Lines, Ranked. “2. Assembly. It’s not glamorous, but hot damn is it effective.”

A supercut of context-free intertitles from Adam Curtis documentaries. Even if you don’t know who Adam Curtis is, this is entertaining.

New episode of Great Art Explained on Francis Bacon. “A new generation was starting to ask - who gets to decide what is right? And who has the authority to tell us how to live?”

20 years ago: a guy interviewing for an IT job gets pulled onto live TV. “Mr. Goma is being celebrated as a folk hero of sorts for anyone who has ever found themselves ill-equipped for a challenge in the workplace.”

Jon Krakauer writes about what has changed about climbing Mt. Everest since he wrote Into Thin Air. “The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine.”

Infants are dying because parents are opting-out of vitamin K shots. “In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention.”

My pal Matt Haughey recut the first season of Apple TV’s Murderbot into a 3.5-hour-long movie. “I did it fast so there are a few jarring cuts, but I now have an entertaining as hell movie with zero interruptions.”

This is nuts: Fred Again has uploaded a video of every single show he did during his USB002 tour (except Mexico City) — it’s four and a half days long. “im told this is the longest video on YouTube ever?”

Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile) Tags: design · Eric Rohman · movie posters · movies

The official trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was just released. Really looking forward to this.

What now-familiar domain names looked like before they were bought by big-time companies, e.g. openai.com was “the personal homepage of a guy named glenn”, doordash.com was a porn site, threads.com sold spools of thread.

Pocket forests. “The Miyawaki method of reforestation inserts small, densely packed wild acreage into urban environs. It’s proving wildly successful.” The key is densely planting diverse & native species…this isn’t just planting some trees.

Could This Fish Be a Notebook? “David Byrne learns how fisheries from Iceland to the Great Lakes are using 100% of their catch — and shares his tips for making fish head soup.”

Huh. A24 is coming out with an Anthony Bourdain biopic that focuses on the time period around the chef/writer’s college years, when he first started working in kitchens. Directed by Matt Johnson, who co-created Nirvana the Band the Show and directed BlackBerry. Could be good. (via rex)

Tags: Anthony Bourdain · movies · Tony · trailers · video

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in black & white with the Japanese audio track “becomes the best ‘Space Kurosawa’ movie ever made”.

Microshifting. “From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks. When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” This is how I’ve worked for the past decade+…bursts of work throughout the day & week.

The Booksellers is a 2019 feature-length documentary film about antiquarian and rare book dealers; you can watch the whole movie for free on YouTube.

The artist Banksy has installed (without a permit, one assumes) a new statue in London that depicts a man in a suit marching off off a ledge, blinded by a flag.

The artwork has been dubbed Blind Patriotism, although Banksy, enigmatic as always, doesn’t explain the meaning of his latest work. However, many have interpreted it as satirising the rise of nationalistic fervour in the UK, typified by the populist politician Nigel Farage and other forces on the far right.

Another bullseye for Banksy. 🎯

Tags: art · Banksy · politics

Designer Jenny Volvovski’s collection of unsolicited book cover designs. “I really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.”

I’m not a fan of the first part of this music video (reminds me too much of dipshits I had to endure at school), but the single-take choreography from ~4:18 is great.

According to this peer-reviewed paper, the “screeching sound of peeling tape” is caused by tiny sonic booms. The speeds at work here are in the range of Mach 0.7–1.8. Supersonic crafts!

NASA has released some 12,000 unseen photos from the recent Artemis II mission; here are some of the best shots.

Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow?

The answer key is here, along with this tidbit:

The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.

See also this super-sized US map with 64 states.

And then after I wrote all of the above, I decided to check and of course I’d posted about this map before, soon after it came out. *sigh*

Tags: maps · usa · xkcd

A 55-minute mix of Boards of Canada B-sides and rarities.

“They Would Never Use the Death Star on Us”: Alderaan Residents Reflect on Their Support for the Empire as a Large Imperial Installation Enters the System. “The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch…”

I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retiremen...

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes. “The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue.”

Ohhhhh dear, Richard Dawkins: Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude Appears to Be Conscious. “My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.” 😬

Unruly Play: “A collection of 169 works of play in unlikely places. Games about unusual things. Unexpected encounters.”

Ada Palmer & Bruce Schneier: AI Learns Language From Skewed Sources. That Could Change How We Humans Speak – and Think. “Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.”