Watched 24 Hour Party People (2002) by an author from letterboxd.com
Manchester, 1976. Tony Wilson is an ambitious but frustrated local TV news reporter looking for a way to make his mark. After witnessing a life-changing concert by a band known as the Sex Pistols, he persuades his station to televise one of their performances, and soon Manchester's punk groups are clamoring for him to manage them. Riding the wave of a musical revolution, Wilson and his friends create the legendary Factory Records label and The Hacienda club.

Turns out this is like a stealth Alan Partridge film because Coogan (allegedly) based Partridge on Tony Wilson. So, if you like Alan Partridge and ever asked yourself: “what would it look like if Alan started a record label and bought a club to promote his bands?” Here’s your answer.

It’s also a biopic of the Manchester music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s (before I was even in my ‘tweens), that apparently reshaped “club life” itself. As with any biopic, I dunno how much of that is strictly true, but it’s a good story well told.

Features a boatload of British acting talent (including Moaning Myrtle getting uprighted in a toilet cubicle) and, obviously, some banging tunes.

★★★½

My review

Watched Atomic Blonde (2017) by an author from letterboxd.com
An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.

Watched on Monday October 20, 2025.

★★★★

My review

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I run this site on a VPS. I recently had some problems because there was no log management configured for SQL and a harmless warning completely filled the storage. The irony was that, as the storage filled, the more applications failed and the more errors were generated, so it totally snowballed.

In the following week I had two portable devices start to display odd behaviour too. Turns out both of them were also short of storage. Several apps on one iOS device had apparently cached gigs of data that could only be removed by uninstalling and reinstalling the app. This feels like a problem we solved decades ago but then developers started relying on increasing storage capacity instead and stop caring.

Read Wargames Atlantic CEO reveals his secret identity, pledges to repay $46k debts by an author
Active since 2018, Wargames Atlantic is a successful American wargame miniature manufacturer, producing sci-fi, fantasy, and historical miniatures for its own lines and other miniature designers - and its CEO has been living a double life. In a company blog post on Monday, the man known publicly as ...

Meanwhile, in… tiny plastic solider drama? Huh. Not a sector used to controversy unless it’s wehraboos (or fascism adjacent)

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Recently found that one of my users, bob, could not log in. I tried to check the user in the Synology Control Panel > User & Group but got the message “failed to load the user data”. No other users seemed affected.

I logged in with <span class="code">ssh</span> with suspicions that some file permissions had been messed up. Took a bit of time but I discovered that some ill-advised and careless use of <span class="code">chown -R</span> in <span class="code">/volume1</span> (switching ownership of some shared files) meant that bob no longer owned the files/folders in <span class="code">/volume1/@userpreference/bob</span>.

I <span class="code">chown</span>ed them back to bob and it fixed the problem.

Sorry, bob.

I was today years old when I learned that I own an NFT 🤣 Turns out I’m a massive hypocrite and I didn’t even know.

(Yes, it’s a Reddit “Collectible” avatar)

My friend now has a mandatory, annual “AI objective”. I suggested this:

Minimise the risk of inclusion of mathematically certain, AI hallucinations, for which I would be blamed, by avoiding any usage beyond simple sentences rephrasing/proofing

Watched Top Gun: Maverick (2022) by an author from letterboxd.com
After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell finds himself training a detachment of TOP GUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.

Watched with the kids (10/13), they loved it. Can’t blame them.

Afterwards was trying to think of a better sequel. Not just a sequel that surpassed the original but in a “Best films that were sequels” way.

T2 was the only contender I came up with off the top of my head.

★★★★★

My review

Replied to Thomas 🔭🕹️ (@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io) (Hachyderm.io)
Just had to block (not on here) people who were arguing that wearing helmet doesn’t add protection for you when you use a bicycle. Incredible stuff.

I think a lot of people just underestimate the danger from a blow to the back of the head. While extremely rare, kids die from head injuries just playing tag. The increased risk as a cyclist should be self-evident.