The Brothers Sun

Only watched 1.5 episodes so far. Nice enough fight scenes but don't care much for the repeatedly "funny" dialogues between the brothers.

Godzilla Minus One

Great film! More war film with wonderful monster spectacle than just a monster film.

Good exposition, serious time for characters, and a good score.

Slightly surprised at the happy ending; I expected him to actually die.

Caitrin Keiper - "Do Elephants Have Souls"

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls

One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical – a matriarch's recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water – to the passionate – grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend.

After the elephant had struck him, she "realized" that he could not walk and, using her trunk and front feet, had gently moved him several meters and propped him up under the shade of a tree. There she stood guard over him through the afternoon, through the night, and into the next day. Her family left her behind, but she stayed on, occasionally touching him with ther trunk. When a herd of buffaloes came to drink at the trough, she left his side and chased them away. It was clear to the man that she "knew" that he was injured and took it upon herself to protect him.

Staff members at the Elephant Sanctuary told me of an incident with one of their "girls," who spotted a falled bird outside her barn and ran right over to it, utterly distraught. She crooned and stroked it and did not settle down till it had been properly laid to rest. What did this mean to her, exactly? We don't know. But she was clearly very moved by a fellow creature's woe and had no trouble seeing it for what it was, different life forms through they were.

In his thoughtful 1985 essay "Tool, Image, and Grave," the phiosopher of biology Hans Jonas takes up three activities attributed solely to humans.

On one count, elephants fail the tool test, for they do not make artefacts they then reuse. [...] However, they do use objects as intermediaries between them and their environment, such as stick to scratch between their toes and remove bugs from other areas, or twisted clumps of grass like Q-tips to clean inside their ears or whisks to swat at flies. As J.H. Williams recounts in "Elephant Bill" (1950), work elephants in Asia collared with bells have been known to plug up the bells with mud so that they can go and steal bananas in the middle of the night unnoticed – a purposeful modification of someone else's tool. Elephants dig holes for water, cover them with plugs of bark and grass, and return later to their secret stash. Elephants learn by trial and error what sorts of materials do and do not shock them in their efforts to break through electric fences – and in at least one recorded instance (described in Lawrence Anthony's The Elephant Whisperer, 2009), followed the buzzing of the fence all the way around to its origin, the generator, which, having been stomped to smithereens, allowed them to untwine the fence and go their merry way.

Ruby, who spent almost her entire life at the Phoenix Zoo and was given paints for recreation after her keepers observed her always doodling in the sand, would commonly select paint colors that matched events around her, such as visitors' shirts outside her cage or the red, yellow and white of a fire truck that had pulled up with flashing lights earlier in the day.

Jonas's final and strongest criterion is the grave. [...] Here [man] is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that – whatever it may mean to them – purposively commemorate their dead, in a way Joyce Poole calls "eerie and deeply moving": "It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. it's as even the birds have stopped singing." Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, "they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches."

D. Graham Burnett - "Fracking Eyeballs"

ihttps://asteriskmag.com/issues/04/fracking-eyeballs

involuntary attention seemed to work better when things made less sense.

"irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones." Howard K Nixon found. Which is to say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue.

Pearl

Prequel to "X", and filmed side by side.

Good stuff, mostly character development, with obvious plot.

Farm houses, barns, alligators, and sharp objects.

on Quake and Trent Reznor

Trent Reznor, who did the soundtrack of the first Quake (1996), didn't want to do it for Quake II because the game "lacked atmosphere", in his interview with Insider Magazine.

He wanted a soundtrack that was less explosive, less metal-driving-the-game-experience like the heavy metal Doom and Doom 2 used, but more like John Carpenter or David Lynch movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n8iU7abqkQ

Noah Caldwell-Gervais essay:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBDI35NjQg

Fargo s5

with her from Ted Lasso (Juno--) and John Hamm... good stuff.

Darker than other seasons. And a sprinkle of magic realism!

George Stiffman - "America doesn't know tofu"

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/02/america-doesn-t-know-tofu

A common misconception outside of Asian communities is that tofu is just an ingredient. In fact, it's an entire category of proteins. Just as a chef would never cook chicken breast like chicken feet, so too are these tofus completely different from one another. They have different strengths and weaknesses. They have different flavors. They have different mouthfeels. It's not like substituting a black bean for a kidney bean. Because these tofus are so different from one another, and from meat, each one opens up its own world of culinary possibilities.

Peter Watts - "Blindsight"

amazing hard sci-fi exploring whether sentience is actually worth it, via a First Contact situation with a ship called Rorschach.

"memories aren't historical archives. They're-improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that's not to say your memories aren't true, okay? They're an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they're not photographs. More like impressionist paintings."

"I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere."

"I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online."

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message, only after wasting time and effort does the deception become apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
    Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
    The signal is an attack.

"One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multi-feature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly side-cast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as ... counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."
    I felt my jaw clencing. "And the expressions? What do they represent?"
    "Software customizes output for user."
    An agonizing gallery pled for mercy on all sides.
    "I am wired for hunting," he reminded gently.

Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans, yet orangs consistently recognize themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time. Gorillas don't self-recognize at all. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys - not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives. Such facts almost suggest that sentience itself could be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

is alright.  First half was fine, but the time warp thing etc in the second half... meh.

The Harder They Fall

Western, Black actors and settings.

(Them going into a "white town" which is literally white is just great.)

Proper Western.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

about how stories change and morph.

I thought I would love it, but couldn't care much about it.

Played this probably a year or more ago.

Gears of War and Disco Elysium essays by Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Gears of War

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_7ngJDbUQE

Disco Elysium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-gQCZL8VA8

Saltburn

With the (in)famous cum bath scene.

Parody? Satire?

I couldn't really see the point.

Genevieve Valentine - "Dream Houses"

Jump ship, crew got killed/murdered, except for one.

Novella.

The Killer

Great "slow assassin protagonist" film by David Lynch.

Negatiator - "Dark is the Night - Soviet Song Тёмная ночь"

It seems the "soviet song" part is part of the title.

Krobak - "Broken (Are Little Victories by the Ship of Life)"

It's as if Yann Tiersen goes post-rock.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais on Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring

Don't always agree with him, but as always, mightily entertaining essay.

Olivie Blake - "The Atlas Six"

Another magic novel, enjoyable so far.

Six (former) students are invited for an apprenticeship at the "hidden" library of Alexandria, ran by a guy names Blake Atlas.

Nico + Libby ("physicalists"?), Callum (empath), Parisa (telepath), Reina (naturalist), Tristan (illusionists)

Writing is OK, the story is fun, even though some parts and character descriptions seem rushed.

Every chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the six, which works surprisingly well to create a coherent narrative.