DevOps
fromArmin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
1 day agoAbsurd In Production
Absurd is a durable execution system built on Postgres, providing efficient task management and checkpointing without needing separate services.
Under the ABS challenge system, a team begins each game with two challenges. If a player gets an umpire's call overturned, their team retains the challenge. In effect, this means a team has unlimited challenges until they get two wrong.
A Fine Balance, adapted by playwright and novelist Anosh Irani, will premiere as a play of the same name from in late August. Set in mid-1970s India, A Fine Balance follows four people—a widowed seamstress, a student, and two tailors—who find themselves thrown together in a small Bombay apartment when the government declares a 'state of internal emergency.'
All this to say that Alexander Whitley can harness the technology that so fascinates him, and equally importantly, that he fully understands, to enhance his primary vocation as a dance maker and produce bewitching work. Unfortunately, Mirror, and its companion piece The Rite of Spring, in the brand new double bill currently at Sadler's Wells East, proved major disappointments.
People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.
I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this any more. Chalamet said in a recorded conversation for Variety, expressing his reluctance to participate in art forms he perceives as lacking contemporary audience engagement and cultural relevance.
I landed Oct. 5, and we started work Oct. 6, so it was like jump straight in. And when it's your day off, it's like, 'OK, I just need to shop and clean and relax.' Nearly six months in, the actor is slowly familiarizing himself with New York neighborhood by neighborhood, including the West Village, which he says he recently explored with his girlfriend.
I don't want to be working in ballet or opera things where it's like 'Hey, keep this thing alive,' even though it's like no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.
Manic Street Creature is gig theatre in its purest form. Kirsty Patrick Ward (The Rat Trap) directs a story about a musician breaking onto the London scene, told as a musical set. Olivier Award-winner Maimuna Memon (Standing at the Sky's Edge) leads a tour-de-force about young love, creative ambition and mental health.
I'm most at peace at our place in Kangaroo Valley, a couple of hours south of Sydney - we have 12 acres of native Australian semi-rainforest. If I'm five hours into a day of trying to get rid of the weeds from a copse of trees, I'm pretty fucking happy, especially if my kids and my wife are helping me.
A woman's relationship with Trader Joe's is abstract. It's like the way women see Trader Joe's, it's the way the aliens from 'Arrival' view time. Unlike most men—who make a beeline straight for the same blue-corn tortilla chips that have been there since pre-Obama—women swan dreamily through the store, guided by their foremothers toward the strangest possible products.
London's critics are not unanimous in their praise (but that's nothing unusual). The Financial Times suggests the play occasionally gravitates into "cultural grumbling" when it tackles modern issues such as cancel culture and university politics, and argues that the material feels more reflective than razor-sharp satire. notes that while the humour "simmers gently," its plotting is uneven and its engagement with contemporary politics sometimes feels cursory rather than incisive.
"Heated Rivalry," a low-budget Canadian series that began streaming on HBO Max late last year, quickly made the leap from unexpected word-of-mouth success to full-blown cultural phenomenon. The show, which follows a pair of professional hockey players who fall for each other, has been name-checked by everyone from the N.H.L. commissioner to Zohran Mamdani; its two young leads, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, just served as Olympic torch-bearers.
From Yes Minister co-writer Jonathan Lynn comes I'm Sorry, Prime Minister - the final act between Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey. Jim Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones) is back - older, no wiser, and still gloriously out of his depth. Dreaming of a peaceful retirement at Hacker College, Oxford, Jim instead collides with a very modern nightmare: being cancelled by the college committee.
The Shitheads is part period piece, part family drama and part allegorical epic. It unfolds at some time in prehistory (10,000 - 50,000 BC, to be exact). Nomadic hunter-gatherers coexist with a family of cannibalistic cave dwellers who justify their eating habits by dehumanising their human prey. Hunter-gatherers are 'shitheads', they say - inferior, stupid, without expansive interior lives. One of these cave-dwellers, a straight-talking fighter named Clare (Jacoba Williams - Vera), meets Greg (Jonny Khan - Statues), an endearing, simple-minded gatherer.
Spalding Gray used to perform a show called Interviewing the Audience. The celebrated monologist would invite a stranger he had met in the lobby to join him on stage. Through a sequence of innocuous questions, he would get them to open up about their lives. At one performance, a guest broke the audience's hearts by talking about her daughter's murder. At benefit nights, people living with HIV shared their tales. Other times, the anecdotes would be eccentric or amusing.
Since Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in 1938, it is said that not a day has passed when the Pulitzer prize-winning show hasn't been performed. Every time I read it, I come away with the feeling of having been woken up, says Michael Sheen, star of the upcoming touring production of Wilder's play about a close-knit community in small-town America. With this urgent sense of I have to not waste this.'
Worries, fears, hang-ups, and desires are translated through highly skilled puppetry, as interview scenes cast puppet couples talking about their sex lives. Written by Mark Down of Blind Summit, a cohort of exceptional makers and puppeteers expanding the definition of a puppet, this collaboration with the UK's National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles pulls from real-life conversations to get puppets talking dirty.
He would refer to his father as ce salaud bourgeois (that bourgeois arsehole) and he delighted in telling me the story of being thrown out of school aged eight because he punched the gymnastics teacher who was trying to instil discipline into young boys by turning them into military martinets. Of the professions and attitudes that merited his ire the military, the church, hypocrisy, sham, inauthenticity, politicians, academics and fascists collaborateurs had a special place in his heart.
At Troubadour, we are driven by a belief in creating extraordinary spaces that inspire artists, audiences, and the stories they come together to share. The 3,000 seat venue is to be built in Greenwich Securing planning permission for the new Troubadour Greenwich Peninsula Theatre marks a major milestone for us, and an exciting new chapter in our commitment to bold, large-scale live performance.