WFC Liechtenstein: Der heiße Tod

While researching films from Liechtenstein, I was intrigued by the extreme number of porn-sounding late sixties/early seventies films marked as being “from” Liechtenstein. I have no idea what’s that’s all about: Did Liechtenstein have looser porn laws back then?

So I picked this one because it had a pretty high rating (4.8, ahem) among this group of films.

It’s less porny that I thought it would be, but apparently a hard-core version was also released (that had unrelated sex scenes edited into the narrative).

The actors are pretty bad. Most of them leave no scenery unchewed. It has a certain charm, but it’s… not very good.

99 Women. Jesús Franco. 1969. Liechtenstein.

Strawberry G&T

  • gin
  • a dash of strawberry puree
  • a pinch of pepper
  • Fever Tree tonic water
  • 2 strawberry halves

Pour gin, strawberry into an ice-filled glass. Add pepper. Stir. Top off with tonic water and stir lightly. Garnish with strawberry.

Strawberry Puree

  • 1 part sugar
  • 8 parts strawberries
  • a dash of water
  • a bit of lemon juice

Halve the strawberries. In a medium saucepan, combine the halved strawberries with the sugar and water and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Let cool, then add the fresh lemon juice. Transfer to a blender and puree until smooth. Pour the puree through a fine strainer into an airtight container and refrigerate for up to 3 days.

This post is part of the World of Films and Cocktails series. Explore the map.

House of Women

After being exhausted by the Fantagraphics marathon I’ve somewhat avoided comics, but all exhaustion must come to an end, so I bought House of Women by Sophie Goldstein.

I don’t really want to review it (it’s a sci-fi gothic horror story, I guess), because I don’t really have much to say other than “I liked it a lot”, but I just wanted to appreciate how great these books look.

The covers and the first inside page all have these die cuts, so you can see parts of the first and second pages (I mean third…) The die cuts looks like windows or mirrors…

The extravaganza doesn’t end there: There’s also gold ink on the inside covers, rounded pages, and a paper binding glued to the outside spine. Which makes me wonder: Were these books partially hand-made? They’re so handsomely and exactingly put together that I kinda doubt it, but, on the other hand, I’ve seen quite nothing else printed like this…

Oh! The insides. Well, I wasn’t really going to get into that, but it’s formally very interesting, like this page where the titular women are climbing towards their titular house…

And here’s another thing I don’t think I’ve quite seen before done quite this way: There’s an individual on the other side of the door crying, obliterating the words of the people we can see on this side of the door.

It’s not all formal fun, though: It’s mostly straightforward, and it’s very readable.

Fantagraphics will be publishing a collected edition later this year, but I would guess that it’ll look less extravagant than the original editions.

I’m quite late to the party, but these numbers of the back here raise a couple of questions. First of all, who are those 300+ weirdos that bought the first volume that didn’t buy the subsequent volumes? And second: Perhaps making these books were so much work that Goldstein decided to make fewer copies of volume 2 and 3?

In any case, there’s probably a couple dozen copies left in her web shop now, so get buying if you want to fondle the books yourself.

One Thing Leads To Another

In the previous installment, I got a new monitor for my stereo computer.

I thought everything was fine, but then I started noticing stuttering on flac playback. After some investigation, it seems as if X is on (and displaying stuff on this new, bigger monitor), and there’s network traffic, then the flac123 process is starved for time slices, even if the flac123 process is running with realtime priority.

*sigh*

Now, my stereo machine is very, very old. As far as I can tell, it’s from 2005, and is basically a laptop mainboard strapped into a nice case:

(It’s the black thing in the middle.) But even if it’s old, its requirements hadn’t really changed since I got it: It plays music and samples music and routes music to various rooms via an RME Multiface box. So I was going to use it until it stopped working, but I obviously can’t live with stuttering music and I didn’t want to spend more time on this, so I bought a new machine from QuietPC.

There’s not a lot inside, so I put the external 12V pad into the case. Tee hee. Well, thermally that’s probably not recommended, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Nice heat pipes!

Look how different the new machine is! Instead of the round, blue LED power lamp, it’s now a… while LED power lamp. And it’s about 2mm wider than the old machine, but you can’t tell unless you know and then it annoys the fuck out of you.

OOPS!

Anyway, installation notes: Things basically work, but Debian still haven’t fixed their installation CDs to work on machines with NVMe disks. When it fails to install grub, you have to say:

mount --bind /dev /target/dev 
mount --bind /dev/pts /target/dev/pts 
mount --bind /proc /target/proc 
mount --bind /sys /target/sys 
cp /etc/resolv.conf /target/etc 
chroot /target /bin/bash 
aptitude update a
ptitude install grub-efi-amd64 
update-grub 
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/nvme0n1

Fixing this should have been kinda trivial and warranted fixing, wouldn’t you think? But they haven’t, and it’s been that way for a year…

Let’s see… anything else? Oh, yeah, I had to install a kernel and X from jessie backports, because the built-in Intel graphics are too new for Debian Stale. I mean Stable. Put

deb http://ftp.uio.no/debian/ jessie-backports main contrib

into /etc/apt/sources.list and say

apt -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64 xserver-xorg-video-intel

although that may fail according to the phase of the moon, and I had to install linux-image-4.9.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 instead…

And the RME Multiface PCIe card said:

snd_hdsp 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for multiface_firmware_rev11.bin failed with error -2

I got that to work by downloading the ALSA firmware package, compiling and installing the result as /lib/firmware/multiface_firmware_rev11.bin.

Oh, and the old machine was a 32 bit machine, so my C programs written in the late 90s had hilarious code like

(char*)((unsigned int)buf + max (write_start - block_start, 0)

that no longer happened to work (by accident) on a 64 bit machine. And these programs (used for splitting vinyl albums into individual songs and the like) are ridiculously fast now. The first time I ran it I thought there must have been a mistake, because it had split the album by the time I had released the key ordering the album to be split.

That’s the difference between a brand new NVMe disk and a first generation SSD. Man, those things were slow…

And the 3.5GHz Kaby Lake CPU probably doesn’t make things worse, either.

Vroom vroom. Now I can listen to music 10x faster than before. With the new machine, the flac files play with a more agile bassline and well-proportioned vocals, with plenty of details in a surefooted rhythmic structure: Nicely layered and fairly large in scale, but not too much authority or fascism.

Also: Gold interconnects.

Mystery Object

_1320421

I’ve been a bit under the weather the past few days, but today I finally made my way to the post office and collected various packages.  Among these was a package from a store I had ordered a bunch of LED lighting strips for the kitchen.

Included was this pink mystery USB object, not mentioned on the invoice.  It says “Haweel” at one end and it’s bendy:

_1320422

I haven’t dared plug it into a computer yet.

WHAT CAN IT BE!?