Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Paper Airplanes, When Not Moving, Are Stationary

2024-Feb-21

The update today is mostly fixes. There are new things added. However this fix is the first fruit of the mobile-device testing pattern! Let’s not jump for joy just yet. All that means is the browser window used for user testing is squeezed vertically as much as possible. It feels ludicrously simple yet I cannot imagine what more is needed to test how fredlambuth.com will appear on tall vertically oriented screens. Everything should at least be readable on phones now. Maybe not pretty, but at least readable.

Another easy fix that is also the product of new initiatives in the app. The streaming log of all the songs I listen to that is the data model for that notoriously slow web request? I thought the slowness was due to the intricacy of the queries on that page. Turns out I was making a whole table scan and only asking for the last three! I still am doing that in one of the queries, but I truncated the table to just one hundred days, so that table scan is not so severe.

This was a ‘two birds getting stoned at the same time’ scenario. I have started making an analytics section where I’ve been putting away data that cannot be accessed from my web views. Now there is a job every week to scrape away seven days of data and append that weekly scraping to a database in the analytics section, which is just a directory in my dev environment.
The ‘rp’ section will now be changed into some 1,7, n, and 100 day level views. I am a little unsure how to set up the physical data. New flask model? Do I need to bother with models? Vamos a ver muy pronto!

Last update to report is a bit cheeky. There are some more robust options for directing not logged in web viewers. The cheeky part comes from when being redirected to the login page because an unlogged in user tried to use features allowed only for logged in users. That particular authentication error message has been placed in my head at a tender young age. One of the first instances of a ‘hacker’ or IT professional I saw on film. I’ve heard Jurassic Park the novel presents different villains to readers who have IT experience, with Dennis Nedry coming off as much more sympathetic.

Early 90s Hollywood is also what we have on the menu today on the review side. For the graphic material I made a thrilling motorcycle assisted armed robbery with the two title characters of the 1991 film Harley Davidson and The Marlboro Man. In the driver seat I put a muddily illustrated facsimile of Jimi Hendrix. I need some new pens in between my thick chisel tips and my super fine .3/.5 MM flat tips. Jimi Hendrix is here because the young and always entertaining Giancarlo Esposito gave off major Hendrix vibes in his role here. What an actor!

Hendrix, or at least the flamboyant clothes, hair, and mustache of a Hendrix costume, fits in among the cast, which is somehow made up of 20th century American billboard personas, or outright brand names. I’ll be honest, I did not pay too close attention to the scenes in the dive bar where the bonhomie shared between Jack Daniels and Virginia Slim was explained. Not when I was a six years old watching it on stolen Pay-Per-View and not now when I vacantly watched it on Tubi.com. Instead I gravitated to the hammy one liners delivered in between 80s action staples of guns, punches, daring leaps show far enough to hide the stuntman’s face, and car chases. These characters are really named that, but they’re also just good ol’ fashion American types that were fading away; being replaced with urban squalor, kids taking drugs, or whateve was bad in America in 1991.

This movie hardly delivered on the very action that is supposed to be the reason the movie like this could be made. That illustrated motorcycle chase I made does not appear in the film. Mickey Rourke as ‘Harley Davidson’ does not use his motorcycle in any particularly exceptional way. Don Johnson as the Marlboro Man at least has the peculiarly good pistol shooting, and that is realy the only action going on here. This movie seems like five pounds of B-movie action that cannot fill the 10 pound bag of late 80s Hollywood action movies. With the most superficial of Wiki snooping I found the writer and director came from and went on to make middling schlock for film and TV. There was nothing really noteworthy about this movie that would have led me to believe either would have had some other breakout hit.

The writing and directing being uninspiring aside, there is technical craftsmanship put into the lifeless story and characters. The sound crew must be the same guys who worked on the more famed action hits of the 80 and 90s. The guns are all sleek looking assault rifles, sub machine guns, or ridiculously heavy pistols and they all sound powerful. Explosions were large and by themselves done well. The sum of these parts does not add up to make this a movie that finagles them into a narrative ride worth remembering.

There is a lot on the table that might have given any more life to this movie. The ‘five years into the future’ setting of 1996, a setting I completely missed in my repeat viewings as a child, gets introduced and not much done with. The first fight scene of the movie takes place in a gas station with such unheard of prices as high as $3.99 for a gallon of gas! I suppose in 1991 dollars that would be scary. The prices inside the convenience store where Mickey Rourke dispatches some armed robbers also match up with the inflation. That was a nice little touch from the set designers.

Everything after that visually does not go out of there way to point out how much society had decayed from its 1991 vantage point. As a child watching In 1991, this movie looked just how any other movie set in the LA area looked like. To this day it just looks like the more rough parts of LA. There are two scenes set in an airplane graveyard that lends itself well for shootout scenes. Other films have used that locale better than this one did. Just really lazy shooting and fighting.

The six year jump in time wants me to believe the writer had more going on in this script. More speculation on the way the 1980s USA will turn out. Something else I remember about late 80s/early 90s Hollywood movies was the fear of being replaced economically by the ever rising, coldly efficient, and haughty Japan. This film has a touch of this, with the seen but hardly heard corporate overlords that converse via teleconference with the bad guy character played by Tom Sizemore, the overseer of their company’s holdings in the USA. His corporate goons are poker faced ice cold killers that step right out of a cyberpunk manga, draped in full-length bulletproof leather robes. The heroes look exceptionally like a frantic and colorful Village People of misfits that includes a cowboy, a biker, a wrestler, and a Hendrix in comparison to the cool measured moves of the corporate goons.

The story itself does not want to put any more meaning into pitting the two title characters into anything more thematic than two good ol’ boys that robbed an armored car that was more valuable than they initially thought. I suppose there is some sort of artistic merit to the title characters often hanging out on the edge of a billboard, the venue where their names come from. Is there some subtext here? Some ironic twist about there heroes taking the names of corporate mascots while they themselves are so destitute because of the actions of runaway corporate greed. Not in this film!

The corporate goons are evil because they secretly sell drugs, not because they are corporate goons- that I’m rather sure are the unexplained reason why everything in 1996 looks like a 1991 ghetto in LA.

What even clouds these ideas further is the villain’s monologue at the end where he rationalizes the ‘evil’ choice he makes to sell drugs as a side business to his day job as corporate viceroy for a Japanese conglomerate. He says he makes more money from selling drugs rather than whatever he does as an executive for a company that has the only magnificent glass towers in town. So… Who is buying those drugs? Why are drugs illegal? Who is enforcing that? What would the villain do with so much cash in his corporate life? What is the point of the decay and corporations if this guy can make more money selling drugs? Why doesn’t the corporation sell the drugs?

It was just so much ‘Don’t Do Drugs’ or other Reagen era moralizing stuffed into a frustratingly written final shootout capping of a story set in a somewhat cyberpunk setting of corporations hoarding wealth and ignoring economically unviable masses picking among the trash. This film is just a big waste of ideas. There is a big budget spilled all over the film with B-movie level effort. The one standout scene I remember from this movie is the incredibly well done two or so minute intro to the film. Not only does it set the movie well with the ‘far of year of 1996’ setting, but it is remarkably similar to the intro scene that Mickey Rourke would have in Sin City. Mickey Rourke was born to play prodigal son tough guys coming back home.