Blog

Atom Scrollbar Not Visible

Since last update, Atom's been hiding my big custom scrollbar, and after much confusion, I found issue #17002: Scrollbar disappearing/flickering when styled to increase width/height.

So for now, my ~/.atom/styles.less is a few pixels smaller but still obvious and grabbable (rest of the style sheet same as last post):

/* scroll bars should be grabbable */
.scrollbars-visible-always {
    ::-webkit-scrollbar {
        // FIXME: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/17002
        width: 14px !important;
        height: 14px !important;
    }
    ::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
        // based on http://www.girliemac.com/blog/2009/04/30/css3-gradients-no-image-aqua-button/
        // reversed light direction since we have no shine element
        background-color: rgba(60, 132, 198, 0.8);
        background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 90% 90%, from(rgba(108, 191, 255, .9)), to(rgba(28, 91, 155, 0.8)) );
        border: 1px solid blue;
        border-radius: 8px;
        border-top-color: #8ba2c1;
        border-right-color: #5890bf;
        border-bottom-color: #4f93ca;
        border-left-color: #768fa5;
        padding: 1px;
    }
}

On one hand, I'm pissed off that I have to fuck with my editor's internals for basic functionality; but on the gripping hand, it's so nice to have an editor I can fuck with the internals of.

What I'm Watching: Lost in Space

Why are they crash-landing in the ship's mess room, not in the control room, trying to pilot? How can an interstellar journey from Earth to "the colony" (later stated to be on Alpha Centauri) miss and still hit another habitable planet? Even by my usual standard of "FTL is magical bullshit", this is magical bullshit. SIGH.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
—Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Every scene builds pseudo-tension of an improbable danger just barely missed. Then drags on with people weeping or bickering to dramatic music for a half hour.

The alien planet is Canada ??, as usual. Glaciers, then Rockies or Cascades pine forest. They didn't even try to make it look like Not-Canada. That was a stupid running gag in Stargate SG-1, but this is really kinda inexcusable.

The sets look like trendy gyms and cafeterias, except for the ubiquitous flooded Jeffries Tube. The glass screen UIs aren't bad. Production is fine, but not amazing, lot of junky plastic gadgets that could've been made in the 1990s.

The robot is fairly shitty, a gunmetal-and-black, pseudo-organic, insectile death machine with Warhammer 40K spiky bits, so it doesn't have to look like anything that works. I really liked the original Robot, and its predecessor Robby in Forbidden Planet. Nobody would ever love this thing.

Will Robinson isn't supposed to be fit for stress, but in practice he's totally calm, icewater in his veins, face of a sociopath. Or of an 11-year-old child with no comprehension of his scenes. Maybe he's the real robot.

Taylor Russell (from the Saved by the Bell remake) as Judy, the adopted girl for diversity (there are so far 2 black women and one hispanic soap opera actor in a world of honkies) is the only competent one, and initially extra aggressive and adventurous, and then hit with PTSD and a bit too much caution. Competent actress, as well.

Parker Posey as "Dr Smith" is a very different kind of fraud, but so far not as dangerous as the original, and I've always had kind of a thing for her.

Penny is a moron with no survival skills or common sense. Mom is a bossy engineer, Dad's an absent almost divorced soldier, and their bickering and stiffness don't make them endearing.

I am horrorstruck at the total lack of security on everything, like airlocks and other destructive ship systems which work with a single button press and a fail-bad abort button. Except the 3D printer, which won't make a gun after an emergency crash-landing because alien planets don't need guns? No tech or physical security people consulted on this series.

As of S1E4, I don't hate this, but I have zero investment in most of the characters so I check out when Judy or Dr Smith aren't on screen.
★★★☆☆

Santa Clarita Diet

"If you cancel again, it might look like you don't know what you're doing."
"We know, Abby, we're bad at everything because we're your parents."
"No, it's because prior to this, you led a mindlessly happy suburban existence, which left you fundamentally unprepared to deal with the life-and-death decisions that now plague your every waking moment."
—Santa Clarita Diet S2E4

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

The movie has something for everyone, a comedy tonight, but I'm actually talking about:

Blogging is sometimes very different from "social networking", and one of the key things is that there are no private conversations. On the technical side, that's basically impossible: A blog post is public, or it wouldn't show up in feed readers, search engines, or micro.blog. And even "private" messaging in Twitter or Facebook is stored in plaintext on the server, where the staff can read it for laughs or social engineering or selling you to advertisers and Russians.

In the socially stunted worlds of Twitter or Facebook, often someone posts, and the first person to respond may feel like they "own" the conversation, anyone else responding is a "rando", and the lack of proper threading makes conversation very difficult so they just hate everyone. There is, I fear, not much that can be done for many of these; they grew up feral in an innately hostile environment, and won't or can't read about how to have longer discussions. Robert's Rules of Order this is not.

Blogging is about people contributing to a public dialogue. As we had in web forums, or USENET, or college dorm halls, or actual forums going back to Rome and ancient Greece. Threading and arguments about ideas are not just OK, but encouraged, just don't hit below the belt.

You may be able to learn from USENET netiquette (somewhat old link, but anything quoting Eugene Spafford is good).

When being sarcastic, if there's any danger of misinterpretation, use a smiley. Excessive sarcasm is often counter-productive and hurts people's feelings, even when it's unintentional.
—a rule I sure don't live by

What I'm Watching: Hap and Leonard

I watched S1 when it first came on, I love Joe Lansdale and an adaptation of his dirt-poor '80s Texas dark comedy/mysteries should be fantastic.

Sadly, S1 was pretty dull, there's some treachery but a lot of forgettable driving around Texas, and most of the supporting cast were the worst kind of walking meatsticks rather than actors. But it was great having Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar Little) playing cowboy Leonard, and James Purefoy (foppish Mark Anthony in Rome) as ex-hippy Hap has aged into a passable Fred Ward-like tired old hooligan. ★★☆☆☆

S2 is massively better. A kid's body under Leonard's dead uncle Chester's house leads to these two knuckleheads trying to investigate, as Chester had previously, with a mob of women with missing kids led by… no small personage… And there's a carnival which is always fun/terrifying, and my own biases confirmed when they get down to the killer.

This time most of the cast are competent; the killer is, sadly, one of the walking meatsticks and not convincing. MeMaw's great. The flexible redhead in the carny is amazing and I may be rewatching her a few times. Even the shitheel Texan pigs are complex for shitheel pigs and played out well enough.

Only real complaint is even at 6 eps, it's too long, this could be done in 4 or less.

S3 is going to be the KKK story, which should be fun, in a Blazing Saddles, Fletch Lives, Django Unchained kinda way.

"I tell ya. I ain't never been more proud to be an atheist than I am today." "Amen to that!"
Hap & Leonard in a church parking lot

★★★★½

Twitpocalypse 2018

Woo-hoo! So you could write and try to get Jack to keep Twitter's 3rd-party ecosystem running, which relies on the benevolence of a company that has zero reason to support 3rd-party apps, and in fact has stated outright that they don't want them, because they don't make any ad money.

OR, you could take this as a good opportunity to abandon Twitter and join microblogging.

What I'm Watching: The Titan

In grim future world, LA is uninhabitable (is funny joke: LA's been the Hellmouth since the 1960s), and Earth is dying, except for the nice wooded river and pristine forests they keep visiting in this dumpster fire of a movie. Soldier boy Rick is gung ho to be converted into a genetic superman so he can colonize Titan.

Saturn's moon, Titan. Which yes has an atmosphere, but there's 0% Oxygen, not the 5% this dumb movie says. It's so fucking cold -179°C your flesh would crystalize and shatter. There's no Sun or even Saturn itself visible under the atmospheric haze, we know because we dropped the Huygens probe in and saw a muddy haze! No energy for plants, and if there's life it'd be cold, slow, alien microbes or fish. Titan is not a place you can just bioengineer a person for. Mars might be dry and cold, but it's a sunny day in Antarctica in comparison.

Actual Landscape of Titan:
Titan-Huygens View

Mystical Wonderland Titan at end of movie:
the-titan-mystic-wonderland

The military base at the end of the world looks an awful lot like a suburb with a couple nice houses the filmmakers rented, and some industrial ugly office building. Zero set decoration effort.

Everyone walks around spouting short technical phrases learned from Wikipedia, but clearly neither the writers nor the walking meatstick "actors" know what they mean. When anything goes wrong, these supposed mid-21st C scientists & soldiers all turn to prayer. To what god?

The "what went wrong" meetings after the soldiers start going wrong are hilariously bad, unlike any conversation you'd have about a failing project. "Catch up or stop holding me back!" "Nature is unpredictable. Everyone evolves in a different way." ? Evolution works on populations, not individuals, you stupid stupid, STUPID writers.

Then suddenly the soldiers are all freaky Abe Sapien mutants with tentacle fingers and flying squirrel membrane wings, and it turns into a half-assed and joyless slasher flick.

★☆☆☆☆ and I wish I had the chemical lobotomy drug from the movie so I could unsee this.