Notes from November 2024#

2024-11-01#

Ulysses pact, huh? Yeah, I like the concept and all it entails.

2024-11-03#

"Heaven's Gate" from 1980 was a nail to Michael Cimino's commercial career (he made only 4 movies after it). And I wanted to see it for myself. The movie aged quite well, and looking back it's probably hard to point out what was so different from other movies at the time. An epic Western story (with some Polish Easter Eggs). The final battle was nothing short of epic. Generally, there are tonnes of people in so many scenes. Might not be for everyone, but it's not a bad movie.

"El Príncipe" is a Spanish show with action set in Ceuta, a place that was somewhat fascinating me ever since I learned about it. The quality is quite good as for a Spanish show (it's always a gamble), and there are so many twists in each episode that we were very grateful for summaries of the previous ones. There is love, terrorism, and José Coronado. And Ceuta. Although, my reason to see was to train my Spanish. I still got season 2 to see.

"Longlegs" (2024) is a horror which falls, like many contemporary films, somewhere in between. The story, reminding me of "Silence of the Lambs," starts as a procedural with a sparse actors and visually stylised for a late 1980s or early 1990s film. There is a strong liminal vibe due to these choices. I really liked the movie, despite not being a usual fan of the twist they used. Nicholas Cage as a titular Longlegs, who reminds Marilyn Manson a lot, is definitely a strong point of the show.

"Alien: Romulus" (2024) is a movie that is honest with itself. After the last two slightly more ambitious takes, we're back to a space horror. And done really well. The director, Fede Álvarez, gave us "Evil Dead" in 2013, where he showed he can do right by an established franchise. The pacing is good, the aliens don't show too early, and there are at least two visually-stunning scenes that made me wonder why nobody came up with them earlier. I was not hyped about another Alien, but it was fun.

"Don't Tell a Soul" (2020) is a thriller with a minimal cast telling a story of two brothers in the middle of nowhere and a security guard. As for only 80 minutes plus, there are some surprising twists there. But the reason why I reached out for this position was Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute in "The Office." I was curious how would he look as another character. It was like Dark Dwight here, but he generally made it work. Though, the story is about the brothers. "Gummo"-like sad.

2024-11-04#

A former friend told me once something that surprised me. He said that I knew how to pick battles, which was something that he himself was not good at because he would pick up all the battles. I didn't realise I was doing this. However, since he told me that, I started doing this consciously. It's not that you can't win them all. You can't even fight them all. There's just too many. You'd spread yourself thin and lose more of them.

2024-11-09#

A while ago, I started (and merely scratched the topic) creating calendar events for releases of CDs I have, so I can listen to an album on its anniversary. More of an inspiration at this point than mandatory ritual.

In any case, today, we're listening to Out of Tune's "Lights So Bright."

After a couple of years, I finished watching "The Office." It's very funny, and I was impressed that it kept its quality to the end, even after Michael Scott was gone. And the last 2 episodes were really heartwarming. But generally, they truly captured the quirks of office life. While I never went as far as to submerge someone's calculator in jelly, I had a fair share of various pranks, so I found that part very relatable. I think this relatability is the strongest part of the show.

"Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story" is the second season of the anthology series, after the one about Jeffrey Dahmer. I didn't know about the Menendez brothers, so I was watching their story with a fresh eye. I liked the order of revealing things, which accounted for more twists than otherwise. And I was really impressed by an episode with one single shot where the camera was slowly zooming in on one of the brothers as he was telling his story.

"Kinds of Kindness" is an absurdist anthology from Yorgos Lanthimos, one of my favourite directors recently. The movie shows three totally unpredictable stories with the same cast each (but different characters). I loved how it was hard to guess what might happen next. Ever since I saw "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," I wanted to see from Lanthimos something that would impress me as much, and this movie did it. Also, nice soundtrack.

It always make me laugh that "2001: A Space Odyssey" didn't get Oscar for make-up because the Academy simply assumed that Stanley Kubrick used real monkeys. That's probably better than an Oscar.

Inspired by this memory and a HTML validator, I decided to add H1 on the start page and place "Jon Krazov Text Explosion" there. Ah, what the hell.

2024-11-11#

Every game can be gamed.

My new job really sucked me in, and I had no head for posting. On one hand, it's positive, but on the other one, this was meant to be an ongoing project. The first week was fine, but now it's time to get back into the saddle. I might dig out all those months-old drafts and see if I can make out anything of them. Quite often, they were scribbled too cryptically for myself.

So yeah, I started a new job.

BTW, I was working on an Angular component today, and I have to admit that class-based notation was pretty clear and legible to me, unlike ten thousand React Hooks bundled together. I generally don't like classes, but in Angular, they are more of a mental model—you don't instantiate them yourself with new, etc. And as such, they work for me.

A quote from Dune#

"Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history."

2024-11-16#

I picked up Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" to match "Kinds of Kindness" for the weekend, and it worked well. The criticism I heard of this movie was that "there was too much Wes Anderson in Wes Anderson," and I can see where it came from, but eventually, the movie won my heart. Visually, it's stunning as ever, but the winning point was layered narrative with not one but two framing devices. I liked how Augie's conversation with his wife was arranged.

One of the running jokes about the series "Gotham" was that it should have been called "Penguin" instead, due to the prominence of that character. Well, it's finally here. "The Penguin" is a spin-off of "The Batman," with Colin Farrell reprising his role. The show is more than okay, with no superhero nonsense and leaning heavily towards gangster's climates. Colin Farrell is doing an amazing job. Yet still, there is some comic-book oversimplification at times.

"The Outsider" is a Stephen King book adaptation as a series. It's a bit mixed beast: it starts like a rock solid procedural, to turn supernatural halfway through (and become a real slow burner), to have some more action in the last two episodes. Overall, I liked it, especially that the titular character turned out to be a shapeshifter similar to the one from "The Boys." Very strong acting and very likeable characters who also liked each other, which was very nice.

"My Best Friend" from 2001 is the actual Yorgos Lanthimos directorial debut (but it was co-directer, in opposition to 2005's "Kinetta," which was the full debut). Very un-Lanthimos film. It reminds me of video clips from that time, especially that also some hits are used in it. An erotic comedy, actually, about two life-long friends. I liked various background events of groups of people doing exactly the same thing. And the Kansas-City-shuffle plot twist genuinely surprised me.

2024-11-17#

I went to a comic con, which was rather uneventful, but it turned out that John Romita Jr. was signing there, so I decided to take that opportunity and dug out a 26-year old comic from my basement. I could find only one, where he was a guest penciller. But still. My first autographed comic book.

2024-11-19#

Ragnar in space, but I don't mind.

#DuneProphecy

I write here to connect with you. Yeah, you.

I got fascinated with kangaroos. I suspect that due to a bit of fluffy imagery for kids, I had them for more cuddly animals. But they are not. They're muscly as hell and quite dangerous. Their hands and chest seem human-like enough to trigger some sort of uncanny valley feelings. And the tail! I need to watch some documentaries about them.

2024-11-20#

I started listening to Spotify AI DJ when I don't have time for a full album at the end of the workday. The voice is fine, and I even checked if I can change it, but it turned out that it's based on an actual radio DJ. What I like is that it digs out stuff I haven't heard in years. Which sounds very much like this joke I heard back in early 2019 that "if your clients want AI, they probably mean the GROUP_BY clause in MySQL." A randomised playlist would probably suffice.

2024-11-21#

I always liked using a neutral language, but at some point, it got less neutral. The way of expressing myself, which wouldn't mean anything, suddenly became even oppressive. It's like in this image where a person stands in the same place, but the scale shifted to left suddenly leaving the person on the right.

2024-11-23#

Last week, I worked with a system that creates application flows in a GUI tool. You put boxes, you connect them, each of them might retrieve data, save data, or perform easy logical conditions. But also more complex transformations. Each step has a comment section where I can describe in a human-friendly format what it does. And it was nothing short of pleasure. I could work like that on a daily basis: to delegate low-level implementations to something out there and focus on business logic.

2024-11-24#

"Tristana" is Luis Buñuel's movie which is an adaptation of a book, but it's not relevant. It tells a story of a titular girl who ends up in an abusive relationship with a much older man. Some see there a nod to how Spaniards felt about Franco at the end of his life. For me, it was also interesting to see older Spain. And it was surprising to learn that Catherine Denevue speaks Spanish. What caught my attention was complete lack of music, which I suspect was unusual in 1970?

"Vesper" from 2022 is a science-fiction movie with action set sometime in a future and told from a point of view of a 14-year-old girl who lives with her paralysed father in remnants of an old civilisation (all the wealth is locked in so-called citadelas, which is believed to be our future as well, BTW). Very bleak and with Eastern-European flavour (it was shot in Lithuania). What stands out the most is omnipresent David-Cronenberg-like biotechnology (think of "eXistenZ").

One of my lesser useful talents is spotting Mazzy Star's song in movies. Just a few cords and I know. Then Hope Sandoval starts singing, and it's all clear. I can say that their music is very popular with movie makers.

2024-11-25#

A couple of years ago there was a song "This Is A Trent Reznor Song," where the lyrics would describe what was actually happening in the musical layer. Well thought through and well executed. But Trent Reznor himself wrote a composition like that. It's "Driver Down" from the "Lost Highway" soundtrack. There are no lyrics, but it starts with electronic pumping, a bit like from "Quake," which then goes into guitar noise to end up with a slow piano. To me, this was always a Trent Reznor song.

It was even credited to himself, not Nine Inch Nails.

2024-11-27#

One of the best things to do on any operating system is to turn off animations (it's usually placed in accessibility): lighter on battery and faster.

If you don't store your writings in text files, then you're a fool.

2024-11-29#

There is something pleasing for me in writing texts with the Consolas font.