Jorge Luke es un hombre suave.
Jorge Luke es un hombre fuerza.
Jorge Luke es un hombre de las mujeres.
Jorge Luke quiere el telefono.
Jorge Luke es acción!
Jorge Luke es un hombre suave.
Jorge Luke es un hombre fuerza.
Jorge Luke es un hombre de las mujeres.
Jorge Luke quiere el telefono.
Jorge Luke es acción!
For those of you who don’t get Netflix, the company employs a complex algorithm for predicting what movies you’re going to like. It’s based on your ratings of movies you’ve already seen, as well as self-reported assessments of your preferred genres and types of movies.
There was a big brouhaha over this recently when Netflix ran a competition that awarded a million buckeroos to the statistics nerd who could improve the accuracy of their predictions by 10%.
I’ve found that the system works fairly well, up to a point. I had enough confidence in it that earlier in the year I deleted most of the movies from my queue that had a predicted rating of less than three stars.
(Their star system is a little wonky, in that there are five stars instead of four, and the ratings jump from two stars, "didn’t like it," to three stars, "liked it," which leaves out the all-important rating of "meh.")
I personally have rated 2000 movies on their site. It’s a little weird to think that I have an articulate impression of how much I enjoyed 2000 individual movies. So you would think that with such a large sample size they would know precisely how much I would enjoy any movie.
To test this theory out, I decided to watch every movie from my 400-plus queue, that had a rating of more than four stars.
(By the Netflix rating system that would be any movie that would fall between "Liked it a lot" and "Loved it.")
I’m going to go over these movies in the order of how much I actually enjoyed them.
Encounters at the End of the World is one of the more recent documentaries by Werner Herzog. It continues thematically what he began with Grizzly Man, a condemnation of the naive sentimentalizing of nature.
Any summary, including the Netflix summary, doesn’t do this movie justice. Basically, Herzog takes a camera and follows around the scientists and researchers of Antarctica. When we see these people in PBS documentaries, they’re only talking about how amazing the penguin breeding is. What we don’t see, is that these are people living in extreme isolation, whose emotions and sanity are frayed to the point of breaking. The highpoint of the moment is when Herzog is interviewing a nebbish and taciturn researcher on the coast of Antarctica and asks him if it is possible for penguins to experience madness.
I gave this movie five stars, because it’s just that damn amazing.
I had thought that I had managed to catch everything by Peter Greenaway when I was a film nut in college. A Zed & Two Noughts had managed to get under my radar. Which makes me sad for the person I was then, but happy that the person I am now got that particular treat.
It is Greenaway’s meticulously complex followup to The Draughtsman’s Contract, a story of dualism, decay, and black and white animals. A pair of twins who work in a zoo lose their wives in a car wreck involving a swan, then promptly deal with their grief by initiating a love affair with the woman who was driving the car, doing time lapse photography of decaying animals (zebras produce an amazing pile of maggots), and watching David Attenborough narrated nature documentaries.
It’s very clinical, very scholarly, like everything Greenaway directs. For a film nut it is candy for the brain.
I had thought that Sita Sings the Blues was a Bollywood animation that taught Hindi religion to children. There’s an entire genre of those movies. In actuality it’s an American made, underground, creative commons, user-funded cartoon.
In essence it’s a series of shorts strung together to tell the story of Sita’s divorce from Rama in parallel with the director’s divorce from her husband. It’s in turns hypnotic, poignant, melancholy, and painfully dull.
The Saragossa Manuscript is another somewhat dull film. It’s a Polish production about a French officer during a Napoleonic campaign who starts to read a book about a Spanish nobleman. Then in the book, someone starts to tell someone else a story. Then in that story, someone else tells a story. At one point we were at four-degrees of narrative recursion.
It’s beautifully shot and has a character called The Alchemist who is probably the most dapper and stylish human ever.
Holy Mountain is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s followup to El Topo. It’s funded by Yoko Ono and John Lenin, so that should give you an idea of the extent of the self-important hippie mysticism involved.
I remember The Onion described El Topo as "enshrining the moment when the revolution of the 60s counter-culture turned from correcting social ills to the selfish pursuit of personal enlightenment." That’s about the size of Holy Mountain too. But it goes so far over the top, perhaps intentionally zany, perhaps not, that it’s fun watch. I particularly liked the scene where they build a scale-model of pre-Columbian Mexico with horny toads dressed as Aztecs, and then had them invaded by bullfrogs dressed like conquistadors.
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is an anthology movie that Kurosawa directed just before he died. You have to admire a man who has the artistic capital to make a film summary of his great dreams.
Some of the dreams are amazing, like the boy who accidentally observes the wedding procession of foxes. There’s some nice surprises sprinkled throughout, but mainly the dreams are dull and preachy.
Dragon Inn is a Maggie Cheung period-piece kung fu movie from the mid-80s.
This is a fun movie, but not particularly remarkable. Essentially a filler-piece.
The Work of Director Michel Gondry marks the point where the four-plus star movies become actively irritating. Here’s an image of the video from the "Stuff White People Like" blog.
The DVD is about three hours of Gondry’s commercials and his music videos, which are also commercials. There’s a lot of clever stylistic flare, and visible evidence of the recurring theme of recursion, but honestly, it’s all a lot of saccharine crap.
I’ve found that Netflix thinks I like dorky things a lot more than I actually do. The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is a home-production of someone’s D&D campaign.
I find myself, because of my social group, in the position of someone who understands all the D&D in-jokes, but having never played D&D, I don’t particularly think they’re funny.
Serial Experiments Lain: Vol.1: Navi is another example of dorkness that I don’t like. I think because most people who actually bother to watch anime think it’s five-star wonderful, anime shows up on my queue with a much higher ranking than it really deserves.
There’s these Japanese schoolgirls who have computers. God it’s dull.
So that’s pretty much the whole wad of flicks that Netflix thinks I would really like. Except for Rashomon, which is supposed to be really good, but I just can’t bring myself to commit to watch that much movie.
But before I finish, I would like to offer up a counter-example, a movie that Netflix gave a mere two stars, but which I ended up giving a full five: Oranges: Revenge of the Eggplant.
This is a feature-length "live-action animation" by the guy who did that Phantom Menace youtube review that everyone has been telling you to watch. Oranges uses puppetry, with fruit, to tell the story of a vengeful eggplant. This is one of the most violent films ever made, with fruit getting shot, blown up, burned, electrocuted, and anthraxed. And honestly, that’s a certain shade of awesome.
Another food treasure I got from my housemate was a can of ackees.
Ackees are a Jamaican fruit or something. If you google that word get a stack of SEO Jamaican tourism pages with recipes for "Saltfish and Ackees." I also found this choice tidbit of information about the ackee:
But they already had a recall over that, so everything’s cool now.
Also in the birthday box of food was a bag of dried pollack, which I figured was close enough to being dried cod for purposes of making ackees and saltfish.
The dried pollack was soaked overnight and then boiled for twenty minutes.
And then shredded with a fork.
Meanwhile, I made some fried plantains for the side. It’s always hard to get over the fact that they look like bananas but taste like potatoes.
You know what helps me get over that? Frying them in bacon fat.
Then the whole wad got stewed in a frying pan with onions, tomatoes, peppers, and spices like thyme and pepper. Essentially everything that you would normally put in a breakfast hash, except instead of scrambled eggs it’s a pile of bright yellow, possibly fatal fruit.
I suspect that it’s not a coincidence that the national dish of Jamaica has the same colors as the Rastafarians.
The resulting dish tasted mostly of onions and peppers. But the pollack gave it a meaty, chewy satisfaction.
The ackee itself was hardly noticeable. Imagine an avocado, but with a quarter of the density and taste.
Girl Scout Cookie season is coming to a close. If you’re like me, you’ve probably eaten several boxes of thin mint cookies already, and you’re asking yourself, "Where are all the THICK mint cookies? Are those damn girl scouts hoarding them all for themselves?"
Well, you don’t have to be beholden to them. You can make your own damn thick mint cookies.
Here’s how:
Step One: measure the maximum distance between your upper and lower incisors. This is your maximum bite distance.
Step Two: find how many thin mint cookies you can stack up to achieve your maximum bite distance.
Step Three: stack the thin mints face down on a cookie sheet and gently melt their chocolate undersides with a hot air gun.
Step Four: While the chocolate is still liquid, assemble the thin mints into a single thick mint stack.
Step Five: Let your thick mint set up in the freezer.
Step Six: enjoy your thick mint, satisfied with your ability to do exactly what you want to do, no matter what anyone else says.
Space Squid is always too light in the swag and merch department, so I’ve printed up some postcards with the most metal-rocking Space Squid logo yet.
On the back it has everything you might need to actually physically mail the card. Because people still sometimes do these things.
We’ll be selling these postcards at upcoming Space Squid events for a reasonable price.
The death-metal serif-font logo is also a desktop wallpaper image that you can download here for free.
Austin had a rare run-in with snow today, so I showed my co-workers the obscure Midwestern sport of boot skating. Point your toes, baby, point the toes.
(photo courtesy of Jeremiah)
Sometime last year, Pseudopod was kind enough to make an audio performance of my story "Hometown Horrible."
It was a huge honor to become a part of the Escapeartist phenomenon, and it was a fantastic podcast performance. Such a fantastic performance in fact, on the part of the reader Elie Hirschman, as well as the host Alasdair Stuart, that I don’t know how much credit I can claim for the story making it onto the 2009 Best of Pseudopod poll.
At the moment it’s coming in at number two, and I can’t tell you how tickled I am about that. And yes, for the record, I voted for myself, but I also voted for two other stories, so I figure that puts me in the black, morally speaking.
So there I am, in Highland Mall, walking past the gumball kiosk when I realize that I have a pocket full of change.
Clockwise from the top they are Black Cherry, Thunderbolt, Green Apple, and Super Sour.
Do I really need to tell you what they tasted like?
My housemate, who has obviously been paying attention to what goes through the kitchen, gave me some odd foods for my birthday. The cueritos, or pickled pig skin, are much like pork rinds, but instead of being crispy and salty, they are rubbery and sour.
I still don’t know how to read Korean, but this snack seemed to have corn, maybe seaweed, and definitely salt.
Quite delicious.
Having eaten a pickled daikon, I was pleased to find that the fresh daikon was crisp and flavorful, like a radish-potato-celery.
For a while now I’ve been petitioning to go to Luby’s.
If I were 76 years old, I would eat nothing else.
So I did that thing again, where I bought some weird fish at the MT Supermarket, with the idea that I would be able to research how to eat them later. So I got some "wild lady carp."
As it turns out, this entry is the first time in the entire internet that someone has written the exact phrase "wild lady carp." Julia, who is smarter than me, found a couple mentions of the original Vietnamese name, but I had already committed to just giving them a beer-batter frying as one would with smelt.
The packaging was kinda slap-assed. There was some random seaweed, as well as a completely random minnow species.
After I pulled out all the backbones and all the spines on all the dorsal and pectoral fins, we ended up with about three times as much wild lady carp as we were ever likely to eat.
Julia pointed out that they tasted much like the bottom of a lake.
Over the holidays I built a white noise machine for my food-frakking deputy Julia. You never know when you might need to drown out some ambient noise.
I’ve used an old coffeecan as a project enclosure, even though I really shouldn’t. When the circuit boards have a chance to move around inside the tangle of wires, the capacitors and other parts have a tendency to pick up signals that muddy up the sound.
It’s based on the premise that if you put a transistor into the circuit the wrong way, it emits a chaotic power signal, which I then feed through a pair of audio amp IC chips.
The variable potentiometer controls the amount of current bridging over the transistor, in effect tuning the sound.
On top you can see where I glued a sponge on top of the speaker to further smooth out the noise quality. Without the muffling, Julia says it sounds like doom.
And of course there are a number of LED status lights. Because you need LED status lights.
This is what it sounds like.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I need to get your feedback on some glasses styles. I had some catastrophic frame failures recently, so it’s time for me to get some new specs.
Tell me what you think works best. I’m probably going to buy a new pair in the next couple of days, so don’t dawdle!
Also, the way I appear in the photos, frumpy, unshaven, tousled, and dull-eyed is how I normally look, so the glasses need to work with that.
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