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alexr_rwx... and so goes the day. As happy as I am to be home, I haven't really gotten much done since I've been home. The days are sort of insubstantial and floaty, really. I realize it was a while ago when I got up this morning, it's just that not too many things have happened since then.
I got my teeth cleaned. Apparently, they're healthy, if slightly stained from drinking a lot of coffee. I went to pick up comic books. I came home, ate lunch, read comic books, and then went and did the afternoon track practice at Maclay.
That was pretty cool, really :) Those are always entertaining -- it's good to see the track team, even if the people I know are quickly graduating... I know/knew enough of the younger kids for it still to be interesting. I've let Manny and Gary (the track coaches) know that if I live in Tallahassee, I'm going to have to be an assistant track coach :) It's getting to feel gradually stranger hanging out with a bunch of HS-ites and middle-school kids, though, and I don't think too many other alumni come back to hang out terribly often. Eh, I suppose there's really no reason why I wouldn't be welcome. I'm getting older, but I'm still running, and a lot of my friends (coaches included) are still around.
Today's workout involved maybe three or four miles in the forest (with various people, as I switched trails and groups) and some 100m repeats with some 8th graders whom I hadn't met before. It's wonderful not being an actual team member anymore -- I just pick something interesting that somebody's doing and do that for as long as I like, then maybe move on and do somebody else's workout :)
Later on tonight, we (Natalie and myself) went to dinner with the paternal unit, out to Lucy Ho's, where I had some really tasty General Tso's ... tofu (extreme soy protein action!) and Natalie accidently ordered eel sushi when she meant to get veggie futo maki. She ate most of it anyway, but didn't seem super-pleased.
Tonight I finally sat down and watched Blade Runner. Zach had, many moons ago, lent me the DVD, and I'd been meaning to watch it. It'd been on my queue of films to see for some years now. And now that I've seen it, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it... it seems like it's mostly interesting for the setting. To the extent that a flim can do this, it deals pretty well with the whole package of questions "So, do androids have souls?" "Do humans have souls?" and "How do you know you or someone you know isn't an android?" The Deckard/Rachel relationship seems kind of strange, a bit forced... dunno where that comes from, how they go from being really afraid of one another (she's convinced at first that he's going to ice her, and he can't deal with the fact that ... well, she's synthetic and has completely fake memories) to the bedroom and mutual trust s'quickly. The movie as a whole is really eerie, sort of detached, floaty. That, at least, feels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but the book does rather a better job at most everything the movie's trying to do, and a whole lot more. There's more setting, and more story, and more background, and cooler characters in the original PKD book. That's the general case, though, I suppose. Not a bad film at all; it just can't be a PKD novel.
What's really interesting, though, in the film, is the electronics. They're so intensely early-eighties-projecting-a-dark-future, almost Star Wars-esque. Everything has really ugly interfaces on it, and displays aren't very good, and things are done in hard lines and terminal-colour greens, and a lot of stuff is clearly imagined to be analog... HCI folks would probably spend a lot of time cringing in this sort of world :)
Ah, and tomorrow, I get to go and meet Brett and hang out with him at FSU. Yay! :)
I should do something a bit more productive, some time or another. Ah well... this is my break. I suppose I can let myself relax for a bit.
I got my teeth cleaned. Apparently, they're healthy, if slightly stained from drinking a lot of coffee. I went to pick up comic books. I came home, ate lunch, read comic books, and then went and did the afternoon track practice at Maclay.
That was pretty cool, really :) Those are always entertaining -- it's good to see the track team, even if the people I know are quickly graduating... I know/knew enough of the younger kids for it still to be interesting. I've let Manny and Gary (the track coaches) know that if I live in Tallahassee, I'm going to have to be an assistant track coach :) It's getting to feel gradually stranger hanging out with a bunch of HS-ites and middle-school kids, though, and I don't think too many other alumni come back to hang out terribly often. Eh, I suppose there's really no reason why I wouldn't be welcome. I'm getting older, but I'm still running, and a lot of my friends (coaches included) are still around.
Today's workout involved maybe three or four miles in the forest (with various people, as I switched trails and groups) and some 100m repeats with some 8th graders whom I hadn't met before. It's wonderful not being an actual team member anymore -- I just pick something interesting that somebody's doing and do that for as long as I like, then maybe move on and do somebody else's workout :)
Later on tonight, we (Natalie and myself) went to dinner with the paternal unit, out to Lucy Ho's, where I had some really tasty General Tso's ... tofu (extreme soy protein action!) and Natalie accidently ordered eel sushi when she meant to get veggie futo maki. She ate most of it anyway, but didn't seem super-pleased.
Tonight I finally sat down and watched Blade Runner. Zach had, many moons ago, lent me the DVD, and I'd been meaning to watch it. It'd been on my queue of films to see for some years now. And now that I've seen it, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it... it seems like it's mostly interesting for the setting. To the extent that a flim can do this, it deals pretty well with the whole package of questions "So, do androids have souls?" "Do humans have souls?" and "How do you know you or someone you know isn't an android?" The Deckard/Rachel relationship seems kind of strange, a bit forced... dunno where that comes from, how they go from being really afraid of one another (she's convinced at first that he's going to ice her, and he can't deal with the fact that ... well, she's synthetic and has completely fake memories) to the bedroom and mutual trust s'quickly. The movie as a whole is really eerie, sort of detached, floaty. That, at least, feels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but the book does rather a better job at most everything the movie's trying to do, and a whole lot more. There's more setting, and more story, and more background, and cooler characters in the original PKD book. That's the general case, though, I suppose. Not a bad film at all; it just can't be a PKD novel.
What's really interesting, though, in the film, is the electronics. They're so intensely early-eighties-projecting-a-dark-future, almost Star Wars-esque. Everything has really ugly interfaces on it, and displays aren't very good, and things are done in hard lines and terminal-colour greens, and a lot of stuff is clearly imagined to be analog... HCI folks would probably spend a lot of time cringing in this sort of world :)
Ah, and tomorrow, I get to go and meet Brett and hang out with him at FSU. Yay! :)
I should do something a bit more productive, some time or another. Ah well... this is my break. I suppose I can let myself relax for a bit.
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: )
Yes.
Eel sushi . . . that's one I've not tried, though once I (bravely) ordered eel as an entree and was neither hugely disappointed nor thrilled. Yay for G. Cho's Tofu, at any rate. : )
::chuckles at Coffee Teeth, then wanders off to bed::
Re: : )
Date: 2003-03-04 08:18 pm (UTC)It's just a different thing :) They really don't need to be compared, the book and the movie -- they're different stories with some small number of character names reused and a partially recycled background and setting. The moral of this comment is: "You should read more PKD, because PKD is, in Alex's humble opinion, the coolest sci-fi author ever to have his stories turned into Tom Cruise movies."
The Philip Glass music is indeed really cool :) And I like, despite how Harrison Ford doesn't really feel like a PKD character so much as like Indiana Jones, how his Deckard is a very human action hero... no acrobatics or martial-arts stunts or bullet-dodgings on Deckard's part. His human frailty highlights the inhumanity of the replicants really nicely, which plays off of their very human desire for companionship and freedom and continued life.