a quiz where you can test your knowledge of dialogue from The Social Network (2010)
visit here
The social network is one of my favorite movies of all time, and when I first watched I'm pretty sure I looped the thing 17 times. I've had a lot of the dialogue memorized, especially since I have the screenplay downloaded on my phone and read it when I don't have internet on planes and car rides, but I wanted to properly test my knowledge and wrote a quick script to isolate the dialogue from the screenplay (.txt file found on internet archive) and a crappy html website where you can play the game. This took embarrassingly long.
At some point, this stopped being all that interesting (I played enough of the game in the terminal before I got an actual website up) and became more of a petty feud I had with myself. I had to get this done just because I started it, not because it was technically challenging, cool, or in any way interesting to other people. I'm pretty sure this is a common problem.
You may be going through my .java files going "Meghana, why did you make both isolateDialogue and editRawScript and also 4 different .txt files and "wow your index.html looks like you've never made a website before" and "did it really take fifteen hours to do this". And to that I say
- I wanted each overhaul of changing the script to be different for debugging and also I'm lazy.
- This is the first time I'm making a website that has both backend and some frontend. Usually all my stuff is run in the terminal or websites that are just pure static html, so I'm pretty proud of what I've got.
- I've made some mistakes.
The biggest time-suck was isolating all the dialogue. I needed to get all the lines after an all-caps character name (ex. MARK) and needed to stop collecting lines after there was stage direction or a CUT TO:, and man was that tough to get around. Even after all the time I spent, you can still see some quotes being followed or preceded with stage direction because I couldn't figure out a way to algorithmically remove it. Could I go in and manually remove all these mistakes? Yes, but it feels like cheating. I'm pretty sure those could be fixed if I changed the order in which I removed filler lines, but whatever.
Even though this project's pretty inane, it was fun to figure out that puzzle, and it was kinda like being back in APCSA again. Shout out to Mr. Young. I also learned how to use Maven and a REST api for the first time, which is super awesome. Pretty sick that I can deploy .java stuff now, definitely fills a major knowledge gap I have.
I thought of this while sitting on the toilet.