Followed Andrea down to the rink this morning at 6:45; a crescent moon was visible through the mist in the South, and its light shone down on an inch of fresh snow. When we stepped onto the ice our skates made fresh, dark lines in the new powder, and we skated in the cold wind for 20 minutes or so. Sometimes I really do love living in Toronto.
So, went to see Avatar last night with Wayne and adio; three word summary:
Miyazaki on steroids.
So much of the film, visually and thematically, derives from Miyazaki’s work — the flying machines, the floating mountains, the nature goddess, etc. etc. — Castles in the Sky, Princess mononoke, Nausicaa — all of them are present. But this is Miyazaki high on testosterone — instead of actually stopping a war, these peaceful warriors bring it the fuck on; and they do so in the best nativist tradition, a white man’s final fantasy of redemption by bloodshed and assimilation. so there is everything wrong with the film that you might imagine there to be — how is it possible, in 2009, to make a film in which the alien natives are a cross between the Maasai and the Sioux? — but at the same time it is an incredible spectacle. Best fantasy film of all time? (because honestly, this isn’t sci-fi — there’re dragonriders, ferchrissakes!) Lord of the Rings is the only other contender, I guess.
so, I admit it, I had fun on christmas. and also we had an awesome gingerbread house party. so fine, go ahead and gloat, amanda…
Does anyone actually enjoy Christmas? Not, do you want to enjoy Christmas, or do you feel obligated to enjoy Christmas, or do you wistfully believe that there was a time when you enjoyed Christmas; but does anyone actually just love the season in a happy-go-lucky kind of way that makes your heart go pitter-patter & fill with good will toward men? Because (a) I don’t feel like I know anyone for whom that’s the case, and (b) this year, quite honestly, I hate Christmas with a violent passion and would rather spend the whole season barefoot in the snow breaking rocks. Seriously — what the fuck is the point of an obligatory festival of consumption that also entails a revisitation of every familial trauma, past and present?
Next year I’m going to find a way to just induce a coma till after new year’s.
Hedia took this picture yesterday on our dawn paddle around Toronto
Island:
The weather was glorious — warmer than most days in July, it felt! — and there was a kind of splendrous beauty to the colours of the sunlight across the island and against the Toronto skyline. I often complain about how unbeautiful Toronto is but it was gorgeous from the water! I wish I could get out at dawn more often; it’s the loneliest, calmest, and most spectacular time of day on the Lake. Glad to be getting good enough in the small boats that we’re not likely to huli
in the relative safety of Lake Ontario.
Oh, and that’s me in the corner of the photo.
Finally got my invite on Saturday, as did a a whole slew of people, I guess. But now I have all these invites, and hardly anyone to play with on Wave itself; so if you don’t have access yet, and are interested, drop me a line and I’ll "nominate" you, as the terminology seems to be.
There was a special student rate via the circus school for Cirque du Soleil’s Ovo, so the four of us got to go last night. It was pretty awesome. I heard a little ocmplaining behind me about the weakness of the storyline, and the imperfection of a couple of the acts, and I think the criticisms were fair. But there were still some really incredible moments, including:
Anyway, we all had a pretty good time, though Maceo’s attention kept wandering. Mika had her mouth open in awed astonishment for most of the three hours, though. And afterwards we went out to a restaurant and — GASP — the kids both actually tried new food! it was a little shocking.
Watching Mika’s circus class right now — it’s pretty fun…
OK, so here’s the problem: in the old days, if you wnated to share music, you would make your friends a mixed tape. This might even be a soical activity in which you sat around with your friends, possibly stoned, and laboriously copied songs one at a tie from your record player to a cassette.
In some ways this is a lot easier now. If you want to share music with your friends, you can just send them the mp3 files you’ve been listening to, maybe using Dropbox or something similar. Then htey import the music into their ocllection, using whatever tool (for most of my friends, it’s iTunes; for me it’s variously rhythmbox, amarok, or lately, goggles music manager. But when you do htat, you get the music without the playlist order. Alternatively, you can create a playlist (m3u, pls, xsmp, or i guess there are some nonfree formats) and send that to your friend — but when you do htat the file references will be all messed up, and even if your friend has the usic, they won’t be able to play it.
I have a partial solution, which works like this: use whatever tool to export an m3u playlist. Then run a script that reads the playlist, copies the music files into a new directory, then drops a modified playlist into the same directory — one which refers only to the *new*ly-created music files. Then you can drop that directory right into dropbox or whatever, and your friends should be able to play your music.
There’s stil la problem with this — the new music doesn’t get automatically added to your friend’s collection; and if she does add the files, she’s likely to end up with duplicates. So a better solution would
Despite the deficiencies, my current code is useful enough to share, so here it is. I’d love to hear back with some suggestions for improvements.
#!/usr/bin/python # usage: # playlistExporter.py -i oldplaylist -o newdirectory -n playlistname import os.path, sys, shutil from optparse import OptionParser # parse the command line first parser = OptionParser() parser.add_option ("-i", "--input", dest="inputFile", default="~/playlist.m3u", help="get playlist from FILE", action="store", type="string", ) parser.add_option("-o", "--output", dest="newFolder", default="~/NewPlaylist", action="store", type="string", help="save songs and playlist to") parser.add_option("-n", "--name", dest="playlistName", default="myplaylist", action="store", type="string", help="save songs and playlist to") (options, args) = parser.parse_args() # now start the real script # read the playlist, writing the song names to a new list # called "songs" oldPlaylist=open(options.inputFile) songs=[] newPlaylistText="" while 1: line=oldPlaylist.readline() if not line: break if line[0] != "#": clean=line.strip('\n') songs.append(clean) # create the new directory if it doesn't exist already newDir = os.path.abspath(options.newFolder) if not os.path.isdir(newDir): os.mkdir(newDir) # copy the files and create the playlist for song in songs: print(song) song=os.path.abspath(song) print(song) shutil.copy2(song,newDir) newPath=os.path.join("./", os.path.basename(song)) newPlaylistText += "newPath" + "\n" # write the new playlist to a file newPlaylist=open(os.path.join(newDir,options.playlistName + ".m3u"),"w") newPlaylist.write(newPlaylistText) newPlaylist.close
I hate sitting in the living room listening to the kids cough. Mika has been nominally better for 2 days now but she sounds like a failing hydraulic mechanical system of unknown function, perhaps something from The City of Ember. I wish she would just get better instead.
Just wanted to write that, really. But we did go see Holy F Friday night, and while it took me a while to appreciate them, they were actually pretty awesome. Especially enjoyed the screeching 35mm film (thanks to Kathleen for confirmation that’s what they were doing). Still not sure whether any of the tracks from their album were actually played at the show.
Anyway: Go Toronto! Who says we’re Number One on the Do-Not-Travel List?? I mean — Holy Fuck, people!