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The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
The Dark and the Wicked came out a few years ago and while it has been in my queue for a while, I only just got around to watching it. It seemed like one of those movies that I needed to be ready for—not one to just randomly watch whenever. I feel like…
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Music can still be challenging, but not in the way you remember.
After reading about it in Damon Krukowksi’s newsletter, I downloaded the new Cindy Lee album Diamond Jubilee earlier this week. I have been listening to it the last few days and it is pretty good. What bugs me is all the weird hype around this album. I…
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Infested is the best horror movie I have seen in quite a while.
Infested is a French movie about a low-income apartment building in Paris overrun by an invasive spider species. Locked in by the police, the residents have to battle the spiders and try to make their way out to safety. I saw this movie getting some…
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We need to kill the idea that "the web" is somehow separate from tech gear that someone owns.
🔗 The web is not dying – Manu: The current AI chaos is prompting people to write all sorts of posts and articles about the imminent death of the web. The current debacle surrounding the TikTok ban (forced sale?) in the US is making journalists believe…
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E-bikes are motorcycles.
Can we just start calling e-bikes “motorcycles” and be done with it? Barely anyone I see riding one around town here—and there are a lot of them—is actually using the pedals. They are just motorcycles with electric motors. To be clear, it is much better…
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Late Night With the Devil (2023) is okay, but not great.
I think I first started hearing about Late Night With the Devil a few months ago. It looked like a novel take on the found footage horror subgenre—which I generally enjoy—and I was intrigued. It’s been getting pretty good chatter on the festival circuit,…
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YouTube is why film criticism sucks now.
Most movie “criticism” on YouTube is objectively terrible. I wouldn’t care so much, because people being wrong on the internet is an age-old problem and we should not have to get worried and upset every time it happens. Unfortunately, it is no longer…
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A Nightmare on Elm Street is forty(!) years old.
I was listening to the most recent Patreon episode of The Evolution Of Horror, in which they discuss the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie, which turns forty this year. The conversation is really good, as befits one of the better horror movies ever…
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Parents who shout at child athletes are bad people.
I work pretty hard to assume that everyone is doing the best they can given the circumstances in which they find themselves and the tools that they have to work with. I also try not judge anyone else’s parenting choices because I am generally only ever…
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A reminder about how much of politics really is personal
I was talking with someone yesterday about local politics when the topic of one of our legislators at the federal level came up. As it turns out, person I was talking with (who shares my political affiliation) absolutely cannot stand this legislator (who…
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More choices v. better things
I have probably told this story before, but a friend of mine once said—while we stood in the pen and pencil aisle at an office supply big-box store, looking at the wall of hundreds of different pens and pencils—"I don't want more choices, I want better…
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More e-bikes!
I will admit that I have some misgivings and conflicted feelings about the increasing prevalence of e-bikes. I am not going to go into any of those misgivings or concerns here because I don’t think anyone really needs another complainer piece on the…
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Not everyone shares your priorities.
There’s a nifty rhetorical jujutsu I have noticed among the set of tech-types who like to shout online about their pet causes. It goes something like this… Anyone who isn’t as outraged about their pet cause as they are is naïve and stupid. But if you…
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Figuring out how to get people to pay you for the thing you make it hard.
🔗 Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business? - TPM – Talking Points Memo: This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty…
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Science fiction and the myth of technological progress
I was thinking the other day about a few science fiction books that I finished recently. They were pretty good, although they all fall more toward the “hard SF” end of the spectrum than most of the stuff I tend to read. That got me thinking about the…
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Writing about a topic is a tool for structuring my thinking about and understanding of that topic.
Over on one of my other blogs, I write—albeit it in an on-and-off-again fashion—about local politics and municipal policy here in my small western Massachusetts town. We are heading into budget season for the next few months, when all of the various…
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Doing the the thing v. talking about doing the thing v. talking about the technique for doing the thing
🔗 The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise - Marc's Blog: Kit and tools are another imperfect signal for expertise. Clearly, in our field, there’s a significant benefit to knowing a set of tools well, and being able to use these tools as an extension of…
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LinkedIn is awful, Part MCMXXLIV
A person I generally like and respect shared a thing on LinkedIn recently about how "organizational health" is important to long- term company performance. That sounds great! Then I noticed that it was a report from McKinsey and could not help but to…
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🔗 The Carry-On Baggage Bubble Is About To Pop - The Atlantic: “Maybe we don’t need carry-ons at all,” Young went on. He was whispering, almost, as if his secret made him sound bananas, which it somewhat did. “Someone needs to step out and say, ‘We’re not…
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It’s annoying when technology doesn’t work.
I'm reading a thread just now on Mastodon with a bunch of people complaining about timelines being slow to update because of various bottlenecks in the architecture. It reminds me of the regular Micro.blog discussions of cross-posting and timeline…