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Random snapshots while I recover from a week of trudging from one site to another.

Fried scorpions! Not.

Fat cat in a houtong.

The Condom People. L-R: Edna Abong and Lucien Dy Tioco of the Philippine Star, our director Pepe Diokno.

Ooh la la.

The antique market. Where being duped is part of the experience. I found a Victorian brass mariner’s telescope that may be overpriced and fake but I like it.

Sleeping cat at a gallery at 789.

And of course we looked at maps. Ancient maps. Lots of ancient maps.

Attendees of the Qingdao International Beer Festival taking a selfie with a smartphone, Shandong province, China, August 2015. Ian Berry/Magnum Photos

Virginia Woolf’s serious joke that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” was a hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone. For the first time, practically anyone could be found and intruded upon, not only at some fixed address at home or at work, but everywhere and at all times. Before this, everyone could expect, in the ordinary course of the day, some time at least in which to be left alone, unobserved, unsustained and unburdened by public or familial roles. That era now came to an end.

Many probing and intelligent books have recently helped to make sense of psychological life in the digital age. Some of these analyze the unprecedented levels of surveillance of ordinary citizens, others the unprecedented collective choice of those citizens, especially younger ones, to expose their lives on social media; some explore the moods and emotions performed and observed on social networks, or celebrate the Internet as a vast aesthetic and commercial spectacle, even as a focus of spiritual awe, or decry the sudden expansion and acceleration of bureaucratic control.

Read In the Depths of the Digital Age

Flash-forward is the new flashback. On every episode of Bloodline, we are reminded that the good son John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) will dispose of the body of the bad son Danny Rayburn (Ben Mendelsohn) on a boat in the Florida Keys. Did John kill Danny? The very first words we hear on the show are: “Sometimes, you know something’s coming. You feel it in the air. In your gut… Something’s going to go terribly wrong.” The opening credit sequence says as much: clear blue skies over a sun-bleached beach giving way to dark clouds, thunder, lashing rain. Accompanied by a cover of a Metallica song. “Please don’t judge us,” says John. “We’re not bad people, but we did a bad thing.”

Oh, really? We would never have guessed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Read my review of Bloodline in The Binge.

The annual festival is where we first saw Renoir’s Grand Illusion for the first time and became a fan of Eric Rohmer via The Baker Girl of Monceau and Summer’s Tale. Last year they had a fine selection of recent movies. Watch as many movies as you can, even the ones you know nothing about. Especially the ones you know nothing about, and allow yourself to be surprised. (In this year’s slate I’ve only seen Toute Premiere Fois. It’s hysterical!)

To call a cat:

– Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty.

– Ming ming ming muning. Sssswssswssssw.

– Ao raqagon mirri klios? (If the cat speaks Old Valyrian.)

– Dracarys!

– So. Cleganebowl, what do you think?

– Lady Stoneheart? Won’t that be too many resurrected Starks?

If Drogon makes the catcalls:

– You remind me of Natasha at the ball in War and Peace. The Louise and Aylmer Maude translation.

– Is that vintage? The pattern is very interesting in an Escher kind of way.

– Kessa, nyke va moriot merbugon.

– Valar morghulis. By the way you’re much prettier than Daenerys, almost as pretty as Jon Snow.

– San-dor! San-dor! Woof woof!

– Bring back Lady, Shaggydog and Summer!