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manish vij

‘Across the Spider-Verse’

Leak: Across the Spider-Verse has a long middle act set in “Mumbattan,” an alt universe with a mashup Mumbai / Manhattan: Indian peeps, Mughal arches on the Brooklyn Bridge, a train to Bronxnagar, billboards for Zomato, the Indian Yelp.

Scene opening has Miles Morales falling over Manhattan at high altitude. They missed a step not glitching between that and Bombay, which has a similar peninsula layout.

Morales and Gwen Stacy are hosted by Pavitr Prabhakar, the Indian Spidey with great hair (just coconut oil and good genes, he assures them) who finds the hero biz easy.

He balances atop a pillar mallakhamb-style, hangs upside-down with legs crossed, shoots webs with a yo-yo-like weapon. Has an ok Indian accent, voiced by Karan Soni, dorky as usual. The voice doesn’t match the cool character.

Mumbattan starts with a spray of desi-Am jokes: “chai tea” means “tea tea,” I’m not your Eat Pray Love, next you’re going to tell me saffron is so exotic, etc. Definitely desi writers, or Soni riffing.

The Mumbattan multiverse version of Morales’ cop dad is Prabhakar’s girlfriend Gayatri’s turbaned, cop dad Mr. Singh. Pavitr goes from keeping his gf on the down low to her dad congratulating him on his heroics :)

Prabhakar swoops past a vada pav cart and grabs one from someone’s hand like a super-seagull. It’s a good gag.

Eventually all the fun loops back into the main plot: stopping Portal Man from getting to the Mumbattan supercollider. But it’s quite a long, fun part of the flick 🙌🏽

Wholesome series finales

Watching the “Ted Lasso” series finale reminded me of why I couldn’t get through the “Parks and Rec” finale. In wholesome, upbeat series, the finale saccharine levels are unbearably high, like cheesy high-school valedictories.

Like weddings, graduations and IPOs, they push the illusion that life is about reaching specific milestones rather than a continuous process. In screenwriting, this drives unrealistic endings of character arcs—too neat, tied up with a bow.

A wish-fulfillment, fan-service finale is also just a poor episode of its show: no conflict / drama, no setup for future payoff. Feels like the cap on the end of a shoelace, but superfluous, an especially poor example of its genre.

Drama finales, however: 🤌🏽

This week brought us the Shakespearean series finale of a f’d-up family committing emotional violence in a Darwinian scramble to the top. “Barry,” of course—I assume that’s what everyone’s talking about :)

Bluesky: first impressions

Bluesky first impressions: you don’t have to minimize attack surface on a small forum. Kumail posting politics again, AOC and Tapper sound like normal humans.

Hate that Twitter’s dominated by rage bait, mocked up a good news tab in Good Batch re: real sci / tech, econ, social advancements.

Bsky rolled out custom feeds including a positivity one. Right now it’s mostly cat pics, not my taste, but right direction.

The official app has janky scroll and animate, text too small. It was apparently a quick prototype in React Native for x-platform. Far inferior to the buttery-smooth Moot, an early client in Swift.

There’s some protocol complexity / overhead, not a 1:1 Twitter clone like Mastodon. My power user app may be best forked as a separate Bsky app rather than a multiheaded client.

Bsky has search, discover, quote post built in. Mastodon is really hostile to discoverability because it was also a refuge from Twitter harassment. Bsky tries to solve this at the protocol level with more user and server admin choice.

Bsky’s funded by Jack, who’s also right-wing, so it’s way more free speech absolutist (I’m putting this delicately) than Mastodon.

The velvet rope-ism is annoying, but it’s still in beta and actively developed. Small forum, small forum cliques / dynamics.

Overall experience quite positive. Platform is still early in dev, e.g. no video uploads. But some cool ideas, and way better than Twitter. Most important thing is to block buyout / hijack by a random rich dipshit, at the architecture level.

Caloric restriction

I tried caloric restriction: one 400-kcal meal a day.

Pros

  • No electrolytes or supplements
  • Temporarily satisfies food craving
  • Body isn’t cold

Cons

  • Easy to overeat
  • Hard to track weight progress since not eating enough to excrete daily
  • Still high food craving
  • Lower anti-aging benefits (autophagy, HGH)

I’m going to go back to “dirty” fasting, with a couple of cheats: soy milk in tea / coffee, and a 150-kcal homemade muffin right before a run.

‘The Little Mermaid’ (2023)

Live-action The Little Mermaid is bizarre when you think about it.

Disney takes public domain fairytales, strips the subtext, makes them kid-friendly, runs them through the sparkle princess car wash, and sells them movies, streams, remakes, spin-offs, merch and theme park tickets.

It’s a bunch of middle-aged people making content for pre-teen girls, which is not unusual (e.g. doll makers) but a little odd as a field.

With Sleeping Beauty they slap happy paint on a Grimm tale that’s a warning about what happens to bad kids.

With Little Mermaid they bowdlerize a Hans Christian Andersen parable about losing your virginity, to sell to pre-teens.

The diverse casting’s driven not just by the US being 40% non-Euro white now, but several other dynamics.

The tale is set on some Jamaican-ish island because Sebastian the animated crab had that bad Star Wars accent.

Disney sells princess p0rn, because kids have no autonomy, and their fantasy is power, attention and being special. So the heroine must be a princess meeting her prince. Thus there must be royals and a castle.

Colonists would be a bummer, so they must be black or brown, thus a South African-actress queen and Pakistani consort.

Making their 100th white heroine is passé, plus it would be quite obviously ethnocentric to have 10 black people backgrounded in bokeh with lighting and focus on a white couple. Thus Ariel is black.

It’s the heroine not the hero, because men are more accepting of shagging anyone attractive regardless of ethnicity. Thus the hero must be white to retain the 60% Anglo market.

They can’t use an actual Jamaican accent because Americans can’t comprehend it, so they cast an Afr-Am to speak Jamaican-ish. Much like they don’t sell India, they sell Indiarabia and Indica.

This puts Daveed Diggs in the odd position of doing a minstrel Jamaican accent for Big Mouse solely for being a black American actor, no Jamaican heritage or apparent accent expertise.

There’s a crowd of simple natives singing and dancing with the white hero in the center of a circle, easing him on his journey. It’s too egregious, or they wanted to put someone’s relative in, so they throw a desi kid into the crowd.

Reified as live action opens up all these cans of worms the animated movie didn’t. It’s a bizarre confection if you think about it. I suggest we don’t.