Friday night I finally overcame a week's inertia and started hacking on cranberry, my console mode mp3 player. I got a harness around Audio::Play::MPG123 (which works just fine with mpg321 (there is a Audio::Play::MPG321, but it has problems, somewhere -- its poll() method takes a significant fraction of a second to execute, which is wholly unacceptible for something in a core event loop)) and then hooked it up to my Acme::Curses::Marquee, and then added a tiny bit of control logic, et viola a simple randomizing mp3 player. This is just the barest beginning of what I'd eventually like it to be however. I'll write more about that when I have a more concrete idea on how things should work.
Did absolutely nothing else over the weekend except watch a couple more bad movies. We (and by "we" I mean "K") tried watching the recent King Arthur movie, but it was so bad that we actually gave up after about 10 minutes (which is so say, after the third line of dialogue).
We followed up with 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night, which was a far superior movie. Full of nonsensical nudity, nonsensical baroque violence (kudos on the deer head idea), it is a shining example of the mid-1980s slashflick form. Two things really elevate it above the norm, though. First, the Mother Superior nun, who has the least sympathy of any human being ever: the lead character is traumatized by seeing his parents murdered by a petty thief in a Santa suit, so the nun beats him into sitting on another Santa's lap every year, causing him to become more and more violent; later, the children in her care witness a policeman shoot a blind priest dressed as Santa at close range (he nearly falls on top of them), and she simply hustles them back inside and makes them sing "Deck the Halls". Second, everytime the lead character is about to off someone he yells either "PUNISHMENT!", or my personal favorite, "NAUGHTY!". This is sheer genius.
