On one of the problems with leaving the 9-to-6 corporate world for grad school is that the alternative hours can sometimes be a lot worse. Due to a combination of over-committing myself, underestimating the amount of work I’m taking on, and a confluence of deadlines, I figure that in the seven days between last Saturday and yesterday, I put in 90-100 hours of coding, much of it pretty tedious. This is really not the way I would like to do things.
Still, it’s interesting to observe the kind of state this puts one in, though not entirely pleasant. Mostly, I feel remarkably hollowed out. My actions feel mechanical. My interactions feel scripted and overly efficient. My empathy, enthusiasm and humour have left me. (Though the empathy thing may be a pre-existing condition — touch-feely, I am not.) Not only am I not my usual witticism-dropping self, but one night I tried watching an episode of The Daily Show, but all I could think was “this is boring, I should debug my controller class and go to bed so I can wake up in time to catch the 8:47 bus”.
However, I think I’m finally done the Vancouver Art Gallery ActionScript side project that has become such a time sink, and I will never, ever use ActionScript for client-side computing again. Which means I can spent this weekend going to the film festival and planning my trip to Thailand. So huzzah for me!
Needless to say, there’s a wikipedia article. “The equation in the background of the chorus is Schrödinger’s wave equation for the hydrogen atom; however, there is an error in that Planck’s constant is displayed in place of Dirac’s constant.”
I just bought my tickets for the Vancouver International Film Festival. As usual, there’s a lot of dreary-looking films about artists and diseases and camcorder-powered political diatribes, which… yeah. Keep it up, guys. Maybe one day we can finally scrub the last vestiges of cinematic art from art films.
The VIFF specializes in Asian cinema, but they seem to completely miss a lot of what I want to see. Are Kim Ki-duk and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang such household names that they doesn’t need their films picked up by the VIFF? They both have new films that played Toronto and I wanna see them, dammit! Not to mention Werner Herzog’s new movie with Christian Bale. Though at least that one, I’m pretty sure I’ll eventually be able to see.
In some past years, I’ve bought a pass and watched three to five films a day. But as you may have noticed, I’ve grown a little frustrated with the VIFF’s programming, so this year I’m just buying a handful of tickets to films I’m really interested in seeing.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. “Famous” Lacan scholar Slavoj Zizek tours cinema from a psychoanalytic perspective. Yeah, I know. Still, Zizek is a much more entertaining writer than his colleagues, and I’m curious to see this. I really like grand overviews of cinema from specific viewpoints.
Colour Me Kubrick. John Malkovich in a fact-based role of a man who pretends to be Stanley Kubrick.
The Root of All Evil? One of my heroes, Richard Dawkins, wails on religion for a while.
The Host. “A mutant emerges from Seoul’s Han River and focuses its attention on attacking people.” Sign me the fuck up!
Syndromes and a Century. Seeing this Thai film based on the rapturous reviews coming out of the Toronto film festival.
Hana. With Afterlife and Nobody Knows, Kore-eda Hirokazu makes it into the ranks of Japanese directors whose films I’ll go see almost no matter what.
Big Bad Love, Juvenile A. Miike Takashi, too, but for different reasons.
Woman on the Beach. Another film getting raves from Toronto.
Renaissance. Anime-inspired French sci-fi. I’m half-expecting a pretty, pretentious wreck of a film, a la Ghost in the Shell 2, and half thinking I’ll be disappointed if it’s not.
Radiant City. A documentary about suburban sprawl that the festival guide is selling in the most obnoxiously simpleminded and preachy way imaginable? Word!
I just saw The Descent. I’ll probably write more about it later, since it’s the kind of film I love discovering and recommending.
In short, fantastic. Probably the best movie I’ve seen this year (though my cinematic consumption has been way down in ‘06). It’s smart and original and filled with subtle references to other films and unexpected twists. It’s one of the few horror/thriller movies that actually got to me — even before things get really hairy at the halfway point, there are moments of truly heart-pounding tension. In fact, there’s a scene early on with a woman squirming through a cave that is so freaking claustrophobic, I had to close my eyes. But it’s not just scary and intense, it’s also really good, which is also exhilarating in itself. It’s like watching Jaws. Not that’s it’s quite at that level, but it’s the same kind of feeling. Oh, and the photography is amazing — almost all of the movie takes place underground, lit my flashlights and flares, and it really feel like it.
All that, plus smart, ass-kicking, blood-splattered ladies in spelunking gear. And who doesn’t dig that?
Went to Zulu tonight and got my ticket to TV on the Radio. Last one they had. Based on their new album (deliciously named Return to Cookie Mountain), TV on the Radio has gone from a group I was barely interested in to one I’m really excited about seeing!
Here they are rocking Dave and Paul (thanks to Gillian for the link).
The last week or so has been pretty aggravating and stressful — I’m working on a project which I can’t yet talk about, but it involves a lot of ActionScript coding on a tight deadline. I’m sure there are worse languages to implement math-heavy algorithms in than ActionScript, with its see-no-evil approach to syntax checking and hair-pullingly slow arithmetic, but thankfully, I’ve never had to use them.
Still, as aggravating as it has been, I’m grateful I’m not a film critic, because then I would have to see The Last Kiss. I can’t imagine a cinematic experience more tooth-grindingly odious than Zach Braff speaking the words of Paul Haggis. Unless it somehow included Julia Roberts.
Leave it to the The AV Club to make (sour) lemonaid by using this as an excuse to launch a week-long snarkathon featuring the calculated earnestness of Zach Braff. Oh sure, we all hated Garden State. But the AV Club turns that into an art.
You know, I generally (but not always) fall to the left on most social and political issues, but frankly, sometimes that makes me pretty embarrassed about the company that would imply I keep. Case in point: Project Censored, which claims to compile the stories the mainstream media censors.
Let’s leave aside the fact that they don’t supply any actual evidence of censorship, and every single item they list is a beloved leftie cause — I’m sure these people have read their Chomsky, and thus have the magical insight that allows them to detect how “structural forces” are causing censorship before there’s any need to actually, you know, censor. And, of course, only left-wing issues ever need to be censored. Duh. But are all of these stories even underreported? The number one “censored” story is about the US battle over network neutrality. It took me roughly twelve seconds to find 22 mentions in the New York Times alone, and Google lists over 2 million occurrences of the phrase “network neutrality”. Clearly the censors (sorry, I mean “structures”) have not been doing a very good job.
At #18 we have “Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story”, about the massively overreported, widely debunked, BYU conspiracy theorist Steven E Jones. The real underreported story? “Every Other Physicist on Planet Thinks Steven E Jones is a Nut.” #24 tells us the explosive truth about Dick Cheney — he has connections to Halliburton and (get this) stands to profit from them. If only the mainstream (sorry, I mean “corporate”) media had ever made any mention of this whatsoever!
Okay, okay, now I’m just getting sarcastic. I think some of the other stories may really be underreported, though not because of censorship. But really, as an actual thinking person, why should I trust an organization with the same commitment to fairness and balance as Fox News? Just because I happen to sometimes agree with them?
The Templeton is a little diner on Granville St, wedged uncomfortably into a block of sex shops. It’s been running since 1934 and has lots of vintage diner touches, but the free wireless and video projector showing cartoons are probably more recent additions. It also has lots of greasy food and sour coffee and deep fried Mars bars. I dig it
I find this plot by tech analysts Gartner, Inc. to be quite the amusing, especially since I’ve had professional or research encounters with several of these technologies, and I think that yes, folksonomies and social network analysis are about to disillusion a lot of people, and speech translation, augmented reality and prediction markets are all quite likely to get a lot more hype in the near future.
That said, I wonder about the wisdom of trying to fit the evolution of every technology onto this kind of line. Was Ajax really as hyped as Web 2.0 and I somehow missed it? ‘Cause from my point of view Ajax just popped up one day and made Gmail kinda awesome. And biometric payments? Seriously?
I wonder how this will look in five years? Or two?
On one of the problems with leaving the 9-to-6 corporate world for grad school is that the alternative hours can sometimes be a lot worse. Due to a combination of over-committing myself, underestimating the amount of work I’m taking on, and a confluence of deadlines, I figure that in the seven days between last Saturday and yesterday, I put in 90-100 hours of coding, much of it pretty tedious. This is really not the way I would like to do things.
I just bought my tickets for the Vancouver International Film Festival. As usual, there’s a lot of dreary-looking films about artists and diseases and camcorder-powered political diatribes, which… yeah. Keep it up, guys. Maybe one day we can finally scrub the last vestiges of cinematic art from art films.
You know, I generally (but not always) fall to the left on most social and political issues, but frankly, sometimes that makes me pretty embarrassed about the company that would imply I keep. Case in point: 
