watching
Red Wine Cordial
I barely slept last night. I just lay in bed, bored - for what seemed like hours. Trying not to roll around or moan and groan too much to avoid waking Re. Eventually I got up and tip-toed around the house.
A drink of water, a pee, a warm blanket and on the sofa with my laptop. Too tired to do anything intelligent I created a Tik-tok account and scrolled through that. A waste of time, I tried the same in Instagram, rubbish. Facebook full of the same people reposting the same shite. I shut the lid and lay on the lumpy sofa wondering why I could not sleep.
I had done every sleeping exercise I could think of circular breathing, meditations and of course, avoiding screens immediately before bed. What was I doing in the evening before bed?
Well, I had watched the Banshees of Inisherin. In it Martin McDonagh directs Colin Farrell (as Pádraic) and Brendan Gleeson (as Colm) as he did previously in the film, In Bruges. I found the film unsettling.
Colm and Pádraic
Colm unexepectedly cuts off his lifelong friendship with Pádraic for no obvious reason. Pádraic is left bereft. This element of the plot hit me hard and immediately reminded me of when my brother Charlie did the same to me. Pádraic keeps trying to make sense of Colms decision and without me giving much more away, Colm gives a reason: Colm no longer wants to fill his days with aimless chatting, he wants to make music that will be remembered after he has died - there must be more to life…
I wish Charlie had been able to come up with an actual reason like Colm. In both cases though, it was not a nice way to behave. Banshees of Inisherin covers a lot more than this but you will have to watch it. I won’t spoil it.
I watched a second popcorn movie afterwards just to try and settle my brain. I think the real problem though was a single glass of red wine I had. Red wine to me of late is like red cordial. I was pinging and had a shit night
Further Down the Tubes
As the pandemic was getting into its stride in 2020, I was watching:
Pie Net Zero
Whenever I think the momentum's gone, and the Jonathan Pie character should be laid to rest, he comes back with one that's right on target. This long short is rather charming.
How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM | War Stories | Ars Technica
Like anybody who owned a computer in the 1990s, I was mesmerised by Myst. This compelling little mini-doco shows just how hard the Miller brothers were pushing the envelope to get their concept to work on 256-color graphics cards and first generation single-speed CD-ROM drives.
How does an Oscillating Fan work?
The only thing I can make with my bare hands (and maybe a 3D printer) is a mess. I don't have an engineering mind. Jared Owen's videos make me wish I did.
Carol Kaye - Most Heard But Least Known
Wow.
Honest Government Ad | The Fires
There's a smugness to most things that go out under the label "satire", and this is no exception, but it hits the mark. The summer of 2019/20 seemed like the end of the world. Ah, such innocent times.
The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)
I love these interviews where the interviewer asks questions about things that they think are within the domain of academic linguistics but aren't. The polite answers, always with the caveat that he's not really qualified to speak on the topic, show that there's not much that Chomsky hasn't spent at least some time thinking about.
"STATE OF THE UNION 2020" — A Bad Lip Reading
This joke never gets old.
Down the Tubes
Every now and then I find a video worthy of comment, and I never quite get around to commenting on it. Instead, I stick it in a directory labelled "blog".
Now I'm out of disk space on my desktop, my laptop, and for that matter my phone, so while I free up space here it comes, in installments. Back in the pre-pandemic days, I was watching:
How Dark Patterns Trick You Online
If somebody is required to show you something they don't want you to see, you'll find it in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
The Decentralized Web Is Coming — ReasonTV
Ten years ago I might have agreed with the title. Now I have no fight left in me, and I just have to say nope; it's hopeless.
I particularly like the way that they introduce Richard Stallman into the narrative with a photo of some guy with a beard who is definitely not Richard Stallman. I don't know who that person is, but apparently he must be the person who "helped create the popular open source operating system Linux", because that is not a description that RMS would apply to himself. Bonus lazy journalism points for illustrating the concept of "programmer" with the man page for grep.
Visiting a British Pub with Burgess (The Penguin) Meredith
"We're only trying to point out that some of these people are a little more… reserved than some of us."
From a World War II US Military Training film. Times have changed. These days they'd just take out the pub with a drone strike, and get offended at the lack of gratitude.
Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship
I can't help but be fascinated. I'd never slow down while passing the site of a car crash, but maybe I feel compelled because now we're all in the same car — the one that is crashing.
This Is Neoliberalism
This is a really nicely done series. Wish I'd done it.
2020 Harcourt Lecture - Professor Stephanie Kelton
If you've not heard about Modern Monetary Theory, you've not been to the pub with me at any point in the last seven years or so. If, under present circumstances, you aren't able to buy me a drink or six, the next best way to learn about MMT is from Stephanie Kelton. This lecture is from when she was a visiting professor at Adelaide Uni, immediately pre-pandemic, and just prior to the publication of the book which would make her the most influential economist in the world (among everybody but economists).
Season 26 Trailer | The Collection | Doctor Who
Just lovely. A damn near perfect series of Doctor Who, and the last for sixteen years.
Saturday, 28 November 2020 - 2:41pm
For ages, I've been meaning to blog/list interesting videos that I've piped onto my hard disk via youtube-dl. Instead I've just been filing them away in '~/tmp/blog'. Time to free up some disk space on the trusty old Thinkpad!
Last August, 2019, I was mostly watching:
- The Merits Of MMT — Martin North interviews Stephen Hail, mainly about MMT:
I can't remember it at all, frankly, but Stephen must have been on good form, otherwise I wouldn't have kept it.
- Two Of These People Are Lying — The Technical Difficulties:
I've been a fan of these lads ever since the original reverse trivia quiz podcast. Four quite intelligent chaps. Around a kitchen table. Making each other laugh. What's not to like?
- The Purpose of Education — Noam Chomsky interviewed as a remote contribution to a conference:
Behind any significant use of contemporary technology — Internet, communication systems, graphics, whatever it may be — unless behind it is some well constructed directive [or] conceptual apparatus it is very unlikely to be helpful. It may turn out to be harmful. For example, random exploration through the Internet turns out to be a cult generator. You pick up a factoid here and a factoid there and somebody else reinforces it, and all of a sudden you have some crazed picture which has some factual basis, but nothing to do with the world. You have to know how to evaluate and interpret and understand.
- Mr Olds’ Remarkable Elevator — Things You Might Not Know:
Tom Scott demonstrates an invention that should have been invented a century or more earlier, but wasn't because it's a bit of a mind-bender.
- Paying for the Green New Deal — Stephanie Kelton:
Sigh. Remember when the imminent end of human civilisation seemed a pretty high priority? Happy days.
Friday, 7 October 2016 - 7:11pm
And now a choice of viewing on mjd.id.au:
- Solving Our Unemployment Crisis presentation, April 19, 2016 — Bill Mitchell
- Jeremy Corbyn's speech to Annual Conference 2016 — Labour Party
- Wendy Brown on Education — Institute for New Economic Thinking:
One thing [neoliberalism has] done of course is make education increasingly contoured toward the question of return on investment. That is, very few students of working class, let along poor, or even middle class means, can look at a college edution — as we did in my time, your time — as something that has to do with expanding your capacities as a human being, and your capacities as a citizen. Instead, the question is how much money do you put in for how much you will get out as a potentially higher earner at the other end.
- How Stupid Laws and Benevolent Dictators can Ruin the Decentralized Web, too — Cory Doctorow at the Decentralized Web Summit, 8th June 2016:
We must never, ever, give corporations or the state the legal power to silence people who know true things about the systems we entrust our lives, safety, and privacy to. These are the foundational principles: computers obey their owners; true facts about risks to users are always legal to talk about. And I charge you to be hardliners on these principles, to be called fanatics. If they're not calling you puritan for these principles, you're not pushing hard enough.