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Filho is really good at setting a scene and immersing you in a time and place, and just as I was with the titular town in Bacurau, I was fascinated by The Secret Agent’s recreation of Recife during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s. There are so many details and characters, and I didn’t mind that many of them are superfluous to the plot. I also didn’t mind that the plot really takes… See more →

what emotional malfunction makes me so relish being brutalized in this way

“Foreigner! Foreigner! This is America! You’re not American! Get the fuck out!” I woke up on the 250th anniversary of my nation’s independence to the sound of some poor soul on the street having a manic episode, and its substance, such as it was, was thematically indistinguishable from that of any stump speech given by our current, duly-elected president.

With the exception of Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven’s studio sci-fi extravaganzas are all slathered in sociopolitical satire, and this one is arguably the most overt, with Verhoeven, recalling his childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, saying in an interview:

If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me. So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything… See more →

It bothers me that I can’t remember exactly when and where I met Jack. I’m usually pretty good about that. It was probably 2007-ish, probably at SXSW or An Event Apart. I was going to a lot of conferences back then, meeting all kinds of web people from all over the place, and Jack was a web person, though we didn’t talk about the web all that much once we found other things we had… See more →

After finally completing the gargantuan task of manually adding metadata to thousands of my old tweets so they could be more integrated with the rest of my site, I wanted to keep the momentum going. So I turned to the last large personal data source that was still missing from my site: Last.fm, a service for tracking and sharing the music you listen to. As of a few days ago, I’ve been a Last.fm user… See more →

My first Tortoise show since I very belatedly learned that Doug McCombs’s distinctive secret weapon is the unassumingly mighty Fender Bass VI.

One web browser default I’m seldom satisfied with is the appearance of list markers. Their style can be customized with CSS using li::marker, but the options there are limited. The best way I’ve found to fully customize them is to remove default list styles and use a li::before pseudo-element as a list marker:

ol,
ul {
  list-style: none;
}

li::before {
  content: "•";
}

I’ve used a plain old bullet in this example, but content’s value can be whatever you want, and you can also use position, background, and… See more →

Last week? Not my favorite week. My dog injured her leg while playing with other dogs in the park. My basement needed some emergency masonry work. My acid reflux graduated from intermittent warning shots to full-on assault. But somehow, in the midst of all this, I managed to finish up a project I’ve been chipping away at for countless hours over the past 10 months: manually adding metadata to the nearly 6,000 old tweets I’ve… See more →

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