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 ?!
I really like HTMX. But its error reporting is severely
lacking. For example, typos or wrong keywords in hx-trigger or other hx-
attributes do only result in a nondescript console entry and a stack trace:
htmx:syntax:error
The HTMX documentation suggests only
source-diving as a way to find where the attribute parser chokes. While this
works, it is not convenient. I have to switch from the minified HTMX library
to the development version, and then set a breakpoint on the logging routine,
and from there work my way backwards to the origin of the error. Which is most
of the time a typo or wrong keyword in an attribute.
Luckily, HTMX can invoke a callback on the htmx:syntax:error event, so we can
list the offending elements in the console and make them easily clickable:
htmx.on("htmx:syntax:error", (elt) => { console.log("htmx.syntax.error",elt)});
This still does not report the offending hx- attribute, and also does not
tell us, what keyword was wrong or where the expression went bad, but it
is a lot closer and does not require us to go source diving.
Fallout London is a large, user-made mod for Fallout 4. It reimagines London
as a postapocalyptic place with several factions.
The mod is certainly a labour of love, and the area is vast and promises
interesting setups. Not having played Fallout 4 itself, the whole setting is
far too unpaced for my taste.
The scenery certainly looks great in the screenshots, but I could not muster
the patience to grind through the game to see these parts of the city.
A colleague reminded me of this:
2 Minute Acid with Strudel
Strudel is very much like Supercollider / Sonic Pi, but
as a (Haskel and) Javascript library that can do live editing in the browser.
They also have a
tutorial .
What I like about this are the built-in sliders / visualizers. Connecting
this to MIDI inputs
for live performances could also be fun, if I
was doing live performances or performances at all.
https://www.remedygames.com/games/alan-wake
The game is old, from 2010, and thus isn't as humungous as current games,
and it runs well on current hardware.
The story is OKish, it follows a writer as he discovers he is in his own story,
in a Stephen King / Maine setting. Some darkness takes over people and you have
to fight these.
The gameplay is serviceable as well.
The whole game is made up like a TV series, with distinct chapters and recaps
at the start of each new chapter.
You control Alan Wake from a third-person perspective. The game alternates
between a walking simulator and fights where you have to first burn the
darkness away from creatures and then shoot them with a gun. Often the
creatures come from off-screen behind you, which is not helped by the
close perspective.