kottke.org posts about video
From a livestream recorded many years ago, this is Radiohead covering Joy Division’s Ceremony. The song was originally written by Joy Division but the version most people know is New Order’s — it was their first single. From Wikipedia:
“Ceremony” was one of the last Joy Division songs to be composed, with lyrics written by Ian Curtis. According to guitarist Bernard Sumner, the group wrote the song a few weeks before Ian Curtis died “to try and heal him through music” and keep him “involved in the band and involved in music and remind him of what … a great future he had”. Sumner concluded, “Unfortunately, it didn’t work”.
Just three versions of Joy Division performing the song exist, including one on the group’s compilation album Still.
Bill Hammack, aka The Engineer Guy, is an amazing engineering educator and in this video he explains how duct tape is designed to simultaneously do three things well: “a) adhere with light pressure, b) stay in place, yet c) be removable”.
Controlling the stickiness of tape is of utmost importance. In fact, a key element of engineering tape is controlling its stickiness — and only by doing that can tape be wound into a useful roll. If the tape sticks too tightly to itself, we could not use it.
Gotta be honest: I was not expecting Silly Putty to make a relevant guest appearance during his explanation. And I love the ramp & ball test for tape stickiness near the end…a very elegant and simple bit of engineering:
Pressure sensitive tape predates much of the most elementary molecular understanding of adhesion; tape has been mass produced since the early twentieth century. That engineers developed and refined tape without this knowledge is no surprise — recall that the purpose of the engineering method is to solve problems before we have full scientific knowledge.
From the Norwegian Consumer Council, a funny video that warns against the dangers of enshittification. It’s part of their Breaking Free initiative:
Digital products and services are steadily becoming worse. Software
becomes increasingly difficult and frustrating to use, websites and apps
are littered with ads and spam content, and useful features are removed,
degraded, or made subscription-only. This is part of a process called
enshittification.
Enshittification happens in stages: First a company attracts users by
providing a valuable service, often seemingly for free or at an artificially
low price. The company then exploits those users to draw in business
customers, and finally abuses its business customers and claws back all
the value for itself and its shareholders.
Enshittification is the result of a dysfunctional market, where companies
have been able to get away with mistreating and exploiting consumers.
Consumers are trapped in digital services, potential competitors are
shut out, and policymakers and regulators are unable or reluctant to
clamp down on anticompetitive, illegal and otherwise abusive behavior.
In practice, a handful of tech companies have become so powerful that
they do not have reason to fear any consequences.
I went into this video not knowing anything about how a mid-19th century sunshine recorder might work and was genuinely delighted by the reveal. If you’d like to be similarly surprised, stop reading now and just watch the video.
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The sunshine recorder was invented in 1853 for measuring the duration of bright sunshine over a day. The contraption consists of a solid glass ball that acts as a lens, which focuses the light of the Sun onto a paper recording card, burning marks into it. As the Sun moves across the sky, the focus point moves across the recording card, burning a line into it. If it’s super sunny out, the focused beam burns right through the card. So simple! So clever! And so straightforwardly physical — here’s what a daily sunshine record looks like:
(via robert stephens)
Max Cooper’s music videos are always worth a look. This one, directed by Katia Schutz, is for a song called Pattern Index from his forthcoming album (Feeling Is Structure, May 8).
Cooper describes Feeling Is Structure as an “audiovisual album”, which I take to mean that each song will have an associated video released with it. A second video, Ebb and Flow, is already out too:
I thought the official video of Berghain by Rosalía (feat. Björk & Yves Tumor) was great — “I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral?” — and this recent live performance from the Brit Awards takes the song to the next level. I loved it. (via kenzie)
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.
See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.
For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
The chess program available on Delta Air Lines’ seatback screens is an ELO monster that can beat almost all opponents on easy mode. This guy used a series of increasingly powerful bots to see just how good the Delta chess bot is. Can it beat a grandmaster-level bot? (via clive thompson)
This is a mindblowing time capsule of ordinary life: video of a group of friends taking the NYC subway to Coney Island in 1987. Because it was before mobile phones, they had to arrange to meet one of the group members in the first car of the train along the way.
The film was shot by Nelson Sullivan, a videographer who recorded the arts, music, and LGBTQ+ communities in NYC in this same ur-vlogging style.
Viewed today, Sullivan’s video record of his life represents a pre-Internet form of vlogging, while his frequently used technique of turning the camera to face himself clearly anticipates the modern selfie.
You can watch hundreds more of Sullivan’s films on YouTube, including a trip to McDonald’s (the most popular video on the channel), several RuPaul videos, a holiday party at Michael Alig & DJ Keoki’s apartment, and Keith Haring’s NYE party. Sullivan sadly died of a presumed heart attack two years later at the age of 41. (thx, caroline)
Would you like to watch a puppet DJ a chill set of French house music in a cool workplace meeting space? Trick question because of course you would. This went right into my Underscore collection. (via undermanager)
Some genius has taken an audio sample of the hum of a grocery store freezer, cleaned it up, and extended it into a 10-hour video. The freezer’s hum, variously compared to Brian Eno’s music and “an electrical gong bath”, went viral enough to warrant an article in the Guardian last month:
“Anyone noticed how nice the freezers sound in the eccy road co-op?” someone wrote on the Sheffield Reddit page in January. “It’s like all the fans have been carefully tuned to the calmest droning chord ever, it’s like being in an electrical gong bath.”
Earlier this week, another Redditor shared a video of the freezers in all their aural glory, later earning a huge second audience when reposted to X. A debate ensued. Was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U somewhere in the electronic hum? “I think it’s developed a slight discordant edge over the last couple of months,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s ageing like fine wine.”
A pair of hounds chase a hare across a snowy plain — will it get away? In Mario Kart terms, the dogs have the weight and max speed advantage while the hare is maxed out in acceleration, handling, and traction.
Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer.
For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, deep within its forests. From acclaimed director Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”), GHOST ELEPHANTS follows Boyes on an epic journey as he sets out with some of the best master trackers in the world, in pursuit of an animal long believed to be a myth.
From Peter Sobczynski’s rave review of the film:
The subject of Herzog’s fascination this time around is South African naturalist Dr. Steve Boyes, and while he seems perfectly staid and affable at first sight, he has an obsession within him that has consumed his life to such an extent that if he didn’t actually exist, Herzog might have had to invent him. The focus of his fascination is a species of giant elephant residing in the highlands of Angola, known as “ghost elephants” for their apparent ability to avoid detection. Indeed, not only has Boyes never actually seen one of these creatures with his own eyes, but he is not even certain that such creatures exist—the closest he has come is a massive elephant shot near that area in Angola in 1955, now on display at the Smithsonian.
Herzog, National Geographic, elephants, quixotic quest — who says no? Ghost Elephants is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
The Shape of Paris is a balletic short film of skateboarder Andy Anderson zooming, grinding, spinning, and floating around Paris in the summertime. It is also beautifully shot by Brett Novak; Paris has never looked better. As a YT commenter put it: “bro wtf this is the cleanest footage I’ve ever seen. The cinematography and color grading is insane.”
Also, this is the first skate video I’ve seen with “trick acknowledgements” in the credits. Great touch. (via craig mod)
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