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Monday was Sports Day (Wikipedia). In the spirit of endurance and overcoming obstacles, I went and saw Christopher Nolan’s the Odyssey.
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In the process, I discovered that it’s really easy to ride the bicycle to the cinema, at least for later sessions. There’s a huge bicycle rack in front of the shopping mall that’s on the other side of the road and at that time, it’s almost completely empty. At ¥2,000 a pop, a movie ticket is still something I hesitate to buy but I can imagine seeing more films in the next 12 months than I’ve seen in the past 12 years.
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If there is one thing that would put me off going more, it’s the volume. It was so extreme I was getting warning messages on my Apple Watch. After talking to Brandon, I gather that this might have been a deliberate choice by Nolan rather than a mistake by the projectionist but I found it quite unwelcome. It was so overwhelming that halfway through I took out my AirPods Pro and put those in to try to make things more bearable. It was still very loud.
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I thought the film was… an experience. Nolan’s movies have an almost constant propulsion to them that I think is a limitation of his style. I’ve been watching The Dark Knight again recently and it feels like we’re always in a hurry.
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I was trying to remember the last Nolan film I saw in the cinema. I think it was Interstellar (Letterboxd says I first watched it on 30 November 2014 which was the second week of its release in Japan). In that review, I mention that Nolan’s films grow on me over time. Perhaps that’ll be the case with the Odyssey, too.
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Apple had an… event? I was expecting some kind of presentation but it was instead a series of three infomercials: one for the HomeView, one for the HomePod Mini 2 and one for the refreshed Apple TV 4K. I was pretty underwhelmed. The HomeView isn’t available in Japan but even if it were, I’m not sure I’d get one. I do use an iPad a lot when I’m in the kitchen but part of the reason I do that is the size of the screen (I have the 13” iPad Air) and that it’s portable (which the HomeView is not). The HomeView is available in Australia so if I’ve changed my mind by Christmas, I might be able to pick one up then.
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I got Wattle to the point where I’m ready to put it down for a bit. The last part was the design of the dependency system. I’m sure there’s prior art to this but the approach I took was novel to me. Rather than have libraries be installed at the system (or at least user) level, Wattle requires libraries to be installed at the application level. The goal is to avoid a situation where different applications that depend on incompatible versions of a library cause issues for each other.
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I should spend more time working on the documentation (and maybe a mini-marketing site) but I’m not confident anyone else should really use this language. And I had something else I wanted to do: a replacement for my beloved Reporter. I’m still trying to work out whether I want something that would be a useful replacement for Reporter (i.e. something that everybody could use) or something that is useful for me as a replacement for Reporter (i.e. something that’s tailored to me). It’s probably going to be the latter but that obviously makes it a lot less likely it will be of use to anyone else. Perhaps this is the way software goes now in the age of coding agents?
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It’s over an hour long but Maia Wyman (AKA Broey Deschanel) has a video essay about the Odyssey and Christopher Nolan that I thought was very good.
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I was talking to Eugenia about the depths of my nerdery and the topic of anime music videos came up. Despite having been in a university anime club in the early 2000s, she claimed ignorance. I sent her a link to ‘Euphoria’ which she promptly reacted to with what is best characterised as limp disgust. I don’t care what she thinks. Cutting footage of RahXephon (Wikipedia) to Frou Frou’s ‘Must Be Dreaming’ (Apple Music) will always be an inspired choice in my book.
