• metropolis

    i watched metropolis (1927) tonight at a bar with some friends. despite being nearly a century old, it’s a pertinent commentary on class and technology. the explicit moral is literally spelled out at the end, I guess:

    there can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.

    but we couldn’t reach consensus about what this meant re: the worker struggles depicted in the film.

    anyway, it’s late so instead of getting getting into heady things like that, i’ll share something that made me laugh during the movie. this scene reminded me of my lacking estimation skills at various points in my corporate tech career:

    ^ me, hand waving

    ^ my manager

    ^ my current progress

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  • rough thoughts on the bear thing

    it was silly to write all of this down but i created this blog today and i’m still editing the layout, so i want more words to work with.

    create a few distinct sounds, for example:

    • cup/table tap
    • cup/table scrape
    • ball/table tap
    • ball/table scrape
    • cup/ball tap

    these examples are unambiguous and easy to perform rapidly by someone keeping the cup in one hand & ball in the other. i’ll refer to each performed sound as a “bit” from here on out.

    for n bits, you have (number of sounds)^n options. with the examples above that’s 5^n, which is plenty.

    so what’s important to convey?

    the shapes are curvy and strange, so it’s easier to share a limited reference table of basic + advanced shapes instead of deriving each part of the bear from scratch. three bits could cover 125 shapes, which is ample for bear and bear-like drawings.

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