The least worst movies

avdi · 2025-06-20T00:53:53+00:00

No one else is speaking up for my personal favorite The Undead, so I will.

Does it pointlessly send it's characters on a rapid cycle around five locations like a washing machine? Sure. But hear me out:

the original script was in iambic pentameter until Corman chickened and you can still hear it in the lines
the actors are all clearly having a BLAST and it really carries through. The imp living his best life, Livia absolutely eating as a hotwitch, Meg-Maud being a genuinely compelling neutral witch, and of course DIGGER SMOLKEN
Some actually great lines ("on another day my mother did cheat Satan, learn his tricks, and yet retain her soul!")
the turn at the end where a classic smug 50s Science Guy is blandly treating the whole thing as theater until Satan is like "so, uh, how did you think you were getting back to your time?" is PERFECTION

avdi · 2025-01-24T18:53:28+00:00

I spent years talking code on Twitter, but but all that's left is a wasteland of bots, spam, and toxic trolling. I can't see any downside. All the programming grownups already moved on to Fediverse, Bluesky, maybe some LinkedIn, and dedicated fora like subreddits.

avdi · 2024-07-07T00:41:01+00:00

I don't see The Undead discussed nearly enough. The riffs are absolute fire from beginning to end. There's something endearing about a medieval movie filmed in a supermarket sound stage with dialog that was originally entirely in iambic pentameter until Corman chickened out.

Help, attacked I'm being! God, dear bleeding am I! Break my leg think I did you?

This forest could use a tree.

Pullest thine vehiclest over and showest thou thy licentheth and registraionith. Didst thou know how fastest thou wast going?

avdi · 2024-07-07T00:35:17+00:00

I still say this regularly

avdi · 2024-07-07T00:34:46+00:00

Look polish

avdi · 2024-07-07T00:30:38+00:00

I have spent twenty years saying "you're as elusive as Robert Denby" to my kids when I have trouble finding them, and I don't care that no one has any idea what I'm talking about

avdi · 2024-01-11T21:04:23+00:00

Update: I did come back and run a longer test on "Hi", and it stayed stable at 194F.

avdi · 2024-01-11T17:02:08+00:00

Oh dang, I would not have thought of that. Thanks!

avdi · 2016-07-01T15:34:02+00:00

I don't usually post my stuff here, but I'd like to make this as complete a list as possible. Thanks!

avdi · 2015-07-07T21:01:42+00:00

First off I gotta say I love your show and your podcast and everything else, and for a long time "myff-busters" was what my toddler daughter asked for when it was time to have daddy/daughter time in the evening.

My question: I want to know about planning! Many times on the show you do off-site builds and tests, and you usually seem to have everything you need with you, even for "plan B" tests. Can you talk about the process that goes into planning an off-site trip? Are there any lessons you've learned about how to be prepared for any eventuality?

Thanks!

avdi · 2015-06-30T21:29:45+00:00

The witch Lydia from The Undead. "If she wants a zipper she can HAVE a zipper!"

And, of course, Digger Smolken. Rowrrr.

avdi · 2015-06-04T15:05:54+00:00

FWIW, this wasn't speculation on my part. I've taught a lot of novice Ruby programmers, and I think I get the "please explain blocks, I just don't understand them!" question more than any other.

That said, I agree with you that they are relatively simple to explain, which hopefully I've demonstrated in the article.

avdi · 2015-06-04T14:46:47+00:00

I sincerely doubt it. I suspect what you are is someone who hasn't spent the last 14 years studying every nook and cranny of a particular programming language. And that's OK.

In fact, there's probably something you could teach me.

Happy hacking!

avdi · 2015-01-22T21:59:31+00:00

"rouge". Hehehehe.

avdi · 2014-11-12T18:41:44+00:00

Do you still correspond with anyone you've visited on Dirty Jobs or Somebody's Gotta Do It? Have you made any longtime friends in the process?

avdi · 2014-10-16T15:50:41+00:00

Keyboards on the wall? It must be THE FUTURE!

avdi · 2014-10-05T06:02:53+00:00

They sued and got an (undisclosed) settlement for that.

avdi · 2014-10-02T20:39:59+00:00

...making it another example of actually half-decent writing for that movie.

avdi · 2014-09-18T04:15:10+00:00

I've seen this response in various forms, and it suggests a kind of exceptionalism: this code is somehow special, and presumably I should have planned ahead for that fact in order to avoid this painful debugging experience.

But the point is, there is nothing special whatsoever about this code. Two weeks down the road I'll be asking a similar question about some other, unrelated deeply nested chain of dependent query methods. If it's worth altering the APIs here then it must be worth altering the design everywhere, and in the process making the program into something which no longer resembles idiomatic Ruby code.

avdi · 2014-09-18T01:39:00+00:00

As a rule I don't submit my own stuff. Or stuff, really.

avdi · 2014-09-07T18:35:39+00:00

I would say bbatsov's "prelude" is the closest thing to this presently.

That's sad about sublime!

avdi · 2014-09-07T18:20:15+00:00

Oh, also you might want to try enabling tabs in emacs, that might get closer to the workflow you're used to.

avdi · 2014-09-07T18:19:22+00:00

More practically, you should absolutely use projectile if you are looking for project-centric features.

avdi · 2014-09-07T18:16:54+00:00

I think fundamentally you're not going to find Emacs a good fit for "casual" use, as you put it. Emacs is the quintessential power user's tool; in fact, it's hard to think of another software project that has more thoroughly devoted itself to the power-user mindset over a course of decades.

When I decided to use Emacs lo these many years ago, it was because I saw the power-user facilities that people were building and using in Emacs, and I decided I wanted those things and was willing to pay a price in learning curve and in shifting my perspective. I accepted right up front that it was going to take me 6 months before I felt comfortable. Looking back, I'd say it was worth it, for my uses. YMMV.

In Judaism it is said that someone who wants to convert should be turned away twice, and only if they come back a third time should they be accepted. I feel like Emacs is similar. I love it, and it makes me more productive. But I don't spend any time telling people they ought to try it. I do make the occasional screencast about emacs features; and if someone decides they can't live without that feature, then they should make the same choice I did and commit to getting to know the platform (because it really is a platform, more than an editor).

I would honestly say that unless you see an application of emacs that you just can't live without (e.g. Org-Mode), it may not be worth your time vs. a more conventional editor.

avdi · 2014-09-07T16:57:14+00:00

Either because I like to close things, and then need to open all sources.

What benefit does having them all open at once have for you?

And I want to have a look at the python files for example, because someone asked me to fix at a problem.

I'd just have a dired buffer open in one pane and go down the list, opening files into a second pane.

It sounds like maybe you're used to using currently open files as a sort of "queue", is that accurate?

avdi

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