Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
Category: Video
A tear down of how women still get erased from narratives like Toshi here in the new Bob Dylan movie.
https://merrillmarkoe.substack.com/p/a-complete-unknown-the-ballad-of
The lamb ad does a good job showing the madness that is online comments sections. Also it made me want to eat a nice piece of lamb.
Year in Review 2024
It’s been a bit of a grab bag year but overall not as bad as 2023 and a bunch of things seem to be on track.
Health
I got on the neurodiversity bandwagon this year.
First I got myself a self-paid diagnosis for ADHD. This result should not surprise anybody who knows me. I’ve forced myself to be very high functioning throughout my life but it can’t be denied that there were always some underlying issues. I’m on medication from the end of the year and have gone off caffeine.
I also got myself tested for giftedness and got a positive result there as well.
Both of these results were validating if nothing else and put a lot of things that happened in my life in a different perspective.
For anybody who’s not sure whether they should pursue this, my recommendation would be: You will only know how differently you can feel if you do.
I got a mole cut out of my skin. It’s a nice scar to have.
I’m fully vaxxed against FSME and got a booster for COVID in November. That brings me to six jabs in total.
Sports and Injuries
It could have been a great year for sports. After having a great time on our yearly trip to the Alps, I came back to Berlin and badly sprained my ankle after falling off some stairs. I didn’t need any surgery, thankfully, but it did set me back some 8 weeks of physical therapy and having to build up to walking again.
That notwithstanding, I managed to participate in three road cycling group rides this year. MAAP opening up a store here and organising open weekly rides has been really cool. The cycling and the coffee were lit. 🔥
I cycled up the Brocken for my first ever mountain and clocked 4201km in 2024 on Strava.
It’s my goal to weigh 75kgs and I’m still as far away from that as I ever was.
Movies
Letterbox does a good job tracking this and it was a pretty good year for movies. I review all of them over there in detail but I can say the non-Potter kids movies we watched were nice and the Japanese cinema on the whole was excellent. I saw Evil Does Not Exist two times with the second time in the local theatre live scored by its composer Eiko Ishibashi.
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
- Dune: Part Two
- Curious Tobi and the Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers
- Glass Onion
- Frozen
- Tangled
- Raya and the Last Dragon
- Shoplifters
- Luca
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- Yojimbo
- Drive My Car
- Perfect Days
- John Wick: Chapter 4
- Evil Does Not Exist
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline
- Harakiri
- Evil Does Not Exist
- Die Hard
Television
Trakt is doing a great job keeping track of which episodes of which television series I need to watch. It’s the only way I can possibly stay on top of this.
- The Last of Us
- Spy x Family S2
- Death Note
- Frieren
- Tour de France: Unchained S2
- Vigil
- The Peripheral
- Kaiju No 8
- Bluey
- Arcane S2
Looks like I’m turning into a weeb just like everybody else in the culture. I watch anime in part as light entertainment and in part as Japanese immersion. It’s very hard to find anime that has any kind of thematic depth. Frieren comes closest because of how it twists the standard fantasy trope into a story about loss and reminiscence.
Books
It was a fair though not great year for reading.
- Sheaf Theory through Examples, Daniel Rosiak
- Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
- Min kamp 2, Knausgård, Karl Ove
- Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller
- Arkada Yaylılar Çalıyor, Melikşah Altuntaş
- My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
- Kafka Connect: Build and Run Data Pipelines, Mickail Maison
- Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Forugh Farrokzhad
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
- The Kubernetes Book: 2024 Edition, Nigel Poulton
- Kafka Troubleshooting in Production: Stabilizing Kafka Clusters in the Cloud and On-premises, Elad Eldor
- Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is on, Craig Weber
I’m continuing my trend of reading one Knausgård and one Mantel book each year. No reason not to do that again this year.
I picked up some poetry at Perdu during my visit to Amsterdam and have been enjoying reading that.
Every time I see Maria Stuart (which I got put on to by Past Present Future’s fantastic Great Political Fictions series) in the list, I think: “I need to read more Schiller.” but then I keep forgetting to get the files off Gutenberg. Germans sure knew how to write back in the day.
Trips
Besides the trip to the Alps, I went to the Netherlands once in 2024 for Kars’s viva and we took a trip to idyllic Hiddensee after my foot was healed. Much more travel is slated for next year!
Other Culture
I don’t go to exhibitions for lack of time. Besides seeing Evil Does Not Exist in the theatre I managed to burn a ticket to the opera and one to a dance show due to conflicting commitments and forgetfulness. I’m not sure whether I’m going to retry this.
I took the kids to see Ronja at an open air show which was fun.
Miscellaneous
I was a member of the Greens but I cancelled that because even if they’re the least bad political party in Germany, they have been doing a lot of things that I do not wish to support from the inside. I wrote about that here.
I continued to learn and maintain my Japanese level in preparation for my trip in 2025.
I learned a bunch around Kubernetes and Kafka but would have liked to do more programming. I refreshed my algorithms a bit and picked up Factor to play with.
GIFT
Watched “Evil Does Not Exist” as GIFT, the recut and rescored (silent) version performed live by Eiko Ishibashi at HAU1.

This has a shorter runtime than the movie because a lot of fluff is cut out and we are only left with a very summary story. That is a good choice and I can’t say the movie suffers from it very much even though this is version is very much its own thing (i.e. not a narrative movie).
Ishibashi-san is on stage and directs the musical soundtrack while occasionally accompanying the movie on her flute. From the distance it was very hard to tell what she was doing or even what sounds she was producing on top of the soundtrack.
Musically it’s a lot of the soundscapes with the main theme interspersed at various key junctures. We don’t get to learn anything more about the ending.
Kaiju No 8

I was somewhat excited to watch this anime series. It’s only 12 episodes for its first season so it was over pretty quickly.
It was fun and well done but too short to be satisfying or really have an impact. I may need to skip unfinished anime adaptations1 entirely given there’s so much old catalog I could be watching instead. Also now I understand how people get into reading the manga’s while they wait for the adaptations to catch up.
The Kaiju No 8 story is—how could it be any different with such a name—a standard monster beat ’em up. The characters are a bunch of young kids. Things escalate steadily with increasingly powerful and shadowy monsters attacking them. The suits and the group dynamics are somewhat reminiscent of Attack on Titan. As a standard shonen monster beat ’em up anime, it’s fine.
It’s just that there’s nothing in the story that sets it apart, there are no deeper themes that are explored, no interesting motivations, no moral or emotional payoffs worth talking about and no standout characters with staying power. I don’t think I’ll remember much about this show six months from now.
Jujutsu Kaisen
I couldn’t help but compare it to JJK which knocks every one of those dimensions out of the park. I never got around to writing a proper review for its S2 other than this:
The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains. —2023 year in review
S2 was such a phase shift for JJK moving from low stakes happy go-lucky teen show to massively hard bouts of apocalyptic fighting and loss (Nanami…). So many of the characters (“My Brother!”) in JJK have depth and huge fan popularity (Panda-kun, the guy who speaks in Onigiri). Just go on TikTok and see all the Shibuya incident foreshadowing, the Satoru Gojo montages and the number of ships that are doing the rounds.
- I have currently open: Jujutsu Kaisen, Spy x Family and Frieren. [↩]
Coates and Stewart have a warm and powerful conversation around a number of topics but mostly about Israel/Palestine.
For a relatively complete and concise rundown of how insane Germany is at the moment, this conversation with journalist James Jackson is highly recommended. Things are really spiralling into pure madness here and it seems likely that that will be the new normal.
A quick look to what’s awaiting Germany-which has bet heavily on hydrogen cars-several decades in the future. California has a hydrogen highway which looks like it is on its way out.
Long distance bike packing races however brutal they may be look like they fulfil an ideal. They have an activity that’s not that fast but where you can still cover a lot of distance and terrain. The contestants are physically and mentally absurdly fit and still they go through hell. The remoteness of the locations usually creates a special connection to the local people and culture.
It’s something more people should do or at least aspire to.
Herbert believed that progress was an illusion because he was an ideologically motivated reactionary who hated the New Deal, the welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, and any political leader who promised to help the oppressed.
Finally a piece about Dune 2 that doesn’t pull any punches.
https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/dune-2-movies-frank-herbert-books-meaning-differences.html
I would be the last to ever watch anything by Lex Fridman, but TikTok has been feeding me clips from his interview with Bassem Youssef and I can’t help but be impressed. Fridman does a decent job interviewing but of course the conversation is carried by Youssef, who is nothing short of a treasure.
Amos’s style of software engineering historiography accompanied with snide commentary on the state of the art is both educational and entertaining. The weird factoids about Github Actions are the main act here but don’t miss out on the introduction on software delivery or the lead out on capitalism.
(Also I’m in the credits on this one!)
I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.
One of the hosts dropped a casual Hasan Piker reference (in a conversation about pop culture and leftist politics) and… I didn’t even know there were Germans who know who that is.
The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.
I don’t think that really matters that much other than serving to have the person making the comment show their ass for the entire world to see.
I feel that Apple Vision Pro is a deeply interesting and conflicted technology which is also the conclusion that Cortex reaches here. You’ll notice that Grey and Myke actually used the device and they are fairly knowledgeable about apps and ways of working/playing.
I got to take one home for a weekend and I can testify similarly except for missing out on a bunch of features. Because it’s only out in the US, I could not access a paid App Store or get an Apple Arcade subscription. That means I could only get the free vision apps out there which are incredibly lacklustre.
What everybody seems to have done is to take whatever IP they had lying around, wrap it into a VisionOS starter project and throw it onto the App Store. That will probably be the modus operandi for a while going forward. If you look at the absolute dregs on the App Store and now realise that making a good VisionOS app is probably at least 10x as difficult as making a good iOS app, then things are not looking good.
The only really compelling experience was the Encounter Dinosaurs app which is genuinely disconcerting and scary. But because of its very high production values, it’s also only a couple of minutes long.
Most compelling is using the Vision Pro to consume media. Watching movies in Disney+ is a fantastic experience if the device wasn’t so uncomfortable to use. Being able to watch sporting events on a massive screen with sidecar screens and 3D views of the course/track seems like it would also be excellent. It would be even more interesting if we would see a proliferation of 360 cameras to be able to place yourself in a Formula1 car or on a sports pitch. The amount of embodiment it yields, seems like it could go a long way to make remote meetings feel more real.
I agree with this review that this device is a devkit. I’ll wait for the real deal.
SPY x Family – Das Leben der Anderen
I’m enjoying another light season of SPY x FAMILY. It’s a light anime whose premise is that of a spy (Loid) who needs live in deep cover in hostile territory and forms a family of convenience. He finds a woman (Yor) who’s secretly an assassin also in need of cover and an orphan child (Anya) who’s a telepath. It’s great fun.

Season 2 goes on with the story arc and some filler segments thrown in between. Of these, in the third episode (S02E03) they pull off a stunning take on “Das Leben der Anderen”. I was watching it and by the time it was over I couldn’t believe they’d done this.
To connect it to the main plot, the listener who works at the secret police is Yor’s overly jealous brother Yuri, an apt Stasi name if ever there was one. The episode also features some more set pieces which firmly establish Ostania—the city where they live—as Cold War East Berlin.
What adds to the delight is that most people watching the anime will never have an idea about this. It’s like an in-joke for movie people.
Just compare these two stills with each other:


Extremely odd to see a nuanced take on the German political climate by a sociologist on national television. Nils C. Kumkar does a really good job here:
https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video-1298516.html
2023 Year in Review
Looking back on 2023 I can say that we made lemonade out of an overall pretty shit year.
But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.
ACL
I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.
The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.
The chronology as far as I could piece it together:
- Feb 23rd, surgery
- Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
- Feb 27th, first outing
- March 9th, half weight bearing
- March 12th, 90 degree flexion
- April 10th, walking without crutches
- April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
- June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
- June 18th, first time road cycling
I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.
Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.
I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.
Kids
School
The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.
The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.
I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.
Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.
Father
Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.
The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.
That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.
Holidays
I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.
After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.
Studies
I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.
Abstract Algebra
To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.
I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.
Sheaf Theory
Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.
Japanese
I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.
I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.
The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.
Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.
CulturaI
With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.
I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?
There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.
Books
I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.
Video
I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.
When it comes to television things look slightly better:
- The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
- Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
- Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
- The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
- Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
- Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
- Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.
Games
During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.
That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.
Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/waltz-with-the-sims/ (minute 23 and on)
Elements from the book such as the corporation known as “Monad”(!) and robotic public service utilities called “Dr. Easy”are looking back from our current hellscape period a bit too on the nose.
See Dr. Easy act in this short film: https://vimeo.com/68368877
I feel very seen by this.
“This was an act of self-defense.”
Very much looking forward to the movie “How to Blow Up A Pipeline”.
Ik weet nog dat bij elk bezoek aan Hilversum het duidelijk was dat de mensen daar geen idee hebben van wat er buiten Hilversum gebeurt. Grappig om te lezen dat dat nog steeds zo is.
https://www.npo3.nl/brandpuntplus/het-portret-sahil-amar-aissa
A brief English overview of the dizi Alev Alev which truly was very good and focused on empowering women. I still want to make a supercut at some point of all of Ömer and Ozan’s interactions.
Since the first time I saw when I was a kid, I loved Master and Commander. I had no idea that there were 20 books behind it or I would have probably read them.
The online resurgence is also something that has passed me by and it’s pretty funny. Maybe there will be a reboot still?
Despite not being the biggest fan of Shape Up or of 37s, I still really enjoyed watching this video by Ryan Singer about Shaping.
It’s very well done and though I wouldn’t recommend anybody to follow this by the book, you would do well to take inspiration from it.
A thorough treatment in the New Yorker of the way the Indian film industry is being captured by ideology.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/when-the-hindu-right-came-for-bollywood
Gibi: Comedy under Pressure
I just watched and finished season 1 of Gibi which seems to have been enough of a success for them to quickly put out a second season. It’s a Turkish dark comedy show that you can watch online on Exxen. I already wrote it’s a bit like Seinfeld but with a very dark undercurrent.
How dark? Let’s look at the next bit from an episode (S01E10 @ 16:30) where Yılmaz and İlkkan are accused of having caused the death of an old man. They are getting ready to host the deceased’s relatives at a restaurant and participate in the wake.
Did you hear anything from Ethem?
Ethem?
Lately never…
Man, look, they wrote something in fact. Hold on. Somehow we weren’t able to call the guy. (Sigh. Wails.)
Don’t.
His aunt has killed herself. Ethem’s. It was written this morning. I just saw it.
Which aunt?
His older aunt.
I don’t know many other situational comedy shows that do something like this. It has no relation to the story and serves only to set the mood. Interspersing another death that’s just brushed off in an episode that’s already about death demonstrates how little a human life is worth. People die randomly and it’s received with a wail and a shrug.
They will most likely go to the funeral just like they did in a previous episode (S01E04) where Ersoy’s grandmother was eaten by an Erasmus cannibal.
Overarching Theme
Zooming out a bit, the real theme of this first season of Gibi has been pressure, pressure of all kinds: peer pressure, family obligations, social and societal pressure.
- Kokariç: Press ganging into opening a kebab shop and invest in all kinds of goods
- Wadding: Pressure from friends and the environment to conform to current fashion norms
- Nu Model: Pressure from the extended family not to pose nude at the art academy enforced by force of violence
- The Cannibal Coming with Erasmus: Pressure from friends to mourn and be visibly sad
- Wrong Mentor: Pressure by a spiritual guide to follow a very strict regimen
- Dark Force: Collective hysteria around bad things happening
- Second Way: Pressure of belonging
- Whitewash: Pressure by the house painter to go all the way
- Renewal of Break Up: Pressure generated by magician
- Blood Money: Pressure to make amends for somebody unrelated dying
- Bathroom: Pressure to bathe and spend time with a couple of seniors
- Discovery of the Horse: Proto-societal pressure between members of an outcast paleolithic group
Anybody who’s ever been to Turkey knows that the entire country is built on this kind of pressure, also known as genuine interest, shame, concern or emotional blackmail. It’s omnipresent and the only way to escape it is to exit.
HBR asking Seinfeld if McKinsey could have helped them write comedy. Terminal case of brain worms.
As If
I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.
To me this gives off a very Seinfeld-like feeling with nasty people living in a nasty city talking about nasty things with each other. Not the touchy feely stuff that you see in normal sitcoms. You don’t really quite get why these people hang out with each other but they do.
Below is the first episode in its entirety on YouTube where both main characters find themselves pressured to open a kebab shop. The rest of the series on Exxen has passable English subs for anybody who would be interested.
I’m always a sucker for performances where people argue/fight with each other. The more fierce and physical the better. Carnage is an old favourite of mine and the fight scene I witnessed in ‘Langs de Grote Weg’ remains with me as one of the highlights of visiting Frascati.
I’ve watched a couple more episodes and I think I can say that the theme of the show is the weird social conformities that people in Turkey impose on each other. Hell is other people, especially over there.
Exxen
To be able to watch the full series I took a month’s subscription to Exxen. This seems to be one of a bunch of bespoke streaming platforms. Another one I was aware of through social media has been Gain (a self-described ‘next generation content platform’).
The Exxen website is kinda broken and the boss of the site has been quoted saying ‘they are competing with Netflix.’ That may be right, but Netflix is probably not competing with them. Still, with the 80M people living in Turkey, the substantial diaspora as well as people from other countries who consider Turkish culture and media to be aspirational (a lot more of those out there than you would think living in Europe), they probably can get by.
One weird déja-vu has been seeing many of the Turkish social media stars that I used to listen to on Clubhouse (Chaby, Enis, Zeynep) make an appearance in weird and zany television formats exclusive to the platform. Most amazingly, those formats are also pretty professionally executed with high production values.
I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.
Bir Başkadır (Ethos) Character Network Chart

The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.
There are lots of movies where a cast of characters roams a town and occasionally intersects in a couple of dramatic moments. What comes to mind for me most immediately is Amores Perros. Of course a Netflix serial doesn’t hit the cinematic height or dramatic depth of that movie despite having more runtime to play with. What it does manage is to set a mood for the weird tangled up modern Turkey.
The most interesting and dramatic events in Bir Başkadır happen on the road (Mesude’s death under the bridge, the family dance off on the way to the village). Along with some of the commuting sequences and the continuous questions of what bus stops where and how to get somewhere in time, that is an essential part of Istanbul. The city is so vast and spread out that people are always underway, an apt metaphor for character development—interrupted or otherwise—if ever there was one.
A strong hint about the real future of virtual reality and a callback to the MUD era which I had a lot of trouble understanding. Seeing it on Tiktok makes it a lot more tangible in a bunch of ways.
https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/y3z8vm/what-is-reality-shifting-and-why-is-it-taking-over-tiktok
I thought I knew how big a deal TikTok was a year ago already but I feel sorry for not diving in back then because it is much bigger a deal than I had thought.
https://turner.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-tiktok-and-understanding
The Netherlands is going to get Anand-pilled this Sunday.
“The privilege I have — how? No, genuinely, how?”
Well, I say, in terms of wealth, class, education — that kind of privilege, in knowing how to decode the rules in certain spaces. As a caveat, I add that both of us have privilege, and it’s not a criticism; I was simply curious to know what she thought. Things take an awkward turn.
“Well no, because, no… ”There is a very long and tense pause, before she insists that, actually, there is little difference between her experience and that of her co-star John Boyega, who grew up in south London to British Nigerian immigrant parents. “John grew up on a council estate in Peckham and I think me and him are similar enough that… no… Also, I went to a boarding school for performing arts, which was different.”
Daisy Ridley has no idea that she is privileged.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/07/daisy-ridley-jj-abrams-star-wars-a-religion
The men issue of Contrapoints is mostly correct as always.
Ende Gelände is the radical environmentalist movement against climate change and here they are blocking a strip mine.
Protesting is a core German competence. There is deep institutional knowledge of how and why to do this. At the drop of a hat and with a lot of organizing infrastructure, it is possible to get thousands of people to join something like this.
YouTube hatchet job on the CDU
A collective of the largest German YouTubers have just before the European elections launched a campaign against the CDU and it’s a joy to see.
The CDU which is usually fully ignorant when it comes to digital issues has taken this broadside seriously. That by itself was a huge mistake. Most serious institutions would and should brush off something coming from new media.
Whether this will have an effect is hugely unclear. The core CDU audience is disconnected and apathetic but they do get a lot of votes from other segments as well and there they could be slightly vulnerable. In any case, the series of fumbles that the CDU has embarked upon while trying to address this has only served to give the boycott movement wings.
What’s interesting about the YouTubers is that they break with the German institutional consensus which is white, male and old. That group of people has a certain set of opinions and interests which has made sure that Germany has become increasingly backward. The YouTubers are young, (judging by their names and handles) diverse and not all male. And most importantly they have reach and fewer entrenched interests.
Even given that this is an amazing job description, you don’t often see companies describing themselves as a ‘socio-technical system’. This is a great way to show off both your care and your depth of thinking.
“Everyone else, money manager big or small, met with him virtually, over Zoom. When Yuan flew to New York for the IPO, it was just his eighth work trip in five years.”
Zoom is the real deal and the story behind its success is immensely inspiring.
Zoom is an excellent video-conferencing app which turns out to be built on some technical excellence of its own (running WASM encoders and decoders in the browser).
“Really, though, it was the same liberal fantasy, where everyone could laugh together because they were all on the right side of history.”
Despite all the recommendations, I’ve always managed to resist watching Parks and Recreations. I have no time or patience for hopepunk.
The best thing about ContraPoints is that she gives the most charitable possible treatment to in this case Gender Critical people (the other time it was Incels) and then still rips them for all that they are.
Looked up Game of Thrones bastard names and I have to conclude that the surname for a bastard in Germany would have to be Wurst, like Hans Wurst.
Dutch Public Broadcasting Goes Fake News
Geert Wilders, leader of the PVV —the far right Dutch Freedom Party— had his campaign start today for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Spijkenisse, one of his traditional strongholds.
The eight o’clock news of the NOS (the Netherlands’ state broadcaster) opened with this and their reporter Michiel Breedveld on the scene in the video below said it had attracted ‘an unbelievable crowd of people’.
Other reporters who were on the scene today (1, 2) said the number of people Wilders had attracted was somewhere between 80 to 200 and that the ratio of supporters and press was about 1:1.
Salima Bouchtaoui: ‘Spijkenisse this Saturday morning. Lots of press. And lots of police. Few people.’
Haro Kraak: ‘There were at most 150 supporters of the PVV, probably fewer. And at least as much press, probably more.’
There seems to have been so much press that this was what it looked like most of the time.
This incident is oddly reminiscent of Trump’s inauguration where the actual number of people present was much lower than was claimed by the administration.
But the crucial difference is that Trump was the liar. Wilders could spread the lie that his campaign start ‘had the most people ever’ but why should he if the state broadcaster does it for him?
Update: Dutch newspaper the Volkskrant (a newspaper I’ve given some grief before) calls the NOS’s coverage bad and harmful.
Update: De NOS have posted a rectification on their single page hard to link they use for this.
It’s not the opening of the evening news, but it will have to do. Notably they say they have used ‘wrong words’ to describe the event and they still put the number of supporters at several hundred.
Books and movies of 2016
Like every year the books I read and the movies I watched. Recommended ones are in bold.
Books
The book situation was shameful but instead of reading a lot of books, I wrote “Designing Conversational Interfaces”, so I’ll call that even.
- “PACE: A Small Business Owner’s Guide to Complete Cash Flow Clarity” Jesse Mecham
- “Agile Game Development with Scrum” by Keith Clinton
- “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- “The $1 Prototype: A Modern Approach to Mobile UX Design and Rapid Innovation” by Greg Nudelman
- “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion
- “The iPhone App Design Manual: Create Perfect Designs for Effortless Coding and App Store Success”
- “Mobile Web Designer’s Idea Book: The Ultimate Guide to Trends, Themes and Styles in Mobile Web Design”
- “Factotum” by Charles Bukowski
- “Mobile Design Pattern Gallery: UI Patterns for Smartphone Apps”
- “Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov
- “Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd” by Frans Osinga
- “So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love” by Cal Newport
- “Green Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson
- “The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics” by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Movies
This went a lot better with 72 if you count the individual installments of the Decalogue.
- Inside Out
- Princes Mononoke
- Kingsman
- Dekalog IV
- District 9
- The Passion of Joan of Arc
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Persona
- Her
- Dekalog V
- Into the Wild
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens
- Code Inconnu
- The Hateful Eight in 70mm Roadshow at Zoo Palast
- X-Men: Days of Future Past
- Relatos Salvajes
- Dekalog VI
- Cave of Forgotten Dreams
- Sicario
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
- Knock Knock
- Dogville
- Tropa de Elite
- Prelude to Axanar
- Fast & Furious 6
- Addicted to Sheep
- Paths of Glory
- Spirited Away
- Decalogue VII
- Fast Five
- The Martian
- Django Unchained
- Annie Hall
- Dekalog VIII
- Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
- The Assassin
- Amy
- Toy Story 3
- Whiplash
- Dekalog IX
- Lammbock
- A Scanner Darkly
- Pusher
- Like Father Like Son
- Ex Machina
- The Revenant
- Burn After Reading
- Dekalog X
- Pusher II
- RoboCop by José Padilha
- Johnny Mnemonic
- Der siebente Kontinent
- The Wolf of Wall Street
- Spectre
- Easy Rider
- Dredd
- Show Me A Hero
- Pusher III
- Wild Strawberries
- Star Trek Beyond
- Wall Street
- Jodorowsky’s Dune
- The Wind Rises
- Aeon Flux
- Copie Conforme
- Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky
- The Neon Demon
- The Wailing
- İklimler
- World War Z
- Thor
- The Physician
Welt am Draht
I strolled through the massive exhibition ‘Welt am Draht’ at Leipziger Strasse this weekend. This is a selection of video art from the massive Julia Stoschek Collection exhibited in the former Czech Cultural center.
Like everybody says the quality of video art in general is extremely inconsistent. That is true in this exhibit as well. There are a bunch of works where it is not at all obvious why somebody finished it, somebody approved it and somebody paid money for it.
The works that were most interesting in this exhibition consistently were not the video ones but those created with a game engine. That may be my own novelty bias at work, but a fully digital workflow like that allows: 1. more and faster iteration 2. fully dynamic products, the combination of which leads to totally new kinds of things that can be produced.
Some examples:
I forget what this was, but despite the concept being more or less ridiculous it has a compelling internal consistency.
RMB City by Cao Fei is a rich and spectacular playground of randomness.
I can’t really argue with any of Ed Atkins’s work which stands out for the pure skill of the renderings combined with spoken word that is not trite (so rare).
Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks at Perfection is an ongoing collage of elements in a dynamic simulation that looks like an edgy version of the large scale installations Theo Watson makes.
The year in culture
I have a personal log of culture consumed going back to 2003. This year was a particular low on many counts. I have been busy and I don’t ascribe the same value to consuming culture pure for the goal of consuming it anymore. Been there, done that.
I’ve read eleven books (see my Goodreads) which is more than I had expected but nothing compared compared to the bookwormy prowess of people like Hans or Kars.
- The Peripheral by William Gibson
- Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams & Joris Dormans
- Play Matters by Miguel Sicart
- Surface Detail by Ian M. Banks
- The Hydrogen Sonata by Ian M. Banks
- Between the World and Me by Ta-nehisi Coates
- Der Tod des Iwan Iljitsch by Leo Tolstoy
- Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Certain to Win by Chet Richards
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Bold is recommended. It looks like this year I especially enjoyed non-fiction maybe because my fiction was limited to fairly mediocre genre stuff. I’m resolving that reading should not be painful (Russians were a good attempt, but too boring) and that it should also not be trivial (so no more genre fiction crap for me).
In movies I fared slightly better but did not manage to hit the one movie per week baseline with a meagre 23 of which only two in the cinema1. I’m playing catchup now over the christmas break with eleven these views happening in December.
All are in my Letterboxed diary but since sites disappear I’m archiving them here as well. I am immensely pleased with almost all of the movies I have seen except for the two marked as shit.
- Caché
- The Imitation Game
- Oldboy
- Moonrise Kingdom
- The Raid 2: Berandal
- Sonnenallee
- Citizenfour
- Before Midnight
- Straigth outta Compton
- Grizzly Man
- The Fantastic Four 💩
- Frances Ha
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Gravity
- Pacific Rim
- Elysium
- Frozen
- The Princess Bride
- Slow West
- Avengers: Age of Ultron 💩
- Snowpiercer
- Inherent Vice
- Dekalog, trzy
I managed to avoid going to theater plays and went to one opera “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”in the Komische Oper which was delightful.
I guess I can in part explain this shift by my consumption of games. Even without owning a console there is more than enough stuff to play. Here are nineteen games I played for the first time in 2015. Some of them were played only once and some of them were played for dozens of hours2.
- Borderlands 2
- Nuclear Throne
- Panamax
- The Westport Independent
- King of New York
- Bang!
- Cobra Club
- Fallout Shelter
- Her Story
- A Dark Room
- Sage Solitaire
- Let’s make Chaofan
- Panoramical
- Mouse Guard: Swords & Strongholds
- Downwell
- Fightin Words
- Counter Strike: Global Offensive
- Galaxy Trucker
- Sunless Sea
- Codenames
Deutschland ’83
I was tremendously hyped for Deutschland ’83 after hearing about it and watching the first episode. Now that it is finally airing in Germany it turns out that it is not doing that well. Viewership started out low and has been declining over the first four episodes.
People are attributing this to the fact that the average RTL viewer is stupid and only used to watch plain episodic series. That may well be true, but the decline of the series’s ratings closely mirror the decline of my appetite for the show itself. By episode four Deutschland ’83 is a slog and the only thing that got me to the finish line was an empty Sunday and stamina.
The plot devolves and loses whatever internal logic and coherence it had. The characters which are enigmatic to begin with become increasingly hard to empathize with and start doing random things. Worst of all, Deutschland ’83 tries to put a neutral spin on one of the most polarized conflicts of the last century which of course fails.
The one message that does come through is that everybody on the East side was evil and psychopathic and that the people on the West side were basically decent chaps. This is a laughable depiction of the world as it was back then (or as parts of the world still are). The violence and surveillance enacted by the Soviet bloc is hardly different from the stuff the Americans did and still do around the world. The only reason we get to ridicule the East Germans in the series is because they lost.
Mann/Frau
The idea that German television is necessarily terrible has to be reconsidered. I’ve recently started watching Deutschland ’83 which is amazing (more on that later) and yesterday I finished season two of the web series Mann/Frau by BR PULS.
Mann/Frau is a mirror format byte-sized episodic where each installment details the interactions of a man and a woman their relations and lives. It treats most of the themes occupying people around my age living in Berlin but manages to do so drawing more from slapstick than from cliché.
The series is helped enormously by the fact that each episode concludes somewhere under five minutes. Brevity unfortunately is a rare commodity in Germany. The benefits of it here are that it forces them to get to the point quickly, cut rapidly and finish. Episodes of this length also greatly facilitate binge watching1. I had never considered you could make a traditional format series with episodes this short, but it works fine.
Halfway through I did develop an intense distaste for the man (Mirko Lang2) and the man episodes. This isn’t just because the man character is a huge doofus, but also because it turns out that the man and woman episodes are written and directed by a brother and sister respectively. The woman episodes are more punchy, contain less whining and more action.
In this interview with the brother and sister directors the problem becomes painfully obvious. During the entire interview the brother does most of the talking but doesn’t say anything of substance.
I will keep watching when the next season comes out but I might just fast forward through most of the man’s episodes.
These series may have a catalytic effect on the German television landscape. By their very existence they educate the tastes of an audience that might not have known or expected something like this to be possible. And actually creating something good in turn makes it so that other tv makers can’t hide behind the excuse that the whole landscape is mediocre. Who knows what more may be possible.
Straight outta ComptonÂ
I would have preferred Straight Outta Compton to be a documentary cut together from real footage and narrated by the guys themselves. There is a lot of that available which you can see bits of during the credits of this movie. The biopic is well done but the dramatization does not add much and in many parts the movie devolves into melodrama.
What is amazing is how music executives are universally portrayed as the terrible human beings which they are. This is a recurring theme up until the late movie slithering appearance of Jimmy Iovine. If you read up on the stuff that went down with Ruthless you could even argue that the movie downplays it.
The record executives bring the money which in the movie is portrayed as breaking the relationships that make the music. The main characters regularly bail out of collaborations to start from zero because their contracts won’t let them retain ownership of their work. Thinking about that and the outrageous claims still made by record companies made me look into the argument for copyright. It turns out that there’s only a fairly flimsy justification for a system that controls our lives.
I would like to see 12 O’Clock Boys now. Fuck the police.
Nakagin Capsule Tower
Yesterday I saw the documentary on the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Rima Yamazaki as part of the DOKU.ARTS festival here in Berlin. I wasn’t aware of this landmark during my last visit to Tokyo though I must have passed close by while cycling through the city. I’ll make a point to see it when next I visit if it still stands because that is exactly the topic of the documentary.
The tower is a prime example of Metabolist architecture by Kisho Kurokawa. Metabolism is a hard to define but influential strand of architecture that is described in the documentary as an architecture without timelag. It turns out that the tower by now, though charming with its tiny rooms, is outdated and unmaintainable. Most of the owners want to tear it down and have something new built there that makes more economic sense. Among architects and historians there are voices for preserving it as a monument to an important movement in Japanese architecture and other who think it could indeed be torn down.
The main reason why I wanted to see this movie is because next week I’m moving into a building in Berlin designed by a metabolist architect Arata Isozaki. He appears in the movie as a member of the metabolist movement and as an proponent of conservation. I found his reasoning to be somewhat incoherent and overly sentimental. I’m not sure what that means for the building I will be living in but we’ll see. I’ve only been there once, but I absolutely love the building pictured above. Time will tell whether that is justified.
Another architect Toyo Ito who expressed a disillusionment with metabolism was in favor of tearing it down. His reasoning is that buildings just like people are finite and that if they have fulfilled their purpose they should be allowed to disappear to be replaced by something new. This is a way of thinking about architecture that is mostly alien if you live in Europe but that I find to be extremely refreshing. I think our local hangups on history and current efforts to construct buildings in a historicized fashion are morbid but this is the way we do things in Europe.
All along during the documentary I had to think about some William Gibson I read about Tokyo but which I cannot find right now. So instead I’ll post this from My Own Private Tokyo that I came across.
The Japanese, you see, have been repeatedly drop-kicked, ever further down the timeline, by serial national traumata of quite unthinkable weirdness, by 150 years of deep, almost constant, change. The 20th century, for Japan, was like a ride on a rocket sled, with successive bundles of fuel igniting spontaneously, one after another.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
I rewatched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia last week with my parents and it was even better than the first time. I usually think that movies shouldn’t be longer than two hours but here even a second viewing did not bore.
What I learned is that it at one point the convoy moves out of the Kırıkkale area into the administrative part of Turkey that we are from (map).
The idle chit-chat of the people in the cars is still funny but now it was easier to keep track of the interleaving stories. Pared down they rend flesh. Arap’s story about why you need a gun or the piecewise telling of a woman’s suicide are incredible. The point where Clark Gable swallows his words being one extreme example.
My memory had exaggerated the appearance of the angel halfway through the movie. It is still a key moment but not as magically-realistic as I had remembered.
The movie as a whole is about the utter insignificance of human action on all levels. Or as the poet1 said: ‘years again will pass and I will leave no trace // darkness and cold will encompass my weary soul’.
I am immensely looking forward to seeing his next movie Kış Uykusu which is playing in cinemas right now. And I am still eagerly awaiting Nuri Bilge Ceylan to make a movie adaptation of one of Pamuk’s big books (The Black Book or Snow).
- I am told that the poet is Mikhail Lermontov but I haven’t been able to find an English version of the poem. [↩]
Give Da Vinci’s Demons a shot
I’m really into the series Da Vinci’s Demons right now (thanks to Kevin Slavin) which is a light hearted affair for the off season when there’s no Game of Thrones, True Detective or Sherlock.
The trailer for the first season is kinda messed up, try the one for season two otherwise.
I had been clamoring for Game of Thrones inspired historical fiction for a while now. There are lots of dark nooks of history which with a decent treatment could excite large audiences. So many topics to choose from but how about an epic series on Khublai Khan or about Charlemagne?
With Da Vinci’s Demons this is becoming reality at least for Leonardo da Vinci’s life in Florence. This Italian city and the papal intrigue of its time proves to be a great backdrop for an occult story set around this artist/engineer/inventor. The drawn overlays are a bit reminiscent of Sherlock and the premise of Da Vinci creating outrageous contraptions in no time at all is a lot like MacGyver1. Its anachronistic depiction and juiciness are like Game of Thrones though people in da Vinci’s world seem even more cruel. In its depiction of a young incarnation of a well-known figure it even reminds me of Young Indiana Jones. Maybe there’s even a bit of Dan Brown in there but I wouldn’t know because I don’t touch that crap.
As a series it may be too trivial to function as a social status signifier2, but even its pulpiness has found its bearings after the first couple of episodes. The initially more evil characters are rounding out nicely with depth and conflicting interests of their own.
I was happily surprised to see that it has been renewed. After eight episodes in the first season there are at least two more seasons awaiting. Just by watching it I want to read more about Leonardo Da Vinci’s life and go to Florence. History education has never been as fun and if this isn’t the education, it’s a great gateway drug.
(All art from the show’s brilliant accompanying tumblr.)
- I must have seen every episode of MacGyver a couple of times. [↩]
- Which is I believe an important function of the diversion of cultural attention to series and podcasts currently among a certain group people. I opt out by NOT watching House of Cards or Mad Men but instead watching Generation Kill and Deadwood. [↩]
Only God Forgives
After a rather hectic week and day last Friday I went to see Only God Forgives in Central cinema1. The movie is rather excellent if you like extreme violence or Ryan Gosling or both.
The stylized violence and disjunct story telling reminded me remotely of This Is How You Will Disappear. Probably not because any real visual similarity but because I am anxious for somebody in theater to produce something that good and ballsy again. And as this Guardian critic says, the Asian setting and lighting are reminiscent of Noé’s Enter the Void which I would recommend if you can stomach it.
But the violence and the characters in essence are Shakespearian and ‘Only God Forgives’ is how you actually should do a modern day Shakespeare adaptation. The movie is a post-modern mix of Macbeth and King Lear without a hint of slavish following. I lost count of how many bloodless—in all meanings of the word— Shakespeares I have seen on the stage. With this movie Winding Refn has also just schooled all theatre directors.
- Which honestly is a bit of a dump, but it was the best option given the circumstances. [↩]
Not their mothers and fathers
A new large scale German drama series has been making the rounds on Twitter this week called ‘Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter’ and it is interesting though flawed. I haven’t seen a production with these production values on German television before and I think we should see more of it1.
The series is somewhat schmaltzy (see the screen capture above of bullet casings landing in slow motion on a group portrait) but that is to be expected from a mainstream production.
What I found problematic is the sharp division drawn between the group of five main characters and the other actors in wartime Germany. The main characters are idealized figures who are supposed to symbolize their generation and its moral choices during the war. These choices mostly center on the small evils of oversight, looking away, following orders and opportunism. The real capital letter evils are perpetrated by others, mostly those of another generation, whose appearance and motivations are far more sinister.
I know there are several opinions about this (but I am not alone if I read all the critiques in German papers), but this portrayal to me seems to exceptionalize evil which is probably not the best idea. A more naturalistic and flat treatment of the systems of the war would have been immensely more difficult but also immensely better.
Update: Now that I’ve seen the last episode I would like to discourage anybody from watching this series. Any suspense and pace that was in the first episode was gone by the end. Moreover the writing and drama was absurdly poor by then. I know that properly ending stories is hard, but how a modern dramaturg and script writer signed off on this clusterfuck is beyond me. If this was the last hope for German public broadcasting to be relevant then that hope is in vain and the entire institution should be burnt down as quickly as possible.
- Something properly historical could be interesting. Martin suggested a series on the life of Charlemagne. [↩]
Grindin’ at the office
Games on Ignite Berlin #3
Last week I presented at the Berlin Ignite. I had been present at the last one and greatly enjoyed, so I looked what I could add to the mix.
I threw most of the thinking in the studios for the past 1-2 years on the floor with post-its and distilled the pertinent threads from that. As it happens ‘New Games for New Cities’ was the title of a presentation Kars gave some time ago to which I had contributed but had forgotten about.
Leafing through the older presentations, it is good to see that the thinking has evolved over the years. The old points still hold, but time and experience has refined our opinions and forced us to refocus here and there.
Putting the presentation together was a fair amount of work (and not something I was particularly looking forward to the week before a holiday1) but all of the positive responses were more than worth it. I can highly recommend Ignite2 for the mix of topics it touches on, the fun and light delivery and the varied and open crowd it attracts.
Conquest of the Useless
Yesterday we went to see Werner Herzog read from his own work in ‘Erroberung des Nutzlosen’ at the Volksbühne. While an impressive display of authorship my enjoyment of the performance was hampered by me having no knowledge of his movies and a recent aversion towards the theater.
With some heavy German, Herzog reads his diary notes from the production of Fitzcarraldo (trailer below), a massive undertaking to make a movie of a massive undertaking. The whole protracted shooting in the jungle sounds a lot like how Apocalypse Now was made.
The passages Herzog reads are gripping and contain lots of absurdities and events that happen when you are shooting a motion picture in the jungle (also rather reminiscent of También la Lluvia) as well as reflections on the nature of being and emotional turmoil.
The evening is turned into theater by adding evocative background projections of jungle scenes (nice!) and music by a jazz improvisation duo, a Sardinian choir of men and a Senegalese singer. They interject protracted bits of singing in between Herzog’s reading turning the whole thing into something like a Werner Herzog mixtape.
The music is where I lost it. Firstly: I keep forgetting how much I loathe jazz improvisation until its too late and I’m already in the middle of one. It may be fun to do, but I don’t see improvisations go anywhere dramatically. Added to that the music doesn’t fit well with Herzog’s reading. This created a lot of dissonance for me that forced me to interpret all of the musical intermezzi as kitsch. Funnily after Herzog was done reading —during the encore— the music was far more enjoyable.
This is probably a must-see (another probably sold out show tonight) if you’re into Herzog and/or improvisational jazz and/or world music. I couldn’t check those boxes but still enjoyed seeing the man read.
PIVOT over Berlin
I biked over tonight to see the installation PIVOT by Jacob Kirkegaard at the leap in Berlin1 before it finishes tomorrow.
You can read what the author wrote and see his or my pictures. It is a very nicely done curved projection from the Fernsehturm with recorded sound from the pivot mechanics of that same tower. Impressive and imposing.
What struck me most was that the whole thing seems to move so very slowly, deceptively so. When you allow yourself to get engrossed with one part of the video, one part of Berlin before you know it you have lost track of where you were and the entire thing has moved on. So much of Berlin to see in there.
Tomorrow it’s off to the opening of the Casey Reas show at DAM.
- In the Berlin Carré, which is quite a bit different from the Amsterdam Carré. That I can assure you. [↩]
Blind Sequence Trust
De serie video’s Blind Sequence Trust van kunstenaar Joan Leandre speelt in DAM nog tot en met 5 mei.
Leandre is een kunstenaar die al decennia lang bezig is met het gebruiken van computer 3D engines van allerlei vormen om verhalen te vertellen en emoties op te roepen. Het werk zoals dat in DAM te zien is, is lastig te plaatsen, maar zowel de beelden als de muziek zijn bijzonder goed uitgevoerd waardoor1 dingen die niets met elkaar te maken lijken te hebben, toch weten te boeien.
De geavanceerde 3D engines die nu beschikbaar zijn maken het ogenschijnlijk makkelijk om complete werelden te schetsen en te manipuleren. Werelden die zich alleen niet houden aan de regels van de werkelijkheid maar er zelf eentje creëeren waarin alles kan. Leandre put uit science-fiction en de natuur voor zijn werk en maakt daar uitgebreide bewegende collages van.
Het hergebruiken van deze 3D engines zorgt voor een verwarrend resultaat. De artefacten van 3D engines zijn terug te zien net zoals de billboards waarmee bomen worden gerendered en de particle systems die normaal gesproken zorgen voor explosies, rook en vuur. Buiten de game-logica geplaatst krijgen deze effecten een totaal andere lading.
De artiest zelf geeft in dit Rhizome-interview allerhande verklaringen voor zijn werk maar zoals zo vaak bij dit soort dingen, klinkt het naar wartaal. Beter is het om zelf naar het werk te kijken en je te laten meevoeren.
- Het lijkt een beetje op Landscapes without Memory van Joan Fontcuberta dat in FOAM te zien was, maar dan beter. [↩]
Cultural Consumption 2011
I dived into my log to make the yearly tally of what I did and saw. All in all 2011 has proven to be a good year.
It was a bit of a slow movie year though. I only saw 56, the best of which were: “Drive”, “Melancholia”, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”, “Blue Valentine”, “Norwegian Wood”, “True Grit”, “Almanya”, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Kosmos”.
I went to 32 plays in 2011. The best ones:
- “Die Macht der Finsternis” in die Schaubühne
- “Het meisje dat teveel van lucifers hield” by NTGent in Frascati WG
- “Songs at the End of the World” by Wunderbaum in SSBA
- “De Russen!” by Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Holland Festival
- “This is how you will disappear” by Gisèle Vienne in Stadsschouwburg Utrecht (back at the Kaai in February!)
- “Langs de grote weg” by de Vere in Frascati
I read 21 books in 2011. The most notable of those were:
- “The Life and Death of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs
- “The City & The City” by China Miville
- “De kaart en het gebied” by Michel Houellebecq
- “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart
- “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell
- “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
- “Unit Operations” by Ian Bogost
I started tracking the games I played around halfway through the year, so this is not an exhaustive list, but five games I really enjoyed last year were: “Where is my Heart?”, “Nidhogg”, “Space Alert”, “The Binding of Isaac” and “The Resistance”.
Democracy on a fortress
The weekend before last we were on a fortress (part of the defense works of Amsterdam) to spend a day on hacking civic data for Apps for Noord-Holland.
During that day I was interviewed by Netwerk Democratie about open data and digital democracy. The resulting video is here below:
Film: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
De film “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” begint met wijdse Anatolische vergezichten over de zo herkenbare landschappen van mijn jeugd waar drie auto’s zich over dorpsweggetjes van bron naar akker begeven.
De kwestie waar het om draait is het vinden van een lijk. De vermeende moordenaar zit in een van de auto’s omringd door een dokter, twee agenten en een chauffeur. De dikkige kale mannen die de auto vullen en hun banale verhalen over yoghurt en andere alledaagsheden zouden het een knusse rit maken als het een ander doel betrof.
De dialogen tijdens de zoektocht en de koddige situaties hier en daar doen denken aan de karakteristieke scène’s die Tarantino en de Coen broers hebben neergezet maar met meer dan een vleugje mystiek. Nuri Bilge Ceylan zet een typisch Turks platteland neer met zinsnedes die er niet om liegen (en matig vertaald zijn). De wijdse shots over het landschap en het licht ‘s nachts zijn indrukwekkend waar de scène’s overdag een beetje flets bij afsteken.
De lijkvinding schiet niet op net zoals de films van Ceylan. Tergende traagheid lijkt zijn handelsmerk, al is dat in deze film nog draaglijk. In langzame shots van dromen, rollende appels of simpelweg close-ups van de hoofdrolspelers worden dingen gevat die niet in woorden uit te drukken zijn.
De missie zelf lijkt hopeloos en verzandt in een dorpsklucht. Ondertussen doodt men de tijd met verhalen, het uiten van klein en groot zeer naar elkaar, het stelen van groente en fruit en het mijmeren over de wendingen die het leven genomen heeft.
Er is een apocrief verhaal dat de naam Anadolu (Anatolië in het Turks) een samenstelling zou zijn van ‘Ana dolu! Dolu Ana!’, wat zoveel betekent als: ‘Moeder vol! Het is vol moedertje!’ Een groep soldaten was naar verluid door dat deel van Turkije aan het trekken toen ze verdwaald en geplaagd door dorst ten einde raad waren. Ze kwamen op een gegeven moment een vrouw tegen die ze hielp en hun flessen zo ver vulde met water (of ayran) dat ze moesten zeggen: ‘Het is al vol moeder.’
Eenzelfde iets gebeurt in deze film waar de dochter van de burgemeester als een engel in de duisternis licht, thee en cola brengt en alle mannen als betoverd achterlaat.
Nadat het lijk gevonden is, verandert de film en verplaatst de focus zich naar de hoofdpersoon. De film krijgt dan iets tergends, wat toepasselijk is gezien de dodelijke vermoeidheid na een nacht doorwerken. Het echte leven gaat door na de nachtmerrie. Alles wordt afgehandeld, er is ruimte voor compassie maar feitelijk verandert er niks.
Gezien zaterdag 20 augustus in Rialto op het World Cinema Amsterdam festival. In de reguliere Cineville te bekijken in het najaar van 2011.
Throwing my chips in with the reality based crowd
Seeing this presentation in Amsterdam as the culmination of Mobile Monday, was something great. The far reaching vision and reality based optimism Kevin Slavin lays down (his comments) are something we should aspire to. It is worth watching and watching again.
Some choice quotes, though we should just hope that he finishes that essay:
Reality is augmented not when it looks different but when it feels different.
Maybe the aspiration to 3D optical AR starts to feel a little bit like pornography. Like a thin veneer of the actual experience that is flattened for the eye, that’s rendered for the eye which is the one sense most easily fooled to begin with.
Nobody knew better than me and the other people in that room that this was just computer code but it felt like a spirit had moved through the room and knocked all these phones off the table.
For pilots there is no reality except the one right in front of them.
Singular focus in which the eye is looking at rather than around. It diminishes reality. It closes it down. Because as it turns out for the driver as for most everybody here, reality is understood to be the whole world around us, not just that thing in front of us.
They’re inventing new ways to see, rather than new things to look at. And rather than inventing new places to go, they are inventing kind of new ways to travel. Because the whole thing is there’s no shortage of stuff in the world and things to see and enjoy. Reality is plenty, thanks.
Coffee Magic
I witnessed a discussion yesterday that stated that for creative industries to catch root in a certain area there is the need for trendy coffee shops. While that is a necessary condition indeed, it is not sufficient. The coffee produced in said shops also needs to be of excellent quality or at least miles better than whatever most stores in the Netherlands are pouring. The lovely folks over at BERG also have a post about it.
In Utrecht studio proceedings are supported by the Village which may quite well pour the best coffee in the Netherlands. This is how they do it:
Ontsnappen van het dode speleiland
Mijn stukje over de trailer van Dead Island die we vorige week zagen staat online bij Bashers (mijn debuut). Zie verder ook de comments.
Something fishy about this profile
I saw the movie Catfish which seems to have garnered a significant amount of attention and is in many ways the *real* Facebook movie because it actually takes place on facebook and addresses real issues we have all dealt with instead of the dealings of ultra-rich privileged kids at elite-universities.
The setting is an internet relationship as we have seen described many times before and probably have experienced ourselves. Who hasn’t met up with somebody they met on the internet? The premise is given a twist because it adds in elements of a standard internet hoax.
Some thoughts about the movie.
Because it features the web and real elements from that web (instead of a fictionalized computer network as seen in many other movies), it gains a level of authenticity and also is a great example of what James Bridle coined ‘network realism’. This movie could not be made without the (social) network it portrays and a large part of the story take place on it.
Jon Taplin reported that according to Fincher & Sorkin The Social Network is a movie about class in modern day America. The class differences in that movie are relatively minute compared to those in Catfish. On the one hand there’s the young, handsome, rich, metropolitan Nev who is employed in a creative profession and who can pretty much do whatever he wants. On the other hand there’s a poor, rural family who are ill and relatively older and not very attractive.
That part of America is mostly unseen but very real. A vast rural expanse filled with the shattered dreams of the American working class (see also Bubble and this piece on food and class in America).
Another theme is how people with enough time and/or knowledge can turn around Facebook’s mechanisms to regain a feeling of privacy. Kids deactivate their profiles when they are not using the site, others falsify their names so as not to be findable and in the movie somebody constructs an elaborate false identity and backstory for herself.
Privacy is not so much the right to hold secrets about your most private things, it is much more an issue of control and being able to both control and shape the information about yourself that you disseminate. Real and false signals that we send out and the flexibility with which we navigate the waters of sociality are what makes us human, not the strictly defined checkboxes of Facebook’s arcane privacy system.
It is not Assange who has ever said he wants to make everything public, Zuckerberg however has (that would not be a good idea says Dalrymple).
Angela employs the means given to her to live the life she wants to even though it is not real. The way that it falls apart and resolves into a better mutual understanding between her and Nev is a valid outcome, but in a different world, they perhaps would not have needed to find out the truth about each other at all and that would have been an equally valid outcome.
In any case in the end I am more touched by the plight of Angela who’s life as portrayed is a harrowing ordeal of bleakness, whereas for Nev besides some juvenile embarrassment the consequences do not seem at all as serious and maybe even net positive.
Whether the movie is a real documentary or parts of it are fictionalized or whether the whole movie itself is an elaborate hoax (though then exceptionally well meta-written and acted) in the end does not really matter to me. I would like to believe that the events transpiring in the movie and what they say about us and about facebook are true —at least to some extent.
Wip ‘n’ Kip Overwinning
Het blijft toch een mooi gezicht om terug te kijken de Wip ‘n’ Kip op Stekkerfest:
Een grijs-bruin vaderland
Ik schreef een tijdje geleden al bij mijn foto over de Linkse Hobby:
Zonder linkse hobby’s krijgen we een grijs-bruin land van spruitjeslucht en vlagparades. (Flickr)
En dat is bewaarheid.
Maar gelukkig hebben we onze Dichter des Vaderlands, scherpzinnig en met dichterlijke vrijheid als wapen. Na het manifest van Terschelling, is het fijn dat Nasr er op en er overheen gaat met het gedicht ‘Mijn nieuwe vaderland’:
Hele tekst bij P&W en op de site van de Dichter des Vaderlands.
Wordt het niet tijd voor een rhetorische wapenschouw van iedereen die zich verstandig progressief noemt en openlijke vijandigheid in het publieke debat? Dit gaat allemaal nog een stuk lelijker en naarder worden voordat het beter wordt, dus laten we in het geweer komen.
In ander nieuws: Het was nog nooit zo fijn om alternatieven te hebben: “Turkije vindt dat Rutte discrimineert”.
Spiegel van Holland
Gisteren een potje Stereoscoop gespeeld op de Neude in Utrecht en daar een gigantische buit binnengehaald. Deze badges staan nu op mijn profiel te prijken:
Het is echt een heel leuk spelletje wat je pas echt merkt als je hem zelf speelt. Dus hij staat nog een paar dagen op de Neude dus ga er even heen als je in de buurt bent.
Nu mét NRC Next artikel:
GVB clusterfuck
Terwijl we aan de andere kant een strijd voeren voor vrij beschikbare openbaar vervoersinformatie is het openbaar vervoer zelf in een ‘wereldstad’ als Amsterdam nog een zooitje.
Op dit moment is de hele metrolijn van Amstel naar Centraal dicht vanwege onderhoud aan de roltrappen (!). Dat is op zich al WTF. Nog erger is dat er ruzie is tussen een aannemer en de gemeente en dat daardoor de metro volgende zomer weer dicht moet1.
Op de Wibautstraat rijden nu elke vijf minuten vier bussen heen en weer (dat is dus waarom iets als een NZ-lijn nodig is). De stad kan zo’n aannemer op zo’n punt dan niet breken, gek genoeg.
Dus missen de belangrijkste metro-verbinding in de stad maar het GVB maakt nog steeds bakken vol met winst (€150’000 per maand) mede door een geïntroduceerde gebruikersfout in de OV-chipkaart:
Een doorslaand succes die ov-chipkaart alleen niet voor de reiziger. Dat de OV-chipkaart slecht ontworpen is wisten we al. Er moet een chipkaart zijn, maar als we vastzitten aan hetzelfde slechte ontwerp zonder enige mogelijkheid tot verbetering dan liever niet.
- If you fuck us, we will fuck you fifty times over lijkt mij het devies. [↩]
Turks-Syrische herontdekking
De grens tussen Turkije en Syrië is tegenwoordig compleet open en Turkije ‘groeit uit zijn voegen’1:
Aleppo is maar een half uurtje rijden over de grens en een totaal andere wereld. Samen met de bouw en handel die toenemen zal nu het toerisme waarschijnlijk ook groeien. Voorbij is het ongerepte Syrië waar ik drie jaar geleden met wat kunst en vliegwerk in kon reizen.
Goed wel, maar toch een beetje jammer.
- Wat nou Eurozone… [↩]
An augment for my reality
I recently got glasses to make my vision even better than it already is. Nothing wrong with my eyes, but once you’ve seen the difference in sharpness, you do not want to go back. For me it’s an augment:
Talking about augmented reality, this piece of design fiction by the guys at Layar is very convincing to show that AR definitely is going to be a big deal. Here’s to all the naysayers:
Online Tuesday – Data is the new Quicksilver
Afgelopen dinsdag gaf ik een presentatie op Online Tuesday over de toekomst van het internet. Ik had me niet geheel beseft dat de brief van de presentaties subtiel verlegd was naar doe een pitch over de toekomst van je bedrijf, maar des te beter eigenlijk.
Ik gaf een praatje dat zijdelings verwant is aan Monster Swell, namelijk de tsunami van Big Data (zie ook een vorige presentatie) die over ons heen gaat spoelen.
Het format van vijf minuten zonder visuele ondersteuning is de puurste presentatie-vorm —en verdraagt daarom geen bullshit of slechte voorbereiding— maar een verhaal over data-visualisatie zonder visuals… dat is toch lastig.
Volgens mij ging het best aardig (ook naar aanleiding van de reacties) en er is een video-registratie van, zie hieronder vanaf tijdsindex 19:08:
Online Tuesday Juni -Spreker 6-10 from Videofix on Vimeo.
Online Tuesday Juni -Spreker 6-10
Een paar takeaways:
Data is het nieuwe kwikzilver.
Alles wordt in de komende vijf jaar volgesensord.
De val uitgelegd
Hier een hele leuke video over de val van het kabinet (via):
De val van het kabinet from twelve o'clock | motion media on Vimeo.
Dit is echt heel leuk. Ik was me er niet van bewust dat we in Nederland dit niveau van grafisch uitleggend werk konden maken (al zijn ze er wel) en ik wist niet dat Uruzgan ons €1 miljard kost.
Één probleem: de video is grafisch sterk, maar slaagt helaas niet in zijn doel. Als je een overzicht wilt zien van de gebeurtenissen die geleid hebben tot de val van het kabinet dan is het ok, maar het wordt niet helemaal duidelijk waarom het kabinet gevallen is. De video gaat te snel en de verschillende gebeurtenissen en data worden een brei van opeenvolging. Het overzicht en de context missen.
Dit frame is één van de betere in de video omdat je tegelijkertijd heden, verleden en toekomst ziet:
Het was een stuk beter geweest om altijd iets van context te laten zien of herhaaldelijk een overzicht te geven en dan weer in te zoomen, van macroscoop naar microscoop en weer terug.
Vrijheid herdenken
Een nieuw gedicht van onze Dichter des Vaderlands “Een mooie dag om stilte te verscheuren”:
Ik stond trouwens dinsdagavond ook op de Dam.
Table Viewer for Music Hackday
This entire weekend was taken up by Amsterdam Music Hackday for which Alex, Dirk and I had planned to build a prototype version of a surface table projector for music discovery.
The functionality we envision helps ad-hoc groups of people who find themselves in the same location/venue/party to compare their music tastes and see where the overlaps and where the holes are. The table would be a turn-taking jukebox with tangible interactions and nice visuals for all users and spectators.
Easier said than done, of course. We spent a great part of the week and most of the weekend hacking, building, eating, drinking coffee, staying up to the wee hours, literally stabbing ourselves with scalpels, cursing a great deal and drinking whisky to get the thing together, when finally on Sunday in the last hour before the presentation we managed to integrate everything to the level that we could shoot a demo video.
Pictures of the proces and demo videos below:
What we built was just an initial step on the way to the jukebox I described above, but it seemed to look promising enough to net us the first prize from last.fm at Music Hackday for which we were very happy.
We like to thank last.fm, the organizers and the participants of Music Hackday. It was a great event and for us it was a great occasion to finally get this project started.
We will develop the table further and build out the functionality we had envisioned to make it a real locus for social music discovery. It should be hanging in one of our studios soon, so get in touch and visit if you want to try it out.
Passacaglia
Dit gedicht van Ramsey Nasr had ik gemist. Hier het Hemelse Leven.
Van een bijzondere schoonheid weer.
A Film in one Week
Friends of motion studio Eelke Dekker and design agency Booreiland have gone into seclusion for a week in the East of the Netherlands to concept, shoot and produce a movie within that week, project .mov. No ulterior motives, just making a movie for the love of making a movie (and having made that movie).
Some years ago without a budget and far less experience they’d already produced the classic Frag. It took some time however to find the right moment and opportunity to make another one. Now that moment is there with more time, better gear, actually better everything and a recipe for awesome.
Now, any movie needs an audience, but the fun part of this project is that you can track the making of as it goes along. It is all being documented in glorious HD, tweets and photographs. You can checkout the progress of the movie on the tumbleblog for dotmov or follow the dotmov account on Twitter. As this video testifies, even if you can’t be there, it is really fun and insightful to follow the creative process from afar:
Briefing Scenario from dotmov on Vimeo.
Pitching Scenario aan Scriptwriters
More to follow and I can’t wait to see the end result (or more in progress movies for that matter).
Foursquare nu in beeld
Na het radio-item van vorige week staat nu het filmpje dat Lody en Annejan vanochtend van me schoten bij Dwaze Zaken nu online op NOS Headlines.
Ik weet nog niet helemaal wat ik ervan moet denken dat ik hiervoor gevraagd wordt, maar het is wel erg leuk om te doen.
D66 Televisie
Afgelopen weekend was ik ook bij de nieuwjaarsborrel van D66 Amsterdam in het kader van de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen die er aankomen. Ik heb toen samen met wat anderen wat video’s gemaakt van de verschillende lijsttrekkers, gemeenteraadsleden en andere belangrijke D66’ers (ook van Alexander Pechtold en Boris van der Ham) in de komende periode voor het D66 Amsterdam videokanaal.
Simpele middelen, een Kodak Zi8 met externe microfoon en one-takes zonder nabewerking. Videotechnisch is het dan ook niet geweldig, maar inhoudelijk is het resultaat (gezien de middelen) meer dan aardig.
Onrealistische en onwenselijke maatregelen
In een vergelijkbaar filmpje zoals je ze ook voor je film ziet wanneer je legaal DVDs koopt/huurt, komt er weer een stukje propaganda van de entertainment-industrie:
Er valt veel te zeggen in deze discussie maar vast staat dat het letterlijk onmogelijk is om het delen van bestanden te voorkomen zonder een (digitale) politieagent bij elke computer neer te zetten1. En dan nog is het onbegonnen werk.
Waar het mij om ging: Op een gegeven moment zegt iemand in het filmpje dat het zonde is dat er een generatie leert dat je niet hoeft te betalen voor content. Dat lijkt me wel meevallen. Ten eerste zijn mensen best bereid te betalen voor gemakkelijke toegang tot online media wanneer dat mogelijk is (die opties zijn nu extreem beperkt) en is downloaden vooral de toevlucht van mensen met meer tijd dan geld (en die gingen toch al niet betalen). Jongeren leren nu al dat content gratis kan zijn van televisie en de gratis kranten die overal verkrijgbaar zijn.
Het lijkt me veel erger nog als er in de toekomst een generatie ontstaat die het normaal vindt dat alles wat zij doen online en offline (wat bijna niet meer bestaat), vast wordt gelegd. Dat ze dat accepteren en dat ze zichzelf censureren om binnen dat keurslijf niet al teveel op te vallen.
We weten dat dit soort gegevens te lang worden bewaard en dat ze uiteindelijk lekken, misbruikt worden of als basis dienen voor foutieve vervolgingen. Willen we dat toekomstige generaties aandoen?
- Zie bijvoorbeeld ook Martijn van Dam vorige week over de onhaalbaarheid van het download verbod. [↩]
Where’s our rumpus?
Taplin regularly writes that the entertainment business is in crisis because people outside of the USA are not willing to pay for their intellectual property.
Now here’s a case of a new movie “Where The Wild Things Are” which gets extremely favorable reviews both by him and by the Times but which is set to release January 14th, 2010 in the Netherlands (almost three months after its premiere)1.
I’m especially thrilled with the fact that the creators of this movie are uncompromising to mediocrity and dare to be great. From the Times:
[…] a film that often dazzles during its quietest moments, as when Max sets sail, and you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as we do inside our heads. But when the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that the boat is simply a speck amid an overwhelming vastness. This is the human condition, in two eloquent images.
I’m quite sure I want to experience this movie in all its splendour in a cinematic environment but I don’t know if I can resist the inevitable torrents coming our way much much earlier than halfway into January.
The studios are complaining about declining revenues but it looks like it’s their own fault.
- Even Turkey gets it sooner (I’m not so sure that ‘even’ applies anymore to Turkey, though.) [↩]
Innocence
Interesting on the part of the sub-team adding extra information to clarify references, cultural differences and even tone of voice. There were enough of these notes to be distracting, which makes it a mixed blessing. I think a movie is experienced better without.
And here another interesting image in a movie littered with them:
een stittie die stilstaat
Ramsey Nasr bewijst met zijn nieuwste gedicht ‘mi have een droom’ dat hij overduidelijk de beste Dichter des Vaderlands is die we ons maar hadden kunnen wensen:
Volledige tekst en meer uitleg op nrcnext en op nrc.tv wat achtergrond met ook zijn andere Koninginnedag-gedicht ‘In het land der koningen’.
De combinatie straattaal1 en lyriek wordt heel soms wat dissonant maar toch biggie props hoe hij het zich eigen heeft gemaakt. Ik ben wel een beetje benieuwd hoe hij dat gedaan heeft. In het andere filmpje kun je zien dat hij in Antwerpen woont en bijna alleen maar klassieke muziek heeft.
Goed om te zien dat hij net zo goed als in Antwerpen en beter nog voor ons dicht. Ik vraag me af hoeveel PVV’ers de spiegel in dit gedicht voor zich zullen zien.
- Ik kan het volgen maar ik hou me aanbevolen voor een goede gids straattaal. [↩]
Tour de France live online, of toch niet?
Tof van de NOS dat ze de Tour de Frace live uitzenden zowel online als op de iPhone. Zo zie je maar dat als ze willen, ze het wel kunnen. De enige vraag die nog overblijft is waarom niet het complete programmaanbod van de Nederlandse publieke omroep live en on-demand device-onafhankelijk te kijken is.
Wat nog een onplesant detail is bij de live uitzending van de Tour de France is dat deze pas een uur of wat na de start van de etappe begint. Op de zender kan ik snappen dat er ruimte moet zijn, maar de online stream rijdt toch niemand in de wielen?
Mijn vraag:
—–Oorspronkelijk bericht—–
Van: Alper Çugun [mailto:xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Namens Alper Çugun
Verzonden: donderdag 16 juli 2009 14:37
Aan: NOS Publieksvoorlichting
Onderwerp: live tourHoi,
Waarom is de live tour de france online niet in zijn geheel te kijken en vallen we er altijd na een half uur/uur in?
Groet,
Het non-antwoord van de NOS:
Geachte
Dank u voor uw e-mail. Het heeft er o.a. mee te maken met de toegemeten zendtijd van de zendercoördinator.
Met vriendelijke groet
N. K. (Volledige naam geredigeerd. -AÇ)
NOS Publieksvoorlichting
Mijn verbijsterde antwoord:
Maar dit is toch online? Wat heeft dat met zendtijd te maken?
Met vriendelijke groet,
Alper Çugun
Ik heb tot op heden hierop geen antwoord gekregen.
Daarbij moet ik toevoegen dat het een crime is om een bestemming te vinden waar je een vraag als deze heen kunt sturen. De Tour de France 2009 site van de NOS is aardig, maar biedt geen enkele mogelijkheid tot zinnige interactie. De commentatoren van de NOS hebben het geregeld over kijkersvragen maar ik heb geen idee waar je die kunt stellen. Dezelfde vraag als hierboven die ik op een van de tour-weblogs heb gesteld, bij gebrek aan een betere plek, is zonder wederhoor verwijderd.
Het is allemaal niet heel erg ofzo, maar suf is het wel.
Augmented reality in HTML5
One of the last bastions of Flash and native apps is the processing of video from outside sources such as webcams. It does not at all seem difficult to add this functionality to HTML5.
I don’t have much of any experience in designing these kind of specs (though I did request <audio> and <video> elements some two and a half years ago), but here are some design notes which seem to make some sense:
Get outside video
Create a specific src parameter for video, for instance src=”webcam” to get image data from a current installed webcam1. The user-agent can mediate the presence of cameras and the routing of sources. This gives the user-agent a way to get device video into the web application.
Besides augmented reality this could be used for most webcam related applications on websites but for that some more facilities for retrieving and transmitting the video stream will be necessary.
Get at the frames
Now to get at the raw video data the addition to HTMLVideoElement of a method (like the canvas already has) would seem to fit:
ImageData getImageData();
that returns an ImageData object for the current frame of video. This would either work for the current frame when the video is paused or the current frame unpredictably when the video is playing (for applications to retrieve frames of video as fast as they can process them).
Alternatively register a callback function to the <video> element where every video frame is pushed to.
Update: Mark points out below this is already possible using the drawImage function of the canvas rendering context which accepts a video element and draws the current playback position.
If you can reliably extract all video frames and store them locally, you may even be able to build a non-linear video editing application.
Process and redraw
Processing the frames to create an augmented reality is left as an exercise for the reader.
Ideally each frame of video could also be rendered into a canvas where the client could draw other primitives on top of the video frames. This seems to be necessary for the augmented part of the augmented reality.
Update: This already seems to be possible by putting the image back into a canvas, but I don’t think that would sync up the audio properly.
So all that is needed is the addition of an extra source and an extra method to the <video> element. Doesn’t seem like that much, does it?
- Though there may be better ways than a ‘magic value’ for the source attribute. [↩]
The City Is Here For You To Get Fined By
For any international readers, as the Dutch are probably already very much aware of our totalitarian parking policies.
The headline for the piece accompanying this video reads: “Odds of getting fined doubled”in Dutch.
The video is in Dutch but you should still be able to make out a very interesting and frankly somewhat scary urban systems play.
There is a Google Streetview like car which drives through Amsterdam. It has 3 cameras on either side to be able to scan the three predominant parking patterns (queue, fish and orthogonal). The cameras OCR the license plates of all parked cars and check them with a database.
Another necessary ingredient is a new class of parking ticket machines where you need to punch in your license plate before you get your ticket. The machines are pretty poorly designed, causing a lot of user frustration but they are an essential part of the system. These ticket machines are connected and they push your license plate and the time you have bought to a central server.
So if the scanning car finds a license plate which a ticket machine has not designated as having bought a ticket, a third party is dispatched on scooter to check if there is in fact no valid parking ticket lying under the windshield. If there isn’t, he writes a fine.
Changes
The system dramatically increases the odds of you getting fined compared to the previous system where parking inspectors would walk the street samplewise. This approaches a total and real time assessment and billing of urban space.
The fact that the scanner does not need to get out of the car is interesting from a division of labor point of view. The person actually fining the car gets an SMS and then does a tactical strike with the urban rapid entry vehicle of choice. This minimizes the contact surface with the parking inspectors reducing both potential aggression and being able to see parking inspectors coming (and making a mad dash to the ticket machine).
When Google’s car scans the street all kind of privacy concerns are paraded even though the end result benefits and harms the entire public equally. Nobody even realizes yet what the consequences of this approach will be until we get to feel and see it more directly. It is difficult to ‘feel’ a higher accuracy of parking inspection except that people who normally would hardly ever get a fine, will get them now.
I’m also interested in people’s reaction to changing a leaky implementation of a system of regulations with its faults and errors but a human scale to a totalitarian implementation such as this one which covers enough as to be nearly foolproof. Protest? Quiet resignation? We will see.
And for all you militant free parking advocates out there, put this on your reading list: The High Cost of Free Parking
Held in Bollywood
Net in de sneak de Nederlandse productie Bollywood Hero gezien. Dat er een hausse aan Bollywood films zou volgen op het succes van Slumdog Millionaire stond vast, maar dit is wel erg rap.
Het verhaal gaat over een Nederlandse jongen die een rol krijgt (als Engelsman schijnbaar) in een Bollywood film. Hij is erg beschermd opgevoed. Geconfronteerd met de schrijnende ongelijkheid in Mumbai trekt hij het niet meer. Hij kan zich niet verzoenen met de andersheid van de cultuur en hij verliest zichzelf1 waarna hij ten onder gaat.
Het verhaal is een interessant gegeven al ligt de keuze om hulpbehoevende mensen letterlijk in zijn 8mm camera te visualiseren met kleurtjes er een beetje dik bovenop. Het zorgt wel voor een speels effect in een mooie cinematografie. Verder zijn er drie soorten film (film, 8mm en handycam) waarop geschoten is met voor elke soort een eigen functie.
De film is veelbelovend maar breekt voor mij in de tweede helft en wordt dan ronduit tenenkrommend.
Het ligt vooral aan het te simplistische script. Het is natuurlijk niet al te gemakkelijk om op een geloofwaardige manier een pathetische, cultureel ongevoelige kakker met een superman-complex neer te zetten maar als het script dan ook geen enkele recht doet aan de complexiteit van de situatie en alles gladstrijkt is het slecht te harden.
Het is geen slechte film; goede productiewaarden en zeker mooi2, maar ik denk dat er meer in had gezeten. In ieder geval is het een betere film dan Slumdog Millionaire3.
Hofnar in tijden van crisis
Twee dingen die Stewart wel vaker zegt over de humor van the Daily Show is dat je dit soort dingen niet kunt verzinnen en dat de gebeurtenissen vaak op het tragische af zijn en de enige manier om eromheen te komen is vaak om erom te lachen.
Jammer dat onze versie van the Daily Show geflopt is. De satires die op de Nederlandse tv te zien zijn halen dezelfde scherpte niet. Kijk bijvoorbeeld dit stuk. Waar zitten de grappen? Zitten er dingen in die niet waar zijn?
“It’s not rocket science, home owners, apparently it’s alchemy.”
Niet alleen de complete financiele sector van de quants tot de directeuren van de banken hebben zich ontpopt tot charlatans1 maar de zogenaamde onafhankelijke journalistiek die ons op de hoogte had moeten houden, die goed ingelezen en kritisch had moeten zijn heeft ook zitten slapen.
Raar toch dan dat een ‘fake news’-comedyprogramma betrouwbaarder en eerlijker is dan het echte nieuws.
- Behalve de Rabobank; bewijs voor het feit dat een bank die goed bestuurd wordt wel winst móet maken. [↩]
Art in the public space
I started the week out nicely with a lunch lecture from Kie Ellens about art in the public space. It took me some time to properly code it, but it is online finally (and mostly in English):
The architectural student association Stylos is celebrating a lustrum this week, so there were lunch lectures every day, but unfortunately I could only attend the one.
Film en beelden in de stad
Het heruitvinden van de steden is in gevallen zoals Los Angeles iets urgenter dan hier, maar een huizenmarkt die niet op slot is en een leuke publieke ruimte zou ik hier ook op prijs stellen.
Die leuke publieke ruimte is in Rotterdam al heel lang een probleem. Op een paar straten en pleinen na is het een bijzonder onplesante stad. Daar komt nog eens bij dat in de komend paar jaar zowel Lantaren/Venster als Cinerama gaan sluiten en wat ervoor terug komt is nog niet duidelijk.
“Of de opening van de nieuwe vestiging nauw aansluit op de sluiting van Cinerama valt te bezien.”
Een stadscentrum zonder filmhuis is wat mij betreft niet de moeite waard. Wie dat ook vindt kan dan eindelijk ook naar Amsterdam verhuizen.
Wat voor Cinerama in de plaats komt is een woontoren van minimaal 70 meter hoog en een winkelcentrum. Zou er niet genoeg gelegenheid tot winkelen zijn in het centrum van Rotterdam1?
Maar nu blijkt dus dat die woontorens aan de Maas het helemaal zijn in Rotterdam. Dan bedachten wij een leuk plan: we bouwen aan de Maas een sluitende haag van woontorens aan weerszijden. Deze woontorens overkoepelen en overbruggen de maas vanaf 70 meter, zodat als je in het midden woont je door je glazen vloer de schepen onder je door kunt zien varen.
In het achterland van die woontorens slopen we alle gebouwen van na de oorlog (geleidelijk) en herstellen de omgeving in de ouwe staat met veel natuur eromheen. Rotterdammers blij, toeristen blij, iedereen blij.
Maar dit soort plannen daargelaten; er is morgen in NAi een lezing “The Big Picture” over beeldschermen in de publieke ruimte. Ik heb geen idee of ze aan het thema ubicomp2 gaan raken of dat het een navelstaarfeest van architecten en reclamemensen wordt, maar ik zou zeggen ga erheen en take back the city.
Rita kan ook niet meer doen
Vandaag op Twitter al gezien dat Rita Verdonk goed aangepakt is door Alexander Pechtold. Kijk het filmpje op dumpert, opleggen en erin schieten.
Ik vind het sowieso ongeloofwaardig dat Rita Verdonk op dit moment direct voeling heeft met het moraal van onze troepen. Kan iemand dit bevestigen?
Zoals ik op Jaiku al schrijf, als je iemand verbaal zo hard aan kunt pakken dat ze hun voeting verliezen, dan ben je goed.
En dat D’66, dat is misschien nog wel wat.
Nomadz and Androids
Biked to the Hague yesterday and spent part of the day coworking at my friends over at Nomadz. Just when I had to leave for our appointment at the notary Peter dropped by and demoed some very cool applications on the Android G1 phone he’d just gotten from T-Mobile.
Here’s a short video demoing the box the phone comes in (and if the box already is this cool, you can imagine what the phone is like):
Android G1 Box from Alper Çugun on Vimeo.
Beirut is alive
Beirut announced European tour dates of which 5th of May they will be playing in Paradiso, Amsterdam. Yesterday, I got myself two tickets for that gig, which should be fantastic.
And today I also got wind of two new songs released. The dark ‘La Llorona’:
And the more traditional ‘My Night With A Prostitute from Marseilles’:
Light formations
Merry Christmas
Shot a guerilla Christmas vid of the gang after last Thursday’s training:
Breaking the berimbau
Flattened Conflict
The Guardian shows a clip of the recent armed confrontations in Hebron due to the riots by Jewish settlers. I had read earlier about B’Tselem handing out small camera’s to Palestinians so they could record settler aggression and this is a clip that came out of that program.
This is a precursor to how amateur media are going to become even more important to the dissemination of news and how new media can flatten information asymmetry quite effectively.
One question remains about asymmetry and that is asymmetry in mainstream media reporting. The British press has a reputation to have one of the more fair and balanced reports on the conflict (as does for instance Ha’aretz)1. I am curious if Dutch mainstream media have aired this fairly graphic clip, I can’t find anything on either the NOS player2or the main NOS site3 and neither on RTL Nieuws.
Anybody seen this on Dutch television?
- Though odd that I couldn’t find it at the Independent. [↩]
- Maybe because the search and the interface of that player are completely atrocious. [↩]
- Except for this brief blurb about today’s events. [↩]