New Tron movie coming, music by Nine Inch Nails. “Tron: Ares follows a highly sophisticated program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.”
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Entries for January 2025
The Japanese Salaryman Eraser Goes Bald Through Use
Designed by Kazuya Ishikawa, the clever Salaryman Eraser features a Japanese businessman who goes bald as you use the eraser. The same company also makes an eraser that turns into Mt Fuji through repeated use.
New Square Feature Allows Customers To Tip With Bible Quote. “We have also heard our customers and are working to provide Christian cross and praying-hands emojis as well.”
The Bawdy Graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This was was written on the wall of a bar/brothel: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”
The New Comfort Movie Canon: The 10 Best Feel-Good Films of the Last 10 Years. Includes Flow (which I watched the other day and is brilliant), The French Dispatch, Little Women, and Logan Lucky.
Asteroids vs Space Invaders! Scans of Early 80s Gaming Magazines.
The Video Game History Foundation has launched a digital library of documents, magazines, and transcripts related to video games that’s free for everyone to access. Some of you might be interested in the collection of materials related to the development and promotion of games created by Cyan (Myst, Riven, etc.) but I went straight for the library of video game magazines. The earliest issue I could find was this issue of Electronic Games from 1981.
Ha, I bet you had forgotten that George Plimpton was a spokesman for Intellivision. (Quick sidebar here because I can’t resist this odd fact: Plimpton was one of a group of people, which also included former NFL star Rosey Grier & Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, who apprehended and disarmed Sirhan Sirhan after Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy.)
That same issue of Electronic Games from 1981 contains this interesting nugget of news about how long McDonald’s has been thinking about replacing their cashiers with computers:
Will McDonalds be the first fast-food chain to hop on the electronic gaming bandwagon in a big way? The hamburger king has approached Atari about the possibility of designing a computerized video monitor. The device would take the meal order and then help the customer pass the wait pleasantly by playing a videogame. One potential hitch: What happens if a player is on a hot streak when the Big Mac, fries and soft drink show up?
Anyway, I definitely lost more than a few hours to this. You can check out the full digital library and watch this video for more information about what’s in it. (via the verge)
A web version of Pitfall. I used to play this a lot on my cousins’ Intellivision and yep, it’s still as difficult & annoying as I remember it!
Author Mary Childs shares some of her “stress-designed” drafts: On Trying (and Really Failing) to Design My Own Book Cover. “It’s a miracle any cover is ever good.”
Brian Eno Believes in Singing
Brian Eno believes that singing is the key to a good life.
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
(via subtraction)
20 years ago, Seoul tore down an elevated highway and built a park in its place. “The restored waterway has been a triumph.” It attracts millions of visitors, improves air quality, manages floods, cools the city, and hosts plants & wildlife.
Andrea Pitzer lost her mother to Amway. “In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story.”
Joy Machine is a new art gallery in Chicago from the team behind Colossal. “We believe that joy expands our ability to move and be moved and is an essential antidote to despair.”
If I’m being real honest, which I try to be, I can’t say I’m terribly excited about the discovery of a fungus which turns cave spiders into zombies, you know, just on the level of wildlife things I’m into or, as is the case here, not into.
The Best Table Tennis Points Of 2024
I did not think I was going to watch this whole video when I started but I totally did. Some absolutely incredible shots & rallies in here. (thx, dunstan)
From an interview with Na Kim, her answer here could not be more personally resonant with me. “OWEN: Would you say you’re a disciplined person? KIM: I didn’t think I was, but I must be.”
Netflix is making a Little House on the Prairie reboot. “The series will offer a kaleidoscopic view of the struggles and triumphs of those who shaped the frontier.” A manifest destiny series for 2025 seems about right…
The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World — and Shapes Our Future is a forthcoming book from Sam Arbesman, out in June 2025.
The Public Domain Image Archive
The Public Domain Review (a true gem of the web) has launched The Public Domain Image Archive, “a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse”.
While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture.
The “infinite view” is particularly fun…you can just pan & scroll and let the whole collection wash over your visual cortex. (via colossal)
“A Dyson tree is a hypothetical genetically engineered plant (perhaps resembling a tree) capable of growing inside a comet. Plants may be able to produce a breathable atmosphere within the hollow spaces of the comet.”
What If Letterboxd Ratings Decided the Best Picture Oscar?
In deciding the Oscar Best Picture winners from 1927-2023, let’s say you relied on the contemporary ratings of films on Letterboxd instead of the Academy vote totals of the time. Sometimes, you’d get the same answers but rarely. You’d get lots more foreign films from directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Leone, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. You’d get Best Picture wins for The Empire Strikes Back (over Ordinary People), Do the Right Thing (over Driving Miss Daisy), and Brokeback Mountain (over Crash). And Paddington 2!
Looking at just one year, 1999 was a good one for movies but the Oscar nominees were on the safer side:
American Beauty
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense
Here’s the Letterboxd list from 1999, ranked by rating (more than 1K ratings):
Fight Club
The Iron Giant
The Green Mile
Magnolia
All About My Mother
The Matrix
The Straight Story
Beau Travail
The Insider
Being John Malkovich
American Beauty and The Sixth Sense are further down the list and The Cider House Rules is nowhere to be found. Anyway, interesting to compare!
Reuters made a cozy game about cozy games. “Wolfe would put on cozy game music as she worked on the cozy game about cozy games, and she could feel her own stress and anxiety ebb away.”
“The MacArthur Foundation today announced more than $6 million in grants to support the growing field of climate journalism in the United States.” The grants will go to local and independent newsrooms & organizations.
Lorne Michaels may not like it when the actors on SNL break character to crack up at each other, but, to me, it’s the best part of the show. Here’s the NYT with a look at the phenomenon.
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith Has Died, Age 85
Artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has died at the age of 85. From Hyperallergic’s obituary:
As part of a generation of Indigenous artists who tirelessly worked to “break the ‘buckskin ceiling’” in the art world, Smith (an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is known for a prolific arts practice that merged piercing humor and profound socio-political commentary with poetic depictions of Native American life. Her five-decade oeuvre, which spans painting, collage, drawing, print, and sculpture, is an intimate visual lexicon that bridges personal memories and joyful resilience, exemplifying her lifelong refusal to be defined by any singular narrative.
More obits: ARTnews, Artnet, The Art Newspaper.
Her art seems to me to be in conversation with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and countless Native artists & European cave painters from millenia ago — as well as Leonardo da Vinci it seems…that marvelous painting above featuring the buffalo is called “Indian Drawing Lesson (after Leonardo)”.
You can see more of Smith’s work on her website, at The Whitney, at the Garth Greenan Gallery, the Missoula Art Museum, and at the Smithsonian.
An audio recording of the audience’s reaction to Star Wars in 1977, synced to the action of the movie. “This audio was recorded in 1977 when my mother took me to see Star Wars.”
Approvingly citing Musk/X and Zuck/Meta, Substack reiterates its commitment to support Nazis, antisemites, anti-vaxxers, transphobes, and homophobes in spreading disinformation & hate under the guise of “free speech”.
Pee-wee as Himself, a New Documentary Series About Pee-wee Herman
Before he died in 2023, Paul Reubens conducted 40 hours of interviews about his life and career with filmmaker Matt Wolf. These interview form the backbone of Wolf’s two-part documentary series Pee-wee as Himself. The series recently premiered at Sundance and there’s no trailer yet, but Variety has an overview and review.
Reubens is a compelling enough figure to carry a straightforward bio-doc, and over its substantial length, Wolf’s two-part film does justice to its subject’s thoroughly sui generis artistry — a rare blend of experimental performance, broad comedy and high, queer camp that caught imaginations of all ages — while giving due scrutiny to the off-screen legal troubles that unfairly threw his career off-course. Reubens is a generous, engaging raconteur on all such matters, while also allowing himself to be drawn on a personal life that he kept close to his chest up until his death. But it’s the brittle, unsettled dynamic of the interview footage itself that makes “Pee-wee as Himself” unusual and engrossing, as Wolf and Reubens — never, we learn, an artist comfortable with surrendering creative authority — grapple for control of a story that each wants to tell very differently. The result is perhaps a draw, though far from a dull one.
In the interviews for the film, Reubens reveals publicly for the first time that he is gay. He’d been openly gay earlier in his life but had his reasons for not talking about it as his career blossomed:
In adolescence, those inclinations shifted toward the bohemia of the late-1960s art scene, and upon leaving home and going west, CalArts proved a sympathetic environment for his singular talents and personality. At this stage of his life, Reubens was openly gay, while his family was fully supportive in this regard. A long-term, live-in relationship with a fellow artist brought him both happiness and creative stasis: “I lost a lot of myself and my ambition in being with someone else,” he says, reflecting on his subsequent decision to suppress his sexuality to prioritize his career.
Pee-wee as Himself will air later this year on HBO.
I missed this back in October: Venkatesh Rao retired his long-running Ribbonfarm blog. His post is an interesting read, kind of a tour through the era of blogs & social media that Rao believes is now in the rearview.
The ACLU: Know Your Rights (or, what to do if you are questioned about your immigration status). “You have the right to remain silent and do not have to discuss your immigration or citizenship status with police, immigration agents, or other officials.”
Nirvana Before They Were Nirvana: Watch Their 1988 Performance Recorded in a Radio Shack. “In those days the group went by the name of Ted Ed Fred.”
“Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?”
I don’t know how to say this any louder
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS MORE RADICAL, MORE FASCIST, MORE VIOLENT THAN ANYONE IN MAINSTREAM POLITICS OR MEDIA IS WILLING TO ADMIT OUT LOUD
THEY ARE FULLY IN THRALL TO A MOVEMENT OF ONLINE NAZIS THAT WANT TO END AMERICA AND KILL MANY, MANY PEOPLE
They do not care about fixing anything. They do not care about running the government. They want to set the Constitution on fire, destroy the federal government, and torture and murder their enemies for fun. This is their only true political commitment
It’s beyond insane - it’s suicidal - that our leaders and our commentators and our media won’t talk about what’s really going on here. They maintain the pretense that this is all about policy differences, but MAGA is barely even bothering with the pretense of a mask anymore
I agree 100% with Stancil here — it is so completely obvious what Trump and the Republicans are trying to do (they are not hiding it!) and it’s maddening to watch the media and Democratic politicians treat this like any other political situation: “that this is all about policy differences”. They are trying to destroy American democracy and amass power for themselves and the oligarchs that support them — that’s what autocracies are for and it’s why Trump and Republicans want one.
We’ve seen this happen with brittle governments all over the world for the past century — it’s not a novel situation — and Republicans have decided that now is the moment to strike our teetering democracy. They convinced voters to roll a wooden horse covered in MAGA stickers inside the city walls and now they are going to hollow it out from within. That’s the game and the sooner everyone wakes up to this truth, the sooner we can try to fix the situation.
Update: Jamelle Bouie: If All This Sounds Delusional, That’s Because It Is.
Put another way, the American system of government is not one in which the people imbue the president with their sovereign authority. He is a servant of the Constitution, bound by its demands. Most presidents in our history have understood this, even as they inevitably pushed for more and greater authority. Not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power, or as he once said himself, “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The freeze, then, is Trump’s attempt to make this fanciful claim to limitless power a reality. He wants to usurp the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute and unchecked authority. He wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.
💯 Bouie is one of the few traditional media folks who sees this situation clearly.
Title quote courtesy of Bishop Mariann Budde.
Severance Has a New Opening Title Sequence for Season Two
Season two of Severance is underway and while the first episode didn’t have an opening title sequence, the second episode debuted a new sequence. The season one intro was inducted straight into the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame and season two’s intro is just as good. Once again, the titles were done by Oliver Latta, who was found by Severance producer Ben Stiller via his Instagram account.
Interesting: Ooni is coming out with a mixer that they say creates “stronger gluten networks” in your bread or pizza dough. “The stronger the gluten network, the more elasticity and extensibility you get in the dough.”
America Wouldn’t Know the Worst of a Vaccine Decline Until It’s Too Late. “Should vaccination rates drop across the board, one of the first diseases to be resurrected would almost certainly be measles.”
Paul Krugman on “recovering my freedom” and why he left the NY Times after 25 years. “In 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive.”
Ebooks are now available from Bookshop[dot]org. You can read the ebooks you buy in the browser or with their app, but you can’t read them with an ereader (like the Kindle).
The Louvre’s upcoming renovation & expansion includes a dedicated room for the Mona Lisa. “The Mona Lisa would be accessible separately from the rest of the museum…with its own ticket.” An estimated 80% of visitors come just to see the Mona Lisa.
DC superhero Dreamer, Fortnite’s first out trans character (introduced in 2022), is available in the game’s item shop until Jan 31. Brb, totally buying this right now.
Winners of the 2024 Close-Up Photographer of the Year. “Tadpoles devour the corpse of an adult female toad in Cantabria, Spain.” (Damn nature, you scary!)
Who Were the Nazis?
From January 2017, A.R. Moxon on Nazis:
Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.
That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives anymore.
They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?
A 10-hour ambient cover of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack, perfect for relaxing, focus, studying, or drifting off to sleep.
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter to a Man Blow-Drying His Balls at the Gym
I don’t know about you, but my brain is short-circuiting a bit from the news today, so I was glad to run across this video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading Ross Beeley’s letter published by McSweeney’s in 2011 called An Open Letter to the Gentleman Blow-Drying His Balls in the Gym Locker Room.
You’re actually doing it. I mean, we’ve all dreamed of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you’re actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people who just finished exercising at this pricey sports club. Some of us will do it in private in our homes, or in a hotel room using a hairdryer a stranger might have just used to style their hair for that big business meeting in Denver. But not you. You are not confined to such social norms, norms that usually keep flapping, flag-like balls out of my eyes.
(via open culture)
Now Streaming: Seven Samurai’s 4K Restoration
Back in June, I posted about the 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai coming out in theaters; here’s the trailer:
I just checked and the 4K version appears to be out on streaming and 4K Blu-ray. The 4K Blu-ray is available from the Criterion Collection and includes a bunch of extra goodies: two audio commentaries, a making-of documentary, “a two-hour conversation between director Akira Kurosawa and filmmaker Nagisa Oshima”, and a documentary looking at the samurai traditions and films that helped shape Kurosawa’s masterpiece.
As for streaming, here’s the situation:
- There’s a version on Max that might or might not be the recently restored 4K version. I’ve played the beginning and the titles are nice & crisp and there’s no dust & scratches. But the description doesn’t say anything about 4K and you need to subscribe to their top-tier service to get 4K streaming anyway, so who knows. It might just be a 1080p restoration — which still looks really good, to be clear. (Note: Max’s support team confirms that their version isn’t 4K. Boo. Thx @nabil-boutaleb.bsky.social.)
- Apple TV appears to have Criterion’s 4K restoration — the listing shows the “4K” icon and Criterion links directly to it from their page. And the trailer is for the 4K restoration.
- Amazon may also have the 4K version, but there’s no “4K” icon on their listing. But Criterion does link directly to it from their page.
Streaming services should be better about telling viewers exactly what they are getting. I know most people don’t care and the streamers just want to push content to eyeballs, but this is Seven Samurai we’re talking about here!
Anyway, if there are any big film/streaming nerds out there who can help me sort this out, let me know! I’d love to be as accurate as possible even if Max & Amazon don’t care. (Tbh, this kinda makes me want to buy a 4K Blu-ray player and go back to physical media…)
Reupping this Jamelle Bouie piece from Dec: Now Is Not the Time for Surrender. He’s talking about Democratic politicians and they still are not doing much to oppose Trump. This is driving me *nuts*. Fight, you assholes!
The planned new spinoff of the CBS series “FBI” will focus on CIA agents and is currently titled “FBI: CIA”. 😂 Not even The Simpsons at its peak could have come up with something this nonsensical.
The full trailer for season three of The White Lotus. “You will leave an entirely different person.”
Denis Villeneuve’s Criterion Closet Picks
Director Denis Villeneuve steps into the Criterion Closet to choose and talk about a few of his favorite films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Steven Soderbergh’s Che, and Seven Samurai. At one point, he says, “We all look like Smurfs next to Fellini.”
“NBA greats think this D-II coach is a basketball genius. So why don’t you know who he is?” I love reading about stuff like this.
I spent too long playing Neal Agarwal’s Simulation Clicker. “Stimulation Clicker takes players on the all-too-familiar journey from ‘this is neat’ to ‘this is ruining my life.’”
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