A backlog of small things to post
I've been building up these little things to post. Here we go.
Yesterday I went with alisa5179 and 3distic to see Brendan and the Secret of Kells. It's a candidate for favorite film of 2009. It was so gorgeous, and was remarkably well-written by my standard of "not doing the easy/cliched thing I thought it would". I'll admit that I basically have a bunch of pleasure receptors in my system that were made for this film -- Celtic mythology, mythology retold with originality, mythology dealt with in respectful and authentic ways (great research), badass fae, creepy singing little girl, dream references, boy-and-girl protagonists that feel like their age, sympathetic antagonists ... so it pushes my buttons, but DAMN well. Unfortunately, it's getting REALLY limited release, dammit. I've saved it on Netflix and bought the soundtrack on iTunes. BTW, the trailer makes it seem kinda trite and dumb. It's not. Though everything they state is in the movie, it's like they went shopping on a list of cliches for the trailer and missed everything good in the film. It does all of those things, but not as badly as it sounds. It's like ATLA in that, really. I should dislike ATLA from a list of its attributes, but they did all that dumb stuff right.
One little detail in the film deserves its own entry-- a major character in the film is a cat named Pangur Ban, which I believe is an old Irish equivalent of "Felix the White". Pangur comes from a real story: late one night in an Irish monk living in a monastery on an island in Carinthia (Austria) in the 8th or 9th cent. wrote a poem comparing his life to his cat's as marginalia in the scriptures he was studying or transcribing. There's a literal translation online with some history, and some modern Irish poets (yay Eavan Boland) have taken their hand at it. In the film, Pangur Ban doesn't have the same story, his name is never translated, but what a fantastic detail to have worked into the film. There's a cat in a film about Irish monks? Of course it's Pangur Ban.
Congratulations to my friend John Green on the announcement, if not the release just yet, of a game he's worked on: Puzzle Bots!
I've been listening to some audiobooks by Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun. She's very down to earth in how she talks about principles that I've read before, but been unable to understand. She grew up in New Jersey, has had a life I can identify with, and talks in those terms. She's a figurative translation compared to the literal translations I've seen before-- when I hear 'attachment', I know what the word means, but I don't know what it means to Tibetan Buddhism. When Pema talks about "getting stuck" on things and habits good and bad and therefore dealing with the world around you as your habits dictate and not as you need to in that moment ... that makes sense. The audiobooks have been really helping me deal with some professionally-based stress lately. I like to be very abstract, to be thinking about 15 things at once, and I'm enjoying this practice dealing just with what's going on around me, and really dealing with it. That second link, btw, to an episode of Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason, is pretty good. That's a tough topic to tackle flexibly.
I was surprised to see some of the ideas Pema relates brought up in a book I've been reading on project management. The book mentions "flipping the bozo bit" as the self-defense mechanism of shutting down someone that you don't respect. The publisher (of your game) doesn't understand what it takes to develop a feature, so their suggestions are unreasonable. My parents don't know what New York is like today, so they worry about me living in my neighborhood, oh well, just don't talk about it and I won't provoke them. It's a way of shutting down something unpleasant and not dealing with it. You flip the bit (programming term), flip the switch (not programming) and declare that person/group/perspective not worth dealing with. It's very much like some of the things that Pema Chodron talks about in the book that I've enjoyed the most, Getting Unstuck.
Hm. That looks like what was on my list, for now. Back to work!
Yesterday I went with alisa5179 and 3distic to see Brendan and the Secret of Kells. It's a candidate for favorite film of 2009. It was so gorgeous, and was remarkably well-written by my standard of "not doing the easy/cliched thing I thought it would". I'll admit that I basically have a bunch of pleasure receptors in my system that were made for this film -- Celtic mythology, mythology retold with originality, mythology dealt with in respectful and authentic ways (great research), badass fae, creepy singing little girl, dream references, boy-and-girl protagonists that feel like their age, sympathetic antagonists ... so it pushes my buttons, but DAMN well. Unfortunately, it's getting REALLY limited release, dammit. I've saved it on Netflix and bought the soundtrack on iTunes. BTW, the trailer makes it seem kinda trite and dumb. It's not. Though everything they state is in the movie, it's like they went shopping on a list of cliches for the trailer and missed everything good in the film. It does all of those things, but not as badly as it sounds. It's like ATLA in that, really. I should dislike ATLA from a list of its attributes, but they did all that dumb stuff right.
One little detail in the film deserves its own entry-- a major character in the film is a cat named Pangur Ban, which I believe is an old Irish equivalent of "Felix the White". Pangur comes from a real story: late one night in an Irish monk living in a monastery on an island in Carinthia (Austria) in the 8th or 9th cent. wrote a poem comparing his life to his cat's as marginalia in the scriptures he was studying or transcribing. There's a literal translation online with some history, and some modern Irish poets (yay Eavan Boland) have taken their hand at it. In the film, Pangur Ban doesn't have the same story, his name is never translated, but what a fantastic detail to have worked into the film. There's a cat in a film about Irish monks? Of course it's Pangur Ban.
Congratulations to my friend John Green on the announcement, if not the release just yet, of a game he's worked on: Puzzle Bots!
I've been listening to some audiobooks by Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun. She's very down to earth in how she talks about principles that I've read before, but been unable to understand. She grew up in New Jersey, has had a life I can identify with, and talks in those terms. She's a figurative translation compared to the literal translations I've seen before-- when I hear 'attachment', I know what the word means, but I don't know what it means to Tibetan Buddhism. When Pema talks about "getting stuck" on things and habits good and bad and therefore dealing with the world around you as your habits dictate and not as you need to in that moment ... that makes sense. The audiobooks have been really helping me deal with some professionally-based stress lately. I like to be very abstract, to be thinking about 15 things at once, and I'm enjoying this practice dealing just with what's going on around me, and really dealing with it. That second link, btw, to an episode of Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason, is pretty good. That's a tough topic to tackle flexibly.
I was surprised to see some of the ideas Pema relates brought up in a book I've been reading on project management. The book mentions "flipping the bozo bit" as the self-defense mechanism of shutting down someone that you don't respect. The publisher (of your game) doesn't understand what it takes to develop a feature, so their suggestions are unreasonable. My parents don't know what New York is like today, so they worry about me living in my neighborhood, oh well, just don't talk about it and I won't provoke them. It's a way of shutting down something unpleasant and not dealing with it. You flip the bit (programming term), flip the switch (not programming) and declare that person/group/perspective not worth dealing with. It's very much like some of the things that Pema Chodron talks about in the book that I've enjoyed the most, Getting Unstuck.
Hm. That looks like what was on my list, for now. Back to work!