Akira (4k, restored)

Screen on the Green, fucking amazing to see this.

The "intense" scenes where he becomes Akira were not nearly as long and slow-motion as I seem to remember them 

Superman (2025)

No it wasn't *too* bad.

I'm gonna give it 3 out of 5 stars simply because of the Lex Luthor speech, which actually made sense.

But the robots in the "antarctic cave" ... is he batman now???  Superman was always special, because he *was* superman, did not *become* it.

 

youtube - experiment "1000 Players Simulate Civilization: Rich & Poor"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef568d0CrRY 

 

Reminds me somehow a lot of the EVE Online massive heist stories. 

Zoraida Córdova - "The inheritance of Orquídea Divina"

Magic realism about a girl who finds her own way in the world, part magic, part family tree story. Wasn't always fully captured, but it kept me captivated enough.

 

 

 

    "They meant nothing," he repeated.    
    But she should have known. When a man dismisses other women as nothing, he would eventually do the same to her. 
    "You said that, Bolívar."

 

 

    Rey had spent the day after consuming the entire bottle of bourbon Mike had intended to drink in celebration of Félix Montoya's life. Rhiannon hid in the garden, crying and whispering to the grasshoppers who surrounded her like a rapt audience. Meanwhile Marimar went over every finding, every photo. She obsessed over the Living Star, bu there was nothing about him. No real name. No museum obscurities. He was like Orquídea, a mystery they couldn't solve.

 

 

    A slick warmth trickled down from her throat as a new flower bud penetrated the wound. When she touched it, she could feel the thick petals of her new bloom.
    Reh and Rhiannon closed ranks beside her and held her hands. They formed a chain. Then, Marimar let out a scream that shook the valley.
     How do you fight a thing that believes it owns you? How do you fight the past? With gold leaves and salt? With silence? With new earth beneath your feet? With the bodies, the hearts of others?
    With hearts that are tender and bloodied but have thorns of their own.
    With the family that chooses you.

 

Diane Setterfield - "Once Upon a River"

A man carrying a drowned child show up at a pub where everyone always tells stories.  Except the child isn't dead.

Wonderful story so far, interwoven histories in a medieval England. 

Jeff Vandermeer - "Dead Astronauts"

Confusing, but interesting as always.   three entities.  reborn endlessly.  The city.

 

Paradise

Post apocalyptic, enormous city in a mountain, Secret service man finds the president murdered.  A bit haphazard but fun enough.

The Running Man (2025)

Remake.

Silly, but not too bad. Popcorn fun. 

Night Manager (s2)

Still pretty good.  Wondering if they're not gonna drag it out a bit too much with s3, as s2 ended on cliffhanger.

Scream (1996)

still fun to watch, hasn't aged too badly

Apashe - "More (Prelude)"

over the top. film music. score music

Ekaterina Shelehova - "Savage Daughter"

might have been the first song I heard/saw on IG. 

Sicilia Bedda - "Delia"

Willy DeVille - "Heaven Stood Still"

groveling voice, a presentation of cigarettes, of regret, of feelings... So good.

Ekaterina Shelehova - "Earth Melodies"

rawer-than-raw Death Can Dance, in a way.  And in most ways, not at all.

Daft Punk - "Giorgio by Morodor"

Final Destiny 2

Ok, but this was the fourth watched so...

Final Destiny 5

Ties the first 5 films perfectly up.

Final Destiny

The classic. bit slow, (2000?) but good

Final Destiny: Bloodlines

Excellent, precisely the right balance of fun and gore.

Bora Chung - "Midnight Timetable"

Good book with ghost stories ("best stories to write if you have a writer block", according to the author)

Semi-short stories (20-40 pages each) with soft interlocking motives/objects, about a woman taking the night shift in a research hotel where haunted objects are kept.

Probably the one about the streamer who is almost killing himself when he stole a haunted tennis shoe, is one of the best.

 

 

I stare at the house that had swallowed teh man's body and the shadows inside it. The dead man's guilt turns the lights off and brings forth the shadow of the dead woman, who is long gone. The dead man's fear rejects the darkeness and turns on the lights of the house again. The dead man's guilt brings forth the shadow of the dead child, and the dead man's fear once again turns off the lights. This is all that is left tot he dead man. Guilt, and fear. The lights switch on. The lights switch off.

The Detectorists

Same writer as from Small Prophets

Small Prophets

Wonderful little series (gentle comedy?) about a man growing homunculi in jars that will tell the future. Six episodes, wonderful stuff.

Carlo Rovelli - "White Holes"

Let's imagine that we are travelling through countries where the post gets gradually slower, and that we are sending a letter home to our father every day. Our father will receive the letters at lengthening intervals, because we will be arriving in places where the postal services takes longer to forward them. For him it will seem as if we have slowed down: initially he will get news of our day from us every day - but then he will have to wait several days, and eventually even weeks, just to learn about a single day of ours. For him, it is ass if our life has slowed...
    If we then reach the desert, where there is no postal service at all, he will receive only the last letter we write before entering the desert, and it will arrive a long time after it was sent. For our father, the edge of the desert is therefore the place where for him our time stops. It is the horizon beyond which we can no longer be seen by him. He will continue to have information about us only "frozen at the desert's edge".

[...]

which of these times is the 'real' one: the time of those at the horizon, or the time of those watching from a distance? The answer is: neither of them. it's meaningless. It is like asking which regions of the Earth are truly 'above' and which truly 'below'. 

 

Quantum transitions of this kind - leaps from one configuration of space to another - are precisely what is described by loop quantum gravity.
    The equations of ordinary quantum mechanics give the probabilities that jumps from one configuration to another will occur for a physical system that is in space. The equations of loop quantum gravity give the probabilities of leaps from one configuration of space to another configuration of space.

 

Scientists have a difficult relationship with their own ideas; perhaps no one is completely honest, even with oneself, about how much one believes... you need to be diplomatic, reasonable, admit that you could be wrong, but at heart there is a mad desire to scream, "but I'm sure that this is how things are!" we fall in love with our own ideas, are convinced by them...
[...]
    Paul Dirac, the most rational, impassive, cerebral, autistic of scientists, remarks in a lecture that the reason why it is rare for a good scientist who has obtained an important result to take the next step is taht they are the first to have doubts about their own results.

 

The disagreement concerns how much information you can cram into an entityt with a large volume but a small surface. One part of the scientific community is convinced that a black hole with a small horizon can only contain a small amount of information. Another disagrees.
    What does it mean to 'contain information'?
    More or less this; are there more things in a box containing five large and heavy balls, or in a box that contains twenty small marbles? The answer depends on what you mean by 'more things'. The five balls are bigger, they weigh more, so the first box contains more matter, more substance, more energy, more stuff, in this sense there are 'more things' in the box of balls.
    But the number of marbles is greater than the number of balls. In this sense, there are 'more things, more details, in the box of marbles. If we wanted to send signals, by giving a single colour to each marble or each ball, we could send more signals, more colours, more information, with the marbles, because there are more of them. More precisely, it takes more information to describe the marbles than it does for the balls, because there are more of them. In technical terms, the box of balls contains more energy, whereas the box of marbles contains more information.    

I aim at the core of the matter. I remove from my writing anything I can. I imagine those who know nothing about physics would find details useless and burdensome.  The experts, on the other hand, know the details already; they are not interested in hearing them repeated. They want a novel perspective.

 

Where does the direction of time come from, if it is not inscribed in the fundamental grammar of the world?
    It comes from the fact that we live in just one of the many solutions of the fundamental equations, and n this solution, the past appears special to us. The difference between past and future, that is, is a bit like the difference between two geographical directions for someone living in the mountains; in one direction, say north, the ground goes up; in the other, say south, it goes down. But this is not because north and south are intrinsically connected to up and down. Rather, only because around there things happen to be arranged in this way. On the Italian side of the Monte Bianco, 'upwards' is north, whereas on the French side, it is south. The irressistable flow of time is similarly a reflection of the way in which happen to be arranged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Didn't realise I had already watched this once.

Western where men chase a clan of white-dusted natives who "speak" using whistles they grew in their throat, who eat men, who keep their women pregnant, crippled and blind.

Krabi ("Crabs", 1976)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igROsVAk7fY

short of evil scientist building a war crab that devours everything and ultimately itself. 

Shrinking (s2 and s3)

Still good, although the constant "your wife is so hot" comments get tiresome.

But some really good dialogues. 

And the scene with Harrison Ford meeting Michael J. Fox ("what are you here for?" -"Oh just a haircut") was good. 

The Invisible Guest (2016)

Spanish (?) film about a rich guy who kills someone when him and his mistress drive back from a getaway weekend, killing the son of a couple living nearby.

Most of it an 'interrogation' of a woman trying to help him with his defense... who turns out to be someone different. 

Enemy (2013)

Intriguing film where Jake Gylenhall discovers he has a "body double". The meek professor and the actor start to get interested in each other (and each other's wives)

 

Strange symbolism of spiders, including the very last shot where his pregnant wife suddenly becomes a massive spider (symbolic) 

Pluribus

 so good.

 sci fi series where an extra-terrestial signal is the base encoding for a virus that makes all humanity "one" (the "joining") except for 11 individuals.

What follows is a weirdly psychological game between Carol (writer) and them.

 

Amazing stuff. 

Tron: Ares

fucking waste of time

"Moon" (2009)

Had forgotten many details.  Even with the story known, still pretty good.

Tindersticks & Robert Patterson - "Willow"

credit song of "High Life".  Quite moody and fitting.

"High Life" (2018)

film by Claire Denis.

Robert Patterson and others.

 

Criminals are on a spaceship on their way to a black hole.  One way mission.

The doctor is obsessed with fertility.

Strange, slow scenes.

 

"Still - Michael J Fox documentary"

Good stuff.

Sarah Clegg - "The Dead of Winter" (the Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas)

  Good overview of some of the old traditions, Christmas, Krampus, and how they came to be.

 

 

Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose, who travels house to house every Christmas leading a cavalcade of the dead. If she finds a child who hasn't done their chores she slits open their belly, pulls out their guts, stuffs them with straw, and then sews up the wound with a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread.
[...]
Krampus, a hideous towering demon with enormous horns who beats children with a switch or steals them away.
In Iceland, there's Grýla, an ogress who comes down from the mountains at Christmas and is inclined to eat her victims, popping them into a giant stew while her murderous cat - the Yule Cat - prowls at her side. InFrance, there's Père Fouettard - Father Whipper - a butcher who had kidnapped, murdered and tried to pickle three young boys, before he was stopped by St Nicholas. As punishment, according to the legend, he was forced to accompany St Nicholas for the rest of eternity, a looming figure lurking behind the saint, whipping children who don't deserve St Nicholass presents.

 

Saturnalia - a king of Saturnalia, and everyone had to obey him/her. slaves were served, and allowed to 'speak freely'

 

A century and a half before Christ, the Romans had moved their New Year's celebrations from March to January (the vestiges of the older New Year are still visible in September, October, November and December, which were - as their names suggest - the seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months when the year began in March) the date when new consuls took office. The festivities originally associated with this festival - called Kalends - were about as exciting as you'd expected for a celebration centred on politicians assuming power. 

 

It's not a coincedence that the word for a Carnival mask - 'larva' - also translates as 'ghost'. 

 

There are other monsters in the Marshfield mumming besides the murderous king and the Devil. After all, while the costumes gesture vaguely towards the characters - William wears a paper crown, Father Christmas is all in red - the main purpose of the outfits seem to be to entirely disguise the players, making them unrecognisable as people and giving them the uncanny impression of being monsters who have decided to put on a performance. This is because the play came second, laid over an older tradition that revolved around dressing as monsters at Christmastime.
    Another element of this earlier tradition is still visible in the bizarre repetition of the play through the village, a fossilised remnant of a time when monsters would go from house to house, parading through the town, knocking on doors and demanding to be let in.*

*) the reason this sounds an awful lot like trick-or-treating is because the two are related. However, it's a sign of how much Christmas spookiness we've lost that it feels genuinely surprising to discover that it was originally a Christmas cutsom that later spread to Halloween. In the Middle Ages, 'Souling' on Halloween was traditional - a ritual begging where people knocked on houses promising to pray for souls if they were given 'soul cakes' - but the terrifying costumes were added later, and seem to have slipped back into the season from Christmas.

 

Famously, Saturn also ate his children whole, a monstrous deed that was blended with the blood libel so that in one image of Saturn from the 1400s the god, shoving a child into his mouth, is identified by his hat and badge as Jewish. By the time that the child-killer was stalking the Nuremberg Carnival in the 1500s, though, the association etween the child-stealer and Judaism had largely slipped away.

[...]how Carnival and Christmas blended into each other, and the slipping back of the child-eater from February to early December seems almsot inevitable - not only was he a monstrous fancy-dress figure well suited to Christmas guising, he was also the punisher of bad children and it must have felt natural to pair him with St Nicholas, the rewarder of the good. In response, the stories told about St Nicholas began to warp and change to incorporate this chidl-eating figure - especially the legend of the murdered clerks. Soon, it wasn't a thieving innkeeper who murdered the boys but a starving butcher during a famine who slaughtered them, carved up their bodies, and had begun to pickle them in a vat before Nicholas arrived to save the day - the child-eater stopped in the act.

 

St Lucy has another side to her. This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white visions. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptized.

Lucy is celebrated well beyond the Nordic countries, finding her way into Bavarian and Austrian tradition where she is known as schiache Luz - bad Lucy - and bluadige Luz - bloody Lucy

 

 

first century BC, a general idea that women were more likely than men to use magic merged with female monsters called 'striga'- screeching demonesses who flew about at night in packs, ate the organs of children, and stuffed them with straw.

 

 

Herlequin. his horder 

 

From the late Middle Ages on, the Christmas witch was as likely to be followed by a parade of the dead as a parade of women. And the legends of this calvacade became part of the folklore for waht would later be called the 'Wild Hunt'. In some places, Odin would take over from the witches to lead the dead, in others there would be werewolves mixed in with the group. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weapons

Fun enough horror film about all childrend from a class, except one, going missing. 

Bit disappointed that it was "just" a witch story without any background, but it was executed well, and the finale of the kids chasing and then ripping the witch apart, was fun. 

28 Years Later : Bone Temple

 Just as good - better? - than "28 Years Later"

Amazing story against the backdrop of zombies, but where they hardly feature a roll.

 

The Radical Stardom of Clara Bow: The First It Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTphVMbfmU8 

 

Interesting but really sad life of one of the first super stars and how it ruined her life. 

Emma Kok - "Voila"

https://youtu.be/KdIhq1tb8Co?si=GSIh02EgtVK5Dpts&t=68

 

Holy shit what a song.
Original by Barbara Pravi, less orchestral, but also really good. 

Incendies (2010)

by Denis Villeneuve

 

fucking hell. A mother's will sends her twins on a search.  One to search for their father, whom they assumed died a long time ago.  One to search for their brother ... whom they didn't know existed.

Their brother, brought to an orphanage, taken by a warlord, later rapes their mother, prisoner 72, "The woman who sings".

 

 

What follows is a harrowing story, told minimalistic in the best possible way, hardly any music though Radiohead's songs (had to look them up, "You and whose army" and "Spinning Plates") will keep reminding me of this.

Chuck Palahniuk - "Adjustment Day"

From 2018 (? might be 2019) but scarily preniscient.

People (not the ones in power) kill all the ones in power. Then "redistribute" everyone according to the book by Talbott; blacks in south America, whites in North America, gays in California.  It describes a scarily "plausible" explanation.