Derik Badman's Journal

Chaotic week at work with performance issues and spikes and (thankfully brief) downtimes. I am stressed and on edge. Learning via mistakes can be good, but it can also be stressful and dangerous to business.

Saw a chipmunk in a driveway on my morning walk. I so rarely see them, though I know they are around. I guess they don't tend to run around in places where I can easily see them, unlike say squirrels.

Watch the Kristen Stewart lead Seberg biopic the other day. While she was excellent in it as Jean Seberg and basically seemed to be the point of it, the movie was otherwise a pretty big letdown. There's a really interesting story to be told (especially now) about how a movie star was basically destroyed by the FBI just because she donated money and a bit of her public profile to black power groups, but this movie is not it. From some brief research it appears a good bit of the movie was fictionalized (for instance it is apparently quite disputed that she had an affair with one of the men whose programs she was giving money to, but that clearly makes for a more dramatic and racy movie). It focuses on a very short period of time in her life and it doesn't adequately even consider why she got involved. What made a white money star who was living in France start supporting these groups. It also doesn't address her subsequent suicide, which seems to have been a good part related to what the FBI did. In fact, at the end of the film, it just show some few bits of text on the screen that say she died, but don't even indicate it was suicide.

More problematic is the "sympathetic" FBI agent, that I must assume was created for the movie. He's like the good cop character with a pretty wife (the underused Margaret Qualley) who is becoming a doctor. He bugs Seberg and basically helps destroy her life, but he also kind of falls in love with her, so he feels bad about it. He doesn't apparently feel bad about bugging other people or sneaking into their houses or anything, only this one pretty movie star. His "good cop" role is played off his partner's "bad cop" who is shown much more enthused about destroying a person's life not to mention shown yelling violently as his teenage daughter over dinner.

Also problematic is the end scene where the good cop tries to give Seberg her FBI file and she doesn't take it. It's impossible to believe that the women who sued Newsweek for printing a scandalous story about who her baby's father supposedly was (based on FBI lies), wouldn't take that file and use it somehow.

I finished the first half (one of two novels) of Jeroun: The Collected Omnibus by Zachary Jernigan, and I'm not sure I'll read the second half. Somewhere I saw raves for this series that made me think I'd like it, but when I picked it up last night to start on the second half/novel I just wasn't enthused. I think neither the writing nor the characters nor the general plot are just that exciting to me. The writing suffers from a lot of infodump world building, most of the characters are fairly annoying, and there's just so much special terms and fantasy world cruft. Jernigan is perhaps a lot more interested in world building than I am. And I also felt as I read, that too much was being explained. Everything was being explained.