Wanted to add pagination before things got too out of hand. It was easier than I expected honestly, only around a dozen lines of code. I also touched up the sidebar.
The only things it really needs now are RSS and tags. This blog is unfocused to put it mildly so I think it'll be nice to have different feeds for each tag. Trying to properly tag things might end up being too much of a pain but we'll see.
High Spirits (1988) is a fantasy comedy directed by Neil Jordan and featuring Peter O'Toole, Daryl Hannah and even a young Liam Neeson. It's the sort of movie destined to be filler for cable TV or streaming services nowadays; not funny enough to be great, not bad enough to be funny, not weird enough to be a cult hit.
It has a certain je ne sai quoi though. The cast seems to be having a great time, and the high production values and elaborate sets make for some fun gags. As unmemorable as it is it's hard not to enjoy your time with it.
Interestingly, the director Neil Jordan claims he made a very different movie. In an interview he talks about how the studio didn't care for his version, so they made a new cut which he had zero control over; "making a bland comedy out of what was meant to be a biting satire," as he puts it.
You always have to be skeptical of directors who make it out like there was some masterpiece buried beneath studio meddling. In the case of High Spirits the problems go deeper than what can be done with an edit. Still, it makes you wonder.
It turns out there's an answer to this mystery out there, to some extent: in the National Library of Ireland there exists a complete screenplay for High Spirits, among other notes and related material. While it's not the same as being able to see Jordan's cut (which is rumored to exist as a Japanese-exclusive direct-to-video VHS - I'm skeptical) it would certainly give some insight into the original direction for the film.
Why do I care? I don't know, exactly. I guess it's just so tantalizing to know there's an answer to a question out there, and all that's needed is to put the pieces together.
So, if someday someone near Dublin with too much time on their hands and/or a passion for obscure 80s movies happens to read this: you know what you have to do.
I've been interested in picking up a CRT for a few years now, so when found I one on the side of the road during a walk the other day it seemed like a sign. Now I'm the proud owner of a Toshiba 19A21, a low-end TV from 2001. I also now know that I can carry a medium-sized CRT about three blocks before my arms turn to jelly.
The picture was decent, but it could be better - plus I just wanted to learn more about how to calibrate it. I looked up some guides and dove in, and after an hour or so of trial and error this is what I've learned.
These are the settings I have to work with, from the on-screen display. I haven't adjusted any potentiometers (yet). Note that my descriptions here are more how they're used than what they actually do.
First things first I set each of those to their midpoint values, besides Color, which has a minimum of 32 and looks horrendous if it's much higher than that.
Next is adjusting Brightness. With an SMPTE test pattern we need to look at the three skinny vertical gray bars near the bottom right. Brightness should be adjusted until, counterintuitively, the left two should both look the same, pure black, while the right one should just barely be visible.
Then we adjust Contrast. This is more subjective, I think; 'officially' you want it as high as possible before the picture starts blooming, where bright colors bleed into dark areas. But that point is uncomfortably bright for me, especially for the dimly lit room where I have the TV. Plus, higher contrast ages the CRT faster. So I opted for a pretty low setting but really just use whatever looks nice to your eye.
R/G/B Bias is pretty simple; just adjust until blacks and dark grays look neutral, not too warm or cool.
It's worth mentioning that, while I don't have a colorimeter, I do have access to notebookcheck.net, who kindly provides ICC color calibration files for all the laptops they review; meaning you can get proper color calibration for a laptop you own, which makes for a decent reference going forward.
And that takes us to R/B Drive. This is the main color adjustment, and the trickiest part to get right. Using an RGB gradient pattern like this, each should be more or less the same intensity as the others. "Color" should be adjusted so you can clearly differentiate between each of the most saturated bands. White should look, well, white. Since there's no green adjustment I just treated it as a fixed value and adjusted the other channels relative to it.
As for Tint, which is basically hue, if you need to make any adjustments from the default / center value they'll probably be pretty minor. It's easiest to see with a SMTPE test pattern; the yellow should look pure yellow, like a lemon or banana, no green or orange to it. The magenta should look pure magenta too, without any red or purple but right smack in the middle.
That's it. Probably my favorite bit of trivia from all this is how NTSC is known as "Never Twice the Same Color". After playing around with the settings for an hour or so I'm pretty happy where it ended up - yellows look a bit weak, and reds a bit strong, but I think I'm at the point where further adjustments are more likely to drive me crazy than improve the picture. Even though it looks way better than when I took it home and plugged it in for the first time, it's funny how the imperfections start to stand out more once you dive into the finer details of things like this.
CRT displays are imperfect by nature, though; they use and abuse the laws of physics well past the point of being sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic, and they're inextricably tied to the physical world in a way LED displays just aren't. You see the grill, hear the beam, watch the picture fade in as it literally warms up. You learn about how it works just by using it. Not to say modern displays are entirely devoid of that quality, and of course their accuracy and convenience makes them objectively superior for the purpose of displaying pictures. But there is something lost between analog and digital; as silly as it looks it brings me great joy to see my CRT TV sitting next to an LED TV, both old and new offering their strengths.
Sources / further reading:
There's the frontend done... ish. For now.
I'm not super happy with it, but whatever, it works. I'm just not really sure what direction to take it.
For this site in general I'm gravitating towards a sort of flat skeumorphic thing, using flat colors and simple lines to represent real objects that more or less correspond to the content/function - see The Library as an example, where I keep my bookmarks as, well, books.
For the blog here I was thinking of styling the posts like signposts, or maybe like pieces of paper pinned to a bulletin board. How to make that look decent isn't immediately obvious to me though - and in the interest of having a functional blog I decided to just throw something together. The colors need tweaking but I'm kinda digging the orange and navy thing so I'll probably stick with that in some capacity.
I really need to mention how much of an inspiration Michał's blog has been. The styling similarities should be obvious (for the time being at least) - I pretty much copied it wholesale - but I was especially inspired by the kinds of posts he makes (and the frequency, wow!).
I tried to write a full-length, high effort blog post once. It was so embarassingly bad I deleted it immediately upon finishing and swore to never make the same mistake again. But on the other hand, the Twitter/Mastodon microblog paradigm feels so slight, both to read and to write; there's enough space for the idea of an idea and not much else.
I think Michał nails it though. Some longer posts, some shorter, but most hang out in that 200-500 word sweet spot. The low stakes of microblogging with plenty of headroom for deeper dives. I don't know if there's a term for this style but needless to say I enjoy it immensely and will be taking this blog in a similar direction.
That's about it for now. There's still a ton of work to do here, like:
and much more. But now I have a place to dump random thoughts I don't want to let fade away in my head so I'm happy.
This is a post to test my blogging software.
I'm writing this in a markdown file that (hopefully) gets parsed and embedded from a link like /blog/2025/hello-world.
If all goes according to plan it should also be visible in a big list at /blog too.
It just occurred to me tags might be useful too. Hmm. Maybe later.
