Solomon Wakeling

Platoon is really pretty to look at.

Okay no he is the translator, that’s a key role. This film is more direct about the soldiers as perpetrators than Born on the Fourth of July. That felt like the atrocities were accidental but here they are deliberate.

Platoon is really pretty to look at.

Sometimes I have ideas that can’t be salvaged. Combine Leonard Cohen and Sacha Baron Cohen. I heard there was a secret wife that

David had and it improved his life

Having a bit of a Principal Skinner moment in regards to trying to translate this Korean magazine. Am I typing this wrong given I do not speak Korean? Or no, is it the magazine who is wrong? It’s highly likely this magazine is full of slang and typos, but I have no way to know.

The word I am trying to translate is the word for “stress” which I am told in Korean is an English loan word, which would explain why it is misspelled.

Translating my horoscope from the Korean adult magazine I bought in a stopover in Incheon in the final days of 2006. It’s quite bleak so far, I should have expected.

Pornography is illegal in South Korea but this magazine is under the threshold of what they consider pornography. It’s an interesting artefact, since adult magazines are hard to come by now.

I can’t tell if an image is AI because they’re trained on real images and they look pretty close. The only time I can tell is when it looks like an anime girl because they’ve leaned in so hard with idealising it that it gives itself away. But if they made it lowkey normal I’d not be able to pick it.

When it appears to analyse it is just summarising someone else’s argument. But it can’t sustain this for essay length. It can only do it for brief response to prompts.

I can’t tell if an image is AI because they’re trained on real images and they look pretty close. The only time I can tell is when it looks like an anime girl because they’ve leaned in so hard with idealising it that it gives itself away. But if they made it lowkey normal I’d not be able to pick it.

Lucy isn’t given a weapon by Santa Claus because battles are ugly when women fight but then when she’s Queen she fights with the archers against Calormen so it’s probably just that she was a little girl. And Susan considers marrying a Calormene and would have if he hadn’t turned out to be an ass.

The point is not being too proud to embrace childish things. While at the same time the children are routinely banished from Narnia when they get too old. The major theme is clear but it’s not got a simple resolution.

Lucy isn’t given a weapon by Santa Claus because battles are ugly when women fight but then when she’s Queen she fights with the archers against Calormen so it’s probably just that she was a little girl. And Susan considers marrying a Calormene and would have if he hadn’t turned out to be an ass.

Macaulay Culkin is uncredited in Jacob’s Ladder. He carries the entire emotional weight of the film.

This a great film but I am less certain of its standing as a Vietnam film, as I watch them as a group. Saying the government drugged them absolves them of responsibility which means the film doesn’t dig as deeply into perpetrator trauma as it might have.

It’s a blessing that the conservative party in Australia is called the Liberal party because it has saved us from the liberal/leftist discourse seen in the US because of the linguistic confusion. It all sounds like nonsense from where I am sitting.

I don’t really feel bad for Sally Rooney. Her books being pulled draws more attention to her cause which is what she wants. She has her reward. She isn’t a victim of an injustice, she knows exactly what she’s doing.

If you sacrifice for a cause you don’t get to complain about it but I think in fairness she hasn’t been.

Watched Good Morning Vietnam. I remember seeing this as a child at least the part where he says goooood morrniing Vietnam. There’s a lot more gay jokes than I remember. It also feels odd that they used to make comedies that were also very serious. 40 year old virgin wasn’t also about something.

Born on the Fourth of July doesn’t really make the case against the war. Ron Kovic makes two individual mistakes leading to tragedy but this isn’t the fault of the US administration for sending him there. Or it is but this is all assumed knowledge, the wrongness of the war is a given.

The Eustace-dragon scenes in Voyage of the Dawn Treader are so intimate, feels like an allegory for the changes in puberty for boys. Still a very old idea that character improves in children via deprivation. But it’s working on other levels.

Gonna add the Star Wars trilogy to my list of films to watch about Vietnam and related.

It’s very hard to tell a story about pacifism that is also an action movie.