Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: Film

  • #25: Superhero movies were a blip

    Dune’s been on my mind. Not simply for the technical mastery on display, or for its commitment to theatrical spectacle, or even for its place in the larger cultural landscape of 2024.

    I’m just kind of impressed that its a bonafide modern franchise not tied to some sort of superhero source material. It’s not even all that original. Obviously, it’s adapted from a very popular sci-fi series, and it’s been tried before. But the (in some ways far too incessant) comparisons to Star Wars go beyond its thematic and stylistic similarities. It’s a generational blockbuster film franchise that’s self-contained, in its own world, sweeping through audiences. It’s big and epic and interesting and exciting in a way that we haven’t seen in a while.

    It does feel like this year we are starting to see some return to movies as they existed before the days of Marvel. There are summer blockbusters, and mega franchises. There are shots in the dark like Everything, Everywhere all at once. Kevin Costner is even making Westerns again.

    When I first met my now wife, we used to go to an indie theater every week and see whatever was out. There was always some indie rom-com (this was the era of 500 days of summer) or drama that was fun and stylistically original and had a nice self-contained story to it. Then movies got split into either mega blockbusters or super low budget, barely watched indies. All those middle of the road films disappeared.

    So it’s fun to see a movie like this about a woman who tries to reconnect with her boyfriend, who passed away, through connections through music. It’s exactly the kind of thing we would’ve went to the movie to see. Maybe those kinds of movies are coming back.

    And it’s possible that after all of this, superhero movies and never-ending, interconnected IP will be more of a blip of film history rather than a seismic and enduring paradigm shift.

    Maybe multiverses will be all too much.

    Maybe we’ll be able to just make movies again.

    Bookmarks & Notes

    When ChatGPT and it’s many, many competitors began flooding the market, I started to use it a bit in my writing. Mostly I would set it up with something I had written and ask for a revision, then pull some things here and there I liked. But over time, it’s for sure slipping out of use for me. I like this guide from the iA team, Writing with AI . It’s more pragmatic than a lot of other things that I’ve seen. It’s advice essentially boils down to turning to something like ChatGPT at times when you are stuck. Like a rubber duck, but for ideas. But this caution is so important for me:

    AI can and will ruin your voice and credibility if you lazily let it write in your place. As writers we can not allow AI to replace our own thinking. We should use it to simulate the thinking of a missing dialogue partner. To write better, we need to think more, not less.

    I was also feeling that AI was beginning to rob me of my voice. And without that, what else do I even have?

    We Need to Talk About the Front Web. As a generalist, that works with a lot of full stack developers, I have mixed feelings about the division between the front-end and it’s tradeoffs with back-end expertise. But I do understand the way that the intention and semantics of HTML is under attack, and in slow decay. And so I really do appreciate Angela Ricci’s point of view here. The whole thing is absolutely worth a read, I enjoyed every bit of it.

    That’s the web today: abstractions, intertwined dependencies, heavy tools, thirty-party libraries, client-side JavaScript frameworks… SPAs! — we simply broke the web with these.

    And man does the web feel broken sometimes.

    I don’t know if I see No Labels as a “dangerous” experiment, but after reading the profile on them in The Atlantic I’m left wondering, what is even the point of this (other than to placate the egos of it’s founders)?

    Kierkegaard on the root of despair

    The relation to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed the relation to oneself… With despair a fire takes hold in something that cannot burn, or cannot be burned up — the self… To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.

    Notes

    Prepping for Easter

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Film List
    Comics List
    Add to Books
    Revolutions
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #24: Sunday Sauce

    I married into a very big Italian family, with roots in Sicily. So one of the things I learned pretty early on was how to make Sunday gravy (or Sunday sauce depending on your region of origin). I make it here and there, and it’s good for a couple of days worth of leftovers.

    I looked around at a few recipes, and this one felt the closest to the method that I know. Except I don’t use wine, and most of the time I’ll just use sugar instead of carrots, if anything.

    The most important parts of Sunday Gravy, as I understand it, is the long simmer, and the quality of the tomatoes.

    The beauty of it is that you can get going sometime in the morning and leave it to simmer all day, coming back to stir it from time to time. That’s how the tomatoes break apart, and the sauce thickens, and eventually the flavors of the meat combine with it. It’s meant to be cooked slow. That’s why it’s for Sundays.

    And for tomatoes, as the recipe I linked to mentions, you probably want to use the San Marzano variation of whatever can of tomatoes are at your local supermarket. You can really use whatever you want, and you can either buy whole peeled tomatoes and crush them yourself or just buy them crushed. But the quality of the sauce is more or less dependent on what you chose, so it’s probably worth a couple of extra bucks.

    Anyway, this being less of a formal recipe, here are the steps I generally follow.

    1. In a large sauce or stock post, dice up a yellow or white onion and saute it in a healthy tablespoon or two of olive oil. Add a bit of salt while you do.
    2. When the onions are nice and tender, add in some tomato paste. Not quite the full thing of a whole small can. Maybe like 3/4 of it. Add a heap of garlic.
    3. After about a minute or so of moving that all around dump in two 28 oz cans of your tomatoes. Fill up one can with just water and dump that in too. Stir, cover and raise your heat.
    4. Once the sauce is boiling gently, take the heat back down and uncover. Add some more salt and pepper, a lot of fresh basil (pretty key that it’s fresh, imo) and a tablespoon or more of seasoning. You can add some grated carrots, or a healthy pinch of sugar, or a half a packet of Sweet N Low. All of those are just meant to balance out the acidity with some sweetness. You may not even need it.
    5. You can leave this going for a long time, several hours or more if you want. Stir every 20 minutes at least to keep the bottom from burning.
    6. Make your meatballs. I won’t go into all the details, but use a bit of fresh basil with those too. And you can soak some old bread in milk instead of breadcrumbs too.
    7. Once the meatballs are fried, add them to the sauce for at least an hour, until they are cooked through
    8. Continue seasoning as needed
    9. Serve it right away, or the next day, or both

    I enjoy making it, and it makes a fine meal. But I really like a food with such a clear tradition. It’s meant to be left on the stovetop as your kids and your grandkids scamper around the house. It’s meant to be tasted with a wooden spoon every so often. It’s meant for a lazy day inside when dinner can be served at anytime. It’s Sunday gravy (sauce).

    Bookmarks & Notes

    Cory Doctrow is really on to something with this whole enshittificaiton thing. At the beginning of this year, he posted a talk he gave about it to his blog. I like the way that Doctrow sums it up:

    It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

    And we’re seeing that happen to the platforms that we love, only slowly. And it’s going to drive people away from the web, which is a tragedy.

    Laws aren’t going to catch up to this kind of thing. And in the meantime, we’re just going to let artists have their entire careers sucked up by machines.

    Got to see Dune 2 on the big screen. Perhaps Villeneuve’s best work. Perhaps one of my favorite films of all time. Just an incredible, lived-in world that’s beautifully realized and consistent. It’s got all the right story beats, even when it missteps here and there, and it doesn’t beat you over the head with exposition in a way that feels very natural. But this is going to be remembered for its technical brilliance. For all the talk of a bland cinematographic palette, there is something incredibly precise about every aspect of the film’s audiovisual landscape. There is not a single moment that distract the eyes or the ears. Everything is exactly in its place.

    James Hollis on the transition into midlife

    Symptoms of midlife distress are in fact to be welcomed, for they represent not only an instinctually grounded self underneath the acquired personality but a powerful imperative for renewal… In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die… Such death and rebirth is not an end in itself; it is a passage. It is necessary to go through the Middle Passage to more clearly achieve one’s potential and to earn the vitality and wisdom of mature aging. Thus, the Middle Passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self to authenticity.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Film List
    Comics List
    Add to Books
    Revolutions
    Add to the Count of Monte Cristo
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Thinking is an active pursuit

    Thinking about how to keep things small this week. Everything these days feels so big, and we’ve invented these big and complicated systems and procedures for trying to manage just how big it all feels.

    So this week I’m trying to think small. How can I give myself time and space to simply think? How can I simplify? How can I manage the breadth of news in the world without being overwhelmed?

    Doing

    I just finished a slide deck on web history. Specifically, the history of layout and grids and all the things we tried until we got to 3 line CSS solutions that start with display: grid. Hoping to turn that into a talk some day, but I’ll just drop this picture of Bill Nye’s first website for now:

    ALSO PUBLISHED:

    Reading

    On his blog, Ploum describes how the users of the web have split the two. One the one side, the ad-infested, barely usable experience of browsing mainstream sites and social media. Across the divide, the small web. The considered web. The thoughtful web that deals in ideas and clean layouts. Ploum concludes fairly decisively.

    It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

    Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

    One great word of caution. If you think your team has a culture problem, it may be time to look inward.

    This one’s from a little while ago, but I finally dug into Casey Newton’s slight departure with Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. Here’s the thing that’s been sticking with me:

    The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

    It’s kind of one of those obvious things. I spend too much of my time distracted. I’ve been trying to take some time to stare at a while for a little bit and see what happens. See what comes into my head. Then I write that down. So fucking obviousl

    Plus, a quick read on writing culture challenges. Something that is always super interesting to me. I’m in awe and strive to be part of a team that emphasizes communicating through writing.

    Watching

    As an American Jew with skepticism about the Zionist project that increasingly feels like it can’t exist without the subjugation of another people, I have complicated feelings about the current conflict in Israel. But this video is making the rounds now, and it is eye opening.

    And Patrick Willems embarks on a murder mystery to try and answer the question, who killed cinema. The culprit may not be who you think… (it’s not Marvel. Or maybe. Kind of).

    Notes

    Tasks:

    • Write Purdue Case Study
    • Sort out Sportsengine tasks about DNS

    For this upcoming week:

    • Presentation to Geoffs class
    • AI Blog Post
    • Prep for EOS

  • Consuming films like Coca-Cola

    Reading

    The conclusion of two books: Sculpting in Time and Just Keep Investing.

    On Sculpting in Time I will say that it is an incredibly unique perspective and view of cinema—recognized by Tarkovsky as a wholly artistic pursuit and a unique medium focused on the compression and rhythm of time. And these are accurate, and well thought out, though perhaps a bit dated these days, as the cinema has receded into the narrative over form in greater and greater strides over the last few decades. This has caused more than one person to lament lately about the state of content, but thankfully Tarkovsky precedes that view and entirely rejects it.

    He concludes the book with a look at the responsibility of the artist. The responsibility is, of course, to represent one’s own personal vision faithfully. But, there is also a responsibility to create true art, even when it is challenging, rather than popcorn movies for pure consumption:

    People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola. The contact between film director and audience is unique to cinema in that it conveys experience imprinted on film in uncompromisingly affective, and therefore compelling, forms. Th e viewer feels a need for such vicarious experience in order to make up in part for what he himself has lost or missed; he pursues it in a kind of ‘search for lost time’. And how human this newly gained experience will be depends only on the author. A grave responsibility!

    I found it interesting, when talking about Stalker, how bothered he was when people asked him what the mysterious “Zone” at the center of the film was:

    People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films

    I wonder what he would think about Star Wars and Marvel movies, where every offhand storyline requires a huge backstory and every plot thread needs resolving.

    Just Keep Investing more or less reiterates the title over the course of many chapters. It’s good advice though.

    Watching

    I saw an interview with Karim Lakhani about the future of AI. I think in many ways it represents well the popular view, and presents a nuanced vision for what’s to come. One thing that gave me pause was when Lakhani pointed to AI as a place to substitute whenever one is doing tasks that require thinking. This is a useful starting point, but I think that it hides the technology and makes AI feel too much like magic.

    Final Note

    I was reminded of this excellent quote by Oliver Burkerman (in Four Thousand Weeks) from this week’s Marginalian:

    Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.

    Notes

    Meal Plan: Meatloaf + Breaded Chicken using new breading

    Focus

  • Weeknotes #1

    Reading

    Articles

    I saw an interesting parable in a recent entry in Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic blog. There’s a story that goes around that in the midst of his progressive reforms, a labor activist was pushing on new federal discrimination laws. According to some accounts, he responded with “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” It‘s also possible the story isn’t entirely true. Either way it’s pretty cool.

    Finally got through Ronan Farrow’s huge profile / takedown of Elon Musk in the New Yorker. It’s scary and unnerving in all the usual ways and is such an indictment of America’s major political failings it reads like satire sometimes. This about sums it up:

    In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded

    Simon Willison put up a written post of a talk I saw at WordCamp US. It’s brutally practical, which is kind of good.

    Books

    Bleak House chapters 22 through 31, where the threads are beginning to come together. In a much longer aside from the narrator, Mr Guppy starts to put the whole thing together and Lady Deadlock realizes that Esther is indeed her daughter. Richard casts off after an argument with Mr Jarndyce and Esther become ill.

    Dickens appears to excel at weaving together a compelling story and social commentary so that one never lives without the other, and so that each is made better for it. And it keeps you in.

    On to Chapter 4 of Sculpting in Time,Cinema’s destined role where Tarkovsky begins to pick apart the trajectory of cinema by viewing it through the prism of his own experience in the industry. He talks about his transition from film school to the wider world of filmmaking, and the way in which mass appeal has shaped the way in which people respond to film. But he comes back to the universal truth of cinema, that it was a tool invented to record facts, actuality, and time:

    Cinema came into being as a means of recording the very movement of reality: factual, specific, within time and unique; of reproducing again and again the moment, instant by instant, in its fluid mutability-that instant over which we find ourselves able to gain mastery by imprinting it on film.

    Watching

    Started Solaris to keep up with Tarvovsky.

    Notes

    Meal Plan this week
    Monday –
    Tuesday –
    Wednesday
    Thursday

    New todos: