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Tag: notes

Notes: 2023-02-22

February 23, 2023
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Pitchfork dug deep for this review of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3. Cool for the music but also cool for the esoterica. Anyone who claimed to be Crowley’s kid and had a passion for folk music is worth investigating in my book.

Alejandro Galindo seems like a really interesting director. A fair amount of his movies are available on the commercial-based streaming services. I wonder if these weren’t an influence on Roma?

Speaking of directors, Soderbergh’s 2022 yearly media consumption list is up. Someone on Letterboxd made a more convenient list of just the movies, which is handy, but I also like reading through the full stream. (Hm, four views of The Killer? I bet that’s the upcoming Fincher movie rather than John Woo.)

The always insightful J. D. Corley made me want to buy Call of Cthulhu 7th edition with this blog post. It’s just some tips for running the game, but what is this Bout of Madness mechanic? Is that really how it’s written or is that Corley being smart and extending the rulebook in useful ways? Suppose I gotta find out.

Have a 60-odd page PDF about management techniques from Javier Grillo-Marxuach, show runner and writer. OK, it’s really about show running, but it’s interesting how much of this translates directly into smart management techniques. Particularly for director-level managers.

Notes: 2023-01-26

January 26, 2023
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Mmm, a whole month’s worth.

Look! Finally an article about “the average rural voter” that doesn’t turn out to be about a local Republican activist!

I need to remember to check out this online course about modern Ukrainian history from Yale.

The trap everyone falls into with technical debt is basically the result of the fact that human instincts are terrible at risk analysis. “It’s been OK so far!” And then your entire airline stops being able to fly.

Have an excellent list of the best movie action scenes of 2022. Baby Assassins is so cool.

There’s some neat insight into Cronenberg’s process in this interview about Crimes of the Future. Also it’s hilarious that Ted Turner wanted to censor Crash because he was worried about kids having sex in cars.

Living on a boat, building new assembly languages by hand, the usual kind of thing. For my money this is somewhat more interesting than the guy who went off the grid in Manhattan, although that was neat too.

There is no way that Shopify will change underlying behavior with this much change in one shot, but good experiment, will come back and check it out in six months. I am working out of a Dublin office this week and the ability to have uninterrupted blocks of a couple of hours of time every single day is magical.

When thoughtful conservatives read about fascism, they produce one kind of reading list. When thoughtful progressives read about fascism, they produce another kind of reading list. Both have value but only one comes away thinking we’re not in danger of fascism because of, uh, feminized societies.

Pallet cleanser. (YouTube, music.)

Gretchen Felker-Martin pulls the old “I’m gently ribbing you, it’s not a micro-aggression” trick.

Good summary of what the 1/6 Committee learned about social media. You can also read the full report, which is wild, and not just because it tells us that there were Rumble employees worried about violence.

Have a decent summary of why each release of the Twitter Files has (mostly) sucked, from — of all places — TechCrunch.

And now S. and I are off to have pancakes.

Notes: 2022-12-20

December 21, 2022
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Nah, I don’t do these on a schedule or anything.

James Fallows writes about word processors … in 1982. Paywall, sorry. Really good reminder of what computing used to be like. The Sol-20 he was using was a pretty important machine, historically speaking.

Do you interact with other human beings on a regular basis in any way? Read this piece. It’s aimed at engineers but it’s good general advice, which I can summarize as “learn to write well.” You know how you can always find the rough spot on a floor by walking on it barefoot? People notice bad writing, spelling, and grammar even if they don’t know they notice it.

Disney ran a booth at New York Comic Con to advertise the new Guardians of the Galaxy rollercoaster, and the whole thing was an interactive roleplaying experience with a lot of levels. Disney Imagineers have been exploring this area for a while; the high end version is the Galactic Starcruiser, for example. A lesser-known version was the Legends of Frontierland experiment. It’s interesting watching them try new things.

I am currently watching the classic movie serial Les Vampires on the Criterion Channel, and I’m looking forward to rewatching Irma Vep when I’m done, and then I’m looking forward to watching the new TV show also named Irma Vep. Olivier Assayas did a great interview with the LA Times about the interplay between them all. It’s meta, and I do love me some meta.

If you like fanfic and creepypasta and meta-discourse about the nature of fandoms, you might enjoy Northern Caves.

If you like housing developments, you might enjoy reading about Corviale. One kilometer long! It was completed about a decade late for my Delta Green Years of Lead game.

Notes: 2022-12-04

December 4, 2022
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Sarah Polley haș some absolutely wonderful thoughts about making a movie (Women Talking) with a mostly female crew. If you’re really fretful about assigning any behaviors to genders in particular, consider it as a piece about how much value there is in challenging norms. “They crafted a budget based on 10-hour days, shot in and near Toronto, so everybody could be home for bedtime.” Can’t wait to see this one.

EA patented a technique for detecting in game cooperation by mapping out of game social connections. Well, they say collusion, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work in the general case. Back when I was playing competitive Ingress, I could sometimes figure out which agents from other regions were close by paying attention to who followed up on whose Reddit posts. Lack of in-game communication between cooperating players is also a sign of an out of game communication channel. It’s not totally surprising that this can be automated, but it’s a good reminder that privacy is tricky.

See also this Bellingcat piece on identifying the location of a far-right extremist from a single photo plus knowledge of his allies.

Back to movies! In a previous notes post I linked to a Scott Adkins interview about direct to video action movies. As a follow-up, check out this article on French action thrillers and Sara May, the Netflix exec who acquires them. This is great stuff. When people complain about a lack of mid-budget and low-budget movies? This is where some of those movies are. It’s sort of a publicity article for Lost Bullet 2 but that’s OK, cause I liked Lost Bullet a bunch.

Radley Balko, my favorite libertarian, apologizes for a decade-old puff piece on Stewart Rhodes and explains why he made the mistakes he made. Good for him.

Tom Whitwell’s 52 Things I Learned In 2022 has at least one iffy lesson (dog buttons, come on, Clever Hans has some words for you) but overall it’s a fun source of trivia and interesting notes.

We’re gonna lose so much culture… well, no, that’s not the right lesson here. We’ve already lost immense amounts of culture. When I read articles about Syrian cassette tapes vanishing or lost movies, what I should remember is that this is still better than the days when nothing could be recorded. It’s like lost languages, right? We preserve them better now than we ever did.

Notes: 2022-10-28

October 29, 2022
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Back in 1905, before the city was annexed by Seattle, Ballard had different street names. Different and better.

This is OK as creepypasta but it’s great as a parody of forum culture. “Please keep all pet-related talk confined to the appropriate subforum! Thanks!”

For my own reference, this is where you express interest in Letterboxd features and this is where you express interested in TMDB features. Letterboxd has a tricky tightrope to walk: more social features are good but would require more moderation and I think it’s a little bit undermoderated as it is. There’s a very slight spam problem.

Elon Musk, bless his heart, has chosen to lie to Twitter employees about his plans to cut 75% of the workforce. Dude, the Washington Post has the presentations. You just took a ten million dollar hit by firing the CEO instead of sidelining him for a year and paying him to sit at home. Be brave, tell the truth.

Notes: 2022-10-25

October 26, 2022
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The format of these is likely to change, but I do need someplace besides Twitter to dump random thoughts. We’ll see how this works. Thanks are owed to my pal Ginger for demonstrating the value of this sort of thing.

If you like music, Elizabeth Nelson’s piece on Marquee Moon is a must read. It’s such a perfect album made in such weird, imperfect circumstances. I learned not too long ago that those two “pantheonic instrumentalists of the 20th century” she mentions finally united on Matthew Sweet’s great three albums of the 1990s, starting with Girlfriend. Assuming that she meant Richard Lloyd as the first. It’s also worth checking out her band, Paranoid Style, which is as one might expect from the name.

My adolescent schooling trauma, such as it is (it’s not all that), was reawakened when I learned that a Sacramento teacher was just arrested for concealing a 15 year old kid for 2 years. Apparently she teaches at some kind of Waldorf-inspired public school? The lesson here is that you just can’t trust a Waldorf teacher’s judgement. I do wonder a bit if there’s not more to the story — real problems at home? But man, just letting a kid hide out is never going to be a wise solution.

I liked this interview with Scott Adkins. It serves as an introduction to the world of direct to video action movies, which is a pretty cool world if you ask me. I don’t care so much about whether or not John Hyams is an auteur; I just dig the never-ending stream of competent action movies with good fight scenes. It’s a bit like the hey day of Hong Kong action cinema.