Thoughts on recent things, 1 January 2026

9 min read · 1,884 words

I've decided to collect my thoughts on some media I have recently consumed, some places I have recently gone, things I have recently experienced, and papers I have recently read.

Media

Nouvelle Vague

What an amazing love letter to Godard. I had been putting it off due to laziness for a few weeks now, and I am very glad I decided to say "fuck it, I'm bored enough" and watch the film. Not only is it a great portrayal of both the members of the nouvelle vague, but it was such a feel-good movie too. (Maybe because I am a tad bit of an annoying cinephile, that is where my pleasure derived, but who knows?)

I felt such immense joy seeing these character introductions. Just kinda like a "yeah I know him!" type thing, y'know? Made me happy.

Also, having worked on/been associated with a few indie films, yeah. Process checks out. Glad to see not much has changed.

Below, my Letterboxd review:

this was like Endgame for people who are really annoying about film (ça c'est moi)

truly what an incredible film, within the framing and filming style of a biography it still managed to capture the eccentricity of godard's works. this is definitely a movie i will be pushing during movie nights

im genuinely shocked that this is a netflix original

À bout de souffle

I rewatched it the day after Nouvelle Vague as a little refresher. It is honestly not my favorite Godard film, not even close (dare I say of every Godard I've seen it's my least favorite), but man is it just different. I cannot say I've watched many films pre-À bout de souffle, but I can see the influence and impact that it had on filmmaking as a whole. Even today you don't really see anything like À bout de souffle. Death to the Marvelslop.

Disco Elysium

Epic Games gave out Disco Elysium for free on Christmas day, and it has been a game I've been meaning to play for years but have never gotten around to. Well, I'm glad I finally got around to it. It is a really fucking good game. I'm only two days in, unfortunately not having much time to play due to work and familial holiday commitments and the like.

I am going into the game completely blind, as I typically like to do with media. Currently am doing my first run as a self-insert, choosing the options that I would personally choose and aligning the character's skills and abilities with my own. For my next run, I think I will do an INT 1 run, but I'm not sure if an INT 1 in Disco Elysium has the same effects as an INT 1 run in, say, Fallout 1 and 2.

Places and Experiences

Belle Glade DMV

I used to own a beautiful 1987 Peugeot 505 as a project car back when I lived in Orlando. Unfortunately as I was moving back to South Florida, I was forced to sell the car. I had sold the car in March and cancelled the insurance a few months later when prompted to renew. (I was renewing on intervals of six months.)

In December I get a letter in the mail from GEICO denying me coverage due to a suspended driver's license. I am no stranger to speeding tickets, but it has been ages since I had last gotten one and I am very adamant about resolving them ASAP. So what gives?

I contacted the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles and as it turns out, my license had been suspended a month prior due to "lack of insurance on a registered vehicle". Now how could that be? I sold the Peugeot!

Well, apparently I had to surrender the license plate in order to fully mark the car as sold. Oops. Slight issue, as the car now lived somewhere in Texas.

As driving is somewhat crucial in a car-centric society, I had to restore my driving privileges as soon as I possibly could. Unfortunately, this meant a trip to the DMV. I went online to book an appointment—and every single DMV location in Palm Beach County was booked out until mid-January (the date was mid-December)—save for one, Belle Glade.

Belle Glade does not have the best reputation. It is widely known to be a decrepit town out in the middle of nowhere with the highest HIV/AIDS rate per capita in the entire United States; isolated enough from the rest of the county that contemporarily it is hard to say why it's a part of Palm Beach County. Belle Glade was also my closest option by a span of three weeks to re-obtain my driving privileges. So Belle Glade it was.

My dad and I took the near-hour journey to Belle Glade, wandered in to the tattered Tax Collector building to the DMV office, and were greeted with the single smoothest DMV experience we both had ever had.

I was astounded. We managed to see the clerk early—whereas normally you are lucky to see a clerk 30 minutes after your scheduled appointment time—and we were in and out in ten minutes, having restored my driving privileges AND renewing my soon-to-expire driver's license. The clerk was the most pleasant government official I had ever spoken with aside from the FBI, and it brought a new outlook of Belle Glade to my eye.

Definitely an enjoyable experience, despite it being governmental bureaucracy.

Pumphouse Pouratourium

Found a really cool coffee shop near me. They have a whole industrial roasting setup you can watch, as well as the best peppermint mocha latte I've ever had in my life. I will be going back there sometime before I move to Toronto (inshallah).

Elephant's Foot Antiques

I decided on a whim to go on a mission to buy one of those silver cigarette cases, as I was sick and tired of having packs crushed in the pockets of my pants and jackets. I asked my brother if he wanted to come with me to go check out some places and he was interested.

I had seen this place numerous times on my drives to and fro West Palm Beach and had been meaning to stop in for some time. Well, now I have a reason!

Christian and I walked in and we immediately realized it wasn't one of those dinky antique stores that one would've typically expected, but a high-scale boutique. We decided, fuck it, let's check it out anyways. Turns out, they were selling actual fucking ancient artifacts.

Like what the fuck? Actually what the fuck? My brother and I were both in very obvious shock. "Hey, let me buy a 1000-year-old ancient artifact for US$750!" Jesus Christ man. (They probably would've sold him too had they the chance.)

My brother noticed that the bust of Buddha was sourced from the Cleveland Museum of Art.

We perused the rest of the store and remarked that it reminded us both of our late paternal grandmother Bernadette, that she would adore this place. It was definitely to her tastes.

New Year's at St. David Armenian Church

First time at the church for a New Year's event since high school. It was honestly more fun than I'd expected it to be! Initially I didn't know anyone save for my family and my friend Milena, who I'd known for 14 years but have only met in-person 3-odd times before. As I was about to text her that, in walks some random people from the Tampa Armenian Church who I just so happened to know. They each had their own reasons for going to the Boca Armenian Church for New Year's, a church some four-and-a-half hours away from them, but it was nice to see them.

I seldom get to see my extended family, and in the time spent away the growing political divide between us has caused a decent number of them to block and/or unfollow me, so I was understandably a tad wary to see them in person. Turns out these worries were wholly unfounded, as I talked and joked with each of them in the same way we had been doing our whole lives. Hell, despite them blocking me, they were the ones making first contact. It was honestly nice to see them again, save for politics I do really enjoy being around them.

The DJ cut the music around 10:30PM when we were all dancing so someone who was hosting the event could announce a raffle that not a single person cared about. After about five minutes, the host realized this and went to turn the music back on.

On theme with the night, it was nice seeing Milena in-person for the first time in six or seven years. Even though we talk online, we did the usual catch-up one does after long periods of having not seen each other. Through her and my brother, I met Noel, another Armenian our age—an unfortunately rare occurrence for me. I learned that not only did she go to my brother's high school, but one of her relatives (an uncle perhaps, I forgot) attended my parents' wedding. Small world. The four of us went outside and were shooting the shit during the aftermath of the raffle vibe kill. It was decently chilly out, 8ºC, and I was loving it.

Did not manage to get even tipsy despite all the wine and champagne I drank, but oh well, c'est la vie. I got the DJ to play Кайфуем!. I ended up on the dance floor dancing kalinka to it.

I really enjoyed this New Year's.

Nerd Stuff

Research Paper on Temporal Grounding

My good friend Moe recently sent me TimeLens: Rethinking Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs with the caption

Mark my words this will be one of the most consequential papers

After reading it, I fully agree with him. I just don't understand why it took us this long to get a paper like this. I know the problem of mal-labelled data existed in image datasets, but I am shocked as to the extent it exists in video datasets as well (some 70% of data being useless).

New RAG/Vector Index

Found this and while I haven't had time to play around with it, if what it advertises is true (a near 93% reduction in document compression) then it may be revolutionary.

Claude Code

Been fucking around with Claude Code a lot more in-depth recently. I have been using it exclusively for the past few months and only within the past week have I begun creating custom skills and commands for it. I hooked it into Notion and Linear MCP servers, and I created a detailed interviewing slash command that asks me questions and creates in-depth specification documents based on a relatively rough outline I give it.

I also created a slash command that turns specs into Linear issues, handling blocking, project assignment, labels, and priority assignments as well. These two commands alone have greatly improved the planning phase of my development. It genuinely excites me using them. Call me a nerd, idk. I still want to do refinement on them (the spec interview especially takes some time to run through), and afterwards I may publish them online.