Entry 21
Been really slack with these logs recently, which is unfortunate. But that usually comes from being busy, which you can’t be too upset about.
Just got out of The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s new movie. Definitely enjoyed it, but I may need to revisit it. There’s a large focus on military torture and the trauma that spills out from around that, and I wasn’t always able to weave it in to more than just situational importance, importance to the narrative.
I also watched A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals over the past two weeks, and I’ve got to say, I was not a fan of either. A Single Man felt uninteresting and eventually a bit eye-roll-y, and Nocturnal Animals was much more of the same, plus a big dose of what felt to me like misogyny.
The one highlight of those two was Michael Shannon’s performance in Nocturnal Animals. He continues to be one of the most interesting actors around.
I also watched Annette a while back - which definitely struck me. I was in love with all the weird shit in that movie, but I have to be honest when I say that the story felt boring. Like there wasn’t anything to take from it. I brought this up to a friend, who remarked that she understood that - but that for her, the whole thing played as an opera, so she was able to put her brain in opera-mode and go with it. I have seen exactly 0 operas, so I assume I just took too much of a cinematic view to it; should’ve let go of some things and focused more on others. But even with that reaction, I continue to think about the movie, which is surely a sign of what’s swirling around in there.
An observation of last week: I really appreciate what writing things down can do to help me figure things out. This came from writing a commit message this week, where as I was describing the issue that spawned these changes and my approaches to the problem, I realized there was a path I hadn’t taken. Had I committed the code without a detailed explanation, when I was (falsly) sure that I had fixed the issue, I wouldn’t have been as exhaustive.
This showed up again when working out some thoughts that I wanted to communicate to a friend. I was only sure of a broad emotion I was feeling, so rather than blurt it out I sat down and wrote about it, which helped define the edges and complete it.
Certainly not a very revelatory idea, but it’s a lesson to me to make sure I think exhaustively, that writing can help with that.
I’ve also been thinking this week about “private” vs “public” social media accounts. The default on all big social media sites is public. When you post, other people can freely see it. And when you come across someone’s account that’s private, I immediately feel a bit curious. Why the active decision to hide your account? Is there something you post there that’s sensitive?
But lately I’ve been feeling that maybe I’ve got it backwards. It’s a very affecting thing to allow the entire world access to thoughts and snippets of what is usually personal material. It really sounds like a private account should be the default. I wonder if that’s what I want too?