2019-08-19 09:53
Was woken up at 4:30 this morning by a server up notice on my phone. I missed the server down notice, but thankfully it was only a couple minutes of issues with the EU servers the app I work on is running on. But that was enough to keep me up for about an hour trying to get back to sleep. Those early messages always jolt me awake (when I hear them), and then my mind races and I worry that it will be some kind of repeating issue that just wakes me up again. Thankfully, this time it was isolated, though I've now spent a good bit of my morning investigating the issue and trying to figure out what went wrong and what I can do to avoid it happening again. So my week starts with the worst part of my job: server issues.
During/after dinner last night (another try at homemade pesto), we watched the recent American Masters episode on Ursula K. Le Guin. I read the first three Earthsea books when I was young, but only came back to her work more recently. Like Gene Wolfe, she is an author I greatly regret not getting to sooner, as I have loved a lot of the books of hers I've read in recently. The film Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin was too brief but enjoyable. It was a little bit biography, a little bit about her father (an anthropologist), a little bit about Earthsea and some Hainish books and Always Coming Home, a little bit about science fiction and its relation to women. The animation they included in relation to (mostly) the Earthsea books was nice, a painted, brushy stop motiony looking style that worked as brief, vague vignettes.
As Lianne wanted to work on her weaving after that, I ended up browsing the riches that is the Criterion Channel and somehow ended up watching Elevator to the Gallows, a crime film from 1958 by Louis Malle. I was mistakenly under the impression it was an adaption of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but the one I was thinking of is Italian, so... it turns out I had it confused with Ossessione by Visconti, which I also have yet to see. Anyway, this movie was enjoyable enough, though not particularly remarkable. The most interesting aspect was in the very end, where the two murderers end up getting caught because of some undeveloped film. The policeman is like "be careful about leaving photos lying around" (I badly paraphrase) and for the time that seems like a tricky way for a crime to be solved, but in the context of the present it is pretty prescient, as we now have photos everywhere and video and surveillance cameras and that is what they use in so many crimes (and crime films).