Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Applied Cartography
The Sting belongs in the pantheon of films I'm deeply embarrassed to have not watched earlier. Not just because it's a great film — and it is — but because it is so incredibly my shit that I feel retroactively spurned for not having watched it sooner.
The single most pleasurable movie of all time is Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, and it achieves that status in order to try to convey what makes filmmaking uniquely magical: a sense of shared enchantment between the audience and the director, and the ecstasy of the latter pulling a heist on the former -- not (just) trickery, but the successful creation of an ornate and difficult craft. (See also The Prestige.)
Last year, I watched The War Room, the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it was captivating, satisfying, and illuminating. And whether for good reasons or bad, it punctured most of my belief that the political moment we currently find ourselves in is novel in any grand sense. (See also Days of Rage, which covered the seventies; if you're ever worried about civil unrest, it's the one to reach for.)
June, like any month in which I neither write very much nor read very much, feels already cryptographic in retrospect.
There are two mental models about work and fatigue which, like my brief dalliance with Roshe Runs, I have loved and outgrown:
More in technology
I love Letterboxd, but I hate how they show you the cast on the web app. Here's the cast of The Batman on the web. I mean, that's them, but I'm often going to this page wondering who played someone, and that is an
If you visit, someone someone will inevitably tell you: “The Day of the Dead parade isn’t a real tradition!
In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my phone. How it works The bot is called Ulrira, named after a beloved Link’s Awakening character. Ulrira (the bot, not the character) samples a line from the text dump, then makes an HTTP request to post it. Here’s a screenshot of the full thing: As you can see, everything here is hard-coded, from the server credentials to the file name. (It probably wouldn’t be hard to make this more generic, but I didn’t bother.) This used to be a short, hand-written Bash script. I used the new AI-powered Shortcut creator and prompted this into existence. I said something like, “Here’s a Bash script. Turn this into a Shortcut.” Like a lot of LLM output, it wasn’t quite right, but it was useful for getting started. Shortcuts doesn’t seem to have an elegant way to express something like “run this every 6 hours”, so I created four additional scheduler Shortcuts that call the main one. They run at 12am, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. That means there are five shortcuts in total: one to actually make the post, and four to schedule the main Shortcut at different times. Why do it this way? I didn’t want to pay for my server anymore, nor did I want to maintain it. When I went looking for alternatives, they either (1) cost money (2) had some significant limitation (for example, GitHub Actions requires me to update the repo every 60 days). This solution runs on a device with high uptime and is effectively free. If you’re a pro software genius, you might complain that this is not reliable! It doesn’t work if my phone is offline, for example. Or what if I change timezones? But in the words of Link’s Awakening: You’re good! You’re a pro, aren’t you? ………… Well, beat it! Pros aren’t allowed in here! Follow the bot here.
