Happy holidays, sort of
Things don’t work out so well for Santa and his reindeer in “Happy Holidays,” a video by Eoin Duffy. (via This Isn’t Happiness)
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Entries for December 2015
The Force is with your ink
Marisa Kakoulas at Needles and Sins has a cool post on “Star Wars” tribute tattoos.
The one you see here is by A.D. Pancho.
Goodbye 2015, a programming note
Hi there. My name is Jason, the host of this here thing. How was your 2015? Mine was…not good and not bad. Challenging? Interesting? Uneven? Unparalleled? (You don’t want to know. And I’m not going to tell you anyway.) This is my last post to kottke.org this year. I’m leaving on the first proper capital-V vacation I’ve had in years. I am unplugging. No email, no Facebook, no Twitter, very little Instagram. This week, the site will be in the good hands of Susannah Breslin, who guest edited back in March. And next week, the site will be on vacation until January 4. (At least I think it will. A bunch of past editors still have working logins so who know what will happen.) Thanks, and I’ll see you in Jan. And now, Susannah…
The best video essays of 2015. Watched several of these, lots of good stuff here.
15 thoughts about Star Wars: The Force Awakens
1. There are SPOILERS in this post. If you have not seen the movie, do not continue reading. I’ve only read one other review of the movie, so much of this may be stated elsewhere (and better) by others.
2. Overall, I enjoyed the movie. But thinking back to The Phantom Menace, I also enjoyed that quite a bit in the same spine-tingling way. But this movie is way better than the prequels were.
3. The cast was excellent and the casting progressive. I love that the two new protagonists are a black man and a woman. “Why are you grabbing my hand?”
4. Carrie Fisher’s voice has changed a lot. It suited her character.
5. By far the best part of the movie at the showing I went to didn’t appear on screen. I went to a matinee at 11am and the audience was mostly adults…probably 98% over the age of 30. When Rey uses the Force to persuade the Stormtrooper to release her, a little kid’s voice from the front row echoed out loudly across the entire theater: “Jedi mind trick”. The place exploded in laughter. A perfect comedic moment.
6. How many times are they going to keep making the same movie though? The plots of A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens are more or less the same: a small band of resistance fighters going up against an evil superpower headed by two practitioners in the Dark Side discover a weakness in the enemy’s planet-sized superweapon and destroy it with some X-wing fighters in the nick of time. Also: stolen plans in a droid, a young orphan discovering the ways of the Force, a trench run by a gifted young pilot to blow up the superweapon, a bailing-out of the X-wing fighters by the crew of the Millennium Falcon, sons/students striking down their fathers/masters, and so on. Is this part of the reason that Empire Strikes Back is considered the best of the series, because it’s different?
7. When Lucas made the first trilogy (and when he and Spielberg made Raiders of the Lost Ark), he constructed it from a bunch of different sources from when he was a kid and in film school. With The Force Awakens, JJ Abrams did the same thing, but instead of pulling from Flash Gordon and Kurosawa like Lucas did, he pulled from what he grew up with as a kid and in film school…Star Wars and Spielberg. In a way, The Force Awakens is a reboot of the original 1977 Star Wars, similar plot and all. And even if it isn’t a true reboot, it sure does rhyme.
8. Aside: when is the Empire/First Order going to learn not to put all of their eggs in one basket? Their superweapon strategy has failed three times now. They always seem to know where the rebels are hiding, they possess overwhelming force…why don’t they just defeat them through conventional means?
9. More synchronicity. When I watched the original Star Wars as an adult, one of the things I noticed is what a relatively minor character Vader is in the Empire when compared to his importance to the story and his increased power & responsibility in Empire and Jedi. He’s not in command, he’s not really part of the military at all, and the military leaders aren’t all that impressed with The Force. It’s almost almost like he’s the Emperor’s personal assistant. Kylo Ren’s role in The Force Awakens is similar…he’s not in charge (General Hux is), he’s not really part of the military (although he commands troops), and according to Snoke, Ren hasn’t even completed his training. (What was Vader’s excuse, then? He presumably completed his training long before the events of A New Hope…what was taking him so long to gain power?)
10. The scene at the very end bugged me. Having discovered the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker, the last of the Jedi, the Resistance sends Ren, Chewy, and R2 to see what’s up? I get the symbolism and all, but wouldn’t Leia be interested in seeing her brother again? Or more persuasive in getting him to come out of retirement?
11. We’re going to hear more about Rey’s parentage, right? She’s Luke’s daughter or something? (I’m guessing not. Waaay too obvious, even for Star Wars.)
12. Speaking of parentage, why is Snoke so big? So we’re not wondering if Rey is Snoke’s granddaughter or something? Or is it that Snoke’s hologram is big and he’s normal sized? (Wookiepedia says Snoke is 7 feet tall but doesn’t cite a source.)
13. If you liked this movie, you have to give the proper credit to George Lucas for allowing it to exist. He could have sat on this series until after his death and beyond. But he didn’t. He sold the whole shebang to Disney and trusted Kathleen Kennedy to make more movies.
14. Ok, Kennedy. Now I want to see Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars. Wes Anderson’s Star Wars. Miranda July’s Star Wars. Seriously, do this. (I do not want to see Kevin Smith’s Star Wars. That one you can keep.)
15. All theaters should have assigned seating. I got the exact two seats I wanted (two months ahead of time) and showed up to the theater about 10 minutes before showtime, sat down, and the lights went down soon after. So much less stress than getting there 45 minutes (or 2 hours) beforehand and playing Are These Seats Taken? with strangers.
Update: 16. Does Han’s death scene reference the cantina scene w/ Greedo in Episode IV? He and Ren are both holding the lightsaber. Ren tells Han he needs to do something but doesn’t know if he can go through with it. Ren asks Han to help. The lightsaber activates and Han dies. Does Han activate the lightsaber, thereby causing his death? In other words, does Han shoot first? (Bonus update: I just saw the movie again and I don’t think Han activates the lightsaber. He looks too surprised and Ren definitely thrusts the saber into him.)
Update: 17. In his belated review, Chris Blattman notes the remarkable agreement on the lack of spoilers on social media:
Humanity’s tacit agreement to abide by a no-spoilers-on-social-media rule was one of the greatest acts of social cooperation I have witnessed. And we used it up to keep you from learning Han Solo is killed.
Kelly Slater’s perfect wave machine
Surfer Kelly Slater has built what I can only guess is the world’s largest wave pool that pumps out perfectly surfable waves. It looks a bit boring actually, faultless waves every time. Like playing against the computer in NHL ‘94. (via @mathowie)
The seminal Chicago publication Gaper’s Block is shutting down in January. Sad, but well done.
Two-hour DJ set from Tycho
I have really been digging this Burning Man sunrise DJ set from Tycho. (via @arainert)
Pastrami on Rye
Pastrami on Rye is a full-length history of the NYC Jewish deli, written by Judaism scholar Ted Merwin. From a review in The Economist:
Jewish delicatessens may now be known for knishes, latkes and pastrami sandwiches, but back in their heyday, during the 1920s and 1930s in the theatre district in New York, they also served beluga caviar, pâté de foie gras and Chateaubriand steak. Jewish classics were gussied up and defiled: chopped chicken liver was served with truffles. Treyf, like oysters and pork chops, was eaten with abandon alongside kosher delicacies.
That reminds me…a trip to Katz’s is looooooong overdue.
The beauty of mathematics
The “hidden” mathematics and order behind everyday objects & phenomenon like spinning tops, dice, magnifying glasses, and airplanes. (via @stevenstrogatz)
Emoji version of The Force Awakens teaser trailer
YouTube user darman212 used iOS coding app Hopscotch and Final Cut Pro X to make a version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer entirely out of emoji. BB-8 is a soccer ball with a bowl of ramen on his head!
(via @marcprecipice)
The winners of the 2015 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
Because I hate fun, cute and funny animal photos are something I don’t usually get excited about. But I will make an exception just this once for the inaugural Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. (via colossal)
Angry blacksmith takes on 9/11 truthers
One of the most persistent “facts” used by 9/11 truthers is that burning jet fuel can’t generate the temperatures necessary to melt steel beams, therefore something other than airplanes crashing into the WTC towers brought them down, therefore the US government or the Jews or, I don’t know, the buildings’ owners did it to collect the insurance payment.
In his workshop, blacksmith Trenton Tye easily demonstrates that although it’s true jet fuel can’t burn hot enough to melt steel beams, it can definitely soften the steel past the ability to bear any sort of load.
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Triumph The Insult Comic Dog vs Star Wars
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is out today, at least in NYC theaters.1 To celebrate, I watched the classic clip of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog interviewing people standing in line for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
You look like some kind of super-nerd. It looks like you were built in a laboratory out of parts from lesser nerds.
It is all sorts of inappropriate, but also one of my favorite comedy bits of all time. (via @fromedome)
Update: One of the people from the video wrote an article about the experience last month.
Another thing that’s lost on some people is that everyone there was in on it. After all, we were nerds camping on a sidewalk to see a Star Wars movie. We were very much aware of who Conan O’Brien was, and what Triumph was all about. Everyone there was a fan and if you watch the video, people are hunched over laughing in the background in basically every shot. We were glad to let him mock us. In fact, we helped.
(via @CastIrony)
So, did they add these Thursday showings after the initial announcement of tickets going on sale back in October? When I bought my tickets that day, I got them for the first available showing (11am on Fri), or so I remember. Did Disney add these earlier shows at a later point to sucker fans into having to buy tickets twice in order to see it as soon as possible? (I did not do this. But I definitely thought about doing it.) ↩
Star Wars Minus Star Wars
Star Wars Minus Star Wars is a video essay on the original film that doesn’t use a single shot, sound, or snippet of music from the original movie. Instead, it strings together scenes and sounds from movies that influenced George Lucas in making the film and also from movies that have been influenced by Star Wars.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Star Wars. Its arrival in theaters on May 25th 1977 marked the end of one chapter in film history and the beginning of another. It’s a hinge on which film history swings. Upon its release, critic Pauline Kael derided the film as “an assemblage of spare parts-it has no emotional grip… an epic without a dream” Twenty years after its release critic Roger Ebert remarked that the film “colonized our imaginations, and it is hard to stand back and see it simply as a motion picture, because it has so completely become part of our memories.”
They’re both right. Star Wars succeeded because of its roots in film history and mythology, and its influence over generations of filmmakers can be felt in countless works that came after it. For better or worse, Star Wars engulfs the past and future of moviemaking.
That was super-fun to watch. See also Where did Star Wars come from? and Paul’s Boutique Minus Paul’s Boutique. (via @tonyszhou, who calls it “the best Star Wars video essay ever”)
Update: This might be even more impressive. John D’Amico made a full-length shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars using material that influenced (or may have influenced) Lucas in making the film. Very cool.
(thx, jim)
The Free Universal Construction Kit
The Free Universal Construction Kit is a collection of almost 80 adapters between various construction toys like Lego, Lincoln Logs, Duplo, and K’nex (10 toys in all). The kit is available as freely downloadable designs for your 3D printer. The MoMA announced the acquisition of the Construction Kit for their permanent collection earlier this year.
An Unbelievable Story of Rape
The Marshall Project has published An Unbelievable Story of Rape, a story of two rape investigations in different parts of the country.
An 18-year-old said she was attacked at knifepoint. Then she said she made it up. That’s where our story begins.
Read this. It’s a powerful story.
A good guy with a gun
Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show deftly skewers that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” nonsense.
Black holes explained
Kurzgesagt makes some of the most entertaining science explainers around. Check out their most recent video on black holes.
Yesterday was the 3rd anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings. Here’s a list of all the ppl who died that day.
The best book cover designs for 2015
Check out more great covers at the NY Times, Buzzfeed, and The Casual Optimist. Compare with last year’s picks.
The top 25 science stories of 2015. Pluto, CRISPR, water on Mars, etc.
El Nino explained
The forecast high temperature for Christmas Eve in New York City is 66°F. What the hell is going on? Climate change? Yes, but mostly the balmy East Coast temps are due to a super-strong El Niño.1 In the video above, Vox explains what El Niño is and how the Pacific weather pattern affects weather around the globe (including the East Coast of the US).
El Niño is a weather phenomenon that occurs irregularly in the eastern tropical Pacific every two to seven years. When the trade winds that usually blow from east to west weaken, sea surface temperatures start rising, setting off a chain of atmospheric impacts.
El Niños can be strong or weak. Strong events can temporarily disrupt weather patterns around the world, typically making certain regions wetter (Peru or California, say) and others drier (Southeast Asia). Some countries suffer major damage as a result.
Although the severity of this and future El Niños may be due to greenhouse warming. Complex systems, yo!↩
Official BBC instructions for knitting Doctor Who’s scarf
Apparently if you wrote the BBC asking how to make Tom Baker’s Doctor Who scarf, they would send you the knitting instructions on BBC letterhead. According to the Whovians in that forum, the Fourth Doctor wore this particular scarf in a pair of episodes early in season 12. (via laughing squid)
Update: And here’s the Fourth Doctor’s scarf in HTML/CSS/JS by @kosamari.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them teaser trailer
The most teasing of teaser trailers is out for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Harry Potter prequel that everyone insists isn’t a prequel. Out November 2016. (via trailer town)
Update: Toooootally a prequel…Dumbledore gets name-dropped in this one:
Update: The full trailer has been released:
Dau
For the past few years, Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky has been working on a film called Dau about Soviet physicist Lev Landau. Well, sort of. Khrzhanovsky had a huge set built in Ukraine containing a version of a mid-20th century Soviet research institute. For two years, he filmed hundreds of volunteers living on the set as though they were Soviet scientists.
Participants were required to live in period costume (the on-set tailor updated the fashions of the moment as required), to eat period food in period packaging, paid for in Soviet roubles, and to renounce all anachronisms, physical and verbal. No mobile phones, no internet, no laptops; no mention of the state of Israel before the on-set calendar reached 1948. News was supposed to be provided exclusively by the fully staffed on-set newspaper and the on-set radio station. Women were forbidden to wear modern tampons: Soviet-model cloth versions were made available.
When journalist Michael Idov visited the set in 2011 for GQ, even he had to be in character.
ROSENBERG: That’s when Khrzhanovsky appeared. Wearing strangely outdated clothing and spectacles, the director looked sort of like a young Albert Einstein. He would be giving Michael a personal tour of the set, but first Michael would have to be processed.
IDOV: Because you were not supposed to admit that the film shoot was in fact a film shoot. Instead, everyone was operating under the notion that it’s the ’50s. That day it was 1952. So I needed to be made into a 1952 version of myself. They took away my clothes. They gave me a new haircut with, like, temples shaved off and gave me an incredibly itchy period suit - including the underwear.
The one thing I was allowed to keep was my watch. I had a vintage watch from 1959 and after a pretty intense discussion they decided it was OK to let me keep this watch from the future.
ROSENBERG: Then Khrzhanovsky instructed Michael to give his freshly minted Soviet passport to a man guarding an otherwise nondescript hallway.
Makes me think of the play staged by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. (via @philgyford)
What the hell is Bitcoin?
I’ve read a lot of explanations about blockchains and Bitcoin but What Satoshi Did is among the best of them.
This invention works in two parts. Constructing a shared ledger amongst all participants was the first step. By sharing the entire ledger of transactions, all participants could convince themselves that their own transactions were validly entered, that all value derived from an authentic source, and that the entire ledger balanced.
The second part was to agree on the ledger. Using induction, and agreeing on all prior ledger states, Satoshi reduced the problem to agreeing what each new appending block is. The first batch, or genesis block, was created by Satoshi. The next block, and each successive block, included a consensus signature over this block and the previous block, creating a chain of blocks, or the blockchain.
Survival of the fittest, single-celled organism edition
The winner of the 2015 Small World in Motion competition is Wim van Egmond’s video of a single-celled organism consuming a smaller single-celled organism. The winners of the photomicrography contest are worth a look as well.
The sizes of solar systems
As of last month, 685 multi-planet solar systems (with 1705 planets) have been discovered outside our own. This video shows the relative sizes of those systems compared to ours. Please note:
The size of the orbits are all to scale, but the size of the planets are not. For example, Jupiter is actually 11x larger than Earth, but that scale makes Earth-size planets almost invisible (or Jupiters annoyingly large).
(via @daveg)
Making a Murderer
Steven Avery spent 12 years in prison for rape before being exonerated by DNA evidence. After his release, he was charged with murder. Making a Murderer, a new 10-show Netflix series premiering on December 18, will examine Avery’s crimes, a la Serial and The Jinx.
Beating Legend of Zelda without a sword
One of my video game triumphs as a kid was playing all the way through The Legend of Zelda using only the wooden sword.1 It was difficult. The person in the video above beat Zelda with only three hearts and without using a sword (until right at the end…you need a sword to kill Gannon). Hardcore. Makes me want to fire up the Wii and see what I can do.
A close runner-up was beating Zelda without dying.↩
It’s Time to Ban Guns. Yes, All of Them.
Happiness doesn’t help you live longer
Over the years, there’s been a growing consensus that suggests being happy is correlated with living a long life. Well, you can wipe that smile off your face because a massive study published in The Lancent makes it clear that no such correlation exists. So what about all those studies suggesting that stress and joylessness hastened death’s arrival? According the new study’s co-author:
In our view, the previous studies haven’t been well done. All that’s going on is ill health actually was causing unhappiness and stress.
In other words, your unhappiness is going to last longer than you thought.
The memory of a river
If you measure the contours of a river valley with Lidar (like radar with lasers), you get a beautiful map of all the historical river channels. The image above was taken from a poster of the historical channels of the Willamette River…click through to see the whole thing. See also Harold Fisk’s meander maps of the Mississippi River.
The Nice Guys
Am I crazy or does this 70s crime comedy starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling actually look good? I mean, it likely won’t be that good, but entertaining this pleasant fiction will make us happy until next May, when we’ll know for sure. FYI: this is a “red band” trailer, so NSFW and all that.
The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars
When people drive cars, collisions often happen so quickly that they are entirely accidental. When self-driving cars eliminate driver error in these cases, decisions on how to crash can become pre-meditated. The car can think quickly, “Shall I crash to the right? To the left? Straight ahead?” and do a cost/benefit analysis for each option before acting. This is the trolley problem.
How will we program our driverless cars to react in situations where there is no choice to avoid harming someone? Would we want the car to run over a small child instead of a group of five adults? How about choosing between a woman pushing a stroller and three elderly men? Do you want your car to kill you (by hitting a tree at 65mph) instead of hitting and killing someone else? No? How many people would it take before you’d want your car to sacrifice you instead? Two? Six? Twenty?
The video above introduces a wrinkle I had never considered before: what if the consumer could choose the sort of safety they want? If you had to choose between buying a car that would save as many lives as possible and a car that would save you above all other concerns, which would you select? You can imagine that answer would be different for different people and that car companies would build & market cars to appeal to each of them. Perhaps Apple would make a car that places the security of the owner above all else, Google would be a car that would prioritize saving the most lives, and Uber would build a car that keeps the largest Uber spenders alive.1
Ethical concerns like the trolley problem will seem quaint when the full power of manufacturing, marketing, and advertising is applied to self-driving cars. Imagine trying to choose one of the 20 different types of ketchup at the supermarket except that if you choose the wrong one, you and your family die and, surprise, it’s not actually your choice, it’s the potential Trump voter down the street who buys into Car Company X’s advertising urging him to “protect himself” because he feels marginalized in a society that increasingly values diversity over “traditional American values”. I mean, we already see this with huge, unsafe gas-guzzlers driving on the same roads as small, safer, energy-efficient cars, but the addition of software will turbo-charge this process. But overall cars will be much safer so it’ll all be ok?
The bit about Uber is a joke but just barely. You could easily imagine a scenario in which a Samsung car might choose to hit an Apple car over another Samsung car in an accident, all other things being equal.↩
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