Jamie Thingelstad

Tammy, Tyler, and I went to Tron: Ares tonight at Emagine Willow Creek. I’d been wanting to see this since the day it came out.

I saw the original Tron when I was 10 years old living in Jamestown, ND. As a kid that loved computers and spent hours writing mangled BASIC programs the movie was amazing. Some friends and I liked it so much that we wanted to be in the movie. We got frisbees and painted them to look like Tron discs and attempted our own version of disc wars at night. Note, it hurts to get his with a frisbee in the head. 😬 I also put a ton of quarters into the TRON arcade game back in the day. Since then I’ve seen all the Tron movies and shows including Tron: Legacy, Tron: Uprising (series), and now Tron: Ares.

In short, I’m going to like this movie if for no other reason than I enjoy seeing the Tron “world” continue to exist and grow. The production and SFX for Tron: Ares were incredible and in general I find their nods to tech to always be fun. It made me chuckle that while Tron envisions a world where a program can materialize in the real world, you would still have people running killall on something that is for sure a Unix shell. I thought Ares did a good job of also illustrating how simple tasks given to an AI with “by any means” could go terribly wrong. I also liked that Ares himself goes through a process of determining right and wrong and starts to express feelings.

The high point for me was Ares going back to the original Tron grid and meeting Flynn. This was a high-point of nostalgia and I could have stayed in that scene for a while longer.

With that said, and I did like it, some things I didn’t love:

• The storyline took a hard pivot in my view to get to a good v. evil plot point. We now clearly have Encom framed as the Rebel Alliance and Dillinger Systems as the Empire. I’m straining the metaphor but it feels like Ares specifically wanted to get those archetypes setup for future releases. I could gripe a bit about the overt multi-channel product planning being pushed into the story line but all the Star Wars fans could just say “yeah, been there, done that”
• There was no revisit to the ISO’s from Tron: Legacy, short of Quorra’s picture being referenced in the very last scene.
• The premise of things in the “grid” (aka cloud?) coming into the real world is a bit like time travel. It opens up all sorts of “yeah, but what about” story line issues.

Overall a good movie either way. I’m completely and positively sure they are already working on another Tron movie, and I’ll be there for it. 🤓

My cousin Josh’s most recent essay Can-Can is a great read told from his own experience as a college professor.

So, in 34-years of bumbling towards being as overly educated and as idiotic as my oft concussed cognition will allow, the prevailing wind on college campuses has carried the message of learning how to think, rather than being told what to think, and never accepting a set of beliefs, or most anything, uncritically. Question everything, and more importantly, everyone…especially yourself.

Delightful.

Got a 5-star chest in Clash Royale!

Tooling around in Duluth on bikes a bit.

100 TON mooring bollard in Duluth Harbor.

Delicious coffee this morning at 190° Coffee & Tea with Isaiah.

Sunrise on Duluth Harbor. I thought it was cool how the blue in the sky came out as the sun went up.

We had a great hike on the Oberg Mountain Loop. This is Tammy’s sister’s favorite fall hike and it was our first time doing it. I can see why it is so highly recommended. Sadly the Maple’s had nearly all lost their leaves but the Birch were still doing their thing. Highly recommended!

Delicious non-alcoholic beer from Untitled Art. Wow!

I always make a stop at the Lake Superior Trading Post.

Beautiful morning in Grand Marais at the lighthouse.

Group photos on Artist’s Point and Grand Marais Lighthouse.

On Artists Point in Grand Marais. Today’s meditation spot.

Starting our day on the North Shore with my brother and his family with some World’s Best Donuts.

In Duluth at Wild State Cider. Delicious cider. Amazing Wrecktangle pizza. One of the best pretzels we’ve had. And crazy good Creemee’s to end with. Wow!

Recording in triplicate.

I’ve been using Plausible Analytics for over a year and have been using the Plausible Analytics Plug-in created by @lukas to add it to my blog. It hasn’t been updated for a long time and the embed code, while still working, is very outdated. I finally decided to take a few minutes to fork that plug-in and create my own Plausible Analtyics 2 for micro.blog.

It now uses the current code snippet and also sports a Plausible icon as well. Plus, I now have a plug-in in the directory. If you use Plausible Analytics on micro.blog I would definitely suggest switching.