Archer Vice

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

God, the latest season of Archer (or Archer Vice as this season has been dubbed) is fantastic! In the last episode, Archer, Cyrill and Ray are in Bolivia trying to find La Madrina, the godmother of the Cali Cartel in order to sell their “shit-tonne” of cocaine before Pam uses it all (and turns into a slender woman with massive breasts.)

Archer Vice

Here Archer befriends a bunch of locals in his attempt to make contact with El Madrina. It looks to be somewhat successful as they attract the necessary attention. The greatest exchange of the episode:

Cyrill: I have a question; since we’re now essentially captives of the Cali cartel and being dragged off to god knows what terrible fate, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU SMILING!?
Archer: a) We’re not their captives, we’re about to be their business partners, b) I bet there’s a pretty descent chance La Madrina owns a tiger, and c) guapo means handsome.

Of the inevitable sex scene between Archer and La Madrina, we only see the conclusion:

Archer Vice

I can’t wait for next week’s episode. :)

Closure

by Dennis••1•Posted inJournal

Some things are hard not to take personally. A friend cutting off all contact mid-WhatsApp conversation and not bothering to resume contact for over a year (one year, five months, one week, six days, nineteen hours, fourty minutes and thirty-four seconds to be obsessively precise), I find very hard not to take personally. At this point, I should really stop calling her a friend, but without know why it is that she broke off all communication, it seems impossible for me to call her “a person that I used to know.”

To be fair, I shouldn’t be too surprised. I met her a little after she moved to the Netherlands, over a decade ago, and I was a bit surprised at how easily she broke off contact with her friends from back home. She’s moved again, and I guess now I’m the friend she no longer contacts now that she’s abroad.

I’ve resisted the urge to contact her since she stopped talking to me (made easier by no longer being on Facebook) because it’s clear she has no interest in keeping in touch. I’ve gone through all the stages of grief and loss; denial, anger, blah blah, acceptance. Strangely enough, these stages seem oddly cyclical, where I inevitably end up at stage one again. Admittedly, I’m getting very efficient and nowadays I get to acceptance in a matter of minutes. I linger at acceptance for a couple of weeks and start the cycle all over again.

The reason why I don’t just stick to acceptance is because I have no fucking clue why she stopped talking to me. While I can come up with two or three dozen things I have done to deserve it, and perhaps half a dozen other possible reasons, I don’t really know why. There’s no closure. I’ve never actually experienced that lack of closure before, so that’s something I’ve learnt from all of this.

See, every cloud has a silver lining; one of my closest and dearest friends has abandoned all desire of maintaining a relationship with me, but at least now I know what all those dramatic romance films keep harping on about.

Brick Mansions

by Dennis••3•Posted inJournal

Finally, David Belle is getting some Hollywood recognition. Arguably the founder of Parkour (not free running) and someone I would’ve expected to see in a Paul Walker blockbuster vehicle a long time ago. The movie looks kind of shit, and I suspect Luc Besson wrote it just so that he could put David Belle in a Parkour-driven film. I’ll watch it! Who’s with me?

Garbage Island: An Ocea Full of Plastic

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

I just watched Vice’s “Garbage Island: An Ocean Full of Plastic”, which discusses the insane amount of plastic drifting in the Pacific ocean close to Hawaii. It’s an ever shifting area larger than the total size of Texas, where the “plankton-to-plastic ratio” goes up to 1:1000. Now, a lot of the three part documentary deals with life aboard the research vessel, which I could have done without, but it does give you a quick look into the problem.

Part 1/3: http://bit.ly/Garbage-Island-1
Part 2/3: http://bit.ly/Garbage-Island-2
Part 3/3: http://bit.ly/Garbage-Island-3

Why is plankton important? (From Wiki Answers)

The ratio is unknown as the 1999 research report of 6:1 ratio (plastic:plankton) has been discredited for not accurately measuring plankton physically and throughout the water surfaces of the planet. We do know that there is a problem with pollution in our oceans and that it is affecting the marine ecosystem. The plankton species has dropped 40% in population over the past 60 years. The reasons why this is critical for ocean life and human life are;

  1. Plankton is the bottom of the marine ecosystem’s food chain, and without it, marine life would no longer sustain.
  2. Plankton absorbs 1/3 of the sunlight hitting the water surfaces. The less plankton there is, the more sunlight absorbed by the water surface, essentially rising the temperature and changing the environments for species, some of which cannot sustain in high temperatures.
  3. Plankton also absorbs carbon dioxide and produces HALF of the planets oxygen. This is obviously the critical dependance on human life.