Sunshine, 2007 - ★★★
A friend summarized this movie perfectly: good suspense film with hard Sci-Fi elements that go down the drain with the introduction of the villain. Why Sunshine, Why?
I enjoyed the buildup and the start. Not too hard to follow. The story is a bit of a stretch: if the sun was dying, I think the range of life-supporting temperatures on Earth would drop too fast for us to build a spaceship, let alone two. And I won't go into the sun becoming a red giant when it runs out of fuel, which seems to be the case here. So OK, fine, moving on.
The space ride with the crew was thrilling science-wise, though it was a bit macho for reasons, but in a way, that was a (small) part of the point, so alright, I could live with that.
The sun provided a lot of problems, and these could have been explored more and caused more suspense; instead, the movie yanks a villain seemingly out of nowhere and gives said villain some unexplained godly powers. The sun would have made a better villain if you ask me.
This is a solid 3-star: solid entertainment, but nothing too mind-expanding.
An NYC corner 📷
When @matt added Microhooks to his popular Tiny Theme, I decided to give it a try. My current theme, which is based on the Alpine theme, is a messy mesh of CSS fragments and several modified HTML files. I thought I could use a fresh start and get things more organized.
I’m having fun exploring and tweaking my test blog so far. This time I hope to keep all the changes in one CSS file with comments. Here’s what it looks like for now:
/*
Importing Righteous font from Google Fonts for the site title. I still need to work here to get the Title set up; there's a Tinyhook for that.
*/
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Righteous&display=swap');
/* Setting up my beige background color and my fonts to dark gray from Tiny's white: */
body {
background-color: #eee8d5;
color: #666
}
/* Change the color of h2 link posts and dates to the red-crimson I use */
h2 a, a.post-date.u-url {
color: #8b0000;
text-decoration: none;
}
/* Chane the color of the links, and remove underlines; when hovering over a link, underline it to indicate it's a link
With links, we need to define these different instances of link selectors. These are: link, visited, hover, and active.
In TinyTheme, the little "blurbs" on the main page listing the posts are inside an "e-content" div. We want to specify these links only. Otherwise, other links will be affected: */
.e-content a:link, a:active, a:visited {
color: #8b0000;
text-decoration: none;
}
.e-content a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
}
I’m happy with how my org-mode notes look like in GitLab:
I need to resolve a few things, like creating another folder for these notes and tying it into my repository, but after I’m done, the hope is for much more streamlined informational notes.
Mostly finished Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚. There’s the part at the end of this edition where he talks about logotherapy, but I think I understand enough of his story itself to get the core of his teaching. More thoughts may follow.
I got Starter Villain by John Scalzi 📚 on a whim after I found his blog through a comment somewhere around here or Mastodon. So far, it’s a fun read with lots of chuckles.
Emacs abbrevs hacks
I just watched Prot’s excellent video about abrrevs, and I feel my “Emacs IQ” has expanded a bit.
Here are the notes from my settings:
Turn Emacs’ abbrevs on and place them in my Personal folder. The personal folder syncs to my machines so that these shortcuts are available on all of them (the default is somewhere in emacs.d/).
(setq-default abbrev-mode t)
(setq abbrev-file-name "~/Sync/Personal/.abbrev_defs")
In addition, add “@” to my abbrevs, so that I can use “@” with a person number to get their user ID. For example, “Joe” will do nothing, but “@joe” will enter “jr2234.” Useful because I remember a person’s name, not their email address or user ID. Credit: Prot.
(abbrev-table-put global-abbrev-table :regexp "\\(?:^\\|[\t\s]+\\)\\(?1:[@].*\\|.*\\)")
Useful Abbrev reminders:
You can escape abbrevs with C-q after typing the abbrev. For example, if “rnd” expands to “Research and Development” but you actually want to type “rnd” in the buffer, type rnd followed by C-q.
If you want to add a prefix to an abbrev, for example, if you want the end result to be “non-Research and Development”, type: non- and then M-' (this will result in a hyphen showing; this is good) and then rnd to produce the abbrev.
No, it’s not like Slack. Or Teams. And please don’t tell me it’s like IRC.
Discord makes me feel old in a way I don’t like. Most of the people I share common interests with use it all day every day, but to me, it’s just a lot of chaotic noise. I can’t make sense of it.
First Lechtturm-world problems
I started using my new Leuchtturm1917 last weekend, as predicted. There’s a difference in the paper texture, though I’m not sure it’s such a huge difference from the Moleskin, and the color of the pages seems to be just slightly more creamy, which is nice.
Initially, I thought having pre-purposed space for titles and index (contents) would be beneficial, but it’s actually in the way. Let me show you:
there are 26 lines in three dedicated pages in the content section at the start of the notebook. Naturally, each line can be dedicated to a letter to organized topics. Here is where I encountered a problem: I have three lines - three spots - for each letter across three pages. What if I have five topics under P and none under Z? For now, I think I can squeeze more than a couple in each section, but this is not what was intended. I also need to keep the pages with the topics, which means at some point, I will need to split the length of the “topic” line in the middle to fit more topics and page numbers.
Another issue that occurred to me quickly as I was writing my first three entries was the titles. I don’t start every day neatly with a fresh page; I often stop writing mid-page and start again a couple of days later in the middle. In that case, I write the date and topic manually. Now, the mid-page title doesn’t stand out as the title at the top, giving it a sort of secondary-header feeling.
I’m sure some dedicated Leuchtturm lover will quickly set me straight (Jack?). I’m surprised I didn’t think of this earlier.
Ok ok! Enough internet rabbit holes! I’m gonna start doing some work. I swear. Right after I grab something to eat. And check on my laundry. And make the bed. and….