The first part of a Halloween Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie double bill, Honey Bunch is one of those tense horror-thrillers that does a lot with a little. A cast of barely more than 6 people. A single location (creepy old house, now eccentric rehabilitation centre, natch). Bonus points for actors playing more than one role.
The experimental-cure that’s a-bit-more-creepy-than-you-first-expect is well trodden ground, and I don’t think I’d claim Honey Bunch does anything terribly unexpected: we’ve seen most of these characters and locations before, but it does its thing with conviction and is a fun watch. Always at risk of veering into being a little campy horror (the dour nurse, the intense husband - there are touches of League of Gentlemen) but they manage to keep it surprisingly straight-faced, even as the plot gets weirder.
Bechdel pass too!
My first film of LIFF2025 is an interesting one. I don’t know director Paolo Sorrentino particularly well but this is a slow paced study of an unusual life. We join the president of Italy, still mourning the death of his wife, and muddling through the last days of his administration. He’s much respected. He’s made it to where he is by being slow, methodical and precise. Or, less favourably, by avoiding taking any difficult decisions. He’s earned his nickname of “reinforced concrete”.
What follows is a character study of the president. We see him bickering with old friends and his daughter, chatting with the pope, nodding away furtively to hip-hop (despite protesting how much he detests modern music) and furtively smoking endless cigarettes on the roof.
It’s thought provoking and very human. Much of the time, I think I’d find it too slow and open-ended but settled into the cinema for the start of the festival, it felt like a good way to start.
It’s that time again! Armed with 30+ tickets (ok, we’ve scaled back a bit in recent years) and a pencil-marked festival programme, I’m about to take a week off work to do very little except sit in a dark room and watch films. I can’t wait.
I’ve already forgotten what I’ve got picked out but that shouldn’t matter. There’s a big and varied list of stuff - from horror to animation to classic to downright weird. Let’s go!
In December, I set out to move my site from the previous static site generator, Jekyll, to a brand new one, Hugo. Perhaps inevitably, this job turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. Equally inevitably, I wildly overestimated my enthusiasm for hacking away at this over Christmas. As such, here we are at the start of February and it’s (just about) finished.
The site was previously put together using Jekyll. This is a ruby-based static site generator that takes a heap of markdown files, mashes them through a bunch of templates and generates some HTML.
The new static site generator, Hugo, does more or less the same, but is written in Go. So why change? Well… mostly for the fun of doing so, if I’m honest. There’s a bunch of advantages (I can write Go, I can’t write Ruby; it’s slightly faster; it’s got a large current dev community behind it) but none are so big as to really merit this change.
I’ve also used this change to move to running this site with Infrastructure-as-code at the heart of the setup. It’s hosted in AWS Amplify, which is astonishingly easy to setup, and managed by Pulumi. There are a few benefits here:
The only necessary code or config that isn’t in the repo now is the DNS settings. These are managed in Cloudflare using Terraform/Pulumi. They’re only separate because they live alongside a bunch of other, unrelated DNS stuff.
Over at /chopping-mall is something I’m very pleased to have restored: my first blog. I wrote on Chopping Mall intermittently for several years ~2010. It’s always bothered me that it was held in Blogspot / Blogger with no easy way to export it. But no more! I found some XML export and Hugo import tools and now have all the old posts in Markdown, in the repo. There are some broken links and images to sort through, but the vast majority is there.
I’ve split out /walks into its own dedicated site section. Still with maps. Still with files you can download. I’m edging slowly away from Geojson file (lovely open format, yay! Not exported by OS Maps app, boo!) to GPX files.
My hope is that my renewed enthusiasm for this blog will get me using it to build up interesting things bit-by-bit. I’m intending to do booklists, filmlists and so on, and generally use it a bit more. Let’s see…
Having decided that it’s the right time to rebuild my music library (see the previous post), I’m now starting to scratch my head over how to do it.
There are a few areas I clearly need to get my head around and consider the option available to me. These include:
Some of these are easier to answer than others.
I’m trying not to overcomplicate this, but I think there are quite a lot of exciting opportunities here. I want to be able to:
I’d like to be able to build and amend ad-hoc collections with ease (“music for driving”, “cooking music”, “ambient-ish-stuff-to-listen-to-while-reading”).
I’d like to be able to visualise all of the above. I love a graph.
A lesser goal - perhaps more of a nice-to-have - would be to have linking between artists, records, labels, genres. Something where you can get to similar things and explore your collection. I have no idea how feasible this is, and it’s by no means essential.
I want full access to my data. I’m taking it for granted that whatever software I end up using is going to add some sort of data layer on top of file metadata tags - otherwise any query would have to read the whole library! This data must be easily accessible. I don’t mind if its a simple database written to disk or a JSON API that I can query, I just need to be able to get hold of the data independently of the library software.
The simpler, the better.
I think I’m confident in my choices here. I’m sticking with Beets.
Beets has served me well for many, many years. It’s a solid bit of open source software built by music nerds for music nerds. It slurps in new files, tags them according to rules and organises them on disk. It’s backed by a Sqlite database file, which makes querying the data yourself really easy (apart from Sqlite being a pig about concurrent access…).
I think I need to get the basic technical elements set up first. Something along the lines of:
After that, I think the fun really starts. It doesn’t actually matter how I approach it, I just need to keep adding to the library. I plan to do weeks where I explore a specific genre, the back catalog of a specific artist, revisit records I’ve not listened to in a while, explore something brand new. It’s all welcome.
Key decisions that need making:
Other things to explore: