The Night Watch

This is some pretty cool news - the Rijiksmuseum in Amsterdam will be livestreaming their restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

If you don’t know much about this painting then you can do a lot worst than checking out Peter Greenaway’s film Night Watching, which is a weirdly mesmerizing primer on the history behind the painting, told as if it was a Rembrandt painting itself.

The Google Pixel 3 Is A Very Good Phone. But Maybe Phones Have Gone Too Far. »

My neck hurts. I am never not looking down. When I am not looking at my phone, I become slightly anxious. And then, when I do actually look at it, I become even more so. It reminds me of how I once felt about cigarettes. I experience the world with a meticulously crafted, tiny computer slab between me and it. I am an asshole. But so, maybe, are you?

Instead of the usual gushing over the new shiny, I wish more people wrote phone reviews like this.

Apple Watch Series 4 Fall Detection Tested By a Hollywood Stunt Double »

The new Apple Watch OS has improved “exercise detection”. Except when I’m sitting on the couch, rocking the baby to sleep, it will buzz and say “It looks like you’re doing an elliptical workout, track it?”. At least the fall detection looks like it actually works.

▶︎ Net Split or, the Fathomless Heartbreak of Online Itself | MC Frontalot »

I have a really low tolerance for nerdcore, but this is actually pretty good. And it speaks volumes that even MC Frontalot is sorta renouncing nerd culture. From “Internet Sucks”:

I don't love you any more internet You used to be a safe home for my nerd hard and my intellect Now you got so much hate but you just gotta interject Now you got too many chefs up in your kitchenette

Apple buys animated film from Kilkenny-based Cartoon Saloon »

Delighted for Cartoon Saloon. They’re quietly pumping out some of the loveliest animations I’ve seen in a long time – like Ghibli at their finest. If you don’t believe me, check out Puffin Rock on Netflix, which is a genuinely great children’s cartoon that’s full of charm and wit and visual inventiveness and it tells stories about friendship and intelligence that have none of the normal moralising one traditionally associates with children’s tv.

Moonlight

There are two times when it’s appropriate to use Clair de Lune: over amazing high-resolution videos of sunrise on the moon, and the ending of Ocean’s Eleven.

That’s it.

Recent Films - June 2018

(I try to post reviews of all the films I watch over on letterboxd. Here are the most recent reviews I’ve written)

A Quiet Place - 2018 - ★★★★

Since my daughter was born, certain films hit me way harder than they otherwise should. Anything involving a child in peril is danger territory for me. Throw in a father trying to protect the child-in-peril and I’m completely screwed. I’ll be a wreck. For example, War for the Planet of the Apes had me absolutely sobbing in the cinema.

A Quiet Place is exactly the kind of film that hits me harder than it probably should, what with John Krasinski’s kind-faced father bringing the pathos like a doe-eyed hammer. Throw in a nihilistic pre-credits sequence to establish the stakes and, yeah, I hadn’t a fuckin hope.

Some late-game rule-changing to score a cheap emotional hit kinda ruins it a little, but it’s still a tight, tight film.

Super Troopers 2 - 2018 - ★★½

The only thing really missing from this film was a Rodney Dangerfield cameo where he comes out and tells the cops and the mounties to lighten up before turning on really cheesy hair rock music and starting an impromptu dance party.

As light and nutritionally void as the first film, but slightly shorter on charm.

Pitbull. New Order - 2016 - ★½

My continuing education in the less-“worthy” Polish film canon continues with this, a sub-Love/Hate gangster film set in Warsaw. The writer-director, Patryk Vega, is described as the Polish Guy Ritchie. And from what I’ve seen of his films so far, maybe people mean Revolver-era Guy Ritchie? I dunno.

The film itself is a regressive, homophobic and insecure piece of filmmaking. The main character, “Miami”, is a quote-unquote “tough” quote-unquote “sexy” quote-unquote “cop”. No woman can look at him without wanting to fuck him. No man can look at him without wanting to fuck him. “That was the best sex I’ve ever had” says one of his lays. “Coffee?” a detective offers him. “I bet you take it black.” Yes, he’s a hard-fuckin, hard-drinkin cop. Oh, and when the suits in internal affairs take away his badge, he tells them to give it back or he’ll kick the shit out of them. And they do.

It’s that kind of film. The kind we haven’t really seen since Joel Silver cut down on his cocaine intake.

I’ve read a lot of reviews saying that based on this film, it won’t be long before Hollywood comes knocking at Patryk Vega’s door. And I don’t doubt that’s true, but only because they just need any new blood. But the real person who should be tapped for better things is the cinematographer. This film is total garbage, but at least it’s handsome garbage.

Supersonic - 2016 - ★★★½

I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of Oasis. Their music does nothing for me and their personalities are so ugh (although I love reading interviews with Noel Gallagher). So why am I giving three-and-a-half stars to an Oasis documentary? Well, because it’s not a documentary about Oasis. I mean, not really. It’s really a documentary about a period in time. It’s a documentary about success. It’s a documentary about regret.

The music is just helpful context.

Blockers - 2018 - ★½

Why does everyone keep saying what a great comedian John Cena is? Or even Leslie Mann, for that matter? All these huge comedy stars playing the parents and they got DEMOLISHED by the kids in this film. Very weak.

Sneakers - 1992 - ★★★★★

I fucking LOVE this film. It’s my ultimate comfort film.

BUT.

There’s a bit, a plot point, where Mary McDonnell was pretending to be hooked up with Stephen Tobolowsky on a computer date to get his office access card and his voice print and stuff and she gets stung. Except they make it look like she’s not stung. And then, being a pro grifter, she goes “This is the last computer date I go on” and Ben Kingsley mafia-hacker goes “A computer would never match her with him, I SMELL A RAT”.

BRUH IT’S 2018 AND NETFLIX STILL KEEPS RECOMMENDING I WATCH THE BIG BANG THEORY I THINK YOUR SHITTY 1993 COBOL DATING PROGRAM IS PROBABLY NOT AS FUCKIN SOPHISTICATED AS YOU THINK IT IS.

Gotowi na wszystko. Exterminator 2018 - ★★½

My first legit Polish-language film I’m watching for language homework rather than because of ‘merit’ or whatever and it’s about a middle-aged man-child who spends too much on old videogames and gets berated by his partner. Oops!

The film started to lose me in the middle when they suddenly turned the “plot” dial up a thousand notches. But it really lost me when a guy tried to convince his girlfriend to leave the mental hospital she was checked into. “But I need my meds! If I don’t have them, I don’t know what will happen!” “It’s okay because we’ll be together”.

Nope.

Paper Towns

I knew very little about Poland before moving here. Almost nothing about Warsaw. “I hear they have good pacts”, I used to dad-joke1.

Since then, we’ve been trying to get better. We recently went to the National Museum in Warsaw, where they have a new “Gallery of Polish Design” exhibit which is aimed squarely at dipshits like me who have a weird thing for mid-century design and electronics housed in discolouring plastic. Here’s a video of what you can expect in the exhibit:

Although not exactly vintage, they also had a vintage-inspired “paper town” toy that reminded me so much of Nintendo’s Labo. It’s basically a box filled with sheets of cardboard that you punch out and bend and fold into various parts of a ’town'.

As we were leaving, I noticed they were selling a couple of these in the gift shop. So, of course, I bought them.

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Here’s the finished product from a different set that we made earlier, so you can see what they look like finally constructed:

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My daughter (who’s two and a half), was too young to ‘get’ the Labo2 but she absolutely loves these. She loved punching out the little buildings and vehicles and handing them to me to construct. The first night, she took the restaurant (the two-tiered building in the back-left of that bottom picture) to bed with her. My wife even said that if she was in need of a present for a similarly-aged toddler, she would get them one of these packs. They’re cheap, extremely cute, very tactile and recyclable.

If you can’t make it to the National Museum in Warsaw to buy them, you can also order them from ringoringo.pl.


  1. One of the good things about being a dad is that you can dad-joke unironically. ↩︎

  2. Too much waiting around for not enough payoff at the end for her ↩︎

Housekeeping

You may have noticed some changes on this blog (or maybe you didn’t - there’s too much going on in the world for you to be concerned with my bullshit website).

The short version is that I’d been thinking a lot about what I wanted this blog to be. It’s probably the primary face of my internet presence, and I wasn’t really pleased with how it was representing me. Part of the problem, I realised, is that I was using a static website generator to power the website.

Don’t get me wrong, static site generators are wonderful pieces of software. You didn’t have to worry about backups or databases or where your content lives or extracting it from some SQL file later on. But they also mean that writing a blog post is a non-trivial task. To write a post, I had to create a file on my hard drive, open that in my editor, write the blog post, generate the site, preview it locally, then upload it to this server. I was using a fucking Makefile to streamline this process. Makefiles tickle my nerdy side deeply, but the process was so cumbersome it meant that I’d only write a blog post about something that really mattered, instead of just firing off a few posts every day. And I’m many things, but I’m not a ‘once in a while, here are my thoughts on a capital-I Important capital-T Topic’ kind of guy. I don’t work well like that and I didn’t feel like it best represented me.

(An anecdotal aside: during my migration back to Wordpress, I came across a prominent Wordpress developer who had actually left the project, citing fundamental problems with PHP as a language and the Wordpress codebase in general. He also moved to a static site generator and, just like me, his output fell off a cliff after the move. You could argue that this is probably a reflection on the general state of blogging in 2018, but like I said, this is just an anecdotal aside.)

So that was the short version of what’s been happening behind the scenes. Now let’s see what happens next.