::A Geek in Korea::

Namdaemun Fire, originally uploaded by pwalks.

Namdaemun, Korea’s #1 cultural asset, aflame. Authorities suspect arson. I’m deeply saddened by the loss of a Korean cultural landmark, and a world treasure.

Remember how awesome Memento was with the whole “Movie going forwards and backwards at the same time” thing? There is a movie that completely and utterly blows Memento out of the water for time-traveling and general “WTF?”  messing with the audience. It was made on a $7000 dollar budget, and is a Sundance winner. It’s probably one of the coolest movies I’ve seen in a long time, and I can’t wrap my head around it yet.

Primer

Which is available, in it’s entirety, at Google Video. (77 minutes)
Intensive Film Warning: This is a movie where you have to pay close attention to EVERYTHING that happens, watch carefully, and you STILL won’t understand it the first time around. You aren’t even supposed to. Anyone that claims to understand this movie the first time around is a savant, or a liar.

This film does not go out of it’s way to explain anything that is happening, and throws science jargon around a bit. It’s a cruel mistress, but rewarding in the end. It’s really amazing that this film was created at all, and despite the SHOESTRING budget, looks SO good. The budget never seems to impact the film at all.

The Basic Plot

Primer is a story about four engineers that work out of their garage trying to get rich inventing something and filing patents. Two of the engineers discover a weird effect as a byproduct of their latest experiment, and decide to cut the other two out of the group as they decide the best way to cash in on this new invention. As they begin to explore what they can do as a result of their invention their partnership is strained when they have different visions of the best use of the technology. Things happen, causality is played with, and your brain will start to hurt.

I saw it. Now what?
Here is a timeline explaining WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED after you watch it the first time.

I’d like to spread the love for this film, and also talk about it. If anyone else has some mind blowing movies to watch, please share in this thread.

The mechanic of Time Travel in Primer
A general description of the plot.
Wikipedia
Interview with the maker of the film.
An entire FORUM dedicated to trying to figure out this movie.

Cross posted with the Geek in Korea forum.

I am an Ubuntu user that tends to stick to Gnome applications when I can. One exception I made was when choosing my music application. Amarok is a fantastic program to manage music. It’s got tons of features, is extensible, and is really pretty damn cool. It is a KDE application, but both Gnome and KDE applications run in both desktop environments. They simply launch additional windows widgets to draw the menus and handle how the application interacts with the user.

For whatever reason, when I ran Amarok, the system resource usage was exceedingly high. Playing an .mp3 file and maintaining a short play list would eat up 80% of my processor. There HAD to be some sort of bug with it. What can manage my music, play everything in my collection, and use up less resources?

Enter Exaile. The people creating Exaile want it to be an “Amarok for GTK+ written in Python”. Sure. That sounds like exactly what I need.

After I installed Exaile, I selected the plugins I wanted to use, then let it archive my music. From there, it was simple to set up a Random Playlist of 100 songs and start listening to my collection. One of the cooler plugins will let me control the playlist by using menu buttons in the system notification tray. It pops up windows with the album art fetched from Amazon.com. You can even click on a song and find it’s lyrics instantly. It has podcast integration (I never listen to them on my PC though), and everything else I need.

One of the best parts of Exaile is integration with Internet radio stations. It works like Streamripper, where you surf through a list of stations sorted by genre. You can open up a Shoutcast station, add it to a playlist, and listen to it with no problems. Sadly, when I played with streaming radio, the mp3 tags didn’t let it update my Last.fm profile.

While there are a few features missing from what I used to do with Amarok, but Exaile uses few resources at all. While Exaile is a much newer project, it’s come into a usable program quickly. The last time I installed it (0.14 version), I quickly switched back to Amarok, but with the 0.2.11 release of Exaile is my new default player.

Amarok has a pending 2.0 release with all sorts of cool technology on the way. If they improve the performance, I might consider switching back. The competition and constant improvement in applications this high in quality is astounding. I’m happy reaping the benefits as well.

(Windows and Mac users, there are rumors for an Amarok release on your platforms as well, so don’t feel left out for long.)

1) Find the nearest book to you with at least 123 pages.
2) Turn to page 123.
3) Find the 5th sentence.
4) Type the next 3 sentences after the 5th sentence.
5) Tag 5 people

Nearest book: Reading Comprehension D, Developing Fiction, Nonfiction skills: Student Edition

“What is the tallest mountain in the world?”

“Do mountains grow?”

Use the text and pictures from “Top of the world” to answer the questions below.

Lame. My nearest book was a text book.

Today was the first day of the holiday break where both my wife and I didn’t have anywhere to go, anyone to see, or anything specifically to do. Instead of napping all day, we hung out together, watched some television, and even played some Wii Sports together.

This morning I was doing my hour of Super Mario Galaxy. I’m already up to 55 stars. I can “beat” the game tomorrow. Of course, even if I hit 60 stars and take on Bowser, I’d only be a quarter of the way through the game.I like the challenge levels I’ve played so far, but I can’t beat everything on the first, second, and sometimes fifth try. I’ve got a lot of game left despite being near the “end”.

I’d highly recommend a Wii owner looking for an fun game to pick up Super Mario Galaxy. It’s not flawless, but it’s close,and it’s extremely awesome. No matter how worn out the premise “pick up stars”, you never do the same thing twice. Amazing level design. It’s just fun.

After my better half woke up, we ordered pizza for lunch. We watched “Stand by Me“, which she had never seen before. It’s one of those movies you assume everyone has seen, but never go to the effort to track down and watch. Our MegaTV box had it on tap in the “family” section. Nothing says wholesome like swearing pre-teens who smoke looking for a dead body. (To be fair, it does have a rating system in place.)

After the movie, we got down to a little Wii Sports. I got beat in a few of the events I wasn’t concentrating on, but kept my pro status in Bowling for another outing. This is good enough for me. My wife simply offering to play, and doing well at bowling was better than any score I could have achieved anyway.

Yoshi got a walk, and we’ve even got oatmeal cookies baking in the oven. It’s not often our busy schedules allow us to spend so much time together in a relaxed atmosphere. It’s a nice time. Too bad the rest of the month will be so hellish.

Which Character From The Office Are You?

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Which Character on The Simpsons Are You?

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We made good on our promised to visit the relatives not once, but twice in the last twenty-four hours. My wife had told her mom we’d come over to visit yesterday for dinner. We arrived to find her father and brother sick and sleeping. We ate some delicious galbijim (steamed spare ribs), then had to bow out early because everyone was under the weather.

My father-in-law, and brother-in-law got sent to Grandma’s house for the holiday. I’m not sure if they wanted to go or not, but considering that Lunar New Year consists of nothing but sloth and overeating for Korean men, they’d be fools to turn down the chance to be spoiled at the relatives.

My Mother-in-law, on the other hand would work her fingers to the bone to serve them all the food they need, as well as the food for the ancestral ceremonies, so she wisely decided to stay home. Her sister also claimed to be too busy to visit Grandma, with a sick husband at home. We didn’t get a chance to visit them this year.

We went over to my mother-in-law’s house today when she was alone for lunch. As always, I sat around while the ladies worked. My wife did an hour or more of dishes as they prepared food. I’m not allowed to do anything to help, so I brought my Nintendo DS and mp3 player for entertainment. They don’t mind.

After getting stuffed full of food, we played a game of GOPS with my mother-in-law. Like everyone we’ve introduced to the game, she liked it. She had never played a game with poker cards before, so we had to explain the “Jack Queen King” order. That’s pretty common in Korea, as people think a deck of cards is only for gambling, not casual fun.

After the card game, they told me to go take a nap while they talked. No argument here. I went and slept for a few hours. When I woke up, my wife and mother-in-law were also taking a nap, the sun was down, and we needed to get home to feed the dog. We got another meal, as my mother-in-law has a compulsive need to stuff me full of food when I visit. Pacheon (Pancakes with leeks and squid) is another one of my favorites. Went we were completely full, we got sent home.

Yoshi has been trying to get our attention all evening since we returned after being ignored all day. We’ve invited some cousins over to hang out with us tomorrow, but we don’t know if they’ll show. If they don’t, I’ll spend some more time with Super Mario Galaxy. Not a problem in the world at the moment.

I listened to Starship Sofa’s podcast while sitting around during the Lunar New Year holiday. Right now I’m listening to my second episode, and while I like that this has some Hugo Award winning and nominated authors, I don’t know if I like this podcast yet.

The host has a thick Scottish accent, but thankfully doesn’t do the readings of the short fiction. In fact, I don’t know why there is even a host on the podcast at all. A plug for feedback and a drop of a name or two seems to be his only function. I don’t listen to their “round table talk out SF” episodes, only the stories, so maybe he is more involved than I know. It’s also a bi-weekly podcast, and that’s slow. I’ll keep it in queue, but it better deliver quality if it’s that infrequent.

One of the reasons I LOVE Escape Pod is that they have a lot of variety in their story choices and get a lot of new authors too. It’s weekly, but still brings consistent quality. I also like the commentary of Steve Eley about the way they choose stories. There is the annoyance of hearing them ask for donations, but they release their podcasts with a Creative Commons license. That’s pure awesome. Escape Pod is also better polished and seems to have a philosophy of general coolness I can get behind. It’s one of my highlights of the week when I get a chance to listen to it.

Anyway, it’s not like listening to one podcast means that I’m not allowed to listen to the other. The more the merrier when it comes to good Science Fiction short literature is what I’ll say.

Remember when the Batman franchise started off the “gritty comic book remake” genre?  Following the “Superman” model of progressively shitty sequels, there was Batman Returns, then Batman Forever, then finally, in 1997, a Batman movie so bad it took a very long time before anyone was willing to reboot the franchise again. Batman & Robin was a movie that almost killed the superhero movie genre for a time until Spiderman came out. (Speaking of which, Spiderman itself had a several crappy sequels too.)

Rifftrax, headed up by Mike Nelson, did me a great service by making fun of Batman & Robin. I remember hearing  news about that movie when I was in high school. Being a former comic book reading fan, I felt it was my duty to find out all sorts of information about movies based on characters I liked.

I had a faint hope that somehow that movie would be good. I even saw it in the theater. The only repressed memory that remains of the experience is when the film ended, with the three “Bat” characters ran in front of a spot light and then the music faded out to some terrible Smashing Pumpkins song I thought was cool at the time.

What sets this Rifftrax apart is that the script came from fans, not the actors themselves. Usually the Rifftrax crew is responsible for watching the movies dozens of times and coming up with jokes to ease the pain. Instead, the Rifftrax forums put it upon themselves to write the script and then edit it for the performers. Sadly, I didn’t know about this, because I would have been willing to watch that film multiple times just for the chance that one of my jokes would be spoken by Mike Nelson himself.

Anyway, the fact that this is a fan production is evident as the movie goes on. While the jokes were funny, and sometimes hilariously funny, there are more gaps in Batman & Robin than any other rifftrax I’ve watched. Even Mike, riffing entirely alone, would talk more during Roadhouse than in the last 30 minutes of Batman & Robin. There are minutes without dialog from the performers. I’d rather have silence than a lame joke, and it’s clear that most people didn’t make it through the entire movie when they had donated their scripts. There were a lot of missed opportunities in the last few ridiculous minutes of the movie that desperately needed to be heckled.

I’m not sure if the writing process will always produce a “front loaded” script, or that people just give up when they realize they have to watch a crappy movie over and over to write something funny. However, if given the opportunity to ever participate in any future events of this kind, my strategy for writing a joke to get into a script would be to start with the last thirty minutes of a movie and heckle everything I saw. Something would stick, and then I’d be immortalized in Internet geekdom by being able to say I heckled with the best.

A few days ago, we got a call from my mother-in-law, who wanted to know if we’d be going to Grandma’s house for Lunar New Year. We used the standard excuse that we can’t bring Yoshi to family events because we don’t trust our relatives.

Yoshi has to stay on a protein free diet to avoid costly allergy shots, and he also can’t stay outside the house at night. He’s not a dog we’d leave outside to freeze. We can’t spend two or three days away from Yoshi, as he needs to be in a cage when we are out of the house in winter, and he needs his walks. Grandma just doesn’t understand the concept of “dogs as pets”, being a country woman through and through. She still raises them as a food source, which is another reason we’d never bring a dog to her house.

This is only a half truth to avoid having to go visit the very prying, very nosy, downright rude extended relatives we don’t like. We have nothing against Grandma (blunt though she may be) or our mother-in-law that would prevent us from spending time with them otherwise if some of the other relatives weren’t invited. My mother-in-law was not disappointed when she passed on the message we wouldn’t be showing up, although she gets along better with them than we do.
She called Grandma to say she wouldn’t be able to attend the Lunar New Year gathering with the extended relatives either. Her excuse? My wife and I were going to be spending time at her house. This is true. We did plan to go over and spend time with them for a meal. We won’t spend the night because we live in the same city and that’d be a bother for everyone.

We get free days otherwise wasted with rude extended relatives in the country. My mother-in-law avoids days of cooking for thankless relatives, a long drive, and spending lots of money for people bowing to her during Lunar New Year. It’s a Win-Win for everyone.

Except Grandma. But she almost always comes to visit us during Korean holidays. Usually, Grandma says some terse words about my foreigner ways when I make some sort of cultural faux pas due to honorifics, then leaves as quickly as she arrives. She’s fine with me being in the family, but doesn’t really understand what I do, or how I live. All she wants is for me to take care of my wife, and however I accomplish that goal is fine with her. Lucky me. That’s my plan too.