Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle








  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlAlpha Male v0.00003
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    I’m afraid I’m not familiar enough to with the genre to speak about any particular category being good or bad, but I can give you an idea of what I like/hate.

    For theatre, I loved Wicked. I saw it three times and would do it again. Hamilton was also brilliant but Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera were really hard on my ears. I think it’s the whole “We need some dialogue here, but it’s a musical, so let’s have them sing it” that does it. If that’s your experience with musicals, believe me when I tell you, they aren’t all like that. Some are heart-shatteringly beautiful with complex harmonies and the sort of music that makes you feel like you can fly right out of that theatre. Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” still gives me chills when I think about it, and the way Hamilton is stitched together with callbacks between each song: “my shot”, “running out of time”, “wait for it”, “that would be enough”… it’s just amazing work.

    There’s also an excellent off-broadway musical called “Evil Dead: The Musical” and it’s as bad-in-a-good-way-campy as you think. There’s zombies, a splatter zone, and some seriously smart & funny songs in there, including my favourite: “What the Fuck Was That?”. I mean, it’s not good music, but it’s fun :-)

    But Cats… that was cancer for my ears. It was my first musical and nearly soured me on them entirely.

    But it’s not just theatre! I love movie musicals too! Moulin Rouge’s Ewan McGreggor is just jaw-droppingly talented. The finalé (until the curtains close anyway) is punch-the-air-feel-amazing. Another good one is The Greatest Showman: not quite as amazeballs as Moulin Rouge, but surprisingly inspiring, and the duet between Zac Effron and Zendaya definitely has that “life is beautiful” feel to it. Also, “Never Enough” is great too. I also have a deep, deep love for Pitch Perfect.

    Then there’s tv! The Buffy musical kinda started it all, and while it’s not nearly as musically complex as the aforementioned, it’s clever, funny, and 20 years later I can still hear it in my head. “I think this line’s mostly filler” was a nice touch. Since then though, there have been a number of attempts at musical episodes of favourite shows. Most recently, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did a fantastic job with some right bangers. The reigning champion of course is Glee with some awesome stuff [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

    So yeah, it ranges. I’d recommend Wicked & Hamilton to anyone not sure if they can get into musicals, largely because they don’t do that “sing dialogue” thing that I think grates on a lot of people. After that, look for shows starring people you know to be awesome. Kristen Chenoweth for example is a guaranteed win for me. She is absolutely delightful on stage.




  • There have been some great answers on this so far, but I want to highlight my favourite part of Docker: the disposability.

    When you have a running Docker container, you can hop in, fuck about with files, break stuff as you try to figure something out, and then kill the container and all of the mess you’ve created is gone. Now tweak your config and spin up a fresh one exactly the way you need it.

    You’ve been running a service for 6 months and there’s a new upgrade. Delete your instance and just start up the new one. Worried that there might be some cruft left over from before? Don’t be! Every new instance is a clean slate. Regular, reproducible deployments are the norm now.

    As a developer it’s even better: the thing you develop locally is identical to the thing that’s built, tested, and deployed in CI.

    I <3 Docker!





  • Actually, I stepped away from the project 'cause I stopped using it altogether. I started the project to satisfy the British government with their ridiculous requirements for proof of my relationship with my wife so I could live here. Once I was settled though and didn’t need to be able to bring up flight itineraries from 5 years ago, it stopped being something I needed.

    Well that, and lemme tell you, maintaining a popular Free software project is HARD. Everyone has an idea of where stuff should go, but most of the contributions come in piecemeal, so you’re left mostly acting as the one trying to wrangle different styles and architectures into something cohesive… while you’re also holding down a day job. It was stressful to say the least, and with a kid on the way, something had to give.

    But every once in a while I consider installing paperless-ngx just to see how it’s come along, and how much has changed. I’m absolutely delighted that it’s been running and growing in my absence, and from the screenshots alone, I see that a lot of the ideas people had when I was helming made it in in the end.