The worst thing about Russell Brand is, of course, the raping. The next worst thing is how long it was allowed to go on by the comedy community, who are literally incapable of denouncing any behaviour by another comedian, no matter how vile. But the infuriating thing about the reaction to Brand is that it’s another example of the amount of hand-wringing that goes into mediocre art made by terrible people.
Another batch of film reviews. After watching these rot for some time, let’s try limiting ourselves to five at a time, shall we?
Firstly, well-done to KiwiPyCon for keeping a hybrid conference running, in this case with the same Venueless setup that worked well for linux.conf.au this year; I hope this beomce the new norm for conferences, but I guess we shall see. The team with 30 million players Laura Bell Laura is very pleased by the architecture, but refuses to be diverted into discussing the building; she wants to convince us to become the world’s biggest security team: “The best security isn’t noticeable, it just makes everything better” and her goal is to make it the ubiquitous ingediant.
Why add smart plugs to a home? Why complicate the act of switching things on and off at the wall? Glad you asked: I want to schedule devices that don’t have timers, or have timers that are so absurd to work with they might as well not have timers. a. I want to have the timers link up to all the other timed activities in my house, like the lighting. b.
Moving into the second week of the festival; I had been more anxious about cramming my program in, because it hadn’t been clear to many that many films would be rolling over into another week. Imagine my relief when I found I could space things out more than I’d originally planned.
Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band A compelling, but extraordinarily disingenuous documentary covering The Band, from Robbie Robertson’s roots in Canada (Levon Helm’s life in Arkansas doesn’t rate a mention, and the other Canadian members are merely glanced at until they enter the Robbie Show). While many aspects of the documentary are compelling and fascinating - and very interesting if you have even the slightest interest in the history of North American folk, rock, or related music - it’s incredibly biased, and you’d not know from any of the material; there’s a lot of sinning of omission going on here, all in favour of making sure you walk away with the impression that Saint Robbie and his wife (actually ex-wife, but that’s not mentioned in the doco, presumbaly in the interests of keeping the narrative around Robertson’s life as a perfect family man intact).