Soukie’s Place

Image by Pavel Soukenik. Sources: Nike's 'Believe in Something' ad, Kanye West's Twitter post (edited).

Corporate Brands
and
Constitutional Amendments

October 5, 2018 by Pavel Soukenik

Whether their products are apparel, electronics or software, today’s corporations have to increasingly think about their brand image, and the values they represent and promote. That’s because buyers are increasingly sensitive about the values these products project about them into the world, and those who can afford it often ‘vote with their wallet’ to advance the causes they care about.

Corporations aren’t people (more on this at the end) but what they do projects their values, and unless there is little or no choice, people will care about that.¹ In fact, the more similar options there are on the market, the more important it is to differentiate by the brand’s image.

Sometime during Uber’s unending public image nose-dive² I switched to Lyft. (I still use Uber when I’m travelling in countries where Lyft doesn’t operate yet, which illustrates the point about competition.) Volkswagen Group is another corporation that can hope people are going to forget about their willful deception.³ As a positive example, HBO released a Last Week Tonight episode highly critical of the freedoms in China, forgoing their prospects in China rather than cozying up to their government.

What does that have to do with your voice, power and freedom?

The New Oura Ring
An ‘On-Hand’ Review

September 26, 2018 by Pavel Soukenik

The new Oura ring is a second generation wearable health and fitness tracker from Oura Health. This review is based on three weeks with the model Heritage Silver, size 11, and covers the ring, the app, and the website (Oura Cloud). As a frequent traveler, I was also curious how the ring handles time zone changes and recommendations for sleep and recovery.

Basho’s ‘frog’ haiku. Source

Haiku
Beauty in Simplicity

February 20, 2012 by Pavel Soukenik

How simple can a literary form be while still managing to say something beautiful and interesting? Very simple. Consider the following two examples:

The language is straightforward – everyday even – there are no metaphors or similes in sight, it does not rhyme, the meter is free too, and it’s frighteningly succinct. I borrowed these examples from Katharine Hawkinson and Shuson Kato¹, two haiku poets.

The Charms of a Pessimistic Workaholic

February 11, 2012 by Pavel Soukenik

Note that this article was written without the knowledge of Ronan Farrow’s account published 18 months later in Vanity Fair.

The top grossing film from Woody Allen ever, Midnight in Paris, is sweet and nice like a Belgian chocolate. It is like a dessert after some of the more substantial films of Allen’s career, even though – judged on its own – it is somewhat unsatisfactory.

The movie is about human feelings – nostalgia, romance and disagreements – but more in the sense of the characters talking about, rather than living through, them. Contrasted with Allen’s lowest grossing film, September, where the characters also spend a lot of time talking about these issues, in Paris the protagonist and audience are somehow insulated from feeling the pain.

Image source

Challenges of Translating 13^th Century Texts
A Look at ‘Genjo Koan’

May 9, 2011 by Pavel Soukenik

This article was revised and updated on October 7, 2018

While Genjo Koan is one of key writings in Japanese Zen Buddhism, this article is not focused on its philosophical or religious aspects but on the challenges of translating old texts. Genjo Koan, written by Eihei Dogen, is notoriously difficult to translate. Japanese, like all languages, has changed a lot since the 13^th century, and Dogen often intertwines Chinese characters and quotations.

Even more crucially, when sentences in the original language can be interpreted in several ways, and the translator doesn’t know which one was meant, he can accidentally eliminate it because the translation usually cannot preserve the same range of meanings.

Gray Matter

December 26, 2010 by Pavel Soukenik

After eleven years, there is a new adventure game by Jane Jensen who is best known for her Gabriel Knight Mystery series. Once again, the story is grounded in real locations and weaves facts with supernatural occurrences. The protagonists are obviously new — Sam, a street magician, and Dr Styles, a neurobiologist — and the chapters alternate between them just as we saw in Jensen’s two last full games.

A picture from Gray Matter — Sam is after an illusive Deadulus Club for magicians while Dr Styles goes to extremes to prevent his memories from ever fading.

Pardon the Mess