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.
2025-11-18 05:58:50
One thing I always tell people at work (apart from "it depends") is “the closer you get to launch, the less you know”.
This is becoming very apparent at work this week as we start to spec a new product for a client. Unpicking everything that was demonstrated in the pitch and writing requirements, and assumptions — of which there are a few.
As a product nears deployment, the amount of information needed for it to be a success increases exponentially; designers need more answers than strategists, developers need more answers than designers, testers and IT have sooooo many questions.
For this reason, we have to have fuzzier and fuzzier estimates the further out from now we get.
I learned today this is called the Cone of Uncertainty! Developed for the chemical industry in the 1950s, the Cone of Uncertainty (or funnel cone) shows the ideal path but flanked by ever widening "possible" paths.
You will have, undoubtedly, seen this on weather maps showing predicted hurricane trajectories. Very narrow at one end where we can pinpoint the hurricane's actual position now ("known knowns") but more bulbous and indistinct later on as the "known unknowns" begin to affect the trajectory.
So, too, our project plans must allow a degree of flex as we near launch and discover myriad "unknown unknowns" that couldn't have been predicted but must be dealt with urgently.
2025-11-17 04:22:59
Courtesy of Katherine via Nic Chan's "People & Blogs" interview, I learned about intentionally blank pages.
Having read a book or two in my time, I've seen these blank pages; usually a quirk of the way books are bound in bundles of evenly numbered pages that doesn't always align exactly to the number of printed/written pages.
This is a print-only phenomenon — digital books and websites don't have those printing constraints. But, in memory of those pages being lost to the endless march of technology, the "This Page Left Intentionally Blank" Project is calling on us, the webmasters of personal sites, to add an intentionally blank page to our websites.
You can find mine at /blank. What a lovely idea.