kottke.org posts about video
Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.
Using this extraordinary minute-by-minute timeline of nearly all the scenes that make up The Clock, one person is attempting to reverse engineer the entire film. It’s not The Clock, but it’s A Clock. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Says the creator:
So, when I stumbled upon this Fandom Wiki, where the mysterious user ElevenFiftyNine had seemingly started the task of listing all the movies in The Clock, I couldn’t help myself; I started remaking the whole thing from scratch.
So, since I can’t really say this is The Clock, it is my best attempt at making a Clock, by following the excellent effort by ElevenFiftyNine.
A ten-minute excerpt is free on the website but you need to join the Patreon to watch the entire work-in-progress. According to their most recent update, the film is finished but the final version isn’t online quite yet; October 15th is the release date.
BTW, here’s the creator’s definition of “finished”:
I spoke some months ago about what 100% means for this project, and it is not that it is a fully perfect copy of Marclay’s work. The information available online is incomplete, and new information might appear in the future. For now, 100% means that all available information, is in a Clock.
And incredibly, they have never actually seen The Clock in person:
Unfortunately I have never had a chance to see The Clock, as it is only visible when exhibited at a museum. This is increasingly a rare occurrence, and even then, apparently the queues when it is on show, are monstrous. Never mind that it might be anywhere in the world!
Aside from the clips, I haven’t watched any of this yet, but it is a very tempting alternative to waiting for a rare showing somewhere I happen to be.
From the Weird History YouTube channel, an epic undertaking: telling the (US-centric) cultural history of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s in just (just!) 16 hours.
This is like a mega ultra monster extended mix of We Didn’t Start the Fire. The videos are organized chronologically, with each year taking 15-30 minutes to summarize, so you can watch small bits here and there instead of having to ingest a whole decade in one go.
This is not some AI-generated to-study-to jazz video; it’s a guy who really likes jazz playing a bunch of records from his extensive collection.
over the years i’ve built a small but reallllly incredible and meaningful record collection, spanning from jazz, classical, a great folk collection from my dad, hip hop, house music, and random other things. record stores have been a sort of library for me, a place where i can find artifacts. there in sooo much real living history in a record.
most of vinyls i’ve collected are originals too and it’s just such a cool experience. for so many of the records i have they were originally recorded in a studio or live, mixed on a mixing console and put onto tape. then from the tape recording the vibrations were etched into the wax of the vinyl. how cool is that?
there’s a certain sense of bringing back to life i feel when i put a record on, these preserved etches of a song reawakening. it’s really beautiful.
i had an absolutely balll making this and i cant wait to make many more. i truly hope you find some songs that you love in here, so many of these are real favorites of mine.
If you enjoyed that, you might like this other YouTube channel that I posted about recently. (via undermanager)
Direcciones is a short documentary about how giving directions works in Costa Rica, where “a centralized system for street addresses does not exist”. Instead, people use landmarks as reference points when giving directions. Here’s a postal worker talking about how some senders use outdated location markers to send letters:
Pretty bad, addresses here are pretty bad. For example, there is a letter I get, like, once a month. It says, “From the old Cristal Hotel…” and then some other reference points. So, yeah, it’s hard because people don’t update the addresses, they just write “from the old…” and it stays “from the old…” The Cristal Hotel had already closed when I was born.
However, for many residents there’s a kind of poetry in this old style of wayfinding. A lovely and thoughtful short film.
The Hive Architect is a short documentary about honey bee conservationist Matt Somerville and the log hives he builds to house wild bees.
There is a widely held theory that our British honey bee couldn’t exist without being domesticated by beekeepers. However, for bee conservationists like Matt Somerville, this theory is ludicrous.
He has spent decades admiring free-living honey bees nesting in tree cavities and they are under increasing threats from commercial beekeeping, loss of habitat and other violences of the modern world.
So Matt decided to do something about it. For the last 14 years he has spent the winters creating his log hives before driving around all of England in the summer, erecting them as minimal intervention homes for wild honey bees.
Four years ago, Beau Miles planted 1440 trees in 24 hours. Recently, he went back to see how they were doing; those trees are a bonafide forest now.
In 2021 I planted a tree a minute, for 24 hours, on my mates farm. It was freakin hard work, but also one of the coolest, most rewarding days I’ve ever had. I made a film about the project and promised folks I’d return every two years to show off the plot and see how the trees and bushes are going. This was a special day because I really felt like the project had landed. I had a cup of tea in the new forest, from water boiled on a fire made from the forest itself. It’s perhaps the most profound cup of tea I’ve ever had.
Confession: I spent half of this video concerned that Miles had actually cut down one of the trees to build his tea-making fire, but I needn’t have worried: he used the old planting stakes and trees that didn’t grow.
Miles recently made another video about planting trees and the number of views that video got in a month would dictate how many trees he would plant for the next bit of forest.
Here’s a short video by Arthur Brooks (that you are probably watching on your phone) about why you should log off, put your phone down, and let yourself be bored.
You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn’t be clearer.
See also In Praise of Boredom, In Defense of Boredom, and “Boredom: the great engine of creativity”.
I haven’t watched it yet, but I have seen so many recommendations for this gonzo birdwatching documentary called Listers over the past few days that I wanted to share it with you.
Two brothers travel across the United States in a used minivan on a mission to find as many bird species as they can in a single year.
Yeah, not your typical birdwatching fare…the vibe of the brothers’ quest is more like a surf or skate video. Here’s the trailer:
And the whole 2-hour movie is available on YouTube as well:
I’ve hoping to make some time to watch it this weekend; it looks great. The two brothers have also released a companion book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States.
Gabriel Bonnin, aka Singer Sound System, plays an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy that’s driven by an old Singer sewing machine pedal.
My instrument is an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy. I just removed the crank and use a Singer machine to drive it :-) It is equipped with four integrated microphones that allow me to process the sound live, especially in Ableton Live.
Some of his most popular recent covers include the Doctor Who theme1:
Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train:
The X-Files theme:
And Enter Sandman by Metallica:
Oh and Daft Punk!
You can find his stuff on YouTube and Instagram.
The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie; looks like another great prestige caper.
Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.
It’s coming out in “select theaters” on Nov 26 before its debut on Netflix Dec 12.
Watch a man named Ozzie make rope using a very simple hand-cranked machine. The real magic happens starting at about the 12-minute mark, where the three strands of the rope come together — my mouth actually fell open at this point. It’s amazing what you can do with just a simple machine that cleverly leverages the laws of physics and the material’s own properties.
You can order one of these rope making machines from Etsy.
See also How Rope Was Made the Old Fashioned Way, i.e. how rope was made in Edwardian England. (via book of joe)
Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad.
Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape’s last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers’ lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
Interviews in the movie include Ellen Ullman, Kara Swisher, Jamie Zawinski, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, and Brendan Eich. (via robin sloan)
This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy.
I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can’t believe he died more than 20 years ago already. (via craig mod)
In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of the arrangement, U2 asked Bell & the choir to join the band for an upcoming show at Madison Square Garden in NYC. Before the show, the band and the choir rehearsed together at Greater Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem:
Here is some behind-the-scenes footage of the rehearsal (more); Bono’s arm is in a sling for some reason?
The live recording of the song from that MSG show appeared on their next album, Rattle and Hum; here’s the (music-only) video from U2’s YouTube channel:
And here’s an actual video of the MSG performance (taken from the Rattle and Hum DVD):
You can also find the MSG version of the song (and the rest of Rattle and Hum) on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
Bell and the New Voices of Freedom recorded their own version of the song, which you can listen to on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
P.S. That same day, the band walked around Harlem and stumbled across street musicians Satan & Adam; a clip of their song made it onto the album and DVD.
(via laura olin)
I ran across this delightful account that explores and explains everyday scientific questions through maddeningly catchy songs. Like why a cast saw cuts through plaster but spares your skin:
How working principle of an electric kettle is another banger:
My gateway into this account was why are steel coils placed upright when trucks are hauling them:
These will get stuck in your head. Available on YouTube and TikTok (e.g. how is a football made).
For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. Here’s the trailer.
The film recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and the reviews are very good.
Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.
The film premieres in the US on Nov 27 with a nationwide release on Dec 12.
I didn’t know this about eels:
No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present.
For centuries, the world’s greatest thinkers tried to solve the mystery of the eel. Aristotle thought they emerged from mud. Others believe they simply appeared, formed by sunlight and dew. Even today, there’s only one place on Earth where we think all eels are born: somewhere deep in the Atlantic where mysteriously no adult eel has ever been found.
So why are eels like this? What evolutionary advantage lies in such an impossibly complex journey? And why does their life cycle still defy so much of what we know about biology? This isn’t just a story about a fish. It’s a story about a creature that breaks the rules of science.
I found this via Frank Chimero’s short essay on eels.
Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors.
In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”
The film is 54 minutes long but runs in a continuous loop. These videos feature some footage from the film; this one shows five minutes and this one four minutes:
Here’s Marclay on the process of making the video:
It’s quite difficult to find scenes in cinema showing an actor entering a space and then going into another space. I needed two doors: The actor enters one space and then leaves through another door — so it’s one room to the next room to the next room to the next room, and every time a different actor in a different film. It’s a strange choreography to edit. The door has to be opened in a similar way and at the same speed to make it believable. If someone is running and then you see them peek slowly through the door on the other side, it doesn’t look realistic. I also had to match the motion of pulling or pushing the door. To make things even more complicated, that door is hinged on one side and that has to match, the hinge and the door handle. If done well, the viewer gets sucked in and fooled by these editing tricks. So you see an actor in color in the ’80s entering a black-and-white film from the ’50s, and you know it’s not the same actor, but your mind wants to believe that it is. The trick is to create a flow, an illusion of continuity.
Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)
P.S. The Clock is showing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, starting at the end of November and running through Jan 18, 2026.
The other day I was surprised to learn that several years ago, FC Barcelona streamed the entire match of their Nov 2010 5-0 dismantling of Real Madrid to YouTube and you can still watch it in its entirety.
The El Clásico match was notable not only for how much Barça dominated the game1 but also for who played (Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Puyol, Busquets, Abidal, Villa, Valdés for FCB; Ronaldo, Di Maria, Benzema, Özil, Xabi Alonso, Sergio Ramos, Casillas for RM) and coached (Pep Guardiola for FCB and José Mourinho for RM).
I remember watching this game. Messi didn’t score because the Madrid defense was trying to put him in the hospital but he assisted on two goals and famously walked off the pitch near the end of the match, right past Cristiano Ronaldo, looking at the scoreboard and grinning.
The teams met four more times that year, in just a span of 18 days: a 1-1 La Liga draw, a 1-0 Real Madrid victory in the Copa del Ray final, and a pair of matches in the Champions League semis that ended with an aggregate score of 3-1 in favor of Barça, who went on to a dominating 3-1 win against Man United in the final. That 2010-2011 Barcelona club is considered one of the best club teams of all time.
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did.
I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.
Fantastic. If you enjoyed the Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement video, you will probably like this one:
Wanting to get the most out of my new machine, I wanted to look into purchasing what’s called a drag knife. It’s a tool that would go in where the bit is that would allow you to create very precise cuts on things like paper or film. And after realizing I’d have to pay over $150 for one of these things, I thought, maybe I could make one. So that’s what I did. For me, one of the most satisfying things is using a machine to make more tools or features for that machine.
I’m not saying I want to buy myself a CNC machine, but I’m not not saying it either. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
As an occasional yoyo-er, I’ve watched a fair amount of yoyo routines, but this championship-winning routine by 8-time world champ Hajime Miura is the best one I’ve ever seen. Miura’s routine falls somewhere on the spectrum between magical illusion & performance art; even the music is perfect. The result is mesmerizing. (via the kid should see this)
This music video, directed by Kevin McGloughlin for Max Cooper’s song Repetition, features remixed fractal-like forms from the constructed world (roads, skyscrapers, wind turbines, etc.) interspersed with scenes from nature. Totally mesmerizing. (You’ve got a give it a minute to get going though, especially if you’re not a fan of gradual repetitive music. I was in a trance by the end. 😵💫)
Giles Clement tends to go a little overboard with his hobbies. During the pandemic, he taught himself to repair old watches and then decided to try building one himself. Taylor Scott Mason made a short documentary about Clement and his effort to build a watch from scratch in his basement:
Aside from the movement, Clement builds every component of his watches completely from scratch. He even constructed two of his milling machines and designed the typeface for the numbers on the watch face.
My shop is built around two 3 axis CNC machines which I built from scrap steel, surplus parts and a bunch of cussin. The larger of the two has an epoxy granite frame which gives a sturdy platform for cutting titanium and stainless cases, case backs and crowns. The smaller machine sports a 100k RPM spindle and the ability to cut extremely fine details needed for the hands and dials.
I’ve also built a pad printing machine for dials a polishing lathe, a lume injector for hand and dial applications and several drawers full of jigs and fixtures needed to manufacture parts.
You can read more about Clement’s process on his website and buy one of his watches from his online shop. Prices start at $2250.
Today I learned that the opening theme song for the original Iron Chef TV program was adapted from a song composed by Hans Zimmer, who has done scores for films like Interstellar, Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Inception, and Dunkirk. Perhaps even weirder, the name of the theme song is “Show Me Your Firetruck”. (The song is from Zimmer’s score for the movie Backdraft.)
The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.
And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”
(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these but I’m gonna skip the apologies and get right into it. Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past several months. Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, etc. you’ve been enjoying in the comments below!
Dinosaur. It’s a huge pigeon on the High Line — what else do you need to know? (A-)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Entertaining and engaging. It’ll make a good TV series. (B+)
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I hadn’t seen this in several years but I still knew all the words. (A-)
My Brilliant Friend (season four). If there’s one thing I’ve watched in the past several years that I wish had gotten more attention from viewers, critics, and awards panels, it’s this wonderful show. (A+)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow might be the most perfectly cast role in the history of cinema. Great story too. This movie surprised me when I saw it in the theater in 2003 and it’s still in the top tier of action/adventure movies. (A)
Andor (season one). A rewatch to prep for season two. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about this show the first time around, but this second viewing was a revelation. Andor is easily the best Star Wars thing since Empire. (A+)
Galleria Borghese. As previously discussed, the Bernini sculptures were a highlight of the summer. (A+)
Caravaggio 2025. Fantastic exhibition. (A)
The vivid blue color of the Mediterranean. (A+)
La Vita è Un Mozzico. We waited for an hour for sandwiches and it was probably worth it? (A)
Black Doves. British spy thriller? Keira Knightley? Ben Whishaw? Twist my arm. (B+)
Captain America: Brave New World. I’m sorry Sam Wilson / Anthony Mackie, there’s a “we have the Avengers at home” vibe here that’s hard to shake. (B)
Music to Refine To: A Remix Companion to Severance. I love this album; one of my favorite things of the past several months. (A+)
Mickey 17. It was fine? I was distracted while watching it in the theater, which is never a good sign. My favorite Bong Joon Ho film is still Snowpiercer. (B)
Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Absolutely fantastic. (A+)
The French Dispatch. This has quietly become a favorite of mine among Anderson’s films. (A)
The Royal Tenenbaums. However, this is still my favorite. (A+)
Paris Is Burning. Classic documentary of a bygone NYC era & a subculture that is now both flourishing and threatened. (A-)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season two). I love these characters, always the sign of a good Trek. The crossover episode with Lower Decks was delightful even though I’ve not watched any of the animated series yet. The musical episode I liked less (not a showtunes guy) but I appreciated the experimentation. Bring on the Muppet episode. (A)
Severance (season two). Perhaps not as good as the first season — there was a lot in the mid-season episodes that didn’t land for me. Still, I always watched when a new episode dropped. (A-)
Army of Shadows. Part of the unplanned resistance film festival I’ve been screening for myself recently. Not quite as good as I remembered it, but it’s nice to watch something that doesn’t just lay everything out on a platter for you so you can emote properly. (A-)
Best in Show. So many lines from this that I use in my daily life. (A-)
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker. This is such a good series with fantastic guests about a legendary book. Who knew that Roman Mars was such a gigglepuss though? (A)
Johnny English. I didn’t find this quite as delightful as my family does. I prefer Mr. Bean. (B+)
Paddington in Peru. Not quite the magic of the first two, but entertaining. (B)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I have likely said this before, but while Raiders is likely the best Indy movie, Last Crusade is my favorite (probably due to Tom Stoppard’s heavy rewrite of the script). (A+)
Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. It’s interesting to watch the original trilogy having seen so many subsequent movies & TV series.
Ocean’s Twelve. The dancing lasers scene is completely ridiculous. (A)
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Well, I wasn’t expecting a critique of AI and the role of technology in society from this animated feature, but maybe I should have? (B+)
A Complete Unknown. Liked this more than I thought I would. (A-)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Just a wonderful book — witty and fun. (A)
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Fantastic book. Listen to the audiobook version if you can — Scott Brick’s narration elevates the story. (A)
A Quiet Place: Day One. I only watched this because I was on a plane. (B)
Severance (season one). After watching the second season, I rewatched season one. There was apparently much I missed the first time around. (A-)
Black Bag. Soderbergh is always worth watching, especially when he dips into Ocean’s Eleven territory — although this was more serious. (A-)
A Minecraft Movie. The first half was tolerable, enjoyable even. And then not so much. (C+)
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Watched this in the theater for the 20th anniversary. There are some good bits in here, but some of the acting really stinks. Folks in the theater cheered when Anakin slaughtered the younglings, which is probably some sort of meme that I don’t want to know about. (B+)
Sinners. I loved this movie. (A+)
Thunderbolts*. Thought I would like this more than I did. (B)
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The last scene is a masterclass in not having the faintest idea how to end a movie. (B+)
Andor (season two). Only a slight dip from season one. Overall, the series was a brilliant look at radicalization, the messiness of rebellion, and the oppressive flatness of authoritarianism. (A+)
There There by Tommy Orange. Devastating. (A-)
The Fear of Never Landing. Good album to chill out to by Marconi Union, who previously brought you the most relaxing song in the world. (A-)
Novocaine. This was bad. (D+)
Glass Onion. More Benoit Blanc mysteries please — I love watching Daniel Craig and his CSI: KFC accent chewing scenery. (A-)
The Gorge. Half of this was great and the other half was just another pseudo-horror action thing. (B-)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Marvelous. (A)
Andor: The Rogue One Arc. This fan edit of Rogue One in the style of a three-episode Andor arc is as Gilroy-esque a cut as you’re ever going to get. (A-)
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. I had been kinda ambivalent about the M:I movies, but Fallout converted me, so now I’m slowly making my way back through the back catalog. (B+)
Via Carota. Best meal I’ve had in a long time. The tagliatelle was better than any pasta dish I had during my trip to Rome — it’s true, don’t @ me! And the roast chicken was perfect. (A+)
V for Vendetta. Underrated. (A-)
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I’m going to tell you the embarrassing truth: I thought this was about actual samurai and perhaps related to the Tom Cruise movie. It is very much not. I gave it a real shot but ended up abandoning it about halfway through. (C)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Still a marvel of animated creativity. (A)
The Phoenician Scheme. Didn’t vibe with this at all. (B-)
Downhill mountain biking. This is giving me so much life right now. (A+)
Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death. Not my favorite W&G but still. (B+)
F1. Like Top Gun: Maverick crossed with Ford v Ferarri but Cruise and Bale played the aging outsider role much better than Pitt. Is Pitt even a good actor or is he just extremely charismatic? (B+)
Superman. I thought it was fine but didn’t like it as much as others seemed to. Better than anything Zach Snyder did for DC though. (B)
Shōgun. Rewatch with my son. Just an incredible show all the way around. (A+)
The Last of Us (season two). This show was always fighting an uphill battle with me — I don’t like zombie media and I dislike characters (Ellie!) who wouldn’t survive/thrive in the situations that they’re in with their personalities & characteristics. And I finally won. (C+)
The Handmaid’s Tale (season six). *sigh* No idea why I started watching (and then finished) this season; I’m a sucker for closure I guess. (C)
Nintendo Switch 2. I bought this to play Kart with my kids and also for a better Fortnite experience. So far, so good. (B+)
Mario Kart World. I haven’t played a ton of this, but it’s good so far. Free roam mode is pretty fun. I’ve gotta write up my Kart wishlist sometime…Nintendo only checked off one or two items in World. (B+)
Sargent and Paris. Caught this on the very last day of the show and hoo boy was it crowded. (A- for the show, C+ for the crowds)
Let God Sort Em Out. Need to listen to this one a few more times but I’m liking it so far. (B+)
Right now, I’m watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three, listening to Deacon King Kong on audiobook (fantastic, a lock for an A+), rewatching Wandavision, and picking at Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane.
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
In this video, Maurice Moves highlights a pair of flashlights that are extremely useful & well-designed but also shockingly affordable.
Most people never think about flashlights, but as someone who uses one daily for work, it’s always top of mind, and the tech, value, and products are proof that modern flashlights are absolutely insane and defy logic and manufacturing economics.
The two flashlights he featured are the WUBEN G5 Rechargeable EDC Flashlight ($20) and the Nitecore EDC37 8000 ($140) — the Wuben in particular would be affordable at twice the price given how nicely designed and engineered it is.
I feel like this about Apple’s M4 Macbook Airs; as I wrote last week, “$800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer”.
See also No One Knows How to Make a Pencil. (thx, dunstan)
Jon Batiste & Randy Newman team up for a song called Lonely Avenue. This is lovely. (via craig mod)
In a review of City of Angels, the 1998 Hollywood remake of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, Roger Ebert says:
To compare the two films is really beside the point, since “Wings of Desire” exists on its own level as a visionary and original film, and “City of Angels” exists squarely in the pop mainstream.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak leans into the vast gulf between the two films to “explore the differences in cinematic cultures and styles”. He takes a close look at the same scene in both films and what they reveal about Hollywood on the one hand and European art cinema on the other.
Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.1 That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯
That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.
Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.
P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:
So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!
Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.
yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution
A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.
Can you run Doom… on a bird?
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