Link Dump

As per usual, interesting links scrounged from the depths of ye olde internets:

• Make the Censors Watch ‘Paint Drying’ – A wonderful Kickstarter for the best kind of censorship trolling. The basic idea is that the British censors have to watch whatever you send them, so this guy made a 10 hour video of paint drying and forced them to watch it. (via Chizumatic)
• That Time Ronald Reagan Visited Star Trek: The Next Generation And Took The Captain’s Chair – These sorts of things are always funny. I like how Reagan reacts to Klingons “I like them, they remind me of Congress.” Also, Reagan was correct, Star Trek III sucked.
• How to Cook Prison Spread – Delving into the culinary delights of prison food.
• What Errol Morris Thinks of Making a Murderer – Morris is always interesting, and immediately gets at what makes Making a Murderer worthwhile:
  

  I think it’s a mistake to assume, however, that all of these stories are doing the same thing, because they’re not. They’re doing different things. And… you see more and more criticisms of Making a Murderer because they say it’s biased-it leaves out this, that, and the other thing. To me, it’s a very powerful story, ultimately, not about whether these guys are guilty or innocent-but it’s a very powerful story about a miscarriage of justice.

  There’s so many themes in it that are relevant to investigation. But what is powerful in Making a Murderer is not the issue of whether [Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey] are guilty or innocent. It’s the horror of the courts and how that story was handled the first time around and subsequently. I can never ever forget Dassey’s attorney and the investigator. The attorney with the catfish mouth and the investigator crying—unforgettable.

  If you liked Making a Murderer, do yourself a favor and check out The Thin Blue Line (it’s on Netflix streaming).

• How to Make Eggs – A simple subject, but this is a great little reference…
• PHYSICIST: Here’s why blowing up the Death Star would have killed all the Ewoks – The trend of Star Wars revisionism that’s been sweeping the internets is amusing, and it’s funny that people keep finding new angles. This one is interesting, though it’s also exactly why Star Wars isn’t really Science Fiction (and why that’s ok).
• Grandmaster Maurice Ashley plays NYC trash talker – Grandmaster vs. Chess Hustler, and they trash talk. It’s glorious.

That’s all for now, see you next week for the Oscars!

Many apologies for the lack of posting of late, and this one is coming a day late because I basically just forgot to post it. Something about a big sportsball game last night. Anyway, as I prep my Best of 2015 movies list, I have some links to keep you busy:

• Guy annoys girlfriend with puns at Ikea – This is made me laugh more than I would have thought.
• Celebrating the Invisible Artistry and Great Direction of “Spotlight” – Matt Singer valiantly defends the honor of this great, restrained movie:
  

  Spotlight certainly doesn’t have the visual panache of The Revenant or The Hateful Eight, but that doesn’t automatically make it a lesser film. Lavish cinematic style is not an automatic and objective good. It needs to suit the material. And it would not suit the material in Spotlight. …

  Spotlight’s direction is “unsexy” because it depicts a world that is unsexy; it is “workmanlike” because it depicts a world of work. If the Boston Globe reporters’ jobs were fun and exciting, everyone would do them and the newspaper business would be thriving. The whole point of the film is to show why these journalists’ efforts were important in spite of the fact that what they did was, by and large, boring, tedious, and monotonous. Gussying up this film with elaborate camera shots and eye-catching angles would be a betrayal of everything Spotlight represents. In the same way that the Spotlight team keep themselves out of the story, McCarthy keeps himself out of the movie.

  But that doesn’t mean he’s not there, or that film direction is purely the sum total of a movie’s flashy camera moves. Careful consideration of Spotlight reveals McCarthy’s subtle but brilliant direction, not just in terms of cinematography but production design, art direction, and editing as well. Little of it is showy and most of it is easy to miss, particularly if you get caught up in the riveting drama of the Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Church and its unseemly practices.

  Singer then proceeds to back it up with several examples. Very insightful, though it does appear that Spotlight has lost its frontrunner status.

• I’m STILL Not Sayin’ Aliens. But This Star Is Really Weird. – You remember that star that had really weird dips in radiance? It turns out that it’s even weirder than originally thought, especially when taking into account historical observations. No real explanation has made much sense (even, dare I say, the alien hypothesis, however much we’d want it to be).
• ‘Dirty Grandpa’: The Most Important Movie Ever Made – Well that’s a hot take:
  

  Strangely missing from Oscar consideration, Dirty Grandpa would be a serious contender if it had not, bafflingly, missed the Dec. 31 cutoff date. As you’ve most certainly heard, there’s an online petition demanding the White House take action on this travesty. Another curious decision is Lionsgate releasing Dirty Grandpa, a movie that offers no laughs, as a comedy. Instead, it’s an indictment on our society as a whole – a no-bones-about-it, heartbreaking, devastating takedown on this cesspool of society that Dirty Grandpa thinks we have. And it might just be The Most Important Movie Ever Made.

  It turns out that Dirty Grandpa inspired some pretty good writing, including this next link:

• Dirty Grandpa review – This one goes weird:
  

  A couple of weeks ago I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that this movie, “Dirty Grandpa,” was the talk of the nation. Not because the Robert De Niro/Zac Efron/Aubrey Plaza raunch comedy was particularly good, but because, apparently-I didn’t see any of the movie in my dream, just had conversations with people about it-it didn’t do that thing that studio-produced-raunch comedies do, which is take things so far and no further. No. In my dream, “Dirty Grandpa” was spinning heads because it broached John Waters/Harmony Korine levels of outrageousness. The sex scenes between De Niro and Plaza had a “Last Tango In Paris” level of explicitness, for instance.

  Now you just have to take my word for it that I had this dream, but honestly, I did. The question is WHY did I have this dream. As the author of a book on De Niro, I’m frequently (okay, not that frequently, but more often than would be the case for a guy who hadn’t written a book on De Niro) asked what I make of his various career moves. So maybe the dream speaks to my critical desire to see De Niro go back to surprising his audiences with audacious performances. Or maybe I’m just a perv who wants to see Aubrey Plaza naked. I don’t know.

  I think we all know the answer to that question.

• After Dark in CSS – Some genius reimplemented those oldschool After Dark screensavers in CSS. Flying Toasters man. Flying Toasters.

That’s all for now…

Two link dumps in a row? I’m the worst. I shall endeavor to produce something of quality and originality within the next few weeks, but for now, here are some links worth checking out:

• Exercise Vague Caution – Someone puts up a “This Building is Monitored by Closed-Circuit Cameras” sign in Jamie Zawinski’s apartment building, and unimpressed by this security theater, he adds little slogans underneath, such as the titular “Exercise Vague Caution” or “Drone Strikes Authorized 7PM – 5AM”. Beautiful.
• What Does ‘Cinematic TV’ Really Mean? – Interesting video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz and Chris Wade that explores the divide between TV and Cinema. When most people think of “Cinematic” television, they generally just think about production value. A big part of that is that production value for TV is historically pretty terrible. When the X-Files came on in the 1990s, I think everyone recognized a difference. TV at the time had a very “flat” sort of feel to it. The X-Files had actual cinematography and depth that you didn’t see much in TV at the time. Now, that sort of thing is much more common. This video attempts to go further than I have here, and it makes some good arguments, though I think perhaps they may be overstating their case. The best television these days rivals the best cinema, but it’s not like there aren’t craptons of terrible examples of both. Film may still be better than TV on the whole, but TV is growing rapidly.
• Making Meatballs With Mario and Maria Carbone – A neat enough video on its own, but I don’t think I’d be linking to it if Charles C. Mann didn’t append his brief description in a tweet: “A ferocious Oedipal power struggle over meatballs, captured in fine 12-minute video”. Quite an evocative headline for a video about “Dead Cow Spheres”
• The Long, Sweet Love Affair Between Cops and Doughnuts – Surprisingly edifying look into a common trope that has apparently has origins in fact.

And that’s all from now.

With six whole weeks of horror movies, the link repository has been growing and growing with lots of interesting tidbits from the depths of the internets:

• Flipping Out – This is the most inspired and hilarious writing I’ve read in a long time. It’s about the single craziest inning of playoff baseball that’s likely to ever happen, but even if you’re not a sports person, you should read this, because it’s brilliant. There’s a great precision to the writing, and the format is almost conversational, but it’s like one of those Tarantino movies where people are speaking naturalistically, but their speech is stylized in a way that no one actually speaks. Or something. Just read it, ok? It’s great.
  

  Both the most- and least-surprising aspect of that moment was that baseball has a rule for it. And, as you noted, the rule – rule 6.03a, as we learned – is literally an EXACT description of what happened. It was the most surprising aspect because, indeed, no one had ever seen it before. It was the least surprising aspect because of course baseball has a rule for this, it has a rule for everything. And of course it was incredibly specific, because all of baseball’s rules are incredibly specific. Baseball rules are the opposite of football rules. Football rules are like…

  “If a guy kind of grabs a pass but doesn’t really like totally like have it, and then he kind of maybe shimmies around but doesn’t make a like ‘football move,’ or maybe he doesn’t like seem to really like command the ball in a way that I can’t describe but it’s like pornography and I know it when I see it, or something, then let’s go ahead and say it isn’t a catch?”

  Yes – football rules often end in question marks. Because not even the rule writers believe in them.

  Baseball rules are like: “There was an A’s-Yankees game in May of 1933 and this insane thing happened and we made a rule to cover that exact situation.” I’m actually surprised it didn’t say:

  RULE 6.03a: If Russell Martin tries to throw a ball back to a relief pitcher in a tense 7th inning of a deciding playoff game and Shin-Soo Choo is doing that weird thing where he holds his bat out directly in front of him like a divining rod and Martin’s throw bonks off his bat and rolls away, Odor is allowed to score from third.”

  I hesitated to even include this pull-quote because the entire article is amazing and you should really read it, but I couldn’t help myself. Also, NBC needs to make a 30-for-30 style documentary that is just these two guys performing exactly what they wrote here, edited into the actual inning as played.

• Genre Savviness Is Not Enough – I probably should have found a way to work this into the Six Weeks of Halloween, but whatever, this is also a great list of lessons learned from horror movies. Sample awesome:
  

  24. If you hear a nursery song and you are not in an actual nursery, vacate the area immediately.

  25. If your travels must take you through a rural area in which agriculture is done, try to make sure you stick with the towns that grow ground crops. No one has ever been chased through a field of peanuts by an eldritch abomination or cult. Avoid cornfields and apple orchards at all costs.

  Also worth checking out, Popehat’s list.

• If the moon were only one pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system. One of many attempts to internalize the enormity of space.
• A Wild Weekend in Florida – I used to think that Twitter was a terrible place for long form writing, and for the most part I’m right, but then there’s this story about strippers, pimps, guns, and murder, as told by the smarter of the strippers. It’s an astounding piece of work and needs to be turned into a film at some point.
• A-List Directors, interviewed by Sam Mendes – This is charming, and they actually managed to get a large amount of major names.
  

  Have you ever walked off a set in a temper?

  Ang Lee: I only Hulked out once.

  Christopher Nolan: I once tried, but nobody seemed to notice, so I came back.

  George Clooney: No. The reason is because eventually you have to walk back on, and that would be too humiliating.

  Good stuff.

• Arrested Westeros – Mashup of Arrested Development quotes with Game of Thrones screenshots. It’s surprisingly effective.

And we’ll leave it at that for now. See you soon.

Lots of stuff going on lately, here’s a sampling of interesting links plumbed from the depths of the internets:

• The Disgusting But Logical Implications of Star Trek Food Replication Technology – This is important nerdery right here:
  

  But take things to even more logical conclusions. First, there is inevitably going to be some annoying hipster dicks who insist that they can tell the difference between replicator food and real food (and I seem to remember this actually happening on screen).

  In addition, because it’s functioning off of recipes down to the molecular level, does that mean that every dish comes out looking identical to every other time it was ordered? Imagine if every single time you ate a hamburger, every ripple in the lettuce and angle of every sesame seed was exactly the same every single time.

  That’s pretty tame, but the article goes to some… distressing yet surprisingly logical places.

• 11 Tips To Intentionally Ruin A Mock Draft – Basically, draft Tim Tebow in the first round. So yeah, Eagles are perhaps not in for the best of years.
• The Benjamin Franklin Effect: The Surprising Psychology of How to Handle Haters – He took an interesting approach:
  

  Franklin set out to turn his hater into a fan, but he wanted to do it without “paying any servile respect to him.” Franklin’s reputation as a book collector and library founder gave him a standing as a man of discerning literary tastes, so Franklin sent a letter to the hater asking if he could borrow a specific selection from his library, one that was a “very scarce and curious book.” The rival, flattered, sent it right away. Franklin sent it back a week later with a thank-you note. Mission accomplished. The next time the legislature met, the man approached Franklin and spoke to him in person for the first time. Franklin said the man “ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”

  The challenge is that both parties must have a certain amount of dignity in order for this to work. That being said, I’ve found that this sort of thing works better than, say, getting someone fired or mobbing their social media accounts with threats.

• How “oldschool” graphics worked – Another example of limitations leading to creative solutions.
• How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars – Why is it that reading these Wait But Why articles fills me with more sense of wonder than most recent science fiction? This is an epic article, too long to even attempt pulling a quote from, but worth reading nonetheless. And the Tesla post is also worth reading. Basically, you should be reading Wait But Why. Between these two posts, I feel like the future might not be Mad Max-like.
• Researchers have created a self-healing material that works in less than one second – Neat, and probably a good idea to develop further if we actually do go to Mars.
• “Gremlins 2” Brainstorm – Uncensored – Everything about this is brilliant, from Key’s dead-on Dante costume to Peele’s glasses.

And that’s all for now! Get ready, though, the Six Weeks of Halloween are coming on strong. I’ve been planning out my themed weeks, and it’s going to be a fun one. Obscure horror auteurs, sinister puppets, and more. Stay tuned.

The usual roundup of links from ye olde internets:

• Carlos Henrique ‘Kaiser’ – The story of football’s greatest conman – I don’t think this would fly in American football, but what do I know?
  

  In a time when there was no internet and only relatively low access to live television, he understood that a chance to enjoy a career in football was still possible, despite having seen his talent diminish over his teens. His camaraderie with Brazilian footballers like Romario, Renato Gaucho and Edmundo played a pivotal role in his success as part-conman, part-footballer, as Kaiser earned himself three-month trials as a makeweight in deals upon the insistence of his peers.

  Once at the club, Kaiser would execute the next phase of his master plan. He would ask the club to give him time to regain fitness, thereby buying himself some time before he actually had to make the field. And when he did join the training sessions, he would drop to the ground at the first opportunity, clutching his hamstring.

  20 friggen years. Well played. Er, “played”.

• Believe in Featherbowling – Brought to you by ESPN 8: The Ocho, comes this actually interesting story about an obscure curling/shuffleboard-like sport.
• Teller is grateful and impressed – This video of Teller (the silent member of the Penn & Teller duo) actually speaking will traumatize you because Jesus, did you know he could talk?
• Vincent Musetto, 74, Dies; Wrote ‘Headless’ Headline of Ageless Fame – Obituary of the journalistic hero who penned this headline: “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR”. Sheer brilliance.
• Vampire Thought Experiments – Always an entertaining enterprise.
• Don’t Talk PSA: Coach – I could watch Alamo Drafthouse’s Don’t Talk PSAs all day.

That’s all for now. Off to see some impossible missions that will no doubt actually be possible (unless Ethan Hunt actually dies in this one).

As per usual, interesting things from the depths of the internets:

• The Suicide Squad trailer was great, why does Warner Bros. sound so angry about it? – The prevailing narrative is that Marvel has their shit together when it comes to their cinematic universe, but that Warner Bros (and DC) can’t quite crack the code. I’ve always thought this was sloppy thinking, but then, this is also a pretty fantastic illustration of how the two companies approach their work. Marvel’s response to a leaked trailer is fun and endearing. Warner Bros’s response? Petty and annoyed. Incidentally, Suicide Squad looks like it could work pretty well, though I suspect it’s success will hinge entirely on Margot Robbie’s performance (which appears to be electric!)
• Hollywood is quick to cry censorship. The industry’s not wrong to be afraid. – An excellent summary of the weird cycle of criticism and censorship, and the constantly rehashed arguments that never seem to result in anything productive. This touches on issues of free speech and how differently people seem to treat the term “censorship”. I tend to favor the freedom side of that equation. In the words of Ray Bradbury (commenting on the response to Fahrenheit 451): “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” It doesn’t matter if it’s a government match, the books will burn either way.
• Film as Bomb – Interesting discussion of Cronenberg’s The Brood…
  

  With The Brood, what was the bug that Cronenberg jammed up the collective, middlebrow ass? The fact that it was outrageously melodramatic in its boldly literal metaphors: suppressed rage creates murderous children. Plus its refusal to make a scapegoat out of any one character, class, gender or type (no matter what the director’s ‘ideological’ critics, including Robin Wood, have long claimed). Cronenberg’s despair and his mockery spare nobody; and this leaves some spectators crying foul over “misanthropy” and looking in vain for “someone to care about”.

  Cronenberg is certainly a fascinating filmmaker, one I love, but never seem to be on the same page with. On the other hand, that might be why I love his films.

• It Began With Secret Pickles, and Survived a War – A pretty simple tale of a long-married couple from the Bronx, probably a dime a dozen, but dat headline!
  

  One day, looking for something new to do, Bucky had a thought.

  “I asked her, ‘Would you like a pickle?’ ”

  There were Jewish delis every few blocks in their neck of the Bronx. Bagels, bialys, cream cheese, lox, whitefish – and barrels of pickles, a penny apiece.

  It became a summer of secret pickles.

  (This was before Bucky became the Winter Soldier.)

• Friday the 13th Part IV – Running Man – And you guys thought I was obsessive about Friday the 13th movies? Check out this guy, who attempts to decipher an obscure character mentioned in the credits for The Final Chapter…
  

  Who is Running Man? Lots of people run in the movie, but they’re all credited. Could it be an instance where Jason is credited multiple times like he is in part 3? There we had Jason, Prowler, and Jason Stunt Double. Maybe Jason actor Ted White refused to do the scene where he runs after Trish and Thad Geer sprinted to the rescue.

  Somehow I doubt it though. The only section of the movie with a lot of extras is the beginning, when everyone is cleaning up the mess from part 3. One of those extras runs. He runs so much in fact, that I’m convinced he must be Running Man.

  Friday the 13th, the series of movies that never stops giving.

That’s all for now. Apologies for the lack of Wednesday entries of late. This might continue for the near future, but who knows? Maybe I’ll get inspired or something…

Just got back from vacation, so here’s just a few links to tide you over until I recover:

• The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can – A great example of the unglamorous march of technology that fascinates us here at Kaedrin. The number of steps it takes just to shape the can is probably more than you think, and that stay-on pull tab on top is truly ingenious.
• Tomorrow’s Advance Man – Interesting profile of the Conehead looking Marc Andreessen. I found this graph interesting in light of my recent viewing of Tomorrowland:
  

  Over the past thirty years, the level of income throughout the developing world is rising, the number of people in poverty is shrinking, health outcomes are improving, birth rates are falling. And it’ll be even better in ten years. Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimism-it’s the Eden-collapse myth over and over again-and then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and it’s up and to the right. If this is collapse, let’s have more of it!

  Emphasis mine, because that’s a sentiment I see all the time in different spaces and it always bugs me. To take a more innocuous example, why are unhappy endings in vogue? Why do they seem so much more sophisticated than a happy ending? A lot of people will give a movie or book a pass simply for the fact that it has a downer ending (go to any film festival and you’ll find an unending parade of misery porn), and I’ve never understood that. Happy or sad endings aren’t inherently good or bad, and yes, both need to be earned, but for some reason, critics in particular are much more forgiving for the sad endings than they are for happy endings. I’ve always thought it’s a matter of execution, and when your goal is to make the audience feel bad, that’s usually a more difficult sell, so you better do it really, really well. Few do, and yet critics fawn all over them anyway. Perhaps a topic for another time.

• The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence – An excellent (long) read, especially since we seem to be mired in a summer of AI villains and what have you. There are some very scary things about AI, but it’s not quite what we’re seeing at the movies. The thing that troubles me is the speed with which AI will go from a research project to genuine superintelligence:
  

  It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able to understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human.

  At that speed, we’ll have little to no control over what happens… unless we’re super careful ahead of time, and even then, anyone who has worked with computers knows what kinds of inadvertent outcomes can happen, and that’s a little terrifying when we start talking about a superintelligence. On the other hand, AI could be our salvation and a path to immortality. Something is bound to happen within our lifetimes, and it will be interesting for sure (in the Chinese curse sense, for sure).

And that’s all for now!

The usual roundup of interesting things from the depths of the internets, because Mad Max won’t watch itself later tonight and I’d like to be around for that.

• “I Am Not Backing Off Anything I Said” – This interview with Seymour Hersh (about his questioning of the Bin Laden story) is utterly weird:
  

  Chotiner: OK but here is my question about journalism, since you have been doing this longer than I have-

  Hersh: Oh poor you, you don’t know anything. It is amazing you can speak the God’s English.

  It’s not the Onion, I swears, and this is pretty indicative of Hersh’s crankiness level throughout the interview.

• Anne Hathaway will meet a Kaiju in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal – If you don’t know who Nacho Vigalondo is, you should (though I still haven’t seen Open Windows, because I’m the worst). This new effort is described as “Godzilla meets Lost in Translation”. Sold!
• What Is Your Dog Telling You? – Pretty interesting read about dogs’ body language:
  

  For the same reason that Eskimos purportedly have 50 different words for snow, dogs have a vast repertoire of gestures for appeasement and propitiation. The Norwegian dog trainer Turid Rugaas has identified some 30 “calming signals” – movements offered to deflect trouble (which may also relieve stress in both giver and receiver). Supremely subtle, sometimes so quick we don’t notice them, these appeasing signals include a flick of the tongue; turning the head or gaze away; suddenly sniffing the ground or sitting; yawning; shaking off; or approaching on a curve.

  We’re pretty bad at interpreting doggie language…

• Marty McFly is a diabetic – A strangely fitting fan theory for Back to the Future.
• Why can’t we read anymore? – I didn’t really finish the article because it was too long. Just kidding, of course, and I’m not sure I even really buy into this notion that digital media makes us want to read less. Even the author admits that when he forced himself to sit down and read, it was surprisingly easy to do so. As with a lot of things, it’s getting started that’s the difficult part.

That’s all for now.