Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Fortune Favors the Bold, Not Italic

2023-Sep-20

After fiddling with CSS for a while, I’ve come to the suspicion that it is not as screwy as I had thought it to be. Well, not the styling that doesn’t involve spatial relationship of one div to another. I can use the reliable 1,2, or 3 columns in each row grid system provided by Bootstrap. Every time I start from the ground up with that system my visual design comes out looking amateurish. Anything beyond that simplicity I have to poach the CSS from a site’s who’s styling I like and then I hammer the sections I understand into my own HTML templates.

There are a few visual updates in the blog section. This talk of CSS comes from me trying to make some new HTML views from my Spotify data. The back-end was a workmanlike iterative process of remembering SQL-Alchemy’s syntax to do some joins and filtering. Getting those to fit a web design pattern did not have the same slow and steady progress. More of an immediate jump into a mess I hardly could get to my satisfaction. What little I did is over at /spotify/last_100.

In today’s review’s sights we have the recent Hollywood big budget drama Babylon. I heard it was not profitable nor that favored by critics. The critics not liking it is somewhat of a surprise. The director and the subject (Hollywood movie making) are usually professional critic candy.

My obvious grief with the movie is the three hour length. Few movies deserve that much screen time. Brad Pitt grabs his scenes with so much old Hollywood start charm it almost becomes gravitas. His performance felt like a strong buy dying lion lashing out at the wind. The Harley Quinn actress uses the same affectations to present herself as a silent movie sexpot. Which works but doesn’t make me want to watch hours of that schtick.

The director did a bang-up job shooting big sweeping vistas, long tracking shots through complicated scenes, and punchy camera work for sex or violence. There was not enough of that, or just enough and was drowned out by dialogue exploring the motivations of the characters I didn’t care about.