Apathy. Transmutation. Refraction. Consumerism. The things I choice to discuss for 2004.
2005 will be different. A new year. Enjoy it, and have a good celebration tonight.
Best wishes, and remember auld lang syne.
It has been a good year for music and film. Lots of new creativity.
Best Albums of 2004
Honourable mentions for the above should go to Mclusky for the “The Difference Between Me And You Is That I’m Not On Fire“. Opens with two dark tracks, and progresses as a very proficient rock album. Only kept out of the top five by a whisker.
Top Five Bands To Watch In 2005 (we’ll assume that Chinese Democracy won’t make it out again):
Now, the next part is the best films of the year. Tricky business since it has been such a spectacular year for cinema. Because the selection process was so tricky (particularly cross-genre), I’m picking a top three and then listing another ten excellent films.
Other films (no further commentary, just read the review):
That’s all. I would thoroughly recommend all the films and albums listed here. If you haven’t seen or heard any, give them a go.
Forewarning: This is largely a personal post. If you avoid those posts (as I normally do), then stop reading now.
2004. Not sure if it has been a good year or a bad year. Certainly an odd year. Some of the ups and downs, and general occurences:
There are things missing from here, some more poignant and affecting than those listed, some more trivial from an outside perspective.
2004. A year shaped by lots of changes.
Oh dear. It all went a bit wrong. House Of Flying Daggers could have been a great film. The premise (police hunting for the leader of a dissident sect) lends itself perfectly to be an impressive martial arts film with large and small scale battles between the two factions. Instead, the film focusses on the growing love between two characters on opposing sides.
The poor Romeo And Juliet plot is further let down by the twists: weak bluff after bluff after “Aha” after double bluff, not a single one enhancing the film at all.
The final act was particularly weak, with one of the two male characters being picked fairly arbitrarily as the villian and the plot meandering from there.
Dull, lengthy cinematics only gave way to one or two reasonable fight scenes. A shame.
How have you improved the world this year? Consider for a moment your place in the world. You almost certainly consume resources, but do you give the same amount back? Are you apathetic to those around you?
Maybe. You don’t have to deal with other people to change the world, to improve it in some small way. However, if you’re not actively trying to make it better, it is likely that you are passively destroying it.
Again, think about how you contribute to communities and society as a whole. List five ways that you make the world a better place (and please, leave out narcissistic reasons, you are not inherently good). Just list five ways that we are better off for having you around. Can you honestly do it? Why not?
A whole new year is coming. Think about how you can resolve that situation. Figure out your talents and skills, decide on the little things that you can do to improve the world, and then do them. As a thought experiment, this is only a brief curio. Action is what is needed. Action.
Garden State was surprising. Expecting a fairly lightweight comedy about a life going out of control, it was pleasant to actually be watching a film that was more than a passable script with some funny moments.
While the first few scenes are self-indulgent and overly sweet appetisers, the meat of the film is both tender and succulent. A boy, a girl, friends, and a trip home; it writes itself.
A plot synopsis does not do this film justice. See it. See it for the beautiful insight into a life that seems messed up enough to be real. See it for the old friends who seem to genuinely care beyond standard Hollywood “loyalty”. See it because it is genuinely funny. Just see it.
Apathy is a way of life now. How many times have you walked past the homeless, begging for change, with a shirk and slight fleeting shame? Far too many, I’d wager. Would it have killed you to give them a small amount? Probably not.
Apathy is becoming more apparent to me. At this time of year, of celebrations and over-indulgence, we either keep ignoring our fellow man or through them scraps of kindness to sate our own guilt.
You don’t even have to show respect for someone worse off than yourself, just help someone. Suggestions:
I know that it is not likely anyone will do any of these things, but at least consider why you are not doing them or something similar. Why are you not looking out for everyone else? What does it say about you?
It is not often that you leave a film unsure whether you liked what you saw or not. Generally you can tell by the amount of snoring or head-shaking at plot points that you do not like it. It was odd, then, that Napoleon Dynamite left a fairly empty feeling inside. It is funny, but also embarrasing.
The eponymous character is a loser, not the sort of loser who is just non-conformant like in so many US high school films, a genuinely odd loser. His family are stranger, and it can be very uncomfortable to watch them interact.
Just like the film, I’m not sure where to go with this. It’s odd, but not necessarily good or bad.
Alexa, Amazon’s search engine, is apparently encouraging people to create info.txt files. I say apparently because I can’t find the page myself, but I trust the source.
URI namespace pollution is a bad thing!
We can’t do much about it in the case of robots.txt, that standard is too deep-rooted now, but we should be severely discouraging anyone from following that same route.
Why? Spurious requests cause bandwidth to go up. You will already be getting hundreds of requests a day for favicon.ico and robots.txt if you run a site, do you really want more?
This pollution is bad. It’s not extensible or open to pre-discovery. It’s rooted in a view of the web that no longer exists, where the root of a domain represents a website and the only website at that domain. The web doesn’t exist like that any more.
This kind of pollution is damaging and will eventually reduce the scalability of the web, as more protocols suffocate the reasonable URI namespace. There is no need for this. We have enough mechanisms to allow more fluid interactions to discover information that is needed, if present.
So, please, no info.txt files.
Just a quick apology for the brief downtime earlier. Seems someone hacked my host and pissed around with the cache files. All should be back to normal now. If you don’t know what I mean, it doesn’t matter now.