This week: my uncle’s 80th birthday and a bunch of movies, good and mediocre.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

• My uncle celebrated his 80th birthday (?????) this week. Ammu and her brother spent a bunch of time practising for their duet, and I set up most of the audio infrastructure. I still haven’t gotten the hang of it completely, but we connected both a computer playing the music track and two mics to a mixer and from there to a sound system. The clear upgrade from here is to get better-quality cordless mics. If there’s anybody reading this who can recommend a small mixer system (with an amplifier) and great singing mics, do ping!

• The function itself went off great. We had about 150 people turning up, and everybody liked the event, the singing, and the food.

• I watched My Name is Loh Kiwan this week. Not really the best portrayal of North Korean defectors, and it was a bit sappy at times, but a decent enough one-time watch. The acting itself was good, but the screenplay wasn’t up to par.

• Watched Aattam, which was wonderful. It’s in the style of 12 Angry Men, where a bunch of folks meet, debate, change their minds, and generally make a mess of things. I really liked how the ending was ambiguous but still satisfying. Malayalam cinema is just firing on all cylinders.

• Also saw Aadujeevitham (The Goat Life) in theatres, one of the biggest budget Malayalam movies to date. Sadly I don’t think it lives up to the hype. While the technical execution (cinematography, sound design, and art direction) is brilliant and A.R. Rahman’s songs grow on you like fine whiskey, the acting is often disjointed, dialogues are slurred, and the movie just doesn’t have the visceral impact it should have had. I do applaud the treatment of the subject matter though. Most of the middle east was built by South Asian labour, and a lot of them are in conditions akin to modern slavery. Raising general awareness of this issue is important.

• I’ve been learning German for 150 days now on Duolingo! ? I still can’t make out proper sentences in any TV series, or do anything useful with it, but it’s interesting picking up a new language at this age and understanding how similar and different English and Deutsch is. Here’s my poster to wrap up!

Links of the Week

• I really liked this story of hackers pushing at the edges of things and generally making a mess of everything. I don’t know if it was intended but I LOL-ed at a bunch of places.
• Thinking of shooting in RAW again. Lightroom has a bunch of AI features now, and there’s so many cool presets available.

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