crash--zero

Movie Time pt. 1: Sinners

Sinners was good. I knew the main plot-twist going in (don't Google it), but it still hit thanks to Michael B Jordan's killer performance... yeah, I did that.
Sinners (2025) With the immediate focus on the music, I was immediately reminded of Crossroads (1986). Sure, the mechanics are slightly different, but the end result is a tortured poet who has to pay (play?) for his soul.

More to come.

Movie Time pt. 2: KPop Demon Hunters

KPop Demon Hunters was an absolute joy to watch. The writer and directors' love of K-Pop was clear and apparent the whole way through - despite being a nominally Western production, there wasn't a single moment that pulled me out of the conceit: three generational Demon Hunters fight back Gwi-Ma's demon horde with the power of music and dance. That doesn't sound good, does it?

As a casual K-Pop fan in England, I have a reasonable familiarity with with big groups and stars, aswell as some of the tropes & paraphernalia in the genre and fandom - but I don't think even this level of knowledge is required. I nthe same wa that Shang Chi was able to parlay 4000 years of Chinese history and mysticism into a two hour popcorn film, KPop Demon Hunters does the same thing with both historical mysticism AND current fandoms.

House Party

It's Saturday night, and I'm not at a party. Solution: watch House Party with a bottle of red. Every single time I watch this film I go in expecting to be disappointed, that maybe the film has aged poorly, or the music won't hit, or the emotional parts with Kid and his dad don't work any more.
IT. ALWAYS. HITS.
House Party (1990) of Kid n Play dancing the iconic dance This film is absolutely evergreen, and doesn't get enough love.

Kid 'n Play are so so likeable, Full Force are soooo hilarious, and the overall direction is just too good. No surprise that the director went on to be president of entertainment for BET and wrote the Black Panther comic for four years. Cameo from George Clinton? Get out of here.

I read yesterday there was a recent attempt to revive... with new actors. How on earth they think they can make a House Party without my beautiful boys. Fuck me, wikipedia also says the roles were written for Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince... that would NOT have worked, even without all the recent... unpleasentness.

Yes, I know that's a 14Mb .gif - it's worth it.
Ok, thanks to Reddit (again), it's now a svelte 1.94Mb using the Ezgif.com online tool, thanks keeperofhoney!

CSS? C NO NO!

Just spent an hour troubleshooting why the home page is about 18 pixels farther to the left than the stream page. Changed columns, checked borders, margins etc. Turns out it was just because the home page now has enough content to warrant a scrollbar, nudging everything very slightly over to the left. Won't be forgetting that one any time soon!

Also, we have a Cbox powered chat box on the home screen now - go say hi!

Twitter 3.0

There's a little note on the homepage, where I thought I'd put momentary thoughts, transient ideas, whimsies, and nothingnesses. But then in a fit of hubris, and despite the beauty of impermanence, I couldn't bring myself to banish these petty musings to the ether. So here: consume my thoughts.

You cannot like or comment, you just have to read it and move on.

Personal Syntax

You should know that, when I'm talking, in my head I view certain words in a particular context as bold words. Or italicised words. Or Underlined words. I'm going to do the same here, because I have the power.

I know that this is simultaneously unneccessary and exhausting for the reader, but I'm not a good enough writer to convey my meaning without these crutches. I have to embrace the syntactically melodramatic, else I feel I'm not being as clear as I could be. I use them liberally, even in a work setting, and I'm probably hated for it. C'est la vie.

Reality Drift Reality Drift

⟁ System instability detected. Memory leak probable. Proceed as if dreaming.

> boot.sys initialized  
> memory scan: ███████░░░░░░  
> anomaly detected @ sector x17  
> entropy leak... patch failed  
> __recovery_mode_engaged

Collections!

I'm pretty happy with the way the home page looks and works now, so I think next I'll start adding some of my collections next because I'm a hoarder. I'm not very good at it, so I don't have any complete collections - but there's still a bunch of junk I'd like to share. I toyed with adding a simple poll (Laura Kelly's Simple Poll on CodePen looked great), but I have too many things to choose from!

Drop a note in the chatbox which you'd like to see first; comics (almost exclusively 90's, mostly US Marvel, but also a large collection of UK Transformers), my burgeoning cassette tape collection, my similarly burgeoning Gameboy cart collection, my Dune books, my Nintendo DS consoles... or maybe just pics of my cats? They're black & white, so will fit with the colour scheme perfectly.

For real, first comment to suggest a collection wins.

Where Y'All From?

Home Page Layout

I'm going to try moving the navbar links down into the left column of the home screen, and remove the right column altogether, so that it views properly on mobile, ie. nav links at top, content underneath. Will peobably resize left column to match this stream page, tying the whole thing together a bit better. Still haven't decided on a way to present shrines yet - I don't want to use too many pictures, and I don't want it to be a simple copy of the stream page (but secretly I do because I love the look of the stream page).

My parenthetical admission begs the question; should the whole site just be one big long stream page? And if I did that, would it have difficulty loading when it got too big? Questions for future neur0 I guess.

Old Man Yells At Cloud

I realise the tone of this page is somewhat negative, I will be more positive from now on :)

Real Twitter

I will never refer to Twitter by its new name, mainly because it's stupid and confusing; nothing on earth is big enough to claim a single letter from twenty-six letters of the modern latin alphabet as a known reference in the modern lexicon. Get in the sea.

Crimes Of The Future

I watched Cronenberg's Crimes Of The Future and loved it. Perhaps not as much as filthy classics like Rabid and Dead Ringers, but definitely great as a companion piece to eXistenZ. One day I'll devote more thought to the Cronenberg oevre and will either wither into nothingness or ascend to a higher plane.

Talk To Me (chatbox)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

The greatest soundtrack ever recorded: TMNT OST on Cassette This album is the one of the earliest pieces of music that I embraced right deep down into my soul (around the same time I was mainlining Thriller and Bad), and I still listen to it today just as much as I dip back into Michel Jackson's albums. More even.

It's a journey of almost pure New Jack Swing pop tracks, and then a little two track outro of John Du Prez' songified score. Fun fact: John Du Prez (Trevor Jones) also worked extensively with the Monty Python gang on scores for Life of Brian, Time Bandits, Meaning of Life, A Fish Called Wanda etc etc. How on earth did he end up on a TMNT film? He also scored Weird Al's UHF. Kinda mind blowing tbh.

I love this OST so much that it might just deserve its own page and a song-by-song breakdown. Check back tomorrow!

A Not-At-All-Divisive List

Star Trek Ranking:

Come at me.

Image via Star Trek Universe

The Last Of Us S02E01

Season 1 of TLOU never really gripped me, but the high quality production, hot papa, and sweet sweet Bill kept me going until the end. Seems it's going to be Moira Rose keeping me going for season 2, and if she dies I will be very sad.

Disclaimer: I have never played any of the games, nothing against them (when people say that it usually means the opposite, but not here), they've just never quite captured my attention for long enough.

Post +2 Weeks: I just started watching The Expanse instead.

Content Disclaimers

At some point these will be unneccessary (surely!), but in addition to all previously mentioned addenda; I really try to use wiki references when talking about art, media, knowledge. I hate what Amazon did to IMDb, and now I don't trust any other reference source to always stay accurate, impartial or free.

Joseph Unger's Rendering in Mixed Media (1984)

I read a Reddit post about a cool book. It looked really interesting, and that's normally where the story would end, as I'm a frugal person with limited shelf space. In this instance though, the book was, like, less than £3 on AbeBooks, so I bought it.

The decorative images (sparse as they may be) on this site are mainly photographed with no care whatsoever from the gorgeous book, and then tweaked within an inch of their lives using gimp, added some transparency, and thrown online. I apologise to Mr Unger, I'm sure this was never what he hoped for his art, yet here we are.

Discworld Determination

When I was a kid, I somehow ended up with a copy of Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters, as well as the graphic novel of The Colour of Magic. A couple more Discworld books ended up on my shelves, and although I absolutely loved them, I never sought any more Pratchett books out - he was superceded by Frank Herbert I think.

I do kinda wish I had leaned more into Discworld when I was younger, it felt like the fantasy version of Hitchhiker's Guide, which I devoured all the way up to So Long And Thanks For All The Fish around the same time. It does however feel like an easily collectible and readable goal: there are only 41 books! Is June too late to make a New Year's Resolution? I think not!.

Will report back.

UPDATE: I subscribed to the Unseen University collection, starting with The Colour of Magic. First tome arrived three days ago, and it's beautiful. I don't think I'd ever realised how close the experience of reading Discworld novels is to watching a D&D playthrough. I'll wait until I've finished it to share thoughts.

New Homepage

Yeah, now that I can see the chatbox and some images on the streams page, I know I want it to be the main home page. I can create differently formatted pages for shrines/collections etc another time. Old homepage disappearing by this time tomorrow.

I'll need to think about adding a note somewhere fitting that describes the rough feed in chronological order top to bottom...

edit: turns out this is the note.

Swamp Thing

I'm learning about keeping houseplants. I have eight of them, all in one room. I feed them, and gently clean their leaves, and apparently if I'm lucky I will see a couple of them fenestrate in 2-3 years. Hot.

Images?

Can I somehow integrate images into this page, without breaking the aesthetic? All Grey All The Time

Top-To-Bottom or Bottom-To-Top?

First note is that I'm wondering in realtime whether I should add new 'notes' to this page at the bottom or the top; do I want to force all newcomers to read everything from day 1, or just gift visitors with my latest wisdom right up front? I don't know yet, but you'll probably know by the time you've read this - look around, are you at the bottom or the top of the page?

Secondly, and possibly more importantly; is this a better 'homepage' than the current homepage? The posts seems to flow more easily here, although this may be the Malbec speaking. I'll call you tomorrow, ok?