Kirsten Dunst had a great moment in a 2016 Hollywood Reporter roundtable in response to actresses lamenting that they don't work with female directors, saying that "[she's] worked with so many female directors" and that "it's up to us as actresses to give the opportunity to first time directors". While actors have a lot more sway than audiences in getting projects greenlit, I was curious what percentage of the movies I'd seen were directed by women. I googled around, but the website I found wasn't working and this script was non-trivial for breaking down custom lists. So I built my own!
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I recently watched the 1981 movie Possession by Andrzej Żuławski. It's a weird movie, ostensibly horror, but primarily used as a lens for the dissolution of the director's marriage (and political commentary). However the default poster on Letterboxd is explicitly horror focused (claws gripping into a woman’s back, blood trickling down, and bright blue spikes like something out of The Thing poster). I was curious about why they went with this and tried to look up some details on the poster — thus began the rabbit hole. Come along with me on a two day hyperfixation through the history of Possession and its artwork!
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Apple recently added transcripts to their Podcasts app, quickly becoming one of my favorite new features. I wanted to copy a paragraph out of the transcript though, and ran into the 200 word cap on their selection screen. Luckily the MacOS Podcasts app locally caches the transcripts, and so I built a simple web app that allows you to browse the transcripts and easily select parts of them.
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My brother has a website (https://spencerbeals.com, go buy some art!) which uses Wix. There's a product page view where you can see multiple images of a given piece and click to zoom in, but the gallery images are somehow lower resolution than the non-zoomed version, making for a pretty bad user experience. I couldn't find anyway to change this in the tool (or even any forums with people asking about this) but luckily we can fix it with Javascript.
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Back in high school I helped develop a website called The Pack Market, which tried to solve a problem with opening card packs for games like FIFA or Madden—if you're trying to get Messi, even getting someone else rare may be a disappointment. The website solved this by allowing you to buy virtual packs that wouldn't give you the specific players, but the value of those players as XBOX/PSN points which could be later used to buy individual players off of the market. So how do you generate a random card pack from the full set of available people?
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Speedrunning is when you try to complete a video game as fast as possible. You can speedrun individual levels, you can speedrun specific categories like 100% where you try and collect all items and complete all quests, etc. but the main category is Any% — get to the end as fast as possible, anything goes. For many games an Any% speedrun looks similar to someone playing the game normally, albeit with a lot of skill. But for some games the Any% run looks completely different, like Super Mario World's current 41-second World Record. How do people come up with these? Using Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for the GameBoy Advance, I'm going to do a technical deep dive into the Any% speedrun and how you could discover it starting from scratch.
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We now maybe have a hazy sense that going through doors can trigger a cutscene, or that maybe there's some invisible object there that Harry is running into that's doing the same thing. We also know that going through doors triggers scene changes in general, which we see from just moving around Hogwarts, or entering the Flipendo challenge. Let's once again see if there's any memory that seems relevant. What we're looking for is some state indicator of where you are, or where you'll end up when you go through a doorway. And luckily we immediately have access to a number of doors to test this out.
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I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters (Vox, We're Here, Tom Scott, Money Stuff and Heatmap News among many others) all of which I enjoy...but maybe don't always read. I don't want to unsubscribe because I do read them, but I don't need Dropout.tv's episode announcement from three weeks ago floating around in my inbox. Ideally if I don't get to them they could quietly be purged in the background, but the default Gmail and Apple mail filters don't support delayed filtering. But Google Scripts does!
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The iOS compass app is great for pointing north. But what about if you want to point somewhere else? This was a quick two-hour project to whip up a web app for pointing to a static location, much like Jack Sparrow's compass from the Pirates of the Caribbean.
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