Author: rafeman

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Luke Cage

Rating: 2.5

Is it just me or are the Netflix-Marvel series getting slower and slower? I haven’t completely finished «Luke Cage» yet, but after experiencing the rather unmotivated and quite disappointing twist in one of the last episodes, I kind of wish the producers wouldn’t be as comfortable with their current modus operandi as they seemingly are (e.g. slow-paced drama instead of, well, a little bit of something else, too. A tiny little bit more trust in the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, maybe?)

Granted, as a white male living outside of the USA, I’m obviously not in the immediate focus group of «Luke Cage», and I must say, as far as I’m able to judge, they did a pretty solid job not to alienate folks like me completely. But while watching the episodes I always felt reminded of how little a clue I have of what it must be like to live in country still disrupted by racial tensions. (Not unlike watching «The Shield» or «The Wire», where I felt like I just crashed a party where I maybe, definitely didn’t belong.) Even listening to the wonderful soundtrack, I kept myself asking: Am I allowed to enjoy this music or do I not get to like it because I wouldn’t understand it anyway?

I guess it’s more than fair to give a black male his own show, hell, even the skinny dark haired chick got one, but it feels a little bit like… going through a checklist. Maybe not unsimilar to the creation of «Power Man» when he first was conceived in the comics in the midst of the blaxploitation-thingy of the 1970s. (Nothing wrong with that, I hope they’ll do that in the current presidential election.)

And of course, as always the characters and performances are superb (except the character in the above mentioned twist that felt really out of place) and the soundtrack and photography are well above average… But somehow I didn’t really feel that involved this time. It’s more like the next 007 movie: There is one available,… I’ve been waiting for it, so I’ll watch it. But that’s pretty much it, which is somewhat disappointing, as solid as «Luke Cage» as a whole may be.

I guess I’ll wait for the next caucasian, pale sorcerer to win me back. And not to forget: The references to some comics-related visuals alone make «Luke Cage» a must see for all comic book fans.

marvel-luke-cage-poster2

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HTML5 Video: oncanplay / oncanplaythrough Problem (Firefox)

If you ever tried to build an HTML5 video player from scratch, you might encounter the following problem:

The «oncanplay» event doesn’t fire (the video readystate remains 2 instead of 4 («HAVE_ENOUGH_DATA»). In my case, Firefox 43.0.4 just woudn’t work.

After hours and hours of frustration I’ve found the rather simple cause of this behavior:
The video’s readystate 4 had been reached even before the eventlisteners where added to the video-object (probably because the video was already cached in the browser in some way or another). When the listeners finally where added, it was too late because the readystate had already jumped back to 2.

The solution is even more simpler: Set the video’s «autoplay» property to «false»:
The readystate will stay where you want it to be (4) and not jump back to 2… Everybody’s happy:)

(The picture above doesn’t show the «source« tag because I added it later by javascript. And there’s an end tag missing, of course).