Ukraine bringing you down? The prospect of France electing a right wing populist Putin stooge too depressing? Take a break with a dark 2.5 hrs movie about a charismatic genocidal leader rigging elections and taking over the world! Wait, what..!?

The movie is a bit meh. A pastiche of different genres. Harry Potter obviously, nazi war movies, Doctor Strange, period dramas. It is not clear who the target audience is. It's neither a kids movie nor one for grown ups. Great performances from Jude Law, Jessica Williams and Mads Mikkelsen, but all are very one dimensional. Strange how little character development there is in a film that long. Ezra Miller sucks in it.

The special effects of mixed quality. The cute creatures made the audience "awwwww" at appropriate times. Fireworks were awful. A lot of nice visual ideas involving spells. Except when they had people shooting lasers at each other. Those feel like Hong Kong b-movies from the 70s. The Girl whipped out her phone to play Tetris when the final laser-powered showdown came up. Yeah, that bad. A lot of the action is set in Berlin, but it's just "generic European backdrop with trams". Bhutan is just "generic third world mountain village". I imagine travel restrictions played a part, most of it was shot indoors in a London suburb.

The down sides are many. The one dimensional generic nazi baddies. The reassuring old school upper class Britishness that seems to give them so much emotional comfort. Gala dinners and stilted Jane Austen dialogs. Even though most of the cast is mid-30s to mid-40s, everything and everyone looks old. The feel is that of a Harry Potter movie, but slower, as if shot by a 70s director. Funny thing is that from the reviews this is actually an improvement on previous films in the franchise.

I have been fine tuning a recipe for a risotto with cauliflower and cheese, garnished with spicy toasted breadcrumbs. The garnish is essential, otherwise the dish is boring and feels like school canteen fare. For a while I wanted to experiment with using gremolata instead of the breadcrumbs. But gremolata made with lime zest and thai basil instead of lemon and parsley. Finally got around trying it, it didn't quite work. But I discovered that thai basil added in the risotto, that tastes great. And with that the recipe is done, one more for the repertoire.

Gremolata is a chopped garlic + parsley + zest from north Italy. It's the standard garnish for Milan's signature dish, ossobuco (veal shanks). For a long time I have been avoiding mixing ingredients from different cultures. Like soy sauce in Italian food, or burrito and sushi, which seems pretty popular here. I wanted to make sure I learned non-European cuisines well before going fusion. Also The Wife, who grew up in Asia, has always given me a hard time about it. You can see that she's fuming inwardly at the bastardisation when I try that.

It seems that many Asians are funny when Westerners adopts parts of their cultures. But don't see any issues when the adopting goes the opposite way. For example, The Wife's family roll their eyes when they hear of Westerners taking up yoga or God Brahma forbid, some Asian philosophies. But they are all Catholics. Nothing illogical in that 

I was an early adopter of Javascript and was always very fond of it. Even when I switched to Flash and PHP when JS jobs dried up. I was happy when JS came back and started swallowing the world. But in the last few years I got bored of it. It was at about the time Typescript came out. TS is an extra layer of noise added on top of JS to keep enterprise engineers happy. I understand why it can be useful. But I don't like it. It's ugly. I also don't like the whole culture based around JS. It involves a LOT of Twitterstorm. And hipsters. The funniest ones have clenched-fist profile pictures on Twitter, where they lecture everyone. While taking big fat Zuckenberg dollars. Ah the irony.

In the past few years I have been quietly moving towards Python, and working in the ML/DS space. I like it much more. A different crowd, quieter, more computer-sciency. Floats my boat. The field is also interesting, more cutting edge. I am now in my first completely non-JS job since the mid-00s.

And that's all