*Don't reload the page, it's supposed to look like this*

Warner Bros. Discovery, if you go on Max, go to movies, go to Horror, go to the "A-Z" list (horrendous way to sort a list of movies on a streaming service, by the way), go to the bottom of the list. As of Oct. 15, 2024, this list only goes to "W", they don't have any X, Y, or Z movies. The last movie on the list -- and this is kind of funny to me but not the subject of the question -- is "Wes Craven Presents They". The 5th movie back from the end of the list is "We're All Going To the World's Fair". So my question is regarding the 3 movies placed on the list between "We're All Going To the World's Fair" and "Wes Craven Presents They", those 3 movies being as follows:

Allow me to reiterate. These are the last 5 movies on Max's list of horror movies sorted by alphabet:

Warner Bros. Discovery, what am I missing?

-Derek

I'm 1/32nd Italian, that buys the 'W'

This is controversial placement: Jimmy Two-Times is the most memorable guy on the list, but I just don't get his whole thing. I've never met anyone like this. It feels like a thing a screenwriter came up with. Stuff like this can be saved sometimes by good acting, but the line-reading here makes me think the guy playing Jimmy Two-Times doesn't really get Jimmy Two-Times' thing either.

a lot of moving parts, here, and I'm interested in all of them.

not at all sure that Frankie is speaking real italian here, but whatever he says in whichever italian-esque dialect he speaks he does so with confidence and charm, proving language has little to do with words.

Nickey Eyes doesn't have to be explained, and he spends no time explaining himself. He wears age and thick-rimmed glasses each with grace, and his informal noun of choice is charmingly equalizing (in contrast with the demeaning "buddy" or "pal" used elsewhere). Would that I could navigate social introductions with Nickey Eyes' deft touch.

-Derek

Elise and I moved to Brooklyn, we're in the Clinton Hill neighborhood. It's been several months since I last posted. Other than the move, and our adopting a second dog named Ralph, and his gaining a lot of weight from eating Chef's leftovers, nothing is much different.

I'm gonna start into a large-ish project here where I slowly develop some concepts I've been thinking about w/out worrying too much about how fully formed they are as I write. The goal is to hone in on a sort of unifying model (regarding a subject I haven't revealed to you yet) that I don't know the shape of yet. A relevant metaphor here would be the several blindfolded folk woefully misidentifying an elephant in each their own special ways, except I'm all of the blindfolded folk, and I'm giving myself as many tries as I need, and I'm revising my guesses as I go.

The topic I'm interested here is searching, sorting, and filtering items in a database. At this point I'm not interested in the semantics associated with the words 'searching', 'sorting', 'filtering', 'items', or 'database', but that's something I imagine I'll dive into in some later post. I'll just provide a few examples here to give a vague sense of the relevant domain:

Some initial observations about how these examples overlap: lots of individual items to look through; individual items are meaningfully similar (e.g. films with films and baseball players with baseball players, as opposed to films with baseball players); individual items are associated with several objective properties (e.g. batting average, director, capture process) which can easily be classified and compared alongside the properties of all other items in the database.

This probably goes without saying, but I'm focusing here on *informational* databases, or databases which can reasonably be interacted with via phone or website or desktop app, as opposed to collections of physical items (like buttons in a sewing notions cabinet (though I guess that wouldn't really be a "database")). I might decide at some point that this isn't a necessary distinction, but for now it seems pertinent. Oh, and just because it's "information" we're sorting through doesn't mean there couldn't potentially be substantive digital content associated with each individual item. For example, it doesn't matter if it's a database of movie information (like IMDb) or a database of actual streamable movie files (like Netflix); I think the searching, sorting, and filtering of those databases will generally adhere to the same basic axioms.

Is "axioms" actually the correct word? Probably not, but for right now it's an alright placeholder to use as I define my intentions for this whole project: establishing some basic, unifying concepts or guidelines to use when designing or analyzing tools for interacting with databases. I don't know yet what grammatical shape these concepts/guidelines will take, and once I've figured a few of them out I think I'll have a better idea of what to call them. For now, like I said, I'm calling them axioms. "Axioms for searching, sorting, and filtering items in a database." That's the goal.

My plan for getting there is to identify relevant examples of searchable databases, then identify things I like or (maybe more commonly) things I don't like about my interactions with those databases, then reverse-engineer my own subconcious rubric from those positive and negative feelings. As I move on to further examples, I can try applying these reverse-engineered rubric points to see if they're effective tools outside of the context they were conceived in. I'll make lots of revisions, I'll combine and un-combine points, and hopefully they'll slowly solidify into solid and sufficiently general "axioms". I'm not planning on dedicating daily (or even weekly) time to actively work on this project, so it'll probably take a while. I'll try to show most of my work here.

I'd like to stop writing now, but I promised myself before I started that I would give at least a small example of the actual process in this post, so I'll start off with the lowest hanging fruit I can think of:

The iOS Photos App.

Some of my family members recently switched to iPhone, and were mentioning some of the pros and cons of their transition after Thanksgiving dinner. One of them brought up their frustration with the iOS Photos app, which I was happy about because it meant I had a minute or two to complain loudly about what I think is probably the worst app I have the displeasure of using on a daily basis (I'm sure they were very grateful to have invited me).

The iOS Photos app has many functions, and not all of them are bad! But in my mind its key functionality *should be* organizational; a photo library app, like any good library, stores your photos in such a way that you can easily find what you need when you need it. I think Apple feels this way, too, since that's what most of the app's real-estate is ostensibly devoted to. Good heavens, though, they've REALLY bungled the job. I have a lot gripes, but here's the one that I'll devote the rest of this post too:

There's no way to filter screenshots out of the main camera roll.

I take a lot of screenshots because they're a convenient way to save info for later use. They add up fast, they're ugly, and they take up a lot of display real-estate. I recently upgraded my phone and the camera system is way better than my old one, so I've been using it a lot. I would really like to look through those pictures *without having to scroll past a lot of stupid looking screenshots*. Apple KNOWS which pictures are screenshots, and they've even kindly built an album into the app which automatically collects all your screenshots into one place, so there's gotta be a way to do the reverse, right? A way to see everything BUT the screenshots?

Technically there is a way: open the screenshots album I just talked about, hit "select", hit "select all", hit the elipses menu in the bottom right, hit the option "hide", and then confirm that yes, you do want to put all of your screenshots into the very weird and kind of emo "hidden" album. Having done all this, you will no longer see screenshots in your main camera roll, because that's how the hidden album works; pictures in the hidden album can only be viewed in the hidden album.

This is an *incredibly* limited solution. Can you select an option to automatically add new screenshots to the hidden album? No, you can only do it manually. Is there a toggle which lets you see your hidden screenshots in the camera roll again without manually unhiding them all and then manually hiding them all again? No, they're either hidden or they're not. Is there a way to organize your hidden photo album in case you have other, non-screenshot related reasons for using it? No, all photos in the hidden album are mixed together in one big pot. Is there a way to lock all your screenshots behind FaceID verification? Yes, you can do that one if you'd like.

I don't use this option. In fact, I barely feel comfortable calling it an "option". It's a work-around. And there shouldn't have to be a work-around; all of the ingredients are already in place for there to be a tidy and automatic solution *built in to the app*. Here's what that solution could look like:

I'm looking at my camera-roll (or an album I've created, or one of the app's many examples of automatically generated albums). I don't want to see any screenshots in the pictures I'm looking at right now, so I tap the elipses menu in the upper right corner and select the "Filter" drop-down (which is something that *does* already exist on my phone, at least as of my writing this). Out of the list of filters in the drop-down, I choose "Screenshots" (which is an option that *doesn't* exist as of writing). At this point, my phone very quickly looks at a little binary tag present in each of the image files that says "screenshot" or "not a screenshot" -- a tag that already exists, and which my phone is already using to compile the automatic screenshot album -- and it temporarily stops displaying all of the pictures which say "screenshot". Easy!

Actually somewhere in that process there would have to be an extra step where the user decides if they want to "whitelist" the screenshot filter or "blacklist" it (I didn't come up with those terms, these topics have been picked over by much smarter people than I for a very long time). Choosing to whitelist the filter means your phone only shows pictures that *have* the screenshot tag. That's what the automatic screenshot album does, and it's the opposite of what we want in this specific scenario. Instead, we would choose to blacklist the filter so that the phone shows all the pictures *except* the ones with the screenshot tag. My goal here isn't to sort out the UX involved in how the user chooses between blacklisting and whitelisting a filter, or frankly the UX involved in *any* of these database issues (though I might spend some time talking about it here and there). If I had to guess, I'd probably say that Apple's big hang-up with this feature *is* UX-related. Frankly I don't think it's a good excuse, but I'll just add that to the list of topics I'll have to cover at some point later on in this series.

So what are the substantive differences between what Apple is doing and what I think they *should* be doing? Identifying those differences will give me a lot of important information toward coming up with an axiom or two.

First, I took the filtering option out of one small section of the overall app (the automatic screenshot album), and made it a universal option, available to be applied on any screen of the app which has the potential to display multiple photos.

Second, I turned what is currently a whitelist-only filter into a filter that can be applied as a whitelist *or* a blacklist.

I think both of these can be "axiom-ized" without too much trouble (though frankly I'm hand-waving past a lot of the logic here so that I can go watch a movie or something):

Universality Axiom: Whenever there's a possibility for multiple items to be displayed together, there's a potential need for filtering.

Duality Axiom: Collecting items into a category will always create two non-overlapping groups: The items belonging to the category, and the items not belonging to the category.

Dumb names, probably dumb axioms. As I said up top, these are drafts! I'll keep working on them later.

I don't consider myself a goal-oriented person, but I like having goals for things that I do. I'm as surprised and confused in writing that sentence as my imagined reader is in reading it. I don't want to think about why those statements can coexist right now (or about which statement is actually a lie), so I'll move past it and talk about what I want out of posting stuff on this blog and how I think that will influence my posting behavior.

The goal

I like writing things down, and sometimes I like the *idea* of people being able to see and read those things. Partially I guess that points back to some kind of hubris, but it feels immodest to point out my own inavoidable sense of pride, so I'll try not to dwell on it.

Mostly I'm looking to get more comfortable writing for an audience. The whole writing process changes when you know that the end results will be open to outside scrutiny. For one thing, you start feeling like you have to actually finish the project, which generally requires a lot of extra editing and polishing steps. I feel comfortable betting that I've never truly finished any project (writing or otherwise) that I ended up keeping to myself, and I keep most of my projects to myself. As a result, I'm very slow and unsure of myself whenever I have to finish anything. To illustrate, it's taken me 30 minutes or so to figure out how to finish this single paragraph.

The goal, then (or main goal out of many less clear sub-goals) is to trick myself into spending more time polishing the stuff I write by making it publicly accessible. The beauty of this is that it's the possibility of scrutiny which accomplishes the goal, not the scrutiny itself.

The beauty of this

There are a few common points of advice for people trying to grow an audience online. I've mostly heard them applied to instagram accounts and youtube channels, but if I had to bet I'd say they probably emerged in the good old golden days of blogging (not actually sure when that was, though, because frankly I didn't participate). "Establish your niche." I don't wanna do that. "Post consistently." I don't wanna do that. "Develop a clear voice." I'm not opposed to doing that, but I'm opposed to worrying about it all that much.

I'm once again imagining a reader, and this time I'm imagining them concerned. After all, there's not a massive difference between "how to grow your audience" and "how to keep your current audience happy." I like it when someone whose work I follow online sticks to a clear topic of interest, and I like it when they post regularly. If I spend a lot of time worrying about that stuff, though, I won't last 2 months on here. It's just not in the cards for me right now.

For all that I've written here about finishing things, this whole project is really about letting things be unfinished for a while. I'm not sure what this blog will look like or read like in a year or in 25 years or in 3 months. I know it's already fulfilling its purpose, though, based on the inordinate amount of time I've spent writing this ~500 word post. That's called polish, baby.

Land is cheap and plentiful on the internet. This domain name costs $10 a year. I could do blogspot or something for free and then I wouldn't have to write everything in html, but html is easy and I don't want to use blogspot.

I got a book for christmas called "Cabin Porn" and there are some people in there who tell their stories about buying cheap real estate and building nice comfy cabins on it. The pictures make it seem like they did a good job. For that reason I'd prefer not to see those people as inspiration for what I'm doing here. In a different book (Blood Meridian) the protagonist rides for days into barren plains and comes across a hermit. Inside the hermit's hut they sit on the mud floor and eat moldy vegetable soup and old meat. I like this comp better because it feels attainable, so it's on my mood board.

Here are some rules for myself:

1. don't let (or make) anyone else code this thing for you.

I get a little nervous about this when I remember that I withdrew from the Digital Humanities class I took in 2015 because I missed the first day of javascript, but then I remember that it took my professor about 2 hours to cover all of html. I'd like to keep the CSS to a minimum, but I'm not sure what that even means. I'm not afraid of javascript anymore, I just feel now that it's try-hard and I don't need it.

The source is hosted on github and since I don't want to pay for that it has to be a public repo. If you feel strongly about getting involved and making my blog a different color or giving it a tiled background of your face or something then maybe you can branch it and try that out for yourself (I'm pretty sure that's a github thing). Send me the results.

2. don't use more than one page.

I just don't think a blog needs to have more than one page. I already have an idea for breaking this rule, though, where I use another page for a "dark mode" version. That feels within the spirit of the law, because the content on both pages would be the same. I have a browser extension on my phone to fake a dark mode on sites that don't have one built in (wikipedia is a big one), so if I ever implement this idea it will be for you more than for me.

3. never spend any amount of time thinking about posts I could do to attract readers.

The only reason I can think of to try to attract more readers is to make money, and money makes the internet worse.

(Also I've been in the position before of trying to make or write things intended to boost engagement. Frankly it always makes me think less of myself.)

4. never let that stuff you just wrote keep you from making a buck on here.

I believe what I said about how money makes the internet worse, but I also believe in the sour grapes principle. I'll try not to be surprised if I find out the only thing keeping me from embracing all the dirty ad money being passed around the web is the fact that nobody has offered me any.

5. Tone-police yourself relentlessly.

I think "tone-policing" usually refers to being hyper-corrective about the way people talk about sensitive subjects, and that's not what this is about. What this is about is I know who I am as a writer and I don't trust myself not to get real prose-y and cute when I think nobody's watching. "Prose-y and cute" is the tone I'm trying to police against.

Alright cool I think I'm done for now.