I recently revisited one of my favorite movies, Floating Weeds, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, one of only four movies he shot in color. It's otherwise said to be typical of the Ozu style. I want to talk about it because its philosophy and purpose as a movie is very rare. I'm sure there are would-be Ozus out there today. But even a seemingly simple movie like Floating Weeds is a group project that takes a big crew of people and significant financial investment to make, and there doesn't seem to be much motivation for studios to invest in this kind of work. And that's unfortunate for me because it's my favorite kind of movie.

The story is very simple. It's a kind of melodrama about a washed-up kabuki troupe taking up a summer residency in a small seaside town; there the aging head of the troupe reconnects with a long-ago mistress and his secret adolescent son, causing deep insult to his current girlfriend and business partner in the troupe. But the story is not really the point. Ozu worked within a set of self-imposed creative constraints that emphasized visual composition and allowing scenes to play out in real time over narrative urgency, dramatic tension, or even shot-to-shot continuity. In an Ozu movie, the camera remains still in every shot. There are no pans, zooms, wipes, or fades. No time is understood to pass during cuts within a scene; if someone is climbing a flight of stairs, it takes a realistic amount of time for then to do it even if it means there are a few seconds where they've walked off-screen and there's no other action to look at. When time is understood to pass between scenes, they are often separated by a couple of unpopulated location shots—a mosquito coil burning in an empty room, a banner flapping in the breeze, and so on—which bookend narrative moments like the falling and rising of a curtain on a stage as the backdrop and actors are exchanged. The Criterion Collection commissioned an audio commentary on the movie from critic Roger Ebert, who explains that Ozu believed that every single shot of the movie should be composed like a compelling photograph, to the point that he would manually rearrange objects on screen between shots so they would remain geometrically harmonious from different angles, with no regard for the continuity of their placement within the scene. This was the first thing I noticed when I watched Floating Weeds for the first time—not that I was keeping track of these discontinuities, but I noticed that any given frame of the movie was a great photograph.

Somehow, within all these constraints, and without a lot of Hollywood conventions that Ozu studied but rejected in his own work, like the "180 degree rule" or a clear narrative purpose for every moment, the movie tells its story with total clarity. The movie remains interesting, engaging, and beautiful without ever becoming tense or exciting. Ebert's commentary explains this, and basically everything else I noticed and loved about the movie, much more eloquently in his commentary:

Quote:I've seen Floating Weeds lots of times over the last fifteen or twenty years. I don't grow tired of it because its mood lulls me and brings me into a reverie in which I contemplate the lives of the characters and the truth that underlies them about all human life. I'm not waiting for big climactic moments or sensational shots. I'm existing in time and space with other people.

Been trying to figure out the best way to get what I want that's also affordable for either upgrading my current desktop or building a new PC. It's quite old, from about 2015, but has held up fairly nicely. However, there are things I want to do that it just doesn't have the power or capacity for. 

To start, here are my current specs: 
Processor: Intel Core i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz 3.60 GHz
Ram: 16.0 GB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
Motherboard: MSI H81M-E33 (MS-7817)
OS: Windows 10

My current problems are: 
-Need more RAM to do things like AI processing. For what I want, supposedly at least 64 GB would be acceptable. I also do wish to go back to more heavy-duty computer gaming. It's also possible I may want to putz around with stuff like the latest Unreal Engine. 

-Motherboard is kiiiiiinda old. It still has a JCOM1 port and I don't have any spare JUSB port available to connect the Bluetooth from my Wi-Fi 6 AX200 card. I'd like a motherboard with a total of 4 JUSB slots. I want to add an internal SD card reader in addition to adding the Bluetooth. But my motherboard currently only has two JUSB ports. I tried to use a splitter for the Bluetooth from the Wi-Fi 6 AX200 card, but my computer did not respond well to the use of the splitter - it could not identify it correctly and thus it was rendered useless. This has happened with three different types of splitters already.

-Cannot use a Bluetooth dongle either because for some reason they don't work well with my PC and just ultimately crashes the PC when I restart or shut down. 

-In general, the computer cannot seem to handle the more recent high-speed flash drives (such as PNY Pro Elite USB 3.2) and external devices. I've wanted to use hard drive readers for the longest time but every damn time I use them on my computer they are unreadable. I have returned (no joke) like 4 different types of hard drive readers. My computer either doesn't recognize the device or uses it for 2 minutes, stops working, and then crashes the computer when I restart or shut down. Keep in mind for these situations I have already exhausted all efforts at making sure "the latest driver is installed", so I figured the issue is simply my motherboard being outdated to handle these devices.
 
-Lastly, I maybe want a couple more SATA ports to add stuff. I currently have 4 (main drive, two extra drives, CD drive). Not necessary though but at least 4 to keep what I have. 

All this being said, I figured my needs are much more particular now compared to before, since there are specific things I want. The problem is figuring out if I can make affordable adjustments but there's a question of compatibility with what I already have (i.e. could I still use the same RAM cards I have and just add them plus a new one to the new motherboard?).
I drafted up a new computer based on what I want in newegg, and the total came up to a little over 3k  So. Womp. I was playing around with a couple really old computers and found out the hard way that you can't simply switch hard drives from one computer to another if the new computer has a vastly updated motherboard compared to the old computer. Windows needed to be reactivated. I was putzing around with old Windows XP computers and did not have the product key to reactivate, so that whole idea was shot. Not sure if that would be much of an issue though with Windows 10?

Look, I'm not saying that this isn't an awesome vision of perfect parenting, but what is up with comics like this? I'm definitely not advocating for traumatizing children, but this seems like a call-out of parents with less patience than a saint (so, most of them).

   

EDIT: This is a looped GIF of Musk doing the salute, which I recommend as a reaction GIF for when your MAGA grandma invites you over for Easter, Guy Fawkes Day, etc for the next 4 years. I mean, she can't get upset, right? She SAID it's just a "WAVE".

Adding this for general use, sorry I couldn't hide it behind a tag (yet)
   

what I2P protocols are the cool kids using these days?

preferably one that isn't full of horrible crime images.

i know there's Zeronet, Tor/onion protocol, Freenet, etc. just not sure what is popular now.

i'm going to suggest some plugins i think might be cool to have. some i might do anyway, but certainly interested in hearing what others might like.

• shoutbox (basically a real-time chat)
  
• ability to use @ to tag people (this seems like a great one to me)
  
• alerting system (this can integrate with @ tagging)
  
• view unread posts (basically a one-stop "see all new posts since my last visit" page)
  
• ad manager (the idea here would be that we all advertise our own stuff, i would NOT be selling ad space to outsiders)
  
• private message log -- I WILL NOT INSTALL THIS. I actually wanted to call this out specifically. there's a plugin that will allow me to view people's PMs. while i could technically already do that by dumping the database, you can have my public promise right here that i will not be doing that. in fact i will find a way to expire PMs after a length of time so there's no long-term record of them.
  
• avatar gallery (some basic avatars you can choose from so you don't have to upload one or use the boring default)
  
• tag system (at least one person asked for this and i confirmed it can be done)
  
• blog system?
  
• newsletter system
  
• private message reporting (this seems like a good idea in case of abuse)
  
• minify (this reduces bandwidth usage)
  
• spoiler code (hell yeah)
  
• arcade? that's neat
  
• firewall (if it does what it says it will be very useful)
  
• 2 factor auth (another good idea)
  
• fast quote (select desired text, click button, quoted!)
  
• wiki (dunno what we'd use it for but, maybe?)
  
• activity bar (a little chart on your postbit showing how active you are; just for fun)
  
• todo list (probably more for me than anything)
  
• PM pruner and DB optimizer (exactly what i was looking for!)
  
• Admin CP honeypot (another security measure)
  
• image resizer
  
• it's complicated (relationship manager, lol)
  
• politics tagger/hider (this allows posts marked as "political" to be hidden by users who don't want to see them; this would be a merciful option for some, maybe)
  

• courtesy edit time (this gives you a grace period to edit a post during which no "edited by" notice will appear. good for cases where you notice a typo right after you post.)
  
• MyDropzone (improved attachment handler)
  
• drafts autosave (autosave your draft posts/replies so you can come back to them later)
  
• hide content (allows you to hide content with "hide" tags)
  
• email admin on registration (just useful for me)
  
• PWA+AMP (seems a plugin can do this? will try it)
  
• verify new posts (warn you if a thread has new replies while you are replying)
  
• RSS feeds (for anyone who wants those)
  
• link anonymizer (anonymizes outgoing links)
  
• turn order (for RP threads)
  
• postbit dice (dice roller for RP threads)
  
• hovercards (show user profiles while hovering over their names)
  
• MyAchievements (achievement system, i dunno, might be fun)
  
• NewPoints (bunch of plugins for this, a points ecosystem; also for fun, not sure about a practical application)
  

HI INTERNET PEOPLE!!!!! I may or my not want to see other people post cool things about space here. Please info dump about new things too!! I'd be interested to hear :O easy stuff, complex stuff, new discoveries, old news, whatever :O

Here are some photos I took too :3

I'll start:
The timescape theory for dark energy is something I thought was interesting!

Okay, so...!!
1: the universe is expanding, but the expansion is accelerating, and we do NOT know why.
2: the universe's structure is like a big stringy web? idk go look up videos of the cosmic web and simulations of the universe, it's hard to describe ;-;

so the timescape hypothesis suggested that because the giant voids in between whatever the dense parts are called, expand faster and faster, and so universal expansion would be primarity because of them. It's thought that voids have way less gravitational influence, so maybe as the dense parts get denser, they experience time slower as they fall into their own gravitational well (remember relativity and stuff), while the voids keep expanding at the normal rate. So from OUR point of view, as we keep falling in and slowing down, these voids look like they're expanding faster and faster.

Claiming "the density fluctuations are actually significant enough to cause a universal acceleration in expansion" unfortunately disagrees with one of the core assumptions of our current best model of the universe, Lambda-CDM, so disproving it would require some stellar evidence ;-;

BIG "unfortunately" is that the study that claimed to, I think in part, validate the timescape model did use data that's not accurate quite yet. And lots more other types of evidence more strongly supports Lambda-CDM that we haven't tested with Timescape. Not ONLY that, but the time difference between superclusters and supervoids is only be thousands of years, but timescape is suggesting it would have to be billions! It's sad though, cause timescape theory sounds so elegant!

But hey, we gotta disprove wrong things to get to the right things, so we shall see how things play out as more research comes in!

Oh man, you have no idea how excited I am for this! Just like the old days. I used to run the caption contests in a writing forum I used to be a part of. 

Everyone submits one (just one) funny caption to go with the picture that I post. You have roughly one week to post before a winner is chosen.

I'll be the sole judge for now. Later, when we have enough people engaged, the winner will be decided by which post gets the most likes.

First place gets 3 points. 

Two runner-ups each get 1 point.

In some variations, the winner of the round gets to choose the next picture and be the judge. Again, being that the forum is fairly new, I'll be choosing the pictures for a while.

So without further ado, here is our inaugural picture for our first caption contest!