monkinetic the blog

Went to the theater last night, like a real adult.

Except it was a shockingly hilarious parody puppet show version of The princess Bride (By S. Morgenstern) by the All Puppet Players, complete with alcohol, musical numbers, 4th wall breaking, flubs, ad-libs and improv.

And I will never hear the lines “I’m going to do him left handed… if I use my right it’s over too quickly!” the same again (Vizzini the puppet: “We didn’t change those lines – at all!!)

Guess it’s time to revisit the blog engine here. I wrote Goldfrog a few years ago and it’s been chugging along on this Digital Ocean instance fairly well, but at the time I had in mind a two-way sync between gitlab, where I maintain a separate repository of my archived content, and the filesystem/db in Goldfrog.

It worked, sort of, for a while, but the deployment on DO is NOT simple to remember, uses Ansible and code from 2 different git repos to set up or update the server, and was just 3 times more clever than it should have been.

I also implemented a flexible/configurable POSSE feature that is supposed to send updates to my mastodon account but … isn’t right now? And the logging setup on the site is abysmal.

I still like parts of my system. If I did it again, I’d still want:

• My custom posting UI that works like the ancient Radio Userland sites did: post form at the top of the home page list of posts:

And my version in Goldfrog:

• A small web app - not a static site generator
• Content stored ultimately as markdown files so they can be stored in git or similar
• Content indexed in sqlite for searching. serving various archive pages (tags, etc)

UPDATE: As long as I’m dreaming, I wish it was easier to run a small web app like this off a container. I probably could with Digital Ocean’s app platform, I haven’t looked into it lately, and I’d still have to solve the “index in a sqlite db file” problem.

In the 1960s, Disney discovered and used an incredible “greenscreen” technique to film the Mary Poppins actors in an animated scene, perfectly capturing flowing semi-transparent clothes and motion blur and sharp animated characters. They then lost the tech.

Corridor Crew found out about it, someone figured out how to replicate it, and they worked to demonstrate it. And it’s fucking amazing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk

Posted to our #ttrpg group text:

“Curran is 6 days into a drunken binge after being carried kitten-style by that shape-shifted tiger.

He’s been kicked out of 4 taverns for beating other musicians with what was described as “a fucking oboe, and it hurt!” while singing scraps of drinking songs, and two more for storming the stage, yelling “wrong lyrics, you tone-deaf bag of air!”

This man needs another adventure, soon”

(Curran is my human bard :D ) #roleplay #dnd

Some time in the last couple of years I rediscovered [Matt Haughey’s blog]. I subscribed to the RSS feed and am really enjoying his writing again. Bikes, electric vehicles, tech, and general stuff.

Matt’s a great writer and has been doing it for my whole career.

I was introduced to Omnivore.app by someone on Mastodon (can’t find the reference now, but thanks whoever you were)!

Omnivore is a “read later” app like Pocket, but free to use and open source. I’ve found the website to be well done, though there are some issues right now:

• The iOS app freezes pretty often, so I do most of my reading on my Mac
• The Firefox extension is easy to use but the “set labels” feature doesn’t seem to work, and I general want to label/tag everything.

Goodness. Letterform Archive has the entire run of Emigré Magazine online.

Emigré was a huge influence on my graphic design education and short career in the early 90’s, and I will be spending a lot of time in the archive in days to come.