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In the last 24 hours I’ve swung back into the IndieWeb orbit. I think this was mostly prompted by a general disatisfaction with social media right now.

The last time I was here I was trying to work out how to “scrobble” tracks from Amazon Music to this site. I was trying to do this with Shortcuts on iOS and IFTTT.

This time I have been looking at how I can better share my watches from Letterboxd. I have an IFTTT applet that uses an RSS feed Trigger on my Letterboxd and uses the WordPress Action to post here. It’s not very flexible, the formatting is kind of crappy, and, as a result, all the watches are sat in Drafts, waiting to be beautified.

I have been doing a lot with Microsoft Power Automate at work recently and that got me thinking that maybe I could manipulate the data coming in from the RSS feed. I mostly rely on 3rd party tools as I am not skilled enough to whip up and deploy my own API/handle turning apps.

I started scouting around to see if I could find a tool to convert the RSS into another format that I could manipulate a bit more and then feed that into IFTTT (or w/e). I didn’t have much luck, so I thought I better have a look at IFTTT and see if there was anything I could do on their side. I couldn’t remember there being anything. Turns out IFTTT added this thing called filter code. I think the idea is, as the linked article suggests, that it gives you a bit more control of the flow. But it turns out you can basically re-write the applet. You can read the data from the Trigger and set the parameters for the Action.

I came up with a nice regex to remove the username from the feed url, so you can get a link to the movie page on Letterboxd. So, now I should be able to feed that into the Response properties for a watch. I’ll update with a link to the applet when it does exactly what I want.

At that point I was pretty happy and decided to go to bed. That was about 10pm ish. Obviously my brain didn’t fancy that so I ended up looking at my Shortcuts scrobble again… two hours later I was successful. Learned a lot of “obvious” stuff, which I’ll leave to reflect on another day.

When you reply to a request with “I don’t understand what you need me to do” and the response doesn’t actually provide any clarification but expands on why the person cannot do it themselves…
 
It means they don’t understand what they need you to do either.
Watched The Hunt (2020) from letterboxd.com
Twelve strangers wake up in a clearing. They don't know where they are—or how they got there. In the shadow of a dark internet conspiracy theory, ruthless elitists gather at a remote location to hunt humans for sport. But their master plan is about to be derailed when one of the hunted turns the tables on her pursuers.

I always thought Betty Gilpin was kind of badass.

★★★½

Watched Host (2020) from letterboxd.com
Six friends hire a medium to hold a séance via Zoom during lockdown — but they get far more than they bargained for as things quickly go wrong. When an evil spirit starts invading their homes, they begin to realize they might not survive the night.

The kind of film where, afterwards, you think twice before switching the light on. Or turning round too quickly.

Or the dog next door coughs as you pass the window and it scares the living shit out of you…

★★★★

Watched Piranha 3D (2010) from letterboxd.com
Each year the population of sleepy Lake Victoria, Arizona explodes from 5,000 to 50,000 residents for the annual Spring Break celebration. But then, an earthquake opens an underwater chasm, releasing an enormous swarm of ancient Piranha that have been dormant for thousands of years, now with a taste for human flesh. This year, there's something more to worry about than the usual hangovers and complaints from locals, a new type of terror is about to be cut loose on Lake Victoria.

Sadly I did not see this in 3D.

If you are looking for boobs and gore this delivers in spades and on that basis I can’t fault it. I don’t even think it is trying for any real tension. It’s just shore to shore bikinis and blood.

★★★

Watched Alita: Battle Angel (2019) from letterboxd.com
When Alita awakens with no memory of who she is in a future world she does not recognize, she is taken in by Ido, a compassionate doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past.

I liked it a bit more on second watch. The visual effects are way better than I remember. I dunno if I just took against those big eyes.

I think another factor is that now I have seen Rotoscoped Rosa Salazar (in Undone) I can see her performance in Alita, and somehow that elevates it for me. Like you can see the Andy Serkis in Gollum (right?) You appreciate what the actor is doing under the CGI that bit more.

The script clangs a bit in places and I can, in no way buy Waltz and that massive hammer.

I kind of would have liked to see the second part now. Shame.

★★★½

Watched The Ritual (2017) from letterboxd.com
A group of college friends reunite for a trip to the forest, but encounter a menacing presence in the woods that's stalking them.

Starts out pretty darn unsettling but sorely needed some shocks in the finale. It sort of wanders into more familiar territory and it loses something.

★★★½

Watched Revenge (2017) from letterboxd.com
Jen's romantic getaway with her wealthy (married) boyfriend is disrupted when his friends arrive for an impromptu hunting trip. Tension mounts at the house until the situation culminates in an unexpected way.

There are films that you can describe as “dumb fun”. This has all the dumb and none of the fun. It looks pretty decent in places, which is something. But my strongest reaction was definitely concern for the upholstery.

★

“Oh, I need a non-breaking space in a JS regexp, how hard can that be?”
?

\u00a0