Mandaris

Looking back on this, I'm wondering if it's possible to make murder boring. This movie has all the parts for something great but looking back on it, I don't really know how to feel about the work overall.

De Niro plays two characters that looks two similar. It's almost as if Superman and Clark Kent were in the same room. I guess the director wanted to showcase that they were a lot alike but doing things in completely different ways.

Life if short, money is tight, watch something else, and call it a night.

I went back and saw this film after watching Companion to get a feel for the two different movies. The movie really feels a little bit out of time. It has jokes that are still funny and poke fun at some many things that should be made fun of.

There are messages and jokes and just a lot of little things that I really enjoyed.🎬

This movie concept has been done before. What it comes down to is the execution and I feel the cast does a wonderful job of really bringing it <q>to life</q>.

My favorite part of this movie is actually the side characters and not the relationship between the protagonist and her boyfriend.

🎬

It's a lot of little jokes that you've seen in other places and stitches together here for your entertainment. I chuckled at a couple of the jokes but I don't think I can recommend this movie to most unless you want to watch a movie with dirty jokes and bowling.

Don't think. Just watch.🎬

I have configured my blog index to only show posts with titles. At first, I was a little hesitant, but I think it makes for a better experience when I'm reading it. I also found that I do not hesitate as much make microposts.

I got the code from Loura who has written about it on her blog.

Here are the steps I used to make my Micro.blog hosted blog list only the titled posts on my homepage and still paginate correctly. Note: This does require editing your blog theme.

She’s got an amazing site and you should check it out.

I’m currently boycotting McDonalds anyway. I’ve been playing with look up all the companies that backed Trump and correlating how healthy the food is. Maybe there is a connection between them.

China has cancelled 12,000 metric tons of US pork imports, marking the largest cancellation since the pandemic's onset, amidst escalating trade tensions. This move deals a blow to American pork producers, who face high tariffs, hindering their competitiveness in the crucial Chinese market. The National Pork Producers Council highlights the impossible competition due to these tariffs.

I wanted to share this link for a while. I do not know if I will be able to use it in the future, but I am hoping that someone else will find it inspiring.

Sometimes, something new interacts with one of these older ideas and leads to something interesting. This article is about one such case: a hacky technique that allows us to pass some data from CSS to SVG and use it to adjust colors or almost anything else.

I think I’ve been on most of the major social networks and chat systems. It’s part of the reason that I’m on my current hosting provider. In an ever increasingly busy world, having a quick way to connect to others is a great endorphin boost. Discord is another service that I enjoy, but it might not be in the rotation this time next year.

I’m currently using Discord in the same way that I used Slack 3 years ago. It’s a fairly easy way to talk to different groups in one interface. I can go from one group of friends who talk about indie web stuff and then in one click talk to another group about what Big Banana is doing to make us buy more.

Unfortunately, Discord has come up a couple times in my feed with some less than awesome topics.

Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down and will be replaced by former Activision Blizzard and King exec Humam Sakhnini, according to a press release. Sakhnini takes over on April 28th.

And then there is this one…

Discord is preventing some users from accessing sensitive content unless they allow the platform to verify their age by scanning their face or ID. The new age verification process is described as an “experiment” by Discord

I have concerns.

I understand that these things are services and they need to keep the lites on, but I’m tired of investing in things that have a policy of getting all the money they can make and then turning to poop when they try to squeeze out that last drop of profit.

Part of me wants to be hopeful. It’s not as if things will change the first day and it’s not as if discord hasn’t already gotten a lot louder with attempts to sell me something.

After all, it’s the community that you chat with that matters and not the platform.

I remember this post shortly before I saw everyone posting about their slash pages. You can do whatever you want on your blog! For better or worse.

I've been on the lookout for ways to improve the site, and I've seen quite a few little things that are nice to use, but relatively easy to implement. They don't really make or break a website; the absence of such features might be noticed, but will not cause any disruption for the reader. On the other hand, their presence serves as a QoL enhancement.

I’ve been meaning to share this link for a while and I feel that going to the last IndieWeb Homebrew club meeting brought up some thoughts and feelings that I’ve been having.

For one, how much of my writing is not about features that I want to add to my site. What do I want to say on the inter webs? What am I trying to say?

This was a delightful combination of palace intrigue, mystery, and exploring how we deal with grief and abuse. All of it self-contained and easy to follow from start to finish.

Set in a fantasy world with elves and goblins, I feel that you could swap out the races with anything and it would still feel as familiar as the author deals with how people look at different races and cultures and how they apply to class.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about this book is the perspective of the main protagonist, Maia. He’s thrust into a very precarious position of becoming a ruler of an empire that he’s only been given a hint of during his joke of an education¹. Although there are some emotional outbursts, I’m honestly impressed he didn’t immediately order heads to roll as soon as he was in command; history has shown worse examples.

Another thing about this book that I enjoyed is that it has a mystery that is being solved but doesn’t have the perspective of the detective in the narration. I think of it as if I were the police chef and having Columbo or Sherlock come to me and report every once in a while. It’s important that the mystery is solved but a large part of what occupies the main protagonist is dealing with the responsibility of being a ruler. I don’t know if I’ve ever read so much about what is involved in clerical duties in a fictional setting.

Overview

The book tells the story of Maia, a young man of mixed Elven and Goblin heritage, who unexpectedly becomes Emperor of the Elflands, and has to contend with the court's byzantine power structure as well as racial and social tension in his realm.

Overall, I feel this is a very nice, fairly low stakes read and would recommend it.