1 November 2022, early morning
It’s weird to break this blogging hiatus after my mom’s death to talk about how the character encoding on this blog seems to be broken, but it does make me crazy every time I visit this site right now. I assume at some point Dreamhost has upgraded MySQL and/or PHP and left my site in some weird state. One day I’ll have some time to figure this out. Till then, use your imagination when you see some garbage characters.
Weblogs
28 January 2022, early morning
My mom wrote down all her last wishes on sheet of paper from a cheap notebook back in the summer of 2018. I’m not sure why anymore. We had come back from a big trip to Australia months earlier. She had “beaten” her stomach cancer, for now. It seems like a random time. But the note exists and it opens with “Send me happily. No crying.” An unreasonable ask, perhaps, but she hated those Sri Lankan funerals with wailing relatives.
She wanted to be cremated within the day. And so the last two days have been a blur and a race. Now that’s done, what comes next? I don’t know.
It’s hard to think about a person in the past tense. To write about them as someone here before, but not now. I’ll have to write more later. When I have the words.
Life
- Living While Black, in Japan. It speaks to just how dark things are in America that people will happily brush aside some of the casual ignorance that comes with living in such a homogeneous place. Everyone is so happy to be in Japan. They feel free in a way they never did in the US. Such an interesting little video. (via Kottke)
21 June 2021, late morning
I bought a new TV a little while ago, to go with the PlayStation 5 I bought a little while ago. Now I can watch things in 4K and HDR and all that fancy stuff. I bought a few movies to see what all the fuss is about. One of the films was Sam Medes’s 1917, something I had wanted to see for some time. Man, why did I wait to watch this? Sam Mendes, the director, has really made something memorable here. The movie follows two fellows trying to get a message to another battalion at the tail end of the First World War. It’s a really good war movie, about one of the most futile and pointless wars people have fought. Lots of famous British actors you will recognize littered throughout the film. I wasn’t familiar with the two leads, but they were both great. It is such an incredible film. One of the best films I’ve ever seen? Certainly one of the most technically brilliant: the film is presented as one continuous shot. Roger Deakins was the cinematographer on the movie and certainly deserves the Oscar he won. There are some impressive sequences I want to watch again already. Shima and I watched all the documentaries on the disc about making the film, we were so enthralled with the film. If you haven’t seen this movie go see it out.
The trailer for 1917.
Movies
19 April 2021, early morning
I used to write about every movie I watched, and then stopped, probably because there is just too much friction. A shame, it’s sometimes nice to look back and review what films I’ve seen and what I thought at the time. I watch YouTube clips and Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White enough that the great algorithm started funnelling me towards clips from a 2015 film, Burnt. Seeing as this is as close I will get to get to Michelin star dining for some time I decided to watch it yesterday, and it certainly scratched that itch. I’ve seen lots of documentaries about Michelin star chefs and the experience of chasing that star. (Boiling Point about Gordon Ramsay is excellent if you are looking for one. Apparently as part of getting ready for the film Bradley Cooper worked in Ramsay’s restaurant.) The film stars Cooper as a chef returning to the world of fine dining after destroying his career through addiction. He gets his band back together, so to speak, and starts a new restaurant with the hopes of getting 3 stars. The movie features all the French brigade system yelling you’d expect. There is a small love story between Cooper and Miller, but it’s not central to the film. I enjoyed it a lot. It made me so hungry.
[2] Movies
- Is Trump Actually Still in Control? It's funny to me that Trump is too dangerous to be on Twitter, but apparently not too dangerous to be the president of the United States of America. That guy has nuclear launch codes.
- Twitter, Facebook, etc, have finally removed Trump from their platform. This newsletter opens with a great discussion of this topic.
I am tired of letting these companies try to convince us that their violent and racist users with hundreds of thousands of followers creating content shared millions of times are somehow not indicative of what these websites fundamentally are. Trump is a not unique outlier on Facebook and Twitter, he is Facebook and Twitter.
- The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of 'The Last of Us Part II'. The sequel to Last of Us is far more muddled than the original, but I still love it. There is a lot of criticism directed at the game, and it's interesting to read people's thoughts about where it fails. I didn't pick up on these parallels to the conflict in Israel, but it certainly feels like a viable take on things.