Doily
Movieland
The other day, I started idly wondering how much work it would be to collect the data from all my movie blog posts and then, like, do something with it. Something frivolous. On the movie blog I’ve got this thing, which has a kind of stark quality to it, but I’ve been blogging more about movies on this blog…
My “series” blog posts usually follow some sort of template, so surely it would be easy enough to write some code to parse those, and then make something fun and useless? Like… more overviews… and pages for directors… and… I dunno? Stuff?
That surely wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours of typing, right?
Right?
Reader, it took more than a couple hours of typing.
But now there’s results.
The main problem was that the information (director’s name, IMDB code, movie posters, etc) is partially available from many sources, so it’s a matter of smushing it all together. But no matter how much you code (the Emacs Lisp file for the conversion/HTML generation is at 1,500 lines now), there will inevitably be corner cases that have to be identified and then (semi-)manually corrected.
So I spent way too much time on this, but it’s been kinda fun, anyway. For the “web frontend”, I had ChatGPT code up the required Javascript to do image preloading/animation/etc — it’s the kind of thing I’ve done before many a time manually, but this time around, the “screenshots” are a mixture of jpegs, animated GIF and MP4 snippets, and I didn’t really want to bother with getting the corner cases right myself. I can feel my brain atrophying as we speak.
There’s just so many details when you get into it… like I found that I wanted to weed out (in some contexts) screenshots that have subtitles, and ChatGPT made me a Python script to do that, after poking at it a bit and giving it several examples. It works so-so.
(Hm… Let’s try Claude with the same question. … OK, it came up with a script that’s a fraction of the length, works faster, and is more accurate. Lesson learned — it’s Claude for me from now on.)
And I mainly had posters for things that I had bought on DVD, so I had to poke around more and see why my imdb interface had stopped working for that bit. It turns out that Amazon has made the WAF even tighter — it’s almost impossible to scrape now with a headless Chrome, so I had to allow it to pop on the screen when fetching movie posters… That just goes to show how selfish and solipsistic those guys are. They’re not thinking about my needs! My totally normal behaviour of downloading 1K movie posters! They’re such narcissists!
So this is the main entry, I guess. While futzing around with the layout, I was reminded of what the Windows Phone 8 one looked like — not the tiles themselves, but how the layout was designed for scrolling, with boxes often being shown cut off. So I did that:
And for extra annoyance, I bound the pagedown/up keys to scroll horizontally! It’s gruesome! *twirls stache* *ouch* That’s my lip! Careful!
ChatGPT was also helpful in its customary LLM way when making a country code to country name mapping file. It’s mostly the standard two letter codes, but there’s also IMDB-specific codes for countries that no longer exists, like East Germany. After it telling me a couple times that I really wanted something else (and more complicated), it coughed it up… but randomly forgot two countries (Dominica and Macedonia).
I guess I shouldn’t complain — it does save a lot of time, but it’s just so odd what kind of things it fails at…
The box I had for the list of countries was just too small, so either I had to think of a new layout, or… I could ask ChatGPT for å JS snippet to emulate a movie end title? Easy choice!
Since I’ve got all this data, I might as well do some stats.
Heh… looking over individual scores, they do look a bit eccentric. But, like, I’m giving a score for “what it is”. For instance, the lowest-rated Chantal Akerman film is Sud, which I gave a three. That movie is, objectively speaking, much, much better than any super-hero movie, so logically speaking I should be giving all super-hero movies a one or a two. But that’d be boring, so I have a different scale for different kinds of movies. “This is pretty good, for what kind of movie it is”, like.
Does everybody do that? I don’t know what the Letterboxd crowd does…
Not a lot of surprises on the country chart… lots of western…
Good ol’ Ingmar wins.
Wow, 2019 must have been a good year for movies! Or perhaps there’s a different reason…
Anyway. That was a lot of typing for an end result that isn’t, strictly speaking, useful…
Speaking in Tongues
I’ve been a fan of Talking Heads since I was a child, but I didn’t know about the special edition of Speaking in Tongues until, like, last year. Designed by Robert Rauschenberg. And I was shocked to find that it was still cheapish!?
So I bought a copy which finally arrived today, and…
Err… that’s a lot of yellowing…
Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to make it out of very plastickey plastic…
And perhaps the vinyl itself wasn’t supposed to be that dark?
But that looks OK, I guess…
This is what it’s supposed to look like? That looks better!
Yellowed/brownish sleeve and vinyl due to age, like all copies.
Oh well.
Random Comics
I’ve read some comics over the past… three weeks?
These are early-2000s issues of a long-running Norwegian anthology — I never picked up any Norwegian comics at the time, and I don’t quite remember why…
Because it’s really good.
There’s a great variety to the pieces, but I guess you could sum them up with “early 20s comics” — they’re either humour, or they’re very serious indeed. You know. “Profound.” And I like both, so I spend a very comfortable evening reading these books.
It’s published by the people who published all of Jason’s earliest work, and these are from around the time when he was breaking through globally, which is fun.
But there’s just a lot of really original (and entertaining) comics in here. I should see if the used comics store have more of these (I picked them up there).
I got some more periodical comics, but not a lot.
The best of the bunch is, I guess, Black Cat. It’s fun.
Al Ewing’s Venom is also good, but unfortunately they started a crossover series which interrupts what was happening in the series. *sigh* That’s the unfortunate experience of reading a super-hero series — it’ll roll along nicely, and then is taken for a Mega Crossover Detour, and the books often don’t recover afterwards.
But I’m crossing my fingers for this one.
I’ve read these before, but new copies arrived in the mail, so I read them again.
Get Out Your Hankies is from 2016, so it must be among the earliest of the diary books? And I didn’t remember much of the material here, so it was thrilling to read.
I did remember everything that happened in My Dog Jojo, but I was still totally into it. It’s just so good! It’s just a perfect little book — it sneaks up on you and then moves in unexpected ways.
If you want to read new comics by Gabrielle Bell, you should join the Patreon. Lots of great stuff.
This is a book about being gay in Barcelona in 1935.
And while it’s got its heart in the right place, it pretty bad. First of all, the art style, which looks like somebody made a plugin for Cintiq to use Seth’s line, is just kinda not my thing at all.
Second of all, it’s so boring. The book tries to show what pressures the protagonist is under by having people repeatedly ask him “do you have a girlfriend?” and the like, and it just doesn’t work: It ends up annoying the reader instead of just showing the character being annoyed. I know — it’s hard to depict tedious stuff without ending up with a boring book, and the writer here isn’t able to. I had to ditch the book halfway through.
It’s a special issue of Spirou —
the poisson d’avril issue is about AI, or as they say: “l’IA”. So almost all the strips are about AI, and there’s one story where they’ve tried to imagine how an AI-created strip would be like (above to the left), and how much it’d suck. Unfortunately, it’s really not that much worse than many of the other strips they run — full of clichés, illogical sequences and general tedium.
There’s also a kind of round-table on the use of AI and whether the artists use a tablet for drawing or not… I like these themed Spirou issues.
But the non-themed issue is good, too, because Les cavaliers de l’apocadispe are in the countryside visiting grand-parents, and the grand-parents don’t make sensible things like spaghetti for dinner, but have prepared “des champignons á l’eau aux oignons” (mushrooms in water with onions).
Heh heh heh. Les cavaliers is just so precisely observed — that’s like a perfect invention for the most horrible thing a child could imagine eating.
This collection has an X-Men era I’m totally unfamiliar with. I read the X-Men religiously until I was, like, 16, and then I dropped almost all super-hero books (it had something to do with the Kirby boycott or something?). I have a twenty year X-Men knowledge gap. This book collects Adjective-Less X-Men #4 and up, and the Uncanny X-Men from around the same time.
Which seems like an odd thing to collect, but Chris Claremont was booted off the book, and these are the first non-Claremont X-Men comics in a decade and a half, so it makes sense. (There was apparently disagreement between Claremont and superstar artist Jim Lee where the book should be going, and Marvel sided with the superstar artist and booted Claremont.)
And… I can see why. These books (written and pencilled by Jim Lee with dialogue by others) have a certain thing going. Lots of shouting, lot of intense drama, fighting all the time. Claremont was going for more of a soap opera thing, aimed at fourteen-year-olds, while Lee is going more for twelve-year-olds who can look at the pictures and go MAN THAT”S COOL, and they kids are right, of course.
As a writer, Lee makes a good artist.
Lee’s X-Men is a paragon of restraint compared with Whilce Portacio’s Uncanny X-Men issues. They’re totally unhinged, and therefore even more exciting.
Portacio likes drawing figures and nothing else, so each page is just a bunch of random panels with screaming heads, random body parts, and then some radiating lines to fill in whatever background’s left. It’s so cool, man.
And then P. Craig Russell shows up for some pages, which makes a change.
So… these aren’t “good” comics, but I can see why they led to Image Comics being a phenomenon for a few years.
The revived Heavy Metal continues to be very Heavy Metal.
There’s a certain sameness to the approach to the art in many of the pieces, but…
… some people mix it up.
The reprints make a change, though.
But there’s new stuff that’s interesting, too.
At 230 pages per issue, there are, of course, some absolute clunkers included, but I think it still works as a magazine. And it’s much, much better than it was pre-cancellation.
Maps on the Galaxy Flip front screen? Is that possible?
I’ve got one of those foldy phones, and I like the format. The one inconvenience, though, is that, like, you have to unfold it. The phone doesn’t even have *sproing*. Why doesn’t the phone have a button you press end then it goes *sproing*? And you have to do a lot of unfolding if you’re walking around a strange city, looking at Google Maps.
However, there is a screen on the front, too, and on the Samsung Galaxy Flip 7, it’s gotten so big that it should actually be useful. I mean, while walking around, I usually just have to confirm that I’m walking in kinda the right direction instead of 180° wrong, as I’m apt to do.
(When I started writing this blog post, I had a Flip 5, but it died, so the pics here are a mix of Flip 5 and Flip 7… Sorry for any confusion…)
So this is what the Google Maps app look like on the cover screen. About half the screen is filled with stuff that’s unnecessary and covers the actual map. I mean… what are all those things, anyway? The “Latest in…” thing you can pull up, which is exactly what the “Explore” button does, too. And… “Go”? Never used it. The “Saved” button — never tapped it, because the map shows the saved bits anyway. And… “Contribute”? “Updates”!?!
It’s a typical Google effort — they’ve got all this data and functionality, but the app has received no polish for this use case. On a tiny screen like this, all the non-mapsey bits should be hidden under a hamburger menu or something.
It’s even more ridiculous if you’ve plotted a route — then you get virtually no map at all. And this is what I’m usually using when walking around — I never hit the “Start” button, but just look at the map.
So that’s totally unusable.
I also tried Google Maps in Firefox to see whether that makes any sense, and… Well, you can see all the clutter there, and it’s not even using the entire screen. I thought perhaps I could work around the clutter by just hiding elements (with Ublock Origin, for instance), but:
Whenever you hit “Directions”, it forces a redirect to the Google Maps app. According to the Internet, there used to be a way to disable this, by using force=lite or various settings, but these have been disabled in newer versions. I guess Google really, really wants people to have to use the app?
And I tried googling to see if anybody’s made an app of their own to fix this, and I couldn’t find anything. But it’s not trivial to Google for, either…
You need to go through this complicated process to be able to run the app on the cover screen. Samsung is so weird sometimes…
But looking at the Google Maps app now on the Flip 7, it appears that Google has some work — the app now uses the entire screen, and it’s now not as insanely cluttered. I mean, it’s still insane, but less.
See? That’s not totally awful. But then you pull up a route, and:
Yeah, that’s not good. But it’s almost usable… except that when you put the phone in your pocket and then pull it out again, and:
Yeah, Google Maps does its “recentering” thing whenever you unlock the phone, so you lose where you were. That’s pretty maddening on the full-screen version of app, too, but it’s even worse here.
If you hit the turn-by-turn thing, which I don’t like to use anyway, it stops using the entire screen, and you get an interface that’s obviously meant for driving, and there’s all these unnecessary clutter taking up what’s left of the screen. But at least it stops moving the map around when you unlock it.
People have been bitching about all this for years, and apparently Waze has a good front screen app, but it’s exclusively for driving.
I just want a simple map on the screen! Showing where I am and with a line showing where I came from and where I’m going to. Is that too much to ask!?
I was pondering writing my own app for this, but it really isn’t an attractive option. The problem is that I have all my data in Google Maps — locations I want to go to, and things like that — so typically I’d be planning my stuff on a laptop, and then using the phone when out walking. If I were to use a separate front screen app, I wouldn’t have access to that data.
Hm… The Here Wego app has a menu that allows it to be minimised like this, so that’s a lot better than Google Maps… and it doesn’t shift the zoom when you unlock the phone. Perhaps that’s a possibility? Too bad you can’t make that menu thing even smaller. And it has the advantage that I can start the walk on the main screen, close the phone and then open the app on the front screen, and it’ll continue there.
What about the OSMAND (nice name) app? It doesn’t use the full screen, and it’s a bit cluttered…
Hey, you can configure a lot of stuff here, so I made most of the buttons disappear, and now it’s not bad? The map itself is a bit cluttered, but…
It doesn’t snap back when unlocking the screen, so that’s good.
Too bad there’s no option to get rid of more clutter, like elevation and distances and stuff.
But… Have I found a solution!?
I took a walk in the rain to test.
Yes! It seems to work well — no odd shifts i map positions or the like… and it’s possible to export locations from Google Maps, and import them into the OSM app. And also use the desktop Osmand thing, and sync things between them.
Hey! I think Google just lost a Maps app customer? Just because they couldn’t spend some time to make the app spiffier on flip phones.
(Isn’t there a rumour that Apple is going to start selling a flip phone? My guess is that Apple will manage to make a map app that works on the front screen if that’s the case.)
But OsmAnd people! Can’t you make it use the entire flip front screen, instead of just the bits over the cameras? That’s unused screen estate!
But… apparently that’s a Samsung restriction? It only allows select apps to extend down into the “camera area”? Darn! At least that’s chat ChatGPT says.
Or… perhaps I can Google it, and… YES!!! Thank you, Instagram man! There’s a vague button there you can tap to extend the app into the “flex area”!
BEHOLD! ALL THE PIXELS!!!
OK, I don’t think I have to make my own app after all.