Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Superhero movies snubbed no more

I’m not one for paying particular attention to the Academy Awards, but even I had to do a double-take when it was announced that Black Panther earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Not that I think it doesn’t deserve it, it indeed does, and it is a fantastic film. It’s just that these types of movies never seem to make the final list of nominees.

No longer can superhero movies be classed merely as summer blockbusters and be relegated to specific award categories as they have been in the past.

That was the assumption, anyway. Between 2009 and this year, superhero movies still didn’t receive much attention from the academy in its biggest categories. That’s the entire lifespan of Marvel’s current Cinematic Universe — a total of 22 movies passed over. Genre films have largely been relegated to the science categories, including Visual Effects.

— Black Panther is the first superhero movie to earn an Oscars Best Picture nomination by The Verge

It’s taken a long time for these movies to be recognised and hopefully, we will continue to see a broader range of films being nominated for Best Picture in the future.

I had no idea about the “Firefall” that occurs at El Capitan at this time of year.

“Firefall” occurs when the setting sun reflects off of Horsetail Falls at a certain angle, making the waterfall emit a fiery orange glow. It is highly dependent on environmental factors: If the skies are cloudy, that orange light will not hit the east side of El Capitan—the vertical rock formation where the falls are located— and the phenomenon won’t occur.

— Viral photos show Yosemite’s “firefall” phenomenon glowing in California

The pictures of this are just amazing.

Just realised that my bookmarking web app Commonmarks shares the same name as CommonMark, the strongly defined Markdown format. Time for another name change me thinks. I’m open to suggestions. 😉

Cup of coffee on my desk. Pen and paper ready. Text editor open.

My three essentials for weekend hacking on code.

Dark to light

After years of using Solarized Dark as my preferred colour theme for coding, I’m starting to find that I’m now preferring a lighter themes for when I’m writing code. Solarized Light for Sublime Text and Bluloco Light for VS Code.

Solarized Dark is still my preferred color theme for the terminal though.

The perfect album

Sent a few suggestions this morning for the perfect album to my buddy Kurt in Ohio. Suggestions included Bloc Party, Oasis, Massive Attack and Eric Clapton.

Anyone else care to chip in with suggestions for the perfect album?

After a couple of weeks using Stoop, I’ve decided to remove the app from my phone.

The app itself is a novel idea for those who want to read their newsletters outside of their day to day email, but there were a few gripes I had with this app.

The design of the app itself didn’t work for me. The carousel-style of newsletters at the top and the list of newsletters at the bottom wasted a lot of space in the user interface. I would have prefered just a list of newsletters that I could scroll through.

The thought of having an app for newsletters only available on a mobile device was too restrictive. If there’s one activity I don’t mind doing on multiple devices, it’s reading. At least with my newsletters delivered to my inbox or to Feedbin’s newsletter address, I could catch up with newsletters regardless of what device I was near.

Stoop is a nice idea, and might work for those who simply can’t afford to be without their mobile device, but I don’t want to be tied to my iPhone for the sake of a few newsletters.