Sunday, March 01, 2026
Saturday, February 28, 2026
barn owls to the rescue
Man, what a no brainer. pic.twitter.com/ewrqw3GG3V
— REKT Specialist is unbanned! (Parody?) /AFAO/ (@GoatRoper911) February 27, 2026
an email I just sent to my brother
I just sent the following to my brother David in New Mexico:
__________
Dig,
You will be proud to know that I sat down for a shit tonight (Saturday night) and took over 20 minutes to push out a massive log (this happens when I fast after eating salads). As you know, logs for me are rare: It's mostly sludge and rabbit raisins. This massive turd has the consistency of tough clay, so yes, the toilet is now clogged. I went at it several times with my plunger—no dice. I got a long-handled, metal slotted spoon to try to chop the turd up (thrusting the thin handle part into the water since the spoon part won't fit into the toilet's pipe)... the turd is apparently jammed so deep into the pipe that chopping up the visible part has no effect. I poured the Korean equivalent of Drāno (called Trepeong, rhymes with "heh, dung") into the toilet bowl, and now... it's a waiting game. I forgot to take a photo of the log before I began plunging and chopping; the water is all brown and filled with floating scraps of toilet paper, so nothing is visible. Sad.
I'm sure this situation will clear up (ahem) eventually. But for now, I had to wipe my ass with several wet wipes, and I can only pray that I don't need to poop again for the next few hours. If I do, my apartment has public restrooms on several of the lower floors, including the lobby. This might be a nice time to have one of those toilet snakes.
__________
And that's my life in a nutshell. I'm finishing up my Substack content generation right now (it's been a slow Saturday), and I'll switch to other projects tomorrow. Meanwhile, a malignancy sits silently in my bathroom, quietly mocking me with its demonic presence.
STATUS UPDATE, midnight: I went over to the toilet a few minutes ago and saw that everything had drained without refilling—not the best of signs. The turd was no longer visible; scraps of toilet paper and a nasty, brown sheen lingered inside the toilet bowl. I flushed; the water rushed in, and the water level didn't descend. Dammit. The jam was still in place, just farther down the pipe. I went at the toilet with my plunger again. No success. I dumped another load of Korean Drāno into the bowl, and it's once again a waiting game.
I won't write another update until the toilet is clear.
from brown to pink
Yeah, maybe putting brown and pink in the same phrase is sort of naughty in a pink/stink kind of way.
hilarious
😂 Nobody warned us. Nobody prepared us. And broccoli did NOT come to play.
— Jake (@JakeCan72) February 28, 2026
Giant veggie costumes just staged a full protest OUTSIDE a vegan restaurant and the signs are sending me:
“EAT MORE COWS”
“DO ONIONS’ FEELINGS COUNT?”
“THEY DON’T CARROT ALL”
The dedication. The… pic.twitter.com/7QNADdvxyV
mountain from a molehill... but for a good cause
He noticed a wild frog living in his fence post, so he built a 3D-printed home for the frogs to live and hide.
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) February 28, 2026
📹unknowndazza
pic.twitter.com/9im27Ss8yO
always be skeptical
When people start breathlessly touting new sources of alternative energy, don't just heedlessly jump on the bandwagon.
discovery
The narrator presents us with what seems like a mystery... then serves up an insight that I can only call mundane. The narrator's point is especially driven home in Arthur C. Clarke's novel, but you don't need to read the novel to gain the insight being talked about here.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Season 1: review
 |
| Peter Claffey as Dunk (L) and Dexter Sol Ansell as Egg (R) |
As the story begins, Dunk's master has just died (but we'll be seeing him—all of him—in many flashback sequences). Dunk has buried him, and he's decided to continue his master's knightly tradition despite having no standing, himself, as a knight. Dunk heads to a nearby town, Ashford, where he knows a tournament will be taking place—jousting, fencing, etc. His hope is to participate in the tournament, win some money, and maybe gain a spot of honor. In town, he meets a scrawny, bald-headed kid whom Dunk mistakes for a stableboy. The kid calls himself Egg (Ansell), presumably because of his bald, egg-shaped head (we find out otherwise later). The kid wants to travel with Dunk, but Dunk spurns him.
At the local inn, Dunk meets a highborn (noble) drunkard who warns Dunk to stay away from him. In the morning, Dunk wanders into Ashford proper and sets about trying to place his name on the roster for "the lists" (an actual medieval term for the combat arena). Along the way, Dunk meets and interacts with a variety of townies and out-of-town folks: Plummer (Tom Vaughan-Lawler), the snot-hawking steward of Lord Ashford (Paul Hunter); artist-puppeteer-mummer Tanselle (Tanzyn Crawford); Ser Manfred Dondarrion (Daniel Monks), under whom Ser Arlan had once served; the volatile and unprincipled Ser Steffon Fossaway (Edward Ashley); his much friendlier cousin and squire, Raymon Fossaway (Shaun Thomas); the humorous and drink-loving Ser Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings); and a host of Targaryens arriving in town for the tourney, starting with the noble and honorable Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen (Bertie Carvel), Hand of the king and heir to the Iron Throne; his perpetually angry brother Maekar (Sam Spruell), two of whose sons have gone missing; and Maekar's cruel son Aerion (Finn Bennett).
It's a lot to keep track of, and Dunk meets these and more people within the first two episodes. By the end of the first episode, Dunk still isn't on the roster, and Egg has somehow contrived to follow him to Ashford, still wanting to be Dunk's squire. Egg, it turns out, has all of the smarts that Dunk lacks; I was often reminded of Haley Joel Osment as Forrest Gump's son Forrest Junior and how the son and father interact.
As the story continues, Dunk begins to make friends, acquaintances, and enemies in town. Prince Baelor, who is wise and gentle, treats Dunk with a stern sort of respect, and he's the only authority in town who even remembers Dunk's master, Ser Arlan. Whether Dunk makes it onto the tourney roster is rendered moot, however, when the arrogant and cowardly Prince Aerion breaks one of Tansell's fingers for doing a puppet play in which a dragon is killed by a knight. Aerion takes offense because the Targaryens are known as "the blood of the dragon," and Aerion believes himself to be part-dragon. As far as he's concerned, the play is an incitement to rebellion. Egg sees Aerion doing violence to Tansell, and he runs over to tell Dunk, who charges into the tent and proceeds to beat and kick the Targaryen prince. The bloodied prince quips that Dunk has thrown his life away; before Baelor, Dunk demands a trial by combat with Aerion. Coward that he is, Aerion counterproposes a "trial by seven," i.e. two teams of seven knights, reflecting the seven gods in the pantheon of the Faith of the Seven. Baelor hesitantly concedes that his nephew Aerion's counter-challenge is legitimate, so Dunk must assemble a team from among the people he has only just come to know. Some prove surprisingly willing to help Dunk; others make grand promises but end up betraying him. The day of the trial turns into a day of chaos, blood, great triumph, and horrible tragedy (as you'd expect from a George RR Martin story), but I won't give away the particulars. The first season ends on a glum-yet-hopeful tone as Dunk and Egg (who has revealed to Dunk who he really is) ride out of town, possibly headed to the southern land of Dorne.
Praise for this series has been ongoing and constant. Chiefest among the complaints about most recent movies and streaming shows has been lack of respect for story and canon, usually tied to the pushing of a race-oriented and/or feminist agenda. To tackle the politically incorrect angle first: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms stars two white males—one a hulking brute and the other a puny, prepubescent kid. The story of Dunk and Egg is the story of two rootless people who find each other, fall in together, and rely on each other to make it in their often cruel world. Actors Claffey and Ansell, as Dunk and Egg respectively, play off each other perfectly in what may be an example of the most appropriate casting I've ever seen. Claffey plays Dunk as somewhat dim but possessed of common sense as well as a sense of honor. Dunk is also kindhearted and not prone to lose his temper when insulted (many, many people call him stupid). Dexter Sol Ansell, as Egg, is still young enough to have an extremely high-pitched voice when he yells, and for a child actor, the kid is absolutely pitch perfect, taking advantage of the skin of his shaved pate to convey a whole assortment of emotions ranging from excitement to anxiety to extreme sadness and moments of joy.
Other characters were also very well cast. Bertie Carvel as Baelor Targaryen immediately comes to mind as the incarnation of knightly dignity and honor. Sam Spruell as his temperamental and slightly unhinged brother Maekar is also well cast: Maekar's not exactly an evil man, but he's also not easy to get along with. Finn Bennett as the despicable Aerion Targaryen is talented enough to have you rooting for his ass to be thoroughly kicked on the field of combat. Daniel Ings as Lyonel Baratheon makes Lyonel instantly likable but also someone to be suspicious of. He seems loud and extroverted, but this also appears to be a cover for a character full of complex motivations. I hope we see more of him in Season 2.
Quite a few critics noted this series's lighthearted, comic tone (when it wasn't showing blood, cracked bones, and gore) and made story comparisons to 2001's A Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger (one of my favorite, feel-good movies about whether a man can "change his stars"), a story about an ambitious, determined young man who starts off as a nameless, penniless squire, then works his way up to full knighthood. By the end of Season 1, Sir Duncan the Tall is acknowledged as a knight by everyone around him, but his prestige and status are uncertain given how the season concludes. Those who watched the TV series A Game of Thrones know that Ser Duncan the Tall has four pages devoted to his exploits in The White Book or The Book of Brothers, a.k.a., the centuries-long chronicle of the great exploits of the Kingsguard. Of course, people familiar with A Song of Ice and Fire also know that Dunk and Egg, despite having many adventures and a long friendship, both come to a terrible and tragic end.
I have no idea where to insert (insert!) this into my review, but I guess we're going to have to talk about the elephant trunk in the room: Ser Arlan's enormous penis, which makes its ponderous appearance during an early-episode flashback—a lot sooner than I'd thought it was going to appear. Before watching the series, I had already seen a few YouTube reaction videos of women's eyes bugging out at the enormousness of Ser Arlan's singular gift. Having now seen the monster for myself (it's beyond pornographic proportions), I do have to wonder whether it's a prosthesis, like Mark Wahlberg's hypertrophic schlong in Boogie Nights. True, we see Ser Arlan urinate out of his hose beast, but it could still be a prop. Actor Kristian Nairn, who played Hodor on Game of Thrones, has talked about his own phallic prosthesis during a Hodor nude scene, so there's definitely precedent for this sort of thing. Male nudity in Game of Thrones became an issue as more women started to complain about the colossal amount of female nudity on the show, and I guess A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is the inheritor of the male-nudity bandwagon, a continuing attempt to rectify a perceived injustice.
Unimaginably big dicks aside, I have to agree that the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was nicely done and very watchable. I binged it in a single night, mainly thanks to the fact that each of the six episodes was fairly short—about 30-40 minutes. And Season 2 is set to come out next year, so we won't have to wait two to three years as we're doing for every season of House of the Dragon (which takes much longer to make because of the sheer quantity of special effects and gigantic sets). Will Season 2 manage to maintain Season 1's balance of comedy and tragedy? I suppose we'll all have to wait and see, but if Season 1 is anything to go by, the showrunners have done a much better job of respecting the rich source material. As long as they stick to Martin's ideas and themes without going overboard "with their own spin on the story," I think this show could succeed where Game of Thrones—which started off amazing—ultimately failed. Fingers and tentacles crossed.
__________
*The term hedge knight (a wandering knight who sleeps under hedges) wasn't used in our world during the Medieval period, but the concept of a knight-errant or a knight bachelor (chevalier sans terre in France—a knight without land) did exist in our reality, and from what I can see, there was a time in Ireland when the term hedge was applied pejoratively to various professions to indicate that the people plying these trades—doctor, teacher, etc.—were of lower status, lower quality, or lower legitimacy.
Friday, February 27, 2026
calling your dog
Maybe I was just in the mood for a laugh.
 |
| Please forgive the horrible typing. And the overabundance of captions. |
end of February already?
They say that, as you get older, time feels as though it's flowing faster. The biological explanation for this is that your brain is slowing down, which means your perceptions of the world are slowing down. The world itself hasn't changed speed at all, but as your mind gets slower, the world around you seems to bumble along faster. 2025, for better or worse, went by quickly, and 2026 seems to be going by even faster: we're already at the bottom end of February. 2026: my stroke happened in 2021, five years ago. Half a decade.
And spring weather is here. The sun is shining outside, and it's a balmy 12.5ºC (54.5ºF). When I do my walk in mid-March, I doubt I'll need more than a windbreaker/rain coat. Meanwhile, Substack content-generation continues for the next day or so, then I'll be turning to other matters. The seasons turn; life goes on.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Minority Report: review
 |
| Tom Cruise as John Anderton |
John Anderton (Cruise) is a neuroin-addicted cop in 2054. Six years earlier, his young son Sean was kidnapped and never found. Devastated and motivated by the loss of his son, John works with Lamar Burgess (von Sydow) to take an idea developed by the geneticist Dr. Iris Hineman (Smith) to create Precrime, a system that takes advantage of the clairvoyant gifts of three genetic mutants who are blessed or cursed with the ability to see future crimes, especially premeditated murders. Sudden crimes of passion are harder to predict. Precrime has gotten crime-prediction down to a science: the "precogs" have a vision that is transmitted to the officers, led by Anderton, who decipher the images' clues, then rush to the scene of the imminent murder in time to stop it from happening. As a direct result of this agency, crime in Washington, DC (where much of the story takes place) has dropped by 90%, with murders becoming so rare as to be almost nonexistent. But there are people who have trouble with the idea of arresting someone for a crime that hasn't been committed—among them is Agent Danny Witwer (Farrell), a young and ambitious Department of Justice functionary and former seminarian who sees flaws in the Precrime system and has grave philosophical misgivings about Precrime's role. Anderton, by contrast, is a believer in the system, so he and Witwer take an immediate dislike to each other. Lamar Burgess, the head of Precrime, is about to take the program to the national level, and as Precrime's nationalization is on the verge of coming to a vote, something happens to John Anderton.
What starts off as a routine Precrime case goes haywire when Anderton discovers, to his horror, that the precogs have named him as an imminent murderer of a man named Leo Crow (Binder), whom Anderton has never met. Immediately suspecting that he has been set up, Anderton evades attempts at arresting him and goes on a search that takes him to the residence of the now-reclusive Dr. Hineman, where he learns that, on occasion, the three precogs occasionally disagree in their visions of the future. Two of the precogs are male, but the strongest precog, Agatha (Morton), is usually the one to produce a minority report. Per Precrime policy, minority reports are generally purged to keep up the appearance of infallible predictive ability, maintaining trust in the Precrime system at the cost of total honesty. Anderton is desperate to find out whether a minority report exists for him, and Dr. Hineman confirms that, even if the record has been destroyed, Agatha still retains her own imprint of the future crime. Anderton must somehow infiltrate Precrime headquarters, kidnap Agatha, and persuade her to give him her alternate visions—assuming she does, in fact, possess a minority report in her head. Infiltration of Precrime will be a messy business: the world of 2054 is one of total dominance by both a governmental surveillance state and utterly intrusive corporations that use your personal data to target their marketing right at you. (Sound familiar?) Much of this is done by an advanced form of ubiquitous retinal and facial scanning, so Anderton realizes he will have to switch out his eyes and alter his face to be able to go anywhere without being scanned and identified. How far does the mystery of the setup go? Does Anderton end up killing Leo Crow? Does he succeed in extracting Agatha and acquiring his own minority report? Who, ultimately, is the person who set Anderton up, and why?
Minority Report doesn't lack for action, mystery, thrills, dystopian futurism, and philosophical questions about fate and freedom. Coming hard on the heels of Spielberg's unsuccessful 2001 A.I., this much more successful 2002 effort features magnetic cars; newspapers and cereal boxes covered in marketing-driven animated imagery; creepy eye-replacement surgery in filthy conditions; modern, engineered drugs; and a futuristic Washington, DC that combines grimy retro architecture ("the Sprawl") with sleek, futuristic home designs. A kind of rudimentary, not-quite-3D holographic tech serves as entertainment, but there are still recognizable elements of our era's civilization, such as huge department stores and, out in the countryside, quiet farmhouses. Minority Report succeeds with its washed-out, futuristic visuals; nifty sci-fi gadgets (wouldn't we all want a sonic shotgun?); fast pace; and the emotional motivations of its main character.
But the movie fails on multiple levels—something I either didn't see the last time I saw this film years ago or just didn't remember. On the basic, superficial level, there's the problem of Spielberg's perennially sloppy "movie logic," which takes away the seriousness of scenes that could have been more impactful had they been scripted better. Why do the precogs, who are a hive mind when together, occasionally sink under the water of the pool they're lying in ("the Temple")? How does Anderton, during a chase scene, manage to survive the car-assembly factory without getting entombed inside the car he's hiding in while it's being assembled by robots? Where are the assembly line's guards? More importantly, how is Anderton able to use his original eyes—now in a Ziploc bag after his eye-switching surgery—to penetrate Precrime's eye-scan security? Wouldn't Precrime have locked him out as persona non grata the moment he became a suspect? Even Anderton's ex-wife (Morris) uses Anderton's eyes to break into a detention center to rescue her ex-husband. None of this should be possible. At the detention center, which is run by the organ-playing guard Gideon (Nelson), the prisoners are held in a dreamlike state of suspension similar to a coma, unable to move and trapped with their own thoughts while Gideon plays his organ to soothe them (and why are they standing?). When Anderton first visits Gideon as a non-prisoner, Gideon guides Anderton to a particular killer who had supposedly murdered a woman named Ann Lively (Jessica Harper). What struck me about this scene was the unnecessary bizarreness of it: To access the relevant prisoner, Gideon and Anderton telescope out on a gantry that moves among the prisoners, who are stored in vertical columns that can move up and down, obligingly dodging out of the way, like a slow-motion game of Whack-a-Mole, as the gantry moves in and swings from side to side. While this spectacle looks very pretty, it's strikes me as utterly unnecessary: why not just go directly to the prisoner in question? Why wade through an undulating sea of prisoners to get to him (see the scene here; ignore the added music)?
But Minority Report, despite its timely warnings about rampant corporatism and government intrusiveness, fails on a much deeper level: It fails in its exploration of the philosophical question of fate and freedom. Freedom and foreknowledge cannot coexist: If you know—in the rigorous, philosophical sense of know, i.e., know infallibly—that some future event is going to occur, then that's possible only because the future event is already there to be known. This is what is known as the B-theory of time ("block theory"). When knowledge is diagrammed out, there's the knower, the act of knowing, and the thing known. If you're able to change the "outcome" of what you think you know, then that outcome was never predestined because it was never there to be known. You can't know what's not there to be known.*
The movie uses a kind of visual shorthand to demonstrate its own Precrime-justifying logic: Anderton rolls a ball along a curving console toward Witwer. When the ball reaches the edge of the console and is about to drop to the floor, Witwer catches it. John asks why Witwer caught the ball.
Witwer: Because it was gonna fall.
Anderton: You're certain?
Witwer: Yeah.
Anderton: But it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen.
Do you see the flaw in Anderton's logic? The ball didn't fall, which already means there is no fact that [the fall] was going to happen. Witwer was there to catch the ball. Later in the movie, Agatha tells Anderton, "You always have a choice," something that Anderton later tells his boss Lamar. Precrime assumes a kind of metaphysical determinism that is necessary for citizens to believe that Precrime truly possesses reliable predictive power. As Witwer suggests, though, there's a paradox in claiming to be able to prevent the inevitable.
The movie ultimately agrees with my above argument, and it sides against this smug version of "early" Anderton and with the cause of human freedom. And the fact that the precogs can have alternate visions of the future means that the future isn't set. So it goes back to Yoda's wisdom: Always in motion is the future. This ties back into an idea that I have seen over and over again in books and movies, and which I've talked about in many previous reviews: Evil entities always talk and think in terms of destiny, inevitability, and inescapable outcomes; good characters always talk and think in terms of choice, freedom, and open futures. The idea that You can alter your destiny is incoherent: if you can alter your future states, then you don't have a destiny. By definition, a destiny is inalterable. Applied to Minority Report, this way of thinking about good and evil means that Precrime's emphasis on metaphysical inevitability makes it an evil entity.
As a result of all of these superficial and deep problems, I enjoyed Minority Report a lot less, this time, than I did on previous viewings. In many ways, it's still a "good enough" movie: well acted, bleakly color graded, creepily dystopian (we're living that future now), and disturbingly prescient in its extrapolation of certain economical and governmental trends into the near future. But the sloppy way in which the movie handles details and plot logic and the deeper ways in which the movie fails to grapple properly with the philosophical questions it seemingly faces mean that Minority Report, which I used to think of as an awesome film, is merely a good film—and good only for people uninterested in deeper questions of fate, freedom, and Orwellian trends. Even by the end of the story, the larger oppressive society in which Anderton lives hasn't been undone by the story's events. I've even seen fan theories speculating that the movie's conclusion, which bizarrely includes an out-of-nowhere voiceover narration by Anderton, is at best an illusion: Perhaps Anderton is still trapped in prison, living out a fantasy while in an induced coma. If that's true, then I have to tip my hat to Spielberg for being even darker than I ever imagined he could be. Years ago, Minority Report would have gotten an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me. Now, at best, it gets a thumbs-sideways.
__________
*Long ago, I saw a pastor on YouTube attempt to overcome the incompatibility of freedom and foreknowledge by arguing, "When I put a cookie on the edge of the dinner table, I know my son will run by and grab the cookie. My son has free will; he chooses to grab the cookie, so [my] foreknowledge and [his] free will can coexist."—thus preserving the theological notion that God knows your life "from eternity," that he knows every detail of your past, present, and future—and that you're still somehow free to choose your actions.
But the cookie illustration is a dumb argument when you think about it because it doesn't prove the son has free will. If the son reliably grabs the cookie every single time, you're merely reinforcing the case that your son is a prisoner of his compulsions, not a free agent who can choose not to take the cookie. Note, too, the pastor's philosophically sloppy, unrigorous use of the word know.
not my favorite curry
East Asian curry is definitely not my favorite. I'll eat it if you give it to me, but it's not my go-to. I much prefer the slap-yo-mouth curry straight out of India. Even the spicier types of Thai curry are better than the overly sweet nonsense they serve in Japan and Korea. But in the video below, Adam has a go at Japanese curry, and it doesn't look horrible.
Princess Mononoke: review
 |
| wolf-goddess Moro (Gillian Anderson) and San/Mononoke (Claire Danes), wearing the skin of her adopted race |
Prince Ashitaka (Crudup) of the marginalized Emishi people encounters a cursed boar-god that has become a demon, utterly covered in wormlike tendrils of pure evil and hatred and initially invisible as a pig. The demon comes crashing through the forest near an Emishi village, and Ashitaka, who rides a fleet stag named Yakul, manages to kill the demon with some well-placed shots from his bow. But the demon's writhing covering of wormlike protuberances manages to catch hold of Ashitaka's arm during the fight, and the prince's arm is cursed. A village elder informs Ashitaka that the curse will grow and consume him, and he will die. Ashitaka also learns that inside in the corpse of the boar-god/demon is an iron ball—a round from a rifle and the reason for the demon's pain, suffering, and hatred. If Ashitaka finds the source of this rifle round, a mission that will take him into the forest of the gods, there may be a chance that he will solve the deeper problems of demonic attacks, the withering of the forest, and the deaths of forest creatures. Ashitaka must, at any rate, depart from his home, being cursed, and the Emishi rule is that no one may witness his departure.
As Ashitaka journeys to the forest of the gods, he begins to learn about the wider world and the various conflicts happening around him: another boar god (David) is preparing to lead his boars to war against humans in the region of Iron Town, where metal is collected and smelted, and the smelting fires are supplied through the chopping-down of large swathes of forest. A tribe of apes is also looking to go to war against humanity, and a wolf goddess named Moro (Anderson) has adopted an abandoned human girl named San (Danes), known to the citizens of Iron Town as Princess Mononoke (a mononoke is a general term for a vengeful spirit). San thinks of herself as a wolf, and she shares the forest creatures' grudge against the humans, who have despoiled the land in their lust for metal-smelting. But it is becoming obvious that, as the human industry gathers strength and size, the creatures and spirits of the wood must inevitably lose their conflict with the humans. Ashitaka learns all of this and is alarmed: he wishes for all factions simply to live in peace. Lady Eboshi (Driver), leader of Iron Town, claims to be the one who shot the boar god; she is uninterested in peace with the animals and spirits, but she is also not uncompassionate as she has taken in many lepers and others, whom she cares for and who help with the smelting, tool-making, and gunsmithing. And at the heart of the woods is the mysterious Forest Spirit, which takes both the form of a human-faced deer and the form of the Night Walker, a gigantic, Wendigo-like spirit that wanders the land, presiding over life and death. How will these conflicts play out, and will Ashitaka find a way to remove the curse that's slowly killing him?
I'm not the biggest fan of anime, and I've never been a huge fan of East Asian story structures, either, with their often dizzying and labyrinthine crosscurrents of conflict, shifting alliances, changing motivations, and obscure goals and purposes. That said, it was easy enough to suss out this movie's major themes, which are what I'd laid out at the beginning of this review. Westerners might have a hard time relating to Japanese notions of spirituality and divinity; the gods and spirits in this anime universe possess properties that we don't associate with gods in our own modern, Western concepts of theism. In Princess Mononoke, gods can be shot and killed; they can even be beheaded by shots from rifles, but the act of beheading, instead of killing them, just motivates them to go looking for their heads, sowing destruction in their wake as they search. How much of this comes from actual Japanese mythology and how much is made-up "theology" for this specific film, I have no idea. How satisfying the film might be for a first-time Western viewer is anyone's guess. While the visuals are rough but beautiful (for a 1997 film), it's often hard to know what rules and principles are governing the main characters' behavior. As with many East Asian movies, there's little to no romantic potential between Prince Ashitaka and San, a.k.a. Princess Mononoke. There's a vague hope, at the conclusion, that the two might become friends who visit each other on occasion.
While I think the film tried to convey a good message about the eldritch power of nature and the need for human civilization to strive for greater harmony with it, I found the complex conflicts and sometimes obscure character motivations to be a bit off-putting. I also found it ironic that a major part of San's clothing is what looks a lot like a wolf pelt that she almost always has slung across her shoulders. What does her adoptive mother, the wolf-goddess Moro, think of her adopted daughter wearing a wolf pelt? The issue is never even raised. I also didn't like how San was drawn in general; she comes off looking like a 1700s-era European's generic depiction of overseas "savages."
In conclusion, I don't think Princess Mononoke is for everyone. There's a good message about loving nature buried somewhere in the plot, but the vast constellation of ever-colliding characters (I haven't even mentioned Billy Bob Thornton's faux monk Jigo, who is in league with Lady Eboshi, and who attempts to abscond with the Forest Spirit's severed head) crowds this message out in a tangle of plot-related contrivances. I, for one, am in no hurry to see this movie again, and the story doesn't heighten my appreciation of anime in general.
change of plans
 |
| not the "meme" I'm talking about, but one like it |
Finishing up the final three Bad Online English entries for my The Superficial publication on Substack took longer than expected today because one of the "memes," stolen from John McCrarey's site (and more of a joke than a meme), was so long and had so many errors that it took a big chunk of my day to get through it. My work rate slowed to a crawl. I doubt I'll be doing those sorts of "memes" ever again: They're written by and for illiterates, and they're annoyingly formatted: long jokes that are center-justified for some odd reason, which makes them visually annoying.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday, I did successfully get through all three remaining Bad Online English posts, so that's now covered through the end of April. And I did get through two out of three of my intended The Profound posts (on interjections) for the day, and while I might be able to keep up a three-post-per-day rate for the remaining sixteen posts, I'm thinking that I might want to change my plans.
What I'd like to do instead is generate enough Profound posts to get me through my upcoming walk, then do the rest of the posts once I'm back. That means generating five more posts, which can be done in two days, then using the rest of my time from February 28 to March 14 to do other things. It occurs to me that I ought to generate more interactive grammar quizzes since I'm very behind on those, and I can get back to creating my movie-review book, adding around five chapters per day. I ought to be more than halfway through the book's creation by the time I go down south to do my walk, and the book—ebook version—ought to be done and ready for self-publication by the halfway point in April. The dead-tree version ought to be ready by the end of April, by which point I'll once again have to generate another couple months' worth of Substack material and, come May, start looking for steady work, assuming Substack and self-publishing remain a bust.
Once I'm back from my walk, I'll need less than a week to finish making The Profound posts that will see me through May.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
aroused garden gnome
Right there, almost dead center, hips thrust forward, huge boner:
 |
| Come see my wood elf, honey! |
Maybe you think all gnomes wear pointy hats. Bigot.
farmer's carry vs. suitcase carry
People who are masters of weightlifting will scoff at this, but I just discovered this truth for myself: there's a marked difference between a farmer's carry and a suitcase carry. There are too many variations of each exercise to count (sets, reps, arm position, dumbbell vs. kettlebell, time vs. step number, banded vs. stable, etc.), but the fundamental difference is that a farmer's carry involves both of your arms while a suitcase carry, as the name implies, involves only one—as if you were lugging a heavy, wheel-less suitcase through an airport.
Up to now, I've been doing even and uneven farmer's carries routinely. Both work your core and increase your back strength along certain planes of movement. Neither is really a rotational exercise; I've got other exercises to deal with that issue. The variations I've been doing, in what are admittedly minimalist workouts (enough to rebuild lost strength after a stroke and a heart attack), are as follows: 10-kg/10-kg (left/right hand) farmers carries, and 20-kg/10-kg alternating farmer's carries (I do marches in my apartment). And that's it.
But just the other day, I randomly discovered something while I was holding only a 20-kg weight: the suitcase carry, for me at least, fires the opposite core muscles more than a farmer's carry (balanced or uneven weights) does. So today, I added 20-kg suitcase carries to my regimen, and damn, I can feel it in my core. For a guy still dealing with frozen shoulder, the 20-kg suitcase carry is the vertical answer to the side plank—no joke.
So that's my underwhelming discovery. Just thought I'd share the lameness.
only three more to go
 |
| found here |
I'm glad I ordered my Substack work in the way I did, starting from the easy material to the harder material. Psychologically, it brings a feeling of accomplishment and encourages a can-do spirit for when the more difficult material comes around, as is happening now with The Profound. Also, if I have time, I might vibe-code some more quizzes via ChatGPT to reinforce my Substack material. Quizzes are easy enough to code; I had reached a sticking point when I tried vibe-coding my Do You Deserve to Vote? app. I'll get back to that, though: I've had a few ideas in the interim.
As always—there's plenty to do. But first, The Profound. 18 entries' worth. Let's see whether three entries per day is even possible.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
mountain-cow AI art
How now, carabao? Sure enough, there are free "convert photo to Chinese brush art" sites online. I saw this nice photo of a mountain and a cow/carabao* on John McCrarey's site and made it into color and B&W brush art. Here's the original image:
And here are the brush-art conversions—color, then black and white:
 |
| color, but not much color |
 |
| Is it just my dirty mind, or does anyone else see a garden gnome with a boner almost dead center? |
Which do you like better? (I bet you're gonna say, "The photo!")
*It's got the prominent, curved horns of a carabao. But I could be wrong: Maybe it's just a cow.
ululate!
 |
| Robert Carradine, 1984 and more recently |
why the mailing difficulties?
The Hanjin Shipping Service has been telling me that I need to reregister my personal information for them to be able to ship an Amazon book down to Masan. This problem has been going on for more than a week. A Hanjin staffer called me Monday morning; Amazon emailed me last night (Monday night); today, I've been in contact via email with Hanjin again, and they're now telling me I need to reregister my information at the Korean "Unipass" website. The fun never ends. When did mail stop being a straightforward thing?
UPDATE: (5:00 p.m.) I just got a Kakao message from Hanjin that my book was finally released from Customs and is now on its way to my friend Neil in Masan. Next time I order a book copy, I'll have it delivered to me since that sort of book delivery has happened twice this year without a hitch, then I'll mail the book myself to Masan or to whatever in-Korea destination is in the cards.
signs of spring
It's still February, but South Korea is warming up, and the ROK Drop blog has a photo of spring blossoms in Busan.
I hear the US east coast, from the mid-Atlantic to New England, is getting beaten down by a "bomb cyclone" that's brought lots of snow. Normally, I'd say that Korean weather roughly mirrors mid-Atlantic weather since we're at similar latitudes (Seoul = 37.5ºN; northern Virginia = 38.6ºN), but I guess this is one of those times when there's a radical difference. Good luck to my fellow Virginians, both with the weather and your new governor.
Monday, February 23, 2026
whoa—am I ahead of schedule?
If I'm ahead of schedule, it's by only a day, but it still feels good to be on top of things. I want to get back to completing my movie-review book. You may recall the schedule I'd laid out:
This weekend: Work on five weeks' content for The Entertaining (through April).
Also this weekend: Repopulate scheduled posts for the blog.
This coming week, Mon-Tue: Create eight weeks' content for The Creative.
This coming week, Wed-Sat: Create eight weeks' content for The Superficial.
3/1-3/7: Create eight weeks' content for The Profound.
3/8-3/14: Get back to creating the first movie-review book.
3/16-3/20: Walk the Geumgang bike path. (This year's "long" walk, only 146 km.)
3/21-end of March: Finish creating the movie-review book.
I've now gotten through all of this:
This weekend: Work on five weeks' content for The Entertaining (through April).Also this weekend: Repopulate scheduled posts for the blog.This coming week, Mon-Tue: Create eight weeks' content for The Creative.
This coming week, Wed-Sat: Create eight weeks' content for The Superficial.
3/1-3/7: Create eight weeks' content for The Profound.
3/8-3/14: Get back to creating the first movie-review book.
3/16-3/20: Walk the Geumgang bike path. (This year's "long" walk, only 146 km.)
3/21-end of March: Finish creating the movie-review book.
Now comes the hard part—content for The Superficial and The Profound. I may as well take a short break, then start on The Superficial tonight. While I'd love to be done with The Profound before March rolls around, that's probably not going to happen: The posts I do for The Profound are lengthy and detailed. They also contain quizzes, and you can't just write out quiz questions willy-nilly: you have to follow certain criteria to make sure your questions are fair, and that you're quizzing your learners on what they've actually learned.
Anyway, I have to whip up 18 posts each for The Superficial and The Profound. If I do nine posts of the Superficial by tomorrow (Tuesday), then another nine by Wednesday, and if I somehow manage the miracle of creating three posts per day for The Profound, I can be done by March 3, putting me way ahead of schedule. From March 4 to March 14, I can get back to working on the movie-review book, then do my five-day Geumgang walk, then finish the ebook version of the movie-review book a few days before the end of March. A week or so after that (early April, theoretically), the print version of the book (print-on-demand) ought to be ready at Amazon. Fingers and tentacles crossed.
wow—a new paid subscriber!
Starting in March, a lot of my paid content on Substack will include free previews for my free subscribers. But it seems I've already snared an extra paid subscriber, and it's not even March. I'd like to think that this is the beginning of a cascade, but Murphy's Law says otherwise. That said, anything is better than nothing.
And if I do end up moving out of Seoul to pursue university work somewhere, I will continue to post on Substack, but I might have to reduce my volume somewhat. There will still be a ton of content, and for $5 a month, you'll get more than your money's worth.
beware the stink
I haven’t laughed this hard 🤣🤣☠️ Omg 😆 pic.twitter.com/rJ1FbZaXKl
— G-PA (@IndianaGPA) February 22, 2026
did you even notice?
There are things I do on this blog that often matter only to me. For example, I've explained why I defy convention when it comes to how I use ellipses or how I used to use em dashes (back when I wrote em dashes as a double hyphen, i.e., before figuring out em dashes on both Mac and PC). Ellipses are normally supposed to be three or four periods* with spaces in front and behind each of them:
She gave Brent a smile . . . then pulled the trigger.
What I normally do is:
She gave Brent a smile... then pulled the trigger.
This is to avoid the weird, "non-breaking" property that ellipses possess on certain platforms like Blogger. If I didn't put a space after the ellipsis in my version of the sentence, the phrase smile...then would be treated as a single, long word, and at the end of a line, if that "word" was too long, the whole thing would spill over to the next line instead of just the word then. That's why I put the space after the ellipsis. I also write my ellipses the way I do (... , not . . . ) because the "space between every period" convention isn't universally agreed upon. In fact, some word processors, when you type out three periods, will automatically group those three periods together tightly into a single ellipsis "character." Try it out sometime on your word processor: type an ellipsis, then see how many times you have to hit the delete key to erase it. If it's just once, the ellipsis has been changed into a single character. If it's three or four times, then your word processor is a libertarian when it comes to punctuation.
Back when I used to make my em dashes with two hyphens (--), I would put a space after the two hyphens for the same reason: Blogger is weird that way. Now, of course, and for many years, I know how to make proper em dashes (—, for dramatic pauses, etc.), and I no longer insert spaces anywhere. On a Mac, it's a simultaneous keystroke combination: shift-option-hyphen. On a Windows PC, you hold down the alt key and type 0151.
my old way: Frances gripped the heavy barbell-- with her crotch.
my "new" way (for years now): Frances gripped the heavy barbell—with her crotch.
So with ellipses (normally . . . ), I have my quirky, maybe-acceptable way of handling them. And for em dashes (—), I changed how I handle them.
For the longest time, I've also had my own convention for handling movie titles: I surround them with quotation marks. Many news and magazine articles also reflect this convention (see here; I'm not hallucinating this). Technically, the title of any completed creative work should be italicized. Movies, once they're released, are completed creative works. A book of poetry, once published, has a title (Leaves of Grass), but each poem in that collection is cited with quotation marks around the poem's title (a work within a work, like "Song of Myself"). The same would be true for a compendium of short stories, like Stephen King's Four Past Midnight (the collection title) and "The Langoliers" (a story within that collection).
Starting with my recent review of The Last Samurai, I finally decided to bow to proper convention and italicize movie titles. Did you notice? Look at my reviews for The Fall Guy and Nosferatu. The major reason for this is the movie-review book I've been working on: Part of my editing involves stripping away the quotation marks and italicizing all the titles I find. It's a pain in the ass. So as an investment in the future, I'm bowing to convention and italicizing movie titles from now on.
I lose something, though, when I do this: I lose the ability to distinguish between a book title and a movie title, as when I wrote this sentence in my Nosferatu review:
One theme of the movie is about how science fails in the face of pure evil, a theme also touched on in both the novel The Exorcist and the movie "The Exorcist."
With everything now italicized, that distinction will be lost, which is a bit sad. On the other hand, I'll have one less distinction to worry about for future reviews.
But sad or not, I'm now sticking with italics for all titles of completed creative works. Come to think of it, I watched the English-dubbed version of Princess Mononoke again over the weekend—a film I hadn't watched in years. So a review for that will be coming down the pipe this week. Another chance for you to notice my newly italicized movie titles.
__________
*Use three periods for sentence fragments and four periods for complete sentences.
Ave, Dr. Gilleland!
Life is one long disease.
And who in this life is not sick? Is there anyone who does not have to drag his way through a long illness? Even to be born here, in a mortal body, is the onset of our maladies. Our needy condition is supported by daily doses of medicine, for the means we use to relieve our wants are like remedies applied every day. Would hunger not kill you if you did not treat it with the appropriate medicine? Would thirst not destroy you if you neglected to drink? Yet your drinking only keeps thirst at bay; it does not quench it entirely, for after that temporary relief thirst will return.
Go over and read the rest. There is no relief from life except death.
...and what are your feelings on this?
Lupita Nyong'o is reputed to be Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's new version of Homer's The Odyssey. Is this more Netflix-style race-swapping meant to troll rightie audiences? Yet another salvo in the ongoing, tiresome culture war? Before I say anything more, I need to be clear that race-swapping doesn't always hit me the wrong way, and I think a lot of us are still forming opinions about the rightness and wrongness of engaging in the practice. For the most part, my own judgments are more on a case-by-case basis and less rooted in some unchanging, bedrock principle. Sometimes, the race-swapping works; sometimes, it doesn't.
For example, when Dr. Kynes was portrayed as a black woman in Denis Villeneuve's 2021 Dune, Part 1, I didn't see how the doctor's race affected the story being told, so I really couldn't care less. And I had no problem with the decidedly off-white Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho ("Native Hawaiian, German, Irish, and Pawnee"); if anything, I look forward to Momoa's return in the third Dune movie (book review here).
But when race is swapped for a role in an established "canon," that's a very different matter. Think: black Snape in the upcoming Harry Potter HBO series (Snape is undeniably described as white in the books). Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies (but not his later Hobbit movies if the demographics of Esgaroth/Lake-town are any indication) respected the spirit of Tolkien's canon even if the movies radically changed many of the story details, and part of that spirit involved keeping the fantasy story consistent with the northern European traditions that it is/was tied to. So, yes, that meant there'd have to be a lot of white people. And it meant risking the irrational attacks that predictably arrived: "The darker-skinned orcs represent black people! That's racist!"
The counterargument against making your cast "look like Los Angeles," as the Critical Drinker sneeringly puts it, is an easy one: just turn the race-swapping around. Should we make a movie about a cherished African myth in which we portray all of the black characters with white and Asian actors? How about a Japanese movie in which all of the main cast is white? (Actually, something like this may have been tried with the "Chinese" movie The Great Wall. I never saw The Great Wall, so I can't say, but many US critics and moviegoers were shouting "Whitewashing!" at the time. Or a more extreme example might be the "white" remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu, which got turned into The Ring with a largely white cast.) What if KPop Demon Hunters had been race-swapped in both its visuals and its voice cast?
Here's the flip side of the flip side, though: Nolan's The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus instead of a more authentically Greek actor, is already racially compromised, so casting the Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, an Anatolian, may have been a case of In for a penny, in for a pound. And when Zack Snyder's 300 came out years ago, Greek audiences apparently loved the hell out of that movie despite King Leonidas' being played by a toothy Scotsman, and the rest of the Spartans' being played by non-Greeks. Race-swapping—a feature of old and modern Hollywood—and people's attitudes toward it, can't be judged by a simple set of principles or properly viewed through a simplistic lens.
It's also fair to say that the issue of race-swapping didn't suddenly appear with the arrival of Netflix and its version of Cleopatra. White Jesus appears in paintings all over the American South, but he was appearing in European images as early as the 6th century. Black Jesus has been a thing in America since the 1800s. Reasons for race-swapping vary with context. When it comes to religious figures, the common refrain is that "we create God in our own image." I can buy that. Modern Hollywood reflexively inserts people of certain demographics into movies and TV/streaming shows because of an unsatisfiable need to cater to "modern audiences" (the Drinker's much-beloved term) and a desire to have an ethnic- and gender-balanced cast, often referred to as "representation." This isn't always evil. And I fully admit that, when watching older films, I do notice the unrealistic whiteness of certain tableaux—something a less racially aware America took for granted long ago. There was definitely a time when minorities of all sorts were underrepresented in movies and on TV. These days, though, overrepresentation may be the problem.
So while I'm not ecstatic about Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen of Troy, I have to be fair and say I'm also not ecstatic about Matt Damon's casting as Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes, at least, came equipped with an aquiline nose for his role as Odysseus). In 2026, we're globally hyperaware of the massive dramatic talent that exists in all countries, so it should have been easy for Nolan to find Greek and Anatolian actors. Instead, he stuck with Damon because, well, Damon is a Christopher Nolan flunky (Interstellar, Oppenheimer). If I have a problem with anything about the upcoming movie, it's less about how it plays fast and loose with history (race-swapped cast, screenplay in modern English) and more about Agamemnon's stupid helmet design which, according to one archery channel that I watch, will simply funnel arrows into one's face. I'm not sure whether I even want to see this movie. I totally missed Tenet, after all, and I don't feel an ounce of guilt about that.
Sunday, February 22, 2026
Spencer tackles some "pretty rough" surfaces
Spencer doesn't just do lawns: he also does power washing! And it's all for free since he makes his money via YouTube. I wish I'd thought of that business model years ago.
I am bechaired
 |
| See the screw holes for the headrest? |
My new, el-cheapo, made-in-China office chair arrived today. No more scratching up the floor now that I roll on wheels (for office chairs, they're called casters). About those scratches (which appeared only recently): I've lost all hope of getting back whatever damage deposit I'd left last year when I'd made my rental contract... if I'd left any deposit (I'm too lazy to look at my rental contract). More likely, they'll just charge me for repairs.
So far, I'd say the major problems are:
- faulty light sensor (door light got old)
- ruined wallpaper under the A/C (my fault)
- small scratches on the floor by my desk (my fault)
I could probably go out to Euljiro's lighting district, describe my problem, and buy a new light that I would then ask the building repair guys to install. As for the wallpaper... there's a place on the first floor that looks as though it sells housing accessories, so I might talk to them about re-papering my wall (frankly, I hate wallpaper and prefer paint). And as for the new scratches on my floor... I can pray that no one notices them, but they're not exactly invisible. I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and pay the cost for reflooring when the building people see the damage as I'm moving out. If only there were a way to buff the scratches out...
Since I tend to ruin whatever chairs I sit in for months and years, I don't expect this new chair to last very long. Assembling it was a bitch, and part of the problem was the poor quality of the factory assembly: I saw screw holes where the screws wouldn't go through because the plastic molding was uneven. As a result: no headrest for uncle Kevin (see above photo). Not that I ever use a headrest anyway. And I made an active choice not to slap on armrests since I never use those, either. I'll accent the new chair with my usual double layer of ass cushions, then Bob will most decidedly be my uncle.
It feels weird to purchase a new chair when I might finally be moving out of this place this coming summer. I've been in this building for almost eleven years; up to now, I've been fine with Costco folding chairs that had cost me only W17,000 apiece. But I guess those chairs have been feeling their age (and my weight) because two of them recently popped out their backs when I sat in them—a sure sign that (1) I still need to lose another 20 kg, and (2) these chairs have been with me for a long time.
In other news: I've done three out of five weeks' worth of Substack material for The Entertaining (games and puzzles). Two more to go. I'll finish those and spend the rest of the day continuing to repopulate my YouTube scheduled posts.
With February ending, temperatures are rising. Today is sunny and windy. I won't be going for a stroll (just ate—a stroll would give rise to angina), but the afternoon sun is shining through my westward-facing window. I do, however, need to start practice-walking for my upcoming hike along the Geumgang in mid-March. That'll begin this week.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
