Max @max@smeap.com

Arguing with strangers for who knows what reason that Ender’s Game is a bad book with gross politics just like its disgusting homophobic kooky religion writer.

I’m proud of myself for coming up with the dunk that the morality play is “end(er)s justify the means”. It works on so many levels.

That last bit a weird reminder that the best friend and arguably the best director Will Ferrell has worked with is busy making mostly serious political films (though still a Producer on projects like this) and “Fire Saga” could have been something closer to the middle with just a few tweaks to actually confront Eurovision Song Contest politics.

The sub plot that felt like it most overstayed its welcome for me (after the incest jokes if you can consider “possibly inbred tiny Icelandic hometown” a sub plot more than set dressing) was the most telegraphed for anyone familiar with Eurovision: the Russian singer that cannot admit to being gay because “no one is gay in Russia”. Played well, just not surprising, and maybe lacking much bite.

Plot was exactly the paint-by-numbers you would expect from “post-MacKay” era Ferrell, where it seems mostly an excuse for Ferrell to get a nice vacation. (Casa De Mi Padre, the “ode” to the Mexican telenovela, also cowritten by Andrew Steele is the clearest and obvious comparison.) That the movie includes Ferrell shouting a line that Europe is not just the party town for Americans seems an obvious and intentional fourth wall breaking admission. 🤣

Deeper Will Ferrel Eurovision thoughts

Had time to digest my thoughts more.

About the only qualm with “Fire Saga” was that it had a few too many incest jokes, hence the (?).

It was obviously differential to Eurovision itself, which should be unsurprising given the name and logo were licensed. And captured the feel of the contest rather well, that it fills at least this boring American’s annual interest in Eurovision for a year without one.

I got a big kick out of the interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode.

One Easter egg that nearly killed me involved the "Skip Intro" button.

Felt like some closure I didn't expect on the main series from such a strange offshoot. "That was a fascinating transition."

The Will Ferrell Eurovision movie was cute and kind of sweet (?).

The other day Kroger suggested I needed fresh cornbread from their bakery for this weekend. (It was on sale and very prominently displayed.)

This was a suggestion that I appreciate.

I miss queues on video sites. A simple user experience: first in, first out, add/remove/move things up or down. All of the “Watch Next” algorithms at Netflix/YouTube/Hulu are terrible and don’t give me enough control. Sigh.

Today I learned we are in the dystopia where the third largest US beverage company is now called Kuerig Dr. Pepper. Perhaps it is fitting that the Doctor who most tried to sell sodas as health products has become second fiddle to a plastics tech company that sometimes includes coffee beans in between its plastics.

Reminds me, I need more Dr. Pepper on my next grocery run.

I was already really bad about talking to inanimate objects, but I am very aware that I’m going to come out of this period of living alone during a pandemic much, much worse.

(Thanks phone, send toot please.)

Saw one review complain one the screens was only 1080p vertical and 1440p should be considered the bare minimum for "real work", and I just stared in awe because every single photo in that review had a horizontal taskbar. I don't know if you know this, but I know this one easy trick to save you 200px vertically for your "real work".

I've been drooling over ultra-wide monitors and probably close to buying one. Something that has been low key bugging me is how many users that own one still use a horizontal Windows taskbar. I've thought vertical was the only answer when screens went 16:9, I just look at all these photos of wasted vertical space in 21:9 or wider and weep.

In procrastinating dealing with my piles of boxes of books I got it in my head to organize my piles of ebooks in Calibre. Not my daily reading Kindle collection, just the ones sitting on my hard drives from various sources.

After deduping and merging multiple formats to single book entries: 600 “books”. Wow.

More that half of that was my RPG collection and includes a bunch of one-shots and short documents, but I still didn’t expect just shy of 300 non-RPG books.

Lifehack: I’ve yet to meat the sub sandwich that isn’t improved with mint chutney

Now that Microsoft Teams finally supports personal and family use, what is the over/under that the old Skype brand is completely dead, even for consumers?

NancyFX’s creator joined the whining team of Jeremy D. Miller that “Microsoft makes open source too hard for .NET” 🙄

NancyFX and FubuMVC both fall squarely into analogs “Ruby FLOSS is terrible because no one will take my Rails alternative seriously” and “Python FLOSS is broken because Django and Flask keep implementing my best ideas” 🤪 Especially now that ASP.NET Core is FLOSS

We get it, no one wants to use your also-ran. That happens in every FLOSS ecosystem.