Adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s book of the same name, Annihilation is the newest film directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina).
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer.
Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh star as members of the 12th expedition sent into Area X.
Tags: Alex Garland Annihilation books Jeff VanderMeer Jennifer Jason Leigh movies Natalie Portman trailers videoIn a short film from 2011, you can see the shapes, curves, and outlines left by a ballet dancer as her arms, legs, and body move through the dance studio. This isn’t quite dancing about architecture, but maybe dancing about geometry?
Tags: ballet dance geometry video
Elon Musk says SpaceX is on target to send cargo to Mars in 2022 and people in 2024. The way the company will do it is by focusing its resources on a new vehicle, the Interplanetary Transport System (codename: the BFR). That vehicle will be able to travel to Mars, but can also be used to generate revenue for the company through launching satellites, resupplying the ISS, and going to the Moon.
Musk also proposed a variety of new uses for the scaled-down rocket beyond just going to Mars. Supposedly, the ITS can be used to launch satellites, take cargo to the International Space Station, and even do lunar missions to set up a Moon base. SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 fleet is used to do a few of those things already, but Musk says eventually the company will turn to the ITS to do all of its space missions.
“We can build a system that cannibalizes our own products, makes our own products redundant, then all the resources we use for Falcon Heavy and Dragon can be applied to one system,” he said at the conference. Musk says the cost of launching cargo on the ITS will be fairly cheap, too, since the rocket and spaceship will be a fully reusable system — unlike the Falcon 9, which is only 70 to 80 percent reusable.
Musk also astoundingly asserted that the same rocket system could be used for long-distance travel on Earth.
He ended his talk with a pretty incredible promise: using that same interplanetary rocket system for long distance travel on Earth. Musk showed a demonstration of the idea on stage, claiming that it will allow passengers to take “most long distance trips” in just 30 minutes, and go “anywhere on Earth in under an hour” for around the same price of an economy airline ticket.
As they say, “huge if true”. Musk is like the sci-fi Oprah here: You get a electric car! And you get a trip to Mars! And you get a self-driving car! And you get a 30-minute Hyperloop trip from SF to LA! And you get a rocket shuttle from NYC to Mumbai in 43 minutes for $1200! Beeeeeeeeees!!!!
Tags: Elon Musk Mars space SpaceX travel videoLast night, Beyonce posted a video of her remix of J Balvin & Willy William’s song Mi Gente and she’s donating the proceeds to hurricane & earthquake relief efforts in Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean islands, and other affected areas.
As many have said on Twitter, nothing but respect for my President.
Tags: Beyonce J Balvin Puerto Rico Willy William music videoCurrently, the only way to diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease caused by repeated head trauma, is by posthumously examining brain tissue for signs of tau protein buildup. But a group from Boston University may have found a way to test for CTE in living patients.
McKee and her team discovered a specific biomarker in the brains of former football players. A biomarker is a measurable substance which is, in this case, found in the brain and identifies an abnormality.
This particular biomarker is called CCL11, and it’s a secreted protein the human body uses to help regulate the immune system and inflammation in the body.
As The Ringer’s Claire McNear writes, if a CTE test is easily available to players, what will that do to football? (Or indeed, what will it do to sports like soccer, boxing, skateboarding, or even skiing?)
Tags: Claire McNear football medicine NFL science sports“After learning all of this,” the retiring Ferguson wrote of the clarity he gained when he began researching CTE, “I feel a bit betrayed by the people or committees put in place by the league who did not have my best interests at heart.” He should feel betrayed, as should many of his fellow players. As will, certainly, so very many, once they have the ability to see what has happened to them. They may wonder, rightfully, about the people who trained them and paid them, sometimes even as they attempted to shut down research into CTE. They may look at the league’s structure, at the lopsided contracts that rob many players of their leverage, forcing them to choose between getting back on the field or losing a paycheck (and possibly getting cut), and at how the league cycles through players like they’re nothing more than easily broken pieces on a board.
Sheryl Oh of Film School Rejects called the trailer for The Killing of a Sacred Deer “the most suspenseful thing you’ll see today, even if it’s only a minute and 9 seconds long” and I cannot approve upon that description. The film, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (who directed and co-wrote the supremely weird The Lobster), will be out in late October.
Tags: movies Sheryl Oh The Killing of a Sacred Deer trailers video Yorgos Lanthimos
This season on Halt and Catch Fire, competing teams made up of the main characters are building web apps. One team is making a hand-curated directory called Comet and the other is building a search engine with a unique algorithm called Rover. It’s Yahoo vs. Google, more or less. AMC has put up the sites as they appear on the show up on the web: Comet and Rover. They also put up the Cameron Howe fan page seen in the most recent episode, The Howe of It All (that’s a perfectly anachronistic name). See also Yahoo’s website circa 1994 when it was still hosted on a server at Stanford.
A character in the most recent episode also mentioned Justin Hall, creator of the early web’s most well-known personal site, Justin’s Links from the Underground.
Anyone know where I can get a Comet t-shirt? (I already have a Cardiff Electric shirt. (No, really.)) Oh, maybe this?
Tags: Google Halt and Catch Fire Justin Hall search TV WWW YahooAs a young woman, Jane Goodall began a life-long study of wild chimpanzees that revolutionized our understanding of primate behavior. Jane, a documentary produced by National Geographic and directed by Brett Morgen (The Kids Stays in the Picture, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck), tells the story of Goodall’s life, especially her early forays into chimpanzee cultures in Tanzania. The backbone of the film is over 100 hours of 16mm footage that’s been locked away in the National Geographic archives for 50 years.
Philip Glass did the score and the early reviews are very positive. (thx, meg)
Tags: Brett Morgen Jane movies Philip Glass trailers videoHaving achieved spectacular success with Planet Earth II, the BBC and David Attenborough are revisiting another of their previous nature documentaries, the 2001 series The Blue Planet, “a comprehensive series on the natural history of the world’s oceans”. Blue Planet II, Attenborough promises, will use new technology and our increased understanding of the natural world to great advantage in telling the story of the animal and plant life — dancing yeti crabs! dolphins spitting to trick prey! TurtleCam! — that dwells in our oceans.
The score is by Hans Zimmer, who also collaborated with Radiohead to rework an old song of theirs for the series. Bloom, off of King of Limbs, was originally inspired by the first Blue Planet series, so it’s come full circle with its inclusion in the new series. Vox examines how Zimmer and the band adapted the song:
If you listen closely enough to Radiohead and Hans Zimmer’s rework of “Bloom” for Blue Planet II, you can hear a really fascinating orchestral trick at work. They call it the “tidal orchestra” — it’s a musical effect created by instructing each player to play their notes only if the person next to them isn’t playing. The result is a randomly swelling and fading musical bed for the entire series that captures the feeling of ocean waves. It’s a captivating way to score a soundtrack for the ocean — but it also fits in with a long history of capturing randomness in music composition.
The “tidal orchestra” technique was inspired by pointillism and randomness: using small individual sounds to build a soundscape rather than starting with a specific tune. For some reason, it also reminds me of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 797. (No idea what inspired Yorke’s pants though. MC Hammer? Wow.)
Planet Earth II was probably my favorite movie/show/media from the past year, so I am really looking forward to Blue Planet II.
Tags: Blue Planet David Attenborough Earth Hans Zimmer music Radiohead trailers TV video
For the past few years, Patrik Svedberg has been taking photos of a beautiful Swedish tree he dubbed The Broccoli Tree. In a short time, the tree gained a healthy following on Instagram, becoming both a tourist attraction and an online celebrity of sorts. (I posted about tree two years ago.) Yesterday, Svedberg posted a sad update: someone had vandalized the tree by sawing through one of the limbs.
One of the trees branches has now (a couple of days ago..?) been sawn in almost all the way through and it’s just a matter of time before it’ll fall off. I won’t be around to document it, others will for sure so I guess you lunatics who did it can enjoy every moment.
Very soon after, it was decided by some authority that the vandalism meant the entire tree had to come down. A work crew arrived and now it’s gone:
Oscar Wilde once wrote that “Each man kills the thing he loves”. I don’t know exactly what Wilde meant by that, but our collective attention and obsession, amplified by the speed and intensity of the internet & social media, tends to ruin the things we love: authors, musicians, restaurants, actors, beloved movies, vacation spots, artists, democracies, and even a tree that became too famous to live.
Tags: celebrity Oscar Wilde Patrik Svedberg photography Sweden
Women Who Draw, a directory of female illustrators, organized 88 of their members from around the world to draw the sky on August 13, 2017 at noon Eastern Time.
What each artist saw was unique to the time, the weather, and the place. The locations ranged from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, Buenos Aires to rural Georgia. Some saw different hues of blue. Some saw black, pink, or gray. Some saw stars or clouds or fog or rain. Here it was summer. There it was night.
I love projects like these…moments of time, collectively caught in the amber.
Tags: artHello! Jason Kottke here. If you’re a regular reader of this RSS feed, please consider supporting my efforts on kottke.org by becoming a member today. The revenue from memberships is critical to keeping one of the best independent websites running at its full capacity. There are several membership options to choose from; you can check them out here or read about why I’m doing this here.
And if you’re already a member, thank you! You are the best.
If you want to get up to speed about the growing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar involving the government’s long campaign against the Rohingya people, this 5-minute Vox video is a good place to start.
Tags: Myanmar religion Rohingya videoIn what has quickly disintegrated into a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions, a staggering 400,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state to Bangladesh over the past three weeks alone. At least 240,000 of them are children.
The Rohingya are fleeing a campaign of indiscriminate violence by Myanmar’s military, whose tactics are being widely condemned as a form of ethnic cleansing.
Entire villages have been burned to the ground. Women have been raped. Rohingya refugees report that soldiers shot at them as they fled. Along the border with Bangladesh, there are reports that the military has laid land mines to ensure those fleeing won’t return. Though independent observers have no access to the region, the Myanmar government now says 175 villages in the region — 30 percent of all Rohingya villages — are empty.
Signs.com asked dozens of Americans to draw the logos of well-known companies from memory, including Domino’s, Apple, Adidas, and Starbucks. As you can see, there was a wide range in aptitude and some logos fared better than others; overall the Starbucks and Foot Locker logos were the worst drawn while Ikea and Target were the best represented.
There is also this (a true story):
Adidas, the second largest sportswear company in the world, acquired its three-stripes logo in 1952 from footwear brand Karhu Sports for two bottles of whiskey and the equivalent of $2,000.
See also drawing all 50 states from memory, can you draw a working bicycle from memory?, and maps drawn from memory.
Tags: Adidas Burger King design logos StarbucksPoet and English professor Seth Abramson recently published a Twitter thread about his current understanding of Donald Trump: his deliberate terrorization of the American public, lack of policy positions, corruption, and keen understanding of America as “a chaos machine” that “spits out attention, headlines, sometimes money” when you feed it. I think Abramson is right about Trump in many respects and I’ve included a few excerpts below…it was difficult to pick out what to highlight.
We need to never again discuss this man with respect to policy — it’s become more than clear in 9 months that he holds no policy positions.
So if you support Donald Trump because of any view you claim he holds, I don’t ever want to hear from you again. The man holds no views.
There is no position Donald Trump has ever taken that he has not, at some point in the past or present, taken the opposite position to.
…
But the most important thing is this: this is the first U.S. president to systematically and willfully terrorize his own populace daily.
His changeability is intended to keep us anxious and on guard. In fact, he’s admitted publicly, many times, that this is a tactic of his.
His corruption is equally studied: his business model has always been “get away with what you can,” and that’s exactly how he’s governed.
…
It’s *more* than that he’ll go down in our history as the worst president we’ll ever have — he’ll go down as one of our greatest villains.
Benedict Arnold tried to betray America for a prior sovereign — Trump is trying to *torture* a nation that was good to him his whole life.
Have you noticed a change in your mood since January? I mean a change you can’t seem to escape? Anxiety, anger, fear, confusion, doubt?
The most ubiquitous man in your nation is trying to poison you daily — because it gives him power — and no one’s stopping him from doing it.
I’m not using hyperbole: you’re under attack. A deliberate, unprovoked, systematic, and — yes — evil attack. And it’s working. We’re losing.
…
Because the last thing — of the three I mentioned — humans look for in a crisis is hope, and he’s systematically taking *that* away as well.
We don’t have hope future elections will be fair. We don’t have hope our government is working in our interests. We don’t have hope we can trust and love our neighbors and they’ll trust and love us back. And we don’t have hope things will start to make sense again.
Abramson finishes by saying that we need to focus on “legally, peacefully and transparently” removing Trump from power. I’m probably going to get some email about this post,1 so I might as well go all in here with a ludicrous-sounding hunch2 I’ve had about Trump since before the election: not only will he not resign or be impeached (for Russia ties or otherwise), he will refuse to leave office under any circumstances. He will attempt, with a non-zero chance of success, to stay in power even if he’s not re-elected in 2020.
Obviously, this is ridiculous and will not happen. What about laws and precedence and democracy and social mores, you’ll say! And you’d be correct. But Trump’s got more than 3 years to lay the groundwork to make it seem normal for him to do this…and Fox News and the Republicans will let him and aid him if they can. (I mean, if you’re America’s increasingly authoritarian & extremist minority party struggling to stay in power, making the sitting Republican President not subject to an election is far more effective than suppressing the votes of likely Democratic voters through gerrymandering and voter ID laws.) Sure, we’ll be outraged about it, but we’re outraged about him anyway and that hasn’t seemed to matter in a significant way yet.
Ok, that’s nuts, right? Could never happen in America, yes? But watching Trump as President over the past few months, is it really that difficult to imagine him going full OJ here when confronted with losing his powerful position? Instead of Simpson being driven around LA in the white Bronco by Al Cowlings followed by a phalanx of police cruisers, on January 20, 2021, it’ll be Trump locked in the White House with Senator Kid Rock, taunting the military via Twitter to come in and get him.3 That sounds more plausible than Trump genteelly hosting the incoming Democratic President for tea in what USA Today calls “the 220-year-old ritual that has become a hallmark of American democracy: The orderly transition of power that comes at the appointed hour when one president takes the oath of office and his predecessor recedes into history”. Aside from “power”, not a single other word in that sentence even remotely describes anything Trump has ever cared about.
I always get email about my Trump posts. Political posts on kottke.org are pretty unpopular and lose me readers every single time. Stay in your lane, Kottke!↩
Or perhaps “speculative fiction” is a better descriptor? I’m way too level-headed to actually believe this. Aren’t I?!↩
Seriously though, what is the enforcement mechanism surrounding the transfer of power here? The 20th Amendment covers the beginnings and ends of terms and what happens when there’s no president-elect. But what about if a sitting President refuses to leave office? A lot of this stuff is ritual, presumably because of course (of course!!!!) the President is supposed to be a decent person who will honor tradition and democracy. Does Congress decide what to do? Does the Secret Service? The Supreme Court? The military? Can you imagine the cries of “coup” from Trump and his supporters if a bunch of Marines storm the White House? OMG, he’d love it. ↩
Quick reviews of some things I’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in the past month or so. As always, don’t take the letter grades so seriously. I’ve been watching too much TV and not reading enough books. I’m currently trying to get through Scale & Behave and listening to Superintelligence on audiobook and they’re all good & interesting, but I’m having trouble staying interested enough to actually pick them up in lieu of zoning out in front of the TV. I think I need something with more of a narrative.
The Vietnam War. Excellent, a must-see. (A)
The Matrix. Holds up well. I saw this in the theater in 1999, not knowing a damn thing about it, and walked out in a daze…”what the hell did I just see?” (A)
The Founder. There’s a certain kind of businessperson for whom the Ray Kroc depicted in this film would be a hero. Travis Kalanick, etc. Fuck those people. I stand with the McDonald brothers. (B+)
A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches. I aspire to this level of sandwich obsession. (B)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I should have stopped watching after 15 minutes but then I would have missed perhaps the worst closing line in movie history. (C-)
Inception. This might be my favorite Christopher Nolan movie. (A-)
american dream by LCD Soundsystem. I’ve never been able to get into LCD Soundsystem. Is there a trick? What’s the secret? (B-)
Basic Instinct. This movie is not great and hasn’t aged well. But you can totally see why it made Sharon Stone a star…she’s the only thing worth watching in the film. (C-)
Minions. *whispers* I kinda like the Minions and think they are funny and not as insipid/cynical as many others think. (B)
The Antidote. “Reread” this as an audiobook. I recommend this book to others more than any other book I’ve read in the past few years, save the Ferrante books. (A+)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I enjoyed it the first time, but this movie is so much better when watching it with two kids who think that everything coming out of every character’s mouth is the funniest thing they have ever heard. Biggest laugh was “I’m Mary Poppins y’all!”
Everything Now by Arcade Fire. Gets better every time I listen to it. (B+)
10 Bullets. Neat little one-button game. There’s an iOS version (and sequel) but they don’t work on iOS 11. (B)
Dunkirk. Saw this again on a larger screen (not IMAX sadly) and liked it even more this time. (A)
Champlain Valley Fair. I love fairs. We ate so many mini donuts and saw a dog walking a tightrope! (B+)
Logan Lucky. I was somewhat lukewarm on this leaving the theater but thinking back on it now, I definitely will see this again. (B+)
Sleep Well Beast by The National. Meh? (B-)
War for the Planet of the Apes. I saw this 3-4 weeks ago and can’t remember a whole lot about it, but I enjoyed it at the time? I do remember that the CG is seamless. (B-)
Applebee’s Artichoke and Spinach Dip. Way better than it had any right to be. I will make a special trip to eat this again. (A-)
Blade Runner. Rewatched in advance of the sequel. The final cut version, naturally. I watched the original cut for about 20 minutes once and had to shut it off because of the voiceover. (B+)
Past installments of my media diets can be found here.
Tags: TV books lists media diet movies music video gamesLate last week, Donald Trump called any NFL player who kneels during the national anthem protesting police brutality a “son of a bitch” (recall that this is the President of the United States we’re talking about here) and said they should be fired (Ha! He said his catchphrase! From that TV show!). Naturally, NFL players took exception to this and over the weekend, many many more players kneeled, sat, or no-showed during the anthem. And there were many takes, from political commentators and sports journalists alike. One of the best was from Dallas sports anchor Dale Hansen, who deftly cut to the core of the matter in a short monologue:
Donald Trump has said he supports a peaceful protest because it’s an American’s right… But not this protest, and there’s the problem: The opinion that any protest you don’t agree with is a protest that should be stopped.
Martin Luther King should have marched across a different bridge. Young, black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter. And college kids in the 60’s had no right to protest an immoral war.
I served in the military during the Vietnam War… and my foot hurt, too. But I served anyway.
My best friend in high school was killed in Vietnam. Carroll Meir will be 18 years old forever. And he did not die so that you can decide who is a patriot and who loves America more.
The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem. They are respecting the best thing about America. It’s a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise.
They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don’t think white privilege is a fact, you don’t understand America.
Here’s a text transcript…it’s worth reading or watching. See also Bob Costas’ interview on CNN and Shannon Sharpe’s comments.
Tags: Bob Costas Dale Hansen Donald Trump NFL Shannon Sharpe politics racism sports video