The final days in Europe consisted of a combination bus and train journey from Prague to Frankfurt via Nuremberg. The DB bus service was an excellent example of German luxury and comfort. As for Frankfurt, it's always quite a mixed city. We stayed in the Hotel Adler which is comfortable, centrally-located, inexpensive, includes breakfast, and is located on Niddastrasse, which we have nicknamed "Needlestrasse" on account of local junky population. Completely harmless, of course, but it does add some local colour when an individual is fishing under bright lights for a working vein on the back of their hand, and others are cooking up around the corner. We ate a local Chinese restaurant, Meng Yuan, which was notable for its authentic decore and lack on non-Chinese diners; in other words, it was pretty good. A walk up the road to my intellectual homeland, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research revealed that somebody had added an amusing conspiracy theory from ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
reddragdive at Rocknerd that Theodor Adorno wrote all The Beatles songs. Who would do such a thing? Well, certainly Marcuse would understand the motivation of The Aesthetic Dimension.
The following day was an early flight from out of Frankfurt for a twenty-four or so hour flight to Melbourne via Abu Dhabi. I wanted to be ready to sleep by the time we arrived in Melbourne in the evening of local time, which meant staying awake for the entire flight. At the very least it provided the opportunity to watch several movies. I rewatched (for the fourth time now), Blade Runner 2049, and my opinion expressed in an early review remains. The following movie was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which was visually beautiful and had a fair story but didn't really seem to have comprehensible character motivation. Turning to a slasher-drama, Us certainly had a great deal of game, and also decent social critique, even if the ending was predictable. In complete contrast, Isn't It Romantic, was a amusing romantic-comedy involving a person who doesn't like romantic comedies. But the top film of the journey was an Indian gothic-horror Tumbbad which included issues of poverty, greed, madness and a monster called Haster, no less. It was really quite a brilliant story, good characterisation, and with excellent atmospherics.
Arriving back in Australia it was time for a double whiskey and half a sleeping tablet to knock myself out until early the following morning. Why early? Because I didn't have a gap day from landing and returning to work. More to the point the last two days have consisted largely of working my way through the mountain of emails that have accumulated, and teaching a two-day course on Linux and shell-scripting for HPC with an emphasis on bioinformatics content, which I squeeze in three days worth of content in two days. As it was, my delivery wasn't quite up to my usual standard, although what feedback I've seen was pretty positive. In any case, I've been really quite zonked from the journey as my body-clock re-adjusts. It hasn't stopped me going to gaming tonight to play Star Wars: Force and Destiny RPG. Quite a fun game with some narrative input that works reasonably well.
reddragdive at Rocknerd that Theodor Adorno wrote all The Beatles songs. Who would do such a thing? Well, certainly Marcuse would understand the motivation of The Aesthetic Dimension.The following day was an early flight from out of Frankfurt for a twenty-four or so hour flight to Melbourne via Abu Dhabi. I wanted to be ready to sleep by the time we arrived in Melbourne in the evening of local time, which meant staying awake for the entire flight. At the very least it provided the opportunity to watch several movies. I rewatched (for the fourth time now), Blade Runner 2049, and my opinion expressed in an early review remains. The following movie was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which was visually beautiful and had a fair story but didn't really seem to have comprehensible character motivation. Turning to a slasher-drama, Us certainly had a great deal of game, and also decent social critique, even if the ending was predictable. In complete contrast, Isn't It Romantic, was a amusing romantic-comedy involving a person who doesn't like romantic comedies. But the top film of the journey was an Indian gothic-horror Tumbbad which included issues of poverty, greed, madness and a monster called Haster, no less. It was really quite a brilliant story, good characterisation, and with excellent atmospherics.
Arriving back in Australia it was time for a double whiskey and half a sleeping tablet to knock myself out until early the following morning. Why early? Because I didn't have a gap day from landing and returning to work. More to the point the last two days have consisted largely of working my way through the mountain of emails that have accumulated, and teaching a two-day course on Linux and shell-scripting for HPC with an emphasis on bioinformatics content, which I squeeze in three days worth of content in two days. As it was, my delivery wasn't quite up to my usual standard, although what feedback I've seen was pretty positive. In any case, I've been really quite zonked from the journey as my body-clock re-adjusts. It hasn't stopped me going to gaming tonight to play Star Wars: Force and Destiny RPG. Quite a fun game with some narrative input that works reasonably well.
