My sister was using the rather decrepit old laptop I gave her to study C++ some
more today. She's moving along very quickly; on Friday she was compiling some
basic Hello World stuff and today she was learning to separate function
implementations into separate source files and put the forward declarations in
header files and use header guards. She learned a little Java back in middle
school and she's picked up some Python along the way but I think she picks this
stuff up really quickly. I showed her how to construct a simple GNU Makefile
for a project with multiple source files; she's working in Geany for now because
she had some trouble setting up Code::Blocks, & I suggested that she learn how
to manage Makefiles and such manually because that's how we did it in school &
it's easier for me to help with that.

* * *

> give me love, give me love, give me  
> peace on earth  
> give me light, give me life, keep me  
> free from birth  
> give me hope, help me cope with this  
> heavy load  
> trying to touch & reach you with  
> heart & soul

I've long thought that would be the song I'd use for the end of my hypothetical
film adaptation of Murakami Haruki's *Kafka on the Shore*. Kafka, having made
some kind of peace, listens to it on the train back to Tokyo. I adapt novels as
films in my head while I read them. I had this whole strategy in my head, to
clearly imply the nature of Oedipal curse without luridly spelling it out to the
viewer. I don't know how well it would work out as an actual movie.

When I read *The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle*, I imagined it as a miniseries. I gave
Andrew Bird a cameo as the whistling bellhop. It's a really good show; I want
everyone to see it. I think Netflix would give anything for it if I actually had
anything to show them.

But it's not just book adaptations. There's my remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's
*Stalker*, starring Sonequa Martin-Green, and with the "Author" character
replaced by one of these Silicon Valley "innovators" with an alarming cult of
personality. It's contemporary, and American, but has the same pace & mystery as
Tarkovsky's. That's probably the most outlandish of my head-films.

There's original material too. But I think I may have talked about that on feels
before?