2015 New Year resolution (belated)

After several short trips to Korea, Japan, the US, and Spain within a few weeks, I finally came back in London, (caught a cold again), and successfully extended my visa to remain in the UK as a happy dependent :-p.

Now, belatedly, is the time to set new year's targets as every year. This year, again, I should stick to rather simple targets (rough allocation of time); this year is going to be a year of totally challenging new stuff:

• Career: to success in seed financing for the startup (50%).
• Private: to learn anew not to be bored; through studying Finance (MSc-level) and Economics (BSc-level) (20%), learning programming (20%) and absorbing various contents to write up a short fiction (10%).

Happy New Year 2015 monument, in a sort of traditional Japanese way with an orange.

Regrettably, last year I did not achieve much regarding my revised targets:

1. Keep exercise every week: Not really at all. After an accident in golfing, I stopped playing it. 
2. Complete the Cambridge MBA with writing up the final dissertation on 'innovation and corporate governance': Done, but not fully satisfied with what I wrote up.
3. Confirm a place, likely in London, for researching management in the UK while working on the entrepreneurial project: The startup goes well so far (definitely this is the greatest achievement unexpectedly), yet failed to secure a research position.
4. Draft a story of science fiction. An idea of multi-worlds/minds structure is there, yet still too vague to start writing.

Anyway, my life to get busy living goes on.

From a new year's trip to Grand Canyon in the US

Interstellar

Admittedly, the story was a bit long and ended too happily? But that is not the point of the film. I would say, the story (e.g. going through a wormhole to reach another galaxy) and characters (e.g. the captain's son, Dr. Mann, etc.) were rather made up and thoughtfully ordered to just let a person (and a machine) going beyond the event horizon into the black hole (and somehow, however weirdly, he has not experienced 'spaghettification' by the strong gravity of the black hole). Period.

I know people love spacecrafts, but this was not super cool unfortunately.

Our imagination is highly bounded in timespace, or three dimensions and time. This film at least tried to reconstruct the boundaries of audience's imagination. Also, it amazingly showed how a film can show the advanced science of modern physics into the screen (of course with its budget of $160 million and more).

The last quarter or half hour or so was just amazingly structured to put all the mysterious pieces/scenes into one great big, clear picture on how this film ends. That part made it worth seeing the bit boring first half of the film. As some said, a good Science Fiction is also a good Mystery, indeed.

Might be a good idea to see 9 films that inspired the director. I should start with Metropolis as it was also recommended in the Film History evening classes at Imperial College London, as it affected a lot of science fiction films, notably Blade Runner.

1. Star Wars (1977)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
4. Alien (1979)
5. Metropolis (1927)
6. Blade Runner (1982)
7. The Right Stuff (1983)
8. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
9. The Mirror (1975)

* Happy is here half questioned because all the scenes after the event horizon could be just an imaginary memory of the farmer-turn-back-pilot who dreams a feasible return to the earth to see his daughter. Who knows?

The Imitation Game

We saw the film in the first day of its running. It was a good entertainment film for a Friday evening, but not a thing that moves you, indeed. I enjoyed how Benedict plays one of the most intelligent people the world once had (and miserably lost). Frankly speaking, without Benedict Cumberbatch, the storytelling was rather boring and could not go beyond my expectation. Yes, maybe I was not the target audience of the film, since I am a big fan of Turing Machine etc. as a Science Fiction lover.

The Imitation Game (3.5 stars out of 5)