Link Dump

Just the usual spin through interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• How I Beat Boris Becker – Andre Agassi talks about how he spotted Boris Becker’s tell. It’s got a nice Detachment 2702 twist to it as well…
• Carbon monoxide theory – Your house isn’t haunted, it’s just carbon monoxide poisoning:

Many haunted houses have been investigated and found to contain high levels of carbon monoxide or other poisons, which can cause hallucinations. The carbon monoxide theory explains why haunted houses are mostly older houses, which are more likely to contain aging and defective appliances, and why more hauntings are reported in the colder months. Carbon monoxide poisoning explains many of the occurrences in haunted houses, such as feelings of being watched, hearing footsteps or voices, seeing “ghosts”, headaches, dizziness, and sudden death or illness of people or pets, and also strange behavior in pets such as excessive barking or meowing. The carbon monoxide theory also explains why some ghosts don’t show up on photographs or videos (photographs that do show “ghosts” are usually caused by dust, insects, fingers or camera strap in front of the lens, and multiple exposures).

• I’m Built Different – So there’s this tiktok where a ridiculously ripped guy says “I’m not going to say this again, I’m built different” and then he puts an egg in his elbow and cracks it by flexing his bicep (then, despite explicitly claiming he wouldn’t, he says he’s built different again). Anyway, it’s ridiculous, and there’ve been tons of parodies (I especially like the first one in the link above, where the girl does this whole Johnny Carson-esque gesture). That link is good, but there’s a couple of other great ones out there too.
• A Brief History of ‘Looks Like Meat’s Back on the Menu, Boys!’ From ‘The Two Towers’ – It’s a line that has inspired an awful lot of discussion…

That line has confounded and delighted fans ever since the movie’s release, with a good number of tweets and Reddit comments centering on its seeming anachronisms. “Not only is it out of place, it doesn’t even make sense!” complained one confused commenter. “How do orcs even know what a menu is? Do they have fancy restaurants in Mordor? I guess they must.”

• That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story – I think I know which specific film he’s talking about.
• An Interview With the Guy Who Yells “Mortal Kombat” in the Theme for Mortal Kombat – He’s just a random guy…

That’s all for now…

The usual roundup of interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• Sweater Curse – The things you find on Wikipedia:

The “sweater curse” or “curse of the love sweater” is a term used by knitters to describe the belief that if a knitter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, it will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter. In an alternative formulation, the relationship will end before the sweater is even completed. The belief is widely discussed in knitting publications, and some knitters claim to have experienced it. In a 2005 poll, 15% of active knitters said that they had experienced the sweater curse firsthand, and 41% considered it a possibility that should be taken seriously.

• A Bird-Feed Seller Beat a Chess Master Online. Then It Got Ugly – Content moderation is difficult, even in the seemingly quaint realm of online chess. Also weird that e-sports seem to have experienced a bit of an explosion during the pandemic. I often wonder how things like this will be impacted by the vaccine. Will thousands of people still tune in to watch long, thinky chess matches, or will the audience evaporate once they can go out again?
• Drone flies through a bowling alley – I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this sorta of gonzo drone footage in movies. It’s all over youtube and it’s cool looking without the uncanny valley feeling you get from CGI. Anyway, this is a decent enough example, but the real reason I’m including it is this utterly perfect tweak of the original.
• Woman Finds Another Apartment Inside Her Apartment – This is like a setup for a horror movie.
• You Can’t Censor Away Extremism (or Any Other Problem) – Coming at the hate speech problem from a different direction:

One of the themes I’ve come back to many times in my writing is the idea that people mistake empirical claims (this is true about the world) with normative claims (this should be true about the world). Nowhere is this more clear than with “hate speech” and censorship. I think hate speech laws are politically and morally wrong, a normative claim, but more importantly they don’t work, an empirical claim – one which if true renders normative claims that hate speech laws are good irrelevant.

The debate about whether we should censor unpopular views such as hate speech is an important one, but also a strange one. In my experience, it operates wholly independent from any consideration of the restraints of reality.

• SETI Optimism is Human Future Pessimism – Another meditation on the Fermi Paradox, but with more math and some new terminology. Not sure I love the “grabby civilization” phrase, but it captures a useful idea in the discussion.

That’s all for now…

The usual link dump of interesting oddities from the depths of ye olde internets:

• One-way and Two-way Door Decisions – An interesting model for decision-making:

What are one-way and two-way door decisions? One-way door decisions are decisions that you can’t easily reverse. These decisions need to be done carefully. Two-way door decisions can be reversed. You can walk through the door, see if you like it, and if not go back. These decisions can be made fast or even automated.

• Edgar Wright: My Favourite Ever Cinema Experiences – Wright always has interesting things to say, and don’t miss the Empire podcast with Wright and Quentin Tarantino talking about the same subject. Those two together are also always worth listening to (see also: the commentary track on Hot Fuzz). All of this makes me miss movie theaters.
• Bread & Milk – Particularly relevant to those of us in the northeast who’ve been dealing with lots of snow of late. Incidentally, working from home makes snow far less annoying.
• Broccoli Wad – Look, I don’t know how to explain this or why it is or even what is going on here, but it’s hard not to watch.
• Predator end credits with The Golden Girls theme song – It fits surprisingly well.
• Paranormal Activity… of cats – Brilliant
• Barely Anyone Believes In QAnon’s Conspiracy Theories – How to find the lies buried within statistics. The actual numbers are basically right around the Lizardman Constant. (Not to toot my own horn, but I kinda love where this serious/important link is falling within this post. You know, right next to other vitally important links. You’re welcome.)
• Giant Military Cats – As the internet has shifted from blogs to social media, the single-serving website has turned into single-serving feeds of dumb, absurdly specific stuff like this. I particularly like this one, which nearly fooled me when it showed up mixed in with my feed (which, as you can no doubt tell, is full of hard-hitting exposes, etc…)
• Perfectly Cut Screams – Another absurdly specific single-serving social media feed…
• James Ellroy Interview on Conan – Classic interview with James Ellroy (who is an absolute maniac), with Dave Chappelle along for the ride (pretty sure he inspired a famous Chappelle Show skit). If you want, this can send you on a real YouTube spiral of Ellroy mania.

So there you have it, another link dump on the books. Stay tuned for the triumphant return of the 1978 Project, amongst other things.

Ringing in the holiday season with a few interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• Death of the Author (& Beyond) – The notion that an author’s intent is unimportant to your interpretation of their work can make for an interesting discussion, but people generally take the concept much further. This guy just put a name on half of the poor takes we see on social media (I particularly like “Weekend at Bernie’s of the Author”)
• Alien Hunters Discover Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri – I don’t know why, but I almost always click into these articles that are really trying to ride the “It’s probably not aliens, but it’s not not aliens yet either” line. As usual, when it comes to the existence of aliens, no news is actually good news because the Fermi Paradox has some terrifying implications.
• Verifying that you’re not a robot – Well observed…
• Pretending to Press Buttons on a Space Ship – People are really handling lockdown well (this is low-key impressive though).
• Nickelback – Trying Not To Love You – Wait, so, Jason Alexander was in a Nickleback video where he plays a barista who gets into a competition with a fedora and ascot wearing version of himself? How was I not aware of this? Oh wow, it wasn’t that long ago? This is weird. Like, good weird? I don’t know? I’m so confused by this video. How did this happen?
• Alienware – Three armed humans? (Honestly though, what were they thinking with that design?)

That’s all for now. Look, not every post can be as great as last week’s Christmas movie roundup…. so enjoy these links… Happy holidays folks!

The usual link dump of interesting stuff, plumbed from the depths of ye olde internets:

Stomp on the Mystery Box – An exploration of the merits (and lack therein) of J.J. Abrams’ concept of the Mystery Box.

A mystery box is an effective way to get the audience into the characters’ head space. We want to know what the answer is. They want to know what the answer is. We are instantly on the same team.

The fact that the mystery box is empty is extremely handy because it ensures that nobody can guess the ending ahead of time. Just keep tabs on the fan theories and you can stay way out in front of them. If you do have any particular plans in mind, and somebody gets close, throw out your plan and throw a new element into the story which voids that possibility. If asked directly whether a theory is correct, say no. By definition, it can’t be correct — because it was asked. And because there is no solution. Relatedly, a mystery box makes it very difficult for anybody involved in the production to leak the ending.

And finally, obviously, a mystery box saves you some (but not all) of the work of constructing the story in the first place. You have a solid beginning, you have some sketch ideas for the middle, and… you’re done. This is an especially efficient use of your time if your project is, for example, a television show with a strong possibility of being cancelled before it goes anywhere, or the first film in an ongoing franchise.

The Answer to Why Humans Are So Central in Star Trek – I don’t remember what made me look this up again, but this is some classic Star Trek nerd humor (that is genuinely funny, not, like, sad or something). I’m glad someone collected all the ancillary thoughts too. For the record, the actual original post is here.

That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. 

the girl from the movie who doesn’t believe in love – Pitch perfect parody of romantic comedies…

The Decay is Real: Streaming Films on Netflix (and others) Lose Viewership Very Quickly. Interesting data here. Kinda resembles movie theater blockbuster performance, only dropoff from week to week seems even steeper. I have to wonder how much of this is driven by Netflix’s advertising and curation strategy (i.e. when a movie is first released, Netflix pushes it hard by making it the first thing you see when you fire up the app… but then it disappears and gets harder and harder to find as time moves on…) While interesting, this is still based on a very small dataset, but it appears to be better than the “anecdata” that Netflix releases themselves…

John Waters bequeaths his art collection to Baltimore Museum of Art, whose bathrooms will be named in his honor – If you find this “honor” to be odd, you need to watch some John Waters movies. It’s perfect.

Another link dump of culled from the depths of ye olde internets.

Sharpest egg kitchen knife in the world – Riveting video that feels a bit like the kinder, gentler, more productive version of HowToBasic. Stick with it to the end. It’s going somewhere you probably don’t expect. If del.icio.us was still a thing, this would get filed under #idontknowwhatthefuckisgoingoninthisvideo.

An Oral History of ‘Steamed Hams,’ the Funniest ‘Simpsons’ Scene Ever Recorded – Sure, they start with the actual writers from the show, but it quickly evolves into interviews with memesters, isometric exercise trainers, food truck owners, chefs, and Aurora Borealis experts.

Stream Resolutions Are Quality Maximums, Not Minimums – A good point about streaming claims, particularly around HD and 4K.

Stream resolution puts a maximum quality on a stream. For a given codec setting, the more bits you allocate to a stream, the better it will look, until eventually it gets to the point where there’s no more quality to be had. A 720P stream will reach this point sooner than a 1080P stream, which will in turn reach it much sooner than a 4K stream.

However, prior to that point, what really matters more is the bandwidth of a stream. A “720P stream” pushing a megabyte/second will be higher in quality than a “4K stream” pushing 800kilobytes/second. It’s completely possible to have a higher quality “lower resolution” stream.

Motion Smoothing Is an Abomination – A solid overview of the problem that gets into some very detailed specifics as to why motion smoothing systems on televisions are so bad. It’s still amazing to me that these are the default settings TV manufacturers use.

EXCLUSIVE: Meghan and Harry’s new home sits behind a spooky estate once owned by the schizophrenic son of the inventor of the mechanical reaper who developed a foot fetish, carrying his slippers in his arms as if they were live pets – Ok, fine, I’ll read your stupid article.

2020: an isolation odyssey – Some people are using their lockdown to do… things like this. Could be a whole lot worse, I guess. Um, spoilers for 2001: A Space Odyssey? I think? Kinda?

That’s all for now. We may have another link dump coming soon, but then smooth sailing. Did you know that the Six Weeks of Halloween are only a few short weeks away? Most exciting!

It’s been a while since our last twirl through the depths of ye olde internets, so let’s get movin with some interesting links:

The Serendipity Engine – Dude quits his job to go on a “serendipity break”:

The concept of taking a serendipity break is based on my belief that luck doesn’t exist and that new, unexpected opportunities can be the result of feeding the Serendipity Engine. …

The Serendipity Engine works just like an internal combustion engine and, like with a high performance muscle car, you need to feed it with the right kind of propellant. In this analogy, the fuel is made of different activities, skills, and conversations. In my case I select them so that they are deliberately out of or tangential to my current professional domain. The engine also requires maintenance and fine tuning via iterations and changes to the activities or skills I become involved with.

I’ve been thinking about serendipity lately because social media used to be a good way to traverse obscure depths of the internet, but has lately become moribund medium. I will grant that maybe I’m no longer following the right people, but that’s also become more difficult. Speaking of this subject:

A Q&A with Rob Walker, Author of The Art of Noticing – This guy has written a book about observation skills and includes lots of exercises. This interview features a couple of good ones:

KPG: If you were going to a new city or destination, which exercises would you recommend trying as a way to better explore a new place?

RW: One would be Get There The Hard way. At least once during your trip, go to some destination without taking directions from your phone. Plan out a route in advance—you can consult a paper map if you want, or written directions, just don’t rely on your phone—and if you get confused, ask someone for help. Be engaged with the space you’re in and the people you’re around, find your way, and be open to discovery as you go.

The other is Eat Somewhere Dubious. Have one meal at a restaurant that you didn’t find on Yelp or through any sort of recommendation and that doesn’t even look trendy or hip. First you’ll have fun keeping an eye out for it: “Is THAT our dubious restaurant?” Second, even if you have a mediocre meal, you’ll have an unpredictable experience! And this, by the way, is how the best food writers make discoveries and find the places that later get hot on Yelp. So maybe you’ll get lucky.

I did a hike recently where the trail wasn’t especially well marked and my phone wasn’t much help. This just underscores how dependent we’ve become on our phones for stuff like directions. The “Eat Somewhere Dubious” idea actually sounds like a lot of fun, and I will have to try it out. I’ve definitely done something like “Drink Dubious Beer” before (i.e. Vermont Beer Roulette or Belgian Beer Roulette), and it’s always been fun, even if I didn’t much care for the beer.

The ’70s Independents Who Took on the Mafia – Overview of 70s gangster/cop flicks from Mike Malloy, who clearly knows his stuff. Naturally, this vid lead me down a rabbit whole of other Malloy videos, notably this one:

I Don’t Need to Ever Read Another F*cking Word About Sergio Leone – Malloy takes on the glut of books about Sergio Leone (and Sam Peckinpah). Unlike a lot of people complaining about this sort of thing, he puts forth examples of other “tough guy” directors who could use some scholarly treatment…

A Theory of Hot Sauces, with Recommendations – I enjoy hot sauces just fine, but I’m always fascinated by posts like this where someone just talks about their favorites. This guy has been using his pandemic lockdown to explore hot sauce:

OK, so one thing I’ve been doing during pandemic era is trying out hot sauces. Like a lot of hot sauces. Like a really unbearably large number of hot sauces. Like setting up hot sauce tastings where lunch is me making sad fish tacos out of my toddler’s abandoned day-old fish sticks but there are 15 different hot sauces to try with it. Like, when I got the new dream job, I was like, “I need to celebrate!” and… immediately went to an online hot sauce store and bought ten new hot sauces. This is apparently how I pandemic when I’m cut off from exploring restaurants and stuff.

As usual when it comes to hot sauces, the grand majority he lists are things I’ve never heard of (again, not an expert here, but still). Incidentally, I’ve been enjoying Hank Sauce; recommended if you’re in the market for reasonable hot sauces (i.e. tasty but not going to burn your face off).

And that’s all for now. Despite the serendipity explorations above, finding links for posts like this is harder than it used to be… We’ll have to work on improving that.

I debated writing about something political today, which was a bad idea and now I’m depressed so here, fun links that might brighten up your day.

• Zack Snyder Gets Roasted at a Comedy Show – It’s nicer than it sounds, and very funny (both the comedian and Snyder are good sports about it too).
• We Dem Arby’s BoyZ – This will seem dumb until the fake part kicks in. Then it’s… still dumb, but you’ll be laughing.
• Directors forced by their children to be on TikTok – A thread of several examples on Twitter. See, sometimes Twitter is fun.
• Das Fone Hell – So Sam Neill and Helena Bonham Carter got together to make this “Cinema Quarantino Production” and it’s fun.
• Danger Zone: X-Wing Tribute – Someone set a bunch of Star Wars X-Wing footage to Danger Zone like it’s Top Gun: Star Wars or something.
• Lazy cat sleeps on busy restaurant floor refusing to move. Living the dream.

That’s all for now. Stay safe out there.

The usual links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• How I’m Handling Online Teaching – Watch until the end; sheer perfection.
• It’s Time to Build – Interesting view on where we are that is ultimately optimistic, if only we can overcome our inertia:
  

  The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

  And we need to separate the imperative to build these things from ideology and politics. Both sides need to contribute to building.

  One of the books I’ve read during lockdown was The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and this goes well with the article. One of Taleb’s main points is that our inability to predict a fabled “Black Swan” event means that our institutions need to be flexible and prepared… but that sort of robustness can appear to be inefficient or redundant during the longer periods of normalcy. A lot of the stuff in the linked article is talking about exactly this sort of thing. Weirdly enough, Taleb mentions in the book (multiple times) that our overly interconnected globalised supply chain makes us vulnerable to certain events… like a pandemic (i.e. he didn’t so much predict the pandemic as he did the poor response to the pandemic). I like the linked article above because it’s at least thinking about a path forward, while most people are stuck politicizing anything and everything for no benefit whatsoever. It’s frustrating, but again, there’s a way out, and maybe it’s worth thinking about that more than, I dunno, masks.

• Inside Joe Manganiello’s Epic Dungeons & Dragons Campaign – Among many weird little tidbits in this is that Tom Morello invited Vince Vaughn to play in this campaign. I don’t know, I just find it funny that they’re friends.
• The Architecture of Dread – So some prepper billionaire bought an old underground nuclear missile silo and turned it into an inverted skyscraper/self-contained bunker full of luxury accommodation and video screen windows and now he and 57 other people have gone inside and shut the doors…
• ‘Expert Twitter’ Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs – I had kinda hoped that this whole lockdown situation would result in a resurgence of blogs, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Still, it’s heartening to see I’m not the only one who thinks Social Media is too slight to carry the burden we’ve place on it.
• Quibi Sent These Podcasters A Cease-And-Desist, So Now They’re Out For Blood – Utterly bizarre response to fans of a service that was facing enough struggles as it was without shooting themselves in the foot on purpose.

And that’s all for now…