Guo Pei photo dump

If I was 10 years old again, I would have felt reverence, a sense of piety at being at the foot of an all-powerful being even if it was a mere statue, its glassy eyes looking straight ahead as if it didn’t deign to look down at me, a mere child (this was how I felt every time we went to Church).

But I’ve grown older and while not necessarily distant from the religion that I grew up with (I still fervently say my Hail Marys every night before I go to sleep), I have enough wisdom now I think to see through the pageantry and be able to appreciate what it really is - just very pretty, ornate old stuff.

Guo Pei’s creations have the inertness of Catholic religious statues; you’re only ever inspired if you’re a believer. Because outside of that, would anyone really imagine themselves teetering on 6-inch platforms passing off as footwear and walking on them while dragging a 25-kilogram gown?

But Rihanna actually did and this is why haute couture is hardly ever the thing you aspire or pray for in life; let the Gods (and pop stars) have them instead.

Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培 ：时装之幻梦Guo Pei: Fashion, Art, Fantasy 郭培 ：时装之幻梦 is currently showing at the Auckland Art Gallery from December 2023 to May 2024.

Weekday night at the movies

We had to wait till after the siren sounded.

And then we had to wait a couple more minutes ‘just to be sure’ my sister said.

Sure I said trying inwardly to match her nonchalance, but five uneventful visits in, I still couldn’t shake off the feeling of dread that sat at the pit of my stomach alongside the fried chicken we had for dinner (I had way too much). My nephew who was visiting for the first time, didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

He had announced during dinner that he was staying overnight in the city the next day at a friend’s and automatically raising protests from his parents as if he was 12 all over again. But it’s obviously way safer in the city, he argued.

To be honest, he may be 15 years older, but he still acted 12 most of the time. He had brought all his toys as he was always inclined to do on these trips and avoided any kind of meaningful family participation with the exception of meals.

He was in the lounge now with his console and playing a game through the large screen where he was a lost explorer blasting his way through a horde of alien monsters.

The game was so loud that every blast made me wince.

I think I said can we leave now a couple of times, annoyance creeping into my voice until finally, everyone trudged out, donning jackets and putting on boots.

A fog had descended and everything did look like an ordinary winter’s night, a Monday at that with school out. I caught my niece standing at the side of the road doing a small dance and I barked at her to get into the car.

When They first arrived, in the 1st spate of attacks that caught everyone by surprise, a story went around that instead of running and hiding, you could do small, repetitious movements and it would trick Them to think you weren’t, well, human. It spread like wildfire on social media but it was a cruel lie. People who believed it died in the thousands.

The cinema was a short 5-minute drive away. During the day, we could have walked instead but of course..

It looked deserted from the outside, but once we were in, I realised we were looking through digital screens that showed the external visual of an empty building. There were at least a dozen people- mostly kids- inside who like us, were booked for the 8pm showing. Suddenly, I felt a surge of nostalgia -some things never change- like the smell of buttery popcorn, the nervous teen tasked with manning the till, and several arcade-styled games scattered all over the small lobby.

My nephew plonked himself of course on the Tekken console while my niece begged her dad to spend a couple of dollars on the claw machine.

They were readying the theatre and we had minutes to kill. I bought a bag of Skittles and my sister got herself an ice cream cone. We made small talk and several times I glanced outside my mind saying what if, what if, but could only see my darkened reflection on the thick bullet and shatterproof glass.

And then the usher told us to go inside and the kids shuffled in first and I thought, have they even seen the previous movies to this sequel? Movies that were even older than their parents who were probably in their mid to late 30s??

There was a short intermission and then Harrison Ford came onto the screen in his prime at 40, ageless and virile. Turns out that if you were looking for immortality, all you needed was a legendary career, box office clout and the tacit consent of your estate to allow you to ‘act’ indefinitely 10 years on after you’ve died.

Dr. Henry Walton ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr. promised a last adventure way back in 23, but promises are made to be broken in the name of entertainment. First, there was a dial, then there was an artifact from the Trojan War, and now, a gate that opened both space and time.

The gate opened a ‘fissure’ in time and at the mention of the word, a kid screamed ‘anal fissure’ raising howls from their group which drew hushing from the adults.

Indy’s conflict was familiar; family was worth more than all the powers promised by any ancient artifact, and they had to make that decision now before the gate closed completely. And of course, the movie wants you to believe that they won’t make it, with the gate closing ever so slowly, sparks flying, making all sorts of racket when the lights go off in the cinema, as the red panic light came on.

Surprisingly no one actually screams. Mama, my niece called out, panic and fear in her voice, but my sister was seated several seats away and automatically, I took my niece’s hand and reassure her that everything was going to be alright. Elevator music played and then the usher’s voice comes through on the PA. The movie would be back on in five minutes; that it was a false alarm; that the authorities were checking just to be sure. That we all had to wait a couple of minutes after the movie to exit the cinema and get into our cars.

It seemed like forever and I was trying really hard not to look in the direction of the hallway, to imagine Them crashing through the glass, Their impossibly sharp claws and tentacles slashing and cutting everything within striking distance, as they made their way to a theater full of screaming people with no chance of escape…

Mercifully, the movie went back on, and to be honest, I couldn’t really remember how it indeed. I guess I would just have to wait till it drops on the streaming platforms to see what adventure Indiana Jones will be up to next.

I’m here, I’m here…catch me if you can

On my 'shelf'

(from the NY Times review) In Törzs’s world, books of magic, all written in human blood, can do incredible things when someone feeds them a drop of blood and reads them aloud. Abe Kalotay collected these books to protect them from falling into the wrong hands, and raised his daughters, Joanna and Esther, as stewards of a beautiful and dangerous library that had to be kept hidden at all costs; in Esther’s infancy, her mother was murdered by powerful people who wanted the books.

A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them.

Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us―and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.

Currently reading: Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

I’ve had multiple dreams with varying contexts, but essentially all the dreams are in the same location.

A dark path into woodland with faint, fog-swathed light at the end of it. Winding, craggy paths. An abandoned villa with red adobe brick. A hill with a view.

We always look for second chances in life, but the ‘fantasy’ in this book is about finding something better- a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even infinite chance. But this is not Marvel- you won’t find a version of yourself in the multi-verse and swap jokes about wanting to compare genitalia just to see if they’re the same.

But who knows because I’m just in the middle of it and wondering why a major character who dies in the earlier chapters is still alive.

But the science is titillatingly plausible; ironically, I checked it with chatGPT and it came up with the same theoretical assumptions, hmmmm. Scarier still is the fact that AI plays a major role in the book (of course it does).

What's On

The 'ugh' list

  1. Lip readers

  2. ‘Righteous’ people calling out Lea Michele

  3. The far-right

  4. Real-estate people on TikTok

  5. ‘Experts’ on TikTok

  6. Under-seasoned food (like this breakfast platter I had recently at Bird on a Wire)

  7. Any kind of vegetable that is 2x its normal price

  8. Fast-fashion

  9. Summer fashion (you don’t need it- what you need is a perfect body)

  10. House of the Dragon (boring, boring, boring)

Twister is on Netflix

I have strange viewing habits. I have a whole bunch of movies that I love, but I don’t watch them again in their entirety. I skip to the (good) parts I want and call it a day. In this day and age of soooo many things to watch and only 24 hours in your day, you only have so many hours to spare so this is actually being smart about it.

One of my favourite films of all time from the 90s - Twister - is available for viewing on Netflix.

Here are my favourite bits from the film- yup, the parts where I skipped to.

Both Sides Now

I watched the Apple TV + film Coda the other day and I cried and cried.

It also made me obsessed with the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now, which is the song highlight of the film that deals with a young girl- the only one who could hear in a hearing-impaired family- who loved singing. Don’t mind some familiar plot elements; the heart of this film is anchored by incredible performances by a cast who are actual deaf actors (including Oscar winner Marlee Matlin).

The movie today got Oscar nods for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for deaf actor Troy Kotsure)

Boxing Day haul

There’s only one place for the ultimate Boxing Day shopping spree- Smith & Caughey’s. One of the oldest surviving retail businesses in New Zealand, it was established in 1880 by Ulster-born Marianne Smith as a drapers and millinery shop and is the oldest-surviving department store in Auckland.

And also the place for the good stuff.

Here’s what we dropped serious coin on (if we had the money and a tacky apartment).

Saturday night

Streaming is so pervasive, that sometimes I don’t finish what I’m watching and end up doing something mundane instead like laundry, a bit of work, cleaning the bathroom or planning meals. And then I realise that none of that is mundane- but stuck in bed binging on Netflix is. I feel that if I settle in, I’ll be trapped. It’s like cocaine for the eyes.

There’s a shit load of new movies and I’m not sure I’ll end up watching all of them, but here’s my list both current and upcoming:

Anything with Akwafina!

Anything with Halle Barry!

Anything with Dev Patel!

Hated the book, loved the series

If you want to know how a waking nightmare feels like, or how you want to slide your tender thumb across a sharp Japanese knife, watch this

ANYTHING WITH SANDY!

KFC Saturday & Aneesha finds a weapon that could kill the aliens

We finally gave in.

Too blah to cook. I had to wake up early to recreate the goddamned corrupted 3D file which was easier the 2nd time around because now I knew where all the elements went in. And I used objects in actual scale which didn’t make any difference as I belived it would, but shaved off heaps of time in scaling them down to size.

But the program did become noticeably slower as I added more and more objects into the 3D space and I was thinking, if I only had the new MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip, mmmmm ($6,054!).

So it’s episode 6 already in Apple TV + Invasion and the slowness - while it’s done really well mostly- is making me ask a lot of questions with no answers in sight. Like what happened to Sam Neil’s retired sheriff character way back in episode one?? Is he dead or not? If you remember, he was digging around the strange crop circle in a farmer’s field when the aliens somehow ‘stabbed’ him with something. The last shot is of him somewhat looking either stunned or dramatically dead with his eyes open. But judging by how a slew of soldier’s bodies were shown mangled and mutilated in episode 6, there’s still hope that Sam was merely temporarily incapacitated. But it’s strange that it’s this far into the series and that story arc has been totally abandoned.

Going back to Aneesha, she manages to go back to the house and arrives to find it barricaded against something. Her family and the couple who took their family in Patrick and Kelly, are hiding in the attic and this is expectedly where the friendly, sympathetic atmosphere evaporates as everyone panics.

Aneesha declares that they were leaving, and this is where everything goes south; the daughter falls through the attic floor and Aneesha follows to rescue her. The noise alerts the alien, and we see for the 1st time what it looks like- a sort of octopus with tentacles and bristling, camouflage-like skin. Kelly falls through the same underlay flooring, but manages to hold on- but the alien gets her as Patrick desperately tries to hoist his wife up.

Aneesha and Ahmed make it downstairs but Ahmed is attacked while trying to move the furniture they used to barricade the door. Aneesha and the kids escape through a window in the basement and try to make a run for it using Patrick and Kelly’s car. But the alien rams itself through the windshield and takes its time to eat/kill/spit at Aneesha with its multi-layered mouth. Aneesha shoots it (no use), then rams a stick-thingy into its mouth (no use), then throws what looks like a phone-book at it (no use), before finding the weird, stone-age like spear flint that Luke had found and stabs the thing with it- success!

My theory is that while conventional weapons can’t kill it, material from their world can- like the way Kryptonite affects Superman. Because why would it be a special kind of weapon?? It doesn’t look like one and was most likely a shard of something that crashed/exploded when the Malik’s neighbourhood was attacked in episode 2.

The philandering Ahmed survives the attack after all and limps out of the house. Aneesha is relieved to see him, but had he not survived, she would have moved on, but I guess when everyone you know is dying around you, it’s probably comforting to have familiar people around. At this point, whatever they’ve done to you pales in comparison to the life and death struggle you all face.