Shitty Technology Adoption Curve

I talk about this thing in my work called the shitty technology adoption curve. If you want to do something terrible to people with a computer, you can't start with me. I am a mouthy white guy who speaks English as a first language and has a big platform and a short fuse and I will be a pain in your ass. So what you do is you go find someone who has no agency. You find an immigrant, you find a refugee, you find a mental patient, you find a prisoner, and you sand the rough edges of the technology down on their bodies. And then you work your way up the privilege gradient. Your gig workers, blue collar workers, white collar workers. Eventually, you get to everyone, right?

Excerpt taken from this talk with Cory Doctorow. I remember him from the boing boing blog. He is 54 years old.

Taschen's Movies of the 1940s

A list of 88 for the 1940s, not even an even hundred.

1. The Maltese Falcon 1941

2. The Lady Eve 1941

3. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break 1941

4. The Wolf Man 1941

5. How Green Was My Valley 1941

6. Sullivan's Travels 1941

7. The Outlaw 1943

8. Citizen Kane 1941

9. Woman of the Year 1942

10. To Be or Not to Be 1942

11. Bambi 1942

12. Casablanca 1942

13. Mrs. Miniver 1942

14. The Magnificent Ambersons 1942

15. The Black Swan 1942

16. Cat People 1942

17. Shadow of a Doubt 1943

18. Obsession 1943

19. For Whom the Bell Tolls 1943

20. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 1943

21. The Ox-Bow Incident 1943

22. I Walked with a Zombie 1943

23. Heaven Can Wait 1943

24. Le Corbeau 1943

25. Double Indemnity 1944

26. Bathing Beauty 1944

27. The Woman in the Window 1944

28. Arsenic and Old Lace 1944

29. Great Freedom No. 7 1944

30. Gaslight 1944

31. To Have and Have Not 1944

32. Cover Girl 1944

33. The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne 1945

34. Henry V 1944

35. Laura 1944

36. Ivan the Terrible, Part I 1944

37. Ivan the Terrible, Part II: The Boyars' Plot 1946

38. Meet Me in St. Louis 1944

39. The Punch Bowl 1944

40. Children of Paradise 1945

41. The Lost Weekend 1945

42. The Spiral Staircase 1946

43. Mildred Pierce 1945

44. Under the Bridges 1946

45. Rome, Open City 1945

46. Brief Encounter 1945

47. The Best Years of Our Lives 1946

48. Duel in the Sun 1946

49. The Big Sleep 1946

50. A Night in Casablanca 1946

51. Beauty and the Beast 1946

52. It's a Wonderful Life 1946

53. My Darling Clementine 1946

54. Gilda 1946

55. The Killers 1946

56. Notorious 1946

57. Murderers Among Us 1946

58. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 1948

59. Monsieur Verdoux 1947

61. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947

62. Body and Soul 1947

63. The Lady from Shanghai 1947

64. Call Northside 777 1948

65. Red River 1948

66. The Red Shoes 1948

67. Bicycle Thieves 1948

68. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein 1948

69. A Foreign Affair 1948

70. La Terra Trema 1948

71. Letter from an Unknown Woman 1948

72. Fort Apache 1948

73. The Big Day 1949

74. White Heat 1949

75. The Third Man 1949

76. On the Town 1949

77. Kind Hearts and Coronets 1949

78. Adam's Rib 1949

79. Orpheus 1950

80. Winchester '73 1950

81. All About Eve 1950

82. Rashomon 1950

83. Cinderella 1950

84. The Young and the Damned 1950

85. The Gunfighter 1950

86. La Ronde 1950

87. Broken Arrow 1950

88. Sunset Boulevard 1950

See also:

Taschen’s Movies of the 1930s

Bi Gan’s Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet

I’ve added the five movies that Bi Gan picked in his Criterion Closet appearance.

• Youth of the Beast

• Tampopo

• The Complete Jacques Tati

• Master of the House

• 8 1/2

Bi Gan made one original pick: Youth of the Beast. This is why my Master List of Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet is so valuable.

Movies Watched -- Simon of the Desert (1965)

In Spanish. 45 minute running time so wonderfully short. I don’t know anything about Luis Buñuel, but he was clearly a funny guy, a real smartass … this movie is irreverent, maybe even sacrilegious, but it’s also hilarious. Bad boy Buñuel, what a prankster, I enjoyed this …

I watched this because only one guest of the Criterion Closet (Asif Kapadia) picked it … Kapadia also recommended Investigation of a Citizen Beyond Suspicion, which was also good.

Rating: 4, you should see it, esp. with a 45 minute running time.

The devil roams this wilderness. I hear him in the night.

Movies Watched -- Cooley High (1975)

107 minute running time so about seven minutes too long, but I quit watching this after ten minutes. I may have lasted longer if the disc had subtitles, but it didn’t, so I gave up pretty fast. This was about some black kids in Chicago circa 1964 … they’re sort of delinquents, cutting school and stealing and screwing girls. It’s a black culture movie, and I had zero interest in it.

I watched it because only one guest of the Criterion Closet (Luis Guzman) picked this movie. I’m surprised that Criterion re-issued this since it looked pretty terrible, but it might appeal to black people of a certain age?

Rating: 2. This is a good example of a 2 rated movie… it means I didn’t finish it. Rating 1 means I actually sat through it and regret doing so.

You ain’t gots no chance with that high yellow bitch!

Movies Watched -- If... (1969)

112 minute running time … so about 12 minutes too long. British public schoolboy revenge fantasy from the late 1960s … Malcolm McDowell plays Malcolm McDowell (he had the same role in A Clockwork Orange more or less) … rotten rich kids who hated the hypocrisy, the capricious authority, I guess... all about rebellion.

There’s a strong homosexual vein running through the whole movie as well. It’s an interesting movie, the flip flopping between color and black and white doesn’t delineate fantasy and reality, it’s not that simple. And the British Empire was pretty dead by 1969, I think.

I watched this because only one visitor to the Criterion Closet (Andrew Haigh) in the whole history of hundreds of visitors selected it.

Rating is 3.5 … I watched it start to finish, enjoyed a lot of it, though it’s a little too long.

Brunning! This is Jute. You're Jute's bumf tutor. Take him to the sweat room.

David Remnick’s Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet

I’ve added the nine movies that David Remnick picked in his Criterion Closet appearance.

• A Man Escaped

• Burden of Dreams

• By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two

• Citizen Kane

• King Lear

• Shoot the Piano Player

• The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

• The Wes Anderson Archive

• Thelonius Monk Straight, No Chaser

David Remnick made two original picks: The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun and Shoot the Piano Player. This is why my Master List of Closet Picks in the Criterion Closet is so valuable.

Movies Watched -- Eyimofe (2020)

In Nigerian English. 116 minute running time so at least 16 minutes too long. If you’re interested in seeing what life in Nigeria is like, you can watch this movie, but be warned: it’s grim. It’s crowded and dirty and chaotic and people rip each other off at every turn and family relationships are all screwed up and people do the most desperate things to try to get the hell out of there, and who can blame them?

The movie kicks off with a horrific tragedy, so it can’t really go downhill from there. Two separate stories about two decent people, one man, one woman (and her little sister who is pregnant) that sort of intersect, but not really. It’s not a badly made movie, but it’s not fun to watch. You’ll count your lucky stars that you weren’t born in Nigeria. I have zero interest in visiting Africa, except for maybe going on a posh safari.

I watched this movie because it was another Criterion title that had only been picked once (by Ayo Edebiri) in the whole history of closet picks.

Rating: 3 or even 2.5 given that it’s a little too long. It’s not terrible, but you really have to be interested in watching what life is like in Lagos (spoiler: it’s awful) to enjoy it. “A vivid snapshot of life in contemporary Lagos, whose social fabric is captured in all its vibrancy and complexity,” says Criterion.

Are you going to fix everything here?

Movies Watched -- Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

In Italian. 115 minute running time so around 15 minutes too long, but this was not bad… a political movie, commentary on the state of the nation of Italy, circa 1970. I saw this because only one person (Asif Kapadia) who visited the Criterion Closet chose it, and when I went back to see what he said, I realized it was a random pick he made since he liked the title (it is a very good title). Given my new rating system, this is a 4 (you should see it) or possibly a 3.5 given the overly long running time.

It’s a good idea anyway and pretty well executed.

You're a citizen of a democracy, not a horse.

Maoxian's New Rating System for Movies

I used to have a red (stop), yellow (consider), green (go) rating system for movies, but there’s not enough nuance there, so I’ve switched to a five star system. I’m also going to employ a half-star between three and four, and three and two.

• Five is a must-see. Life changing or makes you change the way you think. There are not many movies that get this rating.

• Four is a should-see. I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t deserve the highest rating.

• Three means I finished it, didn’t hate it. But it’s not a should-see. It’s not terrible, parts of it could even be good. Oftentimes decent movies that are too long get this rating.

• Two means it’s bad. Avoid.

• One means it’s terrible. I regret seeing it.

By the end of 2026 I should have a public, sortable spreadsheet for all the movies I’ve seen with their respective rating.