Concerts in Oslo

I maintain a site that list concerts in Oslo.

In Facebook’s continuing war on its users, the events API was discontinued without warning a month ago. (That is, they may allow access to some apps after doing an individual review, but somehow I suspect that allowing access to a service that tries to drive foot traffic to venues that use Facebook to host their calendars won’t be one of those special apps, because Facebook never wants anybody to leave Facebook ever, I think?)

About a quarter of the venues have their event listings on Facebook only, so that’s a rather big blow against having a useful concert listing site.

So I spent an evening reimplementing Facebook event web page scraping, and while doing that I started thinking about whether I should fancify my Concerts in Oslo web site. Scraping an image and a summary from the event pages didn’t seem insurmountable… Just find the largest image and the most coherent textual part of the HTML and there you are. (You have to filter out the “COOKIES EXIST! DID YOU KNOW THAT!” texts on most pages, because they’re often the longest texts, though.)

What took most work was trying to determine how this data should be loaded. In total, all the extra data is about 45MB, so just having it all in that initial table doesn’t really work. And I wanted to keep the data structures the same, so that the apps would also continue to work.

I first tried displaying the event summaries on hovering, but that was insanely annoying. Then I tried expanding the table when scrolling into view, and that was even more annoying, because things would move around a lot and you’d get confused.

UX is hard!

So I settled on pre-expanding the bottom border of each table line and then putting the event info in an absolutely-positioned div relative to the line. It’s a crime against CSS! But it works!

And now I don’t have to do any work on the site… until Facebook changes their HTML again.

Century 1974: The Cars That Ate Paris

The Cars That Ate Paris. Peter Weir. 1974.

I’ve been cocktailing from this very old book, but I think I’m ready to move on to another book now. Oldee-tymey cocktails seem basically to be random combinations of boozes with very little finesse. I feel the need for less booze and more mixers.

Anyway!

This is an early low-budget Peter Weir film (that I bought while in Australia a couple of years ago). I’m not exactly a Peter Weir fan (OK, I hate his films), but I was curious as to what his earlier movies were like.

It’s well made, in a way. I mean, the cinematography is nice, and the audio is good, and the film stock is great…

And the concept is fabulous (a town of people preying on the passing highway), but it’s just a bundle of tedium.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Useful Consumer Review

Some weeks ago I bought this Levimoon lamp. I didn’t really think it was going to work or anything, but hey:

Unfortunately, despite being totally cool and fun, it makes a “BzbbbzbbzzHhghghzzbz” sound after it’s been switched on for about two minutes, so it’s a crapgadget instead of a useful lamp.

And getting the moon to levitate (it’s done with electromagnets) can take a few tries, but I think I’ve got the hang of it now. Instead of taking a minute to get it to the right position, it only takes me ten seconds now. If I’m lucky.

But I can’t believe that I’m complaining about a hovering moon lamp not being perfect. It’s a hovering moon lamp!

Only useless!

Oh well. Perhaps the next iteration will be silent and you can actually have it switched on.

Century 1973: World on a Wire

World on a Wire. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1973.

I am no Fassbinder connoisseur, but I’ve seen my share. But I’m pretty sure this is a pretty abnormal Fassbinder film. On the other hand, aren’t they all? But this is sci-fi flick of sorts, and I don’t think that’s really his metier, is it?

It’s like no Fassbinder I’ve seen. I mean, there are some of the usual touches, like the pretty hippie boys, but the overtly romantic Hollywood scoring throughout is bizarre. Is this meant as a parody of (say) 2001 or Logan’s Run or something? Hm. That’s a bit later than this film…

Fassbinder’s “Italian” audio technique is slightly disturbing. I’m guessing that he didn’t record any audio on set, and had the actors do the lines again on a sound stage later, so the lips are always slightly out-of-sync, but more disturbing are all the foley effects. It’s like watching a radio play (with added pictures) where all the sounds are so… deliberate. When they want one of the character’s feet to make sound when he walks, they do, and when they don’t, they don’t.

But ANYWAY! This turns out to be a paranoid science fiction thing, and it reminds me a lot of the sci-fi masterpiece Liquid Sky (Which happened a decade later.) It’s got a proto-punk approach to making an sf film going on, and it’s just kinda entrancing.

But with more virtual reality. And mirrors. There’s a mirror in every single shot.

Oh, right:

Originally made for German television, this recently rediscovered, three-and-a-half-hour labyrinth is a satiric and surreal look at the world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.

And there’s this.

This must have been so strange to watch on TV at the time. But watching it now, the central revelation isn’t really a surprise, so there’s a certain impatience with having the protagonist discovering what’s going on, since we all understood that from about fifteen minutes into the film.

The documentary that Criterion has made for this film is quite interesting, but it includes some headache-inducingly stupid comments like that it’s “ironic” that Eva, who’s the only “real” character in the film is the one who acts the most artificially. Well, duh!!! THAT WAS FASSBINDER SIGNALLING THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE FILM!!!!

Gah.

It’s emulations all the way down.

At least that what I thought Fassbinder was getting at. I mean, one of the characters says that.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Century 1972: Slaughterhouse Five

Slaughterhouse Five. George Roy Hill. 1972.

Hey! I read this book when I was a teenager. And that was in the previous century! I’m amazed at how many scenes are familiar to me still, so it made a huge impression, apparently. Some of the scenes (like when the guy started talking about the dog and the springs) I knew exactly how would go when the character started in on it.

So I guess in addition to being memorable, director George Roy Hill must have made a pretty faithful adaptation of the book.

That said, I don’t think the film is completely successful. There’s so much shouting; as if Hill felt that the source material needed sprucing up by having the characters shout a lot. But perhaps the main problem is that the guy playing the protagonist is a total cipher. He’s had a charisma bypass.

Still, you have to give a mainstream film credit for being so quirky.

It seems like the book is a particular favourite of certain types of people.

This blog post is part of the Century series.