Random Thought Thread

If there was a scanner on the front of the fridge and it could read the barcodes on items and just automatically enter them into your inventory? THAT would be cool! I'd definitely consider spending some extra money on that.

As it is, my cleaning ladies went through my chest freezer a couple weeks ago and wrote the expiration dates of everything in big red letters on the front and then stacked the stuff so the older items are at the top. Which is really useful, actually, but, still - I feel like they're trying to freezer-shame me!

 

Get them to watch the movie Waiting. When that film came out I had just finished a stint as a steakhouse floor manager (having started as a server and then bartender) in a little place called Steak & Pasta Works in Gainesville, FL. Either the director had cased our restaurant for some months prior to filming or what you see in this film is pretty accurate of most restaurants.

 

If it automatically did that stuff, sure. That'd be great, but I'm just not going to put any extra time into maintaining my refrigerator technology?

 

Hated that movie, couldn't hardly watch it, but I've always given larger tips since seeing it, and places I frequent never give me any trouble.

 

I think the only way to actually enjoy that film is to have done that job for some stretch. It requires some amount of inculturation. Every single character in that film was an archetype of someone I worked with in my actual steakhouse. Naomi, the one with the massive anger management issues, was named Lisa where I worked. She was a carbon copy. Totally convincing plastic smile in front of the customers became a string of curses and epithets that would make a drunken merchant marine wince when she went into the back.

ETA: The massive amount of cannabis intake in that film: spot-on.

 

One dishwarsher.

 

Read an article the other day about a juicer machine that had built in Wi-Fi. Never did actually learn why it would need Wi-Fi though.

 

Hamilton looks so good

 

I've started making videos for my cat and uploading them to YouTube. More of a side project/fun thing to do. These are my cats though, Socket and Chilly. Kinda random, but this is the perfect thread for that, so...

 

I'll give the videos a look.

Also...

Well, guess I'm not going back to sleep. Hello to anyone up this early.

 

It's only a quarter till 11 here in AZ, so think of this as Hello from the past to the future.

 

well I'm tired as fuck, I just killed a moth on accident, now there's bits of moth all over my computer, I'm struggling to type this without touching moth, now I'm feeling very very guilty, aaaagh

Sorry, moth, I forgot you were on my computer, rest in pieces

 

Hello!

@Skye Walker -- That sucks. :[

 

Now there are no less than five moths in my bedroom. How the fuck did they get here? Who left the door open? Why are they in my room?

 

To avenge their fallen comrade, obviously.

 

I'm like that with spiders. I have a special jar to catch them in and put them outside. The guilt comes in waves if I kill them.

 

They're here for revenge, filthy moth killer. You have insulted the Moth Collective. Prepare to die.

 

[tosses dead moth at cat] Who, me? I didn't do it. Obviously, it was him. Cats kill moths, not occasionally kind humans.

 

Have just learned that "Wheel of Time" is finally being made for TV. Thoughts anyone?
I am of two minds on this as TV/movies never do justice to the literary work, but I do love to see the characters come to life.

 

Depends

First, I think it's absolute rubbish that film can never do a literary adaptation justice.

My one absolute go to example: Shakespeare. I've seen some phenomenal Shakespeare plays adapted brilliantly to the screen. The first series of The Hollow Crown as a recent example. And while yes, one might argue it has a leg up on novels as a screenplay, its still nowhere near modern film pacing & style that it is incredibly how well they come out.

But also, classic literature into film or mini-series. I've seen amazing Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, etc.

And this is what I think where the line gets drawn: classics vs contemporary stories.

Because the classics have withstood the test of time, predominantly there is a reverence to the source material. Even if the screenwriter or director doesn't themselves revere it, they know the existing audience does and that pre-existing audience for the subject is going to most likely make up the majority of their audience if not all of it. So relatively, classic literature adapaptations come out generally well.

But more recent works—there's no reverence for the source. It's often the idea behind the book, some concept or image, that film creators get drawn too. And instead of trying to recreate the author's vision, they want to to explore their own. And because it's more likely to garter more attention beyond the original fan base, they don't have to cater exclusively to die-hard fans & can explore appealing to a much broader audience.

That's where it begins to be hit or miss.

For example, in Japanese animated films from Studio Ghibli:

Howl's Moving Castle the animated film & Howl's Moving Castle by Dianne Wynne Jones are two very different stories. But you know what? I actually love both of them. They explore very different things in fascinating ways, and so I respected Miyazaki's vision.

However, The Secret Life of Arietty doesn't really do it for me. There is just something generally lacking in the animated adaptation. I actually much preferred the 1997 live action featuring John Goodman version of Mary Norton's The Borrowers. Like with the other Ghibli animated film, it told a new story with a differing artistic vision—but this one fell short in my mind.

I also rather loved Seventh Son the film even though I hated The Spook's Apprentice books—yes, they kinda made it into a high fantasy epic trope minefield, but it was beautiful and I was in fact fascinated by the idea (not fully explored) of the relation between spooks & witches. I preferred the director's ideas than the original author's (blasphemy, I know. . .)

And I think that's the real problem. If the film creators don't have a holy reverence of the original work, than we are left to decide whether the director's artistic vision is what does it for us or not. And because fans tend to be sticklers for details, we tend to be unforgiving to any changes or failings, big or miniscule

 

Interesting opinion, and I wonder how you'd rate the 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet (Romeo+Juliet)?

Not at all trying to play gotcha, so I'll lead off by saying that I love it, and I'm not a DiCaprio fan at all. The thing that I think it does so well, by stripping away the accents and costumes, is show up exactly what kind of idiotic, posturing fools the younger Montagues and Capulets were. It's sometimes hard wipe away the veneer of nobility that hundreds of years can give events (real or fictional) and see the people beneath them, but I think that restaging the story did just that. Juliet's a stupid little teenager, Romeo's no better, and the fact that the whole thing took just a few days shows up very well, IMHO. I know that there are omitted scenes and fiddling with the timeline that piss off the purists, but I think it probably did a better job of re-creating what Shakespeare wrote than any version that portrays the story as an immortal love affair.

 

So I've decided I want to be a Java developer when I grow up.

 

Quite random. You hit the nail! Kudos!

 

If I had enough money I'd hire a person to clean up my house right now. It's tidy but the dust, oh, it's always the dust. A person with asthma wouldn't get through the night. Why dust? WHYYY?!