Link Dump

Just a routine clearing of the baffles before we get into Six Weeks of Halloween mode; the usual dump of interesting links from ye olde internets:

• Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body – Neat! Of course, the mushroom didn’t actually learn anything and the people who wrote this article (or any of the other similar articles) should be ashamed of their clickbait lies. Scientists figured out how to read chemical and electrical energy from the mushroom and programmed a robot to move when it detected that energy. Still pretty neat, but this isn’t The Last of Us yet.
• Should the Miami Dolphins kill 5 of their players to trigger a disaster draft to improve their roster? Very nice and normal conversation over at Reddit, but I do think it’s funny when people tease out unintended consequences from a given ruleset. Like, obviously if the Miami Dolphins as an organization murdered 5 players, they wouldn’t get away with it. But if a “crazed fan” did it?
• Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art – Typically thoughtful essay from Ted Chiang that puts generative AI in perspective. It’s got some good zingers (“… the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.”), but also articulates a good case for why we should value the human element of artistic expression. Along the way, Chiang also mounts a defense of writing that is “entertaining” (as opposed to “high art”), and the underpinnings of intelligence and skill, and why we engage with writing in the first place. I’ve been thinking about this sort of stuff of late and, someday, might put something up here discussing the ins and outs of a world changed by AI…
• I Am Eating Everything on Denny’s ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Menu – Yet another in Matt Singer’s quest to sacrifice his health at the alter of promotional food menus (this time with special guest!)
• The Blue Zone Distraction – Every now and again, you see a story about how the world’s oldest aged individuals tend to exist in certain geographical regions and cultures. The message is usually about diet or activity or stress, but it turns out that almost all of these geographical regions tend to have older aged populations because of poor record keeping (i.e. inadequate birth/death certificates), fraud (relatives collecting pensions for someone who’s been dead for years/decades), and other such conflations.
• Famous Folks – The realities of famous folks’ lives sound really quite awful. People seem to feel very entitled to them in a way that is deeply disturbing.
• Deborah Ann Woll Teaches Jon Bernthal Dungeons and Dragons – Remarkable on-the-fly introduction to D&D, she’s clearly an experienced DM and knows her stuff, and it’s funny seeing Bernthal’s eyes light up once he realizes what’s happening…
• Making a Sandwich From Scratch Took This Man Six Months – Making a sandwich from scratch, like, truly from scratch, as in growing the wheat for the bread, raising the chicken, etc… cost $1500 and took 140 hours of labor over six months.
• James Cameron Responds to Fans Complaining About 4K Transfers – “When people start reviewing your grain structure, they need to move out of mom’s basement and meet somebody. Right? I’m serious. I mean, are you fucking kidding me?” Sorry James, some of it looks bad (j/k, I thought they were mostly decent, even if I prefer *ahem* grain structure and whatnot). I’m still gonna snag the new Terminator 4K. Fingers crossed that they fixed the sound.
• What happened when I made my sons and their friends go without smartphones – Seems like it was actually pretty beneficial, and only hard for the first few days.

That’s all for now, stay tuned – Halloween season is almost upon us!

The usual collection of links from the depths of ye olde internets, dumped here for your enjoyment:

• I Ate Four “Deadpool & Wolverine” DiGiorno Pizzas – Matt Singer continues to sacrifice his body on an almost decade-long promotional food odyssey.
• I (Barely) Survived ‘Horizon’: How Kevin Costner’s Western Epic Fails Even His Most Diehard ‘Yellowstone’ Fans – I dunno, I kinda enjoyed Horizon (or, er, the first quarter of Horizon that’s been released so far), but this pan of the film is pretty funny:

During the last hour of “Horizon,” a man sitting several rows behind me descended the steps in the dark theater, spilled his half-full bucket of popcorn midway down, reached to pick it up — but was interrupted when he let out an audible fart. At this point, he abandoned the bucket and hustled to the door. If only “Horizon” matched that level of compact storytelling and wit, featuring a memorable character facing challenging odds.

• Can a TV show save your sanity? – What starts as an overview of a ridiculous Bigfoot-hunting “reality” show turns into a pretty good encapsulation of why escapism is valuable, particularly in the environment of continual outrage stoked over the past decade or so.
• Disappearing Polymorph – There are crystal structures that won’t form anymore, even though they existed just fine in the recent past. This phenomenon is of particular concern to the pharmaceutical industry, which has “lost” drugs to polymorphism.
• Calculus Made Easy – A textbook written in 1910 that should be required reading for students today, as they’d get the point much quicker than today’s textbooks…
• Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (in particular, the “difficult case” on page 17) – Woman hears voices in her head saying things to the effect of “Don’t be afraid, we’re here to help.” Doctors put her on anti-psychotic meds and they work for a bit, but the voices come back and tell her to seek immediate treatment, giving her a specific address and telling her to get a brain scan. It turns out to be a hospital, and just to reassure her, the doctors order a brain scan. They identify a brain tumor and eventually remove the tumor. After the surgery, the voices say “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” She never hears the voices again. Several mundane explanations are proposed, but no one knows for sure what actually happened.
• Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record – It’s interesting how much influence you can gain in internet institutions simply by showing up… granted, you have to do so consistently for, like, decades, but still. Anyway, Wikipedia remains pretty useful as a starting place, even if this guy seems a bit goofy (and his influence is limited to certain specific areas).
• Captain Tony Soprano – Perfect
• Dave’s Pickle Warehouse – Yes
• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again – This data scientist has absolutely had it with all the AI talk of late.

That’s all for now…

Just the usual link dump of interesting stuffs for the depths of ye olde internets:

• NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth – Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data back to earth last November, and NASA has been trying to figure out why. In March, they figured out that a specific chip had failed, refactored the code, and sent the update out 15 billion miles. Voyager 1 has now resumed sending useful data about interstellar space back to Earth. A pretty astounding feat of engineering.
• Project Lyra is a feasibility study for a mission that would send a space probe out, bounce it off Jupiter, sending it back towards the sun, which will throw it out of our solar system so fast that it can catch up to Oumuamua (the mysterious space rock that passed through our solar system, changing course in a way that was difficult to explain, and thus leading to much speculation that it was an alien spacecraft or somesuch.) This animation gives a much better view of how the Oberth maneuvers at Jupiter and the Sun would work (and it’s set to Free Bird as a bonus):

• The Man Who Killed Google Search – Speaking of astounding feats of engineering… let’s look at the opposite of that. It’s become something of a truism that Google Search has degraded significantly over the last several years, and it turns out that the reason is rather obvious. All you need to do is prioritize short term economic growth over experience (hiring the guy who killed Yahoo search to do this for you is almost too on the nose, and yet…). Their previous market dominance and simple inertia have kept things going, but man, this story is wild. I suspect AI will eat Google’s lunch (especially since their AI was such a spectacular failure). This story of the enshittification of Google is pretty solid:

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.

… Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.

• Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ – Not to completely rag on Google here, I’ve worked on enough of this sort of thing to see pretty surprising lapses like this happen, but it appears the enshittification of Google is not limited to search. Somewhere, there’s a gruff, difficult engineer who pissed off management by insisting they maintain redundant backups, and he’s feeling vindicated at this moment. This whole story reminded me of Taleb’s The Black Swan and his notion of resilience (which is why Google’s growth-at-all-costs short term view is damaging their company).
• No One Buys Books – During an antitrust trial, all the publishing houses had to disclose a bunch of info about the book business and the information is somewhat eye opening. In brief: Almost all book sales are driven by celebrities (i.e. Britney Spears, etc…), franchise authors (i.e. James Patterson, etc…), and repeat bestsellers from the backlist (i.e. the Bible). Basically, what we think of when we think of books are a gigantic vanity project, with most books making no money at all and typically selling less than 1,000 copies. Seems kinda screwy, but at least that vanity project seems to be persisting (at least, until the publishing industry’s Prabhakar Raghavan arrives).

That’s all for now…

Just the usual spin around ye olde internets for interesting links:

• Ethan Coen’s “Drive-Away Dolls”, Reviewed by Joel Coen – Obviously a parody, but it does seem like the sort of thing they would do, completely straightfaced and never breaking the bit. (Also of note, Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, Reviewed by Ethan Coen.)

Mr. Coen’s chronic deceitfulness likely hurt his lead actresses’ performances. Co-leads Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan seemed distracted and confused — what faulty direction did Mr. Coen give them? Did he tell them something perplexing? Did he give them information that didn’t quite compute? More to the point: Did he tell them that I got diarrhea on the monkey bars in fifth grade? He tells everyone that even though it’s not true! I was on the monkey bars and then got off and ran inside to use the bathroom! That is not getting diarrhea “on” the monkey bars! And I was only sick in the first place because I got the flu that Ethan brought home from Mike Fegel’s birthday party! DID ETHAN TELL MARGARET QUALLEY THAT I GOT DIARRHEA ON THE MONKEY BARS?!?!?! I AM GOING TO ABSOLUTELY DIE IF HE DID THAT!!! HE IS SUCH A MEAN JERK!!

• Pom Klementieff Fantasy Football Trash Talk – So apparently a bunch of the Avengers were in a fantasy football league and made short trash talk videos for each other and then Pom Klemetieff did this in response. Apparently this happened a few years ago and Klemetieff roped in Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson into helping her out. It’s great.
• Stop Motion Godzilla Treats – This is so stupid I love it.
• Cookie Monster Godzilla – Not quite as stupid, but still stupid.
• Etymology of the word “Dog” – The origin of the word “dog” is unknown and apparently “remains one of the great mysteries of English etymology.”
• German Chocolate Cake does not come from Germany. It’s American and it was invented by Samuel German.
• the best picture nominees as it’s always sunny in philadelphia quotes – Perfect, no notes.
• Today is Egg Day – This guy ate 30 eggs in one waking day “solely to prove a woman in a viral tiktok wrong.”
• The Stunt Awards Are Back – Critics got sick of the Oscars not adding a category for Best Stunts, so they did their own, more comprehensive Stunt Awards, and it’s great. I watched a bunch of stuff I might not have if not for these awards.
• Someone Used AI to Rewrite My Book. It’s So Much Worse Than I Could Have Imagined. – AI is going to bring bake gatekeepers, isn’t it?
• Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group – Guy gets invited to speak at the CIA headquarters to what appears to be a relatively informal group of writers. No speaking fee, but there was free lunch and he got to take his picture in front of the CIA seal (which I can only imagine that he’ll be using as his author photo/headshot for the rest of his life).

While we waited for our food, the writer of dystopian sci-fi confirmed that if you work for the CIA, lawyers have to vet anything you publish. But they were more lenient than I would’ve guessed. She said that one of her novels had helped change how the agency viewed fiction versus nonfiction. While reading her novel, the lawyers decided that just because a character in a novel says something doesn’t mean that the author necessarily agrees, so there should be more leeway for CIA fiction writers. (Which suggests CIA lawyers are more nuanced literary critics than half of Goodreads.)

That’s all for now. Next week: The Oscars!

Just the usual link dump of interesting things discovered in the depths of ye olde internets:

• “Who Censored ‘The French Connection’?” Is A Case That Only Popeye Doyle Can Solve – Glenn Kenney provides a good summary of the controversy, though to my knowledge, the mystery has still not been resolved. But it’s another booster for owning physical media.
• Kenneth Branagh Needs to Make 10 More of These – He’s talking about the Poirot films. Agree!
• The World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned – It used to be that artists responding to their critics in any way was seen as poor form. I guess that’s not a thing anymore. Critics can be annoying, but this is just sad. I don’t know much about this artist, but his response gives off pure loser energy.
• Brian Eno on art – This explains some things:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

• What’s Happening To Android? – It’s a good question, curious to see if these trends continue…
• A Cautionary Crime Data Tale – There’s a lot of talk about disinfo out there, but it’s worth noting that much of it isn’t intentional, though that doesn’t really make it any better. It just means that we need to do some basic vetting of the sorts of numbers we see put out there, perhaps especially when they confirm our priors.
• Stephen King stories that could work as I Think You Should Leave bits – Absolutely perfect execution on this.
• This is not an I Think You Should Leave bit – But maybe it could be? I don’t know what this is.

That’s all for now!

To celebrate a July 4 weekend (eh, close enough), we take the usual spin through the depths of ye olde internets for interesting links:

• Goncharov – This is a nonexistent 1973 gangster film directed by Martin Scorsese with the tagline “The greatest mafia movie ever made”. It was conceived on Tumblr in 2022? Wow, I thought Tumblr had pretty much grown into complete irrelevance, but this is pretty funny. This fake movie has a pretty elaborate set of details like posters and superfans that make it feel real. (I discovered this on my phone many moons ago and kept forgetting to include it in one of these link dumps, so I’m way behind the curve here, but still…)
• The city put out a ‘Potty Poll’ to name its new public bathrooms and Philly did not disappoint – These sorts of polls are always a bad idea from the perspective of the people running them (see also: Boaty McBoatface), but lots of fun for everyone else. Some Philly highlights: “Wee the People”, “Porta Jawn”, “Phlush”, “Wooder-Closet”, “Leave Turds, Go Birds”, and “The Dallas Cowboys”. All well and good, but my personal favorite remains: “Kite and Pee”
• How the States Got Their Abbreviations – I don’t know, I’d watch that documentary.
• Back to the Orifice – Interesting take on how “work from home” has changed things and why many “back to the office” pushes are unsuccessful:

The problem with the post-pandemic “back to the office” push is that companies now want three different things from white-collar office workers:

1. Spontaneous in-person teamwork.
2. Virtual worldwide collaboration.
3. Individual productivity.

It’s easy to create to a workspace that supports any one of these three modes of work. It’s hard but possible to create a workspace that supports two. But no workspace can support all three at once because they make radically incompatible demands.

• What the Sports Culture War is All About – Evenhanded portrayal of the way politics and sports interact that comes down right around where I do. Many culture war battles are exhausting because they force people to take sides that aren’t especially relevant to them or to what they’re talking about, which is one reason the current battles in sports are so annoying:

What the subsequent generations aren’t getting as much, what the leagues are confounding in their efforts to woo them, and what activist groups are hamfistedly attempting to channel, is of a transcendent nature. Sports is a surrender, and that’s what makes them great. To notice that so many people sign up to be hypnotized together is less to identify a problem than it is to identify the need it’s addressing. Also, sports is more mirror than mover of the zeitgeist, always a time capsule of conventional wisdom. It remains valuable ad space due to optics and scale, but it’s hard to truly harness towards propagandistic ends. Why? Because the fan communes with the game specifically not to be focused on anything else.

• Baseball player looks for the “and 1” foul – Speaking of sports, this is a very funny baseball play that draws on basketball for the joke. It’s also on Twitter, which is a disaster right now, so I apologize.
  • Apparently you’ll need to be logged into Twitter to view this, and even if you are, you will be rate limited on the amount of tweets you can view. For the record, this is worth being one of the 600 tweets you’ll be able to view right now. Anywho, I’m thinking Twitter is pretty much toast at this point. There are competing explanations for this weekend’s woes, in part because all of them stem from stupid decisions and are thus manifestly believable.
  • Explanation the first: Musk wanted to limit viewing twitter to users of twitter. On its face, this seems stupid, but it’s not unheard of for social media, most of which limits what you can see if you’re not a member. But then, one of the things I liked about Twitter was that you didn’t need to be logged in to see it, and sharing it on text message chains was easy, etc… Anyway, the thought is that this change to limit viewership was made quickly by a depleted development team that didn’t foresee a cascade of issues arising (some dev on Mastodon speculated about Twitter DDOSing itself because when the site suppresses tweets, it thinks something is broken, so it keeps sending the request, which keeps failing, ad infinitum.)
  • Explanation the second: By why was Musk trying to suppress viewership? Don’t they make money on ads? Well, he mentions bots and crawlers and whatnot, and with the AI evolution that’s going on right now, it’s certainly possible that there’s been an uptick in bots and scrapers. This makes a certain sort of sense, but obviously the execution is either broken (and thus impacting all users, not just ones not logged in), unless:
  • Explanation the third: Apparently Twitter was negotiating their cloud hosting contract with Google, which had a deadline of June 30. So basically, these problems started happened right then. The conspiracy here is that maybe Twitter is out of money and can’t pay hosting fees, so they’re trying to stem the bleeding. Kinda plausible, even if it feels like we’re watching Twitter self-destruct. Not sure anyone will truly miss it.
• TCM Creative Structure Set – We’re going through a weird period of time right now where every major corporation seems to be self-sabotaging right in front of our eyes. Obviously TCM is a niche market, but Warner Bros Discovery, which had built up cred with movie dorks by supporting stuff like TCM and filmmakers and HBO, has been doing everything in their power to destroy what they’ve built. This is the third big corporation mentioned in this post alone that has made dumb decisions that are not working out well for them (also of note: Reddit is imploding because of boneheaded tech decisions as well). Anyway, the backlash to TCM changes was big enough to garner some minor concessions, which is something, I guess.

I think that’s enough for now, have a great July 4…

Just the usual link dump of interesting stuff from the depths of ye olde internets:

• TV’s Streaming Bubble Has Burst, a Writers Strike Looms, and “Everybody Is Freaking Out” – A pretty accurate sentiment, as I do think we’re about to see some consolidation in the streaming space (after an absurd push for streaming that was never really supported by reality – though I guess the pandemic threw a major curve into the mix), and we’re definitely seeing a return to theatrical releases, but then all of it could be derailed by the writers’ strike (and, to be clear, I’m on the writers’ side on this one – their asks are eminently reasonable and it feels like studios have already lost more money than they would have if they just paid their writers. I seriously don’t understand Hollywood’s outright hostility to writers.)
• Netflix’s DVD End Is a Warning Sign for Film Lovers – Of course, streaming isn’t going away… and this is a sad milestone, but one I think we could all see coming. For the record, I did have a DVD subscription because they actually had a deeper library than streaming does (though in recent years, it was thinning out).
• Hollywood’s Coming “OS Wars” – This article proposes an interesting idea about the future of streaming: that the real competition will be on home screen aggregators like Roku or Fire. I’m not entirely convinced, but any improvements in aggregation, navigation, curation, and discoverability on streaming can only be a good thing.
• Trafficking the News – This review of Ben Smith’s book “Traffic” signals a potential end for online journalism’s absurd push for traffic for traffic’s sake.

Having now worked in journalism for almost 20 years (he typed, arthritically, bones turning to dust at the mere thought of it) and having lived through various cycles of how journalism pays for and propagates itself, I’ve never been more sure of anything than the idea that chasing traffic for traffic’s sake has been disastrous and that cultivating a base of subscribers is the only way forward. But there are dangers there as well.

• Star Wars by Wes Anderson – I keep seeing AI generated videos and they’re almost always filled with horrifying grotesques, but this one is almost pitch perfect. It turns out that the approach was to use AI to generate still images in a proposed style, then add some minor motion and sound to them, and stitch them together (at least, I think that’s what they did). It turned out pretty great, though it’s also obviously patterned after the SNL parody from a few years ago. Anyway, the Owen Wilson as Darth Vador “Wow” moment is pitch perfect.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie Battles The Pope’s Exorcist At The Box Office In A Troubling Display Of Italian-On-Italian Violence – I know it’s a few weeks old and the article itself is just normal box office droning, but it’s a perfect headline.
• Into Thin AirPods – Have you ever lost an Apple product and wanted to use the Find My app to mete out vigilante justice? A bit anticlimactic, but it’s a fun read.

This is the part where I say I’m aware that everyone—Apple, law enforcement, any friends with good judgment within earshot—strenuously discourages ever, under any circumstances, trying to do vigilante justice with the Find My app. If you so much as mention the possibility, like four people will jump out of the woodwork with stories about someone they knew who was shot or assaulted trying to confront a thief in the act. I’d like to emphasize that I’m firmly on the side of reason, and a steadfast believer that having crime done to me is not an occasion to show off how brave I am.

But! I have watched Veronica Mars so many times.

• Needed: Generic Father Figure for Backyard BBQ – Since it’s grilling season, it’s time to revisit this classic Craigslist ad.
• Raw footage from the recording of Chili’s ‘Baby Back Ribs’ (1998) – The best part is the end, when everyone realizes that they’ve just witnessed a magical creation that will endure for centuries.

That’s all for now, Happy Mother’s Day!

Just the usual collection of links dumped from the depths of ye olde internets:

• It can be annoying to be online – Bijan Stephen responds to a viral article declaring that “We are a generation of adult babies,” which is, of course, based mostly on what people do online (and, more specifically, on social media). Which, as those of us who’ve been on the internets for a while know, is not the same thing as real life.

The thing about this that I really don’t like, other than its childish universalizing, is that it doesn’t actually describe offline behavior. The internet is a place where people post things — and, crucially at this juncture, where people know what it means to post things. In other words: at this point, posting is performance. You do it with an awareness that other people can see what you’re doing; everyone knows that anything posted online can go viral and change the poster’s life. …

A better piece might have asked: why do the algorithms that govern online popularity incentivize people posting infantile sensory content? For my own part I’d guess the answer is some combination of “it’s inoffensive and therefore appealing to many different kinds of people” and “people have very strong reactions to it” — which is a different way of saying that it boosts engagement and therefore increases a site’s all-important growth metrics.

• In The Age Of Streaming, TV Preservation Matters More Than Ever – Streaming continues to take hits on all fronts. It’s so convenient that it’ll never go away or anything, but the promise of streaming continues to disappoint. As usual, the physical media dorks were right.
• Astronomers still scratching their heads over population of ocean-world exoplanets – The notion that earth-like water worlds might be rare is certainly a valid conjecture, but there’s nothing head-scratching about this. As per usual, the details of exoplanet detection are the confounding factor, not the results. Still, the idea that water worlds are rare could represent a great filter would be good news, I guess. If we could ever confirm it (which would be difficult).
• The Stunt Awards – I meant to mention this last week: After decades of fruitless lobbying to the Academy Awards, which still doesn’t have a Best Stunt Oscar, Vulture writers (led by Bilge Ebiri and Brandon Streussnig) decided to just do their own. And it’s good! Folks like Scott Adkins and Albert Pyun garnered awards, which is fantastic (and exactly the sort of thing the Oscars might get some mileage out of if they ever get their act together).
• It’s Evil and Someone is Going to Make It – March is rife with jokey March Madness style brackets for goofy stuff, but I do kinda love this one, which is about fictional companies with evil products. OCP, Cyberdyne Systems, etc… Fun!
• Bad Projection Is Ruining the Movie Theater Experience – If streaming isn’t doing so great… well, neither are theaters. I’m lucky in that my local suburban cadre of Regal theaters seem to be pretty well run (in that I don’t get a lot of the issues described in this article), but if theaters can get their act together, maybe they can scrape back some share from the streamers (so far, so good this year, at least).
• Roundball Rock – It’s always funny when you see an old SNL sketch and you suddenly recognize Tim Robinson (who clearly had a hand writing this sketch).
• “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by George Lucas? – Perfect. Also of note: 2001: A TikTok Odyssey…

And that’s all for now…

The usual link dump of interesting stuffs found in the depths of ye olde internets. Hard to believe it’s been almost 3 months since the last one of these, so strap in:

• Report: Holy Shit, There Still 50 Minutes Left In Movie – We take the Onion for granted. There are times of the year when my movie watching is focused on one theme or the other. One is obviously the Six Weeks of Halloween, which is interesting in this context because they tend to be rather short, 90ish minute affairs. But I’m currently still catching up with 2022 movies, including the rush of prestige flicks released at the end of the year… and I rather frequently get to that 90 minute mark and see that there’s still, like, an hour left in the movie and my only thought is “How? How is there so much movie left?”
• seinpeaks – This account is dedicated to setting Seinfeld to Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score, and it’s surprisingly well done.
• Woman found lookalike online — and killed her to fake own death – Alright, fine, I’ll read your stupid article.
• Whole ‘nother Story – February – Tough but fair.
• Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and More React to 2023 Oscar Nominations – Buried in this story is this gem from Todd Field (director of Tár):

What would be Lydia Tár’s favorite movie of the year?

Oh, I think you know the answer to that.

“Tár”?

I think it would be “Tár.”

Do you have a favorite “Tár” meme?

People send me hysterical stuff. People have taken it so far beyond what any of us would have allowed ourselves to imagine. I think Lydia Tár, herself, would appreciate it, being a lover of anagrams and wordplay.

Did you ever expect the character to resonate so deeply?

Are you crazy? Of course not. But she’s very real to me. That’s a testament to Cate Blanchett.

• Cheating Rumors – This happened less than two weeks ago and it was all over the place for like a day, but I doubt anyone remembers anything about Aaron Taylor-Johnson & Joey King anymore, but this video is funny and probably took longer to create than the whole news cycle covering it.
• Fake trivia for Do the Right Thing on the IMDB Trivia Page – Dude made up a ridiculous bit of trivia about how the heatwave in Do the Right Thing was inspired by an early script for Predator 2. It’s still on the IMDB trivia page and has 35 likes.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned, for the Top 10 Movies of the year post is coming… soon?