I've never seen "The Shining". Or, at least, that's what I thought. It turns out that every single shot in that movie has been recycled, homage'd, and parodied in the last 40 years. It gives the whole movie a weird sense of déjà vu as your brain struggles to identify which scenes you think you've seen before. It is a beautiful and kinaesthetic film. The camera chases the action in such a way as to leave you exhausted. The fact that the characters never blink adds to the sense of intensity. T…
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Legendary performer Judy Garland arrives in London in the winter of 1968 to perform a series of sold-out concerts. It can't be stressed enough how magical a transformation Renée Zellweger goes through. Almost impossible to believe. Zellweger is nowhere to be seen or heard; it is 100% Judy. As a biopic, it straddles the fine line between reality and what we think we remember about Judy. This isn't quite a hagiography, so no one comes out of it unscathed. The plot plays out exactly as you …
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. It's a lovely morning in the home, and you are a horrible cat. Your aim is to cause mayhem and destruction by knocking over as many things as possible. This is a joyful little game - although I suspect it is a lot more fun in VR than on a laptop. The cartoony graphics ran perfectly on Linux. The controls aren't particularly suited to a laptop. Or, at least, I had…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. I have mixed feelings about this. It isn't really a game - and admits as much - more of a low-stakes exploration simulator. It is gorgeous. I couldn't believe my laptop was capable of rendering some of the scenes that it did. It worked perfectly on Linux running Wayland. Overly moody and atmospheric with - thankfully - no jump scares. But it starts really badly.…
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Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger... I was working for a Big Corporate on a Big Product. We were negotiating launch dates. It was the sort of thing where you have to book TV advertising months ahead. We were all set to go, when someone on our team said "Is this really the date when we want to launch?" The Big Scary Manager looked down at them and said "Yes. The second Friday in September is perfect. It avoids most major sporting fixtures and neatly primes us for …
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After writing about how to use MoneyDashboard's unofficial API, the good folk at Moneyed told me about their officially supported API! So here's a quick review & howto guide. Moneyed is a slightly strange service. I think it is designed for companies to give as a benefit to their employees. But you can sign up as an individual. The first month is free - but I don't see a way to tell how much subsequent months are. Although it is presented as an app for Android and iPhone, you can log in on…
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This experiment has now ended. The code is available on https://gitlab.com/edent/very-slow-website One thing most websites try to do is try to serve you the page as fast as possible. So I've decided to do the opposite. I've made a (toy) web server which goes as slow as humanly possible. You can visit it at http://slowww.rf.gd - but you'll need to be patient. This delivers a page at about 175 bits per second. Yes, bits. Not bytes. It is deliberately set to be about as fast as an adult…
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There are two contradictory ways to view this movie. It's a dumb screwball comedy, sure, but it also tries to expose the depressing underbelly of the modern world. Part of the problem is that it rarely challenges the views that it exposes. It is content to let people make fools of themselves, but never asks them to reflect on their foolishness. Nor does it give us the tools to tackle hate except through exposure and mockery. If you're a small business owner, and the shop is struggling, are…
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A group of friends who meet regularly for game nights find themselves entangled in a real-life mystery when the shady brother of one of them is seemingly kidnapped by dangerous gangsters. This is "Smug Marrieds - The Movie". But it is so funny. Like most modern comedy movies, it is little more than a series of sketches tied together by a paper-thin plot. Weirdly, it is shot much more beautifully than you would expect. In retrospect, the plot makes zero sense. But the world is fucked up…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This is... awful? It is visually interesting without actually being fun. It is intriguing for five minutes before becoming hollow. It is surreal and delightfully weird. But it isn't a game. You have to hunt for tiny little targets and click repeatedly to see if anything happens. Sometimes it does. Frankly, the experience would have been more honest if there was just a big …
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/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and the Americans stick a Z in every possible word. But we get along reasonably well. Except in Gmail. Here's my en_GB localised Gmail interface. Note how there is a folder calle…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This starts as a fun little logic puzzle, but quickly descends into frustration. Like Portal, you have limited array of actions and have to manipulate your environment in order to get move on to the next level. But it has a bit of a problem. It is so easy to get lost. There are a bunch of rooms which all look similar, and I found myself quickly running out of puzzles…
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