Went to the 9:40 showing of Age of Ultron Friday night at the theater near me, the one that somehow still charges $11.50 for a regular ticket on a weeknight. It opened here May 1st after already cleaning up overseas for a week or two, so by the time I sat down half of Twitter had already spoiled the good lines for me. Thanks for that, everyone.
I'm not going to review the movie, plenty of people already have, and my opinion of superhero sequels has flattened out into "yeah, that happened, things blew up, see you in two years." What actually got me thinking was Ultron himself, an AI that wakes up, reads the entire internet in about four seconds, and immediately decides humanity is the problem. It's the laziest sci-fi trope there is and it still works on me every time, which annoys me more than it should. I've had a little homelab box tucked in my closet since 2013 that I named JARVIS, half as a joke, long before this movie made that name mean something slightly different. Now every time I SSH into it I think about Ultron instead. Not exactly the branding I was going for.
Sunday was the 4th, so obviously the day got hijacked by the "May the Fourth" thing again. I don't hate it the way some people online do, it's a corny pun Lucasfilm leans on for marketing, sure, but I still put on the original two (just the first two, Jedi drags in the middle for me) and didn't feel bad about it. My roommate insists the prequels don't deserve the hate they get. We have this argument roughly every six months and neither of us has ever budged an inch.
Somewhere in between all that I also went back and watched the replay of the Tesla event from last Thursday, the one where Musk stood on a stage out in Hawthorne and pulled the sheet off the Powerwall. Ten kilowatt-hours for $3,500, a smaller 7kWh version too, meant to hang on a garage wall and either store solar power or just bank cheap overnight utility rates for later. I live in a rented apartment with exactly one exterior outlet I'm not fully convinced is grounded correctly, so a wall-mounted home battery is not exactly in my near future. Did the napkin math anyway, because that's apparently who I am now: at my electric rate it'd take something like eight or nine years just to break even on the unit before you even count install labor or an inverter. Doesn't mean it's a bad product. Means it's a product for people with garages, which I am told exist somewhere outside of city apartment buildings.
None of these three things are related to each other, obviously. A robot villain, a pun holiday, and a battery I can't afford to install anywhere. But that's kind of how a weekend goes sometimes, you end up with three tabs open and no throughline connecting them except that you personally sat there and read all three. I keep meaning to write more focused posts here and instead I get a Friday night movie, a Sunday rewatch, and a Thursday keynote I was too busy to watch live, all mashed into one Wednesday post because that's when I finally had twenty minutes to sit down.
If anyone local actually has a garage and is seriously considering the Powerwall, let me know how the install quote comes back. I'm curious what an electrician actually charges to wire one of these things into a panel, since Tesla's own number obviously doesn't include that part.