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Showing posts from June, 2026

In Defense of Physical Media

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This is not going to be a suddenly crazy new stance for most of my online mutuals: I'm known by most as "that guy who has way too many laserdiscs." An excuse to post my LaserDisc collection? Don't mind if I do! This week, Playstation announced that they were removing over 500 films  from their streaming service because of a lapse of rights. This goes beyond "you can't stream it" or "you can't rent it." If you had "purchased" it on there, you will also lose it. If this is news to you, I truly am sorry. Because a streaming service can only provide a film as long as they either own the rights or they have a deal for those rights - when you "purchase" a film on there - you ain't buying it. You are "long-term renting it." Check the fine print you always just click away. Sony is not special in this relationship to video media - its built into all  streaming services. So if you (like me, I must confess) purchased ...

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...

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...

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...