OTB#48: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Milos Forman. 1975. ⚄

I think I saw this when I was a child. I remember… it being sad? Yes. That’s all I remember. And I think I may have it confused with Birdy. And… Oh! Now I remember the Mad parody of it. There’s some pillow action at the end and a ratched nurse!

OK, that was a lot more than I remembered when I started writing that paragraph, but I’m basically unbiased and have no opinion about this movie.

Except that I’ve never seen a Milos Forman movie that I’ve liked. Details!

[a few minutes pass]

Nurse Ratched! I thought I was making a joke! But that’s her name.

[more time passes]

THAT”S DANNY DEVITO!?

Man.

Anyway, I’m really impressed by some of the performances here. Playing mentally ill people often brings out the worst in actors — you can see the “THIS IS THE OSCAR PERFORMANCE” swirling in their eyes while they’re chewing up the scenery — but here it’s… I won’t say restrained, but it’s almost believable.

Perhaps Danny DeVito in particular.

Louise Fletcher is convincing to begin with, but as her layers of sheer eeeevil are peeled back… not so much. It still won her an Oscar. (But it took home all the Oscars that year, so…)

[more time passes]

I do like this movie a lot. It manages to balance a surprisingly light touch with a story that, from the outset, can’t end in anything but tragedy. It’s melancholic throughout, even in the “fun” scenes.

The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was the party scene towards the end. It didn’t really seem to be necessary for the movie? It was just like… “insert wild 70s scene here”…

Anyway, surprisingly good movie.

I mean, it is Milos Forman.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

Noindex Redux

A month ago, I wondered whether there was any way to make those useless WordPress overview pages (i.e., category, author and “page X” pages) go away from search index results.

To recap, whenever I’m looking for something, Google has a tendency to return a result pointing to “page 35” of somebody’s blog, but when I go to “page 35”, what I’m looking for isn’t there any more, because it’s now on “page 49”.

To illustrate, here’s a search for a term that appears only once on this blog:

Yes, Google returns the blog post (“Small Change”), but as the final result, after two overview pages where you probably won’t find “rs232” when you click on those links.

So I added “noindex” entries for the overview pages on March 5th. It’s now been more than a month, so what does things look like now?

It’s better! The blog post (“Small Change”) is now the first result, and there’s only one overview page included in the result. So perhaps in another month or so, Google will have re-fetched all the pages and removed that, too.

(Note that Google isn’t that good at counting. Ten, two… who cares!)

Now, if only WordPress were to make “noindex, follow” the default on all the overview pages, then the world would be a (very very slightly) better place.

OTB#48: L’eclisse

L’eclisse. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1962. ⚅

Oh, L’eclisse… not Réglisse… So this isn’t a French movie about liquorice, but an Italian movie about an eclipse.

Makes more sense.

[time passes]

OH MY EMACS! Everything in this movie is so gorgeous! The performers, the lighting, the costumes, the interiors, the framing, the film stock, the 2K transfer… And there’s no music telling us how to feel! I could watch this forever.

The only scenes I don’t find riveting are (ironically enough, don’t you think?) the stock market scenes. They just seem… forced? You could pretty much tell from the first scene (where Delon (and mom) made money) that there was going to be another scene with a stock market crash, and that’s not like the rest of the film at all: Throughout the rest of the scenes, there’s a thrilling feeling of not knowing where all this is going.

It’s not a perfect movie. There’s about… a quarter? of the movie that’s kinda less gripping. (From the crash and the following… 30? minutes?) It’s the bit where Monica Vitti can’t decide whether to fuck Alain Delon or not. OK, his character is a shallow, horrible human being, but c’mon. He’s Alain Delon.

But despite his Delonness, it’s the scenes where there’s just Monica Vitti and nobody else that’s the most striking. They’re really something. It’s hard to stop screenshotting because every shot is just wonderful. She manages to be this blank presence… very different from, say, Liv Ullman (in Bergman’s movies), but still as fascinating.

Oh, and it’s not a movie completely devoid of a soundtrack: There’s two scenes near the end, where music is used extremely efficiently.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

The Campaign Against Link Rot

This blog has been going for a while, and more and more of the very, very useful external links (ahem) now point to sites that have disappeared, or that have rearranged all their internal links.

This is sad.

I wondered whether there was a tool that’d just point all the broken links to archive.org, and there doesn’t seem to be. But the support over at the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin seem to be on the ball, so perhaps there will be?

However, based on my extensive research (i.e., pointing about fifty broken links at the Wayback Machine and seeing what happened, about one third had results like):

And other things, like being blocked by robots.txt or… whatever.

So I was idly wondering… would it be possible to just… cache? Whatever we’re linking to? In WordPress?

And the answer is “no”, of course, because creating a mirror of a web page is Trey Difficult. Not to mention a security nightmare. But then it occurred to me that we’d get almost there by just grabbing a screenshot of the page at the time a blog article is written, and then just stash that in the media library! It’s not as good as having the actual text and stuff, but it’s something. You can at least read it. It’s a low-cost, 85% solution to an annoying problem.

But what UX to use to display these captures? Footnotes? A side bar? And then a smart suggestion from irc: What about a hover thing?

So now, 90 minutes later: Tada! Here’s a link to the FSF that should be cached at the time of posting, and stored in my WordPress library. You should be able to get a hovering popup that you can click on to see the (very long) PNG.

I have not implemented this as a WordPress plugin, but in ewp instead, and with some added JS and CSS on the blog. It should be a plugin instead, of course, but I don’t have the stamina to write PHP any more. I tried googling for such a plugin, but I couldn’t find anything.

So: If anybody thinks this is a good idea, please do go ahead and write a WordPress plugin that does this thing.

It basically calls cutycapt (or any other headless web “screen capture” application), and then adds some JS on the “mouseenter” event of the link.

Does this seem useful? Annoying? Confusing?