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unsatisfying ending of Save Yourselves
Friday, April 16 2021
Today was colder, cloudier, and rainier than yesterday, though there was enough waste heat coming off the electronics that I didn't need to run the heat pump in the laboratory.
For over a year now, my boss Alex and I have been directing the development of an extremely complicated web app by a group of developers based in Ukraine. Now, though, the project is running out of money, and Alex has begun gradually weaning the Ukranian team off the project. In their place, the idea is that our in-house team of Angular and C# developers can take over. At some point Alex realized that much of the work we've actually done is on a Confluence account belonging to our Ukranian outsourcers. Much of what I did today was transfer Confluence pages from that account to a new one controlled by our corporate overlords. Confluence doesn't have an export because they want to lock users into their app, but they do recognize the formatting of chunks of a Confluence document copied in one account, allowing the formatting to survive pasting. Unfortunately this is not true of the embedded images.
I'd taken my usual 150 milligram Friday dose of pseudoephedrine, and later I added kratom, alcohol, and fully-legal grown-in-Ulster-County cannabis (which, as usual, I ate instead of smoking).
This afternoon my brother Don called again, mostly wanting to talk about the esoteric things he'd recently learned. But there were buried ledes that I found more interesting. One of our mother's (Hoagie's) horses is apparently lame. It took nearly all I could do to get Don to tell me useful information about the lameness, that, for example, there was a visible injury and that Hoagie thought it might've happened as a result of getting stuck in fencing wire. I stressed to Don that he had to be Hoagie's memory and to remind her about the urgency of the horse matter when it is out of view and she's moved on to some other worry.
Gretchen made a not-very-good Asian noodle salad for dinner, and aftrwards Powerful, Gretchen, and I played three games of Bananagrams. Gretchen won two of them, but I won the middle one. In my game, I was playing so well that Powerful had a backlog of at least two dozen tiles he couldn't effectively place. Shock & awe is a good strategy in that game, as it's easy to demoralize and opponent with constant calls of "peal!" (which means everyone must take a new tile).
This evening Gretchen and I watched Save Yourselves, a film about a Brooklyn couple that decides to break their technology addiction by decompressing in a cabin upstate (in Dutchess County, as it happens). The twist is that they picked the same week to decompress that aliens from outerspace took to invade Earth. The aliens take the form of furry-looking lumps, each the size of a foot stool. The alien interact with the world via a single pink tentacle that can be shot at objects to either use them as winch anchors or to destroy them. Initially, Save Yourselves seemed highly innovative, with clever dialog that seemed like the sort of random, unrehearsed dialog that Gretchen and I routinely engage in. But then a human baby gets added to the mix and the whole thing becomes a muddle, ending with an unsatisfying conclusion that seemed like the sort of thing you get when a filmmaker can't figure out how to land a film. It's not just the ending that dissatisfied; plenty other props and topics were left unexplained or insufficiently developed. What, for example, was the purpose of that mineral crystal one of our protagonists is gifted? What role did that baby serve (other than to convince viewers that cry-free babies exist)?
After the movie, I felt kind of bad for wanting to drink more booze, since it would mean retreating from Gretchen, who seemed to be indicating that she wanted to spend the night socializing with me. I don't really have this new paradigm figured out, one where I occasionally drink but try to do so in a way that has Gretchen thinking I don't drink at all.
I ended up staying up past 3:00am, tinkering with a thrift-store TI-83 Plus graphing calculator that I'd assumed wasn't working at all but which, today, came to life when I picked a particular place to press my fingers or a thigh against the ribbon cable connecting the LCD to the restof the calculator. Sometimes anomalies with the display included mirror-image display of data or even upside-down data, suggesting the effect of my fingers or thigh was pretty high-level, confusing the display into making use of various hiitherto-unknown photoshop-style transformations available to the image it was displaying.
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