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.
From the comments: “It was a wise decision to go with Sam Smith’s Writings on the wall. A mediocre movie deserves an equally mediocre theme song. Radiohead’s Spectre is just fantastic.”↩︎
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.
Somehow reminded me of how bad the reverse/de-aging was in The Irishman and how far we’ve come.↩︎
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
A classic. By various lovely people contributing to the SO community wiki. They do helpfully add: “Have you tried using an XML parser instead?”
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 nerves 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 regex parsers for HTML will instantly transport a programmer’s consciousness into a world of ceaseless screaming, he comes, the pestilent slithy regex-infection will devour your HTML parser, application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fight he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵is un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liquid pain, the song of re̸gular expression parsing will extinguish the voices of mortal man from the sphere I can see it can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful the final snuffing of the lies of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T ALL IS LOST the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮omes he comes the ichor permeates all MY FACE MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼OO NΘ stop the an*̶͑̾̾̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑e not rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚N̐Y̡ 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 🤞
The website is pretty but swallows the scrollbar and hijacks the browser’s scroll behaviour to add a maddening level of inertial scroll. It would be nice if people just did normal web things.↩︎
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.
In his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri remarked, “To the casual observer, Wes Anderson might seem like someone who either refuses to read his own press or has bought into his press to an absurd degree”, alluding to criticism of Anderson’s filmmaking style, but later argued, “There’s a point to all this indulgence. Anderson’s obsessively constructed dioramas explore the very human need to organize, quantify, and control our lives in the face of the unexpected and the uncertain […] Asteroid City might be the purest expression of this dynamic because it’s about the unknown in all its forms.”
We share a truly exceptional ability as a species to breathe meaning into random and awful shit.
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.
Which I only finished because I started.↩︎
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.
“Bedouin Mother”, Ilo Battigelli, 1948 (Source Unknown)
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).
© Lorenzo Folli
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.
© Lorenzo Folli
© Lorenzo Folli
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 🕹️
NEW YORK—Claiming he could easily fit into a similar position at most companies, local CEO Mike Waltke told reporters Monday that his skill set was transferable to any job that requires an inept dumbass to receive a big salary. “I have the incompetence necessary to effortlessly transition into a role at any company that yields a seven-figure income,” said Waltke, adding that as long as a business pays him millions of dollars a year, he’ll adapt quickly with his long resume of botching simple tasks and making stupid fucking decisions. “No matter what the industry is, if they need a complete doofus who makes tons of money, I’m their guy. I’ve spent my entire life honing my stupidity from one job that pays millions to the next, giving me skills that every corporation is looking for in their highest-paid positions.” Waltke continued that, with a few more years of proving himself to be at the forefront of being a fucking moron, he could one day become the richest dipshit in the world.
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.
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
Update: Not exactly HS but good grief.↩︎
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:
Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth’s biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans. The shells of dead diatoms can reach as much as a half-mile (800 m) deep on the ocean floor, and the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from the African Sahara, much of it from the Bodélé Depression, which was once made up of a system of fresh-water lakes.
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.
Which is a fantastic fucking movie if you love Mr. Cage as sincerely and as much as I do.↩︎
When he was young he had prided himself on being clever. Walking down the street, not even thinking anything, just walking along like every other moron, he’d had a distinct sense of how clever he was. He’d never done anything with that cleverness except write stupid articles and make occasionally clever remarks, most of them not even clever. He just felt clever, and it was a good feeling, feeling clever. Now he felt, with equal conviction (and rather more evidence), that he was entering the stupid years. The stupid years complemented the vague years. They went together. The vague years and the stupid years were the same years and they had already started. Well, bring them on. Forgetting everyone’s names - as those adverts in the newspapers were always reminding you - was embarrassing, but apart from that, being stupid was fine, like a premonition of enlightenment.
Be a Kermit the Frog. Have a creative vision and no ego. Recognize the unique talents of those around you. Attract weirdos. Manage chaos. Show kindness. Be sincere.
People ask me why in 2023 I’m still rocking a mullet. Easy answer. Without the lettuce I’m just a guy that says dumb shit all the time. When I say dumb shit with the mullet, it’s like my face is saying one thing out front, and my mullet is apologizing out back. My mullet is “Dumb shit out front, I’m sorry but I grew up in Oklahoma out back” Getting mad at something someone said with a mullet is like getting mad at a person with no arms for not waving at you at the mall.
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:
People have a complicated relationship with change. I like to say that nerds especially have a really complicated relationship with change. We love it to pieces. Change is awesome when we’re the ones doing it.
The moral isn’t “Don’t use systemd”, the moral is “Write stuff in better languages than C”. rsyslog doesn’t exactly have an enviable security record either.
and finally,
The moral is “Don’t use systemd. And don’t chain core system functionality to software from teams with a track record of imcompetence.” It’s about better, experienced programmers. Not “better” languages.
Word.
I imagine that init.d did too when it was introduced.↩︎
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.
There’s a scene where Russell Crowe opens a case containing at least $2M+ in watches and swaps a Panda Rolex on his wrist for a 5711 (or something like it with a few nice complications). Even though it’s very well-established that our protagonist is a man of means, this scene is absolutely essential to the story being told because… 🤷♂️🖕↩︎
Definitely the future of television I had in mind was me having to google every movie I want to watch to see if it’s currently in one of its one-month windows on any of the seven streaming services I pay for. This is way easier than buying a DVD. I love it.
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
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 fired up Microsoft Word under “whooshing deadline” duress and, at the last minute, just said fuck it and picked the very unusual 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 hideous older brother on the left.
Source: Revolution Watch
I got that comparison 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.
Opiatic. Wow. Cool man.
If you’re new to the world of watches, this is a very reasonable price for a piece like this. Consider this Rafa Nadal-endorsed Richard Mille (RM 27-04) that costs well over $2.5M (here’s why). It is, again, a legit wonder of engineering/watchmaking. Accuracy is another story: as far as time-telling goes, the absolute legend, the GOAT that is the Casio F91W ($10 or less) than any Patek or Mille you can buy. It will withstand “12,000 g’s” and last more than a decade on its battery. I maintain that this is what a watch-lover should start their collection with (followed by a Hamilton but that’s another rant).↩︎
This was rather vertigo inducing.
And this one, a photo, wasn’t as vertigo inducing as it was depressing.
Royalty-free image. Photographer unknown.
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.
Update
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
VP Metaverse (at Meta, that is. I don’t know how governance works in the Metaverse).↩︎
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.
Those are things I could find in a few seconds for the recent release of a terrible movie.↩︎
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. 🤦♀️
Because he saw it in House of Cards and thought it looked sick.↩︎
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:
One of the places where the movie hits it out of the park is the casting of S Sudha, a transgender person, as a transgender judge in the movie. One of the fewest and rarest moments in Tamil cinema in which a transgender woman is shown to be in a position of power and authority. When she asserted her identity and agency in her reply to the misogyny of the Public Prosecutor (Kavithalaya Krishnan), the audience in the Chennai theatre erupted in applause, signaling a positive change in society.
What is the difference between ethics and morality? A morality functions according to principle, while an ethics functions according to experimentation. A morality presupposes a discontinuity between principle and action, while an ethics presupposes a continuity of action and character. A morality tells one what one ought to do, while an ethics asks what one might do.
According to Britannica, most of us tend to use the terms interchangeably, and we tend to associate “ethical” behaviour with professions (like law, medicine, and engineering).
Ethicists today, however, use the terms interchangeably. If they do want to differentiate morality from ethics, the onus is on the ethicist to state the definitions of both terms. Ultimately, the distinction between the two is as substantial as a line drawn in the sand.
The way I understand it is: We mostly agree that gay marriage is ethical. However, it may be immoral to an adherent of a religion that proscribes it (but would they agree that it is ethical?)
Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle.
Just amazing. Via and TD.
What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?
Coached by a former Wall Street bond trader who studied the opposition and set up a pipeline that produces Superstar Mathletes:
“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”
Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.
It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.
Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Others he finds on his own. He tracks down test scores of students in his district, follows the data and recruits high achievers. Some who were discovered by his spreadsheets have since graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with math degrees and landed on Wall Street themselves.
The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.”
Disturbing fictionalization of a real-life tragedy (cached). Based on a book by Jon Krakauer. Andrew Garfield is simply excellent as a devout Mormon, dogged detective, and patriarch (“priesthood holder”) of his family.
Features some quick lessons in the History of the LDS which was not very flattering to the Church. Characters say “I’ve had a revelation” a lot before proceeding to perform all manner of shitty deeds. It’s a meditation over common-sense and rationality, spiritual doubt and loss, and the unbridled power that most religions impress into the hands of men by upholding and sanctifying patriarchy.
It’s all bleak, awful stuff. Moreso when even the heroic Pyre engages in it, which is exactly the point. Under the Banner of Heaven illustrates how no one who grows up in this kind of environment can escape its influences — no matter how kind, progressive, or loving they think they are. That’s why it’s so jarring when Pyre transforms — from the man who says, “I love you,” during every phone call with his wife, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens); tucks his daughters into bed each night; and gently invites his dementia-addled mother, Josie (Sandra Seacat), on daily walks — into a domineering “priesthood holder.” The decisions he makes as the family’s religious authority are ostensibly to protect his family from the doctrine he’s beginning to interrogate, but he still uses its male-exalting infrastructure to get what he wants.
Each episode would start with one of the most beautiful title cards I’ve seen for a show:
They should give this young actor an Emmy for the few minutes she’s on screen 💯
Came recommended by HU. I had to borrow them from PG1. A limited, 7-part comic book series based on one of my favorite movies. Told from the perspective of John Doe and provides his backstory which is about as sad and disturbing as you can imagine it would be. About as gory as the movie itself. Most parts have a different style. Plenty of out-of-context Bible quotes. Just really well-executed.
These are hard to find and expensive: anywhere from $250 on eBay to $350 on Amazon.↩︎
You predict (or have insider information) that the price of lawnmowers will fall. The current market price of a lawnmower is $1,000. You go to Eddie’s Lawnmower Rental Company and rent a lawnmower from Eddie for $10 a day. He doesn’t care about you returning the same lawnmower; he just wants you to return a lawnmower (assume that all lawnmowers involved in this story are in great working condition).
You sell this lawnmower to your neighbour for $1,000.
Ten days later, and as you predicted, the price of lawnmowers falls to $500. Now you buy another lawnmower for $500 and return a lawnmower to Eddie. So now you have gained: $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $400.
Now say you made a bad prediction and the price of lawnmowers went up to $1,500. So now you have lost $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($1,500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $600.
Theoretically, there is no bottom to your losses. So you have to be very careful when you short things. It’s not for everyone. Stick to Index Funds if you don’t understand what you’re doing.
Finally, here’s some discussion on where the expression ‘going short’ may have come from.
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