What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Since we're fast approaching the second half of the year, I think it's a good time to look back on the first half, to the movies that came out this year and to share our favorites. I'm giving my favorite 10 (though in no particular order) but if more or fewer stood out to you and you want to share all of them, feel free! Blockbusters, indies, comedies, dramas, whatever stands out to you from 2019 so far. Don't feel pressured to write anything but the title or a basic synopsis if you don't want to.

• Apollo 11: Okay, I know I said this list isn't in order, but this one is definitely #1. It's history in motion, and its images and editing will surely be seared into my mind as the way I think of the Apollo launch.
• An Elephant Sitting Still: Technically came out in 2018 in some regions, but has a 2019 release in my country, which is the order I'm organizing this list in. A beautiful and heartbreaking journey into universal pain and suffering and catharsis in the tiniest things. At nearly 4 hours and with an oppressively melancholy tone, I struggle to recommend it to everyone and anyone, but if the description interests you, definitely give it a look.
• The Farewell: Hilarious and sad, often in the same moment. My love of this may well have been colored by my experiences as an immigrant under very similar circumstances as its main character, but it's an interesting look at differing cultural philosophies of the worth of the individual on their own versus their relation to society.
• The Last Black Man in San Francisco: A layered critique of gentrification and the personal individual obsessions that keep us from truly seeing it and other issues in our world as they happen. It's filled to the brim with things to say, sometimes to a detriment, and some of the screentime spent just showing the sad beauty of San Francisco could've been used to further flesh out some of its ideas, but I still found it extremely compelling all the way through.
• John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum: I think the John Wick movies get a little more bloat on them every entry(much like their titles, actually), but the action only seems to get slicker. I still like the balance of the world, character work, and action in Chapter 2 the best, but while I think 3 drags itself down into its lore a bit too much, its setpieces are still top of the line. I find Keanu endlessly killing people left and right to be incredibly cathartic. Should probably talk to someone about that.
• Burial of Kojo: This doesn't say "Netflix original" on it, but it does seem to be distributed by them in all the countries I checked, so I don't know what's happening there. Regardless, there's a good chance you'll find this on Netflix in your country. I'm willing to admit this movie is heavily, deeply flawed. It overtelegraphs many of its plot points repeatedly, for one. But I also think it is filled with a gorgeous charm. It's light fantasy and grounded fairy tale feels half Tarsem and half Guillermo del Toro, and I was captivated from beginning to end.
• Booksmart: I find the new crop of female led high school movies (Booksmart, Edge of Seventeen, Eighth Grade) to be far more relatable and interesting than the dozens of high school movies of decades prior. It feels like the hands of the filmmakers is more on the pulse of the struggles of modern kids. Booksmart is very much a heightened comedy compared to the other examples I mentioned, but it is great at it. It's hilarious, even if there's one scene in particular that goes on forever. The comparisons to Superbad are mostly warranted, and I still lie awake at night, sad at the fact that I saw this opening night and the theater was mostly empty.
• Dear Ex: The Netflix revolution of every indie movie ending up on streaming services and leaving the theaters to the blockbusters isn't quite happening at the speed originally anticipated, but it definitely seems like more and more of my favorites of the year end up being a streaming original. Dear Ex is a Netflix film about different people grappling with the loss of one man, and it shows the power of the individual to connect the lives of the people they love, and of the many tools we employ to try to get over losses in our lives.
• High Flying Bird: Yet another Netflix movie. Steven Soderbergh is one of the people who can make a bearable heist movie in this day and age imo, and he lends that gift to this to make a movie where the heist isn't money or jewels, but the basic rights of human beings being trampled on by a system that creates middle men to suck up money, leaving the real workers with pennies. It's shot on an iPhone, and there are moments where that seems like a limitation, but honestly, a lot of it looks really impressive.
• Ash is Purest White: This is Jia Zhangke well within his comfort zone, looking at the strain put on human relationships by the passage of time and the everchanging effects of globalization and shifting national landscapes. The World(2004) (aka Shijie) is still my favorite of his, and it is definitely an idea he's explored before, but his ideas and commentary on it have never failed me to keep me enthralled all the same.

I have a list of all the 2019 movies I see that I consider "good" here (29 films at the time of writing this) if anyone wants to take a look at all of them.

I don't know if this would be only an option when you are creating a comment, or added to the list of tags like "Exemplary" and such, but an option to have a "Spoiler" comment tag that collapses the comment but doesn't affect ranking might be a good edition to the "What is your favorite media/What have you consumed recently/Recommendation threads." It's also something that the site already supports, and most importantly, looks atheistically pleasing to me compared to highlightable Spoiler Script.

gotta have a body here, but i don’t want to run into that former askreddit problem, so here are some of my favorite bodies instead:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_of_Allen

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3xYXYzm9H3RzyQgBrYwIcx?nd=1

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

https://www.wikipedia.org

For those who haven't seen my essay-length posts in the past, I occasionally like to delve into explaining different programming concepts, particularly with regards to making your code easier to manage. Sometimes this has to do with how you structure you code and projects, and at others it has to do with how you think about the problems you're solving. I've been in the mood to write up on yet another programming subject, but nothing in particular has stood out to me lately during the course of my work.

With that in mind, I figured I would take a different approach and see if anyone here had some specific requests for content they would like to see. Requests from all levels of experience are welcome!

(And for those who are itching to do a write-up on any of the requests that appear here, feel free to call dibs!)

Edit

For those who want to take a dive into my previous submissions, you can now find them in the new wiki entry created by @cfabbro or directly via the programming.code_quality_tips tag here.

Screenshot

I posted a few days ago about a notes app I was working on called Notementum, and I'm happy to show you the first release (0.1.0). Installation instructions are available on the Github repo: https://github.com/IvanFon/notementum

There's still lots of things I'd like to add, both big and small, and definitely a few bugs here and there, but I've been going for too long without sharing it, and I find it's best to release as early as you can to start getting feedback, and perfect it later.

One things that's missing is documentation. I'd like to start on this soon, but I'm probably not going to share this anywhere other than Tildes just yet, so this comment will do for now :)

Right now, the app only runs on Linux. I'd like to add Windows support, and it almost works, the problem is that WebKit2Gtk, the embedded web view I use to show note previews, doesn't support Windows. I'm going to explore some other options in the future, whether that's figuring out how to compile it, or allowing other preview methods (user's web browser, PDF, etc.).

The app is also very much in alpha, so you shouldn't use this for anything important, there may be bugs that can cause you to lose some of your data. If you do use this for anything, make sure you backup your notes database.

If you want to use it, here's a wall of text on usage:

Like I said, the app still has a few bugs that need to be fixed. If you find any problems, it would be great if you could leave a comment here or open a Github issue (or if you have any feature requests).