In need of an analysis

basti: I really like ‘Entourage’...It kills all the magic of movies entirely.

On the surface, this show is like a male-version of ‘Twilight.’ It's all wish-fulfillment. They do whatever they want with no consequences. Except if you really pay attention to it, it has some very interesting themes.It's not clear whether they are intentional or not, though.

Look at the so-called artistic characters. And look at the examples of the movies they create. Like Billy Walsh and ‘Medellin’/‘Queen's Boulevard’. He's just this pretentious prima-donna. He is obsessed with his artistic initegrity, but the movies themselves are just pseudo-intellectual art. The characters talk about how much they want to make great movies, but it's just crass business.

Inter-generational progress?

"In a society of this sort, with stability in both the underlying growth in productivity and the propensity to consume, each succeeding generation must be richer in material terms than its predecessor."

And this is the way it is

Google Redirects! But Will The Chinese Government Block?!

# The Chinese, in their amazing capacity to endure, conscious of the very real progress the Chinese government has thus far delivered to them in so many other areas, decide this still isn’t big enough for them to rise up and rebel.
# They adapt, switch to other services, and continue with life, making the best of things.
# They may even begin to resent Google and “the West” for abandoning them, for not respecting their circumstances enough to work with them and instead end up being seen as working against them in the guise of working “for” them.

The Virtuous Poor

basti: Some people at work were talking about collecting art.
It was very much like in ‘Wall Street’
I guess if I weren't so poor, then I might go back to coveting wealth.

Predicting the Future

CPUs and GPUs in the next ten years

"Today’s CPUs have already reached higher heat density than a nuclear reactor, and maintaining Moore’s Law will be a considerable challenge once five nanometer gates are achieved.

The Itanium architecture was conceived two decades ago as insurance against that inevitable day...

Unfortunately, the compiler technology to pull this off did not even exist when Intel and HP began the project"

A gift from the past, part 1

For me, access to the internet around the early part of the decade made TV in general, and Cartoon Network in particular, one of those things that fell by the wayside. But just recently I found something that was not in my teenage subconsciousness: Justice League.

When confront with this artifact of a past era it is difficult to say what effect it would have had if I watched it back then, but I definitely appreciate watching the show now. Perhaps I am just becoming capable of appreciating these things.

The most surprising part is how much I enjoyed watching a series that is almost a decade old, and with decent - not great - animation. It wasn't a breakthrough in technique by any means, but the story telling is quite compelling.

When I think back on what meant so much to me as a child, as a teenager, and even as short a while back as one year ago, I can comfortably say I have come to ridicule many of them. This is somewhat of a reversal.

The series is well written with some surprising characters. In watching the Justice League I've gain a sense of appreciation for the American canonical superhero characters who always uphold the same ideals, and sometimes, fight the same supervillains. In the past I've mocked this aspect of DC comics as stagnant, preferring instead the more fast paced anime (perhaps I would not have appreciated this back then after all). But as time passed, many of these new animes felt hollow - because style is no substitue for substance. And plus, one can only withstand so much the confused philosophical meanderings and misogyny of their 'autuers'.

What came across as uplifting in Justice League is the exploration of themes such as love, redemption and renewal amidst the backdrop of characters that we thought we knew. And of some surreal existentialist themes...

(to be continued...)

France, or what's left of it, in Africa

Nodding and Winking

'...we maintain the fiction of our "presence" and endorse the course of events we no longer determine.'

A poet

Interview with Imtiaz Dharker

"And you are as God made you, beautiful
And you are as God made you, unexpected"

Post-colonialism in Dune

basti: It's interesting. I am half-watching the SciFi channel version of ‘Dune.’ There are certan elements they stress that the Lynch version does not.

Like, for example, they stress how kind the Atreides are to the natives. This is meant to be understood directly. Like, that they are generous, benevolent rulers. But I think there is a lot of room for a different interpretation. The movie's attempts to construct this interpretation are faulty - it's just not that well done.

So it's possible to look at this the other way. That these foreigners come in with all of these high-minded ideals about social equality and wontonly disrupt the native culture without any real care for its long-term health.

They show up, dismantle all of these old customs overnight, but there is no real, lasting attempts at building a better society. Just these token gestures.

This, I think, is interesting, because the original Dune does not take this approach at all. Only the 2000 version does, which seems very telling of the intended audience and the preconceptions of the writers. There is this additional burden for the writers to portray the colonial masters as benevolent, but it always takes this very apologetic stance. And the stance seems very hollow. Whereas Lynch seems to have had no need to address this at all.

Diary of an EVE Industrialist, Part 6

Just how unequal is EVE's hyper-capitalistic universe? Apparently, not so unequal than our own.

I remember a while a go, someone calculated the average income of a surface dweller in EVE based the on the price of a dinner meal in one of the official EVE chronicles. The figure came out to be 4 million ISK (Interstellar Kredits) per year.

Well, here are some back of the napkin calculations. To put the 'average' income into perspective, the income of a capsuler, an EVE pilot, is a good 20 million ISK, per hour. Let's take the U.S. as a basis of comparison. The average U.S. income is $33,000 per year. That means, for the U.S. to reach that level of wealth disparity, there needs to be people who are earning $165,000 per hour, or, $1,446,225,000 a year.

According to Forbes, there are 793 identified billionaires in the world with an average net worth of $3 billion each. The yearly income of a capsuler in EVE is half the networth of the average richest people on a 2009 basis.

Consider that the "lifespan" (average subscription month) in EVE is 8 month, the networth of the richest people in EVE are in the same range as the richest people on Earth. Since the average number of EVE capsuler residents is 50K (I use this because EVE recently reached this peak number, with room for future growth) against a background of untold billions on the surface of planets. I have to assume that ratio is not so different from 793 out of 7 billion people. Looking at it that way, the stratification of the richest people in EVE are similar to the wealth divide of this era.

They might as well call it...

There Will Be Time Enough for Love

Private, Public

One of my friends was annoyed by the inanity of some people's advice. Specifically, the advice to "just be yourself" that, although maybe sound at its core, comes across so facile as to be irresponsible. Obviously, people are themselves, and if they don't have a problem as they are then there would be no need for advice.

The problem is not so much with being yourself as with its presentation.

My friend illustrates this dilemma by the way of bringing up a person our age who told everyone how she felt as though she is a child of the 1950s, and watching shows like Mad Men fills her with a sense of nostalgia. Knowing me, my friend said I would have ridiculed her, on the ground that she romanticized the time period and so on, and it would have made me a misanthrope.

I can see both happening, one as the consequence of the other so I didn't disagree. But even our own actions are capable of betraying our underlying beliefs. My friend said what is readily lost in translation in my immediate reaction is my sense of wonder of the contemporary era, and my optimism in man's progress. Those would have been closer to my personality.

Our outward presentation is thought to be set in stone, immutable (but a devastating refutation to this thesis is that since this post's publication, I've edited it at least fifteen times). Often, a person must reconcile the past with the present. This is where we have problem with presenting ourselves. A moment in time against an eternity of changes.

I don't believe there is a simple advice to the issue of self presentation. And my friend said mastery of it is not where we begin, and perhaps not where we will ever reach. 12/29/2009

Seventeen Moments of Spring

Actor who immortalised Soviet spy Stirlitz dies at 81

Wheat

The production value of Chinese movies have gotten better. I Just watched Wheat, a rather pedestrian (it has been a disappointing year for Chinese cinema) historical drama. Of the few things that felt memorable was choreography of the environment, centering around a bend in the river as the day and weather changes. There is also a hint of trending toward realism in the way details are captured, and also understanding of the grimness of the historical subject. Could this mean the general taste, and therefore the psyche of the Chinese people are also changing? In encountering these small details, I only have an instinctual feeling.

Time will tell.

Lu Xun's outspoken grandson

Interview with Zhou Lingfei from Danwei on Vimeo.

In Dreadful Deeds Fearless

the original...

O Prince, O Chief of many throned Powers
That led the embattled Seraphim to war
Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds
Fearless, endangered Heaven’s perpetual King,
And put to proof his supremecy,
Whether upheld by strength, or chance or fate;

Now playing Solium Infernum

Catching up on reading

Who Benefits from Equality

Khrushchev and the birth of the modern media riot

1984 Miner's Strike

Gravity's Rainbow and more recent Pynchon stories

Zhivago's children

Marquez

Weber

Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Honor Killing

a perverse tribute to the social power of fantasy

The rules of the game

Chancery rules

To the layman, nevertheless, those are diplomatic niceties. The fundamental purpose of the book is serious: humans are a contentious and destructive species and so the opportunities for peaceful interaction must be maximized. Here is an essential aid to doing so at the highest levels of professional effectiveness.

The American Dream

11:47 AM basti: ...it's all about this transition to upper middle class success and this American dream of being successful and rich and having a great job but not having to ever think much about anything.