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gRegor Morrill

My name is gRegor Morrill, a.k.a. gRegorLove. I live in San Diego, enjoy tinkering on the web, and try to make people laugh. Yes, “Gregor is a weird name,” and I know gRegor is a weird capitalization. More about me

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Tomorrowland

I re-watched Tomorrowland for the IndieWeb Movie Club May selection chosen by Tantek. I think I initially watched it around 2016, also on his recommendation. I recalled it being visually captivating and OK overall, but unfortunately the story did not stick with me so I didn’t remember much of it going into this re-watch.

No major spoilers below, only brief description of an establishing scene which I don’t think spoils anything.

I’m still left with an “It’s just OK” feeling about it. The moral of the story is decent and hopefully inspiring to people: let’s dream, imagine, and work towards a better future. But it also felt a bit cliche in the ways it sets up and communicates that. For example, early on there are scenes of Casey in high school being taught about wars, climate change, authoritarianism, and everything wrong with the world, all from cynical teachers who sound resigned to it as if nothing could be made better. Driving that point home, they persistently ignore her raised hand until finally she asks, “Can we fix it?” Sure, doomers exist, but every teacher? Maybe I’m expecting too much from a family-friendly PG movie, but it seems like it could be communicated with more nuance.

The storytelling felt a bit clunky in the ways it jumped between action scenes and dialogue and I found the resolution a bit underwhelming.

Still, Casey’s optimism and adventurous spirit is welcomed. It is nice to see a teen girl character portrayed like her. I hope she is inspiring to young people.

Here are some quotes I liked from the movie and other tidbits:

  • “Can it just be fun?” – young Frank responding to a question of why make something
  • “What if there’s nothing there? What if there’s everything?!” – young Casey referring to traveling in space
  • “It’s hard to have ideas and easy to give up.” – Casey
  • I love to try visiting links that are shown in movies to see if they have easter eggs or still work. Props to Disney for maintaining blastfromthepast-houston.com that’s shown in this movie. There are no easter eggs, though; it just redirects to disney.com.
  • The end credits animation done by yU+co was lovely

IndieWeb Movie Club is a monthly blog carnival where a different host suggests a movie, people watch it, and then write about it. Next month’s film is Mary Poppins. Feel free to join in!

Edit: here is Jo’s post about the June IndieWeb Movie Club.

View responses or leave your own response

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Screenshot of album covers that all have a purple-ish, goth aesthetic

I appreciate The Birthday Massacre’s consistency in their album covers. #purple

Notes

Please help support legal costs for an asylum seeker in our Southern California community. They were kidnapped by ICE at their court hearing: https://gofund.me/24440eda

Any amount helps and boosting appreciated. 💛


A handy note for future-me or any other WordPress plugin developers:

If you need a plugin admin link that performs a download (e.g. a CSV file), you will need to use a hook that is called earlier in the process, before WP sends HTTP headers/content to the browser.

With a typical plugin admin page that displays content, I would use:

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'foo_add_menu' );

Then in function foo_add_menu(), I would use add_menu_page like:

// my example is OO, so $this points to the object and calls the index() method
add_menu_page(
    'Plugin Page Title', 
    'Plugin Menu Title', 
    'edit_posts', 
    $this->plugin_name . '_index', 
    [$this, 'index'], 
    ''
);

If you try to do this with a method that starts a download, you will get errors like “Cannot modify header information.” This StackOverflow answer pointed me in the direction of the load-page hook to solve that.

That documentation is a bit slim, but what I figured out was add_menu_page() returns a hook name. You can take that hook name, prefix “load-”, and use the resulting string as the hook name in an add_action().

In my example above, let’s say the plugin name is “foo_plugin” and replace “index” with “download”. The resulting hook name would be:

load-admin_page_foo_plugin_download

Then I can use:

add_action( 'load-admin_page_foo_plugin_download', 'download' );

(Be careful with the hyphen vs underscores in that)

Finally, within the download() class method, I can safely modify HTTP headers to start a download:

header('Content-type: text/csv; charset=utf8');
// other headers and content...

Scheduled to get my pacemaker generator replaced soon. Here’s hoping the new one looks like Stark’s arc reactor.


Great snipe by Rebecca Watson in this video:

“Musk is so terrible at programming that he couldn't even get Grok to say that white genocide is a real thing. Musk has had more success reprogramming his other chatbot, President of the United States Donald Trump...”

youtu.be/bNla2Jl1DZk


An FDA committee is meeting and considering removing some COVID vaccine recommendations for certain groups. Public comment is open until May 23, 2025 11:59PM Eastern.


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