Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

November 24

Oh hey. Final season of Man in the High Castle is out. Watched the first epsiode and once again I've more or less forgotten what's going on.

November 23

That poor ending is still bugging me. It's a six-year-old movie, so spoiler alert and all but lemme talk about what might have been a more interesting outcome.

• Immediaely obvious one, Emerson's "asset" is the bad guy. Arc of the story is to teach Emerson a lesson about trust. Doesn't work for me, but it's an approach. I've not given this enough thought to figure out how it would pan out, as in how you'd reveal it, why she'd wait so long, etc.
• Emerson's boss is the bad guy. See, for me, this idea has legs. First, we already know he's a cold-hearted bastard who probably wouldn't bat an eyelid at shooting Emerson (this is part of why the ending as delivered grates: if he was true to his character he'd have simply shot the two of them in the hospital room and left). Second, he knows how the system works; he assigned Emerson to it - you'd have to drop the bit with the fake operator callsign since that wouldn't make sense. Third, he wants to be kingpin, so he stages the breakin to take out 14 real hits and 1 fake (his own) which will leave him last man standing in the agency upper ranks. So we've got means, motive, opportunity, as they say. How does this pan out? Emerson figures it out somehow, maybe when he makes the cellphone call to his boss. Lures the boss to the base on some pretext; boss falls for pretext on the grounds of wanting to clean everything up; mayhem ensues. Probably bonus points for getting the asset critically involved, e.g. shooting someone who's got the drop on Emerson. Sort of getting a bit into Bourne territory here but that's ok. Then they plant evidence of their deaths, destroy the location, and off we go to an island in the Caribbean with Emerson's millions or whatever.
• Variation on this: it's a test for Emerson to see if he'll shoot the asset, since that's the reason he was put on this task in the first place. Again, I haven't thought this one out because it doesn't really work for me, but it'd sort of fit. This could be a subplot of the above scenario because Emerson's boss wants to leave no trace.

Anyway, this is clearly the start of my highly successful script-doctoring career, so I'm off to search the internet for an agent.

November 22

The Numbers Station was chugging along nicely, and I thought I could see a very nice twist coming, and instead they went for Bad Guy Monologue and Rogue with Heart of Gold and really I felt like throwing the remote at the TV. Such a wasted opportunity.

November 21

Pretty sure I'd seen An Audience with Billy Connolly before, but that's no reason not to watch it again. Half the fun was in trying to identify the '80s celebrities in the crowd.

No good reason for the gap in the diary other than that I've been a bit busy: hoping to move back into renovated house soon, busy at work, a trip to London, various other things.

November 8

I think I preferred How To Talk To Girls At Parties as a short story. As a almost two-hour film, it was a bit uneven and sort of lacking in depth. Cute that they made the protagonist pretty much Young Neil Gaiman at the end, though.

previous month | current month| next month