THE NIN HOTLINE

Meta-update! This website has a new look and feel on the homepage, and I spent time over the last few weeks creating a pretty good collection of homepage covers and tabletops for the covers to sit on, which I'll be cycling out manually with some regularity, until either I or some AI code assistant come up with a clever way to automate the scheduled release of new "covers" for this old blog.

Little things you might not notice if I didn't point them out:

• The website cover art is different depending on the device you're viewing.
• This website is a PWA - this means it's designed to be stupid fast, and on certain devices, you can install it on your homescreen, which gives you kind of an out-of-browser experience. This also hints that my day job is in ecommerce.
• I turned off analytics years ago. My opinions about online stuff have shifted a lot - I'm glad you're here, but I don't need to know how often you visit or what your favorite pages are, I'd rather the site be FAST
• The archives are up for revamping next! At the moment, you can only access the site archives by using our Site Search - which is fully operational again. But sometimes you just want to browse, and though I've had an idea of how to approach that for a while, it's only been with recent advances in public AI tooling that I've felt motivated enough to execute on that vision.
• This website will outlast all the social networks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore them. So I've got accounts on Bluesky, on Threads, on Instagram, and even on Facebook. I'm a bit of a masochist, and I don't believe that syndicating the same content everywhere is interesting, so you'll see they're all different. I don't know which one will win this round, but it's not Mastodon (which I do like), sorry.
• Somehow, the RSS feed here still works - although by announcing that, I surely will have broken it within a month's time.
• Lastly: 2024 is going to be a year of giveaways - and maybe an art project or two. Probably all done through the website, with later announcements on social media. I plan on deaccessioning some interesting stuff - stay tuned.

In a testament to my marketing prowess, I will press the "Publish" button on this page at 1:35am on a school night. One of the downsides to running a static site generator built in 1999-era Perl is that I can't be bothered building out modern content management tooling like, oh, scheduling. But you found your way here, and that's what matters.

Last Christmas, we heard that alongside the work Trent and Atticus were doing for Empire of Light and Bones and All, they were scoring a new film by David Fincher, The Killer. The news broke on Soundtracking, a podcast hosted by Edith Bowman with a name that gives you a good idea of what it's about.

Ever since then, very little has been shared about this new film, directed by the guy who brought Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, among others, to life on the big screen.

Well, a couple of days ago, the first trailer dropped, and there's no comp track here - that's another energetic, multi-layered, signature soundtrack piece by the composers behind HBO's Watchmen, Disney/Pixar's Soul, Gone Girl, and Netflix's Mank. Among other things.

Have a watch and a listen below, join the discussion at Echoing the Sound.

I don't know when I made updates to the site that broke Site Search, the Article Archive, and Permalinks (click the headline on any of the front page news stories for a standalone page), but they were really easy to fix. When you visit theninhotline.com, pretty much everything works now. And now I'm tracking changes through Github, so I can see exactly when I make a mistake like this again next time. If you don't know what that means, don't worrya bout it, and if you do know, yeah, shame on me for taking this long to put my old Perl and PHP codebase into source control.

I'm still posting to our Twitter account, but I've started an account at Threads too, but trading one billionaire's platform for another isn't the solution, which is why I'm putting some fuel back in this machine. Before I get to the fun part - following through on my original vision of the rebooted home page as a kind of art project - I still have a few other functionality updates I want to tackle. And I tell you what, revisiting old Perl code with the help of ChatGPT and similar tools is kind of a game changer.