Haven’t done much today besides watch Wandering Earth (流浪地球), a Chinese sci-fi movie based on a novel by Liu Cixin, with some friends.

We saw the 2D version, and the two of us that were foreigners were impressed. It definitely lived up to most classic action/thriller tropes and felt generic in some respects, but considering the domestic market for movies and average viewer preferences, for a Chinese New Year’s movie it’s understandable. It sucks you into its inter-apocalyptic setting and tells you a story. The characters are pretty bland but the effects and setting make up for it.

Along with 我不是药神, this would be the in my opinion the best Chinese movie released during my year in China.

Site

The last couple of journals never made it to the site because the date was screwed up. What should have been date: 2019-02-17 was instead date: 2019-02-017.

Things I’m Liking

• Madeon - Adventure (2015): This was one of maybe 20 albums that defines my Freshman year of college. Somehow the track Pay No Mind popped into my head, and it wasn’t until googling "just keep saying so" "was dancing" song that I finally figured how to track it down. After so many years and listening to it again, it sounds slower and more deliberate than in my memory. Albums are my preferred method of listening to “music as art” and this is a perfect example of a great album, from its smooth transitions, thematic changes, and nothing jarring – It feels like one long movie and you’ll struggle to hear see seams, which is what any good album will feel like.
• A data-driven exploration of the evolution of chess: Popularity of openings over time: A long title but simple post, taking a huge corpus of chess games since 1850 and plotting the frequency of openings including the first move by white, first move by black, and second move by white. Another interesting post by the author is How Americans make a living based on their age.
• Adding Isso Comments to Hugo: I before that it would be good to get some comments on this site, and the usual default of Disqus isn’t ideal since they do malicious tracking and inject scripts. I’m liking this blog post because it’s exactly my use case. Here’s hoping I can get something set up in a reproducible way.