nikhil.io

Watched with CK. The plot doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But very, very entertaining. Anyone who claims to understand what’s going on after the first 32 viewings is a damned liar. A perfect one-line review:

Excellent soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson (first came by his work when watching The Mandalorian and just knew he was something special.)

Also the Sator Square for a standard dose of Nolan apophenia¹. See also: The pitch meeting.

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.)

You can use the same technique on all sorts of things: plastic bins, pens, keychains, golf balls, pills. The silicone/bloop conforms to the shape of the object to print on rather easily.

Quality Logo Products has a quick explanation:

Entertaining. Thought the alternate ending would’ve been more likely (the highly-trained armchair psychoanalyst that I am 😆)

😭

Clever girl 🐘 ♥️

I wish they would blare portions of Tom Cruise’s COVID meltdown at all grocery stores in my lovely state. Someone on /r/desmoines posted an anti-masker patriot at our Costco who could use this message.

I’m on the phone with every f–king studio at night, insurance companies, producers, and they’re looking at us and using us to make their movies. We are creating thousands of jobs you motherf–kers.

I don’t ever want to see it again, ever! And if you don’t do it you’re fired, if I see you do it again you’re f–king gone. And if anyone in this crew does it – that’s it, and you too and you too. And you, don’t you ever f–king do it again.

That’s it! No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their f-ing homes because our industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education.

That’s what I sleep with every night. The future of this f–king industry! So I’m sorry I am beyond your apologies. I have told you and now I want it and if you don’t do it you’re out. We are not shutting this f–king movie down! Is it understood?

If I see it again you’re f–king gone — and you are — so you’re going to cost him his job, if I see it on the set you’re gone and you’re gone.

That’s it. Am I clear?

Do you understand what I want? Do you understand the responsibility that you have? Because I will deal with your reason. And if you can’t be reasonable and I can’t deal with your logic, you’re fired. That’s it. That is it.

I trust you guys to be here. That’s it. That’s it guys. Have a little think about it. . . [inaudible].

That’s what I think of Universal and Paramount. Warner Brothers. Movies are going because of us. If we shut down it’s going to cost people f–king jobs, their home, their family. That’s what’s happening.

All the way down the line. And I care about you guys, but if you’re not going to help me you’re gone. OK? Do you see that stick? How many meters is that?

When people are standing around a f–king computer and hanging out around here, what are you doing? And if they don’t comply then send their names to Matt Spooner. That’s it.

I must have watched this 14,221 times. A parody of this (real) miniseries. There’s a Part III too.

Via PLG.

Had to cache it because this is just lovely stuff. Pretty sure I had a mini-blackout when I read the Trainspotting part 💯

♥️🐙♥️

Watched because Denzel and Revenge. Not sure why I bothered finishing it. Absolutely awful. The cinematographer appears to have borrowed the ghastly verdigris-like palette from this terribly photoshopped poster, and keeps twitching the camera with the giddiness of a raver who’s taken two of them Mitsubishi pills that were in vogue at the time.

Dakota Fanning is the only other reason to endure this. She was only ten in 2004 but acted like she’d been at it for at least three decades.

Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020.

He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview¹ which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine):

Q: How has the response been from your previous fans and followers that were around before the meme? Also, have you received any interesting or wholesome messages from fans since your meme went viral that you can share with us?

A: When I read the comments section after my video went viral, I see that my Turkish followers still do not understand the meme, and they ask questions like, “Is the channel stolen? Why are there so many foreigners here? Where are the Turks?”

Assorted Bilal things: Here’s a ten-hour version of his viral hit. And here’s him making a lot of Indian people very happy. And lest I forget, this is the original Finnish folk song he’s covering:

Watched with LD. Reminded me of “Hereditary” (it’s a slow burn) but with The Evil being this chimera of financial insolvency, really bad trust issues, childhood trauma, and severe affluenza. Jude Law was perfect, but Carrie Coon was so fucking good as the beleagured yet passively complicit partner and mostly grieving person. The scene shot from the stable facing the manor was genius. Sean Durkin (writer and director) stuck the landing perfectly. Lovely stuff.

Tedious, uneven, rushed, and a colossal waste of an interesting premise and the talents of several amazing actors (Ron Perlman, Dana Delany, Andre Royo, Alona Tal, and a brilliant Garret Dillahunt.) You can skip the latter half of the episodes in the first season (here’s a recap) and skip-watch all but the last three episdoes of the second, and still know what’s going on. It’s as if they were told there wasn’t going to be a third

If impatient, skip to the last minute.

This is Dogor 🐾, an 18,000-year old puppy preserved in Siberian permafrost. His name means “friend.” He was discovered as a lump of frozen mud near Yakutsk and lies at a private museum.

Other researchers, affiliated with the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm (Twitter), think he could be “part of the evolutionary bridge that turned a fierce wild animal into man’s best friend.”

Testing on a rib bone has revealed the animal’s age: about two months, said Stanton, a postdoctoral scholar who has been working for more than a year on a broader attempt to answer lingering questions about canine history.

The analysis also put Dogor’s short life at a particularly interesting period of time, right around when many wolf lineages were going extinct and dogs are thought to have emerged. Exactly how and when they evolved from wolves is unclear; one recent study estimates between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.

These are memo pads that “excavate objects” as they are used. A bit more expensive than your average PostIt, but a very lovely idea.

Informed Choice Iowa is a group that “unites Iowans seeking to preserve their medical freedoms.” They are “pro-science” folk that count “ex-vaxxers”, “selective vaxxers”, “non-vaxxers”, and “vaxxers” among their members. I’m guessing that this list doesn’t include a single practicing physician.

And here’s them celebrating their freedoms, by which they mean a blatant disregard for the science they claim to love and the Iowans they claim to serve. Need confirmation but I hear that eating at least two tubes of toothpaste is on the agenda for their next idiot congregation.

Here’s a local news story about this superspreader event.

One should be good 80%+ of time between that and the awesome pgcli.

Tapped this YouTube suggestion on a lazy Sunday. This man pushed my capacities for sympathy and empathy to their breaking points in this 20-minute highlight reel. I don’t know what to type here other than quote the very first sentence of his Fandom wiki page:

Raj is widely regarded as one of the worst and most useless chefs in Hell’s Kitchen history.

I don’t watch the show and don’t have a full context. But the most charitable assessment I can offer after sitting through the highlight reel below is this: The man is wired very, very differently, which I suppose makes for engaging (cruel?) television 🤷‍♂️

I created YVFT site after my Conservative voting aunt complained on Facebook that there weren’t enough police to deal with disruptive teenagers in her town. I wanted to scream, “But you voted for this!” without looking like a lunatic.

Turns out Miyazaki’s dad was an aeronautical engineer.

You could almost just narrate the body changes and narrate the dream. So here she’s asleep. She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is a camouflage like she’s just subdued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. It’s a very unusual behavior to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another… you don’t usually see that when an animal’s sleeping which really is fascinating.

But yeah if she’s dreaming that’s the dream.

– David Scheel

🐶

(Source Unknown)

Reynolds said election victories for Republicans in the state this week show Iowans support her approach. “It was a validation of our balanced response to COVID-19, one that is mindful of both public health and economic health,” Reynolds said.

Because political victories, not cases or deaths, should inform and ‘validate’ one’s strategy when dealing with a raging pandemic.

Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.

It helps minimize or eliminate popping sounds (“aspirated plosives”) like when you say ‘pop’ or ‘pepper’ or ‘pots’!

Was looking for a portable iPhone microscope and came by this one on Amazon. Doubted the “50x-1000x magnification” claim and landed on this video by Oliver Kim (here’s his channel on YouTube) on how to make sense of that feature.

The key idea here is to think of a microscope as a device that resolves hitherto unseen things. It’s simply not just a magnifier of small things our eyes cannot resolve. This is the difference between the 2x optical zoom on your iPhone versus the 10x you can slide it up to.

So I don’t doubt that the product on Amazon can do 50x, which is fine for my needs. I just don’t believe that the upper bound (1000x) can provide anything useful.

Here’s a community-maintained "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" across various languages on Github. I was curious about a naïve frequency distribution of consonants across the English-language corpus (NSFW, obviously) and wrote a small script. Here are the results:

Not sure what I’m going to do with this information but here it is. 🤬

Foreign correspondents on the state of America and the election in four days.

Saved three lists of the best movies of the genre according to the British Film Institute, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes. Merged them into a giant list here and sorted by year here.

Pretty version with all those lists here. #covidplanning

A bit sloppy compared to the first season but still quite the entertainer (or maybe I just love the surfeit of bad language, of which there is plenty ♥️)

Excellent stuff from the main cast, especially Sheeba Chaddha and Rasika Dugal.

But Pankaj Tripathi could read the backs of shampoo bottles in 40-minute episodes and I’d still binge the ‘show’ and write encomiums about how good a performer he is.

A beautiful story about my favorite alien told with phenomenally good camera work. Left me a bit misty-eyed¹. Lovely stuff.

And, of course, that’s all cartilage. Mama Nature is metal af. As she do 🙏

Mentioned this to NB. Saving here for later.

On this event:

I often wonder what people like him would think of our times.

Well this was certainly most unexpected.

A lovely campus map of UIowa in 1930 (source unknown.)

It’s priced at $475 for the basic model and $800 for a deluxe version. The video is very satisfying to watch (I couldn’t have picked better background music.)

One could start with a Brachiograph for around $20 (basic Raspberry Pi setup, soldering skills, and assembly required.)

Via AS as we were discussing Audemars Piguet’s “petite tapisserie”

CK and I loved this short and strange and beautiful ‘game’ by artist Michael Frei and developer Mario van Rickenbach.

There’s even an art exhibition. I don’t know. Take it for what it is.

On why GNU grep is fast. Via HN.

Michael Keaton and Christopher Lloyd were excellent. But Peter Boyle steals the show as “Jack McDermott. Christ fixation. Megalomania.”

BILLY
Hey, Doc, isn’t it true that if even one of those tiles were to come loose, millions and millions of gallons of water would come pouring down on us and squash us like tiny little bugs? Is that a leak up there? You see those tiles? They’re leaking water right there!

DR. WEITZMAN
Bill. Cut it out. Oh, my God!

JACK
I will hold back the waters.

DR. WEITZMAN
Thanks, Jack.

.

BILLY
Dr. Verboven can be such a perfectionist.

JACK
Yeah, but that’s what makes him such a great diagnostician.

HENRY (DR. VERBOVEN)
Vital signs are good. Zip code checks out.

.

JACK
Let me hold the gun.

HENRY
No.

JACK
I let you sit in the front seat.

(HENRY HANDS GUN TO JACK)

PSYCHIATRIST
Jack, Jesus Christ would never point a gun at another human being.

JACK
Stay out of my psychosis and get your ass in that van.

and finally (even though there’s a lot more understated gold)

JACK
I drove the moneylenders from the temple. I can handle a ten-spot.

🙏

Well-worth the $2 you’ll spend on it. Don’t look behind you if you have major vertigo or megalophobia. “The Creation of Adam” was hair-raising. The Vermeer was just so beautiful 💯

This is lovely. More here.

So saith Uncle Roger, who finally approved someone’s egg-fried rice. Via KP.