Ponderous early '70s Austrialian film which apparently all the critics at Cannes loved. I don't get it.
Billed as a "thriller", a schoolteacher gets stranded at an outback mining town, gambles, gets drunk, shoots kangaroos, and fights. And that's about it.
Other than the ambient menace that always seems to suffuse any movie featuring rural Australian locals, I don't know why this is a thriller. I don't even know if it's a story.
Our own Mislav Kos created a skill that leverages the newly LLM-friendly Claris help docs.
CadenceUX’s claris-filemaker-pro-skill is a skill in the pure sense, and a good one. It ships reference catalogs — all 360 calculation functions, all 155 script steps, the error codes, the help-center URLs — with a local-first, live-verify strategy and even a version-drift detector that flags when a fetched doc references a newer FileMaker version than the skill was built against. What it fixes is what the model knows: it stops your model from hallucinating a function signature or inventing an error code. That is real value. But it is, by design, a knowledge layer. The model still authors the XML; the skill just makes sure the model is better informed while it does that.
Andrew Kear’s FileMaker Layout XML Skill (from Clockwork Creative Technology, with a companion skill…
Decent article on how to query claude without burning too many tokens.
Summary:
1. Edit instead of following up
Go to your prompt → click the pencil icon → rewrite it → hit send. Claude regenerates as if the bad response never happened, so you avoid piling up conversation history.
2. Start fresh every 15–20 messages
When a chat gets long, ask Claude "Summarize everything we've discussed so far," copy that summary, open a new chat, paste it as your opening message, and continue there. Avoids the exponentially rising token cost of long threads.
3. Batch questions into one message
Instead of three separate asks, combine them — e.g. "Summarize this article, list the main points as bullets, then suggest a headline" — so context is only loaded once instead of three times.
4. Upload recurring files to Projects
Sidebar → Projects → create…
Well-spoken of software engineer skill set for agentic coding.
From the readme:
Skills For Real EngineersMy agent skills that I use every day to do real engineering - not vibe coding.
Developing real applications is hard. Approaches like GSD, BMAD, and Spec-Kit try to help by owning the process. But while doing so, they take away your control and make bugs in the process hard to resolve.
These skills are designed to be small, easy to adapt, and composable. They work with any model. They're based on decades of engineering experience. Hack around with them. Make them your own. Enjoy.
If you want to keep up with changes to these skills, and any new ones I create, you can join ~60,000 other devs on my newsletter:
Fairly watchable Canadian sci-fi series about a time traveling cop from the future trying to prevent a terrorist attack in her day. Watched it a while ago, don't remember it clearly but I recall liking it well enough, just jotting it down here for completeness.
What should have been a crappy thriller is actually saved by unexpectedly solid acting. This is the kind of film a younger Jodie Foster might have been in, in between her more prominent roles. It's not "The Accused", it's not even "Panic Room", but it might be "Red Eye".
A young woman working late on Christmas Eve has car trouble and winds up trapped in her building's underground garage with the increasingly unhinged attendant. That's it, that's the entire plot.
Where this movie breaks away from the pack is the slow and deliberate way the villain slowly metamorphosizes from a bumbling nice-seeming guy to an absolute psycho, and the performances, which require a surprising amount of range and depth for a film like this. Both characters somehow manage to convey some depth and variety of emotion; when the villain tells her, "I like you. I would never hurt…
Here we have an oddity. A low-budget Italian late '70s exploitation flick that throws everything but the kitchen sink: gritty NYC cop flick (including wah-wah guitars and bongoes, '70s cop show music); a jungle cult obviously intended to cash in on interest in Jim Jones and the Guyana Peoples' Temple; more boobs than even I want to see, which is really saying something; and graphic cannibalism. It feels like an attempt to merge every '70s exploitation flick, most prominently the notorious (and also Italian; the Italian filmmakers had a way about them) cannibal flick "Cannibal Holocaust", which is interesting, as this seems like an attempt to cash in on that specifically, but was actually filmed before that was released.
The overally production is so cheezy that it very nearly succeeds at that rarely achieved "so bad it's good" context. It's the '70s, so there's lots of unabashed nudity, and of…
Ok, google "Hostel". And the,n think of any movie you've ever seen whose title ends in "III". Now you know.
Truth to tell, it's actually probably a hair more fun than the original, it's got a ridiculous, cartoonish element to it and doesn't dwell on the torture quite as much, there's a passing nod to actual relationship dynamics between the characters, however shallow, as opposed to the original, which was just "these guys are traveling together, they get tortured".
Michael Kupietz, chief Kwit I feel like this might be the most adult thing I've ever done.
4:15 PM · July 9, 2026
Damn. I need to shift my clocks again.
Most people don't know this but, even living in CA, I live on east coast time. For about 5 years now, all my computers and clocks have been set 3 hours ahead of my neighbors. Everybody else at my company starts work at 8AM. I start at 11. They don't know.
But, man, I took a full-time job recently. And I remember this from the last time I had a full-time 9-5 job back in 1995... it's exhausting. A full day of selling your time, the discipline required to do anything with my evening other than recuperate is beyond me.
So, I'm thinking. Let's see, I get off at 7:30 Mike Standard Time (4:30 Pacific)... I go to bed around 3AM Mike Standard Time (Midnight Pacific)... if I shift my schedule 7.5 hours earlier, I could have my full evening…
I had a lot of leftover images from the Fireworks Studies gallery that I had to cut out to keep the album focused, but which I liked a little too much to just let languish on my hard driver... a bunch of images that came out more figurative, plus some more fireworks landscapes and abstracts that didn't make the cut of the main album but which I still liked.
Studies originally done for a July 4 online generative art competition, I believe? I can't quite recall.
(Bonus Gallery Page: Fireworks Study Extras)
Pointless torture porn in the guise of a true crime mockumentary about a serial killer who videotapes all his killings, conveniently for the filmmaker, who now doesn't need to hire a cameraman or cinematographer. Actually not the worst one of these I've ever seen, but that's a very low bar.
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Slow-starting but ultimately decent hard sci-fi mockumentary about the discovery of a near-earth wormhole, and the transhumanist effort to transplant scientists into artificial bodies for the voyage through. Not that well acted at points, and overall nothing to write home about, but decently watchable.
I've written a WordPress plugin which gives you a short code [raw]content[/raw] that exempts the enclosed content block from WordPress's wpautop() processing, so you can include raw <style>, <script>, or other html into posts in the code tab of the classic editor without WordPress breaking them by inserting paragraph or line break tags into the code.
If that's enough explanation for you, the plugin can be found on Github at https://github.com/kupietools/ktwp-wp-plugin-raw-html-shortcode.
The longwinded versionIn HTML5, it's acceptable to put [code]
...[/code] tags in page bodies. Even if it wasn't sometimes it's expedient in WordPress to include custom CSS or javascript in a single post. The correct WordPress way to do this is to enqueue CSS and javascript... but this requires writing PHP, and, if you ask me, is one of those case where the "correct" way of doing things doesn't…
Billed as a horror, mentions Mayans in the title, and has a UFO in the poster image. Movie is 60 minutes of talk followed by 30 minutes of mild action, but unfortunately I'd already lost interest.
During a solitary long-distance voyage to Europa, a space ship's crew speaks in ominous tones and with intense facial expressions. The earth blows up, causing them to add raised voices, ratching up the drama.
Actually not terrible, for run-of-the-mill sci-fi. The production is good, if a little clichéd.
The Soft Boys released "Underwater Moonlight" 46 years ago today, to absolutely no acclaim from anyone... at the time.
Jangly pop before REM revived that, dark like a Baudelaire poem before goth music hit it big, obscurantist and surrealist (and occasionally as silly) as Bob Dylan 10 years after he was out of fashion, trippy as Syd Barrett while their peers were all listening to punk rock, this might be the worst-timed masterpiece in rock and roll history. To this day, I have never once heard any song from it on the radio, ever. I recall even well into the 90s trying and failing to turn people on to it.
But everyone who knows it, knows.
It was an instant favorite of mine when I heard it 41 years ago, and still is.
This movie has been an odd favorite of mine for a long time. It could have, should have, been so terrible, but decent direction and strong acting performances absolutely save it.
The plot is so ridiculous it's hard to explain. In a suburban town, growing up in the shadow of an often-seen but never-mentioned nuclear reactor, a religious teen, the kind who wears a purity ring and goes around to schools lecturing to the kids about the evils of sex, learns, through a series of horrific sexually violent encounters with despicable men, that she has teeth inside her, and evolves from being vehemently opposed to premarital sex to, ultimately, using it to get revenge. It's an absurd setup, but handled so thoughtfully, and with such a nuanced, wide-ranging, and realistic performance from the lead actress, that it actually makes for a surprisingly good movie.
This was originally mis-marketed…
Sub-student-film-quality 45 minute "movie" with actors who can't act, about a woman who discovers she loves eating oysters, which for some reason makes her take men out and kill them.
This was developed as an aid to understanding the dot product function used in Fractal Kitty's There is(Ǝ) – Such that (∋) project.
The dot product is the length of vector A projected on vector B (you can imagine this as the length of the shadow that A would cast on B, if a flashlight were shining perpendicularly at B), times the length of vector B. If the two vectors point in directions 90° apart, the dot product is 0 since neither has a component in the other's direction. If they point in the same exact direction, it is just the full length of A times the full length of B.
Mathematically, the dot product of vectors A and B defined as |A| * |B| * Cos θ, where |A| and |B| are the lengths of vectors A and B, and θ is…
I love this movie. It's a unique and moving tragicomedy about a writer who fronts for blacklisted writers during the Red Scare. Set in the 50s but done with (at the time) up-to-date '70s fashions. Stars a long pre-scandal Woody Allen, and conducted throughout with his usual nebbishy-but-insouciant tone—but, unusually, not written or directed by him—and also features Zero Mostel in an unforgettable role as a blacklisted entertainer being brutally taken advantage of by uncaring, predatory show biz people.
I really don't have the words to explain what's so great about this movie. It's an incredibly well-written, funny, pointed, sympathetic, stirring, and at moments downright painful look at innocent lives bleakly destroyed by a political frenzy, with a unbelievably strong message. It has one of my favorite closing scenes of any movie ever—although you have to watch all the way through the credits to understand what's so very powerful…
FractalKitty's fascinating project to create a visual language, with her signature mathematical bent, for designing animated clocks. She's got sample clocks posted at https://github.com/fractalkitty/ClockTalk and the live project, which can import them, is at https://te-st.ing.
Ok, this movie is vexing. It starts out as a very tedious pursuit flick: a former soldier biking through rural Europe pisses off asshole locals in a bar by rescuing a woman they're harassing, so the locals chase him and the woman through the woods. Suddenly, the movie changes completely, as a creepy figure who for some reason has apparently built a huge Gothic torture complex in the middle of nowhere captures all of them and spends most of the rest of the movie silently torturing them horribly and graphically, with the kind of creative degeneracy you'd find in the worst torture porn.
I will give it one thing: the cinematography has a couple of exceptional moments. The gaunt torturer has shots worthy of "Nosferatu", and as the movie suddenly shifts into increasing (and totally unexplained) phantasmagoria, there are a couple of eerily beautiful shots here and there.
…A favorite classic of mine, a very unique crime/horror flick with a deserved cult following. Edward Woodward as a Christian police detective called to investigate the disappearancec of a young girl on a remote British isle where an ancient pagan religion is still avidly practiced, on the eve of their biggest festival. Villagers wear animal masks, fornicate in public, and openly teach the school children about a pagan view of sex, as the morally outraged Woodward gets drawn into something big and dark. Command performances from all, especially Christopher Lee as the lord of the isle.
What "Dog Day Afternoon" is to crime dramas, this is to horror films: a little dated, perhaps, very much of its time, but just a very well-told-eng story, and different enough, to be entertaining all the way through.
Turns out LLMs know me by an old subdomain I forgot to add to cloudflare's tunnel config. Just added it. See saved chat under filename "Arts Kupietz 404 Issue" in local admin folder.
[code]awk ' /^## / { if (file) close(file) title = substr($0, 4) gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]/, "", title) gsub(/ /, "_", title) file = title ".md" } file { print > file } ' input.md[/code] First, cd into the same folder as the file (here called input.md. Then the above will generate titled .md documents from every section that starts with ##.
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
Open Visual Settings - This gives you controls to customize the visual display of this website to your liking: turn up or down the brightness, contrast, color temperature, hue, saturation, dark mode, and earthquake. Settings are saved per browser tab, so they will be remembered for your whole visit.
Open My Eyes - Have you ever been engrossed in your work, when you suddenly realize someone is staring at your screen, watching everything you do over your shoulder? If not, this simulates the experience.
Open Help - This help popup, silly! You just clicked it! Do you not remember?
New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
Are you sure you want to switch to viewing this website in the "expert mode" command-line interface?
This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.