WFC Saint Kitts and Nevis: New Year Parade Day St. Kitts SugarMas 2016

This is a… documentary… on Youtube…

OK, I’m so ashamed of myself! This is a random clip from Youtube! There’s supposed to be one single real film from St. Kitts and or Nevis, but it’s nowhere to be found on the interwebs! Or Amazon! Or Netflix! Or anywhere!

Anyway, looks like they had fun. All the people in the parade sure seemed to be… keeping… hydrated…

New Year Parade Day St. Kitts SugarMas 2016. unknown. 2016. Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Killer Bee with Pepper and Nutmeg

  • 1 part honey
  • 2 parts orange juice
  • 2 parts club soda
  • 4 parts dark rum
  • 4 parts passion fruit puree
  • “plenty of” black pepper

Warm the honey with a splash of water until dissolved. Stir all the ingredients together in an ice-filled glass. Garnish with nutmeg and a slice of lime.

I thought this was going to be very tart (due to the passion fruit), but it’s kinda nice. Complex flavours.

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

WFC Djibouti: Men in the Arena

Was this what 45 was thinking of?

Yes! Djibouti!

This is more of an American/Somali film than a Djibouti (that’s a word), but there is some Djiboutian (that’s a word) interest… because of the… football…

It’s about a football team.

I mean, I’m not the right person to say whether a football documentary is a good one or not, but I found this very engaging. I almost laughed, I almost cried…

Men in the Arena. J.R. Biersmith. 2017. Djibouti.

Retoxed Detox Tea

  • green tea
  • mint tea
  • ginger
  • lemongrass
  • rum

Grate the ginger, brew with all ingredients except the rum. Allow to chill and then pour into an ice-filled glass. Add rum to taste.

(I added the rum to the recipe.)

I think it’s the mint that ruins this drink.

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

WFC Turkmenistan: Alexander’s Lost World

This is an Australian documentary that can be found on Youtube, but it’s kinda sorta from Turkmenistan. Finding genuine Turkmen films proved rather challenging.

As documentaries go, it’s… OK. It’s nice and HD, so plenty of vistaey vistas. There’s a lot of speculation based on how things “must” have been, and isn’t very convincing, really. But it’s interesting.

Alexander’s Lost World. Unknown. 2013. Turkmenistan.

Vodka Green Tea Sprizter recipe

  • 2 parts vodka
  • 4 parts green tea
  • 2 parts ginger ale
  • 1 part lime juice

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a slice of lime.

This isn’t a Turkmen recipe, but they do seem to like green tea and vodka there, so I used my imagination.

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

WFC Mauritius: La rencontre

This is a stylishly shot but rather trivial short about … I guess, insanity and drugs (tl;ds: Don’t Do Drugs). It’s kinda fun, although it goes out of its way to explain all the mysteries it sets up in way too much detail.

And it’s not on Youtube, but on Viddsee (sic), which sounds totally legitimate. I couldn’t convince mplayer to play it, so I had to watch it on my Android tablet. And it’s way artifacty.

The Encounter. Jon Rabaud. 2015. Mauritius.

Mango Rum

  • 2 parts triple sec
  • 5 parts dark rum
  • 5 parts cold water
  • 10 parts mango

Run all the ingredients through a blender. Pour into an ice-filled glass.

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

Editing Movie Posters From Emacs

I was waiting for some people to drop by yesterday to pick up a sofa, and I started thinking about how nice it would be to pull down movie posters automatically and perhaps put some text or border or something on them.

Instead of sensibly looking for an API for this kind of stuff, I wondered whether I could just quickly alter the imbd.el library, since it already had some imdb parsing functionality, and I have all films tagged with imdb IDs.

The short answer is “no, that can’t be done without insane hacks”, and the longer answer is, “I did it anyway”.

The imdb website uses a Javascript thing to display a “carousel” of images, and parsing Javascript with regexps and stuff isn’t something that can be recommended.

But it works right now, and will probably break when imdb does the smallest possible change to their code, but hey, whatevs.

To alter the images (as an example, I’ve added that red border with the wrong date up there). I wrote a teensy little library that just creates an SVG image, plonks the poster JPG into the SVG and then adds the border and text.  Composing images like this via SVG in Emacs is incredibly easy, especially since you can “live edit” the images by altering the SVG programmatically.

And then the couch people finally arrived.