Movies reviewed this week: The L-Shaped Room, M. Butterfly, The Hidden, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and A Kind of Loving.
Month: October 2022
awk '/in_reply_to_screen_name/ { print $3 }' tweets.json | sed 's/[","]//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -v BryantD | tail -20
56 graphxgrrl
57 patrickoduffy
58 jessnevins
59 othergretchen
60 GlobeChadFinn
61 ryantomorrow
65 smakofsky
66 seclectech
69 multiplexer
73 gentlyepigrams
75 rmd1023
76 mgrasso
79 JimHenleyMusic
79 Wolf_six
89 carlrigney
102 _r_o_n_e_
107 rone_____1
129 emilytheslayer
306 rdonoghue
341 ce_murphyBack in 1905, before the city was annexed by Seattle, Ballard had different street names. Different and better.
This is OK as creepypasta but it’s great as a parody of forum culture. “Please keep all pet-related talk confined to the appropriate subforum! Thanks!”
For my own reference, this is where you express interest in Letterboxd features and this is where you express interested in TMDB features. Letterboxd has a tricky tightrope to walk: more social features are good but would require more moderation and I think it’s a little bit undermoderated as it is. There’s a very slight spam problem.
Elon Musk, bless his heart, has chosen to lie to Twitter employees about his plans to cut 75% of the workforce. Dude, the Washington Post has the presentations. You just took a ten million dollar hit by firing the CEO instead of sidelining him for a year and paying him to sit at home. Be brave, tell the truth.
[Reproduced from Twitter, slightly edited. I’m fiddling around in a lightweight way with a tool to turn Twitter archives into HTML pages and/or WordPress posts, while I’m at it. Who knows if I’ll get anywhere with it.]
If you have any qualms about a Musk-managed Twitter, now is a decent time to think about whether or not you want to hang around. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. Here’s my plan. I think there’s a decent chance Musk will turn around and off-load Twitter within the next six months, thanks to the amount of debt that banks are taking on as part of this, so I’m not going to do anything drastic; no hurry for me.
I’m gonna leave my bots turned off. I don’t think they were serving any super-important purpose, except maybe the startsmall bot, but life goes on.
I am going read-only. Twitter’s a useful information site for me so I’m not going to stop reading it, but I don’t need to post there. I’ve been building some workflows to make it easier to collect random thoughts; I can do semi-daily posts to https://popone.innocence.com.
I downloaded all my Twitter data. You should too if you’re thinking about leaving, even if you don’t know what to do with it. There might be tools for the less technical someday.
My key links now live at https://innocence.com/~durrell/linktree/ — I own that domain name, so that’s a persistent place to find me. I’m on Cohost and Mastodon, although I’m not putting a huge amount of effort into either of those.
I’ll reevaluate in six months or so. Earlier if it makes sense, but I’ve got a reminder set for May.
The best social media advice I have right now is to spin up a Discord for your buddies. I have one centered around movies. It’s easy and free and you don’t need hundreds of members — just invite your pals and let them invite a few of people and you can get a nice space. Why Discord? It’s popular, many people already have a login, and they don’t need to make a new one to join your Discord. As boring as it is to go with the market leader, it’s sometimes smart. Also, assuming Slack is the alternative, I prefer being in the target audience — Slack is in the corporate market.
If you like a social media service which is more in your control,Darius Kazemi’s https://runyourown.social is a very good approach.
Finally, I continue to be deeply grateful that my random Tweets about Eric Hargan went mildly viral. There are quite a few people I Twitter-met that way who are insanely cool; I’ve been glad to get little windows into your worlds and have occasional conversations. Thank you.
The format of these is likely to change, but I do need someplace besides Twitter to dump random thoughts. We’ll see how this works. Thanks are owed to my pal Ginger for demonstrating the value of this sort of thing.
If you like music, Elizabeth Nelson’s piece on Marquee Moon is a must read. It’s such a perfect album made in such weird, imperfect circumstances. I learned not too long ago that those two “pantheonic instrumentalists of the 20th century” she mentions finally united on Matthew Sweet’s great three albums of the 1990s, starting with Girlfriend. Assuming that she meant Richard Lloyd as the first. It’s also worth checking out her band, Paranoid Style, which is as one might expect from the name.
My adolescent schooling trauma, such as it is (it’s not all that), was reawakened when I learned that a Sacramento teacher was just arrested for concealing a 15 year old kid for 2 years. Apparently she teaches at some kind of Waldorf-inspired public school? The lesson here is that you just can’t trust a Waldorf teacher’s judgement. I do wonder a bit if there’s not more to the story — real problems at home? But man, just letting a kid hide out is never going to be a wise solution.
I liked this interview with Scott Adkins. It serves as an introduction to the world of direct to video action movies, which is a pretty cool world if you ask me. I don’t care so much about whether or not John Hyams is an auteur; I just dig the never-ending stream of competent action movies with good fight scenes. It’s a bit like the hey day of Hong Kong action cinema.
Movies reviewed this week: Mandabi, The House, Nosferatu, Fallen Angels, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Movies reviewed this week: Ganja & Hess, Dracula, The Perfection, Carrie, Vampyr, The House of the Devil, A Taste of Honey, August 32nd on Earth, and Phenomena.
I made a thing! I have been on a minor roll with python recently and this seemed like a fun project so I started working on it. Towards the end I reached out to the awesome person who inspired me, since she didn’t seem to have been keeping her tracker up to date, and she said I should go ahead and launch mine. So here we are.
I used this as an excuse to try out new technology and libraries. Click and Cloup made the list; the first because I wanted to try out new argument parsers and the second because I needed option groups. This forced me to learn to use setuptools better, which was a win. I am gonna keep using this tech going forward.
I also wound up sticking Rich in there for better CLI output and it’s kinda great, so that’ll stay in my toolbox too.
Dataset turned out to be too limited, because it’s really just for columnar data in a single table and it turns out itch.io jams have one little thing which break that paradigm; namely, multiple owners per jam. So now I’m using sqlite with JSON support and honestly it’s a bit grungy. Maybe next time I’ll learn SQLAlchemy for real.
My python has gotten significantly better over the last year with this kind of small but enjoyable work, and I am gonna keep doing it.
Movies reviewed this week: X, Cat People, Spider, Pandorum, Creature from Black Lake, and Village of the Damned.
Movies reviewed this week: Angel Heart, The Deadly Bees, Dead Snow, The Darjeeling Limited, Suspiria, The Penalty, The Masque of the Red Death, Seoul Station, and Where Is My Friend’s House?.