Posts

Pontificating on Running in Crowds

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I like doing projects that challenge me. Big things that I've never done before. I've run a music festival; written and self-published a book; started a monthly delivery service; designed and had a board game professionally published; and now I'm looking to start a nonprofit for opening movie theaters. Might as well include proof that I ran a music festival Each time I pivoted to a new project, not only did I have to learn new skills to handle the task I discovered the existing community and, for lack of a better word, infiltrated it. For some of the communities, like the music festival, the community was definitely preexisting. I had to find them, but they were there. When I got into board game design, while finding folks down for a board game isn't that  challenging - finding where the designers are was tricky. I contributed to bringing the designers of an area together to have weekly test play nights and it was magical. Getting into the nonprofit community locally is...
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A Listicle on Shows I've Watched Recently

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I like watching stuff. Sometimes its hard to find the good stuff to watch from the bad stuff. Movies are a self-contained thing and you can usually tell real quick if it's gonna be "your thing" or not. Shows? Sometimes you have to give it three or four episodes to make that decision. Anyways, here's a review of shows that I'm either caught up on, rewatching, or in the middle of watching a season of. Widow's Bay  on AppleTV Widow's Bay, Season 1 Dang y'all. I'm digging this. I figured I would because I dig Matthew Rhys and Stephen Root and horror shows but I wasn't ready for this. It has a fascinating tone that walks both horror and comedy without being too horrific or too goofy. You never know if you're gonna be shocked or laughing and that tension  is deftly handled in the writing, directing, and acting. And the acting. My goodness. I love Stephen Root. I've been on Team Root since I first saw him in Office Space. I go out of my way to...
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Code Post: Building Relationship-Based Access Control in Ruby on Rails

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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...
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You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Make Art But It Helps

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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...
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On the Topic of Dream Ballets

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  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...
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Pontificating on Social Media

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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...
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Well... is it CANON???

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 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...
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