Hollywood has spent nearly 600 million dollars trying to bring Matt Damon back home 😎 First they saved him in Saving Private Ryan. Then they left him floating in space in Interstellar. Then they abandoned him on Mars in The Martian. And now The Odyssey is sending an entire Greek epic after him for another $250M. At this point Matt Damon isn’t an actor anymore. He’s a very expensive missing person case 😅
Sure it seems a legit expense...
Max wanted to catch a movie before bedtime. We couldn't find Shaolin Soccer available again. The ones on YouTube were basically clickbait. Netflix had a couple of other Stephen Chow movies. I gave Max some options: A Chinese Odyssey 🇨🇳 featuring Stephen Chow, Space Sweepers 🇰🇷, and The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure 🇰🇷.
He initially chose A Chinese Odyssey since he was slightly familiar with the Monkey King myth. But after a minute, he felt Pirates would be a better choice and a much newer movie. I guess that age of the movie (released in 1995) was a factor. 🤷🏾♂️
I had watched The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure back in 2022. This time around, we had fun watching the antics of the pirates. Max liked it and I feel he is now starting to learn watching movies without the need for a theatre experience and without popcorn 🍿.
Next time around, I need to convince him to watch some Jackie Chan movies. I'm looking forward to seeing what he discovers next.
A science teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship. As his memory returns, he uncovers a mission to stop a mysterious substance killing Earth's sun and that an unexpected friendship may be the key.
It had been a long wait to catch this movie on the big screen. Max and I decided to catch the late night show at Inox, Marina Mall on Thursday.
I had read the book when it came out in 2021. I wanted to see how the cinematic version looked like. And it was impressive. I wish I had watched it in IMAX.
Max loved it and asked me for the book to read. We also loved the music and listened to it on the way back home.
Pavunuthayi is a fiercely independent, intimidating elderly woman in a rural village, known for being tough, ruthless, and blunt-especially as a moneylender whose strict enforcement of dues makes her feared by locals.
We started watching the movie as a family but finally I was the only one awake by the time the credits rolled in.
They had already watched the movie on the big screen a few weeks back.
In Shanghai, China in the 1940s, a wannabe gangster aspires to join the notorious "Axe Gang" while residents of a housing complex exhibit extraordinary powers in defending their turf.
I had promised Max we'd watch a movie after dinner. After some deliberation, I chose Shaolin Soccer because it's funny and football-related.
Unfortunately, it wasn't on any of my streaming services, so I switched to Stephen Chow's other film, Kung Fu Hustle, which was on Netflix.
Max was initially skeptical about watching a movie twice his age, but he started to enjoy it as we watched.
His favorite scene was the knife throwing scene. We had a great laugh watching the movie.
Movie Poster by David Merrell
IndiGo achieved what my teachers couldn't: getting me to sit at the front.
I am currently working my way through Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics when I read about the Newton/Leibniz rivalry on who invented calculus. 1
In 1696, Johann Bernoulli and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz challenged Europe’s mathematicians to solve the Brachistochrone problem (finding the path of fastest descent). Isaac Newton, then 54 and working at the Royal Mint, received the challenge on Jan 29, 1697. He solved it overnight and submitted it anonymously. Bernoulli instantly recognized the author, famously stating: "ex ungue leonem (as the lion by his claw).
That phrase got me wondering about fingerprints and identity.
Over the past year and more, we have been using the em dash as the "lion's claw" of an LLM-generated content. And because it's prevalent, the claw has become a tell. We used to say, _"On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog."_ Except now, the dog is an AI, and we know it’s a dog because it can’t stop using em dashes to simulate "thoughtful" prose. 🤷🏾♂️
I imagine Bernoulli opening Newton’s anonymous letter today. Instead of elegant geometry, he finds a perfectly optimized, AI-generated proof. And if he looks for a 'claw', he would find none, not a hint of a man who stayed up all night grumbling about being dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things. It made me wonder: would Newton purposefully insert a stray comma today, just to prove he wasn't a bot?
I hated calculus at school and now I know who to blame for it. ↩
Another year older, a little too much biryani, and a long evening walk under a patient sky. Forty-six is for watching the clouds, not chasing them.
