My friend Ethan has his short story “Unfrozen Eons Drown the Future” read on the Weird Tales podcast!

Examined Worlds: “Unfrozen Eons Drown the Future”: My New Short Story on The Weird Tales Podcast!

If you’re into Lovecraftian sci-horror, give it a listen. The host reads the story well.

I’m sad for Daniel Craig that No Time to Die is his last James Bond film. It should have been better.

Tl;dr: Bond – formulaic, thus predictable; way too long; boring; beautiful; wasted talent.

Spoilers below, maybe. I mean, it’s a Bond flick.

First, part of the story that was hinted at early in a seeming non sequitur and ended up as a set piece was from You Only Live Twice, the novel. Will we end up with a washed-up-on-the-shore-in-Japan Bond meeting Kissy Suzuki as the introduction to the next Bend actor?

Second, getting Phoebe Waller-Bridge to help with the script was a great move by Craig. Given how anemic the movie is, I can’t begin to imagine how tepid it was before she joined. I’m 100% convinced the script was a camel.

Third, I want to be Paloma – Ana de Armas completely upstages Craig in this like she did in Knives Out. She looks spectacular, literally kicks ass while wearing an outfit that is appropriate for black tie and for her acrobatic fighting skills, and has a better form of Roger Moore’s humor.

Fourth, this movie is woefully way too long. I don’t think that there was enough in this script to stretch into 2 movies. It drags in many places for no reason.

Fifth, let’s again ask where the armies of bad guys who burst forth from the tree line come from, why they were not employed earlier on, and their ability to die with a single bullet, when … 

Sixth, the main people don’t die after being shot multiple times, especially when a man is shot multiple times by a woman. Somehow a clip emptied into main baddy doesn’t keep him from saving the woman who shot him, setting up the … uh, drama?

Seventh, the MacGuffin and the bad guy scientist and the other (?) bad guy who stole him were woefully secondary to the plot.

YMMV.

I watched There Will Be Blood (TWBB; 2012) for my Film Studies class.

An ever present thing in the movie for me is Daniel Day Lewis (DDL) using a John Houston accent throughout – it works but is also distracting.

Unlike Taxi Driver (TD) and most of Django Unchained (DU), TWBB shoots action in the wide shot giving scope to a story that could have been claustrophobic. It still is contained – there are many close ups and places where the camera frames things tightly, like the scene before the well blows.

In a movie where dialog takes up considerable time compared to action on the screen, the dialog – often delivered by DDL and, to a lesser extent, Paul Dano (PD) – has its own kinetic energy that conveys action.

Juxtapose the dialog in TWBB to super hero movies’ scenes where the hero’s stand around in a circle and talk. In the former, the camera is on the face and the expression and the eyes while the dialog is spoken, delivering an intensity and significance to the words. In the latter, the camera spins around a daily scrum status update meeting way too light hearted to convey the importance of their work (saving Earth or the galaxy or whatever).

This is another dark film, but of the three I think I enjoyed and appreciated it the most.

Random notes:

• The scope of this movie feels huge though it isn’t really
• A thought I had on first viewing that I forgot: this could be a prequel of sorts to Chinatown & The Two Jakes
• Paul F. Tompkins is wasted in the early town meeting scene
• There is a massive lack of women in this; I assume that’s intentional
• The music and score is on-point
• If characters aren’t coated in oil or dirt, pay attention
• Ciarán Hinds was also wasted – he seems purposed built for having a bigger role in this movie
• Narrative developments happen off screen that end up significant in the closing scenes
• Like TD, this is a very White cast; I assume that is intentional

Money Stuff: Twitter’s Board Gave Up:

You could imagine him [Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal] giving an answer that employees did want to hear. “This will make our product stronger than ever.” “This will give us the funding we need to improve the service.” “This means we can focus on delighting our users rather than on the stock price.” “This means more free speech, which is a core value of ours.” “Elon Musk is a business visionary and he will run the company better.” “Elon Musk loves Twitter and uses it way, way more than any of the current executives or directors, so he will run it better than we do.” I don’t know. I’m not saying that I necessarily believe any of those things, or that Agrawal does, or that you should. I’m just saying you could imagine the CEO of a company, who had just voted to sell that company, telling the employees of the company that that was the right decision for the company, whatever that means. You could imagine some enthusiasm. You could imagine the CEO thinking that the person who values the company the most and will pay the most for it — Musk — will do good things with it. Agrawal said the opposite. The implication is that Twitter has interests as a company that are distinct from the interests of its shareholders, but that Twitter’s board felt it had no choice but to do what was best for shareholders even if it was worse for the company. (Emphasis mine)

This deal, whether it happens or not, will be taught in business and law schools for years. I’m of the opinion the deal will not close, but I would not be surprised if it did.

Leadership seminar speakers will also probably mine this rich vein as maybe a cautionary tale? Employment coaches certainly will, telling their clients that if the company says stuff like Agarwal has, fire up the job search.

I was fiddling about with a script I need to run from time to time but need escalated privileges to run. Editing /etc/sudoers isn’t an option, so I took to the Reddit. I found this:

Scripting with sudo on Mac – BrettTerpstra.com:

The gist is this: when you need to script a tool that requires administrator privileges, you want to make the process as automated as possible without creating glaring security problems (like including a password in plain text). …

Fortunately, macOS has tools built in to make this work. We’ll use a combination of macOS’s Keychain Access and the security command to make running superuser tasks both convenient and secure.

Yay! I already use Keychain for managing my SSH and GPG keys, so this definitely falls in with that.

Here’s the pertinent article bits, but read the whole thing for screenshots and how this is used in Brett’s excellent Batch app.

The first step is to create a Keychain entry for the password you want to use. In our case, this will be your system password.
Open Keychain Access in /Applications/Utilities. Unlock your login keychain if needed, then click the “Create new” button in the toolbar. Give the item a unique name, any account name you want, and then enter the password and click “Add.” …

Now this password entry can be accessed using the command line tool security, which we can use in a script. If the keychain is unlocked, the password will be retrieved without interaction. If it’s locked, you’ll get a dialog asking for your keychain password when the script runs.
In our script, we’ll call security and give it the name assigned to the keychain item (-l), and the account name (-a). The -w flag tells it to return only the password (otherwise there’s a lot of data it spits out). …

To incorporate this into a shell script, we’ll just use tr to trim the newline off it and save it to a variable, and then pipe it to sudo. Using sudo -S tells sudo to read the password from STDIN (the result of the pipe). …

The first time security is used from a script, you’ll get a prompt to allow access. Be sure to click “Always Allow” to avoid getting the same prompt every time.

I watched 2 films Sunday for my film studies class: Taxi Driver (1976) and Django Unchained (2012). I will probably watch There Will Be Blood (2007) tonight and pick which 2 of the 3 to do for my unit 1 analysis, and which of those 2 I will write about for my unit essay.

Taxi Driver

It’s been at least 20 years, probably 30, since I last viewed this film. I remembered going in how uncomfortable the movie is to watch. Robert De Niro is perfect in the role, bringing a staccato integration with other characters while his voice-overs give an internal monologue that vacillates between assured and unhinged in equal measure.

Cybil Sheppard’s Betty lights up the screen in almost every scene she is in.

A young Jodie Foster delivers Iris with a delicate veneer ineffectively hiding her fear.

Peter Boyle portrays maybe the most interesting character in the movie. When Travis Bickel (De Niro) goes to get the taxi job at the start we can see Boyle’s Wizard in a heated discussion through the window over the dispatcher’s shoulder. I would love a story about Wizard that takes place simultaneously with Taxi Driver.

Random thoughts:

• Albert Brooks and Harvey Keitel are wasted in this movie
• That said, they both inform Bickel’s interactions with Betty and Iris, respectively
• I forgot about the scene with Martin Scorsese as the guy in the back of Bickel’s cab talking about how he will kill his wife
• Windows, mirrors, and eyes are recurring elements
• I forget how New York used to look & be
• I forgot how the movie ends
• I had to stop the movie twice and watch 30 Rock episodes
• This is a movie that would be hard to remake today in the modern age
• It is about 20 minutes too long
• The political posters end up in interesting spaces
• The music was spot on – the xylophone pieces really bothered me. Bernard Hermann, well done

Django Unchained

This was my first ever viewing. I was not looking forward to it, because:

• I’ve grown disenamored of Tarantino’s homages
• I do not like Jamie Foxx or Leonardo DiCaprio as actors
• It’s dark and heavy

I ended up enjoying it more than I thought. Christoph Waltz was great as King Shultz, Samuel L. Jackson played Steven superbly, and the bounty hunter section of the film was as good a bit of the Western genre as you’d find in this century.

I am impressed by the second dinner scene where Leo cuts his hand. I read that it actually happened and he stayed in character and pushed through. He received a standing ovation from the cast and crew for this, and the scene was clearly his best.

Random thoughts:

• Few women are in it, and the ones that are and have screen time are mostly wasted, which is out of step for Tarantino movies
• Walton Goggins was also wasted
• The scene with the Australian mine employees was a missed opportunity
• This was Tarantino’s super hero movie
• A lot of seeing things through slats/gun sights/gaps in things, and like Taxi Driver eyes in general are key elements
• Tarantino in this movie was as disturbing as Scorsese in his but for different reasons — Tarantino is awful in acting and accent
• Where in the hell did Candie get all those gun hands?
• Hi, Chattanooga! (The first outfitting scene for Django)
• Reading articles about the movie I think there was a lot that was cut that should have been left in to make the movie hold together better than a super hero movie
• I could do without the cameos — give up-and-comers with ability the roles
• That said, the woman with the covered face in Candie’s crew was another wasted opportunity
• This should have been 2+ movies — bounty hunter & vigilante in Django Unchained and then rescue husband in Django Unleashed — or else been 30 minutes shorter. A third movie could have been about him and Brumhilda trying to settle somewhere.
• No one wised up to Hilde and Django having the same ‘R’ burned into their right cheek. It took Stephen to somehow decode that they knew each other

Biggest Criticisms

The music in this movie is a mess. The pieces that were homage to spaghetti westerns and more modern stuff done in a country-and-western vein were great. However, Tarantino kept taking me out of the movie with more modern pieces that reminded me that this is a movie and they were thematically out-of-place.

The super hero elements I alluded to also took me out of the suspended disbelief this kind of movie deserved: blood & other body matter spatter was comical; the clown car that spewed gun-toting plantation hands was ridiculous; Django shooting a rider off his horse the first time he fires a rifle is absurd; that he turns out to be a shooting savant is even more absurd; and his interaction with the Australian miners had me thinking “it can’t be this easy”, until it was.

The Sportswashing Edition:

“Everyone needs money. That’s why they call it money.”

– David Mamet, Heist

Jeff here. About a year ago, news began to circulate among the golf media that the Saudis—through their Public Investment Fund, and with the fiercely unlikeable Greg Norman as their frontman—were preparing to throw an unholy amount of money at some of the current greats of the game in an attempt to launch a rival league to the PGA Tour. The news was met with a mixture of moral outrage (the word “bonesaw” often featuring prominently) and a sort of glib flippancy (“who would ever leave the PGA Tour and its AMAZING pension plan?”)

These professional athletes are employees of the Saudi Arabian government regardless of how they spin their funding.

My big take away from this nonsense, since I’m soured on pro sports of every kind, is that I have been in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia several times and it is a miserable place to be. It’s the ancestral homestead of the House of Saud, which is why it’s the capital.

It’s not safe for foreigners, especially non-Muslims. All of the locals I know advised me about where not to go ever and when to not go everywhere. Had I gone back again I would have set up a spreadsheet to keep it all clear.

That these professional sports people think it’s ok that they not only take the Saudi’s money but also launder the Saudi’s reputation is reprehensible, I was never going to watch these Saudi employees anyway.