That’s pretty hot fucking big deal.
If you don’t mind my saying so.
Intel’s big bug
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Author Archives: gawen
A life of adventure
Today’s movie: The Last Jedi
Jedi: The Last Star Wars
Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Michael Bay J.J. Abrams Rian Johnson. This movie is nothing but a vapid monumental grotesque joke. Seriously just don’t waste your time, don’t even think about buying the physical release or watching it by any other mean. You’ll just get awfully disappointed or you may also probably like it which is your choice after all. Either way that heavily marketed steamroller is unstoppable. There is no hope for Star Wars, but not only that.
There will be no spoiler ahead, even though you wouldn’t really miss anything.
It is as visually stunning as most other blockbusters nowadays, with humour and subtlety rivaling with Star Wars Holiday Special, like most other blockbusters nowadays. Not to say it is a hopeless dumb piece of garbage. But it certainly is hopeless. Imagine for an instant the archetypal CGIed bad guy, choreographically gesturing as if painfully trying to appear as human as anybody, defiantly looking down on you so you are sure that when he says he’s bad, he really means it. Imagine everything trying too hard to paint the scenery, draw the characters, outline the story. Imagine this is just your basic adventure action movie of the year, with a minor standardized twist. A movie that you must see anyway because you know, Star Wars and Porgs. Well that’s all there is to it.
Or perhaps there is more. A solemn vow not to renew itself. Ignominiously merging all the preceding episodes in one last go. Hammering the idea of making a clean sweep of the past. All that while preparing the path for a more streamlined way of storytelling, that would definitely transfer the franchise from geek and fanboys alike to the public at large.
This is not a fanboy critic, even though I liked the original trilogy so to say. Really I am not complaining that this movie wasn’t faithful or respectful to the original universe, that’s not the point. It is in fact the same story, basically following the same principles, scarily warmed over. A tired franchise repeating itself over and over again.
And this is where it gets so nightmarishly hopeless, in that you shouldn’t expect the following episodes to be any more different than this. Star Wars hasn’t got anything left to say more than a variant of the same thing. Which is easy to understand though, seeing how severely it got bashed last time it really tried to reinvent itself. But now it’s pretty dead, yet there it is, a gargantuan zombie, dead alive and still walking, pushed in the back by the Disney overlord as a carefully crafted marketing behemoth.
It is in that, that those movies are so hideously disrespectful. It’s a voyage in a museum of dead figures, figuratively speaking, all of them as convincing as mounted automatons.
Seeing how Disney is eagerly trying to bring that giant back to life, yet not instilling a single speck of life into it, is disgusting. Although they tried and did so, to a limited extent with Rogue One, a self proclaimed side story. And to be honest they tried to bring back some of that alchemy back into this installment. But clearly that wasn’t enough, and it fell apart like an ill finished Frankenstein’s monster.
Beside, there is another thing that the movie is trying to tell. That there are no real heroes, only wise leaders on various scales who somehow know the absolute right from the wrong. And that in the end, those truth holders are the ones worthy to remember, because they fight knowing that all we have is each other, and no other great cause can surpass that. The sweet tyranny of mutual love and the principle of life. But dare try to go beyond that and it’s just business as usual.
It tries to complete the simplistic manichaean view of the original story and presents this as the triangle formed by the republic, implicitly good, versus despotism, implicitly evil, versus anarchy, implicitly amoral. The intent is honorable and it goes further in developing those ideas than the preceding episode. But the movie itself screams ridicule from start to finish. Each attempt at self-reference to the original trilogy is really painful, but it never stops nor even pauses a little. Instead it comes waves after waves of throat pushed fan service, bad humour and forced acting. All of this summed up as an insincere and unconvincing piece which quickly fell into the realm of boredom.
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Aside
Today’s movie: Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner, without Vangelis, without Harrison Ford, without that much subtlety, but for a twist. It was cool for sure, yet we didn’t go anywhere near the Tannhäuser Gate. But here to comfort you is Edward James Olmos making a paper-sheep, just in case you didn’t know what you were into.
Those kind of self references are numerous, so far to border on gratuitous fanservice. Still the movie is beautiful, and definitely trying to tell us something, but never gives us the opportunity to position ourselves in regard to its message.
Meanwhile on Linux
Quake-like terminal for i3
Tiling window managers are cool but there are times when all you want is quick access to a terminal that you can toggle when needs be, so you can either do simple calculation, start jobs, open files or satisfy your weird Unix fetish through convoluted piping to dubious file descriptors, all that from the comfort of your own cozy shell interpreter.
Well if that applies to you i3 user then search no more because I may have got just what you need!
I’ve written a drop-down quake-like terminal for i3, i3-QuakeTerm, inspired by a similar drop-down terminal I did for AwesomeWM and i3-quickterm another similar terminal for i3. The later did not work for me because of a bug in i3ipc-python that was just fixed recently. So I implemented my own version as a workaround.
There are some notable differences however. First everything can be done from the command line, so there is no need for any configuration file. But it is still possible to register multiple drop-down terminal types by providing a different name to each one of them.
It also uses WM_CLASS instance attribute instead of i3’s mark to identify the terminal. As a result you can access the terminal window and control it early from i3’s configuration. Finally the terminal is created with a fork instead of in-place starting. That means that you can use any kind of graphical command as the terminal, even if it doesn’t start any shell or command itself, as long as you can use or modify its name as an unique identifier.
More info on the github page.
Bye bye Awesome!
My desktop is not awesome anymore, but it is full of high trees.
In a preceding post I complained about Awesome’s inconstant API and concluded that I would probably switch in the near future which I finally did last week. That’s right, I finally ditched AwesomeWM for i3, and so far not disappointed at all.
In overall the configuration is a lot easier with i3 than it is on Awesome. Sure you cannot play as much as you used to with lua, but the syntax of the configuration file is rich enough that you don’t need much scripting anyway. It’s very Unixy, simple in its core and delegates itself nicely to external tools (i3bar, i3status) and scripts. There is a very nice IPC mechanism (that goes through a Unix socket) that you can use from command line or librairies in C, Python, OCaml and many others.
Now there is no fancy widget as you do have in Awesome, everything is text + UTF8 with some coloring. Perhaps there is an i3bar alternative that can do more than this but I don’t know of any yet. Workspaces are also different, they are shared between outputs and not visible in i3bar until focused or contain a window, but in time you get used to it. Although there is nothing that I really miss from Awesome, also the simple API, simple configuration, nice documentation, clean IPC via Unix socket (which is really nice, you can communicate with i3 from virtually anywhere, even assembly), all of those were really worth the change.
Atari soldering day!
Had to do some soldering on my Atari recently, so I took the opportunity to take some photos of the mainboard (from both sides since I also had to desolder and replace some components). Not that it’s that much hard to find on the Internet, but here’s my two cents. It’s a 1040STE, however I took the photos with my phone so it’s not the best quality:
Also if you want more info about STE hardware I highly recommend this site.
Today’s movie: Valérian AND Laureline
If Luc Besson only had the occasion to do one single movie in its entire life, that would probably be it. That’s the consecration of the fifth element. Now go ahead in your Limouzingue fly me from Rubanis to Syrte the magnificient, we’ll stop by Point Central and we’ll head for the stars, or a world without star, par l’Espace.
We are but simple travelers who seek the enchanter who lives beyond these woods.
Now if you think that’s a rip off of Mass Effect, you are wrong! Stop playing video games and go read your classics. Now if you think you are going to see an adventure of Valérian and Laureline, you are wrong! It’s heavily inspired but it’s nothing like it, and it’s something in its own right. Valérian is not that clumpsy hero of the equinox, a brave knight despite himself. Laureline is gratuitously aggressive (so much that it gets kind of scary). The Shingouz are not as dubious as they ought to be. The grumpy transmuter is not grumpy at all (they don’t even come from Bluxte, but they sure are rare), and except for the apparence they are closer to telepathic Spiglics than anything else. And for god sake, in this movie Point Central is the ISS!
M. Bison little known brother, he’s the one who made it in the family.
It’s very close to the Ambassador of the Shadows (despite the title), but there are numerous nodes to some of the other albums in the series. The movie is still Valérian and Laureline (also despite the title) their is an unspoken balance about it that is very hard to find nowadays, they are acting as a team, they are each other’s sidekicks, and they are each other’s heroes and that’s incredibly refreshing.
It’s also very simple. You shouldn’t expect the need to turn your brain on for two hours. But I’m not sure you should expect anything else. Would it have been more faithful, it wouldn’t have been enough. Would it have been less faithful, it wouldn’t have been worth the name. And this movie tries hard to do just that by placing itself right in the middle. So in the end it’s a pleasant and visually stunning space adventure among the riches of cosmos.
