Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
After enjoying The Last Murder at the End of the World, I thought I might be sufficiently removed from the (real) pandemic to enjoy reading about a (fictional) pandemic! And it was fine at first, but I eventually did get kinda creeped out. I’ve been feeling a bit more upbeat about the world in general after the midterms, so the fact that this was a bit much for me is some combination of my being forever scarred by the pandemic (possible!) or Mandel’s excellent work in painting a terrifying picture.
Anyway, it was good! Might try some of her other books next.
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Remaking movies versus remaking video games
Whenever Disney announces they’re doing a live-action remake of a beloved animated movie, I roll my eyes and wonder why they felt the need to do that (obviously, the money). But I realized I don’t feel the same way about remakes of video games, and tried to figure out why.
One reason is that I can pull out my copy of The Lion King (1994) and it’s still a great movie! I suppose for some movies better CGI and whatnot can make it look better, but most movies didn’t use a lot of CGI back then…because it looked bad! But a 20-year old video game looks much less pretty than a remake that came out today.
Another thing is that newer video games have a lot more modern conveniences than in the old days; better map systems, inventory management, saving, etc. This does depend a bit on the quality of the remake, but in general it’s so much easier to add this stuff these days.
I think I may also just have a distaste for live-action movies with CGI animals and whatnot.
(yes, this was prompted by starting the Ocarina of Time remake š )
You Can See Everything was an experience
I had seen The Rehearsal season 2 going in, so I was aware of Nathan Fielder’s general shtick, which is why I was not sure I could actually watch this movie:
But I had a day off last week and decided I wanted to see it in the theater. And I’m glad I did – as the movie got progressively more unhinged (complementary), it was nice to have people to nervously laugh with! (I’ll cop to looking down at my phone a few times just to deal with the cringe!)
Obviously the movie is about Elizabeth Holmes, but it also becomes more about what a documentary is and truth and all that. And by the end, maybe you feel bad for Holmes, or maybe the opposite.
Which is a very unsettling feeling! And I think that’s what Fielder et al want. But while I agree that truth can be hard to find and whatnot, I don’t want to get too moral relativistic here, and rereading Bad Blood brought me back down to Earth; it is certainly possible she was taken advantage of by Balwani and Evans, but she did plenty of bad stuff by herself.
New project: Mathman game!
You can play a game of Mathman! (source on GitHub)
Mathman was a segment on the 80s show Square One TV, a show that I adored in elementary school and cried if I missed. (which must have been very frustrating for my parents in a pre-DVR era!) He moonlights as my favicon on my website and my avatar on most social media sites.
You can find episodes on YouTube – a few years ago David and I had shown the kids some, and they thought it was mildly neat. This was enough to make us want to create our own version to help them practice math. We worked on it for a bit and got it working well enough that they played it a few times but lost interest pretty quickly.
Fast forward two years, and I figured I should get around to actually publishing it! I made a few small improvements and cajoled it to (mostly?) work on mobile.
It was trickier than it seemed, and we got to throw in some neat features:
- Audio from the original series!
- Text-to-speech to read the objective for the level (thanks SpeechSynthesisUtterance! although this doesn’t work on iPhone and it’s supposed to, I should dig into that…)
- Smooth motion between grid squares! (trickier than it sounds!)
- Detecting swipes from a touch event on a canvas! (not too hard!)
- Detecting taps on a canvas! (much more annoying!)
Anyway, it was a fun project to work on, and a nice reminder that the web platform is really powerful. It’s so cool to make a project that will work on any computer, phone, or tablet!
The kids thought it was neat that we made this, but didn’t actually play it that much. (and now the questions are too easy for them!) But kids outgrowing things/not being as interested in things as you’d hope is just a part of parenting š
Coming soon: another bespoke project that the kids enjoyed for a brief while!
