Culture

Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully. This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times. Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way! Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU – India’s going to be a huge headache. This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly. One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly (original). Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic (original) and thinks people are leaving. Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range. OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far. ...

Only one actor who appears in more than one of these movies, just sayin'. (My new posting habit has been interrupted by a case of covid. Doing fine, just not too bright right now.)

The format of these is likely to change, but I do need someplace besides Twitter to dump random thoughts. We’ll see how this works. Thanks are owed to my pal Ginger for demonstrating the value of this sort of thing. If you like music, Elizabeth Nelson’s piece on Marquee Moon is a must read. It’s such a perfect album made in such weird, imperfect circumstances. I learned not too long ago that those two “pantheonic instrumentalists of the 20th century” she mentions finally united on Matthew Sweet’s great three albums of the 1990s, starting with Girlfriend. Assuming that she meant Richard Lloyd as the first. It’s also worth checking out her band, Paranoid Style, which is as one might expect from the name. ...

Or: ”A Lyric Scenario for The Yellow King RPG” Gather no more than three people. Watch Last Year in Marienbad together in silence. Select characters from those depicted in the movie. Discuss your motivations, remaining in character. It is unnecessary to agree on the facts of the fiction. If there is disagreement on motivations, play Nim to resolve them. “It’s a stupid game.” “There’s a trick.” “Just take an odd number.” “There must be rules.” ...

Before the pandemic, I’d been thinking about writing a little aggregator to pull movie times at my favorite local indie theaters into a calendar. I’m bad at remembering to see that cool showing a month from now but if I had a calendar that would theoretically help. Obviously I didn’t need it for the last couple of years but the silver lining is that I got better at Python. I spent some time coding over the last week of my sabbatical and voila: the Seattle Arthouse Movie Calendar. ...

I’m off work for a few weeks till my new job starts! Since I’m watching movies as a hobby this year, and since I like having some structure in my freedom: Finish up Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy (I’ve seen The Marriage of Maria Braun) Finish up the Black Society Trilogy, by Fassbinder’s spiritual child, Takashi Miike (I’ve likewise seen the first movie, Shinjuku Triad Society) A brief pause. How is there not an essay out there discussing the similarities between these two directors? A few people have mentioned their similar prolific tendencies, and okay, Miike isn’t out there working in experimental theater, but they’re both making movies about outsiders scraping to get by in an unjust society and at their best, they’re both cynically lyrical. I don’t think Miike was heavily influenced by Fassbinder and as far as I know Miike didn’t ever recalibrate his style after watching a lot of Douglas Sirk, but come on! They’re practically brothers! ...

Finished up the work discussed previously; I’m now planning on running an update weekly on Monday, which will aggregate the previous week’s reviews. There are working spoiler blocks. An example post: Movie Reviews: 6/27/2022 to 7/3/2022. The code for all this is now public at https://github.com/BryantD/letterboxd-feed-wp.

John Sandford has always been both an author I enjoy and one who fascinates me from the political perspective. His writing is aware of politics, and often revolves around politics, but few of his protagonists have any interest in discussing their political views beyond the immediate. Perhaps this reflects the author. Who knows? Lucas Davenport shoots and kills people, a lot. He’s a cop. There’s also a strong thread of police corruption in those books. Nobody is a hero just because they wear a badge. ...

I watched The Firemen’s Ball recently and enjoyed it quite a bit. The way Forman extracts humor from the banality really struck me. It also reminded me of the Electric Bastionland mini-campaign I’ve been chewing on. I mean, tell me this isn’t a Bastion Council at work. You could just run the whole movie as a background thread while other things are going on. “Ah, no, Monsieur Bagatelle can’t speak right now, he’s at the Firemen’s Ball.” “Well, I’m willing to do you that favor, but you need to make sure my daughter wins the beauty pageant.” “Huh, when did that building burn down?” But it also intersects nicely with the Piertown Borough ideas I’ve been toying with. Don’t read after the cut if you’re playing in my mini-campaign. By which I mean if you want to play in this, drop me a comment, I have two slots I need to fill.

I generally always feel like I want to see more movies. A year ago I decided that if I signed up for an all-you-can-eat movie theater membership I might actually see more movies. Mostly thanks to the sunk cost fallacy. Accordingly, I signed up for AMC’s version of the program and waited to see what would happen. This cost me $21 a month. In order to avoid having to make a spreadsheet, I decided my break even target was 2 movies a month. In Seattle, the average ticket runs around $12, but matinees are like $6, so I figured 2 movies a month would be a simple target. ...