Month: November 2019

Aoi Kitchen

For the last 140 years or so, Japan has had eating establishments known as yoshoku-ya. These specialize in foods from outside the country’s cuisine that have been adapted for Japanese tastes, such as curry (India via England) or hamburgers (Germany by way of America). The results are often enthralling, and the canon constitutes a perfect example of the salutary nature of fusion cuisines, which have often developed as a result of international trade, or from more negative causes like war and colonialism. Though these dishes have dotted New York Japanese restaurants for decades, only recently have restaurants opened with menus more thoroughly dedicated to yoshoku — sometimes offering several dishes artistically on a single tray. Aoi Kitchen is the latest example. The largest features set meals that each focus on one yoshoku dish. The one I ordered blew me away: omurice. While this is no ordinary fried rice, the omelet is also unusual. It plays with the nature and meaning of eggs. A hemispheric heap of fried rice goes on the plate, then an omelet cooked into a dome is placed so that it seamlessly covers and conceals the rice. The exceedingly yellow omelet forms a damp tarp, so that the partly cooked egg glistens in every depression and crevice of the dome.

Apple Monopoly

It’s that last bit — the multiple generations bit — that is of interest here. Apple first released its notorious butterfly keyboard in April 2015, and has only now replaced it in 1 model in November 2019. Over that time period the company has sold $99b worth of Macs, the majority of which have been laptops. This is truly the power of integration! Or, to put it another way, the power — and downside — of monopoly. No, Apple does not have a monopoly in computers — how amazing would that be! — but the company does have a monopoly on macOS. It sells the only hardware that runs macOS, which is why millions of customers kept buying computers that, particularly in the last couple of years, were widely reported to be at risk of significant problems.

2021-02-04: On the many ways Apple is sketchy as hell, and what can be done about it.

Yang Horrible Tech Policy

the more we hear from Yang about his tech policy ideas, the more ridiculous and completely disconnected from the actual tech world he seems. He got a lot of flak a couple months back when he advocated for voting via your mobile device via blockchain which he declared to be “fraud proof.” This was universally mocked by security professionals and cryptocurrency experts, including one who described the proposal as “unbelievably dumb.”

So, his pro-tech campaign had already hit some choppy waters, and they got much, much worse last week when he introduced his official policy for regulating technology firms that is so filled with bad ideas that I initially thought it was a parody. It may be the single worst tech policy proposal of any current or former candidate for President (and, frankly, nearly all of them are pretty bad). It’s as if he took all the terrible ideas that Senator Josh Hawley has been proposing over the last year or so and said “Oh, I can top all of those with worse proposals.”

Lindsay Pickett Cityscapes

Oil painter Lindsay Pickett crafts distorted cityscapes that are at times taken from the artist’s dreams. His influences range from Dali and Bosch to scifi illustrators like Wayne Barlowe and Jim Burns. The key to crafting these pieces is not just subverting physics, but walking the tightrope of making them somehow convincing.

Primal

Insanely brutal fight scene from animated series Primal

Primal is an American animated television series created and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky. It premiered on October 7, 2019 on Adult Swim. Primal follows a caveman (named “Spear” in the show’s production notes and voiced by Aaron LaPlante), a formidable hunter at the dawn of evolution, and a female Tyrannosaurus (called “Fang” in the show’s production notes) on the brink of extinction, brought together by tragedy into an unlikely partnership as they fight to survive the violent creatures that also live in the prehistoric world.