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I've fiddled with this review a few times, and it isn't perfect, but I'm still rather proud of it:
[The Final Cut:]
The most profound scenes in Blade Runner are usually the most violent, which is a misfortune the original cut tried to get around, but a bloodier international release was much more popular. It's taken years of occasional exposures and different versions for me to understand the meaning of the violence, and I'm not sure how I feel, but there is a theme and focus.
The Final Cut jettisons a voice-over and a happier ending and uses the violence, a brief dream clue, and some other tweaks. The ending is not new (there have been 5 versions of Blade Runner, not including TV edits) but it is both the most subtle and the most Bruce Willis, if that contrast makes sense to you. The ambiguity of earlier versions has been reduced and redirected. The last scene is anticlimactic, certainly, and memorable, and again I'm not sure whether I like it.
Now I know why I never remember the story. Some people call it thin, but I think spare and masculine are better descriptors, or perhaps "subterranean," my dad's. For an overpopulated future, the number of characters is shockingly small, the span of time from beginning to end very short. The plot may have been a novel once, but the movie is a short story or a vignette, and for its lean purposes, that is right.
I noticed there's a more than superficial parallel with Apocalypse Now!--the slow beginning, the virtuosity of the editing, the prominent music, the descent into a dark other psyche reaching across the landscape. Both movies carry you along faster and faster, having started slow and continued heavy. The editing reaches crescendos--in Blade Runner, especially around that Promethean, almost Oedipal scene involving the destruction of the creator.
The acting is brilliant and lifts the movie out of emptiness. (Sean Young's role as an android might be her most ideal.) The restoration has an otherworldly lightness that makes the characters look like they're on a spaceship, turns Earth into one of those floating advertisements. The special effects could pass for cheap modern effects. A short list of movies that turned aspects of Blade Runner's attitude into new emotions: Total Recall, The 5th Element, Dark City, Dune.
Some flaws... the photographs used as clues never made sense to me, and the new cut makes it obvious the logic was exceedingly weak. To be honest, I sometimes miss the film-noir voiceover, though there was too much of it before. Finally, where the dialogue is catchiest, it is usually the least believable.
Four stars is no kind of assertion that this movie is not a masterpiece, just that it does not entirely and absolutely jive with me.
Well, I don't feel good about 4 stars either! If you like--plus 1/2 because I agree with the people who think Blade Runner is a piece of world cinema, and for delivery of this line: "I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those... moments will be lost in time... like tears... in rain."
Oh, yes. Why is the violence necessary? You can figure it out, I think, but to me it feels mired in the brevity of life. The replicants end, unlike humans, according to a cruelly fixed lifespan, or else by blade runner. However, the life itself is not particularly different, and Decker and the strongest replicant share a predatory detachment and human comprehension. The wrenching deaths need to show that the replicants cling to life as desperately as humans, even though they're mechanically a bit different. |
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Oct. 28th, 2009 @ 04:16 am
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In a real infinity, everything repeats.
In real infinity everything repeats
In infinity everything repeats
Infinity everything repeats
Infinity repeats
Infinity |
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I'm doing a grad certificate in some secret area and writing mostly notes and little movie reviews on Facebook's Flixster app, wholly because I like to do it, and no one reads them. A few weeks ago I got a copy of DevonTHINK Pro, a piece of software that helps one make a database of documents and create notes and wiki links among files and concepts. The conversion has been tentative but I think it's a fine way forward.
In employment I've been thinning out, working at most about 8 hours a week, because I'm not really a born tutor, though I do enjoy tutoring more often than I do not enjoy it. Mostly it is the younger kids who don't want to be there that upset me; I can't make them want to be there, but it saddens me that I can't. If I were a kid entertainer, or maybe just a regular guy with better social skills, I could engage them more. So it is our shared responsibility, not mine or theirs, that means they don't want to be there. And I don't like it when our shared responsibility falls into a ditch of countercontrol, whining, and failing efforts to Get Things Done.
It amazes me that Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether he deserves it yet, entirely, is less interesting to me than the result itself and what it means for the future.
It's time to return to this bloody 60 page document on behavioral game theory. What a mess. At least it's difficult but not impossible (even if I don't have time to get it all).Discoloration:  contemplative |
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There's an idea that I've struggled to express, and I've finally found a way. The idea, in essence, is that our basic need to live and find meaning launches a certain moral relativism. How often do people change their principles when they find that principles have led them or others near some demise? If you are a moral relativist, this renegotiation with fate and claw will not bother you at all, but if you are a moral universalist or absolutist, you will feel very strongly tempted to look down on anyone who makes such an adjustment to the cut of the suit, whatever the circumstances, unless the adjustment be somehow knowingly toward what you think is the absolute correct way, your (I would say mythical, but the idea should not be ignored in theory or practice) absolute correctness.
Now I've seen expression of this same idea of altering the chain-mail of action in Wikipedia's discussing the small classic book Finite and Infinite Games by the philosopher James P. Carse. The book distinguishes life's actions in two camps, finite games the point of which is to win, and infinite games the point of which is to continue with everyone still in the game, even if it means changing the rules. Wikipedia says what I always wanted to express but couldn't, quite:
"If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play."
For all I know this came straight from the book, and this long inexpressibility was caused by only feeling I should be able to express the idea because I read it once and couldn't remember the words. But haven't you had a similar thought, that, despicable as it may seem sometimes for a character in a novel or a movie to become in a way degenerate, to lose the principles of idealistic youth because of endless struggles in the world, some of these adjustments are in fact necessary for the character to continue living and hoping? For that is one of the very greatest drivers of human action *and* principles. If the way you behave makes you not want to live, or makes you not value the greater good, then I would say in almost every case the rules by which you behave ought to be modified.
The pursuit of happiness, in short, is an infinite game whose ongoing result is often to change human principles of action, not always toward what the rest of the world would see as noble. |
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I am a cut. Dirty blood is all my failure. I am bleeding scarves on the wind in the water, luscious red scarves taking my failure from me. Failure? The word suddenly is beautiful, a state, an entry granted to the queen. Nobleness. Fairness. Why be afraid? Why be proud, ashamed? There is no shame in a dead end, a quote of nature, an icicle. In the heart, an icicle. Flagstones covered with it. Growing. |
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refresh so rough-worn these banks
my muse, so forgotten your vision
& its tatters, but in your newness
play your organ song your splendor
spineless cutlass carving, carving forms;
drop your sentience your golden sense,
your tresses and your human dress;
feed me from your sticky breasts where
holly draped and rain have fed;
stifle my-only plant and grow my-only;
listen where the seeds of earth have slept
and listen drunk and hounding
I'm your shape, an open stairway and a door,
and you the entrance in
your fingers, which you raise and count in seconds
or inventions, your
circumcision of my fawning lips
a-lingering
Jul. 31st, 2009 @ 12:34 am
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| » the superiority of snow |
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Snowing one perceives air has a body of its own.
As flakes tumble slow enough to see themselves
there is depth;
look at a television and see static,
call it
random--but here is the real thing, the voice
of nature in our midst to stand
in no wall of sound or rain but a field, an ice island, a crystal growing feldspar,
aeropsia.
Jul. 31st, 2009 @ 12:20 am
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| » wolf woods cold real |
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The movement of trees in the wind above, the wide bowl of stars on my head,
the feeling of underwater, the clarity of breathing...
From a stood-up house
here is an invitation:
Come in, Woods,
come in, Cold and Real!
And in our plaster and plastic island
we feel Platonic shapes swaying in trees above...
Woods, Cold, and Real are talking.
One scuffs a boot on stone,
the smell of scones rises and blossoms (in a blossom),
they are sitting round a fire
by a fire they are in wide chairs
by, lounging in clogs and plush chairlike thoughts
alongside its blaze:
"Bloke wouldn't say what he want an egg for"
Jul. 30th, 2009 @ 11:40 pm
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| » quizzing lies |
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I just figured out why people tell a certain kind of lie and then tell you they lied. Well I guess they do it different reasons. And I guess I already thought this, but not in the same way. They want to see how easily you can be fooled, sometimes. Sometimes they're just making a joke, and you blunder into it; sometimes they want to feel powerful for outsmarting you. But I think mostly, with this particular kind of lie, they want to see how easy you are to fool. In any case, the joking around gives them that information. Sorry, no great insight here after all, except I was sort of having a conversation with myself and I lied to myself, and I saw how easy I was to fool.
Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 12:00 am
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| » popular search terms |
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There is a question I often come up against in one form or another. One recent form is "Why don't I write entries on the sorts of things that get many hits in Google?" That's a very good question, and I don't want to dismiss it. It's not that I don't think popular and current ideas (and search terms) are important. At the most, it's this: what's popular is not always important, and what is important and true is not always popular. That is my only leg to stand on. Short of this excuse, all I can say is that I don't know much about what everyone else knows. Partly, I'm stupid. Partly it's because I'm isolated, and that is the result of a sort of stupidity, and leads itself to a second sort of stupidity.
Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 05:35 pm
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| » on being direct |
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It is perfectly civilized to consider saying something true and then to decide not to say it. In fact, this is one of the foundations of social skill, if not the stone itself: to know when to be direct and when to shut up. Be utterly aware that it is not, apart from popular belief, remotely the same as lying. Censoring verbal impulses is often a matter of wording and timing. The same truth in different words can have an infinitude of effect. The same truth too early can turn someone away who would later accept and love that truth. (Can you hear the Catholic Church cackling and rubbing its palms together? I can.)
The danger, of course, is hiding something more than relevant, something critical. Privacy is a right, in a sense an absolute right; we have no unbounded need to tell people what's in our minds. And what a relief that is! And to both sides! Honesty falls down when somebody says they need to know something, and you misdirect them. "I can't tell you" is honest; but a broken, nonrepresentative, cherried truth is not. We have a feedforward sense to predict which is which that relies on our theory of mind, our imagination of what another person thinks or experiences. This also is a social skill. But most humans are good at knowing when they're spinning a meretricious playlist or taking a drugged interlocutor on a long walk to see some roses. Are you selecting, or are you leading on?
This is the sort of obviousness that I take a long time to spell out and understand. It's easy to write but hard to learn if it isn't instinctive.
I should say that a little dishonesty works in play. A little dishonesty is good in play. The question is what is play? Play, weirdly enough I think, has to do with privacy. A game is self-contained within the world; to the extent that punishments emit from the play world to the player--to the extent the game exudes real-world punishment--it is not really a game. However it is free to exude real-world reward. In this way play is strictly constructive. It skirts around punishment, seeks to avoid it. You might have a very different definition of play, but for me, that's what it is--creating rather than destroying. To the extent that there is destruction in play, it is virtual; as soon as it is not, the play has dissolved.
I'm not sure if you see where I'm going with honesty and directness vis a vis play, or even how play is connected to privacy. I'll clarify: play creates a private universe (this isn't my idea--it's called the Magic Circle), a universe accessed by the players and perhaps observed in part by spectators, but the more spectators, in a sense, the more the game approaches reality. (In real life, hiding information is especially okay when it is this kind of privacy, the kind that does not create punishments; a joke is an analogy.) Is NBA basketball really play? Sort of. It's an enormous enterprise, though, and maybe a testament to the original creative power of the whole act. A game of pick-up basketball? Unabashedly play. What's the difference? That depends on your definition, but according to mine, the pick-up game is private and has few outside demands, but the NBA game has to take place, and thousands of people's lives depend on it. If it goes down, there could be great losses.
My definitions create problems. When you get real-world rewards from a game, as I allow in my definition, you may begin to depend on real-world rewards. The loss of those rewards becomes a punishment, eventually. But that makes sense, still; once it becomes a punishment, you aren't really playing anymore. Play is by definition not addictive, not need-based, but perhaps drive-based, or curiosity-based. A joke is funny until your paycheck depends on it.
[A later edit:]
I've been reading Jasper Juul's Half-Real and he talks about this concept exactly. He calls it "negotiable consequences." It's not that a game has no real-world consequences, it's that these are negotiable by the players.
Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 03:23 pm
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| » doc control |
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Does anyone have experience using Google Docs?
This isn't important for the question itself, and I'd love an answer even if you don't read the rest of this post, but I'm still trying to work out the best way to keep many documents at my fingertips. I'm sure other people must fly like this, however attention-deficited and disordered it might be. I like to have 20-40 text windows open with notes, and ideally I would like those notes to not go boldly into the void if my computer crashes. Eventually I group some notes together, I edit some paragraphs and find names and hard drive locations for them, I post some things as posts, and I downright delete other things, but the point is it takes me a while to sort through all this, and most importantly of all, once I save a document and close the file, I probably won't see it for a year or two unless it's a hot file that I use a lot.
This is what I'm trying to work around. I've considered leaving shortcuts in a directory of current files, but 1) I find creating links/shortcurts cumbersome on a MacBook with a trackpad and therefore rarely do it (this could be solved, no doubt, with some shortcut to making shortcuts) and 2) I fear the directory would quickly swell and defeat its purpose. Of these difficulties, neither in itself is insurmountable, but both would need to be solved simultaneously.
Which leaves some undiscovered solution, like Google Docs, or--what has helped tremendously with nutrition notes--Luminotes. The latter's quirks I find best suited to a densely interconnected web of notes. There's something about actual linear compositions that doesn't somehow sit well in Luminotes, probably the need to manually enforce a navigation hierarchy--in other words, there is no default way to just look at your whole list of notes, or to drag and drop them into directories. For a system of interconnected notes, this makes perfect sense (though drag and drop would be lovely).
Despite the meaning of the name, I think manual wikis may be too slow for what I'm after, unless I've got my head stuck in a vase and I'd see how marvelously fast they can be if only I'd learn one. But they're close, and the graphical ones I think will get there.
Which brings me back to Google Docs. That looks very close to what I want for actual documents. Maybe I'll just go ahead and use it for a few days and see how I like it.
It's an eternal problem of mine that I can't reboot my computer because I have so many TextEdit windows open, and I don't want to lose track of what I was working on. Let's hope it's only eternal in the sense of irrevocably having happened.
My final thought is that since I've been looking into databases for my little project, I've started to see how wikis and databases are inextricably linked. Things have improved a bit; my biggest qualms with Luminotes early on were the flukey search mechanism, namely its speed and the odd things that happened when I clicked a result I wanted to go to. Too often nothing would happen and I'd click again and then I'd get uncontrollable, whirling scrolling movements that didn't lead to what I wanted. Something like that. It seems to have improved, anyway, but the realization remains that the ultimate graphical wiki is the ultimate method of storing notes in a database, each note having links to other notes, and providing a nice way to retrieve and navigate them.
Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 01:50 pm
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| » felt it playing the AGI King's Quest 1 remake and afterwards, cleaning my teeth |
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At some point existence needs no further justification, but is justified in itself already, by itself already. For me this point is clearest in a computer game. We think the game should have a point outside the game, but I ask why? A game in itself is delightful, and with a little moderation, delightfully harmless, and with a good design, delightfully cerebral. If you need a reason, a game is the most challenging artform. It skirts questions of the computable. A man or woman or a team writes an experience out in logic, and somehow, like an Escher from the wood carvings that ruined his hands, a phoenix of spindly filaments and mind draws and drags up from the automata.
Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 02:37 am
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| » from Postgres to C# Mono in an afternoon |
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After much agonizing in the last 13 hours, I've decided on a platform for a little project of mine. I'm going to use C# for fun, specifically C# Mono, and db4o for a database (management system). Until a few hours ago I had it in mind I wanted C++ and PostgreSQL, but I feel the complexities of PostgreSQL, a weird if venerable sort of middle ground between object and relational database that (as far as I can tell) doesn't store objects elegantly from any source language, may not repay the effort. This is all rather new to me, hence many straight hours of reading.
C# will be fun. While Mono isn't in total cogency yet, I believe in its potential. The same binaries can run on Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux. That's sexy even if the performance is laggard and the garbage collector is garbage. I already know Java, and that's the point. I already know Java. Less fun.
Damn, I am quite enjoying this. I've copped out a bit on the rigor and assumed C# Mono performance will slowly rise to the occasion, and anyway I can put C# on my resume. As to the details of this assignment, they're utterly secret.
One thing I've kept in mind is sage (I hope) advice from Paul Graham: You get your system running in whatever dirty powerful easy way possible, and then you optimize it. If you're obsessed with processor cycles from the beginning, you may lose something more far-sighted. Or as Donald Knuth put it simply, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Hence db4o, what looks like the easiest most elegant free object database
(ODMS) going. Of course Paul Graham's preference for the villainously quick would recommend Java over C#, but hell. If someone chatty with Java and C++ can't mosey into C#, what can he do?
Jul. 2nd, 2009 @ 03:06 am
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| » (No Subject) |
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Galactic Colonization Limited By The Inability To Expand Exponentially(PhysOrg.com) -- For more than 50 years, many have taken the so-called Fermi Paradox to indicate that the existence of intelligent alien civilizations is an impossibility. However, a recent re-examination of the paradox points out that, rather than discounting the spread of an intelligent civilization, the Fermi Paradox merely points out that advanced civilizations with exponential growth are unlikely to exist.
Jun. 24th, 2009 @ 02:39 pm
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| » the bad pose |
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While I would love to study games, to take them seriously, to pay attention, I can't stand the self-importance that burbles so often in people of my inclination. Intellect is one thing, and grandiosity another; what's really unbearable is all this formalism. Calling games "texts" (or even worse "hypertexts") and players "readers" and whatnot, mumbling reverently about the important questions raised about the boundary of real and imagined violence, or the need for automatically adjusting difficulty levels to empower readers to participate in a seamless fantasy. Bah! Vile and squanderable jargon! Begone from us!
Nobody writes as broadly and intelligently as Chris Crawford.
Jun. 19th, 2009 @ 12:05 am
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| » exotic desert banana |
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1 banana
1.5 tbsp tahini
grains of paradise
good bread
* mash up banana with tahini
* crush or grind some grains of paradise and sprinkle over pasty goopy stuff
* eat with good bread
~ I like sprouted-grain-with-hemp bread
~ this could use ideas for presentation, if that's important: maybe a mint leaf? pomegranate drupelets? sliced dates?
~ I wonder if another flavor, like red wine or port or even absinthe, would do this good; tiny touches of exotica
Jun. 12th, 2009 @ 03:06 pm
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| » general update |
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I've applied for a graduate certificate in computational social science. I don't know what this means, exactly, but I'll soon find out. CSS looks closely related to computer games, if not openly, then at least in a connectable way.
I've emailed my cognitive psych professor thanking him for the class and asking for life advice. I don't know how this will go down.
In the same vein I'm also trying to write an email to my creative writing prof last year at Tech, who finally mailed me my portfolio as I asked, but without any comments. It can be inferred, I suppose, that he didn't like the stories very much, and I'm trying to figure out how to tell him his was one of my favorite classes at Tech, and perhaps keep open the possibility, as he offerred it, that he will take a look at any stories I send him in the future.
I've been watching through all the Star Trek movies and even some of the original episodes. So far nothing has been very disappointing, except the new movie, which I rewatched after the other rewatchings only to decide it was worse than everything else. Star Trek V, I think, is infamous not because the quality is low (admittedly the script's midsection is flabby and hard to follow in an exact way, and the whole thing reaches for a little self-parody, which not everyone likes) but because of the end scene involving "God"--a powerful fake--which strikes a little close to home, daringly but perhaps without immediate dividends for the studio or the fan base. If Star Trek V nearly sank the series, more power to it. That moment and the campfire singing, however cheezy some might find it, have profound vertical powers. Star Trek V was not at all disappointing to me.
My favorite original episode, by the way, out of a little over half a dozen from season 1, is The Enemy Within. Everything works. It's the one where Kirk gets duplicated in the transporter, which is malfunctioning, and his evil twin lets loose on the ship. The result is much more interesting than a Jekyll/Hyde rehash, but I won't spoil it for you.
Oh. I helped my brother move in just down the street from the J Craig Ventor Institute, where he's interning while working on his PhD. That was actually his top choice, since Craig Ventor famously innovated the shotgun technique of gene sequencing during the Human Genome Proect, and allowed it to be finished ahead of schedule.
Jun. 8th, 2009 @ 03:53 am
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| » damn straight |
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1/2 cup black chickpeas, already cooked
1/2 large vidalia onion, chopped
cover with water and boil gently on med-low maybe 30 mins, with lid
add 1 cup frozen green fava beans
1/2 tbsp turmeric
cook 50 more minutes or so, still covered, with enough water to maintain a soupy consistency
1/2 tbsp olive oil
Jun. 8th, 2009 @ 03:49 am
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lyndonian's journal