Month: July 2021

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Watched Fear Street: 1666 (2021) from letterboxd.com
In 1666, a colonial town is gripped by a hysterical witch-hunt that has deadly consequences for centuries to come, and it's up to teenagers in 1994 to finally put an end to their town's curse, before it's too late.

Of the three, this one musters a much stronger Stranger Things vibe. It pays off parts 1 and 2 REALLY well. There is some properly brutal shit, rivalling part 1.

There is SO much to like about this but something just doesn’t play right. It just doesn’t feel like enough. If this had been a 12 episode limited series I feel like people would be going nuts for it. Maybe it just needed a bit more budget? In the UK, I still feel like the 18 cert adds an expectation that isn’t met.

I don’t think I liked this part much more than I liked the other parts. It has the same problems, in the form of pace killing heart-to-hearts and the same strengths, characters you give a shit about and a zany story.

I think the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

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Watched Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021) from letterboxd.com
In 1978, two rival groups at Camp Nightwing must band together to solve a terrifying mystery when horrors from their towns' history come alive.

Well, I liked it more than 94. I wasn’t thrilled with the score in some parts and there were some weirdly long monologues/confessionals that killed the pace. Also, didn’t Guardians have this soundtrack?

But I liked the summer camp setting WITH campers. I liked the characters and the relationships. I liked the transition from petty camp bullshit/bullying to bloodbath, where we just end up focused on a few characters. I liked how it built the mythology and I liked the tone.

Regarding the tone, I feel there is some sort of disconnect on the UK rating. I guess the 18 is for violence but the tone is somewhere between a 12A and a 15. It feels odd.

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So, I had a minor disaster. This is what went wrong and how I fixed it.

We use the amazing WordPress Redirection plugin. We recently started a survey and the best way to contact the participants was by letter. We had to include a URL to the survey. Some people were mistyping the URL. For example:

/direct-payments-servey
/direct-payments-urvey
/directpayment-survery/
/directpaymentsurvey
/directpaymentssurvey

The correct URL is /direct-payments-survey/

To fix this, at 8:10am this morning, I threw up a very hasty regex redirect and went to have my breakfast, slapping myself on the back. It matches all the errors and, I thought, would catch most other typos. Here it is:

^/(directpayment|direct-payment).*

Problem is it also caught the target URL and an endless redirect ensued. The page was down for 9 hours.

After my trials a little while back trying to get to grips with not matching strings in a regex I had a good idea for how to fix it.

^/(?!direct-payments-survey)(directpayment|direct-payment).*

It was that easy. Here is the regex on regex101 as usual.

The silver lining here is that I now have a very reusable fix when I need to match something very close to the target URL. I’ve had this problem in the past and often just created a completely different URL. Even then this was not foolproof as WordPress keeps it’s own records of old URLs and redirects.

I do like celebrate a victory but today I must acknowledge a failure. I put a pretty important web page into an endless redirect loop with some fast and loose admin. Sadly, I made that change at 8:10am and I only just fixed it… ?