2023-07-30
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let’s be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you’ve figured that out, why don’t you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It’s time for a vibe shift. The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world.movies
2023-02-15
Moving to a new country with a new currency, one of the things we’ve been thinking about is, “is it cheaper?” It’s a very intangible thing. I’m too stupid to do quick currency conversions in my head, I’m earning a different amount of money (is it more, is it less, yes!), and different kinds of costs work out very differently. Recently we had an incident with an outrageously expensive (or was it?2020-09-15
I rewatched lots of Pixar shorts the other night. So much of Pixar’s storytelling is fixating on parenting, growing up, child development. Also it seems like each Pixar short is some kind of experiment in animation or storytelling. A great example is Piper, the story of a sandpiper on a beach learning to find shells in the sand. The animation of the surf, and the sand with all its different consistencies and levels of water saturation is amazing.2020-09-15
We watched Boys State this week. It’s a documentary that follows a cohort of Texan teenage boys going through an intense one-week political bootcamp at the Texas state capitol. They’re divided randomly into two parties*, given lessons in the state constitution, and then they run a compressed set of elections for party chairmen, gubernatorial candidates, and ultimately for state governor. I really enjoyed it, though I felt myself predictably enamoured with the charismatic and thoughtful liberals Steven and René.The Distrust of LBJ-Era Filmmaking
2020-05-06
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” Buck admits while cycling through facts and figures about casualty rates in the event of a Russian tactical strike. This line—and many others in Kubrick’s masterpiece—have been invoked in recent weeks in the context of a very different sort of international catastrophe and its dubiously motivated overseers; this currency speaks to the timelessness of Dr. Strangelove’s vision even as everything in it is rigorously specific to the mid-’60s: the wryly sacrilegious use of Vera Lynn’s World War II standard “We’ll Meet Again,” a song dedicated to British soldiers leaving their loved ones, to soundtrack a mushroom cloud; the Playboy magazines strewn in the cockpit of the B-52 bomber; the political power vacuum in which the lack of a Kennedy-esque stalwart prefigures mutually assured destruction. But if Kennedy is Dr. Strangelove’s structuring absence, Scott’s jowly, Southern-fried shtick as General Turgidson manifests a weirdly prescient riff on LBJ, who’d shortly be advocating his own callous calculus during the onset and development of the Vietnam War.
— ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘Strangelove,’ and the Distrust of LBJ-Era Filmmaking, Adam Nayman in The Ringer
2020-01-01
While Bobby, the never-married protagonist of “Company,” would seem at first blush to have little in common with the divorcing Charlie in “Marriage Story,” Driver found both men had a stubborn unwillingness to really confront themselves. When “Marriage Story” begins, Charlie’s wife, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) has moved on and is moving out, but it takes Charlie ages to realize that things will never go back to normal, and that he is now shouldering a significant loss.
“He can’t name the thing, he can’t express it,” Driver said. “Only through an abstract way can he process it and grieve.”
— Adam Driver Has Put Everything He’s Got On Screen, Kyle Buchanan in New York Times
