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AUSTIN, TX—Stressing that the billionaire’s completely erratic behavior had strained the already fraught relationships, sources confirmed Thursday that a rift was widening between Elon Musk and anyone who had ever met him. “Elon’s megalomania and tendency to lash out indiscriminately seem to have soured things with every person he’s encountered in his entire life,” said an anonymous source close to the embattled tech mogul, adding that Musk’s staunch refusal to engage in self-reflection or address his many off-putting personal tics had so far estranged him from the White House, his business partners, his neighbors, the mothers of his children, the children themselves, interviewers, investors, restaurant waitstaff, and all others who had directly interacted with him in any manner for any length of time. “These acquaintances are making every effort to distance themselves from Elon, whom they have come to see as a liability and a hindrance to their goals. Even those who have only briefly dealt with him over social media say they no longer wish to be associated. It’s obviously a bad look to have blown up every last one of his interpersonal connections, but knowing Elon, that’ll only make him dig in his heels and make things even worse.” The source added that while the acrimony between Musk and everyone he had ever met was likely irreversible, the falling out had only strengthened his relationship with ketamine.

These are our idols. What a world.

Read these two articles on the OpenAI and Jony Ive collab. Smelled some familiar bullshit first and felt some déjà vu next.

Thought the biggest thing you set out to do was Artificial General Super Intelligence (for the benefit of all humankind, of course).

Anyway. Ive’s company has a “staff of roughly 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists and product development specialists” (source) who appear to be experimenting furiously with what to make, for this is what we’re told the thing will do:

The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users off of screens. Altman said the device also isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.

Sounds like a sleeker version of this flaming piece of shit daring foray into the future of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction:

Can’t wait for the Ive video introducing it. And he wouldn’t be the first ex-Apple person with too much money who had an idea on how to transform our relationship with our computers. Altman invested in that disaster too.

But I’m a know-nothing curmedgeon and it’s certainly possible that this will be an unalloyed success in the hands of these wizened titans of industry (even if Uber-Curmudgeon Ed Zitron doesn’t think so.) I wish the happy couple the very best of luck 💝

Like many others, I saw the movie first. Good stuff, Natalie Portman is great and Hugo Weaving is fantastic even behind a mask. This novel is not like the movie. Length and character depth aside, it’s very British in its setting, sensibilities, and its response to its time (in the movie, I do remember wondering what Bush-era excesses had to with a fascist state in the UK). It is also is much darker than its film adaptation.

I think the claim is that anarchy, which Moore defines as a state of being without leaders but not without order, is the only effective resistance to runaway fascism.

He explores a lot of the latter’s properties: It happens slowly, then suddenly. It metastasizes slowly with both the apathy and consent of a majority. And when it’s here, it’s too late; all resistance (other than anarchy of course) is merely symbolic.

Now because there is no firm philosophical center to fascism other than outgroup hate and appeals to some glorious, prosperous, and fictitious age of yore¹, it will collapse and destroy everyone involved, including the usual prey of minorities and immigrants and other People Not Like Us.

Moore gives space to almost every character to illustrate this. Like the average person, whether or not they’re True Believers:

Or the bourgeois Top 9.99%³, including a few aspiring token minorities who consider themselves the ‘Right People’, who surrender any prior conviction, morality, and common decency to self-aggrandizement (or preservation).

But all this cannot happen at this point in (the end of) history. Alarmist hogwash. Zero contemporary parallels. There is no oligarchic capture of democratic institutions. Wealth inequality is at an all-time low. Unchecked globalization was a raring success. Billionaires need more tax breaks and we are obliged to feel proud when unfettered Capitalism creates the first Trillionaire. The ongoing privatization or outright elimination of public institutions and goods and services will cure the most unfortunate amongst us of their moral and spiritual failings. All xenophobic and economic nationalist movements like Brexit were triumphs of sovereignty and self-determination.

Social Media companies must exercise their Free Speech rights by absolving themselves of all ethical responsibility to moderate their platforms (“Corporations are People, my Friend”). Think of the shareholders and the executives and their famished households. Climate Change is natural, hence does not require interventions (what would God think?), and will not result in mass humanitarian and allied migration crises. Survival of the Fittest bro, where’s your bunker (or Mars Colony) invite? Taxation and regulation are for communists. Empathy is weakness. Up is down. East is West. Wrong is Right.

So yeah. No way any of this is building up to anything. Stop listening to hysterical candyasses. It’s not as bad as it seems⁴. This book is a work of fiction written by a crazy disheveled anarchist and augurs nothing. Relax. Like and subscribe, sign up for my newsletter, buy my coin, and pay for my course on disruptive innovation, bro.

V is Annoying #

V is portrayed to be very intelligent, well-read and cultured, and an expert planner and strategist. No disagreement here. But Lord is he annoying when he opens his damn mouth. Here’s his reply when Evie asks a perfectly simple “You’re almost finished aren’t you?”

Took me two and a half passes to get through that thicket. More of a yes or no question, Vincenzo. And pray how is the poor girl supposed to react to that edgelord logorrhea? “Uh… word.”

And that’s just a sample. It’s not enough that he literally tortures her: almost every simple thing she enquires of him leads her to a linguistic hostage situation. There’s no direct answer to anything asked of him, presumably to show that he’s some posthuman “4D Chess” level above the rest. He kept reminding me of a few good-hearted assholes I knew in college, over the age of twenty mind you, who texted and sometimes spoke like this for no fucking reason.

ME: “Hey you want a beer?”

ELLIOT: “Unequivocally. Chilled ferments shall slake my thirst and refresh my frayed cognitive apparatus. You have both my company and gratitude this evening, sir.”

ME: “Word.”

Great book though. I’m sure I’ll read it again. Looking forward to reading something happier.

This reading comes from the resource Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior.

In the introduction to Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, writer Cynthia Ozick states,

Indifference is not so much a gesture of looking away — of choosing to be passive — as it is an active disinclination to feel. Indifference shuts down the humane, and does it deliberately, with all the strength deliberateness demands. Indifference is as determined — and as forcefully muscular — as any blow. Indifference to past suffering is a sure sign that there will be indifference to present suffering.

Throughout the reading “No Time to Think,” the slow, incremental, yet willful choice to not act, to become a bystander and to remain indifferent is revealed. Ozick reminds us that the bystander—the one who does not take part in any evil act directly, but turns away —is still a participant. “the act of turning away, however empty-handed and harmlessly, remains nevertheless an act.”

Milton Mayer, an American college professor, wanted to find out how ordinary people reacted to Hitler’s policies and philosophy. Seven years after the war, he interviewed German men from a cross-section of society. One of them, a college professor, told Mayer how he responded.

So Much Activity #

[My] Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was “expected to” participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

Too Busy to Think #

…The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your “little men,” your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about – we were decent people – and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think.

Waiting to React #

One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not? – Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, which restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty #

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings; yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your older friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to – to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

Small Steps #

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions, would have been sufficiently shocked – if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

Too Late #

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Living with New Morals #

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Endnotes #

¹ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, 177-181

Connection Questions #

1. Why did the professor obey? What factors led to his decision? How did he evaluate that decision nearly twenty years later? How do you evaluate it? Why does he emphasize the small steps he took? How do each of those small steps make it easier to take no action at all?

2. Draw an identity chart for the professor. What aspects of his identity may have influenced the
   decisions he made in 1933? How do you think life in a world dominated by fear affected the choices
   he made?

3. Reread Peter Drucker’s decision (Reading 8). Compare it to those described in this reading. Does an individual have the responsibility to take a stand? When? Under what circumstances?

4. How might “thinking” have made a difference in the professor’s decisions? At what point did the
   state take on so much power or the person give up so much power that human qualities were suppressed in the name of patriotism? Is it possible to think too much? Can thinking too much
   paralyze one’s responses?

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876 - 1950) was a renowned painter and printmaker who traveled far and wide. These are a few from his 32-panel “India and Southeast Asia” series. I found myself staring at each for a long while and am absolutely in love¹.

“Ni lerdo, Ni Perezoso”

My co-worker from Argentina shared this idiom after another delivered some delightful Friday Value™. It means “neither slow nor lazy” and is commonly used to describe people who attend to a situation quickly, decisively, and sometimes unexpectedly, with no hesitation.

No math/equations. Just clear and concise overviews of topics. Made as a video to fall asleep to!

I’d say things are going pretty well.

A three-hour rundown of the game’s mythology from the 1992 Mortal Kombat to 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1 by ClementJ64. For a more extensive historical overview that doesn’t get into the mythology, there’s Ian Scherer’s excellent “The History of Mortal Kombat”¹. Lots of dedicated research in both videos for a beloved thirty year-old franchise.

And there’s no “Game of Thrones”-level storytelling or world-building here. It’s a fighting video game where the characters’ abilities matter more than their stories or relationships. It’s fairly cogent but they do make things up as needed from one title to the next and every fan adjusts accordingly and is A-OK with the good fun of it all². The only thing of importance to me is whether Sub-Zero and Scorpion are bros or sworn enemies across successive titles.

I didn’t think of the resources the game devs saved by giving us a nice rainbow palette of ninja-clones³ and this makes total sense. At least in the Good Old Days, color replacements and eleventh-hour backstories were cheaper than the space and memory required for brand new characters.

It’s an old and ingenious trick and I love it.

Plus #

My cousin introduced me to the very first title and I was hooked. My dad bought us Mortal Kombat 3 for the PC at GITEX and I still remember my amazement and excitement. My sister and I spent a lot of time playing it (my favorites were Sub-Zero and Sektor and hers Sonya Blade, Sheeva, and Scorpion). Good times 🥋 And there was, of course, the absolutely legendary soundtrack.

My favorite memory is when we learned that there was a secret character (Smoke the Ninja) that we couldn’t unlock. My sister and I wrote a letter to Midway, to their address on the box (it was in the UK iirc), asking for help. A month later, a full guide showed up with happy notes from a few people. What a gesture; I wish I still had this most lovely document. We were beside ourselves with excitement but I wish we wrote a thank you letter.

Should I need to duel my sister after twenty-four years, there’s Mortal Kombat+, which is a set of enhancements and bugfixes to the original trio of games. Fight!

And if you’re as old and uncool as I am:

But that’s not entirely accurate. There’s an important distinction.

Not looking up “waifu”. I think enough’s enough here.

This was my first Glass Beams album. Enjoyed it without even knowing of their mesmerizing stage presence. Here’s their Bandcamp page.

This is super-cool. They place a piece of Uranium Oxide in a cloud chamber and you can actually see two kinds of radioactive ‘bullets’ just flying out of the sample:

1. Alpha particles, which make shorter and chonkier streaks because they’re Helium nucleii which are much heavier than:
2. Beta particles which make longer and thinner streaks as they’re light little electrons (or positrons)

Stylish and polished spy caper from Soderbergh and Company. Not a single wasted moment: witty, engaging, lavish, taut, nothing more, nothing less. About as lean and efficient as the spies it features.

The soundtrack’s by David Holmes, a longtime collaborator (did the Oceans trilogy with him, for example). At just 28 minutes, it’s as brief and engrossing as the movie.

I did wonder how most characters managed to look ridiculously dapper and live and work in spacious and sumptuously furnished homes and offices on their government salaries.

The typeface used in the poster and titles is Aristotelica, a “rounded geometric sans” that, like all other elements (soundtrack, locations, pacing), just fits the movie as well as Pierce Brosnan’s bespoke suits.

This is yet another $JASON_STATHAM_MOVIE. He’s in construction now and a beloved foreman and leader of people (of course).

And they still won’t leave him alone.

What’s different this time: There’s this whole John Wick-style Russian criminal brotherhood involved here. I really didn’t give a shit about this setup or any character, with the exception of Andrej Kaminsky as uberboss Symon Kharchenko. He speaks softly, moves slowly, and there’s this Anton Chigur-like menace to him¹.

It was needlessly long too. I’ll just wait for the next one 🙏 My bet on which sweaty and grimy blue-collar job it’ll be is Welder. A close second is Logger, and in some really, really remote place where he can use his jungle combat and tracker (and trap-setting) skills 🔥

A crowdsourced list of the best trip-hop songs with each letter of the alphabet. Most popular are Massive Attack and Portishead (no surprises here). Here’s a YouTube playlist.

See also: Top 10 Essential Albums as voted by the community.

I forget who told me that Bill Watterson was coming out of retirement to write an actual book. I was giddy enough to pre-order. I finished it in about two minutes and then really read it in about five-to-ten.

The physical book itself, a hardcover, is very nicely done. Sturdy: excellent binding and high-quality glossy paper. I pick it up once in a while to meditate over the story and art.

Speaking of the art. It’s this two and many times three-dimensional clay, cardboard, Elmers glue, and paint chiarascuro that they spent a lot more time working on compared to the story. Just two artists exploring a new direction both for their individual selves and as a team, and saying no to each other but not to the motive force of the project itself.

And I think that’s really what this work is. An experiment in collaboration by two very talented artists and visual storytellers. I think I’d get the same enjoyment from the book if I paid more attention to getting lost in the art and skipping every other page of text. I can see why someone would be upset by its length, however.

As for what it means, I think it’s about Nature, perhaps our blue-green home, about how much she sustains and forgives us. And we just keep taking 🤷‍♂️. But it’ll all be fine. The last few pages reminded me of this prophet:

The wife and I inhaled this in a day. Pizza, fizzy water, PJs, this show. It is really freaking funny in that snippy, rapidfire Armando Iannuci Veep sort of way.

Agatha Christie-type whodunnit. The genius detective, played supremely well by Uzo Aduba, is an avid bird-watcher and issues deductions (when challenged) with an enthusiasm, arrogance, and cadence that would make modern Sherlock proud. Or jealous.

Here’s Pete Holmes’ version of what I mean. If you haven’t seen this, it’s one of my favorite things as a giant fan of Doyle’s works.

Now since we’re dealing with an American show, there’s a very high likelihood that its writers will banish all editors, disable their Delete keys, and turn five episodes into eight, unlike their British peers who know how to end things on a high note. This show suffers from this problem, though not too much. I may have uttered “Oh come the fuck on” a few times during the detective’s (seemingly) 18-hour summation scene.

But this is a funny-as-hell, intriguing, and well-acted and produced mystery with plenty of twists and red herrings.

I will never forget the character of the hapless White House Calligrapher for as long as I live. Even thinking about him’s making me laugh right now. Splendid stuff.

Saving this since I look it up at least once a year.

Enjoyed this two-part video titled “How We Measure The Cosmos” by 3Blue1Brown where ace mathematician Terry Tao explains how human beings answered the question “How far away is that thing?” over our history and at a cosmic scale. Took us a good while and, as one could predict, got faster towards the current time. Trying to answer that question also led us to discover (and only around 100 years ago!¹) that our galaxy is merely one of 100-200 billion in the observable universe².

In that video, Prof. Tao talks about how you can infer the shape of the Earth based on the shadow it casts on the moon. Some searching led me to this amazing image. This is not what happens in the sky, however. You’ll need to imagine a fern frond³ unfurling to form a nice long arc when you meditate over it:

From The Future World of Agriculture, published in 1984.

A lot of what’s depicted here has actually come to pass. Including that truck, a strange hybrid of a GMC Jimmy and a Corvette, that’s still cooler than a CyberTruck.

Towards the middle of this movie, I imagined Hitchcock building one of those 1/120 scale models of railroad towns¹ most meticulously, and then taking sheer fiendish delight in terrorizing it with a toy Godzilla or a sandbucket avalanche.

Wasn’t too far off (surprisingly). It was his favorite movie for this sort of pleasure:

And then there’s this exchange:

CHARLIE
Oh, what’s the matter with you two ? Do you always have to talk about killing people?

HERB
We’re not talking about killing people.

JOSEPH
Herb’s talking about killing me, and I’m talking about killing him.

ANN
It’s your father’s way of relaxing.

CHARLIE
Can’t he find some other way to relax? Can’t we have a little peace and quiet without dragging in poisons all the time?

This really sad article (cached) on how the author lost an older loved one to the unbelievable racket that’s Amway contains the most hopeful passages I’ve read about the current times. Emphasis and exorcism mine:

It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which ****p’s political followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some prominent ****p supporters may see him as a means to wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe, eventually, when they see what his second administration delivers, some voters will peel away.

That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.

This too shall pass. Let’s hope that we are all strong in what we choose to build after it does¹. But it’s going to suck for a while, and for the most vulnerable amongst us. Thoughts and prayers.

Watched this with the wife. The first season was an absolute masterpiece. Set design, story, suspense, acting, cinematography, and a favorite thing I look forward to in dystopian/post-apocalyptic sci-fi shows: retro computers and user interfaces 🥰 It makes me very happy to imagine Humanity finally being rid of ads, trackers, unempathetic user-hostile design, and shitty product managers, even if there’s very little else left.

I couldn’t imagine how they built that exquisitely complex and claustrophobic set. Luckily enough, Adam Savage had the same question and met the people who made it. Even if you’re not into this sort of thing, the video is worth a watch to appreciate just how insanely creative people can be.

The soundtrack… oh my the soundtrack. Just so beautiful and befitting. By Atli Övarsson, who joins his Icelandic brethren in creating ‘that’ sound. Think Ludwig Göransson for The Mandalorian, Jóhann Jóhannsson for Sicario, Hildur Guðnadóttir for Chernobyl¹. Don’t work for Pitchfork and will resist a description (which would’ve included words like “congruent”) but it’s one of those things where I now stand a pretty good chance of guessing if the composer were Icelandic.

All that being said, the second season was okay and we decided we don’t really care about the unanswered questions and the cliffhanger and won’t be finishing the two others they have planned.

Steve Zahn is an excellent actor.

Saw with KL, UE, and friends. I’ve never written a screenplay and would be laughably shit at it but I genuinely feel that I could’ve knocked this one out in a few days.

There’s a new Captain America who’s trying to find his footing in the MCU following the very dignified and demure exit of Steve Rogers. This new Captain has

• His iconic shield from the old guy
• Wings via someone called the Falcon
• which have been enhanced by Vibranium via a Black Panther/Wakanda hookup, and
• a Helmet from Ant Man

This amazing armor lets him do pretty anything he’d like, even if he didn’t consume serum for spiritual purposes. However, even with all these blessings, he stops the big bad villain by asking him to be nice for a fucking change.

The only saving grace here is Anthony Mackie’s earnest performance.

There’s a villain with a disgustingly severe acne problem whose superpower is his ability to compute the probabilities of various events. He is sold to us as a genius… who is stymied and thwarted non-stop by his nemesis and, presumably due to therapy, is pretty vocal with just how surprised he is at how things pan out. I get that he never exactly says he’d be 100% successful but this is laughable “So you’re telling me there’s a chance” territory here.

There’s also Harrison Ford. We saw this clip of him on Conan before the movie began and this is all I could think of. Yes, he points at stuff. And he slays at 82. It’s rather amazing. Ford was 50 when The Fugitive came out (an all-time favorite) and he’s capable of as much intensity. What a star.

He plays the President of the United States, who is an unstable character, estranged from his family, addicted to power, and turns into a giant red monster who destroys the White House. Silly stories right?

This child plays a minor character who has as much impact on the story as any one of the random NPC prison guards or soliders who litter every scene.

There’s a coalition of global powers that features France, India, USA, Japan, and a Conspicuous Absence 🇨🇳 Too big of a market to sully with disasters I suppose. The action sequences were really cool though, particularly the Navy battle (between the US and its archenemy Japan).

I had a giant pretzel, a pizza, and two enormous servings of club soda.

by the inimitable Mr. Lovenstein

Saw with CK. 32-minute, Groundhog Day-style short film that snagged an Oscar in its category in 2021. Symbolisms and motif even a pitbull named Jeter can understand. Lots of violence and many parts were difficult to watch, which I suppose is the point¹. Look at the futility of attempting reason and compromise with a rotten, systemic problem.

Andrew Howard is frighteningly good as the cop (or ‘The System’). Pulls an effortless Racist Pesci and is Welsh!

Controversy over it being similar in spirit to this 4-minute super short film called “Groundhog Day For A Black Man” by Cynthia Kao.

I say ‘little’ relative to all else it finds itself in. Read some place that if the Milky Way were the size of the United States, our ‘little’ Sun would be the size of… drumroll… a grain of sand someplace in the Midwest 🫠🌽

Saw with LD at the theater (on the last day it was playing!) and am really glad I did. I saw the 1922 version in college and have been mesmerized with it since. People are pretty surprised, like I was, to hear that the story is an unlicensed Dracula knockoff.

This is a really immersive movie. It’s Eggers’ fourth and we’ve seen all of them. The Witch is still our favorite, followed by The Northman. Lily-Rose Depp was just terrific and just might be to some lucky director whatever Helena Bonham Carter was to Tim Burton. The movie just kept vacillating between Eggers’ unique style and vision to that of those insipid (but totally fun) “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” flicks. I don’t think Willem Dafoe’s comedic relief was necessary. I also couldn’t stop focusing on how bad his wig was.

Am told that the soundtrack, by Robin Carolan, is excellent. Bill Skarsdard is totally unrecognizeable as Nosferatu. His character’s surprising and ample mustache could not get me stop thinking of how much he looked like Karel Roden as Rasputin in Hellboy (2004)

Might be the only one here…

Perhaps a bit embarrassing since I’ve read the book so many times¹, but I had no idea that The Count of Monte Cristo was based on a real life story, thanks to this video.

The cringe I get from the explanation from someone who truly knows the game is akin to the one I get from “hacking the mainframe” or “tracking the killer’s IP address” or the casual “bypassing the firewall”.

All hat, no cattle indeed. I can venture a guess at the answer but: Why, why is any of this poorly executed, ultra-cringey enhancement to your popular and established mystique even necessary?

Pretty sure Elon could isolate the node and dump them on the other side of the router. Via CM. Come to think of it, he might just do “a total rewrite of the whole thing” with “really high velocity”. He can do anything, this guy.

I finally switched over from Chrome to Firefox, after switching away from the latter over 12 years ago. I’d basically given up on any shred of privacy I might have left on the internet, but the final straw for me was Chrome totally bypassing the DNS blocklists on my PiHole¹ (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Unsurprising, really. You’re encouraged to read this comic (PDF) on the company’s intentionally odious practices².

The usual argument is “why’re you complaining about something that’s free?” Because I deem privacy to be a fundamental right that is to be respected even if you’re giving shit away. We can gripe about its fundamentalness but can perhaps agree that “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for — in plain English, and repeatedly.” There’s nothing clear about this with Chrome. It’s not hard to quit doing sneaky and evil things without peoples’ informed consent.

The Good #

Transferring bookmarks (of which I have very few) and history was a breeze.

Most extensions I’ve depended upon in Chrome are available for Firefox. There appear to be ways to get Chrome extensions to work in Firefox but I haven’t needed them. Pure nostalgia: I was reminded of the Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick which I starting using in 2004 (I think) to live-edit with CSS (which I thought was just magical, in addition to being a giant time-saver). It’s still around and is still fantastically useful. And available for Chrome as well. lol.

Developer tools, which I need for my job, are mostly the same³ but I found myself preferring the Firefox DevTools a little more for aesthetic/ergonomic/design reasons.

Picture in Picture is excellent.

Preventing YouTube and other websites from autoplaying videos is excellent.

The Okay #

Syncing is P2P, not centralized, and not as elegant and “Just Works™” like with Chrome. But it’s mostly the small things. Like how toolbar layouts are not synced⁴, and how switching the default search provider on your desktop won’t change it on your mobile device. Not a deal-breaker in the least.

On a Mac, the Emoji entry shortcut ( Ctrl+Command+Space) doesn’t work. For the amount of emojis I use in my personal communications, this is far more annoying than the syncing issues.

AirPlay doesn’t work. Never worked on Chrome either. So whatever. Use Safari.

The Bad #

None. It’s a fantastic browser.

Other Stuff #

So why not Safari? Extensions. That’s really it. It’s a very limited ecosystem and some things I really need aren’t available for Safari. I suppose I could use two different browsers for work and play but I’m not there yet.

While I do use a PiHole, I’d recommend Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin⁵ to people switching away. Maybe even add NoScript to the mix. I believe Facebook Container is installed by default. The adversarial/defensive relationship we have with the internet feels bit sad to me as a 90s kid who still remembers its magic and promise but that’s how it is.

You can see where Firefox stores your profile via Help → More Troubleshooting Information → Profile Folder

I’ve configured all installations on my laptops and phone to use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine.

A lovely little book on ghastly parenting by animals that are not us. Gifted this to a family member who just had her first baby and is your normal, apprehensive, anxious, stressed-out, impossibly-in-love first-time parent¹. I loved Priscilla Witte’s witty² illustrations and what I think is the overall message here, which I wrote to her: Try your best and enjoy the ride. All shall be well 🥰

Let’s celebrate the not-so-great and “Wish it had gone better!” Embrace the mediocre family times you share together.

The book has a few notes towards the end. Love a good reminder that Nature is rather hardcore. Two things I thought of as I read short descriptions of why the featured animals do what they do are (1) a minimization of energy/waste and (2) good 'ol natural selection: they just want to make sure they continue to make more of themselves.

Cuckoos are still terrible and I might dislike them more than Canadian Geese, the bros of the bird world. But all this aside, it’s a fact that there is no more worse mom or parent than this nightmare of a human being:

*shudder*

Features two late legends, Sanjeev Kumar (Santa) and Kishore Kumar (singer). Not sure who advised the former to strike a “BRO WHAT’S EVEN GOING ON” expression throughout the song.

Wondered what became of the kids in the video. Assuming they were ~10 at the time this movie was released in 1974 they’d be in their 60s now. Time, yo.

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.

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). You’re in a dream, it’s all a dream.

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 was 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.

You can’t parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can’t be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML. HTML is not a regular language and hence cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Regex queries are not equipped to break down HTML into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me. Even enhanced irregular regular expressions as used by Perl are not up to the task of parsing HTML. You will never make me crack. HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the n​erves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror. Rege̿̔̉x-based HTML parsers are the cancer that is killing StackOverflow it is too late it is too late we cannot be saved the transgression of a chi͡ld ensures regex will consume all living tissue (except for HTML which it cannot, as previously prophesied) dear lord help us how can anyone survive this scourge using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture and security holes using regex as a tool to process HTML establishes a breach between this world and the dread realm of c͒ͪo͛ͫrrupt entities (like SGML entities, but more corrupt) a mere glimpse of the world of reg​ex parsers for HTML will ins​tantly transport a programmer’s consciousness into a world of ceaseless screaming, he comes, the pestilent slithy regex-infection wil​l devour your HT​ML parser, application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fi​ght he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵i​s un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo​͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liq​uid pain, the song of re̸gular exp​ression parsing will exti​nguish the voices of mor​tal man from the sp​here I can see it can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful t​he final snuffing of the lie​s of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T ALL I​S LOST the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮omes he comes the ich​or permeates all MY FACE MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼O​O NΘ stop the an​*̶͑̾̾​̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑e n​ot rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚​N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

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 🤞