The Missing Bill Murray Scene From Asteroid City

So, ever since I'd heard that Bill Murray had to drop out of filming Asteroid City, I've wondered which role he'd meant to play. After seeing the movie, I thought it was either the grandfather (played by Tom Hanks) or the hotel manager (Steve Carell) and it was Carell's role:

Murray was originally cast as a motel manager in the desert town where the movie is set, in 1955. "Normally, I don't think it's such a nice idea to tell everyone the person who didn't end up in the movie," Anderson said recently. "But Bill got covid in Ireland, and it was four days before he was supposed to work." Murray was in Ireland for a family trip ("And usually golf has something to do with it," Anderson said), en route to Spain, where "Asteroid City" was shooting. With Murray in quarantine, Anderson scrambled to recast the part. "The movie was a jigsaw puzzle of actors' schedules, so we couldn't wait," he recalled. "We were extremely lucky that Steve Carell said yes — and was perfect in the part."

Murray showed up to the set anyway after he recovered and he and Anderson filmed tongue-so-firmly-in-cheek-I-don't-even-have-the-right-metaphor-for-it promo for the film that perfectly complements the film's meta structure.

Then, the day after the movie wrapped, Anderson and Murray concocted an idea: in a metatheatrical curlicue, Murray would play a character who was cut from the film. Anderson corralled Schwartzman, who plays a war photographer (and the actor playing the war photographer), and they shot a short scene in the style of a retro promotional trailer for a Hollywood film, in which a director or a studio executive would give a stilted pitch for an exciting new picture. Think of the Paramount head Robert Evans boosting "Love Story" and "The Godfather," or Cecil B. DeMille hyping his 1934 production of "Cleopatra." Anderson recalled, "We made this very peculiar thing that is just a spontaneous creation before the set was going to be struck down. It was the last thing we did. And then we put all our things in the golf cart and drove off into the sunset."

[I know, this is a lot of Asteroid City stuff — maybe you don't care about this quite so much? He gets like this about stuff he likes. It's ok, he'll grow tired of it in a few days and the site will go back to being about *checks notes* everything else in this whole wide world. -ed]

Tags: Asteroid City · Bill Murray · movies · Wes Anderson

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Four Quick Links for Friday Noonish

The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. "The justices again appear poised to pursue a purely theoretical liberty at the expense of the lives of people of color." This 2018 piece by Adam Serwer was right-on.

How book bans threaten democracy. "The restrictions are escalating into threats to defund public libraries."

The non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative has released an official statement on Barbenheimer. (No, really!) "NTI has concluded that the only sensible 'Barbenheimer' viewing order is Oppenheimer first, followed by Barbie."

Harvard Admits First White Student. "After nearly four centuries in existence, we are finally able to leave behind our woeful legacy of discrimination and accept our first student of Caucasian descent."

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"The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier."

Elie Mystal writing for the Nation on the Supreme Court's recent decision that declared affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional.

But the death of affirmative action was not achieved merely through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While conservatives on the Supreme Court delivered the fatal blow, the policy has long been made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to integration and equality turns cold the moment their little cherubs fail to get into their first choice of college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism and injustice, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn't get into whatever "elite" school they were hoping for. If you want to make an immigrant family adopt a Klansman's view of the intelligence, culture, and work ethic of Black folks, tell them that their kid's standardized test scores are not enough to guarantee entry into ivy-draped halls of power. Some of the most horribly racist claptrap folks have felt comfortable saying to my face has been said in the context of people telling me why they don't like affirmative action, or why my credentials are somehow "unearned" because they were "given" to me by affirmative action.

That last bit is in some ways the most devastating: Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I've had white folks whom I could standardize-test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy — whose parents' name was on one of the buildings on campus — who asked me how it felt to know I got "extra help" to get in. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping.

I recommended this yesterday in a Quick Link, but Scene On Radio's episode of their Seeing White series on White Affirmative Action is great.

Tags: Elie Mystal · politics · racism · Supreme Court · USA

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The Winners of the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards

The National Audubon Society has announced the winners of the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards. I've highlighted a few of my favorites above (from top to bottom, photos by Sandra Rothenberg, Kieran Barlow, and Nathan Arnold). Oh, and don't miss the pair of videos from Steven Chu...

Tags: best of · best of 2023 · birds · photography

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Five Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

After 20 years of observations, scientists find "strong evidence" that the universe is awash with huge gravitational waves (w/ wavelengths of tens of light years). "The Earth is jiggling due to gravitational waves that are sweeping our Galaxy."

For decades, it was pretty much just assumed that men hunted and women gathered in pre-agricultural societies but in a recent analysis of humans remains, "they found about half of the time people buried with hunting tools were female".

CEO's Skill Set Transferable To Any Job That Requires Dumbass To Receive Big Salary. "No matter what the industry is, if they need a complete doofus who makes tons of money, I'm their guy."

NY Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán threw what is just the 24th perfect game in major league history last night. 9 innings, 99 pitches, 0 hits, 0 walks.

Variety: The 10 Best Films of the Year (So Far). They include Air, Flamin' Hot, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

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The Radical Theology of Mr. Rogers

From Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a piece on the still-radical teachings of Fred Rogers, who emphasized the "love thy neighbor" part of the Bible rather than the twisted "persecute the other" version that has taken hold in so-called Christian communities in America over the past few decades.

Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister whose life's work was, I believe, built almost entirely (if not entirely) around Leviticus 19:18: "Love your neighbor as yourself: I am God." Hence... the neighborhood. In practice it that looked like this (all of these are his words): "To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way [they are], right here and now." and "Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving."

Part of his philosophy was acknowledging that, because we loved them, we needed to have truthful, difficult conversations with our children.

When Bobby Kennedy was murdered that same year, he did something that's pretty much impossible to our world today.

He had a puppet tiger ask an actor:

"What does 'assassination' mean?"

He knew that small children would be hearing this word, and that they would be aware that something major had happened. And that most of the time, when adults are preoccupied with communal tragedy and trauma, children get left out-to their own detriment.

Better they should know, in an age-appropriate way, and be given the tools to cope, than to be left out in the cold, as he put it, "at the mercy of their own imaginations."

Again, naming true things and simply holding space to let children deal with them — rather than trying to hide or minimize or gaslight because it seems too hard.

That's love.

(via @CultureDesk)

Tags: Danya Ruttenberg · Fred Rogers · religion · TV

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The 40 Greatest Tech Books of All Time

The Verge has published a list of the 40 best nonfiction books about "tech" (which relates to the industry centered around Silicon Valley & the internet and not technology in general). I was pleased to see Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire Evans and Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs on there, as well as Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman and Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I'm baffled that Tracy Kidder's amazing The Soul of a New Machine didn't make the top 5 or even 10.

But reading through the rest of the list, it occurred to me that I don't really read tech books — and if I did, I didn't get a whole lot from them. When I was younger and trying to understand the industry and momentous period I was participating in, I generally looked to books outside of tech as guides. I read things like How Buildings Learn by Steward Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, Chaos by James Gleick, The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Anyway, back to the list — it seems incomplete in a way that I can't quite articulate. I would have liked to have seen Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet on there. What else? I would like to hear about your favorite books about tech (or non-tech books that are sneakily about tech anyway) or what you think might be missing from the list. Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Tags: best of · books · lists

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The Chickening

The Chickening is a surreal visual remix of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining done by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force. It mostly defies description, so just watch the first minute or so (after which you won't be able to resist the rest of it). The short film is playing at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

But seriously, WTF was that?! (via @UnlikelyWorlds)

[This was originally posted on January 26, 2016.]

Tags:Davy Force    movies    Nick DenBoer    remix    Stanley Kubrick    The Shining    video   

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Behind the Scenes of Wes Anderson's Asteroid City

The other day I posted about how contemporary filmmakers, Wes Anderson in particular, use miniatures in their films. The model/prop maker featured, Simon Weisse, has worked with Anderson on several films, including his latest, Asteroid City. Weisse has been posting behind-the-scenes shots of his studio's work on Asteroid City to his under-followed Instagram account and I thought a separate post highlighting some of those props and miniatures would be fun.

This video shows a bunch more of the miniatures used in the movie:

I also ran across a few behind-the-scenes videos of the production if you're in the mood to deep-dive (as I appear to be):

If you're lucky enough to be in London in the next week and a half, you can go and see some of these props and sets and even eat at the diner at 180 Studios. Very. Jealous.

Tags: Asteroid City · film school · movies · photography · Simon Weisse · video · Wes Anderson

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Four Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

Trump's animatronic in Disney's Hall of Presidents was repurposed from presumed election winner Hillary Clinton's. "They probably originally tried to salvage the animatronic by keeping Hillary's skull and putting Trump's skin over top of it."

A group at MIT is developing a megawatt electric motor for use in airplanes. "To electrify larger, heavier jets, such as commercial airliners, megawatt-scale motors are required."

The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature, including work from James Baldwin, Alison Bechdel, Tony Kushner, Leslie Feinberg, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich.

"An inhaled Covid vaccine booster was more than 5-fold effective for inducing neutralizing antibodies at 28-days, and more durable at 1-year, than shots, vs Omicron BA.5 in a randomized trial."

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Footage of the First NYC Gay Pride Parade in 1970

From the Library of Congress, footage of the first gay pride march in NYC in 1970. The march, called the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, was held on June 28 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. From Gothamist:

The Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March started in Greenwich Village at about 2 p.m. that day in 1970, just outside the Stonewall Inn, which was then for rent, having closed the previous October.

As they gathered, the marchers were few, and brave. There were groups from Washington, DC and Boston, college organizations from Rutgers, Yale and Columbia. Some transgender people who were there at the time said that organizers asked them to march in the back, but they refused.

"The trans community said, 'Hell no, we won't go.' We fought for this as much as you did, or even started it," said Victoria Cruz. "And we just mingled throughout the crowd. There was no trans contingent. We just mingled."

They started walking very briskly up Christopher Street, because they were scared. There had been bomb threats. People worried they would be shot at, or harassed again by the police. Martin Boyce was there, and he says that afterwards they joked it was "the first run."

"I was worried about being single file, because I just watched a program on National Geographic about wildebeests and I saw how the ones on the side were picked off. So I thought I would stay in the middle — but there was no middle."

As the march went on, it gathered people & momentum and they eventually made it without major incident to Central Park.

Tags: LGBTQ · NYC · video

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What If Ruff But Too Much?

Love these absurdist portraits of over-luxuriated nobles in the style of Rococo and Baroque European painters by Volker Hermes. You can check out more of his work on Instagram. (via colossal)

Tags: art · remix · Volker Hermes

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How NASA Writes Space-Proof Code

When you write some code and put it on a spacecraft headed into the far reaches of space, you need to it work, no matter what. Mistakes can mean loss of mission or even loss of life. In 2006, Gerard Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software wrote a paper called The Power of 10: Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code. The rules focus on testability, readability, and predictability:

1. Avoid complex flow constructs, such as goto and recursion.
2. All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code.
3. Avoid heap memory allocation.
4. Restrict functions to a single printed page.
5. Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function.
6. Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible.
7. Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless.
8. Use the preprocessor sparingly.
9. Limit pointer use to a single dereference, and do not use function pointers.
10. Compile with all possible warnings active; all warnings should then be addressed before release of the software.

All this might seem a little inside baseball if you're not a software developer (I caught only about 75% of it — the video embedded above helped a lot), but the goal of the Power of 10 rules is to ensure that developers are working in such a way that their code does the same thing every time, can be tested completely, and is therefore more reliable.

Even here on Earth, perhaps more of our software should work this way. In 2011, NASA applied these rules in their analysis of unintended acceleration of Toyota vehicles and found 243 violations of 9 out of the 10 rules. Are the self-driving features found in today's cars written with these rules in mind or can recursive, untestable code run off into infinities while it's piloting people down the freeway at 70mph?

And what about AI? Anil Dash recently argued that today's AI is unreasonable:

Amongst engineers, coders, technical architects, and product designers, one of the most important traits that a system can have is that one can reason about that system in a consistent and predictable way. Even "garbage in, garbage out" is an articulation of this principle — a system should be predictable enough in its operation that we can then rely on it when building other systems upon it.

This core concept of a system being reason-able is pervasive in the intellectual architecture of true technologies. Postel's Law ("Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.") depends on reasonable-ness. The famous IETF keywords list, which offers a specific technical definition for terms like "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", and "SHOULD NOT", assumes that a system will behave in a reasonable and predictable way, and the entire internet runs on specifications that sit on top of that assumption.

The very act of debugging assumes that a system is meant to work in a particular way, with repeatable outputs, and that deviations from those expectations are the manifestation of that bug, which is why being able to reproduce a bug is the very first step to debugging.

Into that world, let's introduce bullshit. Today's highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design.

I bet NASA will be very slow and careful in deciding to run AI systems on spacecraft — after all, they know how 2001: A Space Odyssey ends just as well as the rest of us do.

Tags: Anil Dash · computing · Gerard Holzmann · NASA · programming · video

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The Wellington Family

Meet the members of the Wellington Family, foods related in spirit and structure to Beef Wellington: pigs in a blanket, Hot Pockets, corn dogs, and Pop Tarts.

See also The Cube Rule of Food, which suggests that the Wellington Family actually belongs to the larger Calzone Clan but sadly that pigs in a blanket are actually sushi.

P.S. I found this illustration here but couldn't trace the original source. Happy to give credit is anyone knows where this is from...

Tags: food · illustration

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Design Notes on the Alphabet

From XKCD, some notes on the design of the alphabet. I actually hadn't noticed the spacing of the vowels before.

See also The Evolution of the Alphabet.

Tags: alphabet · design · Randall Munroe · XKCD

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Six Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish

Is the Army's New Tactical Bra Ready for Deployment? "Yes, it's flame-resistant, but what else can it do? Shoot bullets? Hypnotize the enemy? Turn its wearer invisible?"

The Emancipation Proclamation will be placed on permanent display in the Rotunda of the National Archives Building next to the other founding documents of our country (Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights). (via @overholt)

A single dose of MDMA caused a white nationalist to reconsider his views and actions. "Love is the most important thing. Nothing matters without love."

Also good on the Russian micro-coup: Masha Gessen's recap for the New Yorker. "But this past weekend Russians...saw something extraordinary. They saw real political conflict. They saw someone other than Putin act politically..."

FYI, you can buy yourself a "The Original Berf of Chicagoland" t-shirt. According to Cousin, it's a collector's item! #TheBear

Prigozhin's March on Moscow, Ten Lessons From a Mutiny. Another good catch-up piece on the Russian micro-coup from Timothy Snyder.

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It's Time To Subsidize E-Bikes

My pal Clive Thompson, who is in the midst of a two-part bicycle ride across the United States and is writing a book on micromobility, thinks local, state, and federal governments should start offering substantial subsidies for e-bikes in order to help reduce car usage, decrease urban pollution, and to lower the cost of transportation for lower-income families.

The thing is, we should lean heavily into subsidies for electric bikes — now.

If Denver's experience is any guide, it'd be a huge boon for town, cities, and even many suburbs. Ebikes can't be used to replace all car travel, of course; but as folks who experiment with them discover, wow, you start leaving your car at home a lot. If towns and cities are smart about how they organize and issue these credits, they can also help lower-income families add much cheaper mobility to their transportation options. Denver found that low-income-qualified folks who bought ebikes rode them almost 50% more than other voucher-getters, probably because the ebike became, hands-down, their most affordable way to travel.

We're also not talking about a ton of money here. Ebike subsidies are considerably cheaper than those for cars or solar arrays. Even a few hundred bucks of subsidy per e-bike could help drop the price down to something competitive with a regular pedal bike. If all three levels of government worked together — federal, state, and local — the US could find the money for an absolute ton of ebike support, I suspect. (We could also consider reallocating some of the estimated $20 billion in annual subsidies that US taxpayers currently hand out to oil and gas companies.)

Hear, hear. I recently bought an e-bike (more on that in a future post) and went online looking for local subsidies. Vermont had an e-bike incentive program that ran for barely two months in 2022:

The eBike Incentive Program launched July 21, 2022, but closed shortly afterwards on September 16, 2022 when the $105,000 authorized in program funding was exhausted. Vermont residents aged 16 or older were eligible on a first-come, first-served basis for up to $400 towards the purchase of an electric bicycle, with higher incentives for households and individuals with lower incomes.

Bummer. The local power company offers $200 rebates though, which is nice.

Tags: bicycles · Clive Thompson · e-bikes · economics

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The Ambient Machine

Yuri Suzuki's The Ambient Machine is a device for creating atmosphere, playing ambient sounds. The machine has 32 toggle switches on it; each switch actives a different sound (waves, running water, birds, wind, white noise) that you can blend to create your perfect aural backdrop.

The Ambient Machine provides us with a variety of sounds and music that we can use to design our own background ambience. White noise can mask unpleasant sounds around us and give us a sense of relief, Natural sounds can provide the feeling of relocating to a new environment, providing a break from the environments we have been confined to, and musical rhythms can provide patterns for us to find stability with.

Only 20 models of the original machine were created and sold, but you can preorder a slightly different version for ¥143,000 (~$1,000).

Tags: art · audio · design · Yuri Suzuki

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The Value of Reparations

In 1990, the US government sent $20,000 and a formal letter of apology to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II. Morgan Ome, whose grandfather was imprisoned and got a check, looks at the effect this had on those who received it and how the reparative process might look for other communities (Black and Native Americans).

In one of the letters, the daughter of an incarceree tells how the $20,000, invested in her family's home equity and compounded over time, ultimately enabled her to attend Yale. "The redress money my family received has always been a tailwind at my back, making each step of the way a tiny bit easier," she wrote. Just as her family was able to build generational equity, she hoped that Black Americans, too, would have "the choice to invest in education, homeownership, or whatever else they know will benefit their families, and, through the additional choices that wealth provides, to be a little more free."

In addition to money, acts of formal apology, an on-going acknowledgment of harm, and a public process can be important to those harmed:

A $20,000 check could not reestablish lost flower fields, nor could it resurrect a formerly proud and vibrant community. Still, the money, coupled with an official apology, helped alleviate the psychological anguish that many incarcerees endured. Lorraine Bannai, who worked on Fred Korematsu's legal team alongside Don Tamaki, almost never talked with her parents about the incarceration. Yet, after receiving reparations, her mother confided that she had lived under a cloud of guilt for decades, and it had finally been lifted. "My reaction was: 'You weren't guilty of anything. How could you think that?'" Bannai told me. "But on reflection, of course she would think that. She was put behind barbed wire and imprisoned."

Yamamoto, the law professor in Hawaii, stresses that the aims of reparations are not simply to compensate victims but to repair and heal their relationship with society at large. Kenniss Henry, a national co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, told me that her own view of reparations has evolved over time. She sees value in processes such as community hearings and reports documenting a state's history of harm. "It is necessary to have some form of direct payment, but reparations represent more than just a check," she said.

Tags: racism · USA · war · World War II

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Five Quick Links for Monday Noonish

The U.S. Bicycle Route System, "a developing national network of bicycle routes connecting urban and rural communities via signed roads and trails". Over 18,000 miles in 34 states and Washington DC.

If you missed this weekend's Russian micro-coup, this piece by David Remnick is a good place to start catching up. "There came a moment when Prigozhin was no longer Putin's puppet. Pinocchio became a real boy."

This summer, Middlebury, VT is hosting an 11-hole Feminist Mini Golf course. "The kaleidoscopic course blends the vivid cotton candy world of traditional mini golf within a complex art installation that addresses issues related to reproduction..."

Recent research finds that "simply spending time with others (vs. alone) is not associated with a reduced burden of loneliness and may even backfire". Anecdotally, I have found this to be true for me at times.

Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson originally drew Calvin's hair as a mop covering his eyes; his editor suggested he change it and the iconic spiky hair was born.

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How Wes Anderson Uses Miniatures to Create His Distinctive Worlds

Vox talks to prop & model maker Simon Weisse, who made miniatures for Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, about the perhaps surprising popularity of miniatures in contemporary filmmaking, when the technique works and when it doesn't (e.g. when unscalable elements like rain or fire/explosions are involved), and why certain directors use it instead of CGI.

Miniatures in movies are way more common than you may realize, and one of the most stylish filmmakers keeping them alive is Wes Anderson. In this video we spoke to Simon Weisse, prop maker and model marker for some of Wes Anderson's recent projects, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City.

Older movies, like 1977's Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, had no choice but to use miniatures to make their worlds feel real. But even in the modern day of CGI, filmmakers are still using minis — just look at projects like The Mandalorian, Blade Runner 2049, Harry Potter, and The Dark Knight series. In those movies, miniatures are used for expansive sets that establish the world of a film, otherworldly vehicles like spaceships, and more.

It's perfect for Anderson's storybook aesthetic, of course...it looks great in Asteroid City (which I really enjoyed overall).

Tags: film school · movies · video · Wes Anderson

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Chris Ware Does Candide

This is apparently extremely old news (like almost 20 years old), but I ran across the cover that Chris Ware did for Voltaire's Candide in the bookstore yesterday and it still slaps.

P.S. The book covers tag is pretty good if you want to get distracted/inspired by fantastic design for 30 minutes.

Tags: book covers · books · Candide · Chris Ware · comics · Voltaire

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Two Quick Links for Saturday Morning

The decline of American playtime — and how to resurrect it. "If you take away play from children, they're going to be depressed. What is life for anybody without play?"

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice."

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Are Viral Cat Videos Actually Viral?

Or rather, protozoan? Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite which is transmitted from rodents to cats through a crafty mechanism...it makes mice attracted to the smell of cat urine. Mouse goes near cat, cat eats mouse, T. gondii has a new host. From cats, the parasite can jump into humans, where it may be responsible for all sorts of nastiness:

Well, the behavioral influence plays out in a number of strange ways. Toxoplasma infection in humans has been associated with everything from slowed reaction times to a fondness toward cat urine — to more extreme behaviors such as depression and even schizophrenia. And here's the kicker: Two different research groups have independently shown that Toxo-infected individuals are three to four times as likely of being killed in car accidents due to reckless driving.

And maybe makes us want to invent networking technology and share cool links? In this five-minute talk, Kevin Slavin cleverly connects viral media with T. gondii:

That video was so good, I watched the whole thing twice.

[This was originally posted on July 11, 2013.]

Tags:brain    Kevin Slavin    medicine    neuroscience    science    video   

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Lego Stop-Motion Recreation of Iconic Scenes From The Shining

The creepy twins. Jack feverish at the typewriter. Danny riding his Big Wheel through carpeted hallways. The elevators of blood. These familiar scenes from Stanley Kubrick's horror classic The Shining (and several more) have been recreated in this Lego stop-motion animation. The video took 50-60 hours over a three-week period to make and was an exercise in constraints:

"Mostly, it came down to choosing the right pieces," he says. "I made this movie only with pieces I already had in my collection, so I had to do with just what I had laying around. For instance, the famous carpet pattern in the hallway could have been more realistic, but with the pieces I had, it became a little more abstract. I went with clay for the bloody elevator scene also because I do not have thousands of red translucent pieces."

(via boing boing)

Tags: Lego · movies · remix · Stanley Kubrick · stop motion · The Shining · video

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Four Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

"My e-bike has changed my life. I’m happier, healthier, and more active. My relationship to my community has been completely transformed."

Everything Must Be Paid for Twice. The first price is the cost of acquisition and then "in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits."

Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit, a spreadsheet that includes "satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and much more".

All episodes of season 2 of The Bear are now streaming on Hulu. 👀

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The Reason Why Cancer Is So Hard to Beat

Using the metaphor of a cancerous tumor as an unruly village, Kurzgesagt explains how cancer develops in the human body, how the body fights against it, and how, sometimes, the cancer develops into something unmanageable.

In a sense this tiny tumor is like a rogue town. Imagine a group of rebels in Brooklyn decided that they were no longer part of New York but started a new settlement called Tumor Town, which happens to occupy the same space. The new city wants to grow, so it orders tons of steel beams, cement and drywall. New buildings follow no logic, are badly planned, ugly and dangerously crooked. They are built right in the middle of streets, on top of playgrounds and on existing infrastructure. The old neighborhood is torn down or overbuilt to make room for new stuff. Many of the former residents are trapped in the middle of it and begin to starve. This goes on for a while until the smell of death finally attracts attention. Building inspectors and police show up.

Tags: cancer · Kurzgesagt · medicine · science · video

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Why Pop Radio Stations All Sound the Same

On his YouTube channel this week, Phil Edwards explores the question of why all pop music radio stations in the US sound the same. The short answer is consolidation caused by deregulation but the longer answer is worth watching. And if you want more information, Edwards' list of sources in the video description is pretty extensive.

Tags: business · Phil Edward · radio · video

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Kurt Vonnegut's Response to Book Burning

Kurt Vonnegut is just the bee's knees, isn't he? Here's a letter he wrote in 1973 to the head of the school board at Drake High School in North Dakota after the school burned all of its copies of Slaughterhouse-Five in the school's furnace.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

[This was originally posted on March 30, 2012.]

Tags:books    Kurt Vonnegut    Slaughterhouse-Five   

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Five Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

Search engine logic: The Sega Genesis was also known as the "Mega Drive" so if you search Google for "the book of megadrive", the top result is for the first book of the Bible.

Max Park struggled with fine motor skills as a kid, a symptom of his autism. Now he's the fastest in the world at solving a Rubik's Cube.

"The [Supreme] Court's majority is so ethically challenged, internally divided, jurisprudentially sloppy, and ideologically polarized that it cannot do a competent job despite what by historical standards is a ridiculously light workload."

Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court. "Republican megadonor Paul Singer's hedge fund has repeatedly had business before the Supreme Court. Alito has never recused himself."

Editorial from The Guardian: "The contrast between the frantic hunt for a missing submersible and the failure to save migrants drowning in the Mediterranean is illuminating."

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A Little Baby With Really Good Taste

This conversation with musician Perfume Genius about his creative process is interesting throughout. This is something I relate to 1000%:

I'm good at making things, but not talking about why. I made them because I don't know how to talk about why. The explanation is the thing I made.

This too is something I try to hold myself to:

I also just do it, you know what I mean? I just make shit. 90% of doing anything is doing it. Not to sound self-help-y, but when people are asking me for advice, my first thought is, you should just do it. You beat so many people already if you just actually make a finished thing.

I am still a perfectionist sort of person, but when your work entails publishing 10-20 things in public every single day, you have to let go of that. Good enough is better than nothing at all.

Embrace your inner little baby (with really good taste):

I essentially have to get back to feeling like I'm a little baby to make things that are good. A baby with really good taste.

Tags: interviews · music · Perfume Genius

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1968 Howard Johnson's Kids Menu Featuring 2001: A Space Odyssey

In the 60s and 70s, Howard Johnson's was the largest restaurant chain in the US — the restaurants and their associated hotels were ubiquitous while travelling America's roadways. So it made sense that when Stanley Kubrick needed a hospitality brand for the Earthlight Room on the space station circling Earth in 2001: A Space Odyssey, he reached for HoJo's.

And of course, even in 1968, you had to do some sort of cross-promotion and, bizarrely, what Howard Johnson's came up with was a 2001-themed children's menu.

Even more weirdly, the menu is not about the movie itself, it's about a family that goes to see the movie. The whole opening sequence with the apes is omitted entirely, as is the HAL 9000 (arguably the film's main character) — I suspect the HoJo's people didn't get to see the entire movie while putting this together (as evidenced by the "preview edition" graphic in the bottom right corner of the menu's cover).

It's cool to see scenes from the movie rendered in comics form:

You can see the entire menu here, including the activity page — just click on one of the images to enter slideshow mode. (via meanwhile)

Tags: 2001 · comics · Howard Johnson's · movies · remix · restaurants · Stanley Kubrick

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Two Quick Links for Monday Noonish

The Story We've Been Told About Juneteenth Is Wrong. "What are we celebrating when we observe it, and should we be celebrating it at all? Is it actually an indictment of America? A repudiation of the Fourth of July?"

Paul Ford: My Father's Death in 7 Gigabytes. "Dad spent decades writing weird, experimental literature. His last wish: Upload it all to the Internet Archive."

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Three Quick Links for Saturday Noonish

Looks like this fall's Covid shot is going to be targeted towards omicron, XBB.1.5 specifically.

Sigur Rós is out with a new album called Átta that "leans heavily towards the orchestral".

Just for funsies and to celebrate that it's actually t-shirt weather in the northern hemisphere now, I've opened Kottke Hypertext Tee sales back up again for the weekend. I'm wearing mine today!

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Four Quick Links for Friday Noonish

Digits is a new puzzle game from the NY Times that's pretty fun. Here's how the game was designed.

GB Studio is a drag and drop editor for creating Game Boy games.

Forthcoming book from Ethan Marcotte: You Deserve a Tech Union. "Ethan shares these workers' insights and stories, weaving them together to outline the process for forming a union of your very own."

If you missed the blockbuster show at the Rijksmuseum, here's how to see all 36 of Johannes Vermeer's publicly available paintings as soon as they return to their homes around the globe (London, NYC, Holland, Paris, Tokyo).

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Musicless Music Videos

Mario Wienerroither takes music videos, strips out all the sound, and then foleys back in sound effects based on what people are doing in the video. You'll get the gist after about 6 seconds of this Jamiroquai video:

Great stuff. He's also done Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Prodigy's Firestarter, and Queen's I Want to Break Free. (via @faketv)

[This was originally posted on January 29, 2014.]

Tags:Mario Wienerroither    music    remix    video   

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A New Dialect Emerges in South Florida

According to recent research from linguists Phillip Carter and Kristen D'Alessandro Merii, a new dialect of English is forming in South Florida. The dialect, distinct from Spanglish, is spoken English that borrows lexical and semantic rules translated from Spanish. Carter writes:

For example, we found people to use expressions such as "get down from the car" instead of "get out of the car." This is based on the Spanish phrase "bajar del carro," which translates, for speakers outside of Miami, as "get out of the car." But "bajar" means "to get down," so it makes sense that many Miamians think of "exiting" a car in terms of "getting down" and not "getting out."

Locals often say "married with," as in "Alex got married with Jos'e," based on the Spanish "casarse con" — literally translated as "married with." They'll also say "make a party," a literal translation of the Spanish "hacer una fiesta."

We also found "semantic calques," or loan translations of meaning. In Spanish, "carne," which translates as "meat," can refer to both all meat, or to beef, a specific kind of meat. We discovered local speakers saying "meat" to refer specifically to "beef" — as in, "I'll have one meat empanada and two chicken empanadas."

I particularly liked this one:

We found that some expressions were used only among the immigrant generation — for example, "throw a photo," from "tirar una foto," as a variation of "take a photo."

Tags: language

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Seven Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

Beeper is a universal chat app that supports iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Discord, Twitter, Slack, Google Chat, and others. (via @mmasnick)

12 Things People Get Wrong About Being Nonbinary. "Being nonbinary is not just a personality trait or phase; it's a real identity that's existed for thousands of years."

25 years of Banksy's stencils are going on display in Glasgow. "I've kept these stencils hidden away for years, mindful they could be used as evidence in a charge of criminal damage. But that moment seems to have passed..." (via @colossal)

Apple's new Game Porting Toolkit looks interesting. "With zero need to modify any game code, games such as Grand Theft Auto V, Diablo IV, Cyberpunk 2077, and Hogwart’s Legacy can now run on Apple silicon Macs almost as if they’re native."

Evolution Keeps Making Crabs, And Nobody Knows Why. "The defining features of crabbiness have evolved at least five times in the past 250 million years."

Attention digital media workers: the longest-ever strike at a digital media company is only 13 days. The ROI for striking seems pretty high — these companies seem to settle pretty quickly?

I thought this was a limited-time thing, but Amazon is still selling the 2nd gen AirPods Pro for 20% off Apple's price. I bought some of these a few months ago and they are fantastic.

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The Supreme Court Just Made This Gerrymandered Map Illegal

This short video from Vox takes a look at the recent Supreme Court decision that struck down a gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama.

In 2013, a divided Supreme Court gutted one of the major pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the 10 years since then, the court has moved even farther to the right. So when the Voting Rights Act came before the Supreme Court again in 2022, it didn't look good for the law. But then something completely unexpected happened: in a 5-4 decision, two of the conservative justices voted with the 3 liberal justices to preserve the Voting Rights Act. And the effects could be huge.

At stake in the case was the way that Alabama divides up its Congressional districts. Alabama has seven districts, one of which is what's called a "majority-minority district" in which Black Americans are the majority of the population. In 2022, a group of Black voters sued the state, saying that under the law, Alabama should actually have two majority-minority districts. And the Supreme Court agreed.

The decision could affect recently redrawn district maps in other states, which could in turn affect the balance of power in the House of Representatives. You can read more about these gerrymandering cases at the Brennan Center for Justice: Allen v. Milligan: Gerrymandering at the Supreme Court (Formerly Merrill v. Milligan) and Redistricting Litigation Roundup.

Tags: maps · politics · racism · Supreme Court · USA · video

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The New Rubik's Cube World Record Is Just 3.13 Seconds

In roughly the time it took you to read this sentence, Max Park solved a Rubik's Cube. With his time of 3.13 seconds, Park bested Yusheng Du's 2018 mark of 3.47 seconds. Just watch the video above...it's ridiculous. I love how the judge comes in to preserve the scene as everyone goes bananas.

Park was one of the subjects of the excellent documentary, The Speed Cubers (trailer).

Tags: Max Park · Rubik's Cube · video

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Six Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

The history and significance of various LGBTQ+ flags explained. The six colors of the traditional pride flag all mean something...red represents "life and the fight against HIV/AIDS". (via somebits.com)

Electric vehicles alone can't solve transportation's climate problems. "Reducing vehicle travel and investing in other options (like public transit) are critical pieces that should not and cannot be overlooked."

A Peek Into Japan's Convenience Stores. "A far, far cry from their American cousins, convenience stores in Japan are without exception, spotless, well-stocked, open 24x7, and are ... well, actually convenient."

"I just bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing." I loved the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid and have considered buying a contemporary set.

A collection of "dumb or overly forced" astronomical acronyms, including WISEASS, ABRACADABRA, HIPPIES, TATOOINE, Hot DOGs, SUGAR-RUSH, and GANDALF.

For the first time in more than 30 years, there's a new Atari game cartridge coming out for the 2600: a game called Mr. Run and Jump.

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The Absurd Logistics of Concert Tours

I was totally fascinated by this look at the absurd logistics of concert tours and now have a newfound appreciation for all the people involved who collaborate to make the magic happen (and perhaps also a little bit more forgiving about the high price of tickets (but Ticketmaster can still go to hell)).

Now, to an outsider, the load out process might look chaotic, and the pace of the tour may seem unsustainable or unmanageable. But though grueling and exhaustingly complicated, these massive, nation-wide tours function remarkably smoothly considering the variety of variables.

(via open culture)

Tags: how to · music · video

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The Spider-Verse Lego Scene Was Created By a 14-Year-Old Animator

After 14-year-old Preston Mutanga's Lego version of the trailer for Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (embedded above) went viral, the team hired him to animate a short Lego sequence for the actual film.

In the brief scene, we see a Lego version of Peter Parker as he observes a dimensional anomaly and sneaks off to the Daily Bugle's bathroom to alert another Spider-Man about the issue. While the scene is short, it killed in my theater and it also looked as good as anything in the recent Lego films. After seeing it, a few friends of mine even commented that it must have been the same team that animated it. But nope! It was a lone teenager, actually.

You can check out more of Mutanga's work on his YouTube channel.

Tags: Lego · Preston Mutanga · Spider-Man · movies · remix · trailers · video

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Four Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish

For the first time, wind and solar generated more power than coal in the US over the first five months of 2023.

Studio Ghibli is planning to release Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, How Do You Live?, with no trailer or other promotional material. "Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire."

"The ingredients for space yeast are fairly simple. Astronaut breath, water, yeast starter, electricity, a rolling pin and we can make it happen."

The Beatles are set to release one last song after using AI audio tools to extract John Lennon's voice from a scratchy old demo tape.

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Swimming Pool Stories

Icelandic filmmaker Jón Karl Helgason has made a film called Sundlaugasögur (Swimming Pool Stories) about the central role of the swimming pool in Icelandic life. The trailer is above. From Fatherly:

The swimming pool is first and foremost a communal space. "The swimming pool is your second home," Helgason says. "You are brought up in the swimming pool." There may be only 160, or so, swimming pools in the entire country (which is roughly 305 miles wide by 105 miles long), but every one of them is the essential social hub of a community, large or small.

The swimming pool is a public utility — as critical as the grocery store or the bank. "The British go to the pub, the French go to the cafes — in our culture, you meet in the swimming pool," says Helgason. Swimmers come from all walks of life, from farmers to artists to clergymen to celebrities. "You can have 10, 15, 20, 30 people [in the pool] — they're talking about politics and about their lives."

Tags: Iceland · movies · Sundlaugasogur · swimming · trailers · video

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A Massive 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars

Using imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization at Caltech has created a 5.7 terapixel mosaic image that covers 99.5% of the surface of Mars. The whole image is available to navigate with a 3D viewer in your browser.

Tags: astronomy · Mars · science · space

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Vintage Analog Photo Booths

FotoAutomat restores vintage analog photo booths and redeploys them around Europe, mostly in Paris.

There are less than fifty working analog photo booths remaining in the world now. Since 2007, FotoAutomat has been working to preserve this photographic heritage by restoring and maintaining the last original analog photobooths in Paris, Nantes and Prague, mainly in spaces dedicated to art and culture.

This is some primo Wes Anderson shit. (via meanwhile)

Tags: photography

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Five Quick Links for Monday Noonish

If you're still looking for a last-minute gift for your dad, check out the 2023 Father's Day Gift Guide.

If it's asparagus season in your neck of the woods, check out this thread of ways to prepare it.

The one question I was waiting for in this interview with Baby Gronk's dad/manager but didn't get was: "How do you justify this obvious child abuse?" This whole thing is gross.

Members of Radiohead Form Side Project to Sound Exactly Like Radiohead. "It's vital to step outside your comfort zone with most of the same members of the band and see what other roads are available for us to explore."

This is just an amazing story about a frog and their new house.

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Forgetting How to Be Yourself

For the New Yorker, Louisa Thomas on major league pitcher Daniel Bard, who has struggled with the yips on and off during his career.

Many baseball players have minor control issues at one point or another. Sometimes it happens after an injury, when a player is relearning how to throw, over-attending to discrete motions that used to feel fluid and natural. "Overthinking" is the simple way to put it: the brain's prefrontal cortex trips up the sensory cortex and the motor cortex. In other cases, the mind can essentially go blank. Players usually snap out of it, the way Bard had years before. But the brain can get stuck in certain patterns, and the yips can take over in a way that no one fully understands.

I used to write quite a bit about the sort of practiced autopilot that's necessary to perform at a high level and what happens when the wheels come off the wagon and you start overthinking and second-guessing. From a 2021 post about Simone Biles' case of the twisties:

This phenomenon goes by many names — performance anxiety, stage fright, choking, the yips, cueitis (in snooker), and target panic (for archers) - and the world-class are not immune. Daniel Day-Lewis had stage fright so bad he quit the stage decades ago — an affliction he shared with Laurence Olivier, Barbra Streisand, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. If you've read anything at all about this stuff, Biles' case of the twisties doesn't seem so unusual or mysterious — it's just one of those things that makes her, and the rest of us, human.

Back to Bard, who tried a bunch of different fixes for his pitching problems:

Once Bard acknowledged the problem, he tried every available fix. He met with sports psychologists; he saw a hypnotist; he meditated. He whispered mantras, which he found counterproductive — athletes "don't think in words, we think in shapes, feelings, and visions," he told me. He had a rib removed, to help with the blood-flow problem caused by thoracic-outlet syndrome. He tried different arm slots. Adair posted inspirational messages around their house. At one point, she and Bard drove to a Holiday Inn to meet a woman who used eye-movement therapy to treat soldiers with P.T.S.D. Bard also tried a technique called tapping: you tap your fingers on certain places on your head, in a certain order, to reframe traumatic memories. It didn't work.

I don't know if anyone else has felt like this, but I think I might have the yips — not for a sport but for my life. I feel like I have forgotten how to naturally be myself. My preferences, what I enjoy doing, what I think about certain things, how I feel, how I feel about how I feel — it all feels forced right now, overthinking and second-guessing galore. What Would Jason Do? The hell if I know...but I do know that if you're asking yourself what you would do in a certain situation instead of just doing it, you've already lost.

Like Bard, I've tried a bunch of different things recently to fix this, to seemingly little avail. Perhaps thinking about it as the yips but for my life will help me address it?

Tags: baseball · Daniel Bard · Louisa Thomas · relaxed concentration · sports

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Watch a Traditional Japanese Noh Mask Being Made

Noh is a classical Japanese art of dramatic dance that's been performed since the 14th century. The masks worn by characters are an art form in themselves, and in this video, an expert craftsperson carves a noh mask out of a single block of Japanese cypress and then paints it with pigments made from crushed seashells.

I love the look of the rough texture of the mask when she's about halfway through, before she smoothes it out with the paint — it's like IRL low-poly. But the detail of the finished product is incredible.

See also How to Carve Marble Like Italian Master Donatello. (via open culture)

Tags: art · Japan · video

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Real-Life Infrastructure That Looks Like Sci-Fi

Kane Hsieh, proprietor of the excellent MachinePix, has collected a bunch of photos of infrastructure that looks like science fiction.

Tags: Kane Hsieh

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Four Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

I've been reading a lot about the end of Succession and thought this piece by Brian Phillips was particularly interesting. "The crown is made of tinfoil; the only reason to chase it is because childhood trauma is compelling you to."

The Arctic could be completely free of summer sea ice as early as the 2030s. "In a new study, scientists found that the climate milestone could come about a decade sooner than anticipated."

A great profile of the last Italian stone carver in Barre, VT, the Granite Capital of the World. He's a *20th generation* stone carver. "That's when I really knew that this guy was a genius, not just a sculptor."

For the first time in their history, the Human Rights Campaign has declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans. "There is an imminent threat to the health and safety of millions of LGBTQ+ people and families..."

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The Train Speed Optical Illusion

If you watch the video above of a front-facing camera on a moving train, the train appears to move much faster in the zoomed out view than in the zoomed in view. Here's what's going on:

The illusion that speed decreases when zoomed is "because when one focuses on an inner portion of the movie, the optic flow angular speed is slow, and appears to fill one's entitle visual field, which is consistent with overall lower forward speed.

Note: The more zoomed, the more densely packed the overhead rigging appears. So, even though you appear to be moving forward more slowly when zoomed in, the actual rate of rigging flowing by remains constant, consistent with same forward speed in all conditions.

(via the kid should see this)

Tags: optical illusions · video

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Four Quick Links for Tuesday Afternoon

Some myths about blogging that stop people from writing, including "writing boring posts is bad" and "more material is always better".

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life? "Intimate friendships don't come with shared social scripts that lay out what they should look like or how they should progress."

An interactive feature on the wonky grooves of J Dilla. "People are moved by things that aren’t perfect".

Whoa, there's an upcoming streaming channel for Sid & Marty Krofft shows (like H.R. Pufnstuf, The Bugaloos, and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters).

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Blackstar — The Sun In A New Light

Blackstar is a relaxing and meditative 45-minute video of the Sun made by Seán Doran using footage from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Instead of the familiar yellow, Doran has chosen to outfit our star in vivid blue and black, which lends the video a sort of alien familiarity. This looks absolutely stunning in 4K.

Tags: astronomy · meditative · Sean Doran · space · Sun · video

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The 2023 Food Photographer of the Year Awards

The Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year awards have been announced for 2023 and there is lots of good work in more than a dozen categories. As usual, I've included a few of my favorites above (photographers from top to bottom: Zhonghua Yang, Md. Asker Ibne Firoz, Mouneb Taim, Khanh Phan Thi) but you should click through to see the rest. (via curious about everything)

Tags: best of · best of 2023 · food · photography

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