Notes from September 2024
2024-09-01
I started watching "Terminator Zero," and after thirteen Halloweens, I can clearly see that this is a classic slasher. Plus time travel.
The signs were clear. After all the 13 Halloweens, I found myself on a Friday. So, I went for the "Friday the 13th" reboot from 2009 that remakes movies 1-4 (which tells us how much plot was in them). Technically, this is a very good movie. The creators had permission to use whatever they wanted (mask, soundtrack) and gave us leaner Jason with better reasons to kill, but in general, this movie was completely unnecessary. It was nice to see Amanda Righetti outside of "The Mentalist," though.
While I was watching an episode of "Terminator Zero," a series about machines taking over the world, my Roomba got stuck on a chair in the other room.
A quote from Edward V. Berard
"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." -- Edward V Berard
2024-09-02
I finally saw "Threads" (1984). From what I heard about it, I imagined "Mad Max," just with added splatterpunk. But no. It is truly very drastic depiction of nuclear winter but in a different way, more surgical. "Threads" are more chilling than Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." It resembles a lot of an educational movie that they show in schools, which works very well here. It seems at first there was no main character, but she emerged over time. Overall, I recommend it, but it's not an easy watch.
"Cam" (2018), on the other hand, is a lightweight, albeit quite erotic, techno-horror. Janine from "The Handmaid's Tale" is a cam girl here whose streaming is stolen by... something and she has to fight for it. The writer, a former cam girl herself, wanted to create a documentary about her experience but decided that horror would work better. So, these aspects are depicted faithfully, which is a nice thing. The horror part also carries a lot of modern fears (stealing somebody's identity, etc.).
"Doom: Annihilation" (2019) is another attempt at adapting the most important game in the history into a movie. Plot-wise, there is more elements from the game ("Doom" from 2005 was a rewrite from an unrelated story, actually), but with low budget, etc., this is closer to a fan movie. There is a Doomguy-based character, but he's not the hero(ine) here. As much as it pains me to type it right now, it's totally skippable. The only fun here was fishing out a few Easter eggs.
Of all the things we could say about Cybertruck, its looks are actually pretty neat. But then again, my dream car is DeLorean.
Not yor folt
Turns out when you buy a domain plus hosting, you don't get FTP access immediately. They need to process it.
How strange. I have PHP available. It's been, like, 7 years now. Still not enough.
What's a better email at krazov.com than krazov@krazov.com?
[edit] I was considering gmail@krazov.com, like in that old joke about Chuck Norris' email, but this might be a boomer joke by now. Also, Google sucks, so who would want to be connected to them?
2024-09-06
Twenty-one years ago, I saw Placebo live.
2024-09-07
Ever since I read that Ceuta is "remarkably unremarkable," I wanted to see it. The contradiction was impossible to imagine. But it's true, and now I have a problem with how to describe it. There are no classic tourist attractions (we found one museum), there weren't any gift shops (we had to buy fridge magnets in a tobacco kiosk). Architecturally, the main street reminded me of Malta, but then houses more of Gibraltar or Brasilian favelas. We had lunch and ice cream, saw the walls, and returned.
However, I'm glad we went because it is truly interesting to see a remarkably unremarkable place. What all the trip members said was, "There was nothing there." A bit like a description of liminal space. But it was so different: there were people there and shops (Ceuta has no VAT or some similar tax-related arrangement) and a couple of food joints, including McDonald's in an old building in the port. And yet, there was nothing there.
"A blinding cursor pulses in the electronic darkness like a heart coursing with phosphorous light, burning beneath the derma of black-neon glass."
-- "The Matrix" (screenplay)
Shriekback is crowdfunding a new album.
2024-09-11
"A dark wind blows."
-- "The Matrix" (screenplay)
I had a dream. I reached out to a couple of artists, hoping for collaboration. Then I went to a hospital for a heart check-up and as I was lying in bed, with my father by the bedside, Jon Bon Jovi showed up and started asking what idea for a song I have. Then I realised that I have none and I started mumbling that I have many ideas. But then, suddenly, I came up with one, titled "Being on the road." A song to listen to while driving. Bon Jovi said it was great and then promptly left.
It's settled. I don't need any new games.
I have a lot of CDs and often, I would like to listen to something but have limited time, and I miss a list of the albums with total time of each. This week, I started writing down times of every CD I listen to. In plain text, of course. I should have the complete list at some point.
My website reflects my views on privacy: themarkup.org/blacklight?location=us&device=mobile&force=false&url=krazov.com
2024-09-15
Twitter was like putting all the eggs in the same basket. That's why I try diversifying this time around. Lesson learned.
I just rewatched selected parts of "The Matrix," and I gotta say that it aged really well. The outdated tech works surprisingly well and shooting in Melbourne gave us, non-Australians, a familiar yet different Western city vibe.
A quote from Dune
"Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short."
2024-09-19
I played "Odyssey of Noises," map 29 from "The Plutonia Experiment," yesterday. I must have played it many years ago for the last time, so I was curious about how the vague memory holds. Turns out I had something bigger in mind. While the map grew with me in my memory, it shrank in comparison to modern mapping. It also had surprisingly monotonic texturing. But the gameplay holds. In the beginning, I had to stay off the streets. It got better once I had gathered my arsenal.
2024-09-20
I read yesterday that there is so much LLM-generated text in the Internet that it's not possible anymore to reliably analyse linguistic patterns that people use.
The air pressure is so low that even the larger dog was calm during the walk.
Well, alright. I'll leave room for "Dead Cells." I played the Netflix edition, but it's a torture on a touch screen. But it stunned me artistically.
I still have a couple of titles I'd like to check at some point (coincidentally, all Nightdive's releases).
The Cardigans had the silliest cover of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," but I genuinely liked their take on Kraftwerk's "Das Model." Electro-acoustic mix with the right proportions. And Nina Persson sings it in German! Almost everyone goes with the English lyrics.
2024-09-23
After over 80 hours and 100% achievements in "Mad Max," I was very curious about how "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" will fall into my liking. It worked extremely well. At times, it's so over the top that it's almost mythological. And the visuals are impeccable. And I like Anya Taylor-Joy with her calm and reserved demeanour.
I started reading about "Mad Max: Fury Road" after watching "Furiosa," and it turned out to be much closer connected than I remembered, so I went with it the next day. It's amazing how seamlessly it clicks in. I know George Miller was planning to shoot both movies back-to-back, but it didn't panned out. But you can see how all the elements were thought through. It actually watches as one long story, which is funny given that "Fury Road" takes like 48 hours after years of plot in "Furiosa."
Too bad there were no Buzzards in "Furiosa." It was my favourite fraction in the game. Maybe "Mad Max: The Wasteland" will give us more of them. If they ever make the movie, which is not a given at this point in time.
And one more thing, which I think was a nice move and probably a bit bold, "Furiosa" plus "Fury Road" make more of a Furiosa story with a guest arrival of Mad Max in the second part. You could probably even remove him and still have valid movies. Furiosa, on the other hand, was indispensable. As a long-time fan of deuteragonists, I approve of this.
2024-09-24
Someone made a Doom map that has 90,000 monsters (for comparison, nuts.wad is *only* 10,000). It's called "Oversaturation." I started watching a playthrough, which is 6-hour long, and I was even planning to split it into 1-hour chunks, like a series, but then I saw that it's only part 1 of I don't know how many. So I abandoned it. That's just too much. But man, 90K. That's a small town. Quite impressive.
Well, alright, I saw another 15 minutes. I should be done with it in a couple of months.
I returned to playing "Blasphemous II" yesterday. The controls are so good in this one. It's a pure pleasure.
A quote from Ellen Ullman
"We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." -- Ellen Ullman
2024-09-25
My wife was just watching (Spanish) local news, and there was a material about a bull that got away from a run through the city and killed someone and harmed i.e. 4-year old girl. Now everyone's shocked. And we thought about gun crimes in the US ("everyone's" shocked after they happen). And now I thought about drivers killing pedestrians in Poland. The general notion in this situations is that it couldn't have been avoided. It's like a collective blind spot yet obvious for the outsiders.
I often hear a comment that "something is like straight out of Black Mirror." No, my friend, it's exactly the opposite: "Black Mirror" is straight out of our reality. Just pimped with sexy visuals.
I like this intimate stage of knowing an album that when one song ends, I subconsciously start humming or whistling the next track, take a pause, and wonder if I'm right. Then the song kicks in and I know was.
Seems less prominent now, at least in my case, and there might be two reasons for that. One, as there are streamings which offer access to infinitely more music, I listen more and thus, don't imprint any album in my consciousness. With CDs, I had to listen to the same stuff more because I had more limited options. Or two, I'm just older and the new stuff doesn't impress me that much. Might be mix of both. We would need to ask young people, but they might not listen to full albums anymore.
There seems to be no art in Front-End development anymore. It's about which library to use to ship it faster for the time being.
2024-09-26
After a couple of years of experiments, I concluded that the content should always precede the form. And the form alone will not cut it. Sorry. Either you have something to say or no amounts of formal tricks will save you.
A quote from Charles Bukowski
"I have one problem. I don't hate people. They disgust me and I wanna get away from them. I do not have hatred." -- Charles Bukowski
2024-09-27
I was thinking about getting Michael Myers' mask for Halloween, but the ones I found on Amazon, which are cheap (20 to 30 euros), are also of cheap quality and they don't look good. There are better ones on Etsy, but in price range from 200 euros to even 1,000 euros. I don't have a budget like that for a couple of hours of trick-or-treating. And then you need to store it in proper conditions. So, I'll look for some other white mask. The script describes it as such anyway.
But there is a sort of meta joke in here. For the original movie, they just went into a store and bought the first one that was usable. After all, Michael Myers steals it from a store. So if I bought a cheap one, it would be close in spirit to the movie, both in-universe and in-production.
It would also had the same problems that the movie masks had over the years. The second actor had a different head shape and it looked "off," and the viewers would say that it was a different one. The ones on Amazon were called too big by people who bought them. Of course they were because they need to fit anyone. The best option would be to have a mask shaped after a particular wearer, but there we go again to the original issue of budget. Maybe if I win a lottery or something.
One way that using social media to share my thoughts changed me is that I predominantly think in small paragraphs, even if I have a plain text file. I remember reading once that this was something that happened to Friedrich Nietzsche when he switched from a pen to a typewriter. It affected how he formed this thoughts. The process matters.
With the rise of the AI (de)generated content, it's inevitable that those entities will start corrupting or outright compromising programming libraries. And they can do it in amounts that humans cannot review in a timely manner, so it seems a matter of time before we simply cannot trust NPM ecosystem at all (and it's already not that great). Each library uses many dependencies of which many use many more. We're done here.
Dead NPM Theory incoming.
I found an excellent mask on Etsy. Then my wife said she can make it for me.
"Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta" is a hell of a starter for an article. You suddenly feel ancient.
I had to turn on the ceiling fan. And I already thought those days were gone for this year.
2024-09-29
I wrote a short story. I think it's my first short story in English. It was inspired by my interest in staircases and a vision I had when my wife's grandma was on her death bed.
2024-09-30
I started watching "The Penguin" and realised it's set immediately after "The Batman," so I rewatched it. I forgot how well done it is. It's a mix of the Zodiac Killer story and "Seven" visuals ("Seven" might have been set in Gotham City for all we know). My favourite part was that Batman has primarily been a detective here. Also, the plot is quite complex.
I added "Hardcore" from 1979 to my watchlist after learning it was an inspiration for "X" with Mia Goth, but I was postponing it and postponing. The wait is finally over. It's like reversed "X," with the girl's father being the main character here. I was half-expecting an outdated cringe, but the result turned out to be solid. A journey-like narrative with a nice soundtrack. "8MM" had to be inspired by this movie too.