The Twilight Report

Babel

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:38:00 GMT

Thinking about Babel, which as mentioned in the previous post I saw yesterday. I’m not giving anything away by saying that the story is divided into three largely unrelated stories. The connection between the stories is tenuous, but they drive each other. The central characters for two of the stories have been nominated for best supporting actress: Adriana Barraza for her character Amelia in Mexico, and Rinko Kikuchi for her character Chieko in Japan. I wonder how unusual it is for a picture to receive two nominations in the same category like that. Anyway, the nominations, and the award if it follows, would be well deserved for either. Kikuchi (26) delivers a particularly believable performance of a deaf teenager.

It makes me wonder though, why “supporting” and not “starring”? It seems mainly because they aren’t Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchet, who received top billing. Their performances were good, but not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to me the Mexican and Japanese stories are just as important, and much more interesting than the Moroccan (American centric) story. Making the American and Australian actors the stars and the supporting actress nominations for the non-native English speakers reinforces the belligerent Ugly Americanism of Pitt’s character, who sees the world revolving around himself.

like a heartbeat / on the downbeat

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 22:24:00 GMT

Feeling overly dramatic and totally energyless tonight. sendmail should die; remind me again why we can't just use postfix instead?

I have an urge to write another computer demo. Will need two things:

to review OpenGL
inspiration

I was in a bookstore this afternoon after work and I picked up an OpenGL book. The hard bit will be the inspiration. My last demo was inspired by the number e^[1].

Who wants to be in charge of sound effects and music?

The other thing I thought about buying in the bookstore was a Mandarin/English dictionary. I decided to wait for now. I've obviously become interested in 中文^[2], but I have a few 中文 resources that I should finish with before buying new stuff. It could be a passing interest after all.

I'm a dork.
Chinese language

Camera Etiquette

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:20:00 GMT

Today I was by the opera house showing some friends of the family around our fair city. I was about to sit down on this chair when someone from a region outside Australia and the US^[1] approached me with his camera and uttered something incoherent in fragmentary English. At first I thought that he wanted me to take a picture of him with this girl who appeared to be with him, but actually what he wanted me to do was get the hell out of the way so that she could take a picture of him. It's not like I had been standing anywhere near where they were, I guess he just decided to preemptive inform me that his personal time and space was more valuable than mine.

Am I out of line here in thinking that it is good camera etiquette to

avoid walking between camera and subject when approaching a group of people who are obviously are taking a photograph and
when photographing yourself in front of a cultural icon in such a way that the photograph will look so identical to a million others that there will be zero artistic merit to the thing that you really ought to frame the photograph without disturbing people who are minding their own business, especially when all the wanted to do was sit down in a chair which had clearly not been claimed by anyone.

yeah. so.

[1] I won't specify exactly which region

Mr. Farley, you are an ass

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 08:21:00 GMT

Two things came up at Thanksgiving dinner this year that I wanted to talk about. One was my "blog" and the other was video games. I prefer to refer to it as a journal, but it is what is, so it is a blog. I sort of defended the existence of my journal by saying that I started it because I wanted to practice writing to keep my skills from decaying. That is actually true, although there is another reason.

I find when I get angry or into an argument, I often become incoherent. It's not that the ideas are unclear to me, in fact, I find just the opposite: the ideas are so clear in my head that I don't stop to explain key points that need to be made. If I take my time and write down my reasoning for a particular position I find that I can be much more persuasive, or at least less nervous if the subject should come up in a conversation. I have strong opinions, but I tend to be non-confrontational.

Take the other subject at dinner: video games. In the 7th grade I wrote an essay about why video games were good that was so coherent and well written that my no-good English teacher Mr. Farley wrongly accused my mother of having written it. My father felt that I spent too much time playing video games and tried to dissuade me from doing so. In the long term he didn't alter my behavior, I think that he was wrong to try, and I don't think that my interest in video games has stunted my personal growth. I hardly play video games at all anymore, but I do not regret the time I invested in them.

At dinner, one of the guests said that video games were bad because you don't use your own imagination. Since I tend to be non-confrontational in person, I didn't contradict the guest. While it is sort of a personal reasoning, and may not be relevant to everyone's experience, I'd like to explain why I disagree here for the record, and so that in the future I have a coherent line of reasoning for arguing the subject.

(Why video games can be good...)

Voting

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 20:09:00 GMT

This story about voting and the official language of the United States came up in a conversation recently (I think it was at Action Tuesday). I've heard this "fact" repeated a number of times. For example, it appeared in one of the little bits of propaganda they gave me when I was naturalized as an American. It was a "did you know that" list of reasons why everyone should vote. One of the "reasons" to vote is that a proposed law, which would have made German the official language in the United States, was defeated by a single vote. Actually:

In 1794 a group of German speakers in Virginia petitioned Congress to publish federal laws in German as well as English. The intention was not to supplant English but simply to supplement it. A House committee recommended publishing German translations of the laws, but on January 13, 1795, "a vote to adjourn and sit again on the recommendation" (apparently an attempt to keep the measure alive rather than killing it immediately) failed by a vote of 42-41. Frederick Muhlenberg (1750-1801) was in fact Speaker of the House at the time, but how he voted is unknown. Tradition has it that he stepped down to cast a negative vote, apparently being the German-speaking equivalent of an Oreo. Not that it mattered. The vote was merely procedural; its success would have not guaranteed passage of the measure, and in any case German translations of federal statutes are a far cry from making German the official language of the U.S. A similar measure came up a month later and was also voted down, as were subsequent attempts in later years.

Cecil Adams

In addition to being factually incorrect the above "reason to vote" is misleading because it is usually worded to imply that the one vote that made a difference was made in a referendum, rather than in a vote among representatives. I actually think that everyone should vote, and if you don't (and assuming you have the legal right to do so) you've no cause to complain about the train wreck which is our government. Therefore voting is really about guaranteeing my right to complain, not to actually make a difference.

What's in a Letter?

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:24:00 GMT

Somehow, in the boredom of waiting for the timer to finish its timing run, I stumbled across a thread on Wikipedia dominated by the internet vs. Internet debate. I would say obviously some people need to find better things to do with their time, but I am apparently no better because I actually read through about half of it, by which time I had gone through several identical argument cycles (cycle where the same people make the same arguments as though they had not just been made at all); so I am no better.

I never even really thought of this as controversial. To me, you capitalize the Internet where we check our mail and browse the web every day, whereas I do not capitalize the internet of computers which sits behind my firewall at home operating semi-autonomously (many such internets exist). Apparently, however, it is controversial to some people.

So I ask the question: what is in a letter? According to Lynne Truss, in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves about punctuation, she mentions that the word "I" in the English language was original capitalized to make it stick out and be more readable. The German language is infinitely more strait forward in its capitalization rules - all nouns are capitalized - and yet even there, there are some funny rules, Sie the formal form of you is capitalized, whereas du the informal you is not. Some languages don't even have capital letters! I wonder what they do with all the free time they have on their hands due to the near const absence of capitalization arguments.

What goes almost unnoticed in the discussion page of the Internet Wikipedia entry is that there is a whole section of the article which is blatantly biased, inappropriate and offensive; not to mention the fact that it violates the neutral point of view policy of the website. This is so typical of Internet discourse. People waste their time arguing the relative merits of emacs vs. vi (I use pico or nano instead, I don't think that harms anyone else) or who would win if the Enterprise took on an Imperial Star Destroyer (I am pretty sure both are fictional). Surprisingly enough, which type of ship would win usually has a lot to do with which one the author finds most aesthetically or artistically pleasing (ie. is a fan of).

It is so easy to forget that there are actual problems confronting our society. It isn't really an Internet phenomenon either. As a nation we were so caught up in the President's penis, and debating whether he should be impeached, that we totally didn't notice that the "bad guys" were sneaking up on us. Oops. Too political.