6,352 karma · joined July 6, 2013
But yeah, about the OP film Wikipedia notes:
> As in other instances of the very earliest films, the film presents the audience with the images of a shocking experience, without further narrative exposition.
So indeed the genre seems to have proliferated right away.
My word! Apparently everything that comes out of that head is exceedingly gorgeous.
By the way, regarding ‘L’arrivée...’, Wikipedia says that Lumieres attempted 3D films even before getting properly started with flat ones. So, considering that accounts from that time were of quite meh quality, it's possible that the running-out occurred at a 3D showing, making the ‘illusion’ story more plausible.
Lastly, since J.G. Ballard is mentioned, I'll say that both ‘Crash’ and ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ are very cool. Aside from obvious connotations to real people's habits, just the atmosphere of the books is engrossing in the weirdest way. They tickle the brain in a manner that's only similar to what I experienced in childhood, when the world was big and anything could be in it—only, these books are for adults. I don't think they quite make surrealism like that anymore. Kobo Abe and animator Piotr Kamler are contemporaries that are somewhat similar in effect; Cronenberg's ‘Videodrome’ is likewise good (however his ‘Crash’ doesn't really have the feel). Of later stuff, Bret Easton Ellis is proficient in such immersion, and funny enough has a pair ‘American Psycho’-‘Glamorama’ that are close in the themes to each other but are related in execution like the two books of Ballard's, and likewise the film is its own thing by necessity.
Of very current authors, I know only Vladimir Sorokin who can pull off such feats—but his thing is that he can do what he wants with Russian language, and as a result is next to untranslatable. Apparently there's a dude who took on the challenge with English as the target, and several books at once are going to be published very soon (this year, they said)—I'm looking forward to diving in that the first chance I get, but my expectations are high and the outlook cautious.
Reminds me of a case in Moscow (iirc): a homeless guy bought a gym pass that came with a locker, and was storing his things in said locker. The gym administration decided to deny him this arrangement, but he sued them and the court said “since the locker is in the contract, it's his privilege now”.
Huh, apparently ‘the war on general computation’, of which Cory Doctorow spoke, won't necessarily be led by Disney and such corporations, but also by people denying others the right to automate the workings of the GUI on one's machine.
(Coincidentally, this practice might also preclude the operation of aeleveny tools—again, as Doctorow noted, ‘there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs except the naughty ones’. It might be fun to see the faces of the ‘you shouldn't’ folks when they're asked why less-able clients can't use their websites.)
Though by now, after having experience with a performant setups, I would probably choose to chuck the logs directly into something like logstash+elasticsearch, or something more lightweight. Because I came to believe in processing data on arrival, not on request. Though perhaps Webalizer or AWStats themselves can process small batches, idk.
(Coincidentally, looking for a modern alternative to Teleport, particularly on Mac, is a surprisingly fruitless endeavour—at least if one has grown to limit themselves to open-source software. Meanwhile I expect at least two of the sites I sometimes use to go belly-up soonish.)
As for Webalizer itself: one of my first jobs was to make a log analyzer in Perl, and since I knew almost nothing about performant file access, string splitting and data crunching, the resulting code ran fairly slowly. So iirc I soon found Webalizer as the replacement, since it was written in C and by more competent people. Or perhaps I chose AWStats, can't remember.
(Come to think of it, the Perl thing might run okayish by now, since it was a stock Perl loop over the lines with a regular expression—bad but not fatal. Now I'll have to find the cd with the encrypted archives and figure out what was wrong with the code, dammit.)
Said organ was built by its late owner not just in the house, but pretty much into the walls of the house, and as a result the thing had to be ripped out of there rather grotesquely, and then rewired again at the new place: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8PwwRR8deHk
I eyeballed the rate for late-ish 2021 from this hastily found site, at 20 bucks per 200k gold—seemed to change little in the past year, so hopefully holds true for January 2021 as well: https://www.playerauctions.com/market-price-tracker/wow/
Idk where the ‘killing the player’ part came from—though local game journalism at that time was quite, uh, idiosyncratic. But, as the workings of these guards were somewhat hazy in my mind, they gained an ominous air.
More than that, in regard to MMOs in general: both Cory Doctorow and Neil Stephenson wrote books involving exchange of money in MMOs, remarking that bringing a bag of gold to another dude in the game is an actual method of transferring money cross-border without oversight, used by mobs. I vaguely heard (and again mentioned by Doctorow) that the size of economy of larger games like WoW can dwarf not-so-small countries.
It's possible that the story went through a bad case of ‘broken telephone’—and my few feeble attempts of finding the truth in more recent years were unsuccessful. Still I wonder: was there such a thing as described above? Did it work? Was the ‘police’ really an NPC?
Time and again people fail to realize that if they install an adblocker, they remove themselves from the target audience and thus from influencing the content and quality of web pages.
Of course, such predictions are just pure probability, by now.
The US left do advocate for something resembling weak ‘equality of outcome’ in that poor and ill aren't thrown under the bus. However, while the left can be seen as reducing personal economic freedom, the oppression of social freedoms is a purview of conservatives. So ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is closer to a parody of a right-wing dreamland. Perhaps incels would in fact welcome an ‘equal outcome’ social world, where they are on the same level as Chads.
Moreover, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ can easily be paralleled to Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, which is a direct jab at the early Soviet Union. However, idk if Vonnegut was interested in that or read Bulgakov.
(Seeing other Westerners confusedly borrow the same dichotomy is also entertaining, as it often fits poorly to them and they surely should know better.)
However, speaking of costumes: while ‘a wrinkled old hag as a villain witch’ says Baba Yaga, the long hat is not a feature of cultures in and around Russia, or in Asia in general to my knowledge. Neither old hags nor witches need such hats here.
(Coincidentally, apparently there's currently a thriving scene of low-budget cinema and documentary in Yakutia—if my memory is not mistaking it with another one of those eastern republics.)
‘History of the English language’ is a splendid podcast.