This is quite possibly the sexiest movie about chicken farming that I have ever seen. Death Laid an Egg is an extremely arty proto-giallo about a couple who owns a chicken farm, their young secretary, and the husband’s prostitute murder fetish. Not much makes any sense here and it doesn’t really need to. Everything is just so weird/serious, yet set against this ridiculous backdrop of egg farming. I was enthralled… or should I say egg-thralled? No. No, I shouldn’t.
Well, if there’s one thing you can say about this giallo, it’s that the title is not a lie. I think every person single person, man or woman, gets naked before being killed in this movie. Unfortunately everything else is is just ho-hum. When the final killer was revealed I was like, “Wait, who the hell was that?” Very unsatisfying, unless you are a fan of Speedos.
The Wasteland 2 sequel sorta came out of nowhere for me. The previous game was one of the first big Kickstarter success stories and the finished product was everything I could have imagined. I found it weird that Inxile eschewed Kickstarter and went to another platform for crowd founding. As a result, I had no idea this game was being developed.
When I finally heard about the game, I made it a point to be a release day buyer. This is something I rarely do. I generally avoid buying games for more than twenty bucks, but in this instance I really wanted to show my support. The game was a bit buggy on release. No showstoppers, but a little rough on the edges. As of this writing, there are still problems with the camera and interface, but nothing so bad as to make the game unplayable.
The game itself is a pretty good improvement over Wasteland 2 in terms of interface and graphics. As I mentioned above, the camera is wonky, but there have been many visual upgrades. I especially liked the face-to-face dialogues (alá Fallout 1 & 2):
They really provide some emotion and power to the events that are unfolding. You don’t get that sort of engagement when you are listening to voice over that is supposedly coming out of tiny characters who are fighting for screen-space with the subtitled dialogue. But these close-up scenes are not used as much as I would have wanted.
Throughout the game you are faced with many tough choices. In my humble opinion too many of these were of the lesser of two evils variety. Tough choices can also be between to great alternatives and I would have like to have seen more of those. Not everything has to be, “Do you want the turd sandwich or the turd soup?”
As in the previous game, the turn-based combat is as great as ever. It’s nice to have a role playing game that has some modern context to the mechanics and items you wield. I’ve played 4 or 5 Infinity Engine D&D games and I still have no idea WTF the Color Spray spell does or what THAC0 means. I do, however, instantly know what a flamethrower does, and I actually felt like I was getting more powerful and better at combat as I progressed.
Some stronger writing and the cleaning up of some rough edges would have helped, but all-in-all Wasteland 3 was a worthy sequel and well-worth the 50+ hours I put in to it.
Pulsebeat has been on my must-see bucket list for at least a decade. Ever since I found a clip of the showcase aerobics routine on YouTube I have been trying to find a version of this movie to watch. At long last I found a site that posted a crappy transfer of the full movie and that has allowed me to finally see this hidden gem. I will probably write more extensively on the film later, but for now lets just say that this is a hilariously cheesy entry in the short-lived fad of aerobics in movies. I love the seriousness of the acting while wearing shorty-shorts and leotards. Nothing about this movie makes any sense and it is fantastic.
Panic Beats has been on my radar ever since I saw a few clips from it in to Mondo Macabro demo reel that is featured on all their DVDs. Without quite rising to greatness, it does not disappoint. There’s a lot to like here: a solid story, moody lighting, gratuitous nudity, and a effective smattering of gore. It does suffer from slow-ish pacing and bland, TV soap opera level camera work, but when it slips into high gear, it’s pretty great. The story seems lifted straight out of an issue of Tales from the Crypt and involves multiple inheritance plots, angry supernatural spirits, and the usual comeuppance for the evil doers.
I started reading this thinking it would cover the techniques and materials of the Renaissance masters. Apparently, that’s another Vasari book (unsurprisingly) called, “Vasari on Technique.” This is more of a straight up accounting of the major works of the period. Having someone describe artworks through words doesn’t really make for the most exciting read. There’s only so many ways you can say, “His painting was almost indistinguishable from nature.” The most interesting parts of the book are the various anecdotes about the day-to-day activities of the old masters. But those stories a few and far between the rote cataloguing of works.
Hey everybody, did you know today is election day? I hadn’t seen any reminders on social media at all so I thought I’d just let you know here. Remember, post a photo of yourself holding a sticker because voting is not just an expressive act, it is also a performative one!
Another late stage Fulci horror movie that disappoints despite the awesome title music and excellent poster/box art. From the art, you would expect this to be nonstop satanic nuns on a killing rampage. Instead, it’s mostly a bunch of Canadian archeologists camping out in some ancient ruins, drinking, and singing bad folk music. This is Fulci, so there are two or three good, albeit cheap looking gore scenes that have nothing to do with the plot including a kitty eye-gouge attack, a nail through a tongue, and silly putty drawn-and-quarter scene. The killer nuns are literally only in the last five minutes of the movie.
I had never heard of this psychological mystery until I saw it posted on a giallo site. It’s not really a giallo but certainly has all the visual style of one. Every set has a primary color associated with it and as you go from one scene to the next, the palette changes. Mimsy Farmer lives alone in a fancy apartment complex and, not unlike Rosemary’s Baby, everyone around her seems to have sinister motives. Eventually she starts seeing spooky things and the film starts to drift into weirdo territory. By the end you’ll be scratching your head as to what just happened, but it’s all so very arty.
I have been using my new WordPress site for about a month now and can say that I am very satisfied with how everything is working. So much so that I would really like to convert all my sites to WordPress, if not for the fact that hand migration process from Drupal was a horrible pain.
WordPress is much faster than Drupal. Even without a caching plugin I am seeing my pages load up super quick. With the cache enabled—which, as an editor, I don’t actually see—the pages load almost instantaneously.
The Gutenberg editing interface takes a little getting used to, but works very well especially with the addition of the EditorsKit plugin. Adding images and media like YouTube embeds or audio files is completely hassle/code free. The EditorsKit plugin adds in the all important Insert Special Character function and a few other less common HTML tags like `abbr`.
Askimet provides spam-blocking that actually works. Drupal used to have a great anti-spam service in Mollum, but that was unceremoniously discontinued and the floodgates of spam opened up. In a related note, WordPress comment moderation is very simple and clean and, for the time being, I actually like seeing pingbacks
With the right plugins, creating custom content isn’t as bad as I originally thought. I had to pay for the unlimited install Advanced Custom Fields plugin, but, between this site and my work projects, it has been well worth the investment.
Finally, as I have stated before, updating the site is a complete breeze. This was my main reason for making the switch to WordPress. Click a button and the WordPress core is updated! The latest version allows me to tell the system to install updates automatically based on a per-plugin setting. Coming from Drupal, this is life changing.
It’s not all hearts and rainbows here in WordPressland. There are still a few areas that could use some improvement. First and foremost is that lack of anything like Drupal Views. Views allows front-end users to display site content in any manner they can imagine without needing to touch a single line of code. Instead, I am stuck having to hand code queries into WordPress PHP template files. The query code is relatively easy to learn but every little tweak you want to make requires hours of combing through help forums and documentation for an answer. I still have no idea how to add filters to my various Reviews lists. In Views you just expose a filter and poof you have a dropdown or a field that visitors can use to narrow down a list.
I’m sure there is a plugin for this, but I would want to set up automated backups of the site. The WP All-in-One Migration plugin makes backing up easy, but I can figure out a way of making it run on a schedule.
While the front-end of the Media Library is excellent, WordPress is constantly creating unnecessary image copies of every image I upload, regardless of context. This means there’s a lot of unused junk in my uploads directory. It’s not horrible, but my Internet ’98 mentality wants me so save as much hard drive space as possible.
Most of my other complaints are about things that could be accomplished with a module in Drupal but require PHP coding to do in WordPress. Off the top of my head: highlighting a menu-trail based on a content type, customizing RSS output, custom menu blocks, etc.
