I enjoyed this. It had me constantly wondering and wanting to know what happens next. I really liked the quirkiness of it all. But then in the end it left me kind of empty and wondering “why all this?” and “what for?”. All the stories had the same subjects it dealt with, but I couldn’t find any purpose (if there is any), and why it had to be three episodes. So I had the suspicion the movie is just weird for weirdness sake. But maybe that’s just Lanthimos’s thing and I shouldn’t complain. What never seems to disappoint, though, is how he films everything. It’s just fun to watch. Emma Stone was superb once again, but so were all the other actors.
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Jon Batiste is a pianist, songwriter, and composer from New Orleans. He’s been nominated for multiple Grammys, and just won the Golden Globe and got an Oscar nomination for the soundtrack to the Pixar film Soul, which he composed along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Jon is also a recipient of the American Jazz Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and on weeknights, you can see him as the bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In March 2021, he put out his new album, We Are. But the title track from it actually came out much earlier, in June 2020. In this episode, Jon talks about how he drew from his roots, both at a personal level and at a cultural level, and wove all of it into the song.
For more, visit songexploder.net/jon-batiste.
It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:
The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.
Tags: art · art history · death · James Payne · video · Vincent van Gogh
The AP:
Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz said Tuesday that she is leaving The Washington Post, less than two months after the newspaper launched an internal review following her social media post about President Joe Biden.
Lorenz, a well-regarded expert on internet culture, wrote a book “Extremely Online” last year and said she is launching a newsletter, “User Mag,” on Substack.
Well-regarded by whom? Lorenz is a hack — a self-proclaimed social media expert done in by her own “private” Instagram post describing President Joe Biden as a “war criminal” that she subsequently lied about having posted. She didn’t “exit” the Post. She was obviously and rightfully fired.
Link: apnews.com/article/taylor-lorenz-tech-journalism-washington…
This video from “MTT” warmed my heart. And that takes a lot. I learned Pascal on this keyboard. I absolutely loved this keyboard when I first encountered it. But, today, man, what a weird keyboard it is. I mean the arrow-key layout is one thing (up, down, left, right — arranged horizontally). But how about putting the backslash (\) key on the right of the space bar and the backtick (`) key on the left? I mean that’s just crazy. I recall absolutely loving the feel of this keyboard as a teenager but I’ve never bothered chasing one down in my adult life because I know today I could never bear the weird layout. But MTT didn’t just do the lazy thing (buy an ADB-USB adapter), he went the whole nine yards and designed and soldered his own custom parts to turn this 1986 gem into a modern day Bluetooth keyboard. Masterful.
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, an apt word because the flocks move like a rumor pulsing through a crowded room. This is a particularly beautiful murmuration observed in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
[This is a vintage post originally from Jan 2015.]
Tags: birds · timeless posts · video
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of books that need to be sorted alphabetically by author. What’s the fastest way to accomplish this task? Luckily, efficient sorting is a problem that’s been studied extensively in computer science and this TED-Ed video walks us through three possible sorts: bubble sort, insertion sort, and quicksort.
For more on sorting, check out Sorting Algorithms Visualized, sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing, and a site where you can compare many different sorting algorithms with each other. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: programming · video
“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.
Tags: art · art school · color · Evan Puschak · Henri Matisse · video
Examples of a book cover design trend: multi-panel illustrations or “bento books”. Think the covers for Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
The humble hyperlink, the backbone of the entire internet, is increasingly endangered. “If you degrade hyperlinks…you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things.”
