Quarter Life Crisis

Rounded¶

When actually looking at a receipt I received recently, it looked like they’re actually rounding their totals to the next €0,05 at the d.m. drug store. Nice move.

I didn’t check whether they adjusted all their prices to be perfect multiples of 5 cents and only have the rounding issue remaining for special items (photo prints in my case) that are individually priced. Or whether they just kept their old prices and started rounding (off). I’m wondering to which extent this makes things easier and quicker for them.

It’s also another hint that software in those checkout terminals must be able to cope with all sorts of crazy ideas. And I could easily imagine that this could be considered a bit of a bookkeeping nightmare as well.

8:52 • Feedback (4+0)

FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO Live¶

Another wave of ‘Nintendocore’ arrived in Göttingen tonight from Sweden, FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO. The band has a real drummer giving us the beats and a bunch of keyboards and electronic devices operated by the singer who mostly screamed while running up and down in front of the audience with his back turned to us.

Quite a powerful and energetic gig that was rather short. Possibly due to the short length of their songs. Compared to last summer’s Nintendocoriade I’d range them between Les Trucs and Gtuk. Less interesting than the former and not quite as outlandish as the latter.

And they were selling pretty cool 8cm CDs [MacBook suckers, try to read these!] which turn out to be spray painted. With average song lengths of less than two minutes, even the tiny CD comes with ten titles and room to spare…

23:59 • Feedback (0+0)

Corpus Delicti¶

On Saturday we had to go to the theatre the second time this week as the final show of Corpus Delicti was on and we managed to miss all the earlier ones.

The piece is based on a 2009 book by Juli Zeh on a dystopia featuring a health-focued regime in the mid 21st century. Its subjects have to live healthy and prove their health in regular screenings. They are punished for transgressions like cigarettes or missing their screening. In the piece Mia Holl, a successful scientist, starts missing her screenings because her brother killed himself. He did so in prison after being convicted for raping and killing a girl. A deed, which Mia is sure he didn’t commit. The judge at first understands Mia’s situation and is willing to let her ‘get away’ with a small fine. But her lawyers recommends fighting it on the grounds of her difficult situation. By doing that she triggers the rage of the system whose ‘method’ she is seen to criticise. As such regimes go, you won’t get away with doubting or criticising their ‘methods’, so Mia is in for trouble and ends up finding herself in prison. It turns out her lawyer is quite keen on working against the system and she seemed a good opportunity to do so, while she is rational and agrees with his points.

The way they put the piece on stage was rather cool with plain and efficient decorations as well as light. The future high-tech aspect was given by a screen projecting the ‘facts’ about the people on stage and in court. This was done very neatly by projecting from behind.

Mia’s home was at the very front of the stage. And it was filled with a centimetre or so of water, thus distinguishing it from the rest of the stage and making people wet when going there (in most situations visitors actually put on those little plastic bag shoes people wear in operating theatres when visiting Mia’s place). Special kudos go to the main actress who did a great job in putting her role on stage.

9:41 • Feedback (0+0)

February Films¶

This month with: Whatever Works, She, a Chinese, Metropolis, Food, Inc..

Whatever Works

In my eternal, yet-not-completed quest of watching all Woody Allen films, I couldn’t skip his latest: Whatever Works [IMDB]. It stars Seinfeld mastermind Larry David in a totally Woody Allen-esque role as weirdo physicist genius Boris who also enjoys commenting to the viewer on what’s going on in the film.

Melody, a naïve young girl who just ran away from the American south and is unfamiliar with Boris’ clever and ironic way of communicating runs into Boris, ends up living at his place and marrying him. This shouldn’t work but, strangely, it does. Whatever works… Melody’s puritan mother arrives soon after and ends up living as an artist with two guys and finally her father also arrives, and soon falls for a guy. I.e. the film’s motto »Whatever Works« is taken very seriously, and gives us a fun bit of entertainment which is too obviously un-subtle in many places.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

She, a Chinese

She, a chinese [IMDB] by Guo Xiaolu portrays a chinese girl, Li Mei, who grows up in the Chinese countryside. Rather than being keen on a life there, she dreams of living in the city and leaving the country for the West. And she lives up to those dreams by actually moving there. First to a nearby city where she fails to work in a clothing factory, starts working in a ‘massage’ parlour and then to London where her work is horrible until she gets to know old widower Mr Hunt who eventually marries her, greatly simplifying her life in the UK that way. But she can’t stand that he still loves his deceased wife and starts making out with a fast food worker who treats her badly instead.

It’s an impressive film. Particularly because it keeps tearing you back and forth between thinking that Li Mei is lucky in how things are working out for her and unlucky for the same reasons as she never reaches the better life she had dreamt of. Likewise you keep thinking that she’s relying on her luck a bit too much and voluntarily exposes herself to additional risks all the time. She tolerates the consequence of that without complaints, but she doesn’t seem overly happy with her life either.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Metropolis

Without doubt the big cinematic event of the season was the presentation of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [IMDB, Wikipedia] which is pretty close to the 1927 original thanks to the ‘lost’ scenes that were found in Argentinia two years ago. The film was presented at the Berlinale film festival this month and accompanied by a whole orchestra. Even better, the whole show was broadcast live on arte, creating the ultra-rare occasion for a bunch of us to sit together and watch TV [eek!].

What can I say, the film is great. And the missing scenes helped it make a lot more sense – although I suspect that all the documentary material I read about it helped as well. The difference in quality between the proper ‘original’ and the copy of an original which was in use for decades and from which the missing scenes are supplied now is also baffling.

Even though Metropolis may have been a box-office flop back in the days and even though it’s inconveniently long, it’s still very much worth seeing because it’s amazingly modern and – one suspects – its picture of the modern world influenced many, if not most, other films made since then.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Food, Inc.

Food, Inc. [IMDB] is a ‘documentary’ about the corporatisation of the food supply in the United States. In a way it summarises what is already written in recent books on the same topic, particularly Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma whose authors also appear in the film. Things are taken beyond the facts by a mother who lost her son due to e. coli in food.

The film does contain some interesting facts on how food is made today and how these methods are hidden from the people who pay for them. It also tries to highlight how poorly politics work in this area where big business meets the basic needs of the people and how this leads to unhealthy food, horrible living conditions for the animals involved, ecological problems and even social problems due to all the manual work having been relegated to the easily exploited poor. A brief detour also discusses how it’s creepy but to a certain extent helpful that big business is getting on the ‘organic’ bandwagon.

As the facts alone are depressing and condemning enough, I thought it was pretty superfluous to try to catch the viewer with the emotional bits as well. But I suppose that’s for the American market.

I wonder how the German food industry fares in comparison. On the one hand I suspect it’s just not as huge and corporate as it’s American equivalent (but trying to get there) and there should be more regulation, less GM stuff and so on. On the other hand, Germans are the people who’ll eat any kind of shit as long as it’s dirt-cheap, so perhaps that gives us a little head-start here…

See also: We feed the world, Unser täglich Brot.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

11:40 • Feedback (0+0)

Wir müssen Reden¶

Seen at Junges Theater this week: Wir müssen Reden, a ‘musical’ about a group of four men who are friends and end locked up in a place long enough for them to talk about their worries and their lives. As the piece has been made a ‘musical’ they ended up singing plenty of pop songs from famous Queen to thoughtfully weird Rainald Grebe along with it. Some of those songs fit in while others seemed a bit out of place.

The piece’s focus is the role of men in our current society, touching how the four protagonists deal with that in their lives, jobs and families and how it differs from the plans they may have had in their youths. In part it succeeded showing a certain anxiety they live with.

That said, the ‘musical’ part of the piece was a bit weird. With less singing and more talking and making an effort to present the characters at the beginning and jumping from pop song to pop song at the end with very little for the characters to do or discuss. However, it was a nice touch that the music for a good bunch of the pieces they sang to was performed live on stage.

23:48 • Feedback (0+0)

Berlin Weekend / Das Pop Live¶

I spent the weekend in Berlin, having a fun meal and evening with Tom. Visiting – once again – the Martin-Gropius-Bau and enjoying the exhibition with photos by F. C. Gundlach [Wikipedia, Foundation] there: it certainly looks like his style of fashion photography from the 1960s and ’70s seriously influences our impression of the time. Getting round to seeing the Deutsche Kinematek with its nicely designed standard exhibition on the history of German film as well as the current Metropolis exhibition. And, to top off the weekend, we went to see Das Pop in Lido.

Their support band Lawrence Arabia went down rather well with my friends even though they sounded like choir kids from time to time.

I think the audience was a bit un-enthusiastic throughout and when Das Pop started playing it also seemed a bit too big for the band to be able to create that specific atmosphere. Yet – battling the technical difficulties of countless defective cables and plugs – they tried and delivered a show that was much more intense and direct than their latest (eponymous, hence almost impossible to find on the web) album led us to suspect/fear. Good stuff.

Now, if only my crappy camera could have made a non-shaky version of this photo:

It might have been great, even showing off the singer’s weirdly 1980s style shoes. Perhaps one of the countless people taking photos in the room managed to catch that. While I love photos I found the amount and annoyingness of photo people at this gig astounding. It also seemed that the more ‘professional’ ones (i.e. the ones with the proper cameras) cared mainly about how they pose while standing in front of the stage and taking photos. Weird.

20:06 • Feedback (0+0)

MasterCard® SecureCode™¶

I’ve got a cheap and cheerful credit card which is called MasterCard. I mainly use it for shopping abroad as we have a reasonably working system of money transfers in Germany - and even in the whole Euro-zone thanks to regulators.

For a while now, sites at which I tried to shop wanted to bully me into the MasterCard® SecureCode™ system. I don’t know much about banking, but as far as I can tell the situation is as follows: By and large credit cards are an anti-social way of paying for goods because some credit card company gets to keep a few per cent of the price for a service that may have been worth that kind of money in the 1960s or 1970s but which should be much cheaper today: assuring the person selling something to me that they’ll receive their money without forcing me to carry it around in cash. In particular, the system is based on the credit card company paying the money for you and you having to pay them back, hence the ‘credit’ in the name. Somehow retailers are not supposed (which probably means ‘forbidden by some legal junk’) to surcharge those fees to the person wanting to use a credit card and instead raise their prices for all customers to cover those charges. Yikes.

If you’re in a country which is technically reasonably advanced it’s feasible these days to just skip the whole credit crap and use a debit card which means that swiping the card should just cause a money transfer from your existing money to the retailer’s account. Much lower risks and, hopefully (well, just look at PayPal for a royal FAIL of that hope), lower fees. That seems like a reasonable thing to do when cash isn’t convenient enough.

One rather curious fact about credit cards is that you can use them without any sort of authentication. Go to a railway ticket vending machine, insert the card, pay for the ticket, done. Go to a store, swipe the card, scribble on the sheet of paper they hand you for ‘signing’ and you bought something. Type the card number and that extremely secret other three digit number from the back of the card into a website and you can order the most interesting goods! This system just seems idiotic and begs to be abused. Which it apparently is.

So far, credit card companies pay for most of that damage. It even seems that they have become quite good at doing statistic analyses of payments and knowing where numbers are likely to be stolen and how they will be used. Two of my friends received calls from their credit card company after returning from their holidays asking whether they just bought a kitchen (say) in Japan. Of course they didn’t and the credit card people suspected that. Yet, the damage caused by this has to be paid with our money at the end of the day, so perhaps simply having a less idiotic system would be helpful.

Of course ‘less idiotic’ is a concept that is alien to the banking sector. It seems that for what they call ‘better security’ they now want to force us to sign up for a ‘secret code’ of our own choice to ‘authenticate’ payments for online orders. It’s a code you can pick yourself, so it’s likely to be easy to remember or just the same as all your other codes. Perhaps convenient for you but also risky, particularly as the conditions read as if it’s your responsibility to keep that code secret. It sounds like the banks want to ‘improve’ their broken system by shifting the risk of its bad design to the users.

To add insult to injury, the SecureCode™ system looks particularly fishy. Not only do the terms and conditions state that data are processed in a data protection rogue state (U.S.A) rather than locally, it also seems to inject iframes into the payment web pages of the web sites you are using which connect to that SecureCode™ system. If I’m not mistaken, the concept of using frames on payment pages was developed by scammers. As modern browsers may warn about frames pointing to other servers inside an encrypted page, it seems that the query is redirected over the hosting server.

For example when trying to buy something at thalia.de, they ruin their user experience (and the chance of me actually clicking the ‘pay’ button) by injecting a frame from the URL: https://ssl.thalia.de/shop/buch_startseite_thalia/cciframe/?ACSURL=https%3A%2F%2Fsecure5.arcot.com%2Facs… which looks pretty much like their server is just forwarding the request to https://secure5.arcot.com/acspage/cap? with parameters RID, PaReq and TermURL. I have no idea about hacking websites, but why shouldn’t enterprising hackers consider this an interesting thing to fuck with? It looks like an invitation to fool around a bit.

And why do retailers agree to this? It makes interaction with their sites worse and removes a crucial part of it from their control (frames! unexpected scroll bars! language and looks they cannot control!), thus creating a massive potential for failure in completing the transaction.

I won’t deny that getting authentication right is hard. Making it safe and convenient may even be impossible. But it seems that they’re not even trying to fail at any of the real challenges but they simply put on some show which may save them extra money. That’s probably what you learn in MBA 101, but it doesn’t humour me as a customer.

10:12 • Feedback (2+0)

Rue Royale Live¶

On Thursday another Wohnzimmerkonzert took place in the pools bar, bringing us Rue Royale with Kim Janssen. The latter started off with an acoustic set while everybody gathered on the sofas and the ground. Later on he helped Rue Royale out by playing some keyboard parts to their songs as well.

Once again great music in a lovely atmosphere. And it was quite crowded once more, with the latecomers having to make do by sitting on the stairs.

23:59 • Feedback (0+0)