The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (movie review)

The backstory here (hey, it’s my journal) is I’d hoped to return the five DVD set of Orson Welles content to MMU on SE Belmont, and maybe score something else (F for Fake maybe? They didn’t have that — or maybe I searched wrong? I’ll double-check later). 

However, after I’d plunked the vids case through the return slot, a sharp clerk fished them up and cued me to the fact that I’d only returned four of the five disc (despite the printed reminder message on the case, and despite my having glanced at the multi-DVD container before heading out and persuading myself I had all five). 

Nope. Number five was still at home in the player, I realized at that point. My bad. So I’d need to come back later on a second try. 

But in the meantime, on the way home (I was walking), why not see this 3:45 matinee, a cartoon (animation), at The Bagdad? End of backstory.

OK, now let’s cut to a central scene in the movie, one I considered most relevant to a subject I study, namely Synergetic Geometry as pioneered by the late, great, one-and-only, R. Buckminster Fuller (RBF). 

I’m talking about the geodesic sphere we found ourselves within as a point of view, the concave inner surface omni-triangulated (I was looking for pentagon patterns)). At the center of this sphere is like a Marvin the Martian and/or Darth Vader gun, set to destroy a whole civilization or planet — the backdrop for this story is the whole galaxy of many planets, reminiscent Little Prince.

Surrounding the giant gun, which is drawing power from the imprisoned princess (a mommy to minions), are concentric gyroscopic wheels (not unlike in Lawnmower Man, the B-movie). 

I could see why the baddies felt powerful in controlling such a precessional gizmo. All they needed was some girl-boss-turned-slave energy to make their evil and destructive dreams come true.

But then the other girl boss, the older sister, appeared with the Mario Brothers and a friend, and, deus ex machina, convexity met concavity (their two hands) through the glass, eliciting an even more primal energy, and the evil design was exploded. 

Precession favors the regenerative. I could see kids might be getting the message. 

The domineering male archetype (symbolized a father-son pair of death cult dinosaurs) takes a back seat to a more nurturing civilization-building female energy.

By the time I got home and had all five DVDs ready, it had started raining, so I accomplished the return (successful this time (I cued the guy: “all there this time”) by car, while steaming an artichoke in the Instant Pot pressure cooker.

Marvin the Martian in AI Art

Of Meetups and Queries

Per these recent movie reviews, I’ve been continuing my Film Studies with MMU, thinking ahead to where “a production” produces more lasting results than mere movie lot props, as our props will be made for the real world. 

Tough Guys links me to trains and thereby to steel (I think of that Amtrak on the Steel bridge — a digital picture I took during No Kings 3.0) whereas the five disc set on Orson Welles takes me back into Martian Math, as well as the noir genre.

Picture one of those yurt-n-dome-based windmill-powered communities I’ve been positing for Mongolia or Siberia, with Alaska-Cascadia-based campground prototypes. Such installations would naturally attract documentary makers, as well as inspire science fiction (such as about a train tunnel under the Bering Strait perhaps).

On the Wanderers front, Terry passed me his latest thinking at the Spring Equinox, which I triple-hole punched and added to my “bus reading” binder, to which same binder I today added a hardcopy of Daniel’s paper on Blake vs Newton and Bimetallism i.e. Gold vs Silver (so also Economics in flavor). 

We had a follow-up breakfast at Bread and Ink, as Tom’s (our customary venue) was still closed owing to that kitchen fire.  

Speaking of Tom’s, the new food pod is almost complete: the food carts are open and operating, it’s just the indoor commons that’s still under construction.

Terry’s paper traces what he considers to be two flavors of thermodynamics, one tracing through the Carnots and the other through Boltzmann and others. Did Newton really recant infinitesimals?  Lots to track down. Terry’s thinking inspires me to see in terms grand polarities, with equatorial geodesics tracing a tightrope walk between the two, a dialectic hybrid or unity-of-opposites.

As usual, I left the meeting with a lot to think about, and while my queries were fresh in my mind, I ran a Deep Research prompt through Perplexity and got back what I consider to be worthy Philosophy of Engineering, which I file under Cascadian Pragmatism (a useful categorization more than some textbook definition).

That’s the second time in about a week that the LLM’s (“gossip-bot’s”) output as come across as worthy of memorializing on GitHub, directly pasting the Markdown copy into Markdown cells in a Jupyter Notebook. The earlier prompt, regarding namespaces using the 4D meme, was likewise “perfecto” (picture an Italian chef, making that perfecto gesture).

Refreshing a Teaching App

I didn't expect I'd be spending my morning wrestling with the Periodic Table. Talk about back to basics. The back story is I was visiting my PythonAnywhere application, a teaching stack, Flask atop Python with SQLite on the side, and noticed my half-assed demo wasn't actually bullet-proof. I'd only disable any editing later, before the hack. A couple lines in my Glossary had been defaced.

In the process of refreshing the Glossary (geek terms, wrote it myself), I noticed the Periodic Table was far from complete, with less than half the 118 elements I knew were out there. That's when I fired up a new Jupyter Notebook, to document the process, top to bottom, of taking two CSV sources, merging them, and extracting just what I needed to fit a pre-existing mold.

That's all in the foreground. In the background, an out-of-control city-state known as The District (aka City of Morons in these journals) is threatening to attack Persia and destroy it, in retaliation for its own psychotic war of aggression. If this were a farm animal, we'd put it down, quick and easy, but given we're dealing with the Pentagon (now private sector), we have to factor in the criminal element (organized crime runs that shop, we all know).

I'm far away in Portland, Oregon and don't engage in any message traffic with any official DCers, except on Facebook maybe, where I'll write comments like "too late" if it's someone posing as “from the USA" (snicker). Sorry Charlie, you're not persuading me any more with that flavor of BS; we haven't had a real USA in some decades, per our Medal of Freedom winning hero.

BTW, I recommend not contacting the defacer sticking an email address in my database. I never did. But I wanted to show what enterprising hackers might accomplish. Actually, in this case, nothing all that special had to happen as the code's weaknesses were all mine. Fortunately, it's a learning application, designed to be hacked on. I'm learning. 

Also, I'm not gonna try Manus through Meta. If I try Manus, it won't be in a way Meta knows anything about.

Oregon Rail Heritage

School of Tomorrow: Spring Term Update