RunPee Weekly Newsletter 26th edition (September 9th, 2020)

Was this trilogy capper bodacious? Do we to get to nice things again? I’m here to say that not only are William S. Preston, Esq, and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan triumphantly back, but their daughters are even better. Also, Death makes a most stellar return. To celebrate properly, this Newsletter is devoted to time travel!

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Classic Movie Review – Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
More detailed nerdiness than you might expect from a middling midquel, here’s why Death saves this movie, and how the time travel mechanics work out, somehow. It’s totally non-heinous, dudes.
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Movie Review – Before I Fall
Groundhog Day meets Mean Girls. Really, *really* mean girls. I’m glad I got out of high school before this kind of social media bullying kicked in. Here’s an excuse to watch privileged white girls torture each other over and over on Valentines Day.
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First View Movie Review – Primer
If you saw this movie and came away confused, that’s fine. Primer is a high-concept recursive time travel journey – it’s not intended to give away easy answers. It also won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, even though it cost only $7000 to make and starred writer/producer/fellow geek Shane Carruth as one of basically two actors. Want a movie to make you think tonight?
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First View Movie Review – About Time
Cozy sentimental story by the guy who gave us Love Actually and Four Weddings & A Funeral. There’s time travel in this tale, but somehow that’s besides the point. Does ultimate power ultimately change anything? Does control over time even matter?
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Movie Review – Naked (2017)
Marlon Wayans plays a man who wakes up on the wrong side of his own wedding everyday, day after day after day. It’s a Groundhog Day premise with a lot of goofiness that eventually finds its feet once Wayans finds some clothes. Although the title suggests the full frontal, it’s tasteful enough for family viewing.
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Weekly progress diary on RunPee:NX
We are rebuilding the RunPee app from scratch using Google Flutter. Here’s a brief report on our weekly progress:

It’s been a week of refactoring. Did I have to do it? No. Will you be able to tell that I did it? No. But will RunPee:NX be better for it in the long run? Yes.

If you’re not a developer, refactoring is going back over code and rewriting it to improve performance, reliability, and maintainability. It would be great if every developer could write perfect code the first time around, but sometimes you just need to get things working in order to step back, see the big picture and understand the right way to do it.