The Danger Of Good Intentions
Paternalism - a world view that states that sometimes forcing a person against their freedom, if for their own good, is acceptable. A good example is the collapsing bridge thought experiment. A bridge is about to collapse and you know it for certain. You advertise this fact so people will not go onto the bridge. You put signs. You tell people about it. But somebody still walks toward the bridge with what looks like an intention to cross it anyway. You show that person the signs. No response. You yell at the person "The bridge is about to collapse!". No response either. You realize that the person probably doesn't even speak English. Is it okay to force this person, to reduce his freedom, and force him out of the bridge?
Beau Is Afraid
There is a sub-genre of Horror films categorized by surrealism. It could range between totally insane films like anything directed by David Lynch all the way to something like Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, where it is kind of surreal, but also doesn't actually ask from the audience too much in terms of figuring out what is going on. "Beau Is Afraid" is more toward the David Lynch category of surreal horror.
Are You Sure That You Remember
Unfinished book about future where freedom is established much better than today. If we look few hundred years into the past, people had less freedom than people have now. So optimistically in future people will even more freedom. Thought, it doesn't mean that the characters will live a care-free problem-free life. Quite the contrary. With freedom comes responsibility. With freedom comes a huge amount of strange situations. And of course, there is the obvious question. How the hell people sell things in the future?
Addons For SuperTuxKart
There is this game called SuperTuxKart that I didn't develop. But which is among the best Free Software games out there. And they have a way to make and publish addons. This is a list of addons that I made for SuperTuxKart.
Debunking A Critique of Free Software by Anonymous
An Ultimate Hacker by the name of Troler sent me an interesting article written by some anonymous writer and published subsequently by Jake Bauer. I already debunked a few anti-free-software and anti-Stallman articles before. But most of them were from either complete imbeciles or corporate imbeciles. This time it seems like the article, which is titled "A Critique of Free Software" is written by a Free Software enthusiast. And by a person that is genuinely interested in the success of Freedom. He criticizes some aspects of the Free Software Foundation that he believes are detrimental to its stated goals. And believes that the goal is not what they tell it is.
What Lies Beneath
Have you ever wondered what would Alfred Hitchcock do in the age of CGI and VFX? What kind of strange insane shorts he would come up with? Well Robert Zemeckis set out for himself a challenge to find out. He is notorious for using visual effects creatively. A lot of people might be familiar with the mirror shot he did in the film Contact. So something like trying to make a Hitchcockian thriller of the 21st century was just about the right kind of thing for Zemeckis.
Kids Should Be Told More Complex Stories
People are flawed. All of us are. Each has something stupid about. And the funny thing is, it's impossible to avoid people either. We had tried! Lock-downs didn't work. People want to be with other people. And it's preferable that people would be with other people often. Communication is often a key to good psychological state. If we don't want all people to turn to murder maniacs we should never allow lock-downs to happen.
Sheiny The Hacker
Sheiny The Hacker is a book long in making. If you read my article about "How I Started Using GNU / Linux", you know that this book originally was started as a movie project. But slowly I realized that this type of material is technically legally un-film-able.
The House That Jack Built
When I started doing movie reviews I told myself that I will make reviews right after I saw the movie. But there is an exception to this rule. The first and the last time I saw The House That Jack Built was in Jerusalem Cinemateque in the end of 2018. Roughly 5 years ago. And this review will be made from the memory I have of the movie. I have no problem with the existence of this movie. Freedom of Speech is important. But I am not willing to watch it again. Even though I am kind of a fan of the director Lars Von Trier and the movie is arguably very good. It's just I'm not brave enough to sit through it again.
Who Is The Best Person
How do you judge the best? Do you use the Christian moral goodness as a base for justification? You know values like humility, charity and so on. Or do you use the definition of somebody like Friedrich Nietzsche who believed that goodness is measured in quality? You know, beauty, strength, influence... and so on. To be frank, it seems like it is either that the truth is somewhere in the middle or there are two different types of the same thing. It seems like the word "good" means two different things at once.
The Creator
Gareth Edwards is a type of writer / director that I can relate to. I remember watching the Star Wars movie that he directed Rogue One back when it came out and feeling like I know what this guy is doing. Like I myself want to be that guy. Back in 2016 ( when Rogue One came out ) I still didn't quite give up the Wrong Hate project and what he showed was the stuff that I was aiming for.
Why Jews Are Successful
Like it or not, but it seems like a large majority of hate toward Jewish people stems from the rate of Jewish success, which is apparently so large, that people form conspiracy theories, which I would love to be true, about Jewish elite classes or whatever, that rig the system in favor of Jews above anyone else ( actually if I think about this hard enough something like this is theoretically possible, but it would be completely decentralized and almost utterly uncoordinated ) . The truth is perhaps anti-climatically mundane in comparison.
Deception
Sometimes developers of a program will lie to the user knowing very well that they are lying. This kind of Deception is often implemented as a malicious functionality.
Breaking The Waves
Lars Von Trier is an interesting filmmaker. He directs mostly very depressing movies that are very hard to watch. Breaking The Waves is an interesting case study in his filmography because on some weird level this is one of the rare examples of a Lars Von Trier film with a happy ending. Even though you could perhaps argue that the ending is nowhere near happy at all.
The Pentas
Pentas are 5 gong-style round drum-things which are used to play simple melodies. Each one of those is one note in a scale called the Pentatonic scale. If you take the modern western scale with it's 7 notes (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si). The pentatonic scale is the best sounding 5 of those (Do, Re, Mi, Sol, La). The easiest way of achieving the pentatonic scale on a piano would be to play only the black keys. Also the pentatonic scale is quite popular with beginner guitarists. It's rather simple on a fret-board and gives a nice sounding solo when improvising. The Pentas - being my second album, was still recorded during my time learning the guitar. So I used a lot of the pentatotic scale in it. Thought quite frankly, knowing about the other two notes (Fa and Si) I added them quite often still.
Bones And All
It is very hard to describe the style of Luca Guadagnino, the director of Bones And All. His films are very good. But it seems like he is not interested in plot, which is weird, considering that the movies are good. He is famous for his erotic dramas, films centered around a sexual tension between people, like his perhaps most acclaimed movie Call Me By Your Name, in which all the substance comes from very subtle things. A character looks a certain way on another character. Or perhaps holds onto another character's hand for way too long. And you have to piece together all these little clues to even start feeling some kind of presence of a plot. Because if you don't pay attention it all looks like people just casually hanging out. And then suddenly a payoff happens, which would make sense only if you paid attention to the little clues.
Eyes Wide Shut
Fuck! What a great ending of a great director's filmography. Eyes Wide Shut 1999 was the last film directed by Stanley Kubrick, who died towards the end of post-production of this movie. There are rumors that Stanley Kubrick's death is related to the content of this film. And that somebody wasn't very happy with what he did. At that time Stanley Kubrick had the final cut rights at Warner Bros. Meaning that he would be the person that approves the movie that will be shown to the audience. There was a story of somebody overhearing yells at Stanley Kubrick that he can't show that stuff from one of the executives on the movie. And 6 days later Kubrick was dead. Perhaps just a conspiracy theory. But considering what the movie is about, there might be something to those theories.
Plausible Deniability
"I think you may like it" - said Mendel to Sheiny one day as he was looking at his TV screen. He was just browsing the web in search of some interesting things to look about and found an old interview with Jacque Fresco who was talking about an idea for a language of the future. He claimed that the languages of today are to vague and allow for multiple interpretations of the same idea, which allows for things like religion to be so successful and for people like lawyers to have successful jobs. And that in the future people would develop a concrete scientific language which will not allow for misunderstandings. Which will make all people understand each other perfectly. And which will put an end to such things like Plausible Deniability.
Only God Forgives
From my review of Drive you probably know that I like the taste of Nicolas Winding Refn's cock. And in this review I will be sucking his cock once again, while drooping saliva all of his masterpiece Only God Forgives.
