Welcome to March, 2020. Corona-chan is rampaging throughout the world. Governments are in panic and introducing retarded laws that will _help_ contain the virus. In Hungary every store/restaurant/resort is closed or closes after 3 PM. Working from home is depressing, monotonous at best. The weather has been shit since monday. What am I doing to avoid losing my mind?
Movies
As I finally spend more time at home I decided to watch a movie every night. They are mostly random movies hoarded throughout the last few years that I didn't have time to watch.
Monday: Letters from Iwo Jima
Recommended by a friend, this movie tells the story of the fight for Iwojima during WW2 from Japanese point of view.
Tuesday: Van valami furcsa és megmagyarázhatlan (There's something strange and inexplicable [in Budapest])
Hungarian movie about a guy getting his shit together. It was a bit relatable movie experience for me.
Wednesday: Downsizing
Utter crap, tons of wasted potential. The whole story could be told without the shrinking setting, so what was the point of putting it into the plot in the first place?
Thursday: The Blair Witch Project
Clicking through the movie it felt like a cheap horror movie, but watching it from the beginning you really get to feel the anxiety of the characters.
Friday: The Scorpion King
Classic one. Dwayne Johnson kicks ass.
Saturday: Handmaiden
A korean movie with a clever plot twist. It includes scenes never seen in any theatrical movie. In the extended version those scenes are, well, extended.
Sunday: The Insider
A former member of leadership at a tobacco company agrees to do an interview about shady businesses conducted by the tobacco industry that if aired, will result in public outrage. Excellent movie with superb acting, albeit a bit long.
Music
I have hooked up my old amp to one of my computers. After a random 5 minute googling looking for new music I discovered radiorecord.ru, which is the site for a Russian FM radio station focused primarily on dance music. Their site has an amazingly wide choice of electronic music. Since last weekend I've been blasting the "Uplifting" channel pretty much all day. I also enjoy the "Rave", "Trancehouse", "Trancemission" and many other channels.
It is possible to listen to a Radio Record station using your favorite music player. Actually I advise you to do so, because the stream stutters more frequently on major browsers and the site loads a shitload of tracking scripts from various Russian sites.
You'll need to download the corresponding m3u or xspf file from here. Some media players can open these formats natively, for those that can't you need to open them with a text editor and copy the stream url which looks like http://air.radiorecord.ru:805/_. Then, depending on your player, add a new stream/location and copy-paste the link there.
Fun fact: Radio Record uses Icecast servers for broadcasting, which seem to be backed up by Liquidsoap. Liquidsoap is an audio processing software targeted at web audio broadcasting. It is scriptable using a language similar to OCaml and has a ton of features. I used to fiddle with it a few years ago trying to write a PHP frontend web application for it, but eventually I lost interest. After some time I took a Ruby on Rails webdev class at university and decided to rewrite my frontend in Ruby. I spent a lot more time than I should have on this project, but in the end it barely worked. Nevertheless, I passed the class and the things learned there turned out to be the most valuable knowledge I have gathered throughout the university years.
