It’s reasonably well known that one path to a hospitable online community is charging people a fee to register. See Metafilter for the best case. They charge $5 to register and it cuts way down on drive-by assholes. The less good case is Something Awful, which charges $10 to register and is often a pit. But that’s because they don’t moderate all that hard. (Something Awful is also the only pro wrestling discussion forum I know of where you’ll get raked through the coals for saying things like “Unfortunately abadon as an attractive woman would have a lot more success if her gimmick didn’t involve making herself extremely unattractive”. It’s a pit of contradictions. Anyhow.) ...

Movies reviewed this week: The L-Shaped Room, M. Butterfly, The Hidden, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and A Kind of Loving.

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_murphy

Back in 1905, before the city was annexed by Seattle, Ballard had different street names (original). 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. ...

[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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Movies reviewed this week: X, Cat People, Spider, Pandorum, Creature from Black Lake, and Village of the Damned.