More Songs! Neutral Milk Hotel, Oceansize, Sunny Day Real Estate

These are some of the songs I would've been listening to maybe five years ago, in the fall while walking outside.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over The Sea

Medium Expectations: On Gome Home (2013)

Sam's bedroom

Five minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down.  It wasn't a big thing, really.  The game starts you off at the front door of a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning.  I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond the porch.  A steady torrent of rain beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and cold?  I'd just figured out how to unlock the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby.  It was an actual relief entering the house and putting walls between me and the raging storm outside.  I took a look around, the first glimpse at the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam) and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning.  None of them were here apparently for my homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much.  My parents were on holiday, my sister had something to deal with.  So, I contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either side.  Then I turned around, went back outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them inside.  No dice.  Trying to pick them up had been one of the first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys.  Perhaps now that I had the front doors open, Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately, the bags still proved unresponsive.  The game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit.  This was a small thing, of course, that I was being bothered by, and you can forgive small things.  But it’s often these small surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a game.

AJAX, States, and Pushstate()

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Many popular websites make use of AJAX, for example Google and Twitter. To understand why it's being used, we have to understand how the traditional World Wide Web was meant to be built. The web was intended to work like this: you use a web browser application (eg. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) on your computer to visit a web page, by giving the browser that page's URL address (eg. http://www.google.com). The browser, or client, connects to a web server via the internet and requests that web page, which is merely a text file, specifically an HTML file. That server serves that file back to the client browser, and the browser displays that page, also requesting any additional files such as images needed to completely display that page. You can then click on a hyperlink to visit another web page, and your browser goes and connects to whatever web server is that file is stored on to get that page. But as the web has matured, websites have gotten more complicated, bigger, and more visual, and the basic HTML web model has become obsolete. We moved from mostly text-based pages to websites consisting of many web pages, all with consistent visual elements (eg. logo in the top left, a navigational menu along the top or side, a footer) which are there to make the web more user friendly. We've also developed new technologies, like CSS, Javascript, and PHP, to supplement our basic HTML websites, and one of these technologies is AJAX.

Ha Jin's The Bridegroom (2000) Book Review

In "The Bridegroom," Ha Jin seems more interested in writing stories about circumstances than about people. Almost all of the short stories collected in his 2000 book are concerned with lower and middle class folk living in China, struggling against greater, sometimes conflicting, forces: communism and capitalism, encroaching western values and small town prejudices, societal pressures and familial obligations, and an overarching bureaucracy trying to stabilize and control a vast population in a country in transition. The stories explore life within this paradoxical environment, and are much more preoccupied with introducing and stepping through the injustices and dilemmas facing the characters than the characters themselves; they are powerless to effect the unfolding situations imposed upon them, and develop little more nuance beyond "worried businessman" and "foreign-educated woman". This lends a universality of sorts, and the stories do well in presenting different tableaus, even if the stories tend to beat somewhat repetitious drums. As a pounding critique of life in China it may work, but the futility that permeates all the stories leads to a sameness, and at some point all of the senselessness starts bleeding out, such that it's hard not to redirect some of it onto the stories themselves. 

Videos of live performances from The Weakerthans, Steven Page, and Gorillaz

The Weakerthans - Fallow (acoustic on Backstage Pass)

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) movie review

Olympus Has Fallen is a mind-blowingly stupid and ludicrous movie about Korean terrorists taking over the White House. This premise alone should tell you what type of movie it is. But you know what? I loved it. The general advice for going to these types of big dumb action movies is to shut your brain off, but honestly, I had a lot of fun laughing at all the glaringly obvious plot holes there were. The writers did just enough work to keep the movie moving at a brisk pace and to have everyone in the audience understand everything that's going on, and nothing more.  I mean, if you're someone who gets offended by movies like this where everyone (except maybe the protagonist) acts like complete idiots, then this ain't the movie for you. But hey, this might be a dumb blockbuster, but this also is a dumb blockbuster that's both better and dumber than any other dumb blockbuster in recent memory. Better than Battleship, better than 2012, and better than Transformers.  Also, surprisingly brutal violence, definitely not the typical PG-13 stuff you see these days, but some real, up-close, headshots, torture, and executions, which was, if nothing else, a change of pace.  

#TeamWalt, Fictional Heroes and Villains, and Interpreting Morality in Breaking Bad

I am not on #TeamWalt. Walter White should go to jail, for all the morally reprehensibly things he has done for morally dubious reasons. Many people, though, proudly label themselves members of Team Walt, and actively cheer for the Breaking Bad protagonist, and they'll even have justifications for all of Walt's actions; they say Walt's always been doing everything for his family, to provide for them, to keep them safe, and that includes his surrogate son, Jesse. Others don't deny that Walt's done bad things, but they say it's fun to cheer for Walt, to see him succeed, and he is the protagonist, after all. This is his story, and those viewers want him to keep going, keep outsmarting people, keep doing terrible things in order to survive, because that's what keeps the show moving forward. There are people that are fervent in their defence of Walt's actions, and I want to take a closer look at that viewpoint here.