Laserdisc Rot

Y'all have seen me do personal posts and cinema posts. Now it's time for the code posts. If you are here for me ranting about cinema or whining about my life and don't want to read about me nerding out to code I promise not to take it personal. I'm also assuming a target audience of this blog of someone who has familiarity with database architecture. I'll still be back next week and I promise I'll do code posts at most once a month. So! Relationship-Based Access Control! Also known as "Fine Grain Access Control" it stands in contrast to "Role-Based Access Control" which, if you have familiarity with authorization systems, you probably have heard of, or at least know about. It's management of access to areas and data based off of the role a user has: like an admin could go anywhere but someone with a "Financial Manager" role wouldn't be able to edit permissions of another user. If  you're familiar with Role-Based Access C...

The last week and so I've been getting more into art. It started with wanting to make a zine for the upcoming Appalachia Cinema Preservation Society movie screening. In the era of generative AI (and I guess as an apology for designing a zine completely on a computer like a poser), I wanted at least something  handmade on there - so I drew the cover. I named him "Smiley McTrustworthy" A part of my past I don't talk about a lot - less from being disappointed in it and more because I've led a life of weird projects that overshadow this section - is that for a few years I was the designer for my college newspaper. It was a small enough community that we actually gave the local papers a run for their money and won awards. I loved designing. Not just the act of it but specifically designing something that had an end result of something in the physical realm. I've apparently forgotten how much I enjoyed that, but I've been rediscovering it with this project. Som...

  That's cinema, baby I've been burning the candle on both ends to try to get the ACPS website ready for launch and I was tempted to write about it but then I remembered last week I promised to blog about Cinema. And this topic was eating at me, wanting to be written about and I just gotta. The Dream Ballet! It's a surreal moment in a musical where the walls of reality melt and we get pure emotion expressed in this dreamlike setting that usually only one member of the cast remembers - being their dream. As a dream, it also is filled with exaggeration, foreshadowing, and symbolism. A recent example is from Greta Gerwig's Barbie with "I'm Just Ken" where Ryan Gosling's Ken and his cadre of other Kens go to war with Simu Liu's Ken and his own cadre of Kens.  It's worth noting the only other modern example of Dream Ballets in film is La La Land , so thank you for your commitment to Dream Ballets, Mr. Gosling. Anyways, a pal on my favorite niche mic...

I was on the fence on doing another fun media post like last week's yelling about Star Wars and the importance of "canon" , but I had something I actually wanted to write about and get off my chest. This week was a flurry on my Appalachia Cinema Preservation Society project , particularly that I launched Social Media accounts for it. (Links for those will be at the bottom in case you want to follow it anywhere). For the past... gosh... at least four years my only social media presence was on Mastodon (a niche microblogging network that is part of the ActivityPub - one popular, yet laughably incorrect way to describe it is to say it's like email), and in order to get ACPS represented elsewhere, I created new accounts on Facebook and Instagram. For about the last half-a-week I've been putzing around on those sites trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do on them. The reason I originally left Facebook and Instagram was because of all the data collect...

 This past week contained May the Fourth and I can't help but think of Star Wars. Always. The two posters that literally hover over me in my home office Back in 2010, I went to Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, FL (which now feels like a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). I was excited for a lot of reasons but up on top was that Leland Chee, the manager of the Holocron, the "Lucasfilm continuity database," was giving a presentation on the new continuity rules moving forward after the recent Disney acquisition. If you were like me, you were a Star Wars fan of the 90s, but if you weren't one of us specific weirdos - let me describe it to you: we were desperate  for any media. Hell, salivating for any memorabilia we could get our hands on. When Taco Bell had merchandise tie-ins with the Nintendo 64 Shadows of the Empire game? Yeah we were on that. I had every book that was structured like Tales from Jabba's Palace  that gave the backstory of every stra...

Okay I promise I won't keep stretching the rot analogy in my headlines after this. I'm just proud that I'm still writing. A little over two months ago I broke my leg. It was during a late ice storm and I was trying to take the trash out. I slipped and it full on felt like my leg bent underneath me. There's also a good 100 yards between the house and where the street is, so I had to limp back. Our dog, Callisto the cute Corgi, likes to come out with me to take out the trash and she just had this look of impotent concern as I slowly hopped towards the house. She's a good dog. I mention this because I finally got the clean bill of health from the doc today. There's still a slight fracture that hasn't fully healed on the leg bone but the ankle is fully okay now. He had some concern early on that we might have had to do surgery. Very grateful that it never came to that. For the first two weeks I had to just sit in one place and heal. If that didn't mean leavi...