Posts on Threads (2026.05 - 2026.08)

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

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May 2, 2026　　# Movie: Animal Farm

Watched the movie Animal Farm, and was a little bit disappointed. The disappointment mainly came from my liking for the George Orwell novel Animal Farm on which this movie is based. The novel, though bears a similarity to a children's fairy tale, was not written for children, nor was it meant to be childish. This movie adaptation, however, casted it into the form of a very typical children's cartoon. I'm OK with the introduction of some modern elements, such as drones, but the fabricated ending, the all-bad-guys-eliminated (in a laughably easy way) and the world-falls-into-good-guys'-capable-hands ending, is so typical in children's cartoons, and so typically childish, that it spoiled the reservedness of the novel, and turned an insightful warning into a stereotyped preaching.

May 3, 2026　　# Movie: The Devil Wears Prada 2

Watched the movie The Devil Wears Prada 2. Upon passing by the below scene near Union Square on the way to the theater (with a long line of people, not shown in this photo, that I suppose were waiting for turns to take photos with it), I realized that this movie must be popular. Surely enough, it was confirmed by the fact that the theater capitalized on the popularity of the movie by adding five more minutes of advertisement before it. It is an enjoyable movie, comedy in nature, full of humor and sarcasm, and yet well-mingled with sincerity.

May 9, 2026　　# Movie: The Sheep Detectives

Watched The Sheep Detectives, an admirably creative movie "starred" by a group of "bilingual" (human language + sheep language) sheep. It is not only pleasantly amusing, but also wittily philosophical, all thanks to its unique angle from sheep's point of view. I particularly liked the sheep's comments on the human God, which reminded me of the below cartoon that I saw many years ago (and which impressed me a lot) that pictured a cockroaches' version of God, which is as self-centered as the human version and thus, I'm sorry to say, is no sillier than the latter.

May 17, 2026　　# Movie: The Sheep Detectives

A "homebrew" music performance today in a nicely shaded outdoor area at the Sands Point Preserve, a seashore park that I last visited during the pandemic. To those who have read Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (or watched the corresponding movie), this park is on a peninsula known as the "East Egg" in Fitzgerald's novel.

May 22, 2026　　# Movie: The Mandalorian and Grogu

Watched the movie The Mandalorian and Grogu. As a half-hardcore Star Wars fan (literally half, since I'm a big fan of episodes I-III, somewhat OK with IV-VI, but more or less pissed off by VII-IX), a movie with a baby Yoda is certainly worth watching. The result? Generally OK. I'm especially amused to see that the immovably heavy Hutts can actually fight physically (against a few physical and biological laws though). My complaints are: The baby Yoda and his miniature Anzellan friends are made too cartoonish for a non-cartoon movie, and the plot armor is too extreme even measured by the bar as ridiculously low as was set by episodes VII-IX.

May 29, 2026　　# Movie: Pressure

Watched the movie Pressure. It's about meteorologists racing to provide a weather forecast for the largest seaborne invasion in history: D-Day. The "pressure" that so strongly presses on both the meteorologists and the generals, and subtly drives the exceptionally turbulent weather, is presented in a very colorful and impressive way, and truly deserved to be the title of the movie. A very nice WWII movie, and I enjoyed it a lot.

PS: It seems my English posts are becoming more and more predominantly movie reviews, but there is nothing much I can do since pretty much everything else is covered by my non-English writings. :-)

June 5, 2026　　# Movie: Backrooms

Watched Backrooms, a "science fiction psychological horror" movie (the "science fiction" part is largely a mislabel). I'm not a fan of horror movies, much less psychological horror movies, but was seduced by the preview that leaned towards mystery rather than the psychological and horror aspects. Didn't like it, for the same general reason that I don't like psychological horror movies: the lack of even the minimal explanation and logic (in this movie, for instance, why would Clark, who had just found the backrooms in panic and shocked by losing two employees there, suddenly become so used to and familiar with the place?).

Watched the movie Tuner. The main idea of the movie, that an extraordinary hearing capability was used in safe-breaking, is not new, and I have watched something similar many years ago. But there is plenty of space to make interesting movies with similar ideas, and I'm glad to say that this one, both the idea and the movie, in my opinion, fall into this category, and I enjoyed it. I also particularly liked the ending of the movie, in which Niki, after his hyperacusis condition that had long prevented him from playing piano was accidentally neutralized by his injury, had a masterful piano performance that moved his on-the-verge-of-breaking-up girlfriend Ruthie into tears. It is an ending better than having Niki and Ruthie explicitly break up or explicitly reconcile, though it is doubtful that someone, however talented he might be in the past, can play piano at a professionally great level after so many years without proper hearing, let alone practicing.

June 19, 2026　　# Movie: Disclosure Day

Watched the movie Disclosure Day. This is a movie I have been looking forward to, due to both Spielberg the producer and the preview which well incited my curiosity. After watching, however, my feeling is mixed. The bottom line is of course: It's a fine movie to watch (otherwise I wouldn't call my feeling "mixed"). But judging by the standard for a sci-fi movie, the plot is not very sound. For instance: 1. The cardinal that awakened the psychic abilities of Margaret is an alien in disguise, but if such aliens freely exist on Earth, things should have evolved differently over the past years, and the alien Hugo's group rescued and freed in the ending scene wouldn't make as big a deal as the movie indicated. 2. The psychic abilities of Margaret immediately exposed her, which almost got her captured and ruined everything. Assuming the disclosure day is what the aliens wanted, and they have technologies at least as good as what humans have reverse engineered, they should be able to control events better. 3. The movie vastly over-stated human compassion. News reporters breaking into tears upon seeing aliens buried or mistreated? I'm yet to see a news reporter do so when reporting atrocities against fellow human beings.

July 2, 2026　　# Kuznetsov & Nikolau

Yesterday news broke that two persons, a male and a female, climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, displayed a banner that read "When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace" (a line that can be taken personally by many political leaders in this unprecedentedly down-spiraling world), and the male proposed to the female. They were, not surprisingly, detained by the NYPD when they climbed down. Even from the vague images in the earlier versions of the news, a 2024 Netflix documentary, Skywalkers: A Love Story, immediately came to my mind, and it was soon confirmed that the two persons were indeed the characters in the documentary. Their names are Ivan Kuznetsov and Angela Nikolau, and I'm glad that they, after many years of accompanying each other, are finally engaged. :-)

July 9, 2026　　# Environmental Impact of ChatGPT

A few interesting numbers regarding the environmental impact of ChatGPT (quoted from The AI Illusion, a 2026 book by Luc Julia):

1. ChatGPT 4.0 emits about 4.32 grams of CO₂ per request (equivalent to 216 Google searches).

2. ChatGPT 4.0 consumes 0.1~0.4 kWh of electricity per request (equivalent to 500 Google searches).

3. ChatGPT 4.0 requires 3 bottles of cooling water to generate 100 words.

Though I'm not very satisfied with the above presentation (for instance, talking about a "request" without mentioning its complexity is quite meaningless, and CO₂ emission should have a range similar to that of electricity), one gets some rough idea to understand the resource bottlenecks modern AI is encountering, and perhaps also to understand a joke which says that merely omitting courtesy words such as "please" when using ChatGPT helps protect the environment.

July 16, 2026　　# Now and Then ‒ Technology

Found a few historical notes in a book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future (by R. Hoffman & G. Beato), that are rather amusing. For instance (re-phrased for brevity):

1. Printing would enable heresy and misinformation.

2. Telephone would displace in-person visits.

3. Addiction to cars would destroy family life.

Those are claims people made in the past, and they are so remarkably similar to what one hears nowadays, except that internet, social media, and cellphones have taken the place of printing, telephone and cars, and have made the claims far more valid. Even more, the modern three are so closely related that each one can individually fuel all three claims.

July 17, 2026　　# Movie: The Odyssey

Watched the The Odyssey movie yesterday (I mentioned the date since it's a rare case that I watched a movie prior to its public release). It's a very good movie, with not only grand special effects but also a nice and intricate way of piecing together Odysseus's memory and reality. The final battle, after Odysseus strung the bow which basically revealed his identity, seems largely avoidable though, should his identity immediately acknowledged by the queen. After all, for so many years, nobody openly rebelled against the queen, let alone against the king. But I have never read the Greek epic, thus can't say for sure. What I can say, however, and pretty much for sure, is that the Helen in this movie doesn't remotely represent the most beautiful woman in the world in Greek mythology, or Greek aesthetics in general. I'm totally fine with Hollywood presenting or promoting the (skin-)colorfulness of modern society, but the adaptation of an epic in which many of the modern values didn't exist yet, is not the best place to exercise ideologies.

July 22, 2026　　# A Few AI Related Quotes

A few quotes from Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future (A 2025 book by R. Hoffman & G. Beato I mentioned before):

"The future is notoriously hard to foresee accurately—for pessimists and optimists alike."

"As hard as it may be to accurately predict the future, it’s even harder to stop it. Simply trying to stop ... is not going to help us humans meet either the challenges or the opportunities that AI presents."

"You’ll never get the future you want simply by prohibiting the future you don’t want."

August 3, 2026　　# Movie: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Watched the movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day and liked it. I watched one or two very old Spider-Man movies some 20+ years ago and perhaps never watched anything newer in the series until this one. The vast knowledge gap manifested itself when people around me (mostly younger than me judging from the noise they made) laughed or wowed at info as trivial as mere names, with which I have no clue where the fun or subtlety lies. One thing I'm a little puzzled by is that Spider-Man did a long-distance spidey-move without wearing his mask, numerous cameras surely have captured that. If such carelessness is a common thing for Spider-Man, maintaining anonymousity would be mission impossible. But of course, this might be a once-in-a-lifetime action, or something might have happened each time to erase all the records and memories... the vast knowledge gap I have might have enough room for explanations. :-)

August 7, 2026　　# Movie: One Night Only

Watched an interesting movie: One Night Only. Isaac Asimov once said, in his essay collection From Earth to Heaven, that science fiction should not just imagine new gadgets, but also the social consequences of those new gadgets. For instance, science fiction should not only imagine the automobile (prior to its invention), but also imagine the pollution and energy problems caused by the automobile. Though One Night Only is not science fiction, it did imagine the social consequences of an artificial law, that pre-marital sex is legal only for one night a year, and is thus as interesting as science fiction. This movie also successfully packed many twists into a timeline of a mere 102 minutes: as the movie time (as well as the time in the movie) passed, I began to think that there would be no time for the characters to wrap things up, and yet things did wrap up. :-)

August 27, 2026　　# Movie: The End of Oak Street

After a long pause due to a family trip to Europe, I'm back to my regular movie-watching life, and watched The End of Oak Street, a Jurassic Park-type movie set in a time-bubble that brought a small 1982 neighborhood into the age of dinosaurs. A family of four was the focus of this survival story, in which only the dad has an argument for optimism: the movie director won't let them die (you know what he actually referred to :-). A genius twist that distinguished this movie from the ordinary is that the dad actually died. But an even more genius twist is that when the rest of the family went back to 1982, about 20 minutes prior to the catastrophe, the mom called a pizza delivery service, for which the dad had been working but (so he thought) kept secret in order not to embarrass the mom. When the dad found out, in astonishment and perhaps embarrassment, that the mom was the receiver, his whole family, who had witnessed his death a mere moment ago, rushed towards him and embraced him passionately. That was touching.

August 30, 2026　　# Movie: The Dog Stars

Watched The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic movie set in a pessimistically near future of 2035. This movie portrayed a world after a catastrophic pandemic with a tiny surviving population, for which the surval instinct is basically barbarism. I liked a very tiny detail in which Hig, the only person in the movie who is still sympathetic enough to help people, when being treated as an intruder and disarmed by Pops, said before being repelled: "my name is Hig" ‒ a simple sentence I felt was better than any other way of showing friendliness and sincerity. The movie also has the complexity of Hig stubbornly pursuing a dreamland (a common theme in post-apocalyptic movies), but ended up bumping into a thriller. The ending of the movie, though, in which a Mennonite tribe becomes the survival camp, is itself quite apocalyptic in my view (human, please don't be reborn to be even more religious than today).

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posted on September 3, 2026

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