Trailer for Rogue One

No more teaser trailers or trailer teases, this is the real thing. And here’s my HOT TAKE, basically my thoughts as they happened watching the trailer:

  1. Forrest Whitaker doing a weird breathy accent is super distracting. Is that supposed to be a British accent?
  2. Oh God, what if they try to make Ben Mendelsohn do a British accent?
  3. This looks every inch a Gareth Edwards film.
  4. It looks like they’re trying to set up K-2SO as the comic relief. If those are the best laughs they could pick out for the trailer, oh dear.
  5. Felicity Jones seems like she’s stuck in the Tomb Raider school of action acting.

Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic about this one. It looks great, really nailing the 70s aesthetic with a cinéma vérité feel. But Edwards’ last film, Godzilla, was let down by its characters and nothing in this trailer suggests things have improved.

What's Making Me Happy - Week of August 1st

In an effort to push out the jive and bring in the love, I’m going to more of an effort to talk about the things that are bringing me joy.

Stranger Things

Stranger Things

It never quite shakes off its influences (basically all of Spielberg’s early 80s films - Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters and Poltergeist), but as a piece of summer fluff, Stranger Things was surprisingly entertaining. It’s less cliffhanger-y than the other Netflix original shows, but it’s managed to achieve a pretty compelling vibe that draws you back for more. I’m interested to see what they do for season 2 now that they’ve basically tapped the 80s Spielberg well dry.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Sleeping Giants

Sleeping Giants is a big dopey sci-fi thriller about the discovery of huge pieces of a statue from an ancient civilisation. And the whole thing is told in an epistolary manner, where each chapter is the transcript of an interview. So the information is drip-fed to the reader, increasing the tension. It’s not going to win any literary awards, but it’s so fast-paced and cinematic, it’s a great summer read.

Brie Larson as Captain Marvel

A lot of great news came out of Comic Con. We got a rad Doctor Strange trailer, a pretty decent Wonder Woman trailer. But my absolute favourite news so far has been the announcement that Brie Larson will be playing Carol Danvers in the Captain Marvel film. This is some perfect casting.

Films You’d Love Your Kids to See

The Lighthouse Cinema here in Dublin are running a “Films you’d love your kids to see” season. Now, I question the logic of programming for kids and scheduling shows way too late for kids to actually attend. Still, I’m not going to turn up an opportunity to see The Goonies in the cinema.

Preacher

If, four months ago, you had asked me about my expectations for AMC’s adaptation of Preacher, I would have probably given you the vocal equivalent of the poop emoji. But the finale this week capped what turned out to be an unexpectedly great season of an unexpectedly great show. It’s not a straight one-for-one adaptation of the comic, but they absolutely nailed the tone of the books. Definitely worth checking out.

Hello Hugo

Last week, I began the process of moving this site from Jekyll to Hugo. Jekyll is great. Really great, actually. It was my first real experiment with static sites and it was really fun and taught me a lot. But I’ve been starting to feel its limits. I pumped in everything from the past iterations of my blog, through Wordpress and Tumblr, leaving me with over 1,400 posts. So building the site with Jekyll each time I wanted to update it was slowwwww. Jekyll’s other big draw – its GitHub integration is amazing – is great if you’re hosting your site there. But I’m not. I’m self-hosting. So I started looking at Hugo.

I also had a look at Middleman, which has some impressive names using it, but was just a deeply unpleasant experience as an end-user1.

So for funtimes, I wanted to see how long it would take a fresh, vanilla install of the three most popular static site generators – Jekyll, Middleman and Hugo – to render the 1,400+ individual markdown files that make up this blog.

Jekyll
35.35 real 31.04 user 2.50 sys

middleman
22.47 real 30.61 user 3.97 sys

hugo
8.12 real 8.96 user 1.45 sys

It’s hard to argue with this kind of performance improvement, but what sealed the deal was the fact they include a built-in hugo import jekyll command that can get you started migrating your site across. I had my entire site migrated across in less than an hour.


  1. Middleman feels as if it’s been written for robots and not humans. To build your site in Jekyll, you type jekyll build, which is easy to remember. To build it in Hugo, you just type hugo, which is almost impossible to forget. To build your site in MM, you type bundle exec middleman build, which yes, is easy enough to remember after you’ve done it a couple of times but my God, it’s so clunky and basically tells you everything you need to know about what it’s like to use Middleman. ↩︎

pico 8

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with Pico-8. It has completely replaced Processing as my go-to tool for creating toys in code. If you’re of the same vintage as me (i.e. you lived through the 8-bit era and your year of birth seems distressingly far down web forms), then you might get a kick out of it too. Here are some of the reasons I like it so much.

1. It has everything you need

It’s got a built-in editors for code, sound effects, music and levels. You can construct an entire game without ever leaving the application.

2. It’s web-aware

With the touch of a button1, you can generate a gif of your program as it’s running. A small, perfectly-sized gif that’s perfect for tweeting. Speaking of which…

3. < 140 characters to do cool things

The #pico8 hashtag on Twitter has some great examples of the things people are doing with Pico-8. In less than 140 characters, you can have an entire program.

4. It reminds me of the good old days

I still remember sitting in front of a Commodore 64 for hours and typing out a program from Commodore User Magazine. It was a great way of learning a language and, looking back I realise, a great way of teaching patience. Well, the Pico-8 Fanzine also has a


  1. or well, two. One to start the recording, one to stop it. ↩︎

Versioning, Licensing, and Sketch 4.0 »

It seems like we’re moving to the world where app subscription models are the norm and I’m worried about what this means for the future of some of my favourite apps. In December, YNAB announced it was moving to a web-based, subscription model. In January, it was forced to change its strategy a little in the face of a severely negative response.

But the Sketch model seems like a pretty great compromise. Buy a license and you’ll receive a year’s worth of free upgrades. After that, no more upgrades (besides bug-fix upgrades) but your software will continue to work. This seems like a really clever and consumer-friendly way of addressing this problem.

The Trailers for Ghostbusters (2016) and the Art of Editing Comedy »

Tony Zhou (of the excellent Every Frame a Painting) takes a look at the difference between the US and UK trailers for the new Ghostbusters and how a few frames can make all the difference between a joke that hits and a joke that lands.

Interview With Lacey Noonan »

Boston.com’s interview with Lacey Noonan, self-publishing superstar and author of niche erotica like I Don’t Care If My Best Friend’s Mom is a Sasquatch, She’s Hot and I’m Taking a Shower With Her Because It’s the New Millennium and its sequel I Don’t Care if My Sasquatch Lover Says the World is Exploding, She’s Hot But I Play Bass and There’s Nothing Hotter Right Now Than Rap-Rock Because It’s the New Millennium.

BDC: Do your friends and family know you write these novels, or is it private? You mention your husband in your bio, Does he know?

Lacey: My husband knows. Some friends know. That’s about it. He actually helped with some of the finer football details in the Gronkalish book. But I am the heat commander. I control the boners.

This lady is amazing.

Write a tune. Fuckin' start with that

I’ve said it before, but Noel Gallagher gives the best interviews.

A Brief History of John Baldessari

Four little words that guarantee I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to make time for: “narrated by Tom Waits”.

John Baldessari was Tumblr before the internet was ever a thing, and this is a terrific introduction.

Drop whatever you’re doing and make time for this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing

This is so good. And I feel like a lot of what Ta-Nehisi Coates says in this video is applicable to any sort of creative work.