What I’m Watching: Three Korean Zombies Edition

  • Seoul Station: Animated prequel to Train to Busan. Hye-sun, a young woman of negotiable affections and her douchebag boyfriend/wannabe-pimp, and a hobo and his mysteriously dying “bro”, cross paths at Seoul’s main subway station just as the zombie plague starts. It is successful at getting me to care about the girl, and to a lesser extent the men around her; one character flip didn’t surprise me much but it needed a little more evidence.

Animation’s kind of stiff, low FPS, but detailed, very much not in the style of most anime. What it most reminds me of are the Long Tomorrow and B-52 segments of Heavy Metal; I think it’s not actually rotoscoped, but looks a lot like it. Despite being animated, with “unlimited special effects budget” as it were, there’s not a lot of sets, not a lot of speaking parts, not a lot of flashy action pieces, it could’ve all been filmed practically for less money.

I’m a little put out by the cell phone vamping. Girl turns off her iPhone. Then it’s out of reach. Then they’re in a tunnel. Then coverage just stops because… it’s plot convenient. And the other side just sits there shouting her name into it, instead of doing anything. It’s a good way to pad out 30 extra minutes of “tension” that wouldn’t exist if people just calmly (under zombie attack, yes) left messages for each other while travelling towards a common point.

It is very Korean, where the government is not on the side of the people, it’s in self-preservation mode and has been putting down anti-government riots since the war. An American version of this (suppose Fear the Walking Dead was animated and wasn’t absolute trash) would make different stupid mistakes; just as many dead civilians but less heartless bureaucracy. A Japanese version would be briefly hilarious, and then everyone would die because they were too polite to break skulls. The Chinese version would probably drop fuel-air bombs on the area.

★★★½☆

  • RV: Resurrected Victim: A prosecutor comes over to his crazy sister’s house, and finds his dead (murdered by a mugger) mother there watching TV. A pastor (ugh, Korean christians; worse than zombies, and they’re all thru this film) barges in and falls to his knees calling out to Jesus, quoting his “resurrection” fairy tale, singing and praying like the crazy people they are. She goes all zombie on them, as anyone would. Then we get an official briefing/infodump about resurrections, because apparently the writer hasn’t heard of “show, don’t tell”.

It feels like a TV series, several episodes spliced together into a “movie”. Or a fever-dream scenario by a Call of Cthulhu referee. Coincidence or fate brings everyone who needs to be in a scene together, but the B-team and C-team investigators just get forgotten for long stretches of the film, then show up again to tag along a couple scenes behind the prosecutor.

“The fact that RVs always appear in the rain is related to the fact that 80% of the human body is H2O.
And the iron content in their blood is more than ten times higher than that of normal humans.
When the vengeance is enacted, all these seem to be related to the strong magnetic field that is formed.”
—inexplicably bad English-speaking… Italian? gentleman with a priest sidekick, possibly in the wrong movie.

The mystery being solved is fine, and eventually all the plots are tied together, if not at all satisfactorily at the end, with a preachy speech. The “RVs” do almost nothing, the entire plot could be a non-supernatural drama, or have hallucinations or visions of ghosts, with minimal changes and far less of a wasted premise.

★★★☆☆

  • Stranger: I’m only a few episodes into this series, about a prosecutor (again?!) who feels no emotions (a philosophical zombie!) after a childhood surgery. He solves crimes, fights corruption in his bureau, tries to pass as a person but doesn’t really succeed. The sympathetic woman cop Han (Doona Bae, most recently from Kingdom and Sense8) and his rival prosecutor are well-played. There’s an overall season plot, and not much episodic plot, which makes it hard to decide where to stop, doesn’t give a clear delineation between episodes, and I can’t binge more than a couple hours of Korean TV at a time, so it’s taking a while to get thru.

But so far, I like everything about this, good investigation, forensics, office treachery that isn’t mysterious figures in the dark but rather just awful coworkers. Best of all, a protagonist who’s proactive, isn’t all weepy and stupid, has his own secrets but isn’t a villain. Han is also really adorable, she tries to be a supercop (a coworker calls her “Angelina Jolie”, but really she’s more Michelle Yeoh ) but also takes in strays and is surprisingly good for a police force not exactly known for that.

★★★★½

Everybody Knows Tuesday Music

RasPi 400: Adorable New Keyboard Computer

This is very nice, at least in principle.

Classic home computers – BBC Micros, ZX Spectrums, Commodore Amigas, and the rest – integrated the motherboard directly into the keyboard.
No separate system unit and case; no keyboard cable. Just a computer, a power supply, a monitor cable, and (sometimes) a mouse.

Hm, the naming is obviously after the Atari 400 (so 800 will be the 8GB model?), but they don’t mention Atari. Well, the criminals now doing business as “Atari SA” aren’t people you want to associate with. And these are English, who couldn’t afford nice computers back then.

It’s not really $70, it’s $100 plus a monitor, because the cabling is unusual, you should not get the no-cables computer-only box. When I got my RasPi4 I had to email them to get my micro-HDMI cables (which they did supply), and the cheapo monitor is still terrible but I haven’t found a good cheap replacement. The RasPi400 also doesn’t have a power switch; the CanaKit set at least gave me an inline power clicker.

Having the keyboard & computer in one gets you much closer to a nice clean cyberdeck than the current maze of wires; there’s no battery pack, but in most cases what you want is a small computer in your satchel you can set down, plug in, and work. I’m dubious of using a mouse with this in most space-constrained areas (machine rooms, or cafés—in the distant future when we can go back to cafés), but trackpads and trackballs are expensive, too.

RasPi4 is critically heat-constrained, the fan runs all the time on mine or it dies. El Regerino does a teardown and review, and the giant heat sink plate seems to solve the problem. I could probably justify getting this just to have silence! Or a fedi-pal has suggested the Argon One heat-sink case, which is a much cheaper fix.

Software’s still an issue. Raspbian is a relentlessly mediocre Linux variant; I said earlier I’d switch it to BSD, but that hasn’t happened yet. I should update to the newer “Raspberry Pi OS” and see if it’s better. … Later: Not really. You can set some better scaling options now so it’s not unreadable. WOO. (I shouldn’t mock, scalable UI is really fucking hard, and they’ve got at least most of the stock software configured for it; notably Chromium yes, but not Firefox).

Dev tools are not great on RasPiOS. Ludicrously, they suggest Python, the slowest modern language on the slowest modern hardware. Their free “Create GUIs with Python” book uses a fat layer on top of Tkinter, which is awesome for portability, totally awful for going through now 3 layers to reach hardware. No. Almost anything will be better on it. As I noted, Gauche runs, it’s fine for porting small tools, and has industrial-strength (and industrial-ugly) GTK.

A much better IDE will be sudo apt-get install vim-gtk3 (gvim runs faster than vim in lxterm, though it pulls in a preposterous set of dependencies)

Just as a sanity test (“maybe a 4GB, 1.5GHz, heat-constrained computer is OK for Python!”), I wrote a tiny 10 PRINT maze program in both. Gauche fills the terminal instantly; I can see the lines being drawn by Python, and it’s even slower in any IDE. That’s just one random number per char, imagine doing real work!

All their programming books and the new Beginner’s Guide are up for free as PDF on their MagPi books page, or now in-OS from Raspberry menu, Help, Bookshelf. Looking thru the guide, it covers:

  • Hardware tour so you can identify ports
  • Software setup
  • Programming in Scratch for kids. As I was raised on BASIC and assembly, I roll my eyes at programming by drag-and-drop instead of interactive text editing, but Scratch isn’t awful, just cutesy, bulky (a 10-statement program will fill a page of the book) and very slow.
  • Programming in Python. Thonny IDE looks OK, for what it is, with integrated REPL, tabbed editing, and debugger. But IDLE does as well; both use Tkinter, and are non-fun slow on the little device.
  • A starter chapter on using the GPIO, doing wiring, digital circuits, and Scratch to blink an LED. Then controlling the Sense Hat, which is maybe the worst peripheral I’ve ever seen. There’s plenty of other small-screen interfaces or sensor devices that’d be better, surely.
  • Appendices on how to install software, and finally an extremely inadequate tutorial on using the terminal.

For $100, it’s a cute little portable computer, but the way they suggest using it will make it seem like a 1K RAM ZX-80, not the reasonably fast secondary machine (or kid’s first Scheme terminal) it can be if you’re not working under multiple layers of mud.