2025-11-24 18:48:17
Full of the magic of Christmas, this musical tale of family reunion, betrayal, and toymaking feels like Disney made Dinsdale's The Toymakers.
Gentle steampunk magical toys include a narcissistic matador and a wooden robot that is not Wall-E.
Forrest Whittaker sings.
2025-11-24 05:30:26
This time last year, my garden was under 6 inches of snow. This year the "cold snap" has barely resulted in ground frost.
I remembered an old laptop in a box so I tried setting up a local shared server. Now I have a nice little system involving a mounted cloud drive, a cron job, samba, and Plex. It means I can save content to the cloud drive from literally anywhere and, within the hour, it's available on various devices on my local network and Plex on the TVs. All for free.
I didn't really listen to any new music this week but former Crystal Castles frontwoman, Alice Glass, gifted us with "Mercy Kill" — icy, robotic, fucked up glitch. Amazing.
All effort this week has been towards preparation for a workshop early next week. Nothing I can really talk about in detail. We have been working towards a framework to produce rapid prototypes. I've been quite involved in a new capacity that's been challenging but rewarding. I'm really looking forward to executing on the day and, fingers crossed, absolutely bossing it!
I have something he will never have — enough
Joseph Heller, to Kurt Vonnegut at a party
2025-11-23 15:12:47
“A feisty princess locked in a tower must save the kingdom from an evil sociopath” is right up my street!
The entire film is basically a lengthy, well-choreographed fight scene that showcases the princesses prowess as well as witty one-liners that 1980s Schwarzenegger would be proud of. It somehow reminded me of "Oldboy" but also "Suckerpunch".
Dominic Cooper makes for a fabulously cartoonish villain. He is cruel, unrelenting, and an all-round bad egg from his black goatee beard to his velvet doublet.
The movie hits so many good fantasy action movie tropes; insurmountable odds, training montage, a fucking cool sword — we even get "ripping the frilly bits off a dress to make it more suitable for fighting in".
Joey King is exactly right as the title princess; cool af and fully committed to the role. She feels a credible action heroine because it doesn't just come across as "toxic masculinity with a vagina" — she fights like a girl (complimentary).
2025-11-23 04:08:53
While summarising a book I was intending purchasing as a gift for a friend, Anthropic's Claude LLM provided me with sources for its summations.
Unfortunately, those citations are for the articles it read on the way to help it bypass paywalls on the actual content it needed to cite.
In this particular instance, harmless. But, once again, this is not a technology that should be used for anything important. Or in areas you don't have a good working knowledge of.
2025-11-21 17:01:05
Thanks to the little energy-related facts I get in communications from my electricity supplier, I learned the Kentucky Coal Mining museum has been solar powered since 2017 in what seems like the Scooby Doo double-take of the century.
"It is a little ironic…"
Brandon Robinson, communications director, Interview with WYMT
2025-11-21 06:07:52
I set out on the first of November with noble intentions to share a learning every day. I'd been doing well, my statistics for November were looking like a nice solid block of colour!
But then life happened. Work got busy, home got busy. I was tired and wracking my brains for something I had learned I could share and suddenly it wasn't fun anymore. I was looking for a topic to write about for the sake of an arbitrary self-imposed schedule. I was trying to create content (derogatory).
There's a part of my brain that very much likes the neatness and the patterns and the achievement. There's also the part of my brain that abhors "line must go up" mentality — the pursuit of forward momentum at the cost of everything else.
The unstoppable force hit the immovable object this week and I think I'm done.
Not with writing, not with blogging, not with learning; just with deadlines.