Eli's Space

Author: Eli

  • Endings: Scavengers Reign (2023)

    Released in 2023, Scavengers Reign oozes with creativity and, well, ooze.

    It came out on Max (HBO Go? Go?), and it flew under my radar until this week, when a coworker gave me a resounding recommendation and I saw another post on X that raved about it. When the universe speaks, I listen.

    I finished the series in a day. There’s only 1 season. There should be more, but it wasn’t renewed. Some preliminary research suggests the showrunners have more story to tell, but I’m not getting my hopes up. I’m going to treat it like it’s truly finished, and if this post turns out to be preemptive, all the better!

    Here come the spoilers. A quick summary of the plot: at an indeterminate point in the future of some universe (maybe ours, maybe not) a massive colony ship loaded with cargo and destined for a new planet runs into trouble. While most of the passengers are in cryo-sleep for the long voyage, a few of the awake crew members manage to escape down to a nearby planet. Their escape pods are scattered far and wide across a strange, diverse, alien landscape.

    The story follows a few different people coming from different areas as they get the giant mothership to land, and then head towards it to attempt to rescue those in cryo-sleep and to use the shuttle to get off world and find help.

    Flora and fauna are the stars of the show, and scene after scene introduces us to vegetation, habitats, and complex interconnected behaviors of species that could have been inspired by a 5-year-old’s crayon scribbles. Thankfully, I never had any trouble with my suspension of disbelief. Why couldn’t an alien climate give us acid-spitting birds, parasitic lemurs with mind control, and fungus that breathes life into electronics?

    The plot line is simple enough as we watch the survivors attempt to survive. Not all of them make it. In fact, death is a constant in the show, alongside that sense of discovery. As is often the case with science fiction, the audience is given a rich tapestry of philosophy and thought to munch on (alongside the gorgeous visuals). It’s not heavy-handed though. While some of the themes are dark (including one particular plot line around guilt) generally the show leans more into light, whimsy, wonder.

    At some point, a passing ship hears a distress call from one of the stranded crew, and they join the fray. Slowly, steadily, everyone inches towards the recently landed mother ship: Demeter.

    And that brings us to the ending. When they get to the Demeter. It wouldn’t be television without some friction or drama. In this case we have the crew from the passing ship (hoping to loot some cargo for their own home colony) going head to head against the crew of the Demeter who wants to wake up the survivors. Simultaneously, we’ve got aforementioned psycho lemur running around trying to murder everyone that moves. Did I mention it has telekinetic powers?

    Unfortunately, one of the looters manages to hop in the sole remaining shuttle and takes off, leaving the rest behind and removing any hope of getting off-planet for quite some time. Much more fortunately, a surprise ally (previously presumed dead) shows up and saves the good guys from psycho lemur (who is actually a parasitic lemur and one of the crew members in a strange symbiosis, but don’t sweat the details).

    We see many of the cryo-tubes have been destroyed, but there are still a dozen or more sleepers who the crew dutifully wakes up.

    Some time passes, and we cut to a future view of the grounded mothership surrounded by a little village. The humans have been diligent. The mysterious ally I alluded to is off redefining what machines and life are. And while the planet isn’t any less harsh, it’s also no less wonderful, and I got a sense that the colony was thriving, despite the fact they hadn’t quite made it to their intended destination.

    The show could have ended there very neatly, but clearly the showrunners had a thread of hope for renewal, and the final scene shows the looter’s shuttle being captured by a giant religious consortium ship floating through the stars. There’s little dialogue, but the imagery suggests mad monks and ritual sacrifices. As they board their captured shuttle, they find that some of the flora and fauna from that mystical planet left with the shuttle, and grew out of control. I believe we’re being set up for a season where the mad monks see the life-giving power of these plants and animals, and attempt to capture and/or control it.

    Maybe one day we’ll see if I’m right. But for now, let’s properly review the ending.

    I knew going in that it was cancelled, so my expectations for a clean cut weren’t super high. The imagery was so instantly engaging that I knew the art would penetrate into my soul and stay with me even the plot was awful and the ending made no sense.

    Lucky for me, the plot was coherent, and the ending answered most of the important questions. Don’t get me wrong — there’s still plenty of questions that have no answer, but it feels like a Tolkien world-building approach. It didn’t leave me infuriated and exasperated as much as I found myself starry-eyed and dreaming about this vast planet of possibilities.

    Maybe it was a bit rushed in the last few episodes…I can imagine some of the plot lines were ready to run for a few seasons, but I appreciate the creators doing their best to give the viewers some closure.

    In terms of twists, there was maybe one real surprise with the plot, when our surprise ally showed up. The planet already provided ample surprises.

    Twists: 5/10
    Execution: 8/10
    Satisfaction: 8/10

    Bottom Line: Clocking in at about 6 hour in total run-time, this is described as a mini-series on IMDB and I think it works in that lens. Yes, there was room and hope for another season, but I believe anyone looking for psychedelic, ponderous, and delightfully imaginative fare will be quite happy with this show and its ending. I know I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever the creators do next!

  • Squirrel Annoyer

    I have a few bird-feeders, and enjoy supporting the local bird population. The birds are polite, taking a seed or two and then fluttering away. Squirrels, however, have a tendency to hop on the feeder and sit there for an hour at a time just chompity-chomping away. They scare away all the birds and eat an unfair share.

    View the Source Code:

    https://github.com/elisspace/squirrel_annoyer

    The Journey So Far

    I should have started documenting this earlier, but so far I’ve probably tried 50 different solutions to keep the squirrels off the feeders without setting traps or laying poison or anything else quite so drastic. I actually am fond of my furry friends, and simply wish to enforce good manners.

    I’ve tried all the feeders you’ve seen advertised on TV. They spin, they use springs to cover the inlets, they practically wash the dishes and make the bed. Alas, no luck via feeder variation. I next tried my own physical modifications. I’ve got the big inverted wok-style hat on one of the feeders now. Like the previous attempts, it worked well for a week or two but eventually an intrepid tree-rat figured out just the right bit of acrobatics to slide over the edge and catch the feeder below.

    I tried electrifying the fence. I managed to shock myself several times, but the squirrels escaped unscathed. It turns out it’s harder than expected to electrify something hanging in the middle of the air. A real electrician would probably have had it working in 3 minutes, but alas…

    I put barbed wire and razors between the feeders and where the squirrels come from. I felt kind of bad about it, until I watched them traipse past the traps with the grace of a Russian ballerina.

    I share a few of the highlights, but the journey had many more bumps and turns that I may write about later.

    Fast-forward to Today

    I’ve been enjoying dipping my toes into the hobby electronics world. I have Home Assistant set up and this has allowed me many opportunities to develop my tinkering abilities with cheap and affordable sensors and chips. I figured I might apply the same skills to my years-long battle against the small, grey nutty ninjas.

    I first set out to create a script that alerts me when a squirrel is on the feeder. You need a clear detection mechanism/trigger before anything else can be implemented. This logic is seen in squirrel_annoyer.py. I pull images from my cameras, and then use AI image processing to check for a squirrel. If we get a hit, an alarm sounds. Currently, the alarm is a rather alarming scream.wav I pulled from an copyright-free library online. My wife hates it. It scares the bajeesus out of me! But not just me…

    squirrel_annoyer.py

    After getting the basic script working I used it “manually”. I’d hear the alarm and rush outside to scare the squirrels off the feeder. Funnily enough, it seemed some classical conditioning started to work. The squirrels would hear the scream and jump off the feeder on their own (at least sometimes).

    For some technical notes, I have a lot of troubleshooting messages in there, and it should be somewhat self-explanatory. I used AI to generate the skeleton and then tweaked it from there.

    In the future, I want to use my library of positive/negatively-identified photos to train my own local AI which will save me the outrageous $10/month it currently costs using OpenAI’s 4o model.

    code.py

    Realizing there might be something to the sound angle of attack, I next bought an ESP32-C6 from Adafruit and started working on a speaker setup that I could power with a battery. My idea is to play an obnoxiously loud sound that’s high enough to be above human thresholds so I don’t annoy the neighbors (just their dogs).

    The current iteration uses an MQTT trigger (sent by the previously mentioned script) and plays the sound via an cheap attached tweeter speaker (designed for higher frequency work). I’ve got a Lithium Ion battery attached to keep it going, and basic testing has showed the 6600 mAh battery lasts over a day without any current power saving features enabled or utilized. As the squirrels only come out during daylight I can charge every night.

    Future Work

    There’s lots to do. I need to find a way to package up the speaker-widget and attach it to the speaker to take advantage of the inverse-square law and maximum amplitude/volume. This will need to be waterproof and fairly durable. Gee, I wish I had a 3D printer!

    Beyond that, I need to do some testing to get the right exact sound to play. The script on-device currently plays a short melody that I can hear for testing purposes, but eventually I don’t want to hear it at all.

    I also need to train my own local image-detection model to save money on API calls. I plan to let the API run a while longer to build a really good library of yes/no’s, and then it should be fairly quick work to my own model.

    And if all of this doesn’t fit my final needs…then it’s time to move on to attempt #52. Maybe a servo that bangs on the feeder? Pops a balloon full of water on the squirrel? Ideas are welcome.

  • Endings: Lessons in Chemistry (2023)

    Miss me?

    Released last year on Apple TV, “Lessons in Chemistry” is described as “in the 1950s, Elizabeth Zott’s dream of being a chemist is put on hold when she finds herself pregnant, alone, and fired from her lab.” It tackles the challenges of a 1950s female chemist in a male-dominated world.

    It’s a strong, 8-episode mini-series. Brie Larson (of Captain Marvel fame) delivers a strong lead performance, and the cast is rounded out with a string of A-list faces you’d recognize. The writing is excellent, flowing naturally (mostly) and flexing as the narrator changes from episode to episode, including substantial and delightful narration from the family dog at one point. bow WOW!

    Thematically, this show’s twin foci are sexism and racism, and I believe the dialogue portraying these issues.

    Until we get to the ending.

    Within the space of about an episode and a half, miracles occur that defy belief. I can’t blame the showrunners; I imagine they just wanted a happy, neat ending, and on that premise they deliver in spades. Every plotline you care about is wrapped up nicely. However, the show moves beyond the bounds of reality in the name of “girl power” as a series of increasingly unlikely events occur.

    It’s not that any of the single events is impossible, or even a bad story choice on its own. You’ve got the woman who transitions from a housewife in a cooking show’s audience to being a medical school student within the course of a month. Maybe she already had a relevant undergrad and she’d recently become an empty-nester. Or discovering your child’s grandmother, previously presumed dead, is, in fact, alive, rich, and a patron of the very field (chemistry) you’ve dedicated your life to. That’s the kind of deus ex machina moment that can brilliantly wrap up a story, a cute twist. My problem is the cumulative layering on the “girl wins, guy loses” sub-plot after sub-plot had my eyes rolling by the credits. Maybe it’s a bit much, but it does aim to leave you smiling.

    Overall, I still enjoyed it, and can appreciate that women have art like this to boost their confidence and spark inner greatness. I’m sure that was one intent of the fiction, and in the context of the show, a very marketable and profitable intent. I suspect the oft-mentioned pendulum is now swinging back, however, and we’ll start to see more balanced work, once the momentum of all the projects started under peak wokeness are subsumed.

    Twists: 5/10
    Execution: 8/10
    Satisfaction: 6/10

    Bottom Line: Anyone should be able to enjoy the first 75% of the series, with a well-spun yarn about overcoming the odds, but some may find the ending sacrifices a little reality for the sake of women’s empowerment.

  • MetaCTF CyberGames 2021: A to Z

    This year I participated in my first capture the flag (CTF) event! After a recommendation from my current Cybersecurity bootcamp instructor I’m glad I checked out MetaCTF and had a chance to participate. I learned a lot in the process, and I want to share a few writeups from the easier end of the spectrum. While these problems already have some writeups, my own approach hopefully offers at least one or two details that are instructive beyond those other great options.

    A to Z (100 points)

    This encrypted flag will only require a simple substitution cipher to solve. Rearrange the letters from A to Z.

    yzhsufo_rh_nb_uze_wdziu

    Process

    To start with I ran the string through a quickly-googled Caesar cipher tool. For those unfamiliar, a Caesar cipher is a simple code system that was, in fact, used by Caesar. You simply replace one character with another character. The website I just linked uses the traditional version, where you basically start a different place in the alphabet (ex: S) and that becomes the replacement for A. Then the next letter, alphabetically (continuing with the ex: T) becomes B, and so on. When you get to the end of your code alphabet you wrap around to the beginning (ex: Z replaces H, and then A replaces G). Given the simplicity of this, it was enough to deliver an encoded message with a number (representing the starting index) if the recipient understood how it worked.

    Unfortunately, after quickly scanning through all 26 possible starting positions it became clear this didn’t work. What about the second sentence? I took the given code and rearranged it’s letters from A to Z. Nope. Z to A? That didn’t work either.

    You may have already figured out my mistake, but to be honest I skipped this one at the time of the event and only returned a month later, slightly better armed with a fabulous tool: Cyberchef. Cyberchef is your one-stop-shop for dealing with text across any format or encoding you can imagine. Put simply, you give it input text and a set of instructions, and it bakes the text and gives you an output text encoded/decoded however you asked.

    In this case, it hit me: the cipher/key was the part I needed to rearrange! How? Well…I rearranged it so A (plain text) = Z (encoded text)…and then…what if B = Y, and so on? In other words, I just reversed the alphabet for the cipher/key.

    Hmm…that didn’t help much…

    It took me a second to realize my issue, but then I remember that in ASCII (or any text encoding, really) uppercase and lowercase letters are treated differently. My recipe text was all upper case, so I needed to either retype the substitution rules in lowercase…or…

    Bazinga!

    …use the tools CyberChef already had. To explain in detail what’s happening here: I copy/paste the text from the challenge into the input field. Then I found the “To Upper Case” action on the left of CyberChef’s page in the “Operations” section. Similarly, I found the “Substitute” operations and dragged it below the “To Upper Case” action, because it happens second (the actions happen from top to bottom). At this point I was done–Cyberchef instantaneously output the processed text, bringing us to the flag text you see above. You can follow this link to see the exact Cyberchef configuration, and play around with it.

    I hope you found this instructive. The two main takeaways here are to understand what Caesar’s cipher is, and to get a look at CyberChef. 

    For a hand-picked list of write-ups gleaned from MetaCTF's discord check this document I've put together. For even more writeups check here.
  • Spooktober 2021 Wrap-Up: Ghoulishly Good

    Spooktober 2021 Wrap-Up: Ghoulishly Good

    Greetings ghouls and goblins. We’ve just wrapped up another lovely year of our friendly little movie festival (details here) and it’s time to share some notes. At the least, future me appreciates the reminders!

    We watched 28 movies (officially), totaling 48 hours, spanning 7 countries and stretching across 5 decades.

    The top rated movie, on average, was unsurprisingly Stanley Kubrick’s masterful The Shining (1980), garnering 8.3 stars (out of 10).

    Family time!

    In last place, and well deserved, came Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive (1986), with an outstanding 3 stars (still out of 10). A famous anecdote tells us that when asked why he never directed another movie, King replied, “Did you see Maximum Overdrive?!”

    All of us were ready to gouge our eyes out halfway through the first act…and it kept getting worse.

    Overall, the highest ranked theme was “based on comic books” and the lowest ranked was “based on video games”. It appears to be quite difficult to adapt a very imaginative, animated video game to a live action film in particular. However, personally I was both impressed and pleasantly surprised by Doom (2005).

    I can’t be the only person who assumed The Rock would end up becoming Doom Guy, right?

    With an excellent cast, steady pacing, and good visual effects, it did justice to one of my favorite video game franchises. I suspect that my own familiarity with the games helped me gloss over some under-developed plot points, but, as my best friend and I often proclaim, “there’s nothing wrong with fan service!” At the least, it’s gratuitously awesome first person shooter-inspired scene greatly outdid the other movie on our list to try that: House of the Dead (2003). Not constrained by live action, the Japanese Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008) succeeded with plenty of the conspiracy and monsters that Resident Evil fans know and love.

    At least Uwe Boll movies have a bit of production value…and boobs.

    The other notable movie we all agreed was excellent: Candyman (2021). More of a sequel to the original 1992 film than a remake, it delivered a slick, complex expansion of the story that leaves me hoping we’ll get some more entries in the series soon.

    Ultimately, why do we watch horror? The answer is personal, unique to each person. Maybe it lets you dip into the darker side of your emotions in a safe, controlled way. Maybe you savor the effects, and enjoy comparing and contrasting zombie makeup from over the years. Some people have a fond memory of a loved one who introduced them to their first slasher; others use it to help process pain inflicted by those in similar close proximity.

    Personally, upon my own reflection, I decided that horror is the “other” genre. Stories and characters that don’t quite fit anywhere else find a loving home in this genre that stretches from belly laugh-inducing comedy to deeply unsettling existential examinations that stay with you for months afterwards. This “otherness” attracts the viewers who themselves lack a clear genre, classification, home.

    I’m deeply honored to have made it through one more year of our little marathon with my closest genre-less friends. A special shout-out is due to Emm, master of trivia and burgeoning designer. Also, Linh, who watched most of the movies with me at home while we were locked down made the experience 100x better as we both laughed and cried and gasped at the same moments.

    🎃 Until next year 🎃,
    Eli

  • BASED (Spooktober 2021)

    BASED (Spooktober 2021)

    The Triumvirate of Awesome hereby announces the 2021 Spooktober Film Festival theme:

    🎃 BASED 🎃

    Jack-o-lantern poster courtesy the French Fox, Web poster courtesy Eli’s Space.

    Week by week we’ll look at cinema based on books (Week 1), video games (W2), comics (W3), and finally…other movies (W4)! You’re invited to join for any/all of our viewings (available through Plex).

    Foreign Fridays will offer scares from around the world, while Wacky Wednesday will tickle your funny bone for those who prefer something less intense. As an homage to last year’s monster madness we’ve returned with Monster Mondays where something not-quite-human will leap across (but hopefully not out of) your screens.

    Curated with scare,
    The Triumvirate of Awesome

  • Endings: Nekromantik (1987)

    Endings: Nekromantik (1987)

    Jörg Buttgereit created this film as a statement about censorship in Germany. When viewed through that lens it doesn’t disappoint, but just about any other perspective will leave you wanting. Plot? Shakey. Character development? Sorta.

    To briefly summarize, the film centers on a young street cleaner whose business seems to primarily focus on cleaning up after gruesome car accidents. Luckily for him and his necromaniacal girlfriend this provides access to plenty of corpses. Typically stealing an eyeball here, a heart there, he amasses a collection of body parts in jars in his humble apartment. These play a delightful role in his sex life, but the real prize is a full corpse he manages to sneak back.

    Sadly, after a brief period of triad bliss (boy, girl, and corpse, ooh la la) the gal makes a decision and absconds with the mummified fellow. Sorry dude, but how could you possibly compare to the rusty length of pipe installed between Sir. Always Up’s dried out legs?

    Naturally this makes our street cleaner upset. Eventually this angst drives him to find another corpse to sport fuck, albeit one that starts his date alive. Once he’s finished there he returns home and we’re left with a wonderful final scene of him masturbating to completion and then some, as he cums buckets of semen and blood from a penis that gives new meaning to “wood”.

    The real surprises here come from the subject material, but then in hindsight the escalation of events seems only natural. The twist occurs just a few minutes in as we realize how serious the movie’s title was, and the rest follows suit somewhat predictably. Sooo…low points for offering a surprising ending.

    Similarly, we don’t find out what happened with the girlfriend and Sir Always Up. And does our humble street cleaner face any consequences for his murder/rape? Does his job ever notice the missing organs? All of these loose ends detract from the general sense of satisfaction, but on the other hand, cumming blood?! Maybe the sequel (which I haven’t watched yet) will handle the rest. Okay, some points are added back.

    Which leaves us with…

    Twists: 3
    Execution: 2
    Satisfaction: 7

    Bottom line: Give it a pass unless you’re a big fan of the gore genres, anti-censorship, or, uh, you find corpses sexy.

  • Weirdos Heroes

    The Triumvirate of Awesome is back with more movies! This time around it’s a mini-marathon born of boredom as the current lock-down in Vietnam continues for it’s third month.

    Emmanuel was in process of re-watching the Marvel lines of movies, and that sparked the idea to keep on the theme of heroes, but without spoiling his own watch plans. Thus was born our “Weirdos Heroes” theme.

    Poster showing overview of the 3 movies planned

    Comprising three films (one per member of the triumvirate) you can look forward to three film reviews. One for Watchmen (2009), another for The Crow (1994), and one more for The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (2003).

    If you decide to join us for any part of this (anti?)heroic journey, be sure to leave a comment below!

  • echoes

    I found a new blog,

    something I guess I’m interested in now

    strangers shoving words onto a distant server

    shouting into a trashcan

    but

    i’m a hipster

    read: it’s better before people know about it anyway

    bukowski bu-how-she’s doing?

    my words on her page

    flattery, but she didn’t swipe right

    art school drop-up with a chip on her shoulder

    i wanna eat it

    savor the archetype of past art school girlfriends

    all seeking for unique identity

    in the same way.

    but teasing aside

    my inner romantic

    considering a vast city of conformists

    sits at the bottom of a trashcan

    curious, listening

  • Endings: Blow Out (1981)

    Endings: Blow Out (1981)

    I gained a minor obsession with DePalma after reading Shock Value. This quick read highlighted horror’s changes from the early days of film through the mid-90s. It focused largely on the great auteurs of the 60s-80s, and no list on horror auteurs is complete without mentioning Brian DePalma, window-voyeur extraordinaire.

    Enter Blow Out, one of the early string of hits that propelled Brian into the limelight. Blow Out starts as a humble movie sound effects editor, Jack (John Travolta), stumbles across a terrible car accident while recording sounds for future FX work. Without hesitation he jumps into the icy water and rescues Sally (Nancy Allen). Cut to the hospital, and Jack wonders what has brought in scores of ravenous journalists. It turns out the other stiff in the car (already dead when Jack dove down) looked like a strong candidate for POTUS. Jack is sworn to secrecy (the usual lines about the corpse’s family suffering at the knowledge of his affair) and he leaves out the back with a dazed Sally in tow.

    With an uneasiness sparked by the pleas for his secrecy Jack starts to notice other irregularities with the story. His tape recording from the eventful night clearly indicates a shot rang out prior to the titular blow out.

    From here the relationship betwixt Jack and Sally develops, and DePalma fleshes out (pun intended) their motivations. Simultaneously we see hired gun Burke (John Lithgow) attempting to tie up loose ends…

    Thrillers, in particular, call for tightly crafted endings. As writer and director, DePalma exercises maximum creative control over the production, and it shows. Tensions build steadily, plot lines converging towards a magnificent final scene. Specifically, Sally and Jack converge upon Burke (demonstrably a cruel, heartless killer by this point) in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station.

    Our final moments come with literal fireworks, a giant flag, quality screams, and Jack’s slow motion dash to save Sally. It’s difficult to raise the ante, but Travolta’s facial expressions as he exacts revenge/justice upon Burke (with Burke’s own icepick) combine with flashing red and blue lights across Sally’s dead figure, and finally, fireworks in the background as he clutches her lifeless body to his. It might be a bit too strong, in fact, but I don’t mind a bit of cheese every now and then. In fact, I love it!

    The epilogue brings a moment of black irony as we hear Sally’s very real scream dubbed into the very B-horror movie we opened with nearly two hours ago. A television news broadcast is conspicuously lacking talk of a the assassination conspiracy, and in the end, Jack is the final victim, alive, but carrying the weight of his knowledge alone; the movie scream guy haunted by the real thing.

    Twists: 3 (pretty damn predictable, although Sally’s death was up for debate until the very end)
    Execution: 9 (DePalma is a technical master)
    Satisfaction: 6 (purposely leaves you a bit empty, good effect, but I’d have preferred a bit more justice)