Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
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[personal profile] rimrunner


Cover art for the anthology Shakespeare Adjacent, showing a portrait of William Shakespeare, sitting in front of a laptop and holding a smartphone. He has a pair of earbuds in and is wearing a digital watch. In the background are modern objects: a digital photo and an electric lamp.



I'm so excited to announce that the Kickstarter for the 2 Jokers Publishing anthology Shakespeare Adjacent is now live! It's a delight to work once again with Lou Tambone, who also co-edited From Bayou to Abyss, as well as co-editor Ali McDowell. I have a longstanding love for Shakespeare's stories, especially his skill at characterization and, of course, his witty dialogue. I also love how his stories can be remixed, retold, and translated to other media without losing any of their power or relatability. It's a real treat to get to play around with one of my favorites of his plays, and try it out in a novel setting.

I don't write a lot of romance, despite having respect and affection for the genre, so I decided to try my hand at one of the romantic comedies. Of course there's a lot more going on in Much Ado About Nothing beyond the central romances (as fun as it always is to watch Benedick and Beatrice spar--if you've never seen David Tennant and Catherine Tate in those roles, incidentally, it's well worth it), including the larger political context in which the story is set, the family rivalry between Don Pedro and Don John, and the changing gender norms and relationships at the time that Shakespeare wrote it. Do all of these still work in a future Western setting beset by drought and political deterioration?

Back the Kickstarter, and judge for yourself--and get 12 other stories to read, into the bargain!



An invitation to back the Kickstarter for the anthology Shakespeare Adjacent, with the book’s cover showing a portrait of William Shakespeare, sitting in front of a laptop and holding a smartphone. He has a pair of earbuds in and is wearing a digital watch. In the background are modern objects: a digital photo and an electric lamp.

June 27

Jun. 27th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Watched Maria. Was disappointed. I think the movie's summed up by the hack from Le Figaro who shows up outside the theatre towards the end: he's basically the entire atmosphere of the thing.

June 25

Jun. 25th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Tonight's episode of The Sweeney featured entirely gratuitous nudity, and the actress didn't even get a credit for her troubles. "Think of the exposure", I'm sure they told her. Exposure is right.

June 24

Jun. 24th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Well that was annoying: mac up and kernel-panicked.

Also annoying: a DVD with a handful of actual titles but 99 fake ones on it.

June 23

Jun. 23rd, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
On-call this week at t'office. Pager went off 15 minutes before shift-end, which was not nice.

June 20

Jun. 20th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Black Bag is an excellent piece of work. It feels like John Le Carré - it's about the gritty, almost boring side of the spy business, rather than the action and derring-do of the likes of Bond and Bourne. I'll put it this way: you could translate it directly to stage and lose nothing. Beautifully played by all involved, and if it's your thing, it has a pretty decent roll call as well.

Annoyingly, the IMDb trivia for this movie is basically someone pasting an interview / puff piece a paragraph at a time into the interface and frankly I hate that crap.

June 19

Jun. 19th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
More Sweeney. The episodes seem longer somehow - there's an awful lot packed into the hour and it's not always clear, given the precedent of the first episode, what the outcome will actually be. I have to say the plot of this one kinda escalated into incredulity rather quickly towards the end.

June 18

Jun. 18th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Second episode of the season containing a bit of implied eye candy for The Boys. I guess this is what passed for ratings-gathering in the 70s.

June 17

Jun. 17th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Season 3 of The Sweeney kicks off with an atypical story where the boys - spoiler - lose out.

June 16

Jun. 16th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Churning away at the DVDs. I have not yet figured out how best to deal with bonus content on DVDs that I will likely never watch but I guess I've at least got to identify and name it.

June 15

Jun. 15th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Doing a little investigative maintenance on a robot vacuum. There's a video online for our species of robot where a guy shows you how to remove the covers, and it reminds me of a half-rememberd episode of Quincy, M.E. - which I used watch with my dad - where Quincy is obliged to do a demo autoopsy for a bunch of newbies but needs to be somewhere else, so he (more or less literally) rips into it such that they all get queasy and run off, freeing him up to do whatever he needs to do. Picture that, but the corpse is a robot vacuum, and Quincy is the guy who is pressed for time but you've asked him to show you how to open the casing. ZZZZZZZIP!

June 14

Jun. 14th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
A Complete Unknown takes a couple of liberties particularly with the whole "controversial" move to electric instruments, but it's still an excellent movie. The leads, in particular, are astoundingly good. Even if you're not a fan of Dylan's music I think this works pretty well as a story.

June 13

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
We continue to watch Mr. Regan and Mr. Carter anyway. There's a funny TV advert from the 90s - for a car I used own, the Nissan Almera - featuring two guys done up to look convincingly like the boys from The Sweeney.

My usual way of working with things like the DVD ripping script is to have it do a bunch of work, fall on its face, and then I do a bunch more work on it. The current incarnaton is remarkably good at not falling on its face so I'm left with the slightly tedious work of identifying which episode of a TV show it's working on. I've been idly thinking about trying to get it to figure that out itself but I don't have a clear idea how to do that. One thing that occurred to me was dumping out subtitles and getting some species of local LLM to compare the results with a Wikipedia description of the episode list; simpler than that (slightly, maybe) is to see if I can pull the episode title out of the credits. The main difficulty with any of these approaches is that it'll definitely be more work than the manual slog.

June 12

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:59 pm
[syndicated profile] waider_geeks_feed
Oh that's grating. If I go to Amazon.com I can find the Sweeney with all episodes for all seasons. Somehow the version that's available to me is shredded: season 2 consists of 5 of the 12 or 13 episodes.

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