Rian Johnson has published all of the scripts for the movies he’s written (minus The Last Jedi) on his website; this should be required reading for any aspiring screenwriter. I’ll be diving into the script for Brick later this evening.
Cabel Sasser runs a studio called Panic, which makes excellent software for the Mac, has dabbled in video game production, and recently designed and shipped their own handheld video game console. Yesterday on his weblog he posted a number of scans of a series of catalogs produced in the 1980’s which featured gadgets of all kinds. The DAK catalogs had everything from breadmakers to radar detectors to audio equipment, and they used to come to our house addressed to the previous owners. As a young impressionable middle-school student I read the description for one of their products, a graphic equalizer, and obsessed over it for months. I recall asking for it for Christmas, my Dad turning me down, and me being a dick about it, which still haunts me.
Eventually I earned enough money to buy it, and I hooked it up to the huge Fisher audio system I’d bought the previous summer with money from painting the house. As I recall it didn’t amplify anything (the ad copy claimed my stereo would “literally explode with life”) but made the mix a lot muddier, no matter how much I fooled with the channels. I messed with it for months but eventually disconnected it, having learned an expensive lesson about believing ad copy without reading any reviews.
Thanks Cabel, that totally took me back. Read his post—it’s a fun look into the wild and crazy days of direct mail in the 80’s.
I’ve been an on-again, off-again user of Mint since it first started, and I found it really helpful for providing an overall picture of how well our spending/saving/debt picture looked as a household. They made it easy to hook into the APIs of each banking institution, bypassing all of the platform-specific stuff and presenting the information in a clear interface. They got bought by Intuit a while back—you know, the company that makes tax preparation software falsely advertised as free and actively lobbying to stop Americans being able to file taxes for free—who have now announced they’re shutting it down. They’re pushing people to some new paid service called Credit Karma, which I’m sure will offer half the services and suck really badly. The enshittification continues.
Honda just released an electric update to the Motocompo, a tiny foldable motorcycle they designed and built for city traveling back in the 1980’s. The original gas-powered bike was produced for two years and now sell for ridiculous amounts of money; the new Motocompacto is listed for $995. Cleaner, lighter, and just as funky, it folds down into a 30″ x 21″ x 4″ box, is good for about 15 miles of range, and takes 3.5 hours to charge. If I was commuting into DC every day and had a longer walk to deal with, I would have already placed my order for one.
I spent three and a half hours at a vet ER with Hazel Monday night, who was pacing the house with her tail between her legs whining. by the time we were all ready to go to bed, she was getting more and more frantic, so I put my shoes back on and headed out to Elicott City to get her checked out. We sat in a cold exam room for a while and they took her in back to get checked out. I explained why she was wearing the headscarf and the symptoms we were seeing, as well as the fact that we haven’t seen her poop in several days. They presented a me with an expensive estimate which I approved, and they took her back for some invasive and embarrassing treatment. Poor girl. We then waited in the exam room for another half an hour of constant whining until they got the bill and meds together and cut us loose. We crashed out at 3AM and the girls mercifully let us sleep in as late as possible. Hazel is still uncomfortable; hopefully the medicine will get things moving for her soon, and the pressure will be relieved.
Ah, that’s better. I was getting tired of the way the sidebar links looked—my old sidebar plugin was retired last year so I had to scramble to find a new solution, and when that was implemented it added a bunch of extra CSS and code into that block of text. I finally dug into the code and found the right combination of selectors to override that garbage, and updated it to use the same font as the body copy in a more readable size.
As I write this I realize I haven’t updated the look and feel of this site in over ten years; the stripped-down template I’m using to base the whole site on has been working pretty seamlessly the whole time, with a few small caveats. Part of that is because the template is so basic, which is the main reason I chose it. I’d like to update the look and feel and do something different, but a huge part of me thinks about that project and just gets tired. I do miss working on the web in small doses, but the thought of a large-scale project doesn’t hold the same amount of professional challenge it once did. Were I to change the template, a couple of things I’ve considered doing are:
- Running the sidebar links inline in the main story feed with some kind of visual differentiator, so that they’re not pinned to the top of the page and appear in the main timeline
- Switching away from red and gray to something more soothing
- Cleaning up the comment listings
- Setting up the pages for better responsiveness on smaller devices—currently there’s a huge margin on the sides that’s more trouble than it’s worth to remove
Every out-of-the-box template I’ve seen is overcomplicated and usually geared towards some kind of storefront; the days of simple blog templates made for blogs is so far in the past as to be forgotten. I have little patience to figure out how to rip whole modules out of someone else’s convoluted templates, so here we sit.
I finally watched the movie that concludes the Venture Brothers TV series, and while it was a bit convoluted and maybe didn’t hit all of the beats I wanted it to, I thought it was a great wrap-up for the characters and storyline I’ve been following for twenty years. Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart had some great callbacks, some laugh-out-loud bits, and some surprisingly heartfelt moments. There were some things I had to catch up on, as Adult Swim wasn’t playing the final season online, so I backtracked and went through the last episodes on MAX, and then watched the movie again. Clearly I would have loved to see them continue the series but I’m glad they were given the chance to tie it up properly.
Jen and I are in Baltimore for my annual cancer checkup, and so far the bloodwork looks very good. Across the board, most of my numbers are up, and crucially, my white blood cell count increased for the first time since a weird blip in 2020, as well as my platelet count, lymphocytes, and neutrophils. The absolute values (an actual count vs. an average) for lymphocytes are still low—just skirting the bottom of the “normal” range. So if my white blood cell and lymphocyte counts can keep improving, I’ll be real happy.
The fact that I can sit in the waiting room between the CAT scan and my checkup, collect my bloodwork results in real time, add them to a spreadsheet on my laptop, and update graphing software to plot my progress kind of boggles the mind.
We have a Brother all-in-one printer that was highly touted to be the “best printer for Macs” when I bought it several years ago. This is how I feel about it. It’s one more “cannot connect to printer” message away from its day in the field with a baseball bat.
The St. Mary’s County Oyster Festival has been a tradition Jen and I have upheld since the earliest days of our courtship; the first time we went together was the first time I met her parents. Our previous visits have been chronicled here, and it’s one of the yearly events I look forward to with the girls—partially because of the event, and partially because of the food. Southern Maryland cooking is a unique little outlier, and I look forward to fried oysters and St. Mary’s County ham with anticipation.
It was, then, with some unhappiness we found ourselves without any ham. There were a ton of people there, and a wide variety of oysters prepared in different ways, but we walked from one side of the fair to the other looking for a sandwich or a platter without success. Apparently the local grocer who used to make it and supply it to the fair went out of business? The price of oysters has gone up somewhat, which made me glad I’d withdrawn $200 from the ATM and not the $100 I originally intended to, but they were just as delicious as I remember—there’s something specific about the breading used in St. Mary’s County that is better than anywhere else we’ve tried. We tried smoked oysters, served with gouda, bacon, and onion, and Finn and I found them delicious while Jen didn’t like them. We also tried a quartet of fried Oreos, which were good but heavy on shortening.
The rest of the fair was much the same as years past, although the carnival rides are gone, replaced with a huge craft beer tasting tent and more vendors. We brought Hazel with us for obvious reasons, and she did very well walking through the fair—but I suspect that was also aided by the fact that she’s got the bonnet back on: her right ear has opened back up.
When we left the fair we headed back to Bob’s house and visited for a little while before taking him out for some dinner. By the time we got home, we were all stuffed and about ten minutes away from falling asleep.