I stitched this for a friend who used to play the wizard in Gauntlet.

I'm happy how the wizard turned out, with the black t-shirt also contributing shadows to the hands:

Also, the logo and the gradient worked well, Inkscape has some convenient features here:

I'm not so happy with the distance I put between logo and wizard, but it's not too bad either.

RSS.Style: Better UX for your RSS and Atom feeds!

In true old-skool fashion, even my RSS feeds are now also viewable in the browser, thanks to the XSLT stylesheets from rss.style. They rewrite the XML into something a browser can render. Obviously using a proper RSS reader, like Thunderbird is better, but hey!

This is already a bit older, but I'm still amazed of how much is possible when using one of the state of the art engines (and lots of custom code, I suppose). But this is certainly nice eye-candy. Hopefully, the story and writing of the game will hold up the mark set by The Witcher 3.

The Witcher 4 - Gameplay UE 5.6 Tech Demo | State of Unreal 2025 - YouTube

I'm doing more stuff with HTMX.

HTMX allows for almost-convenient polling by adding hx-trigger="every 1s" to an attribute. This allows you to kick off some processing on your server after having served a page and automagically update the page with the status and a download link when processing completes.

<div class="preview-card" id="preview-div"
    hx-trigger="every 1s"
    hx-get="/preview"
    hx-swap="outerHTML"
>
Please stand by while we prepare your content
</div>

The polling only works if the element has a hx-get or hx-post attribute. It does not work on <form> elements with action="..." , surprisingly.

The workaround is to add an explicit hx-get or hx-post="..." attribute to the element:

<form method="POST" action="/submit"
    hx-trigger="every 1s"
    hx-post="/preview"
    hx-swap="none"
>
<input name="message" type="text" />
...
</form>

I watched this movie in April or May 2025. The German title is Blood & Sinners, while the US title seems to be just Sinners. Overall, the music is entertaining, but I don't get the fawning reviews elsewhere.

I found the movie a bit aimless, and a hodgepodge of interesting ideas. Overall, I think it has more promise than the movie realized. There are some plots that don't go anywhere, which suggests to me that the script went through several rewrites or is a combination of several other scripts.

The setting of the movie is the Deep South in the 1930s.

The population are: (Former) Slaves, (Irish) Whites, the token Asians.

Genre: Vampire Splatter Music Movie

Content-wise, the music gets short-changed. I saw this movie billed as a musical, but to me, it is not. To me, a musical means that the song advances the story and exposes some inner monologue of the actors, which does not happen here at all. I've learned that the term of art is Book Musical. Polyphonic has a treatise on Sinners, and from there it could fall under the type of Backstage Musical.

The Blues/Music gets built up as driving element of the story, except that the idea and the general idea of magic music is lost after its expositional scene.

The story beats are mildly aligned with From Dusk 'Till Dawn (which is fine, From Dusk 'Till Dawn is a good movie).

Some of the story turns are quite weakly motivated. One person runs away in the middle of the battle without motivation. There are some mexicans that have one scene, seemingly hunting for vampires. Who are they and why are they there? The ending is a cliffhanger-style sequel setup.

Weirdly enough, this movie rates as a top movie for 2025 with 7.7 on IMDB, but maybe that is because there were no better movies at the time ?!