Saw a movie (Climax) and sorting through old files.

Climax (2018)

Directed by Gaspar Noé, considered a “psychological horror dance experimental film” by wikipedia. It’s about a dance troupe in 1996 spending a night in a schoolhouse, practicing their dance and finally unwinding with a party. Things get crazy when the sangria is spiked with LSD.

It was aesthetically pleasing (besides the camerawork I’ll mention later) and it was a treat to get to know the characters over the movie. Besides two of them, they were not professional actors but rather dancers. Most of the actions and conversations were improv with only a few choreographed sections – Actors and actresses were encouraged to experiment and make up dialogue. The movie is defined by its soundtrack, its long cuts, colors, and interactions between characters. It reminded me vaguely of Wild Tales (2014) in its ideas of human primality. A connection could be made that both directors were born in Argentina.

For the negatives: I’m not well-versed in art film like the people I saw this movie with and had no idea what I was going into, so it was hard to watch at times. Not the “hard to watch” caused by violent or awkward situations, but physically hard to watch like a camera swinging around in a room full of strobe lights. The camera angles made me feel motion sick the pacing felt really slow at times. There were points where I had to close my eyes to avoid getting a headache. Although I hated the movie coming out of the theatre, over the rest of the night and into today it grew on me.

Please watch the opening dance scene, you’ll probably like it.

Old Files

I found a hard drive while helping my parents clean up for a move. It had files going back to 2012, and I searched the entire filesystem top to bottom – I have a vague memory of someone giving me some bitcoins in payment for some minecraft server stuff way back then, and I’ve been trying to find the wallet file ever since.

No bitcoins were found, but other stuff did turn up. Like:

• An interview with the creator of Minecraft (“notch”) I recorded with some online friends back in 2010
• All my old D&D campaign world building materials
• Nostalgic high school photos
• Tons of music, anime, and books
• Random screengrabs and a few generations of “Downloads” folders

Raspberry Pi

When looking through these old electronics, I also found a raspi. This was repurposed into a chromecast-esque machine that’s plugged into a spare monitor. Using a “raspicast” app, I can stream anything off the pi’s filesystem, any videos, music or pictures from my phone’s filesystem, and also youtube videos using the share intent in android. It’s very quick, and turns from the terminal view to the media whenever it’s casting and immediately returns back when it’s done or canceled. The only complaints I have is that it doesn’t handle youtube live very well, and I don’t think there’s a good way to control it from my laptop.

Misc

No plans to participate in the St. Patrick’s Day festivities, but I might have a glass of whiskey.