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Winter Break
Jan. 20th, 2023 12:21 amMovies
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022): Somewhat a disappointment after so many people praised it so much. The movie is probably fun for someone not familiar with absurdist philosophy, but otherwise it felt shallow and yawning. Nihilism reduced to a generational conflict, as it was 19th century Turgenev. Maybe for teenagers it is a good movie: I remember watching the Matrix and liking it a lot, but if I was to watch the Matrix as an adult I would surely get bored with how much it pushes its philosophy. 7/10.
No Bears (2022): an Iranian movie whose director is in prison for making it. What a great immersion in a small Iranian village! After the movie I felt like I visited this village because I knew all the rules: take off the shoes at home, offer guests tea, sit on the carpet. It's a cute depiction of villagers life on the border of Turkey, with contrasting episodes from across the border in Turkey, a made up conflict between the villagers and the film maker, and many comical and dramatic situations arising from it. 9/10.
Turn Every Page (2022): a documentary interviewing the writer Robert Caro and his editor Robert Gottlieb about their working process, which turns into a truly captivating thriller about the importance of commas and semicolons in writing. It made me wanna read Caro's classic "The Power Broker," which is over a thousand pages long. Caro says he writes about a thousand words every day, which is not too much, if I think about it, multiply it by 300 and it becomes a short book. Caro's books are multiple years efforts, contain multi-million number of words, so it all makes more sense how those thick books are written day by day. 9/10.
In the theater I ran into Jerry Seinfeld: he was wearing a mask, waiting in the hall, but my eyes caught his familiar face, and I thought "oh, shit, is it Jerry Seinfeld?" – and he looked at me seeing I recognized him, then I got shy to talk to him. I thought I would unveil him to other people around, and he was probably thinking of nice diner after the movie, and I was thinking the same myself. Maybe I should have asked him if he enjoyed this quirky movie about writers as much as I did?
Metropolitan (1990): a Christmas comedy about wealthy young New Yorkers and a poor student getting to a party with them. Old retro style, witty, occasionally quite funny, a bit dramatic – it creates this imaginary romantic Christmas old happy New York that doesn't exist in reality; then it makes tons of tourist to come to New York every December and stand in long lines at every tourist trap and feel romantic. 7/10.
Video games
Hearts of Iron 4 (2016): I thought I'm grown up enough for playing a serious Paradox game. I watched some YouTube, read the guides, put learning tasks in my Todo list like if it was a serious thing. Overall, I somewhat had fun playing it. At least, the game mechanics teach me something about wars. Since these days I read a ton of news about the war in Ukraine, it is enlightening. It's not kid's Civilization, where you build a bare tank and go to a war with it – in HoI4 they simulate realistic war mechanics with combined arms design, divisions, conscription, production lines, etc.
I began with a tutorial that places you playing Italy starting in 1936, the tutorial then went through colonizing Eritrea, and said that was it for learning, and then I continued playing – as a newbie, by 1940, I lost all my African colonies, captured Albania, and tried to conquer Yugoslavia. First, I needed to push propaganda that looked like excerpts from the news, autogenerated, as I understood, they read like something that Putler could say: "Yugoslavia are building up forces by our border"; "Yugoslavians are preparing for a war!", etc. Finally, thanks to the propaganda, I could justify the war enough to start it. That turned a disaster. Yugoslavia kicked me in the north, going to Milan, then they almost liberated Albania. The British said I crossed red lines and declared a war on me, then kicked me from my African colonies. By July 1940, my largest forces are completely encircled in Africa, without supply, and they better surrender – but turned out the game has not option for me just to tell them to give up. In the European front, on the other hand, Germans soon came to help me in Yugoslavia, completely invaded it, along with me taking back Albania and Italian Alps.
By 1940 the world situation overall is the Soviets and Germans rule Eurasia. They divided the world and act in their sphere of influence. Vichy France is quite friendly to us (Italy and Germany), the Brits are not too active. All quite on the Western front. America is quite inaccessible for me, since the British control both Suez canal and Gibraltar. Somehow, I was able to buy some needed resources from Brazil and the Soviets. Soviets are quite useful for us, actually. In February 1940, the Soviets and Germans declared a trade agreement, which seems to mitigate our need for resources. There are news of the wars in Asia, but that's too far away from Italy, so we don't care. The real war has not started yet, but I feel like I went through too much already.
Snowboarding
This winter just sucks for snowboarding – it's too warm, too little snow. In New York city there was no snow at all this season. Whatever, still, we've got some snow in the mountains in upstate.
Thunder Ridge (NY): a small ski resort conveniently accessible by a train from Penn station, and from central Harlem. It has just a few pretty nice long lines, 3 or 4 lifts. Also it's open till 9pm, which reminds me Boreal in California, which is not nearly as conveniently accessible by a train, but offers night snowboarding too.
Belleayre (NY): quite a bigger resort. There was OvrRide bus going from Brooklyn and stopping in downtown and midtown. Takes about 2 hours to go there. It's one of the four resorts (Windham, Hunter, Plattekill, Belleayre), Mount Hunter being the most known, but Belleayre supposedly less crowded. The top of the resort had good snow and nice lines, even though it's nothing like in Tahoe.
Books
Various political science books and articles (Morgenthau, Waltz, Wendt, Joseph S. Nye Jr., etc): theorizing about birth of society, anarchy in international relations, international security systems. It's quite interesting, but it often goes into sociology, especially in its methods, which I'm not familiar with. Thinking if I should read something on sociology first.
Computer Networks by Kurose: I wanted to refresh/update on computer networks. Last time I learned something about networks, I read a book as a teenager: it started with the physical layer, with all cool ways to push bits on the cable, cool Manchester code to make more 0's and 1's even from a big file of zeros, and so on up to application layer. This book starts the opposite way: top down, it starts with the application layer and goes down to physical. Interestingly, it doesn't even mention ISO model anymore. I guess it's not as important. Skimming the book quite fast, but not much useful stuff to update my knowledge. Later at least I hope to better understand wireless networks.
Герцен, "Былое и Думы": полистал из библиотеки. Кажется интересно, но много, слишком много всего, а время старое какое-то 1840-ые, ну их.
News
I continued reading and watching a ton of news about Russia/Ukraine. I can't really do much about changing this, but I do try to limit it: that's what I check first when I wake up, that's what I read before bed. I'm trying to limit the reading throughout the days because otherwise it just becomes a day of doom scrolling – nothing useful I produce in that state for sure.
Russian language sources continue to dominate my news feed. English reports are usually high quality, but lack in details and delivered not as fast – as it turns out, when something happens, the speed of delivery matter a lot; it's a tradeoff too, of course – because there is always a good chance of misinformation in quick news. But still, understanding it, I can sort things out. Those sources are Telegram channels (УНИАН, Радио Свобода, Conflict Intelligence Team, Майкл Наки, are good ones). I also found a strange pleasure in watching Russian propaganda sources – they are failing and complaining about their doomed situation (Стрелков, Соловьиный Помет, Дмитриев) – it developed in a whole new genre, very popular as I can tell, when millions of people understand the absurdity of Russian propaganda, find entertainment in watching the most idiotic excepts from it. Jokes aside, the entire society seems mentally sick at the moment; a deeply sad state of affairs.
Even stranger, I almost stopped checking out Russian so-called "opposition media" – those are Эхо, Meduza, Дождь (TV Rain), Популярная Политика – there is something not right going on with them; hard to tell what exactly. They broadcast from Europe, but they try to bridge to their audience living in Russia, which I don't even know if it still exist there (since all the censorship in Russia). So they perpetuate that truly Russian mindset, a Russian dream of 2000s, that "rationalist" thinking to their view, when money rule and the problems of Russian are seen in efficiency terms, in corruption, in the bloody dictator. Their main selling point is that they running against the war, but they did not yet try to reflect on what long chain of events led to the war. They just have the same small group of people discussing the same things from the same point of view. Of course, they are perhaps our only hope for Russia, but it all seems quite doomed, and I'm not optimistic about the "wonderful Russian of future," a term they use for describing some better hopeful future in the country (wiki: Прекрасная Россия будущего).
From English media, I don't have too exotic news feed: a lot of it is just the New York Times, FT, and the like mass media. I finally read the Timeinterview of Zaluzhny, and I found it quite shallow and flat. The Time magazine is unsophisticated source for people who rarely read anything, of course. On the other hand, I don't usually find time to get to something like the Foreign Affairs coverage. Democracy Now seemed to stopped pushing pro-negotiations freaks like Jeffrey Sachs, and otherwise they help me track what's important besides Ukraine these days. Not as much France 24English broadcast as some time ago, after they kept inviting strange people with no clue of what's going on; I still like them though. Deutsche Welle(DW) English broadcast, BBC are fine once in a while.
The war felt moderately quiet after Catholic Christmas and before Orthodox Christmas. Before Christmas Ukrainian officials made an impression of continuing the offense that they started in September, but as I already noticed long ago, if someone planning something, they are not gonna tell us about it; it seems Ukrainian focused on fortification this time. On January 1, Ukrainians missile struck Russian barracks, apparently killing many Russian solders. After Orthodox Christmas, later in January Russians claimed to run an offense on Soledar, a small village in Donetsk Oblast. It seems they see somewhat importance in it and I wonder what it is. I wonder if the mines around the village could be used as supply storage unreachable by Russian artillery, but no one talks about it, of course, and I question the rationale of watching the war so closely, as I do.
On January 14, a Russian rocket struck an apartment complex in Dnipro killing many civilians. Even though similar episodes happened before, somehow, it evoked my childhood memories of 1999 apartment bombings in Russia, in my home town of Volgodonsk, when I remember walking in the morning to the sight of explosion, as a kid, seeing rescuers working; all buildings around with windows shattered; and the smell – something you can't show on the pictures or properly describe – I remember that smell of war that I'm scared of smelling again. But the imagery looks very similar, which makes me remember those times again.
Back then in 1999, there was a conspiracy, as we thought, that FSB, and Putin's forces were behind the bombings in order to mobilize the population in Chechen war. In Ryazan incident, ordinary civil police captured FSB officers planting bombs in apartment buildings; FSB later declared it was an exercise to test police alertness. But the idea that FSB was behind the other bombings felt like an implausible conspiracy; now it does feel very much plausible: this is how Putin's world looks like, it is in Dnipro, it wants to come to Ukraine, and this is how ugly it looks.
Overall, I'm sad that so much of my mental energy goes into the war rather than creative things of progressive future, but that's the dues of the time, as I see it. We had not progressed much from the 20th century as we thought we had. It will be a generational trauma that we will unconsciously cary to next generations in subtle ways. Still, I hopeful of limiting its impact.
Music
Groove Armada, "Late Night Tales" – Makin' a Living: remix of a song from the 70s. It has this easy rhythm that goes alone with my day. The album experiments too much with different genres and not suitable for continuous listening though, in my opinion.
Roadtrip to Canis Mayor Dwarf Galaxy set: starting somewhat Indie/Soul transitioning to techno set.
Kevin Yost, "One Starry Night": another rhythmic album suitable for easy background.
Nora En Pure, "Birthright"
China's Underground Music is Weirder Than You Think: an interesting documentary about China's punk scene. I should checkout the bands mentioned in the film.
Oxxxymiron, "Красота и Уродство": Russian rap inspired by current politics. A lot of it feels banal, but some lines are alright. Musically, it's very boring; I'm not a poetry kind though.
Other
MoMA: getting lost at MoMA. Now the AI is at MoMA. Everywhere I see is war.
Park Slope: seems like a nice neighborhood of New York city. The tourist should go there instead of flooding the lines in midtown.
Cooked "Roasted Chicken clementines & arak" from Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookbook. It felt strange, with all the clementines, and arak (I used greek ouzo instead), and fennel. But all turned yummy.
