kottke.org posts about video
I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent interactive agent that promises to “do your every slightest bidding, to fetch and carry for you, to work tirelessly and selflessly on your behalf, always ready, always willing, no job too small or too menial”.
Circumventing the limitations of ‘linear’ broadcast TV, the 50-minute programme imagines a new world in which an AI software ‘agent’ - brought to life here by Doctor Who favourite Tom Baker - helps the user (played by Adams) to find and access material of interest in a global world of hyperlinked information - text, images, audio and video.
Pop-up ‘micons’ (moving icons) conveniently link to interviews with leading technologists of the era (among them Ted Nelson, Robert Winter, Robert Abel, Kristina Hooper, Fabrice Forin and Steve Gano).
Some of this stuff has dated badly - few visions of the future get everything right! - but the programme is nevertheless of considerable historical importance.
Incredibly, at about the time Hyperland was being broadcast, a young CERN computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee was beavering away on URLs and HTTP, the foundations of what would become the World Wide Web.
Even Adams, who foresaw so much, didn’t anticipate the impact the Web - and the Internet that conveys its data globally - would have on civilisation. Needless to say, the enticing infoworld envisaged in Hyperland was a public-service one of education, art, literature (including nods to Adams’ own works!) and entertainment. There’s no advertising, hacking, cybercrime, information theft, social-media addicts, unaccountable corporate domination or drug-like dependence on the smartphones that Adams himself predicted.
And Tom Baker’s enthusiastic agent isn’t forever popping up to try and sell you something…
The YouTube version above is missing a segment, but you can watch (and download) the whole program on the Internet Archive, a project that fits the vision of the future imagined by techno-utopians like Adams.
I’m imagining what 16-year-old Jason would have made of this (or HyperCard or hypertext had he had any clue that they existed until 4-5 years later) — his brain probably would have exploded.
This woman does some amazing things with a series of white rings — lots of precision optical illusions.
It’s mesmerizing watching people moving like machines — an interesting psychological thing. Like Avantgardey, which if you haven’t heard of them (just because they show up all the time on my Instagram doesn’t mean that happens for everyone), you should check them out:
(via @sevlu)
Diego Poncelet recently set a new world record for the fastest speed on a skateboard. The old record was 146.7 km/h (91.2 mph) and he hit 151.8 km/h (94.3 mph). There are a couple of parts you can skip, but watching most of the video is worth it because you see the process and can compare how truly insanely fast he is moving during the final run — I found myself holding my breath for the last minute or so.
Also, I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.
I just found the first time I posted about speed skateboarding on KDO: this post from 2008. Less aerodynamic, more gonzo, and the cameraman is also on a skateboard going equally fast.
A lovely little mountain biking video with some incredible locations and cinematography. The drone piloting is A+. Also available on Vimeo. (via alastair humphreys)
The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter.
The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of scampering feet is inaudible to us. But not to him. With the help of a special acoustic camera equipped with 60 highly sensitive microphones, we can see what the owl is hearing.
The footage in this video is amazing — and so is the owl’s sense of hearing. A YouTube commenter says “Cat software in Bird hardware. Bad news for the Rodents.” You can watch a short video on the science behind owl hunting techniques and watch the whole episode this is from about how animals use sound (but only in Canada, it seems…VPN works fine tho).
The only problem with this video is that now I want two hours of just closeup footage of the owl’s face and it flying directly towards the camera. Those eyes! And its mid-flight loaf-of-white-bread-shaped body! I would also like the owl to be my friend.
BTW, this clip is from a show called The Nature of Things, which is a CBC nature series that’s been going since 1960. A good thing to have on your radar if you’re looking for well-produced science & nature programs.
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline)
This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung)
It might be that this text-only quiz game from 1993 is the most challenging F1 video game of all time. Here are a couple of the 23 questions from Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz:
3. Which team was the best in the 80’s?
Statistically, it’s McLaren, but that’s not a correct answer. The correct answer is “Mc Laren.”
4. Who is the youngest champion of ever?
The correct answer in 1993 was Emerson Fittipaldi, but his full name cannot be accepted because it contains too many characters for the computer. The game will not take “Fittipaldi,” “Emerson,” or “E Fittipaldi.” The answer must be “Fit.”
The real quiz, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear.
Berger is a former F1 driver, and the game is so weird and forgotten that it’s not even listed on his Wikipedia page — and it might not have been an official game at all. What is listed on his Wikipedia page is the epic prank war he waged against teammate Ayrton Senna:
In an Australian hotel room, Berger filled Senna’s bed with frogs. An infuriated Senna confronted Berger, who replied, “Did you find the snake?” Senna retaliated by putting strong-smelling French cheese in the air conditioning unit of Berger’s room.
It seems likely it was in this spirit that Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz game was created: as a prank Berger himself would have enjoyed. You can play a cracked version of the C64 game for yourself on the Internet Archive (answer “N” and “N” if you want to play it in hard mode as intended) and watch this gameplay video:
Agustín Ferrando Trenchi became a little obsessed with the moon as a kid. As an adult, he’s taken tons of photos and hundreds of hours of footage of the moon. After seeing an airplane fly close to the moon while he filmed, Trenchi began a quest to capture a plane flying across the face of the moon.
Over the course of 10 years, he took photos and videos of birds and statues silhouetted by the moon, but planes eluded him.
I realized if I wanted to film this, I was going to have to try a different approach. It wasn’t just going to happen by accident. So in February of this year, taking advantage of being in London, I decided to go near one of the busiest airports in the world to maximize my odds as much as possible.
But while we were on our way, I had second thoughts. I felt like it took the fun out of it. It didn’t make sense to force it that much either. So we got off.
I’m not going to spoil the video, but the whole thing is just so lovely — a meditation on obsessions, journeys, and finding meaning in your life. (via virginia)
Laika is the stop-motion animation studio that made Coraline & Kubo and the Two Strings. Their newest film, Wildwood, looks pretty incredible; have a look at the trailer.
Creative Boom recently highlighted some of the process behind the film, which is heavily dependent on physical sets and puppets.
The man tasked with putting the show together was art director Matthew Maldonado, having spent five years designing and building Wildwood’s sets. So I asked him the million dollar question: how much of Wildwood is physical and how much is digital?
Matthew’s response is simple. “Every single thing was made by hand, truly,” he stresses. “And every single thing that we built was either shot in camera or referenced by our effects department. We’ve got some really wide, expansive locations and there’s some digital aspect to all of that. But if it wasn’t on camera, on stage, it’s a scanned asset or a reference asset, specifically made by the artisans in the art department.”
“The show” referenced in the quote above is Wildwood: The Exhibition, due to open soon at the Design Museum in London.
(via justin lind)
BBC Earth is returning to the ocean. 25 years after the first installment, the legendary naturalist, presenter, and centenarian David Attenborough narrates Blue Planet III. This first look video, backed by a song Hans Zimmer & Jade Thirwall, is teeming with stunning footage of sea life of all sorts.
Ed Yong called BPIII’s predecessor the best nature series ever:
Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series that the BBC has ever produced.
It is almost transcendentally good—the product of a team that, after six decades of experience, is now at the height of its powers. The Blue Planet II crew traveled to 39 countries to capture over 6,000 hours of footage. They stuck their cameras into coral crevices. They hung off speedboats to film dolphins rocketing behind them. They literally stared into the abyss—and then repeatedly entered it. The resulting episodes, each narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark velvety tones, are hour-long distillations of wonder, featuring sequences that would be breathtaking had earlier shots left you with any breath to take away.
Blue Planet III will air sometime later in the year in the UK; not so sure about timelines in other locations at this point.
Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description:
In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on lockdown in 2020 turns to it as he tries to push the boundaries of perception.
It’s got a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and some good reviews on Letterboxd, including this one from film reviewer David Ehrlich:
me before seeing this movie: that is a big tree.
me after seeing this movie: that is a giant, hormonal, unbearably horned up 900-year-old virgin that understands loneliness on a level that most humans could never even begin to imagine.
The trailer and description put me in mind of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.
Back in ~2008, right on the cusp of stardom, Lady Gaga did a crate-digging video in a London record shop and named Radiohead’s set at Bonnaroo 2006 as her favorite show she’s ever been to. A post-fame Gaga reaffirmed her choice in this 2018 Vogue interview. Many share her opinion. Here’s the official concert video of that Bonnaroo show so you can judge for yourself.
The setlist for the show:
There There
2+2=5
15 Step
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Exit Music (For a Film)
Kid A
Dollars & Cents
Videotape
No Surprises
Paranoid Android
The Gloaming
The National Anthem
Climbing Up The Walls
Nude
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
The Bends
Myxomatosis
How To Disappear Completely
You And Whose Army?
Pyramid Song
Like Spinning Plates
Fake Plastic Trees
Bodysnatchers
Lucky
Idioteque
Karma Police
House of Cards
Everything In Its Right Place
Even the band loved it:
The lore surrounding this show is well-documented: It was among the longest live sets the band has ever played, both by duration (two hours and twenty minutes) and number of songs (29). It featured early, alternate arrangements of six unreleased tracks that would go on to anchor ‘In Rainbows’ the following year. Thom Yorke said it was “his favourite gig for years and years and years.” Jonny Greenwood called it “the best festival experience I’ve ever had in America.”
I’ve mentioned this before but my favorite show was also Radiohead, in Oxford in 2001. It rained and they played Creep for the first time in three years; the crowd exploded.
During the pandemic, the band uploaded a number of full-length videos of their live shows to YouTube. Enjoy.
YouTuber Rob Martinez travelled to Columbus, Ohio to tell the story of what he calls the best sandwich shop in America, Wario’s Beef and Pork. Here’s part of the transcript of owner Stephan Madias talking about the restaurant:
For the longest time, especially the first two years, I was very protective of how the bread was sliced and I would not let anybody cut bread. It’s about the experience. I think about me eating the sandwich. Think about the things that happen when you get a big sandwich. You take that first bite into it. I want you to be able to, like, move this thing around. Take bites from the top, the bottom, the front, the back. And it’s held.
We’re very particular, and it’s part of the reason why we don’t have the bakery cut the bread is cuz we want to sort through our things. Yes, we have volume. Yes, we have speed, but [my employees] all have the integrity that we started when we only sold five sandwiches an hour when the shop first started. That’s part of being committed to the fundamentals and being consistent.
The devil’s in the details, man. You got to take the extra minute to do it. Some people like it. Some people complain about it.
As a fellow sandwich overthinker, I love the ethos and the process. And man, those sandwiches do look amazing — tomato butter, homemade whiz for the cheese steaks, a chicken caesar sandwich, what is not to like?
O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics:
‘Cause when love is gone
There’s always justice
And when justice is gone
There’s always force
And when force is gone
There’s always Mom
Hi, Mom
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
In your automatic arms
Your electronic arms
In your arms
So hold me, Mom
In your long arms
Your petrochemical arms
Your military arms
In your electronic arms
Ah, ah, ah, ah
60 Minutes did a profile of Anderson a few years ago and she explained the meaning of the song (to her):
This is a song about how basically technology cannot save you. It’s about a lot of things: justice, safety, power.
As a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, this kind of music wasn’t available to me, so I only actually heard this for the first time fairly recently. So I thought I’d post it in case you hadn’t really heard it either — that and the message & meaning it carries is relevant these days.
I also liked this rendition of it, slowed down and reverbed. There are also several O Superman remixes on Soundcloud of varying quality.
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