News You Can Bruise for 2025 January

Wed Jan 01 2025 15:46 December Film Roundup:

Leah's Perfect Gift (2024): I had a part in making this movie! It's based on Leah's Perfect Christmas by Catherine Beck, the pen name of a member of my writing group.
Near the beginning of the film the story train is visibly shunted off the generic "Hallmark Christmas movie" setup into a story that is, at best, poking loving fun at Hallmark Christmas movies, and then it's shunted back onto the track at the end for a Hallmark Christmas movie conclusion. In the middle the movie's all right, but the book spends a lot more time on Leah's outsider's view of Christmas in a way that really rings true. Also, in the book they take the Metro North up to Connecticut rather than driving, which makes way more sense.
The book is better, is what I'm saying. In a Film Roundup first, I will reproduce some of my old notes from the meeting of our writing group where we went over Leah's Perfect Christmas:
Really cute, I don't have a lot to change.
The best part was the dinner where Leah takes Gavin's bleu cheese because his mom won't make a meal accommodation, and then his mom makes a completely unnecessary meal accommodation for Maddie.
The parents are ridiculous stereotypes, but I didn't reliably find them ridiculous to the point of satire. I'd like to see more of that.
The main issue I felt was a kind of emotional monotony through the middle of the book. Often a rom-com has a red herring romantic partner. I would either introduce a red herring or make the Christmas experience—not necessarily the parents—less uniformly unbearable. There needs to be something to distract Leah from Gavin, because I'm not being brought through the story solely by the idea that Gavin isn't the guy he seems to be when they're in New York.

I haven't read the final version of the book, but in the movie they chose door #2, giving Leah a variety of Christmasy side quests that let them showcase the many, many colorful sets and props available to the production.
Beaches (1988): The chick flicks continue! On my way back from Japan I stopped in LA to see Susanna and family. She and I walked around Crystal Cove State Park, where the beach house seen in Beaches has been preserved as a miniature film museum. (According to the museum, that house was used in a lot of movies, but most of them were silent movies in the early days of Hollywood, so nobody cares anymore.)
This reminded me that our mom loved the soundtrack to Beaches, or at least kept the tape in her car for a really long time until we knew all the songs. (Other albums I assume Mom loved from the same evidence: Neil Diamond: His 12 Greatest Hits.) So I told Susanna I'd watch the movie with Sumana when I got back.
And... it's pretty good. The critical consensus is negative, but I thought it did a good job of showing a long-lasting friendship between two women, a friendship that is strained but never breaks. And there are a lot of good songs on that soundtrack. In the 20+ years since I last heard the Beaches soundtrack I've grown more able to recognize the musical homages going on in the songs. In particular, I correctly identified "Oh Industry" as "a Laurie Anderson thing."

And now, it's time to send off another Star Trek series with this month's Television Spotlight.

Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024): A standout of the Stream Trek era. I looked forward to every episode and thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of fan callbacks and traditional Trek stories. But there's one thing I didn't enjoy, and it's summed up by Sumana's common refrain while we were watching: "No one's making you be in Starfleet, Mariner." I griped about this in my roundup of season 1 and it never stopped being a problem. Beckett Mariner, the main character of the show, acts like a sulking draftee for nearly the entire series, even though she's a graduate of an elite military academy and a member of a post-scarcity civilization devoted entirely to personal betterment.
She sulks on a ship whose crew starts out mediocre but improves in cohesion over time. She sulks on her punitive assignment to a crappy space station, which we later see get turned around by crew who came in with a more positive attitude. Other people improve, but she doesn't. There's a blissful couple of episodes when she actually leaves Starfleet and seems to be living the life she wants, but she comes right back. I can sorta make this make sense based on the exposition we get—mommy issues plus Dominion War PTSD, basically—but the series kept showing Mariner grow as a person, only to hit her reset button at the end of an episode or season. (Tendi did have sustained, persistent growth throughout the series, so it is possible.)
The versions of Mariner and Boimler in the Strange New Worlds crossover were much more appealing than the cartoon versions, which probably indicates that the characters' flaws are exaggerated for comic effect vis-a-vis what they'd be like in a live-action show. But I don't find it funny to see people learn the same lessons over and over. It is a tribute to the writing of Lower Decks and the charisma of the actors that I loved the show despite this really annoying problem they never fixed.

Fri Jan 03 2025 10:46 The Eater of Meaning is now part of the olipy family: You know that email you get when a website you like is acquired by a big company and you know it's going to get shut down? This is like that, only the website shut down first and then got merged into a bigger project.

In May 2003 I created The Eater of Meaning, a web proxy that changes the words on a web page and renders the results. It was popular for a while in the "blogosphere" and then I kind of forgot about it for 20 years, until it broke in 2024.

Throughout 2024 I got occasional emails from poets about the Eater of Meaning and could I fix it. Upon reflection I decided that while running a public web proxy on my personal website in 2003 was kind of fun, doing so in 2024 is a bad idea. So the CGI script breaking was a blessing in disguise. But I didn't want the Eater of Meaning to disappear entirely because, as I've found out, it's important to some poets' artistic practice.

So I've rewritten the Eater of Meaning code in modern Python, and added it to olipy, my pack of art supplies. With basic Python skills (or even Python package-installing skills) you can have access to just about all of the Eater of Meaning's old functionality, as well as some new eaters based on the other olipy tools. I realize that this isn't as convenient as having it as a proxy on a website, but this is the best I can do for now.

Sun Jan 05 2025 12:51 2024 Film Roundup Roundup: I saw 73 movies in 2024, and twenty were good enough to be added to Film Roundup Roundup, my ever-growing list of over 300 really good movies.

Here's my top ten for 2024. A very big year for Japanese movies, but Hundreds of Beavers takes the gold home for the U.S. of A.

Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
Supermarket Woman (1996)
River (2023)
Tokyo Olympiad (1965)
Slacker (1990)
Dance With Me (2019)
The Big Clock (1948)
A Taxing Woman (1987)
Something Wild (1986)
The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)

(1) Sun Jan 12 2025 13:56 2024 Japan trip: I've hinted at this before in NYCB but now I've got my photos organized and I'm ready to talk about the vacation I took in Japan last November. I was nominally on vacation with my friend James, but he was working most days, so I spent a lot of time walking around exploring before meeting him for dinner, which I found to be a great way to run a vacation.

I've put up a huge photo gallery of pictures full of wacky and interesting stuff, but in case you're planning your own visit, here are some of my recommendations:

Hibiya Park in Tokyo, where they have a replica of the Liberty Bell.
The Meguro Parasitalogical Museum
The playful architecture of Makoto Sei Watanabe: Aoyama Technical College, the Iidabashi subway station, and, uh, the K Museum. I knew the K Museum had been shut down, but after taking a long bus ride to see its corpse, I discovered that it was also covered in tarps and undergoing demolition. Oh well, I got to see a neighborhood of Tokyo I wouldn't have seen otherwise.
NTT DoCoMo History Square, featuring a timeline of hundreds of old cell phones. The moment in history where the iPhone is introduced looks like the mass extinction that wiped out the Ediacaran fauna. The guy who runs the museum was really excited to have a visitor, so check this one out!
Huge tonkatsu. It's delicious. I tried the Nagoya style but I prefer the original.
Between Tokyo and Kyoto we spent two nights at the Kashiawaya Ryokan in Shima Onsen, a place much like the onsen town in the movie River. It was great to have some downtime after a week of running around Tokyo.
The Kyoto Railway Museum.
The Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design. Don't be fooled by the size of the building; this a really small museum in the basement a convention center. Great museum, though.
National Museum of Art in Osaka.
The Silver Ball Planet arcade, also in Osaka. I'm sure there are bigger pinball arcades in the United States but this was the biggest one I've been in.
The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima is rightfully famous but I was also struck by the actual hypocenter of the nuclear explosion, which just has a plaque next to a hospital and a parking garage.
The Toyota Museum in Nagoya, which is divided into two parts: looms and cars. A must for fans of lean manufacturing!
I don't want to contribute to Kyoto's overtourism problem, but the Fushimi Inari Shrine was amazing. I got there at 8:30 AM and it was pretty crowded already, but the further up the mountain you hike, the less crowded it is (and the more expensive the vending machine water is). I will tell you that I didn't get much out of the hike once I passed the scenic viewpoint about halfway up.
The other huge overtouristed site in Kyoto, the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, is... not as amazing IMO. But, on the other side of the forest is the Arashiyama Park, which is really nice.
Why did I call it Beautiful Soup instead of Nuts DOM?
It took some planning but I got a great view of Mt. Fuji from the shinkansen on the way back to Tokyo. It's so much bigger than anything else in the landscape that it feels like someone landed an asteroid.
The Tokyo Printing Museum, a museum designed to showcase the wealth of Toppan, a big printing company. But it's some pretty cool wealth. In addition to lots of old-timey prints and oboks there was a really nice temporary exhibit about linotype machines, but I've got nothing but memories from that part since photos weren't allowed in the temporary exhibits.
There are two Tokyo neighborhoods with little whale statues, and I saw both of them in the same day: 1 2

Finally I want to mention a couple stores that I didn't take pictures of. B-Side Label has cool laptop stickers. There are a few locations; I went to the one in Kyoto.

Second, New Yorkers might remember City Bakery, which sold really great pastries including the legendary pretzel croissant, plus hot chocolate which was way too rich for my taste. In 2019 City Bakery went out of business, leaving Americans croissant-less. But there are twenty City Bakery locations in Japan! We were randomly walking through a mall in Nagoya—bam! City Bakery! Heading to the Kyoto shopping district—City Bakery! They're quite a nostalgia trip, with everything looking and tasting exactly like it did the old City Bakery on 19th street, or maybe 18th, I could never remember. Anyway, that's why I've now got a freezer full of pretzel croissants from halfway across the world.