The Hateful Eight

As with so many other things, I was late getting into Quentin Tarantino. I tried to watch Pulp Fiction in the 90s as a teeanger, but I quickly got bored. I did see from Dusk Till Dawn as a teenager too, loved it, but didn’t realise at the time it was Tarantino. Many years later, I don’t remember how, I came to be watching Kill Bill and wow! It blew me away. I’ve been a fan since and even rewatched Pulp Fiction. Kill Bill remains his best work but I loved Inglorious Bastards too (despite the subtitles).

The Hateful Eight is different. Very different and very good. In the middle it’s slow and I went to a late showing after a long day, which made it a bit more difficult. It has one of the most engaging character building opening parts of any film I’ve seen. Often the character building in films is slow and boring, especially if it’s the first part of a trilogy, but not the Hateful Eight.

About half way through it feels like it’s nearly over. Then it goes back to a different thread of events early that day, which put the later events in context. Then as the main thread is picked up again it turns into a typically Tarantino blood bath.

I find stories where everyone dies at the end disappointing (and I love Blake's 7!) and a lot like stories where someone wakes up and it was all a dream. It would have been a much better ending if Mannix had somehow walked away.

Comments

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog