nikhil.io

Best I’ve seen in recent memory.

Features the poem “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling, read with this bone-chilling pitch and cadence by a chap named Taylor Holmes in 1915. Here’s the track by itself. Sounds like it was taken from a record; the noise doesn’t help with the chilling of the bones.

Update

The last few minutes remind me of this song.

Not sure what else to add here, other than my head reeling with “How the heck does one even think up this subject?”. And appreciating how the Internet can be such an amazing forum for collective weirdness and joy.

Speaking of fora, the link’s on Twitter so here’s a cached version to save you the discomfiture of engaging with it.

Not completely unsurprising, but yeah: I was struck by how it’s essentially a continuous tone after about 2,000 BPM. Makes one wonder if anything in the Universe is really continuous or if all of it is fundamentally discrete. Also makes you wonder how animals like bees perceive the world.

This is $JASON_STATHAM_MOVIE and I absolutely love it¹. It’s familiar, there’s no pretense, you’re a 13-year old, and it feels really nice spending your evening watching some evil-looking people get their (highly improbable) comeuppance from a single and very determined operator. It’s like huddling under a blanket with the air-conditioning on in the Middle Eastern heat in front of your family TV (a 21" Belson) and your Mum makes you greasy food².

The Beekeeper is next, for days when I say “fuck it” and toss a frozen pizza into the oven after work ✨🍕✨

All the usual suspects (for a movie like this at least): What is memory? Does the past exist? Where and what am I, what the heck is this, and how do I know that it is real? And so on.

No worries there, standard fare so far (for a movie like this that is). What’s truly amazing is how succinctly Chris Marker chooses to explore these questions. If you think your memory of something plays out like a video, he makes you deal with still images that you get to stitch together in your own head. If you think you can ‘hear’ clearly what someone may have said in the past, he makes you deal with this kind of unstructured, abstract (poetic?) narration that kinda makes sense but not really.

LD and I saw this together and, when I asked her what she thought halfway into it, she said she was “very intrigued”. That’s really about it. Takes a few viewings, after which you may avail yourself of the many, many analyses out there¹. I just wanted to take in and enjoy a film-making experience I’d never had before, without worrying myself about a ‘message’ (or even a story for that matter).

Totally Ignorant Sidenote: I don’t know what it is about filmmakers and cinematographers who were young in the 50s and 60s that makes them so freaking good at photography. Arrestingly so. In the age of instagratification the first person I could think of who wants you to wait and immerse yourself in a scene is Denis Villeneuve (who works with legends like these).

Here’s an extreme (and yet shitty) example of the opposite of what I’m trying to say up there. Seven seconds and fourteen cuts of a dude jumping a fence. You know, to add the ‘urgency’ and ‘tension’ missing in the shit script.

Saw with LD. A (really dark) teenage space adventure that made me feel like I was 14 and was watching “Alien” for the first time on our family TV (a 21" Belson). They tugged at every dormant heartstring from our childhood. Graininess, floppy drives, joysticks, lots of CRT displays, and clunky mechanical keyboards¹. Absolutely lush visuals, soundtrack, and cinematography. I’m glad we saw it on a big screen.

Every time I see a space flick I drift off thinking where we’d be as humanity if we got our shit together. I was then brought back to Earth by noting that much of space travel and commerce were enabled and controlled by Weyland-Yutani, the Evil Galactic MegaCorporation that’s responsible for much of the trouble in the Alien franchise beginning, of course, with the Galactic Ego of its MegaRich founder. Not sure why I thought we wouldn’t be in the thrall of unreasonably despotic gazillionaires in a dystopian sci-fi movie…

I last saw Cailee Spaeny in Devs. She’s a most worthy successor to Sigourney Weaver². But David Jonsson just outstanding as Andy the Android³.

I’ll be watching this again and soon 🥰

Super-cool. I look forward to bookmarking this, telling myself that I’ll finally put Pi Zero to good use, and never doing this 🤘

Perhaps not as incredibly astounding as this overlay of Spectre¹ on the opening credits of the movie but this one of How to Disappear Completely over a few scenes from Lost in Translation just fits somehow.

Always on the lookout for good work music. This was suggested by YouTube’s mighty algorithm and more than fit the bill. A few tracks reminded me of 10,000Hz Legend by Air. You can listen to the entire album on YouTube or visit their Bandcamp page.

I was rather mesmerized by the typeface:

and, after some searching, found “Infantometric Pro” to be sufficiently close. Look forward to writing some postcards in this style (while listening to this album of course).

I’m re-watching Columbo after around ten years and this is my maiden episode. Read that Rolling Stone recently rated it the 52nd Greatest TV Episode of all time. There are no other Columbo episodes on that list and I’m not sure that I’d pick this one. The sleuthing is underwhelming compared to, say, an absolute banger like The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case.

Now their description says that Falk was so “superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob”. This is indisputable, but John Cassavates’ swagger, charm, and presence are truly something to behold. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much his character looked like real-life maestro Leonard Bernstein and whether this was intentional. Like he was a cross between Bernstein and Bourdain.

Oh and Mr. Miyagi’s (briefly) in this too! Not to mention Gwyneth Paltrow’s mom. Unsurprising given the lovely history of guest appearances on the show.

There’s a discussion about how Columbo made $11,000 in 1972. Taxes aside, and according to the BLS calculator, that’s about $85,000 per year. Columbo values the murderer-maestro’s mansion at $750K. That’s ~$6M in today’s dollars. I imagine this is a laughable amount for a mansion that size (with a tennis court (of course)) in today’s Los Angeles though. Cassavetes’ character drives a Jaguar E-Type which I still think is one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.

I will (a) watch the original and this prequel again soon and (b) name a lot of things “Furiosa” (starting with the tillandsia I’m going to get this weekend).

A mad ride like the first one and I’m amazed again by how they managed to arrest my attention for 2.5 hours. Watched on the big screen with MM. They played vignettes of the first movie during the credits and I told him that the mobile wall of speakers and the guitar guy were Top 5 Maddest Things I’ve seen on a big screen, and I watch a lot of old-school, popular Indian cinema.

They aged Anya Taylor-Joy using AI and it was rather magical¹. Chris Hemsworth has fantastic comedic timing. Rictus and Scrotus somehow reminded me of Tweedledee and Tweedledum:

When I was about 13 or so, I was blown away when I learned that ancient Greek and Roman statues used to be painted and were not commissioned to be ghostly-white. An all-time favorite is this Greek sculpture of a Persian archer.

I tremendously enjoy any recreations of color in the ancient world. So when I found this mostly intact home from first century Pompeii, I was tickled pink 🥰

Simply astounding. I got those from Le Sireneuse Journal¹. There’s a nice story of its discovery and a lot more detail on their site but the TL;DR is: Built around 1AD, belonged to a rich family (of course), was buried 36ft under a street for a while because of Vesuvius’ eruption, was discovered by a butcher who was digging out a cellar. Was looted.

I hope to visit one day 🤞

Tidy, as usual when it comes to his movies, but total rubbish. I imagine that I would get this shit if I guided ChatGPT to generate a parody of his most indulgent excesses. Meat for the most hardcore of his fans and a (meticulous) waste of the sheer amount of talent involved. How this has a 75% on RottenTomatoes is beyond me.

We share a truly exceptional ability as a species to breathe meaning into random and awful things.

I plan on absolving Mr. Anderson by watching The Grand Budapest Hotel soon, for what may be the tenth time. I consider it his finest work and love getting lost in it, something his ego made impossible to do with this garbage¹.

Well not really. I was immediately reminded of (a) where I grew up and (b) Dune when I saw this photo of a Bedouin mother and her child.

Intense and so beautiful. It was composed by this chap called Ilo Battigelli (1922-2009, RIP) who worked for Aramco’s oil refineries in Saudi Arabia until the mid-50s. The locals took to calling him “Ilo the Pirate” because he had his studio at a beach 🏴‍☠️. He appears to have had a long and lovely career as a photographer after leaving the Persian Gulf. You can read a little more about him here.

I was able to find this colorized version by Lorenzo Folli (Instagram).

Stunning stuff. Folli appears to be quite a master at colorizing history. Two quick favorites are this picture of a young Van Gogh (never saw this bro sans beard!) and Victoria with Abdul the Munshi.

From the United Automobile Worker magazine, 1937:

“What did you tell that man just now?”
“I told him to hurry.”
“What right do you have to tell him to hurry?”
“I pay him to hurry.”
“How much do you pay him?”
“Four dollars a day.”
“Where do you get the money?”
“I sell products.”
“Who makes the products?”
“He does.”
“How many products does he make in a day?”
“Ten dollars worth.”
“Then, instead of you paying him, he pays you $6 a day to stand around and tell him to hurry.”
“Well, but I own the machines.”
“How did you get the machines?”
“Sold products and bought them.”
“Who made the products?”
“Shut up. He might hear you.”

I installed this game in May 2018 and finally beat it five years later in June 2023. I wish I could somehow figure out the amount of time I’ve spent trying to beat this exquisitely-made scrolling shooter, for it would be the amount of time I’ve spent on planes, in Ubers, sick and bedridden, or just a little bored, which is mostly when I’d play it. Here’s what it looks like.

It’s fine on a phone (even on an iPhone Mini) but I loved beating some harder levels and modes on my giant iPad. It’s free but I paid to remove the ads and nothing else.

On vacation in North Carolina, my brother-in-law started playing this arcade game called 1944: The Loop Master which looked uncannily like Sky Force: Reloaded.

The Loop Master is, in turn, a sequel to 19XX: The War Against Destiny, which looks like if you applied an 8-bit filter to Sky Force: Reloaded and kept the WWII aesthetic of the boss monsters the same but modernized the player’s aircraft. Here’s a complete playthrough:

I tried to find out why it had a “Reloaded” in the names. It’s based on an older game, simply called Sky Force. I look forward to referencing this post in 2030 🕹️

Must be nice.

Caption by CO 🤣

This is insanely adorable.

For more cuteness, you can see a high-res photo of a transparent baby octopus or a baby octopus’ chromatophores 🥰

I love me my cowsay. It’s a lovely amusement that greets me every time I open a terminal session.

People typically use it with the fortune command but my cow moos a random developer excuse. I generate that using this bash function and this invocation:

command -v cowsay >/dev/null 2>&1 && {
    # shellcheck source=/dev/null
    random_excuse | cowsay -s
    echo ""
}

I was looking for more cowsay templates and found this giant list. You’d use echo "Moomoo" | cowsay -f some_template.cow. If you need color, there’s Charc0al’s list which doubles as a converter in case you want to use your own images. Since I don’t trust things on the internet to continue to be where they are, I saved that repo here.

Sears, the department store, sold DIY homes via catalog for 32 years between 1908 and 1940 through a program called Sears Modern Homes. They offered 447 different housing styles which you can see here.

The designs were not ‘remarkable’ in any way: Sears themselves admit that they were “not an innovative home designer”. These were just some popular styles at the times they were offered.

However, as a customer, you would have enjoyed a lot of agency in either customizing a home you picked as a starting point from the catalog, or submitting your own custom, crazy blueprint to Sears. Prices ranged from $600 - $6,000 ($18,620 - $186,200 in today’s money). You could get a 5-15 year loan at 6-7% interest.

Your “assembly required” home would have been dispatched to you via railroad boxcar. Your delivery would’ve had around 30,000 (or more) parts of all sorts: wiring, plumbing, bricks, mortar, lumber, staircases, nails, paint, varnish, and so on. To raise this barn, you would’ve either enlisted your family and friends’ help or contracted out the work to a local handyperson.

The most expensive home was an Honor Bilt and looked like this:

Sears estimate that they sold between 70,000 to 75,000 homes over thirty-two years. It is hard to estimate the number of these homes that are still standing for various reasons. For one, Sears’ own records of which homes were sold to whom were inexplicably destroyed during an enthusiastic “corporate house cleaning”. For another, Sears allowed homebuyers a generous amount of customization. Finally, the passage of time that naturally changes a home complicates its identification and authentication.

I was interested in what one of these dwellings looked like on the inside and found this media of a design called the Martha Washington. One was listed in February 2016 in DC for a million dollars.

Sources

• The Sears Archives
• Historic Vids
• Sears Homes of Chicagoland
• Antique Home Style
• A Case In Point For Chevy Chase Kit House History - DC House Cat

I have never given Jeff Bezos a moment’s thought before this week. I am always interested in extraordinary achievement and often admire it. I am fascinated by what extraordinary achievers understand, and how evolved they are as people.

Looking at him in his astronaut costume, and his cowboy hat, and his omega speedmaster moon watch, coming out of his penis craft, being greeted by his ling cod lipped girlfriend, dripping in oversized diamonds, I saw a man completely without a sense of irony. Not a man aware that he had been entrusted with the greatest fortune in human history to benefit all of humanity, but a small narcissistic buffoon, unaware that the universe is 10,000,000,000 light years wide and he had just spent $5,000,000,000 to fly sixty miles through it, so the whole world could look at him at once and see what a truly small man he is, and hear his Kermit the Frog voice declare that his big plan is to pollute space.

Trenchant, brilliant stuff by William Kennedy 💯

(Cached)

Via Wikipedia. I am “not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke” the genesis of other styles. “Haskell Style” has to be a joke (like this masterpiece) and I just pray I don’t encounter it in the wild¹ 🙏

// Allman
while (x === y)
{
  func1();
  func2();
}

// Horstmann
while (x === y)
{ func1();
  func2();
}

// Kernighan & Ritchie
while (x === y) {
  func1();
  func2();
}

// GNU
while (x === y)
  {
    func1();
    func2();
  }

// Haskell style
while (x === y)
  { func1()
  ; func2()
  ;
  }

// Ratliff style
while (x === y) {
  func1();
  func2();
  }

// Whitesmiths
while (x === y)
  {
  func1();
  func2();
  }

// Lisp style
while (x === y)
  { func1();
    func2(); }

See also: “Vertical Hanging Indent” is the One True Indentation Style

If you liked that, you might like this longer documentary called “Being Poirot” by Suchet himself.

They look like priceless brooches and are tremendously important to our planet.

Emphases mine:

Was doing some digital house-keeping and came by a cached copy of that by MisterBG. Things haven’t changed too much over the past two decades…

Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.

Decent background-watch. Whoever did the ‘visions’ knocked it out of the park. A waste of Anthony Hopkins and Colin Farrell, who play clairvoyants whose powers wax and wane in service of the utterly predictable plot. Like Next¹ but slightly better.

Spent a decent portion of my professional life with init.d. Had to deploy a set of Ubuntu servers last week (use FreeBSD at home), which marked my first actual brush with systemd after a long while of sysadmin-ing Linux systems. It’s weird, takes some getting used to, and has a lovely Enterprise™ smell to it¹, but I don’t think I mind it too much, especially with a nice cheatsheet. Just ergonomics; no comments on its security and stewardship 🤐

I wanted to know more about it’s history and enjoyed this really excellent talk by Benno Rice. Had no idea that its creator received death threats and various other forms of online abuse over an innocuous set of ideas and piece of software. Unbelievable.

Some select quotes from the talk and about systemd:

and finally,

Word.

Saw with LD. Stylish, great cinematography, good dose of Russell Crowe’s gravitas, and plenty of wealth-porn¹ (and gratuitous art history lessons). Huge build-up of suspense (a la “Clue” or “Orient Express”) with a lame resolution towards the end.

Oh and RZA’s in this movie. I continue to be delighted by the random stuff he decides to show up in.

These are fossilized crinoids found in Western Australia by Tom Kapitany. Crinoids are animals and belong to the phylum Eichinodermata which includes starfish and sea urchins (and they all have “pentameral symmetry”). This is all well and good but these things, in their fossilized state, look like so much like the sentinels from The Matrix I wonder if there was any inspiration here.

Here are a few more fossils

Source: Fossil Huntress

And their basic anatomy

For those asking from around the world how Britain has gotten into this mess:

• The Conservative Party has always been obsessed with Europe
• This caused divides making the party hard to manage
• Back in 2015 then Prime Minister David Cameron had an idea
• He promised a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU if he won the election
• He won the election
• The referendum was held; 52% of people voted to leave the EU
• David Cameron resigned
• Theresa May became Prime Minister saying that “Brexit means Brexit”
• It turned out that nobody actually knew what Brexit meant
• She called an election and lost the majority
• She couldn’t get the Conservative party to agree on a Brexit deal so she quit
• Boris Johnson became Prime Minister promising to “Get Brexit done”
• He called a general election and won a majority
• The UK left the European Union in January 2020
• Major Brexit issues remain unresolved and it has negatively impacted the UK economy
• Boris Johnson was forced to resign in disgrace in July 2022 following a series of scandals
• Liz Truss was selected to replace Boris Johnson by members of the Conservative Party
• She announced a raft of unfunded tax cuts to “grow the economy”
• The economy collapsed
• She sacked her chancellor
• She resigned

Fin.

And because no good deed goes unpunished,

Fletcher claimed to have been harassed by his own community and he also found bullet holes in his barn. Fletcher used the proceeds from farming the land to pay the taxes for the interned Japanese. From 1942 to 1945 he managed the Tsukamoto, Nitta, and Okamoto farms. Fletcher’s wife Teressa Cassieri also worked the farms.

But because he was a good decent human being,

The agreement was for Fletcher to keep profits after paying the taxes on the farms, but instead he returned the money to the Japanese farmers when they were released.

From a New York Times profile (cached):

For the next three years he worked a total of 90 acres on three farms — he had also decided to run Mr. Tsukamoto’s farm. He worked 18-hour days and lived in the bunkhouse Mr. Tsukamoto had reserved for migrant workers. He paid the bills of all three families — the Tsukamotos, the Okamotos and the Nittas. He kept only half of the profits.

Many Japanese-American families lost property while they were in the camps because they could not pay their bills. Most in the Florin area moved elsewhere after the war. When the Tsukamotos returned in 1945, they found that Mr. Fletcher had left them money in the bank and that his new wife, Teresa, had cleaned the Tsukamotos’ house in preparation for their return. She had chosen to join her husband in the bunkhouse instead of accepting the Tsukamotos’ offer to live in the family’s house.

The mensch lived to the ripe old age of 101 🙏 🙌 Here’s a photograph.

Source: The New York Times

This is the Patek Philippe 5131. It’s a world-timer with an intricate and lovely, hand-painted cloisonné enamel dial, and is a marvel of engineering and ingenuity from one of the Holy Trinity of watchmaking that will set you back at least $150,000 if you’re lucky¹.

It also features one of the shittiest choices of typeface I’ve seen on a watch of its calibre (heh).

I wonder what the design process was at this august company when it came to this watch’s dial. It would appear that someone at Patek opened up Microsoft Word under “whooshing deadline” duress and, at the last minute, just said fuck it and picked the easy classy majesty that is the SHOUTING VARIANT of Lucida Calligraphy. The overall effect is one where you wonder if you’re looking at a bloody knockoff.

I like to imagine they received feedback over this ‘bold’ choice since here’s the next version, the 5231, on the right with its utterly ghastly older brother on the left.

Source: Revolution Watch

I got that picture from this exhaustive history of Patek’s World Timers. It’s well-researched, has a lot of pictures, and is a good read if you can withstand and forgive sentences like this written by the same bro who will definitely not teach you anything about after-dinner drinks.

As if, somehow, by losing myself in the beautifully rendered map of the Americas, Africa and Europe, I could remember how interconnected this world once was and hopefully will be again. So, I began to see my World Timer as a chalice of renewed hope to once more live the glorious opiatic maelstrom of transcontinental travel, even if for the time being this is limited only to my imagination as I write these words.

Cool man.

This was rather vertigo inducing.

Things are going well with the Metaverse:

In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, [Vishal] Shah¹ said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

He went on to call out specific issues with Horizon, writing that “our onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users” and that the team needed to “introduce new users to top-notch worlds that will ensure their first visit is a success.”

Shah said the teams working on Horizon needed to collaborate better together and expect more changes to come. “Today, we are not operating with enough flexibility,” his memo reads. “I want to be clear on this point. We are working on a product that has not found product market fit. If you are on Horizon, I need you to fully embrace ambiguity and change.”

I’m assuming that asking “What the fuck are we spending $70 billion on again?” wouldn’t be a recommended way to embrace ambiguity.

Kate Duffy with Business Insider:

Zuckerberg told employees this year to have their meetings on Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, where people can come together as avatars in virtual workspaces, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.

[…] The source, who remained anonymous, told The Times that many Meta employees didn’t have VR headsets this year or hadn’t gotten around to setting them up. Those staff then had to rush to purchase headsets and register them before their managers realized, the source told The Times.

And the kicker:

Included in the Times report was inside information from two employees who told the newspaper that some workers call important metaverse projects “make Mark happy,” abbreviating it to “MMH.”

Won’t someone think of our mad king? I’m going to return to the office only to be forced to attend meetings virtually. MMH 🥲

Update

A theater-owner on Telugu moviegoers at RRR:

This fucking shit destroyed my theater opening night. The Telugu crowd specifically wrecked out shit. No issues with the Hindi dub or the Tamil dub.

Confetti cannons, spraying soda everywhere, littering in the parking lot, sneaking in more people than there were seats in our biggest auditoriums, screaming and shouting and chanting constantly.

I get the guy is something of a hero. I get you’re excited for your long awaited movie or whatever. Here’s an interesting thought thought: fuck off. :) Just fuck right off. Don’t be an animal and make my and my employees lives worse to have more fun at our expense.

The janitors saw the insane amount of glitter and newspaper shreddings and confetti explosions and said “hm, actually, second thought, fuck this. Nobody gets paid enough for this.” In-between every seat, every chair, in every row and even where there weren’t rows of seats, on every step, even up by the projector window. We’re lucky they didn’t damage the silver screen in any way, tbh, but that’s about it. Took days to fully clean.

Fuck RRR specifically for this reason. I know it’s probably decent, and a few friends watched it on Netflix, but out of sheer principle I just can’t bring myself to watch even a second of it now. There were some fun scenes for sure, but I think I’d much rather watch War or Baahubali 1 and 2 than RRR on account of the bad time everyone but the Telugu crowd had.

With the usual “not all of us” apologies from other Telugu folk of course.

I have never, ever understood this deeply embarrassing behaviour from my people¹. At college, I remember watching a Chiranjeevi movie at some small town in Iowa. The poor folk who ran the theater had no idea what they were in for. Moviegoers littered the entire theater with glitter and torn newspaper and didn’t clean up after the show was done. Some set up an unsanctioned tea and snack station for the intermission (these refreshments were, of course, offered at a price). Chanted, chatted loudly, and generally made a nuisance of themselves.

I’ve been offered quite a few reasons as to why Telugu folk do this and they’re all pretty bullshit. I personally refuse to go to the first screening of any Telugu movie in Des Moines in case I have to deal with “passionate” people who don’t seem to understand that they’re rude, ill-mannered, immature, and annoying pieces of shit to everyone else around them.

I feel very personally attacked by Mr. Lovenstein. And somehow glad I’m not the only person who, for instance, purchases a glorious WaterRower¹ and proceeds to give it a thousand cumulative and approximate ‘pulls’ over three years. 🤦‍♀️

About five minutes in, I felt like I was reading a masterpiece even though I know very little about the graphic novel format. This is some mesmerizing inking (Burns won a lot of “Best Inker” awards for this work). The panels almost look like woodcuts. It’s about teenagers and adolescence and how we see our bodies during those important formative years, as simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. The world of Black Hole is bleak, boring, and pretty horrifying. And we’re talking moody teenagers so you get to witness a lot of terrible decisions, angst, ennui, despair, friendship, love, sex, camaraderie, depression, grief, humor, violence, acceptance, and hope in a very short span of pages. Lots of yonic imagery. The author published this over a ten-year period starting in 1995 and it looks like these are almost exclusively what he worked on during that timespan. Amazing.

Saw with LD. Very heavy subject matter loosely inspired by harrowing real-life cases and I skipped watching a few scenes. Sai Pallavi was intense and excellent, of course, but we were very impressed with the raw vulnerability and menace Saravanan brought to his character (also called “Saravanan”, lol). Kaali Venkat was great too.

S Sudha deserves a special mention both for her austere performance and who she is: