Sakra

Curious wuxia film with Donny Yen.

Has normal "dancing" wuxia, but also magic (fire and wind/power from hands)

Sometimes almost Hollywood style western music.

Silly story at times.

And includes Mission:Impossible style face-masks??!!

Sin City 2 - A Dame To Kill For

okay. More of the usual.  Didn't have the magic of the first for me.

I saw the tv glow

OK, 80s/90s based mystery about a boy and girl watching "the Pink Opaque", with the girl later claiming she actually went there.

makom

 

Makom is een even cruciaal als wonderlijk begrip, een paradox in een woord. Het betekent zowel 'plek' als 'geen plek'. Je kunt er zowel de stad Jeruzalem mee aanduiden, een plek die je kunt bezoeken, maar ook God, een wezen waarvan niemand weet waar het huist. Het woord makom omvat tegelijk het verlangen naar een plek om thuis te zijn samen en het besef dat een thuisgevoel ongrijpbaar is. 'Mokum, de Jiddische benaming van Amsterdam, is een verbastering van makom'

J-F. Dubeau - "The Life Engineered"

Somewhat interesting story about capeks (robots), 2nd and 3rd generation, trying to grapple with their existence, humankind hidden in dormitories; should they create a galaxy for them, or should they kill their creators?

As idea, interesting. In execution, a bit poor. Random emotions assigned to the capeks.  Logic was often ignored.

Tom Merritt - "Pilot X"

time traveling, protagonist "annihilated" the three warring factions (including his own people) of the hidden "Dimensional Wars"

Ok read, flimsy story.

Woman of the Hour

"documentary" about a woman dating a serial killer on a tv show.

Typically Netflix; drawn out way too much. Also, strange jumps back and forth in time.

Civil War

Gripping drama about civil war in America, with journalists trying to get a final interviewing with the besieged president.

Not much fun to watch, considering the current state of things.

Ferry 2

alright. not super great, quality wise nothing like Undercover

Cormac McCarthy - "The Road"

Amazing read. Bleak, beautiful writing.

The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale.

Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

1000xResist

This is straight into Kentucky Route Zero and Firewatcher territory.

Great story, about sisters, about Iris, surviving this plague, the Occupants (??), the Chinese immigrating into America backstory...

The visual story telling, the moment you think you have agency where you're going, and the game hijacks you naturally.

Sometimes the dialogues do *not* allow you to try all options, which is great.

The theme of a single place but shown in different ways, the whole "home base", first just normal, then celebratory, then at night...

The visuals become more and more amazing

How it makes you "discover" dialogue to "answer the riddle". In essense, it's learning the right responses. In reality, it's learning about loss and grief and emotions.

Ann Tashi Slater - "Summer in Tokyo: Rain Women, Cicadas, and Visits from the Dead"

https://magazine.catapult.co/column/stories/column-tokyo-journal-summer-in-tokyo-rain-women-cicadas-visits-from-the-dead

Before I came to Japan, I thought rain was just rain. I’ve since learned there’s shito-shito ame, a light, quiet rain—not to be confused with shobo-shobo, also a light, quiet rain, but in a slightly negative sense. Zaa-zaa is a torrential downpour, potsu-potsu is scattered drops when it’s starting to rain, and bota-bota is heavy drops as rain begins to fall.

If it starts raining while the sun is shining, that’s kitsune no yomeiri—a “fox’s wedding”—because the fox, a trickster, is associated with curious events. Ame onna, “rain woman,” is a woman who seems to bring rain wherever she goes. Aiai-gasa, “love-love umbrella,” means two people sharing an umbrella, a couple in love.

Silence of the Lambs

Still very much holds up.

Fly me to the moon

nice enough little caper about a girl staging the fake moon landing on film in case the real one goes wrong.

Kaliane Bradley - "The Ministry of Time"

Fun little scifi story about modern day Britain getting a hold on a time machine, and stealing a few people from different centuries in the past to the present.

    "Everyone is so cruel to me," said Graham, deadpan, "even though I'm very handsome and brave and I have never done anything wrong. Sixty-five, where are the rest of your clothes?"
    "Banished. I am never more bravely clad than when I go sky-clad."
    I started to laugh, a real, happy, unglamorous laugh. As true laughter does, it summoned smiles from the others. Margaret leant towards me, grinning, and I saw Graham catch Arthur's eye and roll his. It was a moment among moments, but everyone was held in it, captured in a small and easy joy. I return again and again to this memory. It's proof, you see. Not everything I did was wrong.

Oliver K. Langmead - "Calypso"

strange scifi about a colonisation ship where a schism broke out after it arrived at its destination, a planet to terra-form.

written in verse

Love Lies Bleeding

Wacky film about two lesbian/queer girls, one of them a body builder, who get into a Thelma  & Louise kinda situation after one of them kills the abuse husband of the sister of the other.

Francis Spufford - "Cahokia Jazz"

amazing noir detective set in an alternative reality of America

Great language and descriptions.

But when two figures came picking their way through the backlot beyond the diner, in clothes made for office floors and not rubble and weeds, it was plain from Drummond's silent surprise that the one in the lead must be the party that he had been trying to be discreet about. He was a plump, baby-faced takata in a Homburg hat and a bow-tie. The fine chalk stripes of his suit were so far apart that they would have looked almost jazzy, had it not been cut with a loose, expensive neglectfulness. He was only about forty, but both a toddler and an ancient would have been equally at home in his outfit. Behind him came a secretary carrying a couple of items in cardboard. She was labouring with difficulty to extract the points of her heels from the broken ground.

    "Oscar, move this gentleman," the Man said.
    Oscar cracked his knuckles. His black gloves were the size of baseball mitts.The Pinkerton's man only regarded him with a melancholy professional interest, and resettled his jacket minutely, to show the holster bulge. Oscar nodded in a similar minimal spirit. Then he made his way unhurriedly back to the Duesenberg, and through the fog they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, and something metallic being cocked. He came back with a tommy gun twin to the one Barrow had seen at the House of the Moon. The Hashi family must have been buying in bulk.
    The guard moved.

Ken Liu - "The Hidden Girl and other stories"

just as amazing as his first collection.

At some point, got a bit tired of the "Singularity" story, it dragged on a bit too much, but the later stories were great again.

Also, found out Netflix' Love Death + Robots, "Good Hunting" story was based on one of Liu's stories.

(Ghost Days)

"The character forms from the Zhou Dynasty were a bit different from later forms," his father said, as though William was still only a child being taught how to read and write. "So collectors from later ages would sometimes carve their interpretations of the script on the vessels. Like the patina, these interpretations also accumulate on the vessels in layers, build up over time."

宇  字

    "Have you ever noticed how similar the character 'jyi' - for the universe, which is also the first character in your name - is to the character 'zi' - for writing?"

    William shook his head, not really listening.

    This entire culture is based on hypocrisy, on fakery, on mocking up the appearance for that which cannot be obtained.

    "See how the universe is straightforward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve. When you look at these characters, you're convening with the history of these artifacts, with the minds of our ancestors from thousands of years ago. That is the deep wisdom of our people, and no Latin letters will ever get at our truth as deeply as our characters."

(used https://dictionary.writtenchinese.com/#sk=zi&svt=pinyin for finding the characters. But this is Cantonese, so https://cantonese.org/search.php?q=Jyu would have been better) 

(Thoughts and Prayers)

One time, Hayley drove home drunk; another time, she stole from me and lied until I found the money in her purse. She knew how to manipulate people and wasn't shy about doing it. She was fiercely loyal, courageous, kind, but she could also be reckless, cruel, petty. I loved Hayley because she was human, but the girl in that video was both more and less than.

Josh Dzieza - "What do you love when you fall for AI?"

https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt-assistant-romance

thoughtful essay

Naturally, people presented with a technology that uses language with human fluency and invited to interact with it as if it were human immediately started ascribing to it other human faculties. Often, this meant mistaking ChatGPT’s confident style and expert vocabulary for the sort of accuracy they would signal if coming from a human. Others spooked themselves by cajoling the system into saying it was sentient, in love with them, or desiring freedom and power, not realizing it was mirroring back human-written fantasies contained in its training data. These errors were by no means limited to laypeople. More subtle forms of anthropomorphization persist, even among those working on AI. For example, it’s common to say models are progressing from toddler-level intelligence to high-school and PhD levels, when these measures of human education are a poor fit for systems that can explain quantum physics in iambic pentameter but struggle with basic arithmetic. 

These systems can generate language that seems astonishingly human, Shanahan wrote, but the fundamentally alien process they use to do so has important implications for how we should understand their words. To use Shanahan’s example, when you ask a person, “What country is to the south of Rwanda?” and they answer “Burundi,” they are communicating a fact they believe to be true about the external world. When you pose the question to a language model, what you are really asking is, “Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of text, what are the words most likely to follow the sequence ‘what country is to the south of Rwanda?’” Even if the system responds with the word “Burundi,” this is a different sort of assertion with a different relationship to reality than the human’s answer, and to say the AI “knows” or “believes” Burundi to be south of Rwanda is a category mistake that will lead to errors and confusion. 

There is another perspective, not necessarily contradictory, which is that how we treat AI matters not because AI has any intrinsic moral standing but because of its potential to change us.

People often respond to the perceived weaknesses of AI by pointing to similar shortcomings in humans, but these comparisons can be a sort of reverse anthropomorphism that equates what are, in reality, two different phenomena. For example, AI errors are often dismissed by pointing out that people also get things wrong, which is superficially true but elides the different relationship humans and language models have to assertions of fact. Similarly, human relationships can be illusory — someone can misread another person’s feelings — but that is different from how a relationship with a language model is illusory. There, the illusion is that anything stands behind the words at all — feelings, a self — other than the statistical distribution of words in a model’s training data.