With no internet at my house, my time is split between watching movies, reading books, and searching for jobs at the cafe.

Back in the habit of sleeping when the sun comes up and waking up when it’s setting. I’d make a great night watchman in Ming Dynasty Nanjing.

Job Search

I applied for a bunch of jobs yesterday and now understand the old saying of “When you don’t have a job, applying for jobs is your job.” In today’s age of Indeed and digital job application platforms, the whole process takes a long time. I had to make sure my resume was air-tight in two languages, craft CVs fit for the jobs I’m applying for, then sign up on each site with a new account. This includes entering in information like my name, past jobs/education, and extracurriculars over and over again in input boxes even though it’s already in my resume.

My first phone interview offer came in and I’ll be calling them tonight to schedule the interview for next week. This is the part where I don’t feel so bad about being a vampire now since I’m more aligned with the Wisconsin timezone – Waking up at 4pm and sleeping at 5am in Nanjing puts me at 2am-3pm Central time.

This job’s requirements include Java, Spring, Hibernate, Redis, Freemaker, and others. While I have worked with Java in some capacity over the years, I’ll need to research the other technologies mentioned. To do this I’m reading books that contain a subset of these technologies and show how some of them work together.

I’d much prefer to work with more modern solutions like Go, Ruby on Rails, Python, etc. but so it goes. Java and C++ are old tech but still used for a reason.

Movies

Over the past couple days I’ve been watching a lot of movies. Since I don’t have internet at home and the cafe I frequent closes at around 10pm, I’ll download a slew and watch some at home. The goal right now is to watch mostly movies that I missed in 2017 when I was in America, and move towards movies from 2018 I missed while here in Nanjing.

Kuso (2017) 🔗

Directed by one of my favorite musicians Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) and featuring another I like Busdriver (Regan Farquhar), this movie is full of talent that I’ve loved for music but make their way into film.

Kuso is a Japanese word that means “shit” both literally and as something that’s outrageous or poor quality. This describes the movie well, but it’s very thoughtfully made and I was constantly wondering what the actors were thinking as they heard about the scenes they would play in and then acted them.

It’s incomprehensible. It’s a series of four stories and features vulgar/scatological/absurd/psychedllic imagery. It’s hard for me to find much meaning but it was a fun ride. I appreciated the visuals and effects much more than the stories. Busdriver’s introduction and conclusion songs were clever and well-performed, and I can’t wait to see Flying Lotus make a film that’s more comprehensible.

Goodtime (2017) 🔗

A fast-paced thriller about a man trying to get his brother out of jail after committing a bank robbery. I hardly recognized Robert Pattinson who plays the main character. The fast-paced nature of the movie reminded me of a lot of those crazy nights with friends where we would drink in one bar and end up in hijinks all over the city with random strangers. My favorite scenes were the amusement park and the aftermath there as well as the scene where Connie kisses Crystal to distract her from his mug shot on the news. The score was full of that synthwavey goodness that fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly. It reminded me a lot of Trainspotting.

Sidenote: Two years ago I was trying to use a bottle full of liquid LSD as a plot device which brings together three characters in a story I was writing with no success. This movie did it first!

La Chinoise (1967) 🔗

A group of young Maoists in a French apartment, directed by Godard. The filming style is like of a documentary, but the plot is fictional and based on a book by Dostoyevsky. It’s a bit slow, but that might just be my tech-addled brain talking.

The parts I found the most interesting were the points where they all got together for their lectures and demonstrations in the apartment, usually about the Vietnam War. There was a lot other scenes I loved like the interaction between Veronique and her boyfriend where she uses a confession of no longer loving him while listening to music to “struggling on two fronts,” or when the group casts lots using a passage from the Little Red Book, or how during the conversation in the train with Francis Jeanson, Veronique mentions her sensitive plan and the camera for the first time incorporates other passengers on the train.

Also the song Mao-Mao written for the movie is a fun song.

Call Me by Your Name (2017) 🔗

A romance story about an American Greco-Roman archaeology graduate student and young Italian boy.

I love Sufjan Stevens and the music included in the movie (especially the piano cover of Futile Devices, and Visions of Gideon in the last scene), the imagery of the Greek statues in the beginning setting the stage for pederasty, and the cinematography, but hard a hard time enjoying the story and romance. It’s probably just my fundamentalist Christian upbringing that ingrained a kind of negative reaction to any male-male romantic/sexual scenes (compared to my situation it’s ironic that Sufjan Stevens identifies as Christian!) But this film will be remembered as bringing gay romance to the mainstream and exploring new possibilities of romance in film. Really beautiful movie.

Reminded me of My Family and Other Animals which is the story of British family moving to the Greek countryside.

Sorry to Bother You (2018) 🔗

Favorite movie of 2018. It’s about a Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) getting a job at a call center and finding success after adopting a “white voice” on the phone. A playful movie with great effects and characters, twists and turns, and was a fun watch. Lakeith Stanfield played my favorite character in Atlanta and he didn’t disappoint here.

The setting of a metro area and the call center is familiar to me from Milwaukee as I had a few friends that worked for Captel which while not selling anything, was a similar environment.

Watch this movie! There’s a lot of craziness later that might be out of place in other movies, but Riley Boots makes it work.

Blindspotting (2018) 🔗

Another movie from Oakland I discovered during my post-watch research into Sorry to Bother You. Fantastic film with a story that’s both entertaining and a unique look into race and gentrification. The premise is a pair of two friends/coworkers for a moving company in gentrifying Oakland, with the primary driver of plot being Collin (Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame) seeing a unjustified police shooting after his probation curfew.

Parts that stuck out to me were the conversation after Miles runs from the hipster party and the rap/monologue during the climax. The movie bled style and film talent in acting, comedy, set design, script/slang, and plot. This movie could probably be the second example sentence in a dictionary for the word “intersectionality” and really proves Oakland as a center of talent in America. Daveed Diggs is really setting the stage for rap to be a new form of language.

This movie has nothing to do with Trainspotting.

Things I’m Liking

• Racketcon 6: Alexis King – Languages in an Afternoon: I’ve only lived in the world of declarative programming so it’s a good exercise to see into the more Lispy of languages.
• US Foreign Service Officers Recommended Reading List: A six-page list of books (with handy ISBNs for easy searching) of what the US State Department recommends for people trying to get a job. If you’re interested in foreign affairs, this is a great list.

Misc

Today’s soundtrack at the cafe is a mix between jazzy classics and Michael Jackson. “We Are the World” has been repeated three times in a row already. Sufjan Stevens came on the speakers as soon as I was writing about Call Me by Your Name.

Having no internet at my house is a blessing in disguise. I can get my net fix at the cafe, and when it closes digest all the books and resources I’ve downloaded without being distracted by reddit. If there’s something I need to research on the internet, I’ll note it down and research it at the cafe. If there’s something I really need to do on the internet, I can use my 4G hotspot from my phone.