They’re rebooting Ernest Saves Christmas now?

Pomegranate seeds are the trick hidden in this treat.

Equal-Earth is just as flawed as Mercator, just in different ways. Mercator made sense in an era of navigation based on compass measurements, astrological observations, accurate time keeping, and dead reckoning. Mercator still makes sense as a projection associated with local navigation, even in an age of GPS, for the way it preserves angles. Equal-Earth makes sense for the symbol of a global organization, but is mostly useless for navigation. Equal-Earth is really only good for global economics and politics. Waterman butterfly is my favorite for obvious reasons. Then there are the satirical map projections.

I delight in reporting genuine emails from my company that look like sophisticated phishing attempts, bonus points if they send a follow-up assuring us that the previous sketchy email was in fact genuine.

If the fake phishing emails can be caught by my very rudimentary filter they weren’t particularly good anyway. Besides, I still have to look at those emails and report them, otherwise my IT still counts it as a strike against me. Win-win. IT continues to keep me on my toes and I don’t have to take another 30min training course because I ignored an email for a day or two.

In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.

Dracula was published in 1897 and put the vampire count’s origin in Transylvania, Romania. Bela Lugosi was born and raised in what is now Lugoj, Romania, and would go on to play Dracula on Broadway in 1927, then the the Dracula movie began production in 1930.

Bela certainly made his mark on the character, but the accent was just typecasting not an artistic choice.

There is a whole podcast series about Lugosi and other movies of this era, You Must Remember This. I’m not sure if this specific detail is covered explicitly. But my impression (and very hazy memory) leads me to believe that it may be a situation where Lugosi was cast because he looked like the expectation of a vampire from the other movie, but then Lugosi performed better and caught the public’s attention better. Kind of like Hydrox vs. Oreos. Hydrox was first to market, but ultimately lost to the copycat. To be fair to Lugosi, he still added several other elements of style we now consider essential to the quintessential vampire character. He just happened to naturally have a widows peak and authentic “old world exotic accent” (he barely spoke English when he got his start in Hollywood), which gave him an advantage.

EDIT: I should clarify that Karina Longworth’s podcast, You Must Remember This, is about WAY more than Bela. That was just a short series within that podcast. It’s a great listen is you have any interest in film history or long form non-fiction podcasts in general.

It’s definitely more than a horror project. But, it’s also definitely still horror.

Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Gaffer tape. Gaffer tape everywhere. And for those LEDs that you actually want to see, but not light up the whole room, two pieces of gaffer tape with a hair’s breadth between them. Makes for an indicator light that can only really be seen when your looking straight at it.

The twist better be something better than “She/He’s been dead the whole time.”

Around 20-30 years ago, people took a little more care in composing a photo, even the amateurs. Hard drive space was still kind of pricey. Smart phones weren’t ubiquitous yet. It took some level of real investment to create the kind of photos you miss. Lego landscapes are hard. They’re tiny and big at the same time. Focus, depth of field, and lack of a background all work against you in ways a little diorama doesn’t. Combine that with more people that haven’t actually studied the craft of photography, taking more photos than ever and you get flooded with snapshots. Those lazy snapshots still happened 20-30 years ago to be sure, but nobody’s remembering them because they were forgettable then and forgotten now, kind of a survivorship bias. The same reason people argue that the music they listened to in grade school always was and forever will be the best music.

The idea is to have the server safely shutdown BEFORE it loses power, so that BIOS setting wouldn’t mean anything. The server does not loose power while it it running, so it will never “restore last state after AC loss”. The idea is that you can run a low power device (the raspberry pi) for which you don’t care if power is cut abruptly and that can talk to both the UPS and the wake-on-lan of the server directly over ethernet. It being local means those WOL are much more likely to work than trying to send them from outside your network when you’re remote. It’s a lot simpler to set this up once than it is to recover a server with a corrupted file system due to power loss or lose access to your server for weeks because a thunderstorm knocked out power for 30min at the beginning of a long trip. That pi can also take care of other always on services like a pi-hole, home assistant, etc.

I really want to know why this matters in the slightest for this particular movie. Why are you so invested? Is your nearsighted toddler going to have a public meltdown because they can’t see the movie in 3D like the other kids?

Why should I care?

I was hoping the article might explain, but it’s just predictable marketing fluff

Could they not think of an original name? Calling it YouTube-dl is just unnecessarily lazy and confusing. This appears to be mostly a docker image of yt-dlp, which is itself a fork of youtube-dl.

Have you seen the preview? It gives away pretty much the entire plot. This movie seems to share a lot more in common with Coraline than the theme of the title. Strip away from Coraline the fanciful neighbors, talking cat, and layer the supernatural world directly on top of the real world (in place of Coraline’s Being John Malkovich style umbilical tunnel). Then smother the characters with generic horror elements popular today. Now you have this movie, which is “totally not Coraline minus everything that reminds us of Neil Gaiman, we promise.” They clearly made this movie because someone wanted a live action Caroline, but didn’t want to deal with the ick and marketing disaster of producing the work of a once beloved, now known creep and abuser, author.

Another one for the Plex/Jellyfin collection.

No. It’s a film adaptation of a short story that appears to basically be romantasy pinnochio fan fic.