The usual link dump of interesting stuffs from the depths of ye olde internets:
- Project 4K77 – Fans attempting to rescue the original Star Wars movie by doing a 4K scan of an original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print. We all know about the special edition changes and edits like Han shooting first and whatnot, but one thing that becomes glaringly obvious is that recent official releases have also darkened the screen considerably. This sort of digital color correction is a recent trend in cinematography and seems to be bleeding over into home video releases of older stuff as well. I cannot wait for this to end – they make everything look like muted, murky sludge.
- Steven Seagal’s “Strut” – Seagal released an album in 2004 in which he sings in a fake Jamaican accent. His first line in the song “Strut” is “me wan da poonani.”
- The LLMentalist Effect – Are AI language models demonstrations of actual intelligence, or are they just replicating the mechanisms of the psychic’s con?
- Coin Boys – Teacher complains of students’ new thing. Good for them.
The newest thing here is a flock of self-proclaimed “coin boys” who carry a quarter on hand at all times and constantly flip it. They have their entire personality revolve around coins, coin flips, and chance. When we went around doing an ice breaker, 4 or 5 of the kids said some variation of “I live by the coin and die by the coin” as their fact.
Just about an hour ago, when I assigned the first assignment of the school year, one of the coin boys was bold enough to say “heads I do it, tails I don’t.” I told him if he flipped the coin he would be getting a call home on the first week of HS. He flipped it anyway and it came up heads (thank god for that at least).
But then the other coin boy in that class flipped his coin and it came up tails. He said the coin has spoken and he’s not doing it.
- An Interview With Wanksy – An English guy starting putting graffiti around potholes so that the city council would clear them up faster. He calls himself “wanksy” because his graffiti looks like a penis.
- John Neal – A 19th century author most famous for coining the phrase “son-of-a-bitch”, which he did in an 1823 novel called Seventy-Six (about the American Revolution). Naturally, the novel was criticized at the time for its profanity.
- Jaws Bath Bomb – Japan has all the fun toys.
That’s all for now…