Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Stephen King Is The Maine Event

2023-Oct-06

Our update today is another bittersweet encounter with SQL-Alchemy, the Object Relational Modeling framework that is somehow attached to Flask. It has been ten months since I made any architecture decisions about using Flask. I usually go with the default option; the one used in the tutorials. I know SQL-Alchemy is not necessary because I’ve written a lot of web routes that bypass my Flask models and go straight to some Sqlite3 connections. I suppose those are dirty routes that go around proper models-views-controllers practices. I have no expectation for this app I keep here at Fredlambuth.com to become a huge app that will require scaling. Even so, I use this for education means I ought to use those best practices so that one day this thing could scale up as little refactoring needed.

Perhaps SQL-Alchemy was some sort of appeasement made towards helping software developers not have to know too much SQL to write their apps. That is not the case for me. My app is small enough that I think I can handle my own model-to-views mapping. I know a thing or two about objects! Anyways… My actual update to report is that /spotify/daily has a more unified visual styling. Behind the scenes I refactored the very messy view so that it is not so cumbersome to attach images from a different model to my daily table models. Thus we have images for every top five entry.

I’ll tell you h’what! I have one static image file on my web server that does not get called by any of my templates. It is still accessible by knowing the right URL mapping to my static folder. I use a somewhat standard URL directory structure, so if you know where static images ought to be kept, the file is called fur_load0.jpg. I will eventually start the whole MVC setup for another section to my Flask app for hosting my artistic output. I have some more ideas for short comic strips about the laid off job hunting life.

The disks getting shattered in today’s critique skeet shooting session are the 80s movie adaptations of the Stephen King novels Children of The Corn and Pet Sematary. The girlfriend of one of the developers on this site was keen for Stephen King in the formative years of her literary habits. Coupled with the fact that it is now well past the first of October -spooky season- means the development team here at fredlambuth.com is inundated night after night with King cinematic features.

My complaints for both movies are how each are hesitant to show actual gore but are content to show blood. Perhaps it is more a question of budget rather than censorship, but both these movies involve quite a lot of bodily damage, resulting in blood splatter. As a kid I had not noticed too much on the cuts of the violence and instead moved with the flow of the violence. Now as a jaded adult I can watch movie violence as a set of artistic choices. Both movies I mentioned have several deaths but you never really get to see the actual physical act of a body being harmed. They rely on cutaways between action almost about to happen and filmed side effects of somebody getting killed violently.

In the case of today’s critique, I have the feeling this is just cheap and practical editing without any cool on-screen effects. I remember not exactly liking either of these movies as a kid and the theme missing from these films from my other 80s horror childhood favorites is good blood, gore, monster, or any type of effect crafted. Rather than editing of film to suggest any of those on-screen effects.