infinite improbability

I'm still here

I haven't blogged much recently, but I'm still around. Haven't had much motivation, because this is the time of year that working retail gets insane (and puts lots of money in my pocket, whoo hoo), and since I tend to work evenings, by the time I get home I don't feel like doing much of anything other than sitting on the couch disengaging my brain by staring mindlessly at the TV. Plus, my older brother is home for a couple of months after having been gone for the past two years doing linguistic research in India, he gets a midterm two month vacation before heading back for another two year stint at which point he should have finished surveying the people group that he's focusing on.

Saw some good movies in the past few weeks. If you have a chance, I'd highly recommend catching Diarios de Motocicleta, aka Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevara's road trip through South America with his friend while he was in medical school. That was an important period in influencing his becoming a revolutionary, and the movie tells the story in an interesting way. It manages to avoid becoming a Marxist propaganda piece, which is good, because propaganda tends to get in the way of telling a story. Another movie that's worth seeing, if you can (which might be hard because it's currently showing in only 4 theaters in the US) is Primer which is an interesting take on the time travel subgenre of sci-fi. It's really confusing, and it probably needs to be seen more than once, but it's one of the few movies that have an internally consistent portrayal of time travel (part of the reason it's confusing, because of the recursive nature of time travel as portrayed in the film), and it's also one of the few movies I've seen that have people who you can actually believe might be engineers of some sort. Primer was made by some software engineer guy with a mathematics degree who got bored with his engineering job and decided he wanted to make a movie, so consequently, it's not exactly a traditional film. It did win the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, for what that's worth.