Week in Review 20240729

In the growing quest to finally turn one of my Raspberry Pis into a multi-functional machine, I installed Calibre and Calibre-Web on the Pi 5, along with a FreshRSS installation. I initially was going to use Docker to do this, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get Docker to mount or otherwise add the USB drive that the Calibre library is stored on, so I scrapped Docker and installed everything like I always have in Linux via trusty old apt. I did have to build Calibre-Web from source using git-clone and some python virtual environment chicanery, but I got it working in the end.

I’ve started re-building my old CD library that was unfortunately lost over the last couple of decades and I’m thinking of using some of my new and basic python skills to create a database of some kind as I rebuild my library. Maybe I’ll share it here somewhere so the world shall know my rather pedestrian tastes. At one point, thanks to the successful gamification of Columbia House, I had hundreds of CDs that I think I may have paid all but $12 for. I don’t even remember all of them.

But this is the year 2024 and this time I’ll preserve my collection via ripping to FLAC and storing the files on my NAS and other archival media so I don’t lose them again. My goal is to not only rebuild what I had, but include everything I’ve bought & downloaded over the last 20 years in lossless format that I own and can’t be taken away or removed by the whims of our corporate masters.

We went to see Twisters this weekend and that was a fun movie with some exceedingly charming lead actors. The first half of the of the film felt very reminiscent of ’90s movies, with fast-paced introduction scenes that establish everything you need to know about a character in a few seconds. The movie weaves in more contemporary storytelling methods towards the middle and end of the film, but it doesn’t forget why we’re all here — to see attractive people and their quirky friends contend with tornadoes and it executes on that premise to perfection.

The one thing that really stuck out to me is how it presented an idealized depiction of rural America that is glaring for how out of date and old-fashioned it is. No Trump flags, no yellow snake or confederate battle flags, and none of those weird desecrations where all the color is gone from the American flag except a blue line.

Instead the film presents rural America as we’d like it to be: a land whose roadways are bereft of religious billboards, where Old Glory is good enough for everyone, and good country music plays on the radio, instead of interchangeable clones warbling about their girls in cutoff shorts riding in their pickup trucks down to the river on a Friday night.

Never in my life could I have imagined that country music would one day become dominated by generic brodudes chasing the glory of Alan Jackson’s Chattahoochee to such mediocre results. But whoever was picking the tunes for Twisters had good taste and effectively used some great examples of the genre as an emotionally affecting counterpart to their romantic depiction of rural America.