— छह हजार एक सौ सोलह —
I had a very new and different experience with Google today, an almost-unsettling sign of what life will likely increasingly be like as we wade deeper into an AI world.
So, Barbara and I play a daily game called "Framed," in which you guess a movie based on five screenshots, theoretically getting easier with each guess. Today's movie was
Vertigo, which I was unable to guess; I could tell it was Hitchcock but it's been so long since I watched that one, I made a wrong guess of
The Birds when I saw Kim Novak and mistook her for Tippi Hedrin.
Anyway, curious, I googled "machupicchu.livejournal.com" and "hitchcock" and "vertigo." I do searches like this pretty regularly when trying to find when I last watched a particular movie and thus presumably mentioned it in my blog; most of the time it's largely for Letterboxd tracking logging purposes. Usually it pretty reliably just brings up links with a few lines of preview text from blog posts, and maybe 75% of the time it gives me what I am looking for.
This morning, Gemini went above and beyond, though: for the first time, I got a
synopsis of what I wrote about
Vertigo in a blog post from . . . 2003! And here's the entirety of what Gemini offered:
•
AI Overview
On the LiveJournal blog machupicchu, the user famously expressed a highly critical opinion of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo (1958). 🔗
In a post dating back to 2003, the blogger detailed watching the film with a friend named Barbara and lambasted its classic reputation.
The Critique
The review on
machupicchu.livejournal.com targets several key elements of the film:
🔗
•
Pacing: The blogger called it "one of the most god-awful boring films" they had ever seen, arguing that the 128-minute runtime could have easily been trimmed down to 90 minutes because it "spends way too much time on every single shot."
•
The "Auteur" Context: Responding to an Entertainment Weekly blurb celebrating it as a deeply personal statement for Hitchcock, the reviewer argued that a truly great film should stand on its own merits without requiring outside knowledge of a director's personal life.
•
Kim Novak: The user was distinctly unimpressed by the leading lady, explicitly calling her makeup a "nightmare."
🔗
Despite finding a few core elements of the plot "rather intriguing," the blogger concluded that the movie simply put them to sleep. In a later post listing movie stats, the author confirmed they had only ever watched Vertigo once.
🔗 🔗
...
My immediate takeaway from all this was first and foremost this question: "famously"? Where the hell did Gemini get
that from? I am not famous, nor is anything I have ever written.
Naturally I had to ask this follow-up question: Why was this described as famously?
Gemini's response was arguably even weirder:
The term "famously" describes the June 2003 LiveJournal post as a classic artifact of early-2000s contrarian film criticism that stood out against the era's growing academic reverence for Vertigo. In internet history circles, such unpolished blog entries are frequently passed around as examples of the fiercely independent opinions that predated algorithmic social media discourse. You can read the original entry at LiveJournal.
...
That last line included the link to the exact blog post in question, in exactly that way. (Ditto all the other links in the inital AI overview.)
I went to check out the original post. The AI overview was fairly spot on, actually, if suggestive of a lot more writing about it in my post than there actually was.
Here's the part that unsettles me, though. I long ago learned the hard lesson of being a lot more careful about what I write and post online, especially about other people, and particularly people in my life. But, god knows what else is buried deep in my archives that AI could dig up far more easily than any human would ever have been able to? One solution would perhaps to be to take my entire blog down, which would be fully antithetical to the very fiber of how I live my life—and presumably AI can scrape up anything that's ever been posted whether it exists now or not, so would there even be any point?
In any case, it was odd to get this pretty well-laid-out overview of an obscure post I shared from 23 years ago. There's clearly no reason for Gemini to have said I "famously" said anything in it; AI advances at such a rate that presumably that kind of mistake is not going to keep happening for very long.
— छह हजार एक सौ सोलह —
— छह हजार एक सौ सोलह —
As for last night, Shobhit and I went to a play—and we skipped Action Movie Night to do it, an extremely rare instance of skipping that for any reason other than being out of town, or in Shobhit's case, having a rehearsal or gig that posed a scheduling conflict. We were happy to skip it since Greg was the person to choose the movie this week, and his previous three choices ranged from me hating them to me merely disliking them. I still don't know what his choice this was; Tony has yet to update the log.
I'll be using the Braeburn Condos theater tonight anyway. Alexia is coming over to watch the three-hour 2003 miniseries that kicked off the
Battlestar Galactica series.
The play we saw was called
Neha & Neel, a Pratidhwani co-production with Seattle Public Theater in Greenlake (the theater is literally right by the shore of the lake, in Greenlake Park). This also meant that Agastya directed it. He's long been involved with Pratidhwani, which produced the first-ever play (which was in Hindi) that Shobhit acted in in Seattle, over 20 years ago. Agastya also taught the Hindi classes I took for two years between 2005 and 2006 and was where I first met Karen. Come to think of it, Shobhit probably learned of the classes through his connected with Agastya at Pratidhwani.
Anyway. We had just seen Agastya two days before, at the Gregory Awards. Shobhit chatted with him briefly but I never did. People were zipping from person to person to schmooze with far too quickly for me. We then saw him briefly right before the show last night. In their small lobby, they had
flowers and sweets laid out in celebration of Diwali, which is actually November 6-11 this year, the main Diwali day this year being Sunday, November 8 (the annual Diwali Festival at Seattle Center will be Saturday November 7 this year).
The play is only a three-hander, about an Indian-born mother of an American-born 17-year-old on their way from their Bay Area home to tour prospective colleges in Washington D.C. (The third actor plays countless other characters they run into on their travels.) It's basically like a road trip movie, but a play; it's set in airports and in a car, sometimes at stops like a gas station or a hotel room, depending on the scene. The stage is very minimalist but multi-level and you have to use your imagination for the settings based on how they are acting (or in a few cases the use of props, like luggage, or a handheld steering wheel, or a bedspread). It covers a lot about multicultural intersectionality, with a mother who has a strong Indian accent and deep ties to South Asian roots, and a teenager with an American accent who feels neither American enough or Indian enough.
The woman who played the mother was very good, easily the best performer of the three. The guy who played all the secondary characters was pretty good, and skillfully conveyed different characters, though none of them long enough to make a deep impression. The guy who played the teenager had the anxious-teenager body language pretty much down pat, but had the least-natural dialogue delivery (a bit exaggeratedly overwrought pretty much all the time; he tended to sound like a person performing rather than like an actual person). He was relatively easy on the eyes, though (he's actually in his late twenties, for the record).
I'm glad I got to see it. Shobhit did ask Agastya before the show if it was in English, and he said yes, although the real truthful answer to that was "mostly"—there was one scene that was entirely in Hindi. The many South Asian people in the audience largely understood it, but of course I did not. Shobhit did whisper in my ear at one point when the character, Neel, complains that when he tries to speak Hindi, "I sound
gora," and Shobhit said: "That means 'White.'" (The character is self-conscious when attempted to speak Hindi, which he does not know well, and with his American accent he sounds like a White person trying to speak Hindi.)
I really enjoyed the play overall, and am pretty confident it was indeed the better choice rather than whatever movie was shown at Action Movie Night. In another two weeks, according to the log, the choice will be Tom, and
his history, with one notable exception, is actually quite good.
— छह हजार एक सौ सोलह —
[posted 12:31pm]
