John Wick is also great in so many ways. I'd expected to hate it but was pleasantly surprised. Go see 2. It's good.
"[H]orrible"?!?!?! Are you being held hostage by Armond White? Blink twice if he's threatening to make you reread his review of "Toy Story."
In certain ways, the John Wick movies are super-stupid, but you have to suspend your disbelief over those elements. If you can do that (and I can), it's great. What I really liked about it, which I didn't expect, was the world-building -- the glimpses of the criminal world with its own parallel institutions like its own government, or its own money, the switchboard that processes hits, the hotel chain for criminals.
Stylistically it resembles the Hong Kong "Heroic Bloodshed" genre (which I think is basically dead now in Hong Kong), in that ignores any sense of plausibility for violent spectacle, and people get gunned down in numbers that would stand out during the Battle of Verdun, let alone in the middle of a mall.
I really liked the way Wick always confirms his kills with a shot to the head, even if he's already shot them in the torso. Just added a little dose of semi-realism. The plot was pretty stupid, but I enjoyed myself enough that I'll get around to etching 2 eventually.
You may be doing the whole etchings thing wrong.
5: Sounds like he saw Miller's Crossing.
Miller's Crossing: good Coen, or best Coen?
It somewhat surprises me that John Wick would enjoy such popularity: I mean, it's a good enjoyable movie in that genre, but there are so many more along the same lines. I'm thinking particularly of the world-building Walt mentions upthread. I saw the first John Wick movie a while ago, but as I recall, John isn't particularly supernatural, is he? He's (just) a trained assassin, in a world in which trained assassins or otherwise underworld types are somewhat similar to members of the mafia -- a family. It's a good mash-up of those themes.
Most films along those lines are sci-fi. I confess I love that shit. Been looking for more of it that I might not have seen. Sci-fi tending toward action/adventure is fine.
I mean, how different is John Wick from Jason Bourne?
(Erm, the Trump administration has basically been sending me to the movies. I'm sure I'm not the only one.)
My favorite search result is "How many people did God kill in the Bible?" from the Atheists of Silicon Valley. I'd have to research the populations of various OT locations (which sadly don't include Silicon Valley), but given that in His infinite wisdom he created Stalin, it's God ftw.
14: the correct answer being "all of them".
15 is uncontroversial; but calculation of the Three subtotals is the cause of countless disputes.
16: I was just going to say, and then you got there first. But you forgot Mary.
18: that one's not actually in the Bible.
This is how you tell that I'm not a Catholic, rather than being not a Protestant. The church I don't go to doesn't sweat fine distinctions between things attested to in the Bible and other sources of knowledge -- she's a person in the Bible, and we know for other reasons that God didn't kill her.
(Actually, I had no idea the Assumption of Mary wasn't in the Bible. I guess I just (wait for it) assumed.)
I didn't mean it as in "everyone who dies for whatever reason ultimately does so because God wants them to". I meant "God blows up the world and kills everyone". And indeed floods the world and kills almost everyone.
I'm not a Protestant, and I have no idea what any of you people are talking about.
21: Then it doesn't apply to most of those who died in between Noah and Nicolae Carpathia, right?
I just did the same autocomplete test and got mostly the same results, but #3 was "didn't vote in 2016". Oh, this region of mine.
Oh, and #3 was "how many people did Tilikum kill".
20: whereas I'm not a Southern Baptist, hence not focusing on the text itself, and not thinking you're not a heretic. (Did I get all the "not"s in the right places? I'm not sure.)
Wait, Catholics don't think Mary died? Really? Or is this an orgasm pun?
Indeed. I genuinely didn't know that one.
Well it's complicated. Turns out the Catholic Church doesn't have an official position on this point and JPII says she died before she was assumed into heaven.
When I was a kid, about 5 years old, my mother took me to see a dentist who was a Christian, who was highly recommended as a children's dentist. (We were not 'Christian,' exactly, or at least not in that way: we were Roman Catholics). That dentist's waiting room is where I was first introduced to Goofus and Gallant of Highlights magazine, btw.
About a month or two later, a Bible salesman turned up on our doorstep. My mother didn't have the heart to turn him away; and then didn't have the strength or stamina to resist his hard sell. She ended up buying some kind of weirdo, non-mainstream Protestant version of biblical tales for children on a one-year subscription basis (well, weirdo to us, because Catholic). My dad was initially annoyed, but then highly amused, when he learned that his 5-year old daughter had filled out a questionnaire, and then mailed it out with proper postage, which brought the Bible salesman to our door. But he drew the line at extending that subscription beyond the first year.
I recall realizing that that Bible salesman was referencing another world entirely, which didn't seem to have much to do with me at all. But my mother had given him a cup of tea, for which he seemed grateful.
12: Stylistically they're pretty different. Jason Bourne popularized quick cuts, while John Wick is long takes. Anyway, did Jason Bourne has the same insane body count as Wick?
28: I don't think it's been seen as particularly important whether Mary died before the Assumption happened or the Assumption happened instead of her dying. That's why the dogma pronounced on it in 1950 leaves this ambiguous.
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NMM to Chuck Berry
Watching the video of him performing "Johnny B Goode" is electrifying. Generally speaking, I prefer Peter Tosh's cover version, but there's no doubt, watching Chuck Berry, that you're seeing history being made. He is unquestionably iconic.
(Side note: when I saw Lyle Lovett in concert, a couple years ago, he did "Brown Eyed Handsome Man." Everybody likes Chuck Berry)
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The guest speaker at the state Dem fundraiser was Sen Booker. Holy crap.
Bill Paxton, of course, was killed by Stalin, the KKK, Obama and a killer whale.
OT: Just how invasive is OneNote? Evernote just does not work for me, despite everyone's mystical claim that, "you have to use it for everything and then it all becomes clear."
OneNote fits my brain much better but is of course handing buckets of information over to Microsoft. I'm not worried about the police state (in this context), just MS's relentless aggregation of every single thing about me to sell to the highest bidders.
So:
It's no worse than anything else?
Microsoft is going to own my soul no matter what I do?
There are ways to make OneNote less invasive?
There's something out there other than Evernote?
Or what?
Become illiterate. Sorted.
37: I don't know much about OneNote except that periodically I have to swat it down when it pops up trying to be "helpful" on my work PC, where I am forced to use Windows. But I think it's fair to say that MS *is* doing relentless aggregation of the info you volunteer to it, although I'd also say they're not the worst offenders when it comes to feeding your data identity to the neoliberal cloud-Borg.
I have something of this fear, too, and can assure you that it's possible, with greater or lesser amounts of fiddling depending on the level of your paranoia, to assemble a more secure alternative to One/EverNote. But it's certainly less fiddly if what you want it to do is less catch-all in function than everything buckets like Evernote. I have one set up for myself, for instance, that only works with text. If I wanted to include pictures, screenshots, pdfs, etc, then I'd probably set up a fit-to-purpose parallel system instead of trying to make 1 do everything. That is probably where the data hoovers like OneNote have the advantage.
But I'm willing to bet there are bigger computer security geeks on here than I who can offer more informed advice...
I don't understand why "digital note-taking apps" are suddenly a thing. I still just use word processors, in my case OpenOffice; if it's necessary to work with a shared file I use Google Docs. EverNote seems spectacularly pointless to me, I have a couple of clients who use it so I oblige them but I would never use it of my own volition.
It all just feels like another instance of a market being created for some pointless redundant shite that will mostly be used to mine data for the GRU or whomever.
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NMM to Jimmy Breslin.
I don't think I could think of a more quintessentially NYC NYC reporter if I tried.
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O50I90Dd0D0
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40 seems right to me. It seems like a non-issue created by non-products for an invented market.
more quintessentially NYC NYC reporter
Murray Kempton? But I'm sorry to hear about Jimmy.
I have that thought about social media. The number of different products to share text and pictures with your friends that the same people all use baffles me.
44 Yeah, I'd thought of Murray Kempton; when I was younger I was crazy about Murray Kempton's writing in a way I was never about Breslin. No one wrote like Kempton.
He had a piece about getting mugged when he had no money on him and apologizing to the muggers that was wonderful.
I still just use word processors
The reason there are a million note-taking apps is that people have strong and differing opinions about how to organize their information. Evernote's privacy policy leaves a lot to be desired, but I use it for everything, like: saving entire web pages with useful info (so that I don't have to worry about linkrot, and to label them to make them easier to find than re-googling); taking a picture of a bottle of wine that I'd like to remember; collecting notes on helpful techniques at work. The last of these I could do with a word processor, but the first two, not so much. And so on. People just use them very differently.
Anyway, two different styles of left-wing New Yorkiness -- Catholic working class versus overeducated intellectual. They were both great.
The other useful thing about "digital note-taking apps", at least cloud-backed one, is that it's sensible to treat electronic devices, laptops and mobiles alike, as failure-prone, losable, and nigh-disposable. Anything that defaults to keeping your data somewhere other than your own device protects you against the most likely cause of loss.
The other useful thing about "digital note-taking apps", at least cloud-backed one, is that it's sensible to treat electronic devices, laptops and mobiles alike, as failure-prone, losable, and nigh-disposable. Anything that defaults to keeping your data somewhere other than your own device protects you against the most likely cause of loss.
I've been wondering about Evernote/OneNote recently, too. I don't like the idea of handing all of my info to MS (or to Evernote), but I really really want to be able to just take pictures of all the bills and important pieces of mail we get, and have them auto-OCRed into a searchable database. (And other pictures, too, like Ogged says -- but the main thing is being able to throw out all paper.) Anyway, both Evernote & OneNote seem like they would do this, but I wish there were a good self-hosted version that didn't require handing everything to MS (or paying Evernote).
I really really want to be able to just take pictures of all the bills and important pieces of mail we get
This speaks to a different reality from the one in which I live. Obviously, people should do whatever they find most congenial, but in my reality, taking pictures of bills is just redundant.
On some level I'm glad that I'm becoming old enough that I don't have to accommodate this new reality. When I had a fender-bender a couple of years ago, the other party wanted to take a picture of my auto insurance card, rather than just write down the information. Huh. I had to explain that she must employ an actual paper and pen, and I would do that for her if needed.
You objected to her having a picture of your insurance card, because you thought there was some negative use she could make of the picture that she couldn't make of the number from it? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I can't think offhand of how it would work.
48, 51: Okay, but... why exactly in this day and age would people actually want to do all their data management through one app, or one site in the cloud? If that's what Digital Note-Taking apps are designed to be then I get what's in it for them. I don't get what's in it for me. I can already save all the content on a website, I can even do it "to the cloud" if for some reason that would appeal to me; I can already take and store photos; I can already take notes and do normal writing things. Why would I want to do all of that through the same app, when most of what that accomplishes--at minimal gain in functionality, if that--is to concentrate all my activity through one portal and make vital data about me even easier for malignant parties to steal?
No, no. It was that it took me completely by surprise, as I'd already written out my information to hand to her. And that I have a dumb phone which doesn't take pictures.
It's stuck with me as a moment in which I realized how much things have changed for the younger set.
I just ruminate from time to time on whether people have become incapable of conducting their lives without these technological advances. It's my age speaking. I don't say that I think things were better back when; it's more that we did manage to do things, and I wondered about that woman's immediate instinct.
Castock in 56 is talking about something I ingrained a long time (decades) ago, back when people had a choice between buying separate stereo components -- a turntable, a tape player, a receiver -- or buying an all-in-one unit. It was best to avoid the latter, so if the thing crapped out, it was all crapped out; whereas if the tape player died, you could replace just that part.
Some still say that buying a car with actually hand-cranked roll-down windows is preferable to automatic everything. Some consider that buying a laptop -- the modern-day version of an all-in-one unit -- isn't best for the long term.
This is fairly old school thinking at this point, I suspect.
I love the ease of taking photos in situations like 54. Or sending someone to the grocery store w a photo of the exact item that you just ran out of.
I've used evernote since version 1, in, I think, the late nineties, and can say with complete confidence that it's gone downhill since v2, which was the last pre-cloud one.
This experience does lead me to one solid conclusion, which is that the longer you use that sort of program the more useful it becomes. In my business, the ability to look up notes on conversations, phone calls, emails and so forth, when they are all indexed and the archive goes back ten or fiften years is wonderful for answering in accurate detail the question "Why is this lying bastard lying to me."
When it started, Evernote was a way to store and retrieve tagged snippets of information, using a hierarchical tagging system, and this made it absolutely fantastic for such things as taking notes of conferences, which could then be sorted either by speaker, by topic, or by time.
In those days, it was paid for, although as an IT journalist I got it free, which coloured my opinions. Since then it has acquired many more ways to suck in information than simply typing in notes or clipping and caching web pages, which was a hugely useful service: it will save pdfs, photographs, and sound recordings; but much of this information is about the user too, and it all has to go into the cloud. At the same time, the lovely complex tagging system has been replaced by a more or less flat search, which is far less useful.
I still used it for a long time as a way to save web clippings, but it got increasingly bloated with each new release, and I worried more and more about dependence on a single company to keep so much of my information, even if it was secure. The program I had used before (Ecco Pro) was totally destroyed after the company that made it was brought up, and a whole lot of valuable information was lost that way.
So I have switched to pinboard for web clippings. Not perfect, but quick and I think reliable.
Meeting notes I now store in onenote, partly because of the eerie efficiency with which it deciphers my handwriting when I don't type; much because when you make notes on an audio interview it will jump to the relevant point in the recording when you click on the text later.
PDFs would go into zotero were it not for a stupid fuckup with the work system; for the moment they are still quite often dumped into evernote.
I don't find the cloud aspects of microsoft too disturbing. Since I am not prepared to roll my own cloud server, I'm going to have to use someone else's, and MS is big enough to stand up to almost any government. It is going to hang around for the rest of my life, and its business model is still based on selling software or services to customers, not on selling users to advertisers.
sorry. Once I start talking about software it's hard to stop
While we're bitching about tech-
- I paid for a dropbox subscription to back up our phone camera rolls while we're travelling. Why the hell are iPhone photos all rotated when saved as files when not imported to iPhoto? Is it just another fuck you from Apple?
- Our 7 year old iMac is getting rather slow, and the hard drive is quite full with all of our digital photos from forever (since we switched to digital cameras, ~2002.) So I looked up new mac desktops and the HDD space is no more than they were selling 7 years ago, they're just solid state or superdrive or whatever. I really don't want to fragment our photo library or start messing with external drives but I don't see any other solution besides paying for a lot of cloud storage, which is probably what Apple wants with iCloud.
Perhaps the time has come to abandon Apple.
Nathan Williams point in 52 is also very important. The ease with which I can pick up cloud based information from any device does make it hugely more useful.
In general, I think it's too late to worry about privacy from governments. Although I run adblockers and similar defences against spam I think that anyone who wants to find you badly enough will do so if you have any significant online presence. There is a terrifying site showing off MS's visual recognition capacities (I don't doubt the other giants can do the same). If those services are being sold in bulk to anyone who wants them, anyone with their photograph online can be hunted through the crowd.
Why the hell are iPhone photos all rotated
Rotation metadata for images is a clusterfuck. Four years old, but I'm willing to bet that the situation hasn't gotten better.
" I think that anyone who wants to find you badly enough will do so if you have any significant online presence. "
No doubt that is so, but I'd prefer to think I can make it at least a marginal challenge for them to steal every particular about my life and work. Let alone for some random troll or script kiddie to do so.
Spideroak is working on an end-to-end encrypted Evernote clone. Will be interested to see what they manage.
Some still say that buying a car with actually hand-cranked roll-down windows is preferable to automatic everything.
People make fun of my hand-cranked car windows, but I fucking love them. Being able to roll down the window without having the car turned on is a huge feature.
If your car ends up in deep water hand cranked windows can save your life.
If those services are being sold in bulk to anyone who wants them, anyone with their photograph online can be hunted through the crowd.
It's built into Google photos.
62.2 - What's your aversion to external hard drives? They're really not much faff and indeed perfect for the sort of situation you describe (a NAS would probably be overkill). Also, consider this an opportunity to upgrade your OS hard drive to an SSD. They're so much faster than magnetic drives it's just about the single most cost-effective upgrade you can do these days unless you're woefully under-RAMed.
Okay, but... why exactly in this day and age would people actually want to do all their data management through one app, or one site in the cloud?
Speaking as an Evernote and OneNote user (not in any power-user kind of way), it's by no means all my data management, but it does make wrangling various data sources a lot easier and, crucially, makes them accessible and searchable everywhere. When I was house hunting, it was the easiest way to organise web clippings, photos of interiors, photos of estate agent windows, typed notes etc. It's where I store all my notes on and images of new wines/beers I discover.
I'd agree with NW that Evernote has got too big for its own boots, and OneNote isn't particularly user friendly (also, if you're on a modern Windows OS, make sure you're using the desktop version, not the cut-down UWP version). But they're still extremely useful. I saw an article the other day recommending Bear as a stripped down Evernote replacement, but I think it's iOS/Mac only.
71- as far as I can tell it messes up how your pictures are imported and/or metadata (see comment about rotation). I could certainly export all the pictures on NAS or a hard drive, since that's essentially what I have on Dropbox for the last year of photos, but I don't know how to re-point iPhoto to an external drive while keeping the photo library intact. I suppose there's probably a procedure described somewhere for how to do so.
Like so. in fact it was the google summary answer or whatever so I could have asked some dumb assistant program and it would have come up with the answer.
I've played with Bear. It is OK.
I do a huge amount of note-taking at work. I have no great system, sadly. I write most of my notes with a pen* but anything I need to share with others ends up as a Google Do if I am not trying to inline code; if the target audience is non-technical; or if I want people to collaborate. Or it ends up as a Gist on Github, if I do want to inline code, and where it's more me sharing info with other people.
* and have super specific pen and paper nerd preferences.
re: 32
That's one of the things I dislike greatly about the later Bourne movies, and prefer strongly about the Liman directed one. Although I otherwise like the Greengrass ones a lot.
All that fast cutting in fight scenes ends up just making a mess out of them, and while sometimes the first person point of view (or close-in second person point of view) heightens the excitement, it often just feels like a lazy way to shoot a fight scene without really having to make the effort.
It's something that the cartoon-ish, but fun, fight scenes in the first couple of Transporter movies gets right. You might not want to go full 'Statham' for the aesthetic of the Bourne movies, but there's something undeniably exciting about seeing that level of athleticism on display.
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Any one have any idea how long laudanum will last? Because our collection has a couple of 19th century medicine chests and one of them has a sealed and still full bottle of laudanum in there. There's a bottle in the other chest but that one looks used/evaporated. I'm surprised they let it in the country but they may not have known what it is and it's been part of the collection for at least 20 maybe even 30 or more years.
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73/4 just screams "Get a fucking Samsung!" at me. WTActualF?
If Crank has taught us anything, it's that if you're going to go Statham at all, you always go full Statham.
I have a Samsung TV but it's not helping with my photo library.
76.1 Disagree. I think Greengrass cut to wide shots often enough for the viewer to keep track of what was going on (which his host of imitators often don't do). Even so I agree the shaking was excessive, especially in the long shots. The Bournes are among my favorite things ever, and I think the deliberate in your face shakiness is a big part of what made them work (the 2nd, shakiest, one is my favorite).
I guess this is the right thread to mention:
Notepad++ 7.3.3 bug-fixs & enhancements:What a fucking world.
1. Fix CIA Hacking Notepad++ issue (https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_26968090.html).
2. Fix mouse wheel to task list scroll crash bug.
[etc]
re: 81
I like the aesthetic of the Greengrass movies, and some of the action scenes -- the chases, in particular -- work incredibly well with that whole approach. But, for me, some of the fight scenes sort of 'evaporate' and I'd like more of the wide shot stuff.
83: fair enough. I think it's a different aesthetic to choose. The directors of Wick explicitly chose the wide and steady shots because they showcase the performance at the center(which is great). But in showcasing the performance you force the audience to be aware that it's a performance, and so they have to suspend disbelief more. Whereas the whole philosophy of the Bournes was maximum realism, and I think that was the core of what made them work.
OMG, you guys. I just started using One Note and I fucking love it. While it could never rival Excel in my affections, it may be that Microsoft did something else right (for the way my brain works).
I found this video helpful, though her breathlessness is over the top.
Bear looks nice but I've got a Mac laptop, a Windows desktop, and an android phone, so it's no good to me.
Evernote and one note really shine at projects like house hunting, as pointed out by ginger yellow
I run owncloud* at home and it was relatively straightforward to install from linux packages, but I waited until I was pretty comfortable with linux packages to install it. I don't run it on the outside internet because I'm not confident I know enough to keep that secure. At home it just works with machines on the same network. So the cost of not using a cloud service for some data is some things sync only at home.
Or would be, except I already had been using SpiderOak for years when I tried owncloud and still use it.
*I may move to nextcloud because it wouldn't be open source if a project didn't split up at some point.
<nerdier>The one thing that evernote did wonderfully was to clip content from paywalled sites -- legitimately, I hastento add. But pinboard will only save as a note the content you have selected. Later it goes back and caches the whole page, but only if it is not password protected.
OneNote will also clip whole pages and in some ways more intelligently, but it is much harder to get an overview of the results than it is in evernote, or so I find. Less of an intuitive tagging and searching system, too. Once a week I need to see all clips tagged xxx that are less than 6 days old and it is surprising how difficult it is to set that up as a search in some places</nerdier>