I don’t know whether I like Season 1 or Season 2 better. Apples and oranges.
See below for thoughts about the show and the making of the show.
Continue reading Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (Season 2)
IMAX How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
After watching the 2025 remake of How to Train Your Dragon and reading people’s reactions on Reddit, I conceived a desire to see the movie on an IMAX screen. Siqi humored me, and we bought tickets and went and watched the movie again, at a slightly-father-away theater.
See below for a detailed save-the-cat beat sheet plot summary of How to Train Your Dragon (2025). Beware SPOILERS.
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
This work, published in 1722 and attributed to Daniel Defoe but set in 1600s England with interludes in Virginia, is a fictional first-person account of the life of the narrator, “Moll Flanders” (not her real name), the daughter of a Newgate prisoner. Although she is penniless as a child, she manages to give herself the appearance of a gentlewoman. Her fortunes and her identity pass through a number of transformations during the course of her life, which is marred by a series of deceptions and misdeeds, which she eventually comes to repent of.
Wikipedia says this novel, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (which I enjoyed very much), is an example of “spiritual autobiography.”
See below for what I thought. (I am not a fan.)
Continue reading Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
When and Why I Read Moll Flanders
Another famous book by the author of Robinson Crusoe, which I enjoyed.
Genre: English literature
Date started / date finished: 09-Jun-25 to 15-Jun-25
Length: 307 pages
Originally published in: 1722/1995/2023
Source link: Moll Flanders
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
This movie is a remake of the 2010 animated movie How to Train Your Dragon. That means it’s time once again to play Spot the Differences!
Although there are some changes that I personally don’t like, I think they did a great job overall. (Still, the original was better.)
DreamWorks did less revamping than Disney has been doing in their live-action remakes of animated classics. It may be that few changes seemed necessary because 2010 wasn’t that long ago (the live-action Cinderella movie was made 65 years after the 1950 original), or it may be because DreamWorks made a conscious decision to change as little as possible, or it may be both. (Often it’s both.)
So what did change, and why?
You probably don’t want to read this post if you haven’t seen the new movie, and it won’t make sense at all if you haven’t seen the new movie or the old movie. Instead, please enjoy this photo of the counter where I bought gelato after exiting the cinema.
EDIT: I added some notes after I watched it again.
Short trip to Shenzhen
I was invited (with my boss and another colleague) to the International Quantum Academy in Shenzhen to give a talk after I edited Single-Electron Spin Qubits in Silicon for Quantum Computing, a paper written by some researchers who are based there. Siqi came with me, and spent Friday as a tourist on his own. (He went to Huaqiangbei electronics market.) Then we spent Saturday as tourists together.
- Thursday, June 5 – flight from Hangzhou to Shenzhen
- Friday, June 6 – talk at the International Quantum Academy
- Saturday, June 7 – visit to Dafen Oil Painting Village and Sungang Home Furnishings Market
- Sunday, June 8 – return flight from Shenzhen to Hangzhou
Chevron amethyst sphere
Item description / significance
This is a natural purple polished amethyst ball with a white zig-zag line (chevron pattern) of white quartz running around it.
Bought where
in Shenzhen, in a shop in the home decor part of the Sungang Market
Age and origin
As far as I know, this piece is “new” (not previously owned by an individual). I don’t know where the amethyst was mined. Brazil?
What I like about it
It’s amethyst! The chevron pattern is clean and the purple is deep. I’m glad I got to see this sphere in person, because it meant that I could evaluate the quality of the stone in real life.
See below for more thoughts on and photos of this sphere.
International Quantum Academy
I was invited (with my boss and another colleague) to the International Quantum Academy in Shenzhen to give a talk after I edited Single-Electron Spin Qubits in Silicon for Quantum Computing, a paper written by some researchers who are based there.
See my other post about the trip to Shenzhen for what my husband and I saw as tourists on our visit.
See below for photos of my visit to the International Quantum Academy.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)
I was disappointed with this movie for two reasons, one general and one personal:
- The ending didn’t feel final, after so much buildup.
- There was entirely too much water.
To elaborate on the lack of emotional finality: Some reviews say the ending was a gracious and moving send-off that tidily wraps up the whole movie series with meaningful callbacks and clever retconning. That is, of course, what they are supposed to say, so even if such assertions are sincere, they sound hollow. It’s an expensive movie, made by experienced people; naturally, we are expected to like and approve of it. But other reviews agree with my view: whatever the moviemakers may have been trying to do, it didn’t work as well as one might have hoped.
To elaborate on the excess of water: Classic case of “Well done, thanks, I hate it.” I personally hate underwater scenes. Hate hate hate them. They make me disproportionately anxious. I do not find them fun and entertaining, unlike other forms of danger (e.g., precipitous heights, car chases). I enjoy action movies in general, and action movies are exciting because the fictional hero (and in the case of Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan, to an unprecedented extent, the actor playing the fictional hero) is placed in life-threatening danger. But I hate water scenes. And this movie had one that went on for… I dunno, 20 minutes? I Googled and couldn’t immediately find the duration online, but one article said there was a single take in the movie that was 4 minutes long, so I don’t feel like 20 minutes is an unreasonable guess!
More thoughts on Final Reckoning below, including plot spoilers.
Continue reading Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025)
The Maid of Sker by R. D. Blackmore
Wikipedia says, “Blackmore considered The Maid of Sker to be his best novel.” That’s why I read it. But I liked Lorna Doone much better.
(I guess readers can’t be expected to agree with authors about their work; Mark Twain liked Joan of Arc best of his novels, whereas I preferred Connecticut Yankee; E.M. Forster liked The Longest Journey best of all his novels, whereas I preferred A Room with a View.)
This 213,414-word novel is supposedly about a two-year-old high-born girl who mysteriously washes up alone in a boat on the coast of a farm called Sker. However, in actual fact, the book is about the narrator, an old Welsh fisherman and sailor, and could more accurately have been titled David Llewellyn of Newton-Nottage. Old Davy finds the child, who calls herself Bardie, in the summer of 1782, but the tale spans eighteen years, and Davy has spent most of them far away from Bardie. Large swaths of the book are devoted to Davy’s adventures in Devon, which eventually shed some light on Bardie’s origins—but large swaths of the book are also devoted to his adventures in the navy, which do not.
As a narrator, Old Davy suffers greatly in comparison to John Ridd, the narrator of Lorna Doone. Both men profess a commitment to honesty, but Old Davy not only exaggerates (particularly about himself, while pretending to be modest), he lies, and calls his rationalizations honesty! Early on in the novel, he describes to the reader how he tricks people into buying fish he caught that aren’t fresh anymore. That’s disgusting to me for three reasons: I don’t eat fish at all because I don’t like the taste; rotting fish don’t taste good even to people who normally like fish; habitually lying to and running from your customers is the opposite of admirable. He also poaches, smuggles, and simultaneously collects both a pension and a salary from the government. The louder he says he’s not doing something, the more certain you can be that he is (like the duck in the comic at this link). Davy is intended to be funny, and to an extent, he is. But to have this weasely, money-grubbing, boastful man conveying the story is intermittently quite irksome, especially when he says nothing whatsoever related to the maid of Sker for many pages at a time—and all the more when I already read a book by the same author that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Still, the book is a kind of unusually cheerful mystery; everything works out all right in the end, and it was entertaining enough to keep me interested along the way. The story’s origin as a serial publication probably explains the plot tangents.
See below for passages that illustrate the humor of Old Davy.
Continue reading The Maid of Sker by R. D. Blackmore
When and Why I Read The Maid of Sker
I'm reading this because I enjoyed Lorna Doone, by the same author.
Genre: English literature
Date started / date finished: 03-May-25 to 29-May-25
Length: 474 pages
Originally published in: 1872/2014/2024
Source link: The Maid of Sker
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (Season 1)
This 1990s TV show is a wholesome romance thinly disguised as science-fiction. Specifically, it’s about the relationship between two capable and kind-hearted but emotionally vulnerable young professionals. Rewatching Season 1 filled me with the glow of nostalgia.
See below for more on the characters, plot, and themes of the show. No spoilers.
Continue reading Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (Season 1)
