Chris Pratt’s Race Against AI in “Mercy”: A Cinematic Journey | February 10 2026, 16:24

We went to see the movie Mercy with Chris Pratt yesterday. Bekmambetov! His “screenlife” format has finally been expanded into a $50 million blockbuster and stuffed into IMAX. The guy really did well. First, he made six Yolki movies, and then, bam – he broke out and even started to produce something decent. (We were alone in the theater in super comfy motorized chairs. Empty halls — that’s pretty much the norm for the last many years. I don’t know how cinemas even break even. Even the bar was closed, it only works on weekends when more than two people show up to a hall)

So, the plot. The near future. The justice system is maximally optimized: instead of jurors and years of appeals — an impartial AI. The main character (Chris Pratt) is accused of brutally murdering his own wife. The evidence against him is significant, and society demands blood.

He is placed in a high-tech chair and given 90 minutes. This window” for defense — the time in which he must convince the algorithm of his innocence. If after an hour and a half the guilt probability” scale doesn’t drop below a critical threshold — he will be executed right there. Everything happens in real time, the movie runs for 90 minutes.

In the era of neural networks, this seems very timely. Screenlife here is ideal: we see the evidence and the world through the system’s eyes via cameras and browsers. Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson on screen — always a plus.

However, what causes doubt is the attempt to crossbreed a hedgehog with a snake. Screenlife is good for its chamber feel, but here they sell us IMAX 3D, explosions, and chases, although 95% of the time the hero just sits in a chair.

Classic cinema for streaming. Not bad. On the couch with pizza on a Friday night — it’ll be great, there’s a solid detective story. Your brain might explode from the overload of details. Big question whether it’s worth paying for an IMAX ticket to watch Pratt watching a monitor… Who knows. There are some action scenes here and there, and they’re pretty good, but only occasionally.

Overall, detective fans should like it. From the plot, it’s clear they won’t fry the guy in the chair at the end of the movie, the question is how he’ll manage to wriggle out of it.

Surreal Daydreams: Cooking Up a Fantastical Adventure | February 08 2026, 15:36

Just a normal day

So I decided to fry some eggs. I grab the frying pan, and it asks me, “Which floor?”. Unfazed, I pull a piano out of my pocket and press the brake pedal. Suddenly, a flight attendant pops out of the oven and politely asks: “Tea, coffee, or hold a brick?”. I chose the brick, because it was checkered blue and smelled of spring.

I step out onto the balcony and see — instead of a courtyard, there’s an ocean of kefir. I get into a submarine, start the chainsaw, and then a traffic cop on a dolphin stops me. He whistles into a cucumber and says:

— Why are you without a panama hat in a public place?

I show him my passport, but instead of a photo, there’s a dressed herring. He bursts into tears of joy, gifts me a cactus, and flies away on an umbrella towards Syzran.

I go back inside, wanting to put the cactus in a vase, but the vase has married a vacuum cleaner and left on a honeymoon to the mezzanine. Well, I spit, wiped the sweat away with a towel, but it turned out to be the neighbor’s cat. The cat meowed, turned into 18 rubles in a single coin, and rolled under the sofa.

I approach it, get in the elevator, sit down on a bicycle, start a motorcycle, then bang, a conductor comes up to me and says, “Sir, give up your seat”. And I say I don’t smoke. Then this kid starts crying! But I didn’t lose my cool, and hit him on the face, and he grabs his knee and screams: “My back! My back!”

I exit this electric train,

and see, there’s a minibus standing there. Well, I approach and say: “Winston Blue and 0.5 vodka”. But it gives me Bond and beer. I take this prima and moonshine, and run away from those cops! Then these firefighters caught up with me in an ambulance! Caught up and say: “You forgot your change!”. So, I take a kilogram of apples and head to the market to trade.

I bring them, haven’t even set out these bananas, right then an old lady runs up and buys all the peaches, and tells me to put them in a small bag! And I think, she’s totally insane, how am I supposed to put 20 watermelons into her bag?! I took the money and went home! Never went to the forest again… didn’t touch mushrooms… even quit smoking.

Exploring Algorithmic Stylization in Plotter Art: A CMYK Fractal Journey | February 01 2026, 04:18

Now that I have a plotter, I am fully experimenting with ways of algorithmic image stylization. To achieve what is attached, a Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm was used. Essentially, it converts an image into stochastic rasterization – that is, where it’s darker, there are more dots, and then connects the dots with lines so that all points are connected in a single network, the total length of all lines is minimal, and there are no closed loops (meaning it’s precisely a “tree” with branches, not a “web”).

And this is what I do with each of the CMYK channels, then combine the result into a color picture. On this picture, there seem to be no other colors except for these four CMYK ones, but in reality, there is a bit because some smoothing has crept in.

Printing such on a plotter, of course, is difficult, I will be waiting forever, but I am getting the hang of it, I have already printed the first color picture (it turned out so-so. Well, the first pancake is always lumpy. Comments below)

Building a Plotter from Scratch: My DIY Journey | January 30 2026, 05:43

I assembled a plotter from a kit. It’s practically a Lego set – you spill out the parts from the box and then read the manual. It worked right away. I have some ideas about what to do with this thing, I’ll tell you sometime.

Decoding Naval Terms: From “Eskadrenny Minonosets” to “Destroyer” | January 28 2026, 21:57

It turns out that a destroyer is an abbreviation of “squadron mine carrier” and that in English these ships are called destroyers.