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/min...t-dungeons-news

On the mutant show subject, I also enjoy Cloak and Dagger, which is a modernized version of the comics from the 80s. It's definitely aimed at a teen/young adult audience but has its moments. If you enjoy awkward superhero origin stories, there's a lot of great material there. The pacing is pretty slow and the powers are more incidental than anything during the first season. [3/5]


I ultimately really liked The OA but it may be an acquired taste. It has a magical storytelling vibe that feels similar to Sense 8 but without being nearly so focused on sex. It's artistic and ambitious and mostly hits its marks. Much of the first season focuses on flashbacks and storytelling, and there is a really interesting exploration of near death experiences including some pretty effects depicting them. There is a sometimes annoying amount of causing the audience to wonder whether events that are being portrayed are real or not but I think the payoff is pretty good. The end of the first season was pretty polarizing but I think that it is ok given how the second season contextualizes it. The second season has an off the wall ending and cliffhanger and we may not end up seeing any more of it based on a recent cancellation notice. I do still feel like the second season tied things off in a mostly satisfying way, despite the cliffhanger. [3.5/5]