16 October 2013, mid-afternoon
I developed a big batch of film recently. It cost me a lot of money, and i’m not too happy with all the photos I got back. That’s not Downtown Camera’s fault, though. I need to take more photos again. And look at them. That’s how you get good at photography. (That’s a pro-tip for all of you just starting out taking photos.)
29 September 2013, late at night
I’ve seen a lot of really good television. Breaking Bad is probably the best television show ever made. And that’s that.
Comment [3] Television
14 September 2013, lunch time
I watched a Japanese remake of Unforgiven tonight at TIFF. If you have seen the original, replace the cowboys with samurais. If you have not, stop reading this and go watch Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. That film is amazing. This remake stars Ken Watanabe (of course) in the lead role, playing a retired blood thirsty killer who has renounced his old ways. He joins his friend to kill two men who cut up a prostitutes face, as he is in need of money to feed his family. This film is amazing. Does the world need a samurai remake of Unforgiven? Hells fucking yes. Westerns are samurai films are westerns. It’s interesting to see just how neatly the story travels from the Wild West to North Japan. Ken Watanabe does a fine job, as one would expect from an actor of his calibre. The scenery of Hokkaido makes a great backdrop for the film. It’s a beautiful movie. I’m only watching two films at TIFF, I think, so I’m very glad this was my second and probably my last. I really can’t recommend it enough.
12 September 2013, late at night
Last night I watched Johnnie To’s latest film Blind Detective at TIFF. I was expecting something along the lines of Vengence, Full Time Killer, Election, The Mission, Expect the Unexpected, etc. Very quickly I realized this film was a full on romantic comedy buddy cop film. If I had know Sammi Cheng was Andy Lau’s co-star I might have guessed what was up. Still, it was an enjoyable movie. Andy Lau plays a blind detective helping super-rich cop Sammi Cheng track down her missing childhood friend, in between trying to solve other cold cases for their reward money. He has a knack for getting into the criminal’s head and figuring out what happened at the scene of a crime. The film features a lot of Sammi and Andy reenacting scenes from crimes, which jump between being grizzly and hilarious. It’s very strange. Some of the humour is very slapstick and kind of stupid, but a lot of it is quite funny. Andy Lau’s character is kind of a jerk, and he plays it to great effect. The movie reminded me very much of a 90s HK romantic comedy, the sort of thing I’d watch on CFMT. I’m guessing that’s probably not most people’s thing. The movie tries to be a thriller, buddy cop film, and a romance, which is pretty hard to pull off. I’m not sure he did here, but he gets an A for effort.
13 August 2013, early morning
Shima and I watched Celeste & Jesse Forever. It was my sort of romantic comedy: the whole film is tinged with sadness. The movie begins at the end of a love affair: the titular Jesse and Celeste are getting divorced. Things are ending so amicably it’s weirding their friends out. Of course, things don’t go as smoothly as they would like. I love Rashida Jones, who stars as Celeste. It’s possible my feelings about the film are coloured by that, but I don’t think so. The film focuses on Jones’ character and how she reacts to Jesse, played by Andy Samberg, moving on before her. I suppose the film also deals with the whole hot single women who shouldn’t be single but are thing. The film features some great acting and writing. The soundtrack is also killer. (You need to listen to the Biggest Crush Edit of Baby right now.) The film is at its best when it pulls away from its romantic comedy roots. The movie ends with things neatly tied up. It might have been a stronger movie had it ended a bit sooner, at the point Jones is delivering an amazing speech about love and marriage at her friends wedding. Though, it probably would have been a very different film. People complain I recommend all the movies I watch, but whatever, go watch this: I liked it.
23 July 2013, late afternoon
I watched Pacific Rim over the weekend. Have you seen it yet? If not, what’s wrong with you! Go watch it already. This movie was so satisfying. It takes 5 minutes to explain why their are giant robots and giant monsters, and then spends the rest of the film pitting giant robots against giant monsters. It’s thoroughly cheesy, but also thoroughly good.
11 July 2013, early afternoon
I’ve had absolutely fantastic luck with comics recently. Luck too good not to share. I’ll probably turn this into a short series of posts: to start, Hawkeye!
If you are burnt out on stupid super hero books, but just can’t give up on them, you need to be reading the new Hawkeye series by Matt Fraction and David Aja. It’s been collected into two trade paperbacks at this point: My Life as a Weapon and Little Hits. The comics focus on what Hawkeye gets up to when not being an avenger. It’s barely a superhero book. He goes to BBQs and takes his dog to the vet. Somehow it’s super engaging. And yes, there is some crazy action too. One whole issue pokes fun at all his zany arrows, and its brilliant. One issue is told from the point of view of his dog, and people are going absolutely batshitcrazy about how good it is.
You don’t need to know anything about the Avengers, Hawkeye, the Marvel Universe, etc, to enjoy this comic. I don’t think you even need to be a comic book fan to enjoy this one. It’s so well done.
2 July 2013, early afternoon
I watched the new Superman movie last night. It was god damn incredible. How has this film been getting mixed reviews? The “cold-open” of the film takes place on Krypton, and is thoroughly kick-ass. From there we move to the present day, where Superman is living like a drifter, helping people and trying to stay under the radar. His life on Earth is revealed over the course of the first half of the film as a series of flashbacks, mixed in with his discovery of his true origins. The second half of the film is Superman punching shit and it is so unbelievably fantastic. It’s all Kyptonians fighting Kryptonians, and the destruction one would expect from that. I loved this movie.
2 July 2013, early morning
So google.com/reader now sends you to a page letting you know the site has shut down. I knew this was coming, but it still leaves me feeling wistful and let down. Google Reader was so god damn fantastic. I’m curious to see how the competitors that step up to take its place fare. Feedly seems quite nice, and looks to be the early favourite amongst my friends. I’m actually still not sure what i’ll switch to. Right now i’m using Fever once again. Goodbye Google Reader. You will be missed.
Comment [2] Technology
25 June 2013, late morning
First song about the sun, the moon and the stars.
Never thought you’d make it but here we are.
So we dance.
And we sing.
Kamakura is the opening track to Modal Soul Classics II: Dedicated to Nujabes. It’s by far the best album of Japanese hip hop I own, and is probably one of my favourite albums period full-stop. Nujabes died in a car crash in February of 2010. This album came out at the end of 2010. It’s so god damn soulful. This track is really stand out. Pase Rock sings about his friend, and it is good.
24 June 2013, early morning
I watched Star Trek Into Darkness this past Friday. The crew of the Enterprise have to fight Sherlock Holmes. The movie opens with a crazy action sequence and moves quickly from there. It’s as fast paced and action packed as the first film. If you think too hard about it no doubt you’ll find some plot holes. There are definitely lots of lens flares as well. Still, the movie is lots of fun. I quite liked it.
17 June 2013, mid-afternoon
I was in London a few weeks ago. I watched Argo on the flight there. The film tells the tale of the Canadian Government and the CIA helping six Americans holed up in the Canadian ambassador’s house escape Iran. They do so in part by saying they are the film crew of a fake movie: Argo. The film is well written, and features a pretty stellar cast sporting some great haircuts. Argo’s credits include photographs from the revolution paired with matching shots from the film. They start with the various actors and their real life counterparts, and move on to more iconic imagery. To his credit Afleck and his team did an amazing job bringing the period to life. Everything feels so pitch perfect. There are some scenes in the film of sweat shop children reassembling shredded documents. Now I was all, “bullshit,” but sure enough there is a photograph of an example of one of these reassembled documents at the end of the movie. Argo was really well done. You should watch it. Ben Afleck knows how to make good movies. Who knew?
17 June 2013, mid-afternoon
I watched Kick-Ass over the weekend. I had missed it in the cinemas. It’s one of those, “what if superheroes were real” movies, based on a comic book of the same name. What sets it apart from most comic book films is probably its excessive violence. Also, it stars Nicolas Cage, who is fantastic in his role as the Batman-like Big Daddy. There are some pretty great action sequences. The fact they are super bloody is a nice bonus. If you haven’t seen Kick-Ass you should check it out.
14 May 2013, evening time
I watched The Raid Redemption on the weekend. I think it’s safe to say there is no greater action movie. I mean that quite literally. The film was incredible. An elite police team need to break into an apartment building controlled by a criminal mastermind and arrest everyone. Things quickly go awry, and their plans quickly turn to escape. The film is super violent and bloody and so amped up. I could feel my heart racing while watching the movie. There is so much bad-ass action I don’t even know where to start. You need to watch this film. It’s so god damn amazing.
1 May 2013, late morning
I was at the Lightbox again last week to watch Like Someone in Love. Iranian super-star director Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film is set in Tokyo and is wonderful. Akiko is a call girl, presumably to pay for her schooling and board in her new home Tokyo. The film begins with her being sent off to meet a retired professor, forcing her to skip out on meeting her grandmother. Like Someone in Love is a film all about deception and human relationships. Most everyone in the film is lying about who they are, who they are with, etc. It’s slow and methodical. A good chunk of the films dialog takes place with characters who appear off screen. (I think every character in the film is actually first introduced via off screen dialog.) A lot of conversation happens about stuff that the viewer doesn’t see till much later. The movie feels very alive. The actors are all fantastic. I really enjoyed this film. Also, great ending.
Learn more about Like Someone in Love at the Lightbox website.
30 April 2013, mid-morning
It’s been a week of movies for me. I’m rocking it like it’s 2005. I watched Upstream Color at the TIFF Lightbox a week ago. This is the second film by Shane Carruth, the man behind Primer. Like Primer, it has an unusual narrative structure. There is almost no dialog. A lot of the details about the plot are left unsaid, you just need to infer what’s going on based on what you see and how the characters react to the situations they are in. It’s a film about relationships, another similarity to Primer, but without the whole ‘the plot is a puzzle’ element of Primer. It’s a beautiful film, one that’s hard to describe in a sentence or two. Lucky for you, the trailer is fantastic. It’s probably not a film for everyone, but I think it’s well worth watch.
1 April 2013, mid-morning
I watched Miami Connection over the weekend at the Bell Lightbox. The experience was transcendental. I haven’t had that much fun at the movies in a long time. The film was made in 1987, by amateur film maker and all around boss Y.K. Kim. It’s clearly the product of one man’s vision. I will quote the description from TIFF because if that doesn’t make you want to watch the film nothing I say will.
The year is 1987. As motorcycle-riding ninjas tighten their grip on Florida’s narcotics trade, annihilating anyone who gets in their way, multi-national martial arts rock band Dragon Sound decide that they’ve had enough. In between chasing beach bunnies and performing their hit song “Against the Ninja,” the Dragon Sound boys embark on a crusade of roundhouse-kicking, karate-chopping, crime-crushing justice on the streets of Orlando, determined to never stop until they’ve destroyed the every last one of the dealers, thugs, bikers, ninjas — and the entire Miami Connection!
The film is available online for $6 bucks, or $10 if you want the deluxe edition. The soundtrack is amazing. I got both my brother and co-worker to watch the films, and they were not disappointed. Don’t watch the trailer. You need to experience this movie fresh. You definitely need to watch this movie.
They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.
— Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
19 March 2013, late evening
Update Mar 19th 2013: Added a new theme for v2 of Alfred. I’m still using it after all thees years, and it’s still really great.
I’ve been using Alfred for a couple months now. Alfred lets you theme the look and feel of its search window. One of the first things I did after discovering the lovely Solarized colour scheme was make an Alfred theme with the same colour palette. I’m still not sure of my choice of accent colours, but I think it looks sharp. I’ll probably make a light version later. Back to work!
Download: Solarized-Dark.alfredtheme for Alfred v1 or Solarized-Dark.alfredappearance for Alfred v2
the name warsan means good news in the somali language. i hated it. i despised my name. i wanted to be called something soft, something that ended with an “ah” sound. my name is difficult to whisper into the side of my face. my name is easy to use with a hard voice. i appreciate that now. the hesitation on the other side of the phone. the way they would replace my name with ‘baby’. give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name makes you want to tell me the truth. my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right. my mother calls me ‘warsanay’. if a man ever tried to call me that, it means he understands that i am someone’s daughter. it means i’ll let him call me down from a long building. praise my grandmother, warsan baraka. my father’s mother. the woman i was named after.
— the birth name by Warsan Shire
26 February 2013, late afternoon
2005 using a Canon S30:
2009 using a Ricoh GR Digital II:
2013 using a Ricoh GR Digital IV:
By coincidence i’ve ended up taking a photo of myself in a bus shelter every 4 years. I should go back to the Gladstone and take another one there.
The company’s shares are down a bit today, but the company’s stock is taking a much less catastrophic plunge in already-meager profits than Apple, whose stock plunged simply because its Q4 profits increased at an unexpectedly slow rate. That’s because Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers. The shareholders put up the equity, and instead of owning a claim on a steady stream of fat profits, they get a claim on a mighty engine of consumer surplus. Amazon sells things to people at prices that seem impossible because it actually is impossible to make money that way.
— Matthew Yglesias, Amazon Profits Fall 45 Percent, Still the Most Amazing Company in the World
30 January 2013, mid-morning
Two days and two posts about my actual life? Let’s rock it like it’s 2005.
January is a busy month for me, filled with birthdays and anniversaries. One birthday of particular note is my baby’s. Well, she’s not a baby anymore: she’s two. She is like me, but small(er) and a girl. She enjoys Pingu, trucks, sucking her thumb, and all sorts of other things. Every month I’m impressed by how much she’s changed and developed, but then the next month she seems to have changed and developed even more. She has become an interesting little person.
28 January 2013, late at night
When I first met Shima I thought her birthday was on the 23rd. That was the day the members of the Japanese Cultural Club (KonJa!) all went out to celebrate her birthday, as part of our weekly Thursday meeting. We all met at McGinnis, a sports bar the Japanese exchange students loved. In fact, it was where we usually met for KonJa meetings.
Shima and I had met one week prior, at Fed Hall, a night club run by the University of Waterloo. That may sound lame, but that place was amazing. We bumped into each other again the following night at the Revolution, another night club in Waterloo. Friday was their hip-hop night. She was there with some of her’s friends from Toronto. I was there with my friends Yang and Gary—and probably a million other people: Waterloo is a small town. That winter term in Waterloo, like most of my terms at Waterloo, was filled with a lot of clubbing.
Between these two nights and her birthday party was a string of conversation on ICQ.
McGinnis was a fun place to drink, but that night people felt like dancing. We decided to walk over to Loose Change Louie’s. Shima and I had barely spoke while at McGinnis, but some how we end up walking to Louie’s together. It’s was short walk between the two bars, but we both fell in the snow all the same.
The following Monday we met in the South-East stairwell of the Math and Computer building, between the 5th and 6th floor, and decided we should date.
And that was 10 years ago.
23 January 2013, late evening
P.T. Anderson knows how to make movies. I watched The Master at the Lightbox and it was fantastic. The movie is about the relationship between a shell shocked WWII vet and a charismatic cult leader. Joaquin Phoenix gives a stellar performance. He is unbelievably good in this film. Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent as usual. This film also featured some of the best cinematography I’ve seen in a long while. I got to see the 70mm print and it looked amazing. The film is really quite affecting. Go watch this film.
Also, I feel like P.T. Anderson loves shots of people running frantically.
