News You Can Bruise for 2014 March

Mon Mar 03 2014 09:23 February Film Roundup: Three films this month, none of them great, but all of them worth your time.

• Pulp Fiction (1994): I think I came too late to this one. Like Superfly, it puts style way, way above substance. And twenty years later the style a) is kinda dorky and b) has been copied by tons of other movies. Samuel L. Jackson is always cool, but John Travolta was never cool. (Admittedly, I passed up the chance to see Saturday Night Fever; maybe he was cool in that.)

  What substance there is, is gory fun. I loved Travolta's character in the bathroom convincing himself not to make a move on the boss's woman. He spends a lot of this movie in bathrooms, actually. I liked seeing the plot threads winding in and out of each other.

  Before the screening, several people read essays about how much this movie (specifically, its soundtrack) meant to them. I'm glad it was important to them but I'm not really feeling it.

• The Pajama Game (1957): A beautifully shot musical about labor-management relations. It's really good. Lots of background relationships (including one horribly creepy one), not just the male and female leads. Too bad the songs are terrible! I have never hated the songs so much in a musical that I liked.
• Wu xia (2011): Fun violent emotional martial arts movie that keeps jumping from one subgenre to another. Unlike Tai Chi Zero, this movie consistently uses chi manipulation as a driver of fight scenes, to the point of using acupuncture needles as weapons. Good stuff.

Fri Mar 28 2014 10:16 Read My Lips: Two New Bots: I've been trying to finish as much of Situation Normal as possible before my job at the library starts (uh... I think this is the first time I've mentioned my NYPL job on NYCB, but I'll be writing about it later). But I have created two new autonomous agents to engage and confound you.

The first is Euphemism Bot, inspired by the fact that most of the output of Adam's Egress Methods sounds like weird euphemisms for masturbation. Euphemism Bot elevates the tone by putting out weird euphemisms for all sorts of dirty, shameful things. You'll never be understood again! It's been up for about a month, and it's already subverted its programming.

From the naughty to the nautical, there's also Boat Names, which I "launched" today. It periodically sends out names that one, and only one, person decided to give their boat. The data comes from the Queneau-sounding ten thousand boat names, which I first learned of from the trivia podcast Good Job, Brain! (I'm linking to their Twitter page because their main webpage currently shows some base64-encoded text that isn't even a puzzle.) I had this idea kicking around in my head until yesterday's lunch with Andrea Phillips, when the topic turned to weird random datasets we'd collected. And now... a bot is born.

Boat Names also has an Egress Methods connection. I found the list of given names Adam uses for Egress Methods and used it to filter out boats that are named after people. This avoids the boredom of "Eleanor", which just proves that not many boat owners have wives named Eleanor.