It was calming to play this while working today, but it’ll melt off my brain like rain on my window pane.

I’ve been listening to this album when lifting weights at the gym recently. The Justice bass pushes me so hard I find myself dancing on the bench.

This is the first album of hers that I’ve listened to, but I didn’t expect to see that it’s actually her fourth. It plays to me like a first album: lots of reference sounds (the Justice electro, the Charli XCX lyrics), mixture of genres and tempos. Maybe that just her brand and it’s established and I’m just the one learning it.

I’m excited to see her play at Lollapalooza this year.

This new work from Gold Panda sounds like he spent the winter with Daphni and came out convinced of the power of the bop and the beat and the bass. I love this to start my summer.

Some of it gets a bit repetitive - he hasn’t fully fleshed out a range of melodies to pull from - but the grooves are there and I love the mid-album piano riff tune that reminds you of Gold Panda’s gentler roots.

I kept gasping at how much of this film is a callback to The Conversation - and then Gene Hackman showed up! I swear they used the same cage set for both films. 

The first half is very Hitchcock-y, with the audience and the character both nervously untangling a mystery, but different mysteries. 

The story really gets into gear when Gene’s character comes in: he puts everyone else to shame with his electricity and emotional connection. And the scale change in stakes is palpable. 

Some things that knocked it down a peg for me:

The r climax relied too much on the pronoun game for me to take it seriously. But as Marybeth said to me afterward, you line up the dominos and then you gotta knock them down somehow. 

It’s astonishing how much non sequiter lingerie is in this movie (and tinted 90s sunglasses).

You can make some amazing things with just some random bits of your past, a deft deployment of movie making/writing skills, and a serious dose of gumption. What a ride!

I particularly love that the flashbacks are never what we saw the first time. Just like my own memories. 

Also, having been to Toronto over a dozen times now, I loved spotting all the bits and pieces of the city in this. I’ve walked past the Rivoli!

The shape of this is identical to my Letterboxd importer: read a public RSS feed, find reviews that aren’t already on my site, and write them out as Jekyll posts. Bless the open standard of RSS.

Three differences from Letterboxd

The feed mixes activity types. Record Club’s RSS includes more than reviews. It also logs when I add an album to my queue or my rotation. For now, I only want the actual reviews, so I filter on the phrasing of the item title, which is the only place that distinguishes them:

# Record Club mixes review items in with queue/rotation additions in the
# same feed. Only the "listened to and rated" items carry a review body and
# a star rating, so we anchor on that phrasing to skip the rest.
REVIEW_TITLE = /listened to and rated an album: '(.+)' by (.+) - ([★½]+)\z/

The rating lives in the title, as stars. Letterboxd gave me a numeric memberRating field. Record Club embeds the rating right in the item title, rendered as star glyphs like ★★★½. So I parse the glyphs back into a number:

def parse_rating(stars)
  stars.count('★') + (stars.include?('½') ? 0.5 : 0)
end

Cloudflare sometimes mangles the feed. Record Club sits behind Cloudflare, which occasionally serves a challenge to a plain Ruby request and injects a trailing <script> after the closing </rss> tag. That breaks a strict XML parser. A browser-like User-Agent mostly avoids the challenge, and trimming anything past </rss> handles the rest:

req['User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) ...'
# ...
# Trim anything past the closing tag; Cloudflare can append injected markup
# after </rss> that would otherwise break the strict XML parser.
feed = res.body[/\A.*<\/rss>/m] || res.body

Resolving a streaming link

Record Club’s feed doesn’t carry a streaming link, and I wanted one for the “listen on your favorite service” link in the post metadata, and an Apple Music embed in the post body.

The free iTunes Search API resolves an Apple Music album URL from the artist and album name:

uri = URI.parse('https://itunes.apple.com/search')
uri.query = URI.encode_www_form(term: "#{artist} #{album}", entity: 'album', limit: 5)

A bad embed is worse than a missing one, so I only accept a result when both the artist and the album name plausibly match what Record Club gave me:

def plausible_match?(result, artist, album)
  norm = ->(s) { s.to_s.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]/, '') }
  artist_ok = norm.call(result['artistName']).include?(norm.call(artist)) ||
              norm.call(artist).include?(norm.call(result['artistName']))
  album_ok = norm.call(result['collectionName']).include?(norm.call(album)) ||
             norm.call(album).include?(norm.call(result['collectionName']))
  artist_ok && album_ok
end

This guard earned its keep immediately. One of my first imports was the Nine Inch Noize album that Record Club had labeled with the artist as the album name. The top iTunes results were Nine Inch Nails and a TRON soundtrack. The guard declined them all, and I added the correct link by hand. A miss I can fix; a confident wrong answer I might not even notice.

Workflow

Like my other importers, this runs as a step in the GitHub Actions workflow I use to syndicate posts into and out of my site. It runs the script, and if there are content changes, it commits and pushes them. Once a review lands here, the existing machinery that syndicates out to Mastodon and Bluesky just works, per my syndication rules.

So now my movies and my music both live here, archived and linkable and discoverable, no matter which platform I happened to write them on first.

I started listening to this without any context and thought: this sounds like a little bit of The Knife and a little bit of Floating Points. And lo and behold, it is! At least the first half of my estimation. It sounds like he’s using literally the same synths and sound board.

I really like the first half of the album but the second half fades out for me, until the ending swoop of fun.

This isn’t as exciting as the source album, but the melancholy is the point.

Okay, I can get on board with ambient techno like I’m working inside the office Lumon of Severance.

Closer and The Warning are absolutely the best songs on the album but the whole thing wrenches itself out of your speakers and greases its way into the dark corners of your mind and it’s so intense and fun.

I made it a Life Clock last year, counting up the hours of my life. I still like that idea (I even reprogrammed it to show my daughter’s days of life this spring after she was born). But a number that only ever ticks up, slowly, slowly loses attention. I wanted the display to tell me something I’d actually act on when I glance up from my desk. The weather can be that thing for a while.

Packing a forecast into seven digits

The display shows exactly seven digits and nothing else, so I had to encode a whole forecast into a single number.

I split the seven digits into three fields:

The rain digit is just the chance of rain divided by ten and floored, so a 45% chance becomes 4 and a 90% chance becomes 9. One digit is plenty for knowing “should I be worried.”

The temperatures each get three digits. That’s easy enough for 77 (077) or 105, but Chicago winters mean I needed negatives, and the display has no minus sign. So I borrowed the leading digit. Since no real temperature here reaches 900°F, a 9 in the hundreds place means “this is negative”:

• 5°F displays as 005
• -5°F displays as 905
• -12°F displays as 912

One thing I like about this layout: every digit does work. The Life Clock left its leading digit parked on zero, since the hours of my life don’t fill seven places yet (likely never would). That digit wouldn’t flip to 1 until I crossed about 114 years old.

Switching to tomorrow at sunset

I want to know tomorrow’s forecast when the day is effectively over. That really varies, but sunset is a good rule of thumb for when I start thinking more about the next day.

So the display rolls over at sunset to show tomorrow’s forecast.

The code

The display polls a small Val Town service that returns a single number. The data comes from Open-Meteo, which is free and needs no API key.

This review may contain spoilers.

This film does a good job of pulling your attention just around the corner....just one more corner...just one more corner....just a little further....then BAM.

Most of the time is spent in that edging squirm, feeling stuck into taking the next step, like glue on your shoes making the floor move your feet.

There were some seriously grand and terrifying moments: the grotesquery around the christmas tree, the gleeful inhumanity around the dinner table. But ultimately I think there were too many confounding tangents (Mary's mom was here why?) to make this as cohesive as I would have liked. As I left, I thought, maybe that's what they wanted me to feel: unfinished, claustrophobic from all the space and searching.

Getting lost in your own psyche is a recipe for getting eaten.

I enjoyed this film so so so so so much. (Big crooked smile.)

It's loud. It twisted the knife in every scene, tensing my body further and further. And the ending! Triple roundhouse to the gut that was :chefs-kiss:.

So much tension with no release: moments of will they? won't they? that stretch to the point of breaking and then don't resolve so you're left wound up for the next moment to crank it even higher.

The backlighting is on point in this one. And the music: both combine to convey the "Nikki" in play at any given moment in terrifying clarity.

Choosing screams over the end credits was a bet that paid off. (Side note: this movie was sooo loud and full of characters screaming mid-sentence that you could be forgiven for being overwhelmed but boy did I love the intensity.)

Inde Navarrette's performance as Nikki is right up there with Mia Goth as Pearl for my all-time scariest monologues and utterly terrifying emotional range.

Cowardice kills.

I enjoyed this film so so so so so much. (Big crooked smile.)

It's loud. It twisted the knife in every scene, tensing my body further and further. And the ending! Triple roundhouse to the gut that was :chefs-kiss:.

So much tension with no release: moments of will they? won't they? that stretch to the point of breaking and then don't resolve so you're left wound up for the next moment to crank it even higher.

The backlighting is on point in this one. And the music: both combine to convey the "Nikki" in play at any given moment in terrifying clarity.

Choosing screams over the end credits was a bet that paid off. (Side note: this movie was sooo loud and full of characters screaming mid-sentence that you could be forgiven for being overwhelmed but boy did I love the intensity.)

Inde Navarrette's performance as Nikki is right up there with Mia Goth as Pearl for my all-time scariest monologues and utterly terrifying emotional range.

Cowardice kills.

I think Mary Bronstein bet her husband that she could invert almost everything about Uncut Gems and still make the audience feel the same way.

Where that movie follows the male main character as the driving force, careening through the world like a bull in a china shop, this one follows a woman as the world falls through the gaps in her grasp. But you feel exhilarating anguish - and humor in that anguish - all the same.

The visual (non-visual?) choice of never showing the daughter - just hearing her voice off-screen - was ingenious and added subtle horror to every scene. Abstract, guilty weight instead of personhood that keeps you locked in to Linda's subjective experience.

As a new parent myself, I gripped my cushion out of recognition through the new-mom-and-baby scenes. And I still think the most terrifying part of her situation is in the first scene: your child is sick and you can't help.

The beans alone have a pungent smell, like damp moss and bitter leather. I like it. During the brew, the grounds smell like burnt caramel and walnut.

In the cup, I taste light pecan and chocolate - lighter than the strong aromas would lead you to believe. After a bit, I taste sweet apple as well.

It’s no single-origin, but it’s a solid blend; good for serving in a thick ceramic mug at the deli counter.

Yes I’m going to like a space travel story. Yes I’m going to like Ryan Gosling. Yes I’m going to love a faceless monster. 

Ultimately this one was too saccharine and too unscientifically shallow for me to really regard it as a good film, but I enjoyed my ride on the rocket ship.

Opening the bag and once brewed, I get smells of mandarin, fresh leather, and wet tree bark. It’s darkly sour.

I taste key lime, salt, and caramel. But not much comes to mind, and it’s not a strong enough flavor to trigger much of a reaction from my palate, either. Meh. I continue to think that the big players make weak flavors.

Jeff Goldblum is unbelievably perfect for this role. I was electrified. He glues together an already tight script with his pent-up energy, continuously twisting the knot in my stomach until I realized that the knot was going to remain past the third act. This is man-vs-self in one of its best forms, allowing everyone to see part of themselves in his downfall: the terror of your own body, the deep despair of living with mistakes.

Matt and Brandon and I are trying to eat food related to the movie on our horror nights. The day before, I texted, "Ok so what food do we have to eat for The Fly?" First response: "Doesn't matter as long as you vomit on it first."

Unfortunately, our babysitter had to cancel last-minute and so we had to leave the concert early, only a couple songs into Gelli’s performance. We got to see all of Big Sis, though, and they were a fun thrashy mash-up of Confidence Man and 100 Gecs.

In the smell, I find sweet walnut and chocolate, really like a candy coffee.

This smooth brew tastes immediately like baker’s chocolate and mandarin orange. With such a deep flavor, it still tastes crisp, wafting off my tongue. I really like this one.

The automation

Apple Music doesn’t expose a “library export” command in its AppleScript dictionary, so the only option is GUI scripting through System Events. The script:

1. Activates Music.app
2. Navigates the menu: File > Library > Export Library…
3. Uses Cmd+Shift+G in the save dialog to jump to the project directory
4. Clicks Save
5. Waits for the ~46MB XML file to finish writing (by polling file size until it stabilizes)
6. Runs the existing update_music Ruby script to regenerate the page
7. Commits any changes to blog/ and assets/ and pushes to deploy

./utilities/export_and_update_music

The interesting part was discovering that Music.app opens a standalone window "Save" rather than the more common sheet 1 of window 1 pattern that most macOS apps use for save dialogs. That small difference was the only real debugging needed.

Running it on a schedule

Since GUI scripting requires a logged-in session with screen access, a plain cron job won’t work. Instead, I’m using a launchd agent with LimitLoadToSessionType: Aqua, which ensures it only fires when I’m actually at my Mac.

<key>LimitLoadToSessionType</key>
<string>Aqua</string>

It runs weekly on Sunday mornings. Unlike cron, launchd with StartCalendarInterval will fire a missed job on wake, so if my laptop was sleeping during the scheduled time, it catches up as soon as I open the lid.

The other launchd gotcha: the agent runs with a minimal environment, not your shell profile. I had to set PATH (to find Homebrew’s Ruby and bundle) and LANG (to en_US.UTF-8, since the plist parser chokes on non-ASCII track metadata without it) in the plist’s EnvironmentVariables.

Requirements

The prerequisite is granting Accessibility permissions (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility). When running from a terminal, your terminal app needs the permission. When running via launchd, /usr/bin/env needs it instead. Since the script’s shebang uses #!/usr/bin/env bash, env is the parent process that macOS checks for Accessibility access.

The full script is in the repo.

This could be described as an elongated and inverted Power Rangers special, where the kids are bad and the parents are toxic and the villains are goofy-gorey and the lessons are the same.
It's super fun in a heightened camp sort of way - had me laughing out loud watching it at home - and I appreciate someone stretching the idea as far as it could go.
I laughed the most at the throwaway lines ("well, this TV just won't stop bleeding") and background characters (the way Cassius 3000 has an "idle animation", the melted police officer continuously trying to kill himself, etc.) and I think that's where this movie shines: oozing sunny gore into a kid's life. It's sneakily earnest beneath the camp, capping gore-soaked subversion with kids-show morals.

So much of the film is perfect alignment or beautiful discord. She descends the staircase on footsteps in perfect rhythm with the score. The framed balance of the final scenes and the chance encounter and the timing of friends arriving shows the world aligning for her, supporting her. She carelessly drags her scarf as she stumbles into unexpected nature. The myriad mirrors in the shop and the jumbled overheard conversations in the cafe and the impulsive merry-go-round bus ride and the grotesque street performers show the world as constantly breaking and folding in upon itself. And Cléo finds her happiness from learning to accept both, woven together as she walks. It reminds me of my best walks.

Good things come to those who go for a walk.

Varda studied photography prior to filmmaking and it shows in the gorgeous framing and visuals throughout the film. The multi-layered mirrors in the shop were mesmerizing. The perfect framing and long shot of the couple leaving the park was decadent. It made me want to pick up a camera and go outside.

It appealed to my voyeuristic soul. I am forever listening in on the floating conversations of the tables around me, and this channeled that pleasure onto screen.