Author: mdhughes

What I'm Watching: Invasion

An Apple TV+ show. The TV+ app is awful, first of all. It's all big boxes, and the actual controls you want to see what eps are available are hidden under mystery burger icons. And then the show launches in a separate window. Turning on CC/subtitles, which I like even when watching English-language shows, doesn't take effect until I close & reopen the video window. And I can only really watch this on desktop, or iPad; I would have to get an AppleTV (not +) to watch it in the living room.

The cinematography is generally cyan-and-orange, as usual. So hideous. Occasionally you get a full daylight scene with colors, and it looks like a totally different film. Probably they make second unit directors or interns do the scenes that don't look like shit, because if you filmed a scene that isn't dull and oppressive you'd never work in movies again.

Weird also: Obviously filmed before the pandemic. Before the end of the Afghan War. It's so dated already, and not in a way that 2010 and earlier shows are, it's the "present" but none of our current concerns exist.

Have I mentioned I'm getting Apple TV+ for free for a year, and will absolutely be cancelling it before it gets paid because this is dreadful? Well, they're not persuading me otherwise with this.

Anyway.

S1E1. It's told in a bunch of vignettes of different characters, presumably bringing some kind of plot together, but I don't see one yet.

Sam Neill, now very old and kinda frail, is a somewhat useless sheriff in BFE Oklahoma, with some good-ole-boys gone missing, except very quickly their exit location is found. The crackhouse full of Nazis sure seem to fold pretty quick, instead of making law enforcement without backup disappear.

Kids in school somewhere else have nosebleeds (CUBAN RAY GUNS!), and a mother figures out her husband's cheating on her, but the important part is that in a power outage, the iPad also loses power. Look, I don't make this nonsense, I just watch it.

The Japanese astronaut is weirdest… their agency is called "JASA" (with the old NASA worm logo; actual NASA has gone back to the blue meatball) instead of "JAXA" (spiky anime title logo) as it is in reality, some comm tech claims to be putting a "viral download" in the launch capsule, they have their own capsule, the capsule's a big empty tin can which is very unlike the actual Soyuz or SpaceX Dragon capsules anyone goes up in. Clearly nobody involved in this has ever seen a single space launch. I presume since they wasted character time on this, the launch isn't as final as it seems. Is this supposed to be very alternate reality? Or just incompetence?

There's like a 5-second shot of a glittering thing which might be an alien ship.

I'm here for weird alien invasions, but one ep in I give this a ★☆☆☆☆. They better do something interesting in ep 2 or the ride stops here.

S2E2. The broken family whines at each other in a basement, then later outdoors they reenact The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.

Japanese comm tech, barely post-teen idol girl, has an incredibly non-Japanese attitude towards management and older men. There's zero possibility of this girl being in her position and yelling at everyone, and not being dragged out of the building by security. What is even happening here. The technical bits of her typing really fast, with some C++ template code in a console for no reason, and making fanciful statements about satellite positions, are just the incompetent screenwriters trying to sound spacey. Probably fine for low-IQ audiences, but this is so bad.

Harry Potter wannabe listens to terrible music, no point to this kid. They keep coming back to the little weasel and more nothing happens.

Jarheads in Afghanistan dick around doing nothing, finally have a mission to find a missing squad, during a radio blackout, which is becoming a theme. OK, finally something sort of adventure-ish. Another different alien-ish thing.

So for two eps, ★★☆☆☆ and maybe I'll watch more, see if it improves. It's not worse than a lot of things I've seen.

Very very slow, dull, tedious, lot of waiting around… then doing nothing… then waiting… then something sort of happens, with no explanation.

A Flotilla of Shit

Modern software is junk. Almost every program uses vastly more resources than it needs, and does its main task worse than older, more focused programs.

I don't think I have a single "new" program that's as good as the thing it replaced, not a single program as good and light as the stuff we had 30 years ago. So where possible I use 30-40 year old software, and I resent the complex stuff I have to deal with. It's polluting the planet, literally boiling the oceans.

Case 1

This blog is in WordPress, which is in PHP on a giant tower of shitty software, like 20 "plugins" to fix things that are inadequate and wrong in it. I've done what I can to lighten it some, streamline layout, but that's lipstick & yoga pants on a pig. 25 years ago I had a simple blog (uh, actually also in PHP, tho I had another one in Perl, so that's not any better). But that was <1000 LOC, it just needed a tiny local database, and really could've just used flat files. And before the blog, I had just my hierarchical web site, and before that I had Gopher.

Gopher was basically perfect. Just a structured tree of documents, accessed by raw socket connections or manually by telnet. If you wanted to make a journal ("web log" -> "blog" was a decade away), you put links to plain text entries on a Gopher menu.

iMark's Gopher Hole _   _   0
gMugshot    /images/mark.gif    example.com 70
1Games  /games  example.com 70
iJournal    _   _   0
01990-09-01 /journal/1990-09-01.txt example.com 70
01990-08-25 /journal/1990-08-25.txt example.com 70
.

etc. Actually at the time I probably would've done chronological order, not reverse.

We have Gemini now trying to be like Gopher, but it has TLS, and a complex connection protocol, and error messages (Gopher just responded "3" if something went wrong, possibly followed by a message), and then the page you get is presentation, not a menu; it doesn't tell you the content type of any link, it tries to style content in-line, like a lower-resource WWW. But to run Gemini, you need a web server to update TLS, it won't stay up without constant maintenance, and it uses more resources than just serving a web page.

Case 2

Mastodon is a giant database that constantly messages other databases to tell them about posts… and it still sometimes takes a while to propagate messages, or fails utterly. There's no markup except URLs, and either polls or images (can't have both, and aren't inline). The only control you have over your experience is blocking people, and crude text-match filters.

30 years ago, we had USENET, email, and IRC/ICB chat. USENET was often slow, some servers would only connect once a day, others every hour, some every 15 minutes or so. You might need a couple hops to get to someone. But your message length was unlimited, most clients handled some markup with *bold*, /italic/, _underline_, and <URLs and FTP hostnames>. Images had to be UUEncoded, but most clients could insert them easily, graphical ones could display them inline, and download them; I used text-only strn so I'd download and run xv to see images. But the power we had in those clients was so much better. strn did scoring, I had thousands of lines of regular expressions and header lines to match with scores up or down. I'd go into a newsgroup, and the best stuff would be at the top, mediocre stuff below it if I cared, junk and spam and assholes deleted.

If you wanted to immediately contact someone, email or chat existed. There's an experimental chat system on Pleroma, but not on Mastodon yet/ever. Or you can use the modern equivalent of that, burn 1GB of RAM and a CPU core running Slack or Discord. Madness.

Case 3

Emacs. Eight-hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping. Is emacs the original sin, or were there flotilla-of-shit programs before it? Back in the day, you could start micro-emacs ("me" on Atari ST, later uemacs) in milliseconds, or emacs in many tens of seconds or even minutes. The emacs people would just leave this giant blob of an interpreter, editor, half an operating system but not really, running all day, eat most available RAM and CPU, and load files into it. The me and vi people would instantly open a file, edit, and close, barely a blip on the system resources. 30 years later, uemacs starts in nanoseconds, and emacs starts in seconds, but it's just as obnoxious.

Today I use BBEdit, which is svelte for an IDE, but it's a giant pig compared to what "a text editor" needs to be; I keep trying other IDE-types like Sublime Text or Atom, and they're too heavy for me to tolerate. And in console, I run Vim, which isn't as bloated as emacs, but it's fat. None of these make me happy. STeVIe was much lighter, and I've repeatedly considered going back to it if I can recompile it. I did manage to compile Linus' build of uemacs and it's nice, but I can't get used to it again after 25-ish years off it; my console habits are vi, it seems.

Resolved

The end goal of software is not to put everything in it, a flight simulator in your spreadsheet (fucking Excel!); a computer in your fridge for playing ads; a web server, email client, and text editor in your math program "notebook"; a fucking NTFS miner in your MS Paint clone.

The end goal of good software is to do ONE THING. To do it fast, efficiently, and correctly, in the least resources you can.

Re-evaluate your use of flotilla of shit software, and dump it.

Animal Crossing Feeding Frenzy

So, lessons learned so far:

Harv's island has an ABD terminal, so you don't need to bring 800,000 bells along. Anyway, it doesn't matter, because while you can donate partway to all of the shops, when you finish one it's done for the day, you have to wait for tomorrow. And this is why I have Katrina the fortune-teller first, and nothing that I want. "It's fine, I think." as Booker used to say.

You get Brewster on the first Kapp'n island, and it's very normal, boring. The next island is very unlike this, and here I got tomatoes! I assume all the veg have to be discovered on islands, which I'll be running every day. I'll probably post my garden when it's all productive.

None of the Kapp'n islands I've seen yet (one per day, so: 2) have wasps in the trees. Weird. I'll still check every one with a net out, of course, I'm scarred for life.

So anyway now I can make some of the food. Any "kitchen" will do for making food; I've long had a diner modelled on Johnny Rockets in my side room, so the system kitchen in there is fine, or the gas ranges. Sadly campfires don't seem to be kitchens.

Trouble is, I only really use food on the islands, to break rocks. And normally I just carry a stack of apples with me. Oh good grief, I drank "Tomato Puree" to get it out of my inv, and it was worth 5 meals. Just guzzled down a six-pack of katsup, as one does. Well, happily I have a couple toilets in scenic poopin' spots around my island… yes, before the Rick & Morty episode. In case you didn't know, using a toilet removes all your "meals" so you don't break rocks & dig up trees you didn't mean to. UUUURP! But now this means I have to do all the non-breaking work on an island (hitting rocks!), then eat the food I brought, then finally break all the things.

The iPhone NintendoSwitchOnline app has a "Nook Link" section, which has been generally useless, but they've added a bunch of new rewards (toilet paper! After 2 years since the start of pandemic, finally Nook gets some TP in!) and utilities, the Newsletter is pretty interesting, even tracks your turnip prices.

New Animal Crossing New Horizons

The big 2.0 update is finally out! Takes a while to download & install, had to leave it on the charger and keep waking it up so I could see any progress.

First thing up, Isabelle gives a short talk about the ordinances, and island tours. Then Tom Nook spammed my mailbox with new services. Will get to those in a minute.

But then while putting away my junk, changing clothes to be minty-fresh, Eugene comes in, and challenges me to a game of Hi-Lo cards. The villagers can come over to visit now! That wasn't mentioned in any news about the update! Maybe they always could, but my house is on the far side of the river, with no way to reach it from the village center.

Also, it's now the start of mushroom season, so the ground is cluttered with X spots to dig, and little treasures everywhere. It's a nice time to refresh the game.

Turns out Brewster doesn't just appear, you have a quest to find him. Talk to Blathers to find out how…

Get to the Town Hall, and still Tom Nook can't take a check on my ABD account, I have to half-empty my inventory to hold 700,000 bells to pay for more storage. Worth it, but annoying. Isabelle's prices on town ordinances are much more reasonable, a mere 20,000. Meanwhile, make sure to check the Nook Shopping, both for seasonal lanterns, and for new KK Slider records!

And there's a bunch of Nook Miles things to buy, which is fine, I have 479,000 Nook Miles. Yes, that's an insane amount. I see people scrabbling for 1000 in their reset islands, and I just laugh and Scrooge McDuck into my pile of miles… I don't know how that metaphor works.

I'm not sure what the point of the "Island Life 101" app is, it has no tips at present.

"Pro Camera App" is great, almost first-person 3D graphics in this year 2021! But you still can't rotate in most areas, because the models are completely false-front.

The "Wooden Storage Shed" may be a massive game-changer! It's just access to your home storage anywhere. I have crafting stations all over, each one has 1 or 2 tables with wood, stone, iron, sticks… I can replace most of those with a shed.

The "Donation Box" is semi-useless? You can put bells in it, 1000 at a time, or take them out. Tips for visiting another island are usually like a whole bag of bells or more? So this is kind of silly. Unless the villagers deposit in it. I've left it in my outdoor café and will see if anything happens. Given how useless they are at funding bridges, I don't expect much.

There's an "ABD" furnishing (but no recipe) so you can get cash anywhere. I'll put one of those by my house.

I've of course chosen the Nite Owl ordinance, but it won't affect anything until tomorrow, so will see how that works out, too. If I can just shop and see KK Slider, that'd be a nice change.

Catching fish can teach new recipes, so far I've found Dab and Horse Mackerel. More fishing is definitely needed.

That's about all for today, I'll do the island tour & Harv's island tomorrow. Probably have weeks or months of finding new stuff.

Nintendo's said this is the last major update, and the first/last/only paid DLC for the Happy Home Designer thing. But it's a good way to go out, if so. Earlier games on cartridge never got updates, of course, so we're just spoiled.

What I'm Watching: Batman: The Long Halloween 1-2

A series of murders, mostly on mob people, on holidays drive Harvey Dent crazier and crazier, ultimately becoming Two-Face. The comic's a long, slow burn, but has some great moments, including my favorite Thanksgiving meal; Batman's a monomaniacal jerk, but has compassion for some of his antagonists. The mobs really just own Gotham, and hunting down The Roman won't change anything, but it's the thought that counts.

The cartoon movies are a mixed bag. The male characters pretty much all look alike, sometimes with different facial hair; the artist really only has two models, hulking brute like Batman, Dent, Gordon, Falcone, or weedy little dudes like Joker, or nerdy Alberto Falcone. The female characters, too, are all perfect flapper types from a single model, distinguished only by haircut. The scenes are dark even for a Batman cartoon, so it's often hard to make out more details than rough outline.

Jensen Ackles is not a good Batman, he's whiny. Troy Baker as Joker is lame, but I don't like anyone but Mark Hamill for the role; he's especially perfect for it in The Killing Joke, and is supposedly "retired", but really they should've paid or done anything for him to come back. The rest of the voice cast are adequate, Billy Burke's Gordon and Naya Rivera's Catwoman are even pretty good. Josh Duhamel is too growly to be professional lawyer Harvey Dent, and too clean to be cackling, half-mad Two-Face.

The movie does give hints about who Holiday is throughout, but it's not laid out as well as in the comic, there has to be a long, slowly-delivered monologue at the end.

Still, here's your Halloween Batman, which is the best seasonal Batman.

★★★½☆

Haunted Dungeon early beta

Hey, it's a new and slightly more usable build (still Mac only) of the Haunted Dungeon! You can now use all the weapons & armor, eat & drink food & potions, might even make it down to floor 2 or 3!

Up in the next few days:

  • Tossing out items. I need to write a new event mode for selecting it, so I didn't feel like it today.
  • Levelling up. Right now you're doomed because you can't heal except by food & potions; or improve, except by very rare (and a long ways down) stat potions.
  • Start getting the actual story into the game. But only the first hints will be in the upper levels, since you can't get far anyway.
  • Main release on Halloween!

Probably next month:

  • Backpack for storing more items. One of the premises of this game is every item's a singleton, there's no stacking. So every item must be useful by itself, and item slot management is hard.
  • Ranged weapons have range.
  • Magic spells.
  • Elemental effects. It's already true that hitting some monsters with sharp or blunt weapons is better, but there's many more interactions when magic gets involved.
  • Much more dungeon dressing, I'm using Vexed's Demonic Dungeon art for that late-'80s, hi-res but low color count effect.

I'd love to get some feedback if it actually works on everyone's machine, because I'm doing some weird tricks to make it launch. As noted on itch, if it doesn't launch, or crashes, try looking at ~/Documents/haunted-dungeon.log, email me with that file.

The game's written in Scheme, running on Chez Scheme, with SDL2 from Thunderchez. Then I have an excessively complex Scheme script that compiles it, and builds a .app structure for Mac, and should also make Linux & Windows builds on those platforms (or in a VM, which is how I do it); been a while since I tried those, but once this is solid I'll include those.

I normally discuss ongoing projects on fediverse, @mdhughes@appdot.net

'80s Neon Tuesday Music

Inspired by a fediverse conversation about how '80s the '80s were (more '80s than you can believe):

And then looking this up, I discovered Robert Palmer died in 2003, age 54. Nobody told me! guardian obituary

What I'm Watching: Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes

Oh, Netflix. There was a long dry spell of Grim Scandinavian Crime Dramas after the last Bordertown, and Deadwind S2 was aimless without a main plot (tho still amusing mostly). But now they have Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes (there's like 3 other Post Mortems in the last couple years). Also technically horror, but mostly comedy.

A young woman Live (pr. "Leeva", Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) is found dead in a field… mostly dead. Not all that dead. Her brother Odd (Elias Holmen Sørensen being a Norwegian Zach Galifianakis, just hilariously incompetent) and father run the small town's only mortuary. And then she starts to have problems with a need for blood.

Odd is soon in charge of the mortuary, and struggles desperately to keep it open. Live's murderous instincts should be a nice windfall… Instead she just gets wannabe cop/boyfriend Reinert (André Sørum) tangled up in it, and hapless Odd nearly bankrupted a couple times.

It's shot like a horror story or drama, but everyone is so foolish and slapstick it never manages to not be comedy (very morbid, hope you don't mind blood & dead bodies). Some of the eps drag or cycle over the same ground a bit; hopefully if they get more seasons they tighten the plot up more. But just a charming little show.

★★★★½

M1 MacBooks Pro

I love beepy music made from Apple system noises. This is not the first!

I could not care any less about HomePod (I have cheap but acceptable stereo BT speakers in every room) or AirPods (BT lag into my ears makes me dizzy). So do with these as you will. I'll be using cheap wired earbuds or expensive wired cans forever.

M1 names combine the ugly internal product number with marketing "Pro". "Max" implies you can't get better. Who'd need more than 64GB RAM? Should be one or the other, like "Apple Chip Pro", or "M1P-10-16-32" (cores-gpus-ram).

MacBook stats are given in mm & lb. PICK ONE SYSTEM!

"The physical keys replace the Touch Bar." Almost like it was a gigantic mistake everyone hated. And MagSafe is back! Multiple ports and SD card reader! It's 2013 again!

What would you do if you had a million bucks? LCD, 3 XDRs, & a 4K monitor at once! (actual cost of the shown system is ~$25K).

How's the notch gonna work with fullscreen programs like Notch's game Minecraft? Just a blank spot. Might obscure the compass in Elder Scrolls games, too. Maybe it just blacks out the entire upper area in fullscreen, wasting real estate but not being stupid. I dislike the notch thing in every device, desktop more than others.

Battery life & GPU performance are awesome, no kidding. Faster than anything Apple shipped in a desktop even, my iMac 5K has a low-end AMD Radeon.

The 16" with M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 4TB SSD, is $4899, still less than a single XDR monitor. 14" with M1 Pro, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD (get a cheap thunderbolt drive for storage) is $2899, almost reasonable.

I'm not, I think, actually getting this; the iPad Air satisfies my portable needs at present. I want the M1 Max in a Mini format, so I can wire up any monitor (not a $6000 XDR).

But if I took a new dayjob, I'd do it in a minute.