I have thoughts about ChatGTP, MidJourney, and the "sudden" rise of AI content generation. However those thoughts are not very unique or clear, so I will point to a couple recent thoughtful articles...
I knew the movie was "weird", but had avoided any real spoilers, so went into it on Friday with few expectations. Which was good as it was totally not what i expected. It is amazing to me that this movie got made at all. Non-white, older main cast. Subtitles. Crazy non typical story telling. It felt like something i would have watched in the 90's at TIFFs Midnight Madness. Michelle Yeoh was, in one of the few unsurprising things about this film, amazing. A family drama wrapped up in a multiverse of madness. I give it a 4/5.
Watched the new batman movie. I enjoyed that this one had some detectiving going on, giving a nod to Batman's tag-line "The worlds greatest detective". Any opportunity to see Jeffrey Wright is one that should be taken. Had lots of fisticuffs and pugilism. Not much insight or development for the main character, even with the hackneyed voice-over. A bit of a nod to Seven. I give it a 3/5.
I started blogging again this year because i wrote my own blog site generator. Or did i write my own blog site generator so i could start blogging again? I am not actually sure which it is...
I had been using Tumblelog, and there were a couple things that were just not quite right. What does a programmer do when things are not quite right? They scratch their own itch.
The major changes, other then rewriting in c# and Unity3d (ahahaha), were tweaks to the input format itself. Each post can now have its own date/time stamps and an optional title. I also changed how tagging works.
I wrote the tool in c# and Unity3d. Yes, when all you have is a game creation tool, every problem is a game. Mostly because using familiar tools would get it done quickly, even if they are not an exact a fit. Whatever, it works. I was surprised by how little code it took, actually. Used Linq, hand written simple recursive decent parser, a Markdown library and Mustache (via the Nustache library) for the templates.
I keep telling myself that once i've cleaned up the code, and finished a "couple last features", i'll put it up on github or some other place. We will see. Not that i am precious about it, more that i'm not sure anyone else would be interested or get anything from it. Other than maybe a laugh.
Couple Last Features
further tweaks and improvements to the input format
adding an "work in progress" marker so that a post is ignored during publishing
adding an explicit "this is a page" token to PAGE types, so there can be explicit error reporting for badly formatted post & page markers
getting all the variables into an ini file, so i don't have to keep recompiling the app
Went to see this show on Saturday. I was not very enthused to go, being an atheist and non-knitter, and also not a lover of live theatre. However, as one of my intentional activities is to "be more social", I got off my lazy butt and went. Very glad i did. The show was excellent, the story of how the show and knitting was produced, the trials and tribulations of working for 15 years on this single project, amazing. Highly recommended if you ever have the opportunity to see the show itself, or just the Stitched Glass artifacts.
And afterwards the group of us hung out and chatted and had a wonderful time, which i would have also missed. Success for being mindful of "what is important".
So much has already been said about the new Avatar movie, i'm unlikely to add anything with my own ramblings, so i'll keep it short. It looks real. Watched in IMAX 3D, it was amazing. I was in awe of the technical aspects of this movie. The crab robot-sub-things were also a highlight. I rate it a 3 out of 5.
