Monthly Archives: January 2024

Jan 2024 Media Diet

Books, Pals, Reviews, , , , ,

Books

I started a couple of good ones as well. I track all that over on bookwyrm.

TV

The Brothers Sun – This was really good. Fun, violent, funny. Real challenges and character arcs and good twists. The fight scene at the driving range was incredible. A deftly shot, well choreographed smash. Loved it. Michelle Yeoh is getting what she deserves. Justin Chien is great.

BLUE EYE SAMURAI – Stunningly smart. The twists are vicious. Gorgeous as well. Gets dark.

Over the Garden Wall – a really off-kilter cartoon from one of the creators of Adventure Time. Kids and I liked it a lot. They said it seemed like Centaurworld, which was also very yum.

I rewatched Shoresy because it really helps me SET THE TONE.

And I’ve been slowly working my way through Moonlighting, which is such a treasure from my childhood. Jason Lefkowitz turned me onto this – I love the casual 4th wall breaking, the bits they throw in to fill time, the Christmas episode that pulls back to reveal the whole production company singing. And the actual episodes are also good!

Krapopolis – I love everyone in this and cannot bother myself to watch another episode unless I want to fall asleep.

Chad and JT Go Deep – a heartwarming dumb silly journey. Half dramedy, half hidden camera prank show, funny. A Tim and Eric flavor sprinkled over it all.

Movies

Maggie Moore is a very light dark comedy. Really enjoyed this – Tina Fey is good at being not just Liz Lemon. Jon Hamm is good at being not just Don Draper. Micah Stock steals the show as a very pathetic villain.

Dredd – I was stuck in bed with a bad back and thought I’d check it out. It’s horrible. It’s one of those movies that takes the fascist joke seriously and makes it unfunny. Very violent and gross and well shot.

The Imitation Game – brilliant. Deserves all the praise it got.

a swarm of butterflies against a blue sky

The Power Broker Read-along 1

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In addition to my work book club (we’re reading How Big Things Get Done by Brent Flyvberg) I found out that one of my favorite podcasts “99% Invisible” is doing a read-along of the massive Robert Caro book “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”. It’s a biggie – so they are going to work through it over the course of 2024, with one episode a month covering a 12th of the book. This sounds totally achievable.

I’ve just finished the first part – Robert’s beginnings, his family, his progressive paternalistic origins and the brutal education in power that he goes through. This guy seems to be a massive intellect, a fantastically energetic powerhouse of change, an aristocratic snide jerk who looked down on all of us (my ancestors are particularly some of the people his family organized to keep from embarassing them), and possibly one of the most destructive people who doesn’t get credit for it. Once you listen to Butterflies, the Memory Palace’s story of how Thomas Midgely was inadvertently a destructive monster who murdered so many of us a fraction at a time, you begin to think about the other secret monsters in the world – killing us in tiny slices. They removed so many parts of so many peoples lives, bringing the day of their death closer than needed.

Listening to the first episode of 99PI’s Power Broker read-along was great – Robert Caro is the guest, you begin to grasp that Robert Moses did the same, but in the middle of people’s lives and he did it for aesthetic reasons. He wanted to prevent us from having trains and public transportation. He had the choice and he chose to do things that made so many people in my region sit idling in cars, pumping exhaust out and increasing their blood pressure. It reminds me of the part in Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett where a demon takes credit for a the design of a UK motorway as a force of massive incremental evil. I was hooked in the first 20 pages, but I feel like we are in masterful hands by now. I was eager to not get too far ahead of the podcast – but now I can get through the next chunk. It is definitely not too soon to get started and join in – I am eager to chat with folks about it.

Fixing broken unicode in wordpress

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I tried to use unicode stars in posts to show how much I liked some books. I was embarrassed to see them show up as ????? question marks. Yuck. Why is that happening?

I’ve been blogging for a long time and had a suspicion that it was going to be the age of this WordPress install. I’ve diligently upgraded the software, but nobody likes to migrate a DB schema. So I dug through the DB and sure enough, my wp-posts table is in latin1-ci. For non-nerds, that means it’s a case insensitive database that only is set to store “latin” characters – basic ABC123 and punctuation, but none of the fun unicode or non-latin characters in other languages.

I’ve done some digging and it looks like this isn’t a pushbutton process, so it looks like a weekend scripting adventure.

Black Keys X Big Boi – Go Get Tangerine

What a great video. It’s a mashup of rollerblading stunts over a music mashup. Way back when, Wick-It the Instigator mashed up Big Boi’s The Son of Chico Dusty with The Black Keys The Brothers to make The Brothers of Chico Dusty, a wall-to-wall smash. I’m still riding to work over it today.

Unlike the young people in this video, I recently tried to go up a ramp and down a ramp in my new rollerblades and wrecked my wrist. I write to you from my bed where I’m lying on a hot water bottle because ow my back also hurts.