musicmatzes blog

Now, this is rather untypical for me. “Constantine” is a superhero horror film. I am NOT into horror movies AT ALL. Still, I watched Constantine.

Especially because it features Keanu Reeves as the main actor. A must-watch(-actor), in my opinion.

Plot

John Constantine, an occult detective, is called to exorcise a possessed girl. He exorcises demons back to Hell to earn favor with Heaven, which he seeks salvation from because of an suicide attempt in his youth.

He helps someone learn the truth about her sister's death while unraveling a much larger and darker plot.

That's about as much as I can give away without revealing as much as the wikipedia article on the movie does.

Reception

On rottentomatoes, the movie averages at 5.4/10. I would tend towards 7/10 though, even though I am not favourable of horror movies at all.

Still, the tension (and hey, Keanu Reeves!!!) was great and I liked the movie a lot, despite some rather gory scenes.

#movie #horror #fantasy #thriller

“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

This week (2021-06-12– 2021-06-18) I tried to minimalize, had the first lunch outside of my home for months and updated my machines.

Minimalism

In an attempt to minimalize my belongings (yes, I rewatched the minimalists on youtube and even other related videos), I put a lot of things on ebay-kleinanzeigen .

So far it is going rather well, I put up about 35 things, most of them for free or a small fee (1€ for CDs for example). Some for a fee that is fair, as I think.

I also decluttered my working desk and now there's only things on it I really need, that is: My (two) notebooks, my screen, keyboard, mouse (yes, I occasionally need it), Microphone setup gear, normally one mug of cold (non-alcoholic) beverage, one pack of tissues, a small thermometer (a good working environment with the right temperature in the room is important to me) and a few cables (you cannot really get rid of them, can you?).

I hope to be able to declutter further in the next months and slowly progress on my path to real minimalism.

Food

I also ate in the city for the first time in months, probably. Shouldn't have, as it turned out, my gustatory nerves (german) regressed a lot in the last months.

Maybe for the better. Eating out is (in the long run) too expensive and not worth it, especially if there's no social component to it. Or is that the inner swabian speaking?

NixOS 21.05, yay!

I updated three machines to the latest NixOS release and that was really smooth. After a three month uptime it was really worth the reboot.

I'm now on Plasma 5.21 and I really like the small improvements it ships.

Raspberry-Backup

I am playing with an old Raspberry (1!!!) I found while decluttering (not really, I knew I had it... or did I?). So I'm planning to use it for a remote backup solution I plan to deploy at my parents house. Geo-backups, ftw!

I will probably write up another article on the setup as soon as I have it up and running completely, and deployed.

“Now you see me” is a series of movies. I'm talking about the first two parts here (a third is planned).

The movies are in the genre of a heist thriller, which I didn't know before, but I liked the format a lot!

Plot

First of all, these movies are about magicians. Sounds dull, you think? Well, nope. But first lets talk about the plot.

An FBI agent tracks a team of magicians who rob banks during their performances and reward their audiences with the money. This is as little as one can give away without revealing just too much.

Reception

In general, the stunts are really nice and entertaining, as well as the rest of the movies. “Thriller” is matching as a genre here, because the arc of suspense is clearly there!

Wikipedia states that

The film stayed in the top 10 of the North American box office for six weeks after release.

And although a citation is missing on that, I don't doubt it. On Rotten Tomatoes the films have an average rating of 5.71/10 and 4.85/10, which is clearly too low in my opinion. I would tend to give them a clean 8/10 and 7/10, to be honest.

#movie #thriller

“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

This week (2021-06-05– 2021-06-11) I went back to the fitness studio for the first time since October 2020. That was not so successfull.

Fitness

I hiked a few (german) times in the last week (german) even though (german) my fitness studio opened (german).

One thing that I noted was a new surveilance camera at the entrance of my studio (german) and I'm rather pissed off by that. This is definitively not necessary!

Either way, the first training was depressing, as I had to reduce weights by 20-30% and I did not even manage to keep up my warmup routine (running for 30 minutes without break plus some light stretching). I know that I can be back on track in about three months, but still...

Github timeline

Github displays releases in my timeline that were done in repositories I do not follow. I only starred (some of) them. Why does this happen? Is this some kind of AI that thinks I might be interested? Because... I'm not! Especially not in reveal.js, which was the first example where I noticed this!

“Men in Black: International” is the fourth installment of the Men in Black film series, and the first one to not feature Will Smith as the main actor. And that shows.

Will Smith truly gave the Men in Black series its special spin. Men in Black: International does not live up to that (fairly high) standard. Still, it does not fail to entertain, in my opinion.

A word on “political correctness”

Yes, Men in Black: International features a female actor as the main character. I get the impression that more and more film makers aim for what is called “political correctness” by installing female actors in movies.

I do not think this is a bad idea.

But, why does this mean that movies and film series which strongly build on the “Macho/Bad-Boy” stereotype are now “reinvented” with a female main character? There was a debate about a female 007, there is certainly some online discussion about “Star Trek: Discovery” and now there is a female Men in Black main actor. In my opinion, that is a rather uninspired and dull move. Aiming for more female actors for the main character is a very creditable goal – but just re-doing movies and replacing a male main character with a female feels like a half-hearted attempt.

I, for one, would love to see more new female main character movies.

Plot

In the 90s, Molly witnesses her parents being neuralyzed by agents of MIB. She stays un-neuralyzed. From then on, she aims to become one of the MIB.

Besides from that, the plot does not differ greatly from the other MIB movies, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Critic

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 23% based on 318 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10.

(wikipedia)

Strangely, in contrast to the efforts of installing a female character as a strong woman, the movie has lost its coolness. This could have been the one key point where the movie could be able to continue the MIB franchise with a female main character! The previous MIB movies were always some sort of “bad-boy cool-gangster-themed” action movie with comedic elements. Men in Black International does not continue on that road, unfortunately.

Still, the movie is nice for an evening of Monsters and action, and I would agree on the 4.5/10 of rottentomatoes.

#movie #comedy #action #fantasy

“Iceland: On Top of the World” is a documentary about, well, Iceland (amazon, netflix). Normally I don't write about documentaries here, but this one was particularly nice.

I really liked that it features not only facts about the history, but also about the current culture and life in iceland and, but that's no surprise, the absolutely astonishing images of icelandic nature.

Of course there's no plot here I can talk about. Still, I want to say that the 5.8/10 on IMDB is underrated and I'd say this is a solid 9/10!

#movie #documentary #iceland #nature #history

“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

This week (2021-05-29 – 2021-06-04) I got very angry about this “you need an app for this” bullshit and some things died.

App madness

I am very angry (german) about every other service forcing me to install an app of some sort or another on my devices. This time it was my insurance that wanted me to install either a desktop application (Windows and Mac only) or a Smartphone app (Android or iOS only) just to update my bank account or address. How mad can they possibly be?

I reported them to #digitalcourage.

github actions

I probably said it before, but the more I play with #githubactions, the more I like it.

This is mainly due to the fact that the features are well-designed. You can make dependend jobs and you can even boot up #docker containers, if your application has to be tested against, for example, a database or some other service. I know that #github will never #opensource this, that's why I hope someone implements it as a FLOSS alternative!

Awesome Rust

It always amazes me how good the #rust standard library actually is. I was able to solve an issue in my codebase with a two-line patch that would have been way more complex in another language!

Dying things

First audacity, now stackoverflow (german) died.

What's next? I really hope we can develop alternative FLOSS platforms. For audacity, there are several alternative tools around that one can switch to. For stackoverflow, not so much. Especially because the software is only one part, the other part is the data. There are dumps of stackoverflow somewhere on the internet (I'm not linking because I don't know how legal these dumps actually are), so maybe someone can implement a FLOSS alternative (please make it federated or distributed) and import that dataset?

This would be awesome!

R.I.P.D. or “Rest in Peace Department” is a “2013 American science fiction action comedy film”.

Let me anticipate: The movie was a flop. It had negative reviews and was financially unsuccessfull. I can see why.

Plot

As always, I do not want to give away that much information (even less than the wikipedia article on the movie):

Nick, a police officer, dies. After his death, he gets recruited by the Rest in Peace Department, where he should take care of the undead that walk the earth and refuse to move on to the afterlife. He, with his partner Roy, soon has to save the earth from the apocalypse.

My opinion

I have to say that the plot is not very exciting and the movie has only a weak 3.70/10 on rotten tomatoes and bad reviews on other sites as well.

And I have to agree. The movie is not complete garbage, I laughted at least one time... it keeps you entertained to a certain level, perfect if you just want to hang around on your couch after a hard days work but you don't want to have one of these exciting action movies or complicated sci-fi movies on your screen, but something simple that keeps your mind busy but not overloaded.

For that scenario, the movie serves. For everything else, watch something else! 3/10 from me.

#movie #comedy #action #fiction

Wrath of the Titans is a 2012 action fantasy film and a sequel to the 2010 film Clash of the Titans. The latter was rather nice, as far as I can remember. With Wrath of the Titans, I have to admit that the things in my mastodon timeline were more interesting than the movie, so I did not see all scenes.

Plot

Well, it is another one of these “greek/ancient gods fight to save the world”-movies. I really have to admit that I did not get the entire plot and had to read up on wikipedia.

To give you the one phrase from wikipedia that describes the plot best:

Zeus visits Perseus and asks for his help, saying that humans are not praying to the gods; as a result, [...] they can no longer [..] hold[ing] back the imprisoned Titan Kronos from freedom.

Critique

You may have already noticed that I wasn't paying too much attention to the movie. Yes, it was rather easy to get distracted! It is certainly not bad, given that quite a few good and known actors are starred, e.g. Sam Worthington (one of my favourite actors), Rosamund Pike, Ralph Fiennes and also Loam Neeson (and of course some more known ones).

Rotten Tomatoes [...] reports that 27% of 172 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 4.47/10.

(wikipedia)

And I must agree with that. The fight scenes are okayish, the acting is good but there were no emotions sparked with me. I would rate it with 4.5/10, confirming the rottentomatoes average.

#movie #action #fantasy

“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

This week (2021-05-21 – 2021-05-28) I thought about how to scale up the nixpkgs community. Not much more happened.

Scaling the nixpkgs community

I am rather known for my complains about the scaling issues of the nixpkgs community (4.5k open issues, 2.6k open PRs in nixos/nixpkgs alone right now). I am a strong believer in the distributed email based workflow the kernel community and others use and I voiced my arguments on mastodon again, supported by some git-based numbers.

Star Trek Discovery

I am currently watching the Star Trek Discovery series (expect an article on the series as soon as I'm done with it) and I think that, especially in the second season, there's just too much crying (german). Four episodes of sobbing non stop.