Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Had A Ska Accident But My Insurance Won't Pick It Up

2023-Oct-13

There was a bit of waffling back and forth between choosing a whole new module to handle the genre assignment functions. The current version of my app import a module with so many unused functionality. Had they not been there I would have made the decision much quicker to rethink the entire process of determining what master genre to assign to a multi-gram genre (ex. ‘French indie pop’ [3] or ‘neo industrial’ [2]. Or even freestyle[1] ! I noticed that the more amount of grams in a genre puts the meaning closer to the last gram than the first. Nobody mentions ‘French’ after ‘indie pop’. And if it were just ‘indie pop’, pop seems the operative word rather than the first one which serves as an adjective rather than a noun defining itself. The next step is to do some inner-string inspection because there are a few sequences of strings inside those grams that indicate what master genre they should be assigned. ‘-tronica’ is the most glaring one. Appending the suffix -tronica to a geographic region is a very common occurrence in Spotify’s genres.

Now that a very reasoned and thoughtful commit log entry has been delivered, let’s get to the good stuff. We are still in the heart of ‘spooky month’. I myself am not the biggest fan of horror movies for the sake of watching a ‘scary movie’. The people in the development team’s life however have a greater say about how important seasonal theming is, so the only movie material to report on until the end of the month will be scary movies.

I myself enjoy well made special effects, especially the 1980s era of practical effects. The mid-90s brought forth computer effects, so the horror and action movies of the late 80s/early 90s to me represent the acme of good movie production. The aliens are slimy, the robots move and sound like how I thought they would, and the gore is something you can grab. Great cgi can get the job done. I get a vicarious thrill of thinking about the effects crew working to make a fake decapitated head that walks away on spindly crab legs.

House is the movie to be dissected. A title that I do not agree with. It had quality 80s monster puppetry, but the story doesn’t explain how the house is involved with the monsters. All of them seem to come from the PTSD of the main character witnessing the capture of a squadmate on patrol through the jungles of Vietnam during the war. The story veered into the wacky. A touch of slapstick instead of doubling down on horror.

I remember enjoying it as a kid, and seeking it out at the video store, with no luck. I caught it once late at night on cable -before there was a TV guide channel. ‘‘House’ was not the title I thought to look up. Now as an adult I don’t have such glowing kid eyes. It’s an ok 80s creature thriller. It’s not Evil Dead 2!