2023s
I bought supermarket coffee beans yesterday—and like them. My status as a coffee snob is in grave danger.
At the supermarket today I was in line at the cash register behind a rotund voluble middle-aged gentleman who chatted up not one but TWO middle-aged women, also in line. He laughed “HURH HURH HURH” with every sentence. A real John Candy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” vibe.
I also saw another gentleman, sinewy build, with leathery skin, wearing plaid shorts, a sweatshirt, a leather tyrolean hat and a small knapsack on his back. His clothes were weathered and so was he. It was a good look.
Apple buried the setting in WatchOS 10.2 for re-activating swiping to change watchfaces. You need to go into the Settings app, and then Clock -> Swipe to Switch Watch Face. And you need to do it on the Watch itself, not in the Watch app on the phone.
My latest: Cloud cost-consciousness is having a moment. Companies are rediscovering cost awareness, which Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls a “lost art.”
What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?
As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause
Terry Gilliam and Jonathan Pryce on making “Brazil.”
“Robert De Niro prepared to play a plumber by watching a brain surgeon.” …
De Niro agreed because he was a Python fan, Gilliam cast his daughter but she cut her hair off in protest and Pryce needed a wig as he’d just been playing a friar with a tonsure.
“Ask a Manager” says “this is the best office holiday party date story of all time.”
It’s EVEN BETTER THAN THAT.
I’m glad to see work is continuing on ActivityPub support in Tumblr (here’s a statement on Tumblr from CEO Matt Mullenweg), and also not surprised to find there isn’t much interest in WordPress ActivityPub support.
Most people who want something with ActivityPub support just go to Mastodon. At least for now.
We brought Minnie in for a good dog wash for the first time in too long. We tried a new place. They did a good job, but they used perfumed shampoo on her, and now my office, where she sleeps at night, smells like a New Orleans whorehouse.
“… blogging never died…. journalists just stopped paying attention.”
Bruce Schneier: It’s easy to think of generative AI as a friend rather than a service, making us vulnerable to profit-seeking corporations. “AI models, controlled by large corporations, inherently prioritize profit over ethics.”
We have seen ”Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” and I have thoughts
It was very enjoyable. I see fans ranking it as third of the five Indy movies. I’ll go with that.
They did a great job de-aging Harrison Ford for the opening sequence. Apparently this was a result of skilled direction as much a CGI; I noted they cut the camera away from Indy when he was about to do something too athletic, and then cut back to him when the athletic thing was complete. Often, action featuring Indy was shot from the rear.
This quick-cutting was also done in scenes where 1969-Indy is being athletic. For example, in the scene where Indy steals a police horse, we see him standing next to the horse, then we see him on the horse, but we don’t see him getting on the horse. Presumably octogenarian Harrison Ford understandably had a little trouble there.
Still, Ford is in fantastic shape for an 80-year-old. He’s in good shape for any age.
When we watched the second “Ant-Man” movie, where they de-aged Michael Douglas for flashback scenes, I noticed that Douglas looked young, but moved like an older man, a little stiff, like his joints bothered him. Ford doesn’t have that stiffness.
In another instance of casting an older man in an action movie: The 1996 “The Rock” starred Sean Connery, then 66 years old. I noted at the time that the camera cut away whenever the action called for Connery to run.
They had the right amount of pathos at the beginning. A friend who works in Hollywood said Hollywood writers eventually come to hate their characters, and start to torture them, which often makes long-running TV shows hard to watch. Similarly, at least one of the Tobe Maguire Spider-Man sequels was a downer, featuring depressed Peter Parker. “Dial of Destiny” could have gone that way, as we open the 1969 sequence with washed-up sad lonely Indiana Jones. But the movie spent just the right amount of time on that bit, before launching into the action, where Indy perks up.
They had the right amount of fanservice. Sometimes it seems like you need to take a college class to appreciate the Marvel movies, or Star Trek, or Doctor Who, what with all the references to events and characters from previous movies and TV. “Dial of Destiny” had just the right amount of that kind of thing. Hey, it’s John Rhys Davies, and there’s Indy’s fedora, bullwhip and leather jacket. Cool.
Harrison Ford does a great oh-shit face. I feel like this is a formula in every Indiana Jones movie. Indy does something swashbuckly and sneers at his enemies. He enjoys the triumph for a moment and then realizes he’s badly outnumbered and outgunned. Oh, shit.
I was surprised by character development and feelings at the end. Didn’t expect quite so much heart.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge almost stole the movie. And stealing an Indiana Jones movie from Harrison Ford is something. I could absolutely watch a series of Indiana Jones sequels featuring Waller-Bridge. There’d be a scene at the beginning of each movie where her character consults with Indiana Jones for a few minutes, but that would be the extent of Indy’s involvement in the movie.
I could also watch a series of movies featuring Archimedes as Bronze Age Indiana Jones. I don’t think the ancient Greeks or Romans had giant arrows that could be used to shoot down fighter planes. I don’t think they had much in the way of artillery at all, unless you count catapults as artillery. Did they even have catapults? Idk. But the Ancient Greece bits were fun.
The movie did a great job recreating 1969 New York. I grew up on Long Island, and spent time in New York in in the mid-late 1970s, and it was like that.