Wildfire [UK/Ireland, Cathy Brady, 3.5] After going missing for a year, a bipolar woman (Nika McGuigan) drops in on her sister (Nora-Jane Noone), opening the wounds of shared tragedy. Raw, unsubtle family drama against the backdrop of Northern Irish politics as Brexit threatens a fragile peace.

The film is dedicated to the memory of lead actor McGuigan, who died of cancer last year.

40 Years a Prisoner [US, Tommy Oliver, 4] Documentary recounts the 1978 standoff between members of radical Black back-to-nature organization MOVE and Philadelphia police through the efforts of the son of two of the group members to secure their parole. A strong emotional hook greatly assists in telling a tenaciously complicated story.

I would like to have seen more on the genesis of the group and the first stages of their conflict with the mayor and police. So much needs to be unwound in the 1978 standoff that the even more astonishing story of a 1985 confrontation, which resulted in Philadelphia authorities dropping a satchel bomb from a helicopter, killing 11 and burning down 65 houses, goes unmentioned here. Another doc I haven’t seen, Let the Fire Burn, focuses on that part of the story.

True Mothers [Japan, Naomi Kawase, 4.5] Parents of a kindergartner react with dismay when a woman contacts them claiming to be his birth mother. Luminous, delicate drama of shifting perspectives.

Limbo [UK, Ben Sharrock, 4] Syrian oud player grapples with guilt over family left behind as he cools his heels with other refugee claimants at a center in the bleak and isolated Outer Hebrides. Moments of deadpan humor and stark landscapes layer this exploration of displacement.

---

Capsule review boilerplate: Ratings are out of 5. I’ll be collecting these reviews in order of preference in a master post the Monday after the fest. Films shown on the festival circuit will appear in theaters, disc and/or streaming over the next year plus.

1. New program will see pregnant mothers and babies protected from life-threatening virus  SBS
2. World-leading approach to protect babies from RSV  Department of Health
3. Government-funded RSV vaccines to protect infants from severe disease  Australian Pharmacist
4. 'Very scary': Wagga mum's plea for parents to protect babies through RSV jab  The Daily Advertiser
5. Guild backs free RSV vaccinations  Australian Journal of Pharmacy

Fund raisers working in outsourced call centers, or directly for just one non-profit, face many of the same problems. While non-profit fund raising can be a very rewarding career choice, it can also be very stressful at times.

Donors who support a given charity don't always feel that being contacted by their non profit whether by phone or by means of a direct mail campaign, is something that they want to have any part of.

Often times, a fundraiser will feel that the campaign they're currently raising contributions for is a perfect and fool proof campaign. Donors have other ideas. At times it seems that donors who give to groups like The Humane Society Of The United States or PETA are far more receptive to a general appeal for animal welfare than those donors who support Oxfam International, or Habitat or Habitat For Humanity, when considering helping out on an emergency appeal.

Why should this be so? A quick answer to this question is that those fund raisers who are less emotionally invested in a campaign are better able to communicate the wishes and needs of an organization. Quite frankly, believing that one particular type of campaign is less important than another, will limit your ability to do well on either type of campaign in the long run.

After a year or so of professional, fundraising I had an epiphany; it doesn't really matter so much what you say on the phone to a donor. What matters is how you say it. My attitude changed at that point. I became less concerned with asking and more concerned with communicating. My performance improved, I felt far less burned out at the end of the day, and I began to raise more money.


There are certain truths that are universal to all campaigns. Mastery of these axioms of fund raising can only bring about better performance from fund raisers, and better results for the non profits we work for. Scientists who look deeply into the universe become mystics, fund raisers who strive to perfect their craft do as well. This is the first in a more abstract series of posts known as Fund Raising:102

The first is: Always regulate your mood.

No matter how enthusiastic a fund raiser is about a charity, or a campaign, being in control of ones emotions at all times will provide the best results. Donors can hear our emotions on the phone. Most people would rather hear a calm and compelling fund raiser map out the key strategies of a fund raising campaign than unbridled enthusiasm that borders on mania.

There is perhaps no better skill a fund fund raiser can have than the ability to match their tone, their emotional state, with that of the donor's.

Be enthusiastic, but remember that you are a complete stranger to your donor. You've interrupted their life and what always seems to be a critical time, and you want them to give you money!

So build your enthusiasm during the course of the call. Allow the donor to catch up to you rather than bowling them over. A single moment in a good fund raising call is like an eternity. Donors are compelled to listen the the truth of a good pitch.


Fund raisers who speak slowly and clearly, with a mastery of their fund raising campaign, are far less likely to be hung up on at all. Knowledge of the subject matter of a campaign, confidence in the virtue of the cause you are fund raising for, and empathy with the donor with whom you speak, create instant gravitas.

Instead of a rambling mendicant, a skilled fund raiser personifies the true meaning of the word solicitor; An authoritative figure who by virtue of the truth of their cause, and the strength of their argument, compels those who hear to listen, and those who listen to act.

This brings us to the second rule; focus on listening at all times, even while speaking.

If a donor shows a high level of enthusiasm for your campaign then by all means match that enthusiasm. Always strive to be listening to the donor listening to your voice. This concept surpasses what can be taught about fund raising, it must be experienced first hand; an experienced professional fund raiser can measure the attitude and attentiveness of a donor.

Listening to a donor while speaking at the same time is done by knowing, and believing in your campaign enough to stop listening to yourself say the words, and focus solely on the fact that you are speaking with another human being. Not a name, or a telephone number on a screen, not a statistic in a database, a person. The donors can hear this in your voice.

This strategy can change the outcome of virtually any fundraising call in a positive way. If a random donor plucked out of a database somewhere in an autodialer in the belly of your call center can tell what kind of mood you're in, how much better at doing the same thing should a fundraiser who makes 500 to 1000 calls each week?

Anyone who's had even limited success at fund raising through telephone campaigns has had life changing and inspiring conversations with people from all walks of life. Great fund raisers enjoy these moment several times per day.

Below are two lists of nominations for Japanese buzzword of the year.  Each has 30 entries, and from each list one will be chosen as the respective winner.  Since the two lists are already quite long and rich, I will keep my own comments (mostly at the bottom and focusing on phoneticization) to a minimum. […]

Hello again,

This month I've been plugging away on the project I mentioned in the previous post which involves among other things a PDF generator and now an implementation of ML (as in Standard ML, but also the other one). This is probably the 10th "compiler" I've written in my life, and it's kind of fun to revisit these problems that you've done many times and try out different approaches, although this time one of the approaches is "Use C++" (for reasons of making good on a joke, but also for reasons of mlton doesn't work on my computer any more). And although C++ is a fine tool for many applications, it does have some deficiencies for the task of writing a compiler (one of the most irritating: a very modest limit on the stack depth? Like my computer has 256 Gigabytes of RAM and 2^64 virtual addresses and somehow it can only manage 1 megabyte for the stack and there's no standard way to increase it? Get off my lawn). But then you can also experience new ways of struggling with C++, like: A middle of the night power failure wrecked my computer's GPT (as in GUID Partition Table, but also the other one) and I was deep in the depths of taking the computer apart to reset its parts, its BIOS (its Basic In/Out System, which is where it stores its biography) and its hard drives were everywhere on the floor, and it could not be saved, and this after I already broke my computer this year by trying to put the world's biggest video card in it, too hard. And I could not merely perform recovery because of Unknown Error, so I had to begin anew again and restore from backups. But when you restore from backup and you're in the mood of "why is this so complicated and I don't understand how computers work any more?" it occurs to you (me) to also change your underlying development environment instead of reinstalling the devil you know. So I ended my friendship with Cygwin64 and switched to new best friend MSYS2. Both of these things are different ways of wishing that you were using Linux while you're using Windows. The main reason I tried this new way of struggling is that Cygwin is very behind on its version of x86_64 clang (C++ compiler), which I wanted to try because it supports AddressSanitizer and clangd on Windows, and I wanted to give LSP in emacs a shot (it's finally good!). There were a few growing pains, but I think MSYS2 is what I would recommend now. One of the nice things they did was create multiple different environments depending on what you want to do (e.g. "I want to use clang to compile x86_64 code" or "I want to do 32-bit cross compilation for ARM") and in that environment, you just say "g++" and it invokes the compiler you want, instead of the weird contortions I've been doing for years with manually invoking x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++. I was also able to get clblast working before being too filled with rage to continue, so that is nice for the ML inference on the world's biggest graphics card. I made these graphics to help me tune the correct settings of GPU layers (y axis) and number of threads (x axis):

tune-single
tune-batch

In some sense the results are obvious (more threads and more layers is faster) but it was interesting to me how the cliff of performance drops off at a different number of layers for single and batch mode (I guess because the batch needs some memory itself?) and how it's clearly better to use fewer threads than cores for batch as well. I was not surprised to see performance drop off for >32 threads (everybody knows that hyper-threads kinda suck) but I was very surprised to see performance pick up again when it gets back up to 64? And only for single mode? I wish I understood that better. But mostly I'm a sucker for the custom visualizations.

Right but when writing this compiler I realized that I wanted to use some Greek letters, and I can't handle it when some characters are in a different font in my source code, so I finally made some space for those in my programming font FixederSys. These certainly still need some tweaks, but it's already better than just being in some other weird font:


{{{caption}}}

You can also see that I have been adding some "useful" emoji at the top. It is an interesting puzzle to try to make these things recognizable (especially for the 1x version, whose charboxes are 8x16 pixels). I am pretty sure I will not try to do all of the emoji (like, the flags are totally hopeless at 8x16), but it is tempting to round out the Unicode support somewhat. Like I was trying to make a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ today and had to settle for ~\_( :) )_/~ which is pretty much (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻.

Also: Adam revived our old game jam game Headcat, which I described in post 927, now over 16 years ago. You can play it online at Headcat.org. It is harder than I remember, perhaps explaining why it did not reach #1 on the One Appstore Per Child charts.

Also: I started and finished (true ending, but just with one character) Slay the Spire. Good game, but you don't need me to tell you that. Same for Alwa's Legacy, which is the sequel to Alwa's Awakening. Both of these are very true-to-form "8-bit" and "16-bit" platformers that I enjoyed and would recommend for genre fans, though I did not try to 100% them. The graphics are the highlight and I thought it was very cute how these could easily have been a pair of games from the NES and SNES. The good old days. And speaking of good-old days, I am now playing Katamari Damacy, which I had played at a friend's house many years ago, and always wanted to spend more time with. It totally holds up (aside from stuff like: You have to play through the tutorial and first level before you can access the menus at all, like to make the game fullscreen?) and it's honestly inspiring how unhinged the game design and writing are, and how fun it manages to be. What an accomplishment!

A colleague, who has sometimes posted here as Bystander N, has sent me the following, asking me to put it on the blog. It is gratifying, and I hope that it is true.

• Tomorrow is a particularly sad day for my bench. I know Bystander and he had no idea I was going to

  write this short piece. Tomorrow he will be officially “past it”, though of course in reality nothing like

  past it and he is as sharp as they come.

  Both here on this blog and in our retiring rooms we will miss his kindness, warmth, immense

  knowledge, sense of fair play, sense of humour and seemingly endless stream of amusing court

  anecdotes.

  I have not always agreed with him on bail and sentence decisions but that’s the way the system

  works. I have learned a great deal from him and I am really sorry he will not be amongst us any

  longer. I have heard him say that he thinks he saw the best of the bench many years ago. He may

  be right but I’m still sure, even if he will not miss all of it, he will miss most of it.

Jupiter has often been thought to protect the inner Solar System from asteroids and comets, but new research has shown that the giant planet may actually increase the risk of an impact.

yesterday I popped to Hobbycraft to see if they had any pieces I could use for the new Midgard rules. I couldn't find any goblets but I did track down the beads needed for heroic deeds.

While I was travelling through the bead tray, I saw one that I thought would make a great Celtic shield.

It has a nice wrap around curve to it but more importantly, sports a nice Celtic swirly pattern.

Ancient Irish warriors fight with the sea devils.
It has a good level of detail to make it look well crafted and ornate. Once I sculpt a boss for the centre I think it will look just the ticket. Nice deep grooves that will catch ink and weathering very well. The swirl too is a very Celtic looking design.

 This tub was £4 which is unbelievable for an armies worth of shields. I might end up using these beads as heroic deeds markers too as they won't roll unlike the rounder ones.

You can get a next size up in container to fill with your beads for £8, again for hundreds of shields this isn't bad. The small tub should be enough though.

1. Why Virat Kohli, Jasprit Bumrah were missing from Perth nets; India ramp up privacy amid Manchester United-like security  Hindustan Times
2. Virat Kohli in focus: Intense net session begins for upcoming Test series against Australia  The Times of India
3. Virat Kohli in Australia for BGT: A timeline  India Today
4. Black veil of secrecy: India begin training in privacy in Perth  ESPNcricinfo
5. India to play intra-squad warm-up match at WACA on Friday ahead of Australia Tests but BCCI denies public viewing  Hindustan Times

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