WFC Venezuela: Pelo malo

This is really good! I love all the actors, especially the mother. And the cinematography is both fantastic and real at the same time.

Everything’s so tense.

Bad Hair. Mariana Rondón. 2013. Venezuela.

Playero

  • 2 parts coconot flavoured rum
  • 1 part lemon juice
  • 1 part gin
  • 1 part lemon soda
  • 1 part coconut water

Mix rum, lemon juice and gin in a highball glass with ice. Top up with lemon soda and coconut water. Garnish with a cherry.

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

WFC United Arab Emirates: ذيب‎‎

There are good scenes in here, but mostly the actors are pretty hopeless, even for non-professional actors.

And it fails the Bechdel test.

Theeb. Naji Abu Nowar. 2014. United Arab Emirates.

Detox Mule

  • 3 parts ginger beer
  • 3 parts vodka
  • 1 part peppermint syrup (1:1 sugar and peppermint tea)
  • 1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar
  • mint leaves

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

2d cloud

2d cloud is a publisher from Minneapolis who’s been publishing a lot of interesting comics and comics-adjacent stuff the past few years.

Their financing strategy seems to be to do pre-sales via Kickstarter for each “collection”. Nothing much is being… kickstartered… but you send them some money and they send you all these neat comics back. It’s a thing.

Here’s the contents of the latest package I received from them, which I think is the confusingly titled “Winter Collection”:

All the books are of differing sizes, and they’re all wrapped individually.

It’s like Xmas unwrapping all of these.

Except that every unwrapping reveals something you really want to have.

Like the wonderfully giddy Summer Carnival by Jake Terrell…

… and the sexy Sec by Sarah Ferrick…

… the multitudes of Andrew Burkholder…

… and the… whatever this is… by Austen English.

I particularly enjoyed The Necrophilic Landscape by Tracy Auch, but all the books are really rather spiffy.

The Mirror Mirror anthology is even more on the fringes of “comics” than the other books, or perhaps they’re all more central. For instance, I loved the reading experience of the Caroline Hennessy piece excerpted aboved: It’s like turning the page makes the image flip over to the other page, sort of. It’s something else.

Anyway, 2d cloud has a new collection out, the even more confusedly named “Spring Collection”. (Fashion is so confusing.) And it hasn’t reached its funding goals yet, so if any of this seems the slightest bit interesting, please sign up and make this happen.

FF1991: Tales from the Outer Boroughs

Tales from the Outer Boroughs #1-5 by Douglas Michael.

This is a pretty odd series, even as odd series go.

I guess I can see the inspiration here from people like Rick Geary, Ben Katchor and Chris Reynolds, but the artwork isn’t as distinctive as any of those, really. He does have the oblique weirdness going for him, though.

And speaking of Katchor, he supposedly shows up on the inside front cover of issue number two, with what I suppose to be a joke of some kind? If it’s serious, it sounds quite serious, so… I guess it isn’t?

For the second story (which ran two and a half issues), Michael switches to this storytelling format, with “said Dan” stuff underneath the panels. I’m not sure it works? It’s just a bit annoying? And now I’m upspeaking all these sentences?

Anyway, the second story is pretty entertaining. I hate reviews that do nothing but retell a plot, but I just have to here, because it’s just so original:

A very mentally disabled guy is sentenced to death after a shooting. But the law in that state says that the condemned has to show remorse before he can be executed, so the prosecutor convinces the governor to produce a film that’s supposed to awaken the mind and conscience of the condemned.

Hilarity ensues.

That’s a scene from the film, and kinda illustrates the awkwardness of the approach. The clown is thinking about drilling a head in that evil boy’s head (I guess), but is that something that’s shown in the film? Is he (in the film) saying that that’s what he wanted to do?

The simple gag pages flow better. (And: Tee hee.)

The third and final story is a pseudo fairy tale told in Joke German. It’s amusing, but it wears thin.

As far as I know, Douglas Michael hasn’t published a lot of comics after this series was cancelled, but have you tried googling him? Even with quotes and -“michael douglas” it’s pretty much impossible.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

Automatically Mount exfat File Systems in Linux

I do quite a bit of video on my camera, and the easiest way to transfer these rather large files to my computer is to insert the SD card into an SD card connected to my computer.

impossibleI wanted this to be as painless as possible, so I want the computer to auto mount anything inserted, without any distracting GUI stuff popping up.

The usbmount package was suggested, and it almost works. After inserting a card into the reader, it mounts it… but then three seconds later the mount point goes AWOL. If I df, I get this message:

# df
 df: ‘/media/usb1’: Transport endpoint is not connected

And it turns out that this is more complicated than you’d think, because udev and systemd.

The file system on the cards I use is exfat. exfat is a fuse (userland) file system, so usbmount ends up starting a userland process to handle the file system.

And you can’t do that from udev. It does not allow “long lived processes”: It’ll kill off everything started by an udev rule, and that includes the fuse process.

So now what?

It turns out that there is no easy way to do something as trivial as automatically mount an exfat SD card. But there’s a fiddly and yucky way, involving systemd units and other stuff that no sane person should feel necessary to know about, so I’ve created a little package for you with some files that you can just copy to the correct locations, and it’ll Just Work.

gladFor the next two weeks, until the udev/systemd brain trust fucks us all over again.

I’ve tested these files on Debian Jessie in mid July 2016, and it worked then.  Your mileage will vary.  I’ve cobbled this together by Googling for hours and mashing up various recipies that almost work.  Neither udev nor systemd are very good at reporting errors, so it’s all trial and error…