Had a family discussion about a horrible movie that came out of Bollywood last year. If you look at it from the perspective of the action sequences, sure, some could say that it's well done.
But you don't go into a movie to just see parts of it, do you? Overall, it was a horrible movie with a horrible message, horrible characters, horrible direction.
Why do people make such trash? Probably because it rakes in millions of dollars.
I had an awesome dream last night. It was super long but the protagonist was a man who is so desperate to meet his own family, but stops on the way to the airport to help everyone he meets. It's compulsive for him. He must help them.
Along the way he makes a lot of great friends and solves crisis after another. He rejoins a father-daughter and orchestrates it in such a way that all the anger between father and daughter just melts away.
The ending of the dream was bittersweet because I knew it was a dream and was ending but I also knew that the protagonist's own story wasn't finished as he hadn't reached his family yet. Perhaps in another dream.
For a split-second, while looking at the publishing schedule, I thought to myself, "shit, I guess I skipped the 30th! It's already the 1st now." Then I remembered that February just ended. 😆
The book I was singing paens to yesterday, I'm irritated with today. The author seems to have taken the second chapter into a completely different direction which is just sooooo boring to me. I do not give a rats arse about the commune living of the 1960s or 70s or whatever and why they failed.
But, I bet there'll be a good reason for why this is such an important topic to cover. I'm very hopeful that what will come out of this is not just American navel-gazing but something of substance. So, we wait.
Meanwhile, I've ordered a hardcover copy of this book from Half-Price Books. I'm loathe to buy a new book when there are so many awesome pre-loved ones to adopt. Whenever possible, I buy second hand. That said, when I'm in a book store, I can't stop my itch and I always come out with a few brand new books. I recently bought a book that's been on my TBR for a very long time - Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I got book 1 of the 2 book series and I'm looking forward to diving into the Iranian Cultural Revolution and its aftermath from the eyes of a 9 year old. I also got a bit of speculative fiction, which is always a hit or miss, so I'm not going to mention it till I read it.
I’m really loving listening to Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. It’s an insightful book and a pleasure to read. I didn’t go into it thinking of philosophy, but then midway in the first chapter, she starts quoting Deleuze and talking about the Ethics of Care and that’s just perfect serendipity to me!
Her lived experience around dealing with technology as an isolating and enraging medium and her ways of dealing with it, including by going to a particularly Rose Garden which I too loved when I went to California last, as well as her quoting Rebecca Solnit, just make this a must-read for me.
Looking forward to flowing with this book and integrating its precepts into my life. Also considering buying a physical copy of it after I finish the library book I have right now.
I was just thinking back to my childhood. There were a fair few adventures that I had as a child which I barely remember. Even if I remember the adventures themselves, I don't remember the exact locations. Lastly, even when I remember the locations, I don't know if I'll ever go to those places again.
My childhood was spent traveling to and living in all the corners of India, thanks to my Dad's job. It was an amazing adventure in itself to be in a new place and to make new friends every 2 years. Though it later dawned on me that it also meant I'd never have a set of fixed best friends for life, to this day I look back fondly on those moves and exploration.
There's a particular instance which I was remembering just now - as a child in a city called Kharagpur, in the Indian state of West Bengal, I used to run off with my friend and play for hours at end. On one instance, we forgot all about time and family and ended up playing in a ditch with a narrow stream of water for the entire evening, till our parents came looking for us, worried expressions on their faces. I think the time was almost 8 pm. We'd been playing for three or so hours and had no idea that our parents had organized a search party to look for two lost kids.
I would love to visit that ditch one day. If only to stare at it and tell myself that yeah, that happened.
I got irritated by Ghost's web interface not having autocapitalization in iOS Safari. What this means is that at the beginning of a new sentence, the first character isn't automatically capitalized. So I constantly have to use the Shift button on mobile.
This isn't so much an issue on desktop, but on mobile, we're so used to the keyboard taking care of certain things for us, that we register them only when they go wrong. Something about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, or something...
So as part of my irritation, I started dreaming of moving to a different CMS. Then I got bored of that quest and decided against it. I also poked around and changed the theme on this site. Just experimenting.
I recently spotted that the excellent iOS app Drafts has a new Ghost integration which they'd love for you to try. Except it's part of the paid plan and I don't use Drafts enough to warrant paying for it. It's a chicken and egg problem where if I don't start using it, I won't feel the need to use it. It's not on the first page of my phone or the last (the two most used pages). It's in the middle, where things go to get lost and remembered only when needed.
Anyways, enough excursions towards unknown lands. Back to what we have in front of us.
I think I have mold in my house. My breathing has been affected and I feel a metallic taste in my mouth. But more importantly, it's scary because I have a young kid and I don't know how it's affecting her.
Hopefully it'll get resolved soon, either by us moving out, or by temporarily shifting so the apartment can be... fumigated? Un-molded?