TrenchcoatFullOfBats

It’s more that it challenged me so much that the gut-wrenching horror has been burned into my memory to the extent that I don’t need to watch it ever again.

The reality was much worse. The movie was based on a short story written by “Seita” (Akiyuki Nosaka) as a fantasy, apologetic version of what actually happened, in that in the fantasy, he actually gave his starving sister some of his food, but in reality, he ate it himself:

Nosaka said that in the story, Seita “got increasingly transformed into a better human being” since he was trying to “compensate for everything I couldn’t do myself” and that he was never “kind like the main character.”

Nosaka explained that “I always thought I wanted to perform those generous acts in my head, but I couldn’t do so.” He believed that he would always give food to his sister, but when he obtained food, he ate it. The food tasted very good when it was scarce, but he felt remorse afterwards. Nosaka concluded, “I’d think there is no one more hopeless in the world than me. I didn’t put anything about this in the novel.”

There Will Be Blood is another one-and-done for me, for similar reasons; the human cost of human selfishness and greed. Also, the atonal, discordant soundtrack of TWBB is amazing, and fits the story perfectly, but is also really, really uncomfortable.

Just imagine you’re weightless, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tiny little seahorses.

That movie was certainly ahead of its time on the whole brain cloud thing

…but why? (à la Ryan Reynolds in “Harold & Kumar Go to Whitecastle”) Some movies are one-and-done, and that is near the top of that list for me.

My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.

This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.

I heard that he wanted to get Officer Thomson and his lamp on the case, but the request form was incomplete.

The thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in

My Cherry Blues: I’M DOING MY PART

Αυτό είναι το αστείο

This is the joke

I find that I think about the Byzantine Empire more often than the Roman Empire

Lawful good at home.

Laptop and two horizontal monitors at work. Is that lawful neutral good or neutral good lawful?

Personally, I think it’s probably neutral awful - one is HDMI and the other is VGA.

Norway

I think Socrates would say “Why are you asking the question in the first place?”

My dad told me that walnuts were owl eggs.

He got in trouble when I stole all the walnuts in the house and wrapped them in nose tissues to keep them warm so they would hatch and I would have baby owls.

Are you reading a translation, perhaps? In my English version of the book, he does not scratch “KASPAR” on the coach, he scratches “MR PUNCH”.

This is a dual-layered reference. First, Mr Punch refers to Punch and Judy, a puppet show that originated in Italy in the late 1600s but was also popular in the Victorian era.

The basic premise of Punch and Judy is that Punch punches his wife Judy a lot, along with everyone else he encounters. It is considered to be “low” or “slapstick” humour, and it’s “funny” because it’s puppet violence in the style of the Three Stooges.

Dodger would definitely have known about Punch and Judy. Charles Dickens had this to say about Mr. Punch:

In my opinion the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence, and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct. It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance… is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstance that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about, without any pain or suffering.

The other layer to this is that Pratchett’s friend Neil Gaiman wrote a graphic novel in 1994 called Mr. Punch, about a homicidal puppet.

Edit: I just realized there is another, more literal layer to this reference. A diplomat could be called a puppet, whose strings are pulled by their home government, and a puppet who hurts people would definitely be like Mr. Punch.

Scratching it on the diplomat’s coach, which would go out in public, would be like scratching it on a car with a key - a public humiliation, along with property damage.

When you buy a new iPhone, is the location tracking “Find My” feature enabled by default, or do you need to turn it off if you don’t want your phone to upload other people’s location data to Apple while draining your battery?

Great. Now my left eye is twitching uncontrollably and I want to punch a sales drone into next quarter.

Just wait until you hear about how AirTags work:

Apple AirTags emit a Bluetooth signal that anonymously connects to any nearby device active within Apple’s Find My network (any iPhone after iPhone 11 with “Find My” enabled). The AirTag’s location is triangulated based on the strength of the Bluetooth signal sent to those third-party devices.

Your AirTag’s location information is uploaded to the cloud and pinned on a map for easy reference.

According to Exodus, it has 4 trackers and requires 68 permissions.

It can also be configured to report the location of the phone it’s installed on to another Microsoft account holder, as well as what apps the person is using and how long they’re using them.

if I go out in the public, I wear a cricket box.

They said protect your privacy, not your privates.