Tag: Entertainment
-
Features
It’s fashionable to mock Youtube Shorts and Tiktok as catering to modern short attention spans. True except for modern. Entertainment has always provided brief moments and quick distractions for people who can’t devote several hours of intense concentration to a novel or an opera or a Gone With The Wind. Lately I’ve been talking about…
-
Radartoons
Haven’t done one of these in a while. We’re being invaded by the entire Western Hemisphere, starting with snow from Canada! And here’s the bombing in progress. First snow of the season.
-
Trying for the Ig-Nobel
New study on a fashionable subject: Predicting potential problems of persistent plastic particulates Peer-Reviewed Publication I don’t know if the Ig-Nobel still exists. After science tortured and strangled the world for three years, not many folks feel like laughing at science. We OUGHT to be laughing and mocking the whole fucking mess, but there’s not…
-
Philosophical dream
A rare plotted dream tonight. I was wandering through the woods with a Chinese hermit who had made little shelters for himself from piles of tires. At the end of the dream he told me: “If you don’t want to be rich you have more freedom. It’s the same in every system.” Not wildly dramatic…
-
The magic lantern oscilloscope
I bumped into this item sideways. I was looking at a peculiar early typewriter designed by Wheatstone. Since I’m addicted to Wheatstone I tried to animate it, but it was poorly described and pictured. The article noted that it was built by a Mr Pickler, so I started looking in that direction for more info.…
-
Today is & day!
Time to reprint the genuine history of the symbol, which doesn’t match the standard etymology. = = = = = START REPRINT: I’ve always been bothered by the bizarre-sounding etymology of Ampersand. The symbol itself is no mystery: just a stylized version of et. But the usual etymology for the name doesn’t make a lick…
-
Worth reading
Denyse at MindMatters points to an eminently wise essay on AI. Denyse: Others are worried that ChatGPT will detract from a “love of learning” and “critical thinking,” according to Bloomberg. The new AI tool has cast a wrench in plagiarism detection and poses even philosophical questions about what education should be FOR. According to college…
-
Natural clock?
After pondering the eightness of natural money, and the twoness and fourness of natural sleep, the concepts merged in my tired brainlet into a question. What if clocks were consistently binary? Our clocks inherited the quadrants of Roman ‘watches’, mixed with the 12s and 60s of the Babylonian system. As with money, we say the…
-
Dumb multitasking
Multipurpose devices are a tricky idea. Some of them work out, most don’t. Radios with phonographs and radios with clocks were common. Radios in cars were a good idea, and in fact the radio took precedence over more prosaic devices like windshield wipers or heaters. The radio had the place of honor in the center…
-
The old Hollywood
The folks at Ankler are discussing the Barbie/Oppenheimer pair, observing that it breaks out of the Tech Tyrant model and restores the old Hollywood way of working. Rushfield notes that the techies were trying to create algorithmic certainty by running endless remakes of reliable ‘brands’. Entertainment doesn’t work that way. Semiquoting: We’re SHOW people. We…
-
When didn’t it matter?
Rob Lowe’s latest piece takes the long way around to plead for less fussiness by the unions. I think. During the long trip he makes a point that seems automatic but maybe isn’t. He’s talking about what entertainers call continuity, the small details that some people notice immediately but most people don’t see at all.…
-
Zenith animism
Zenith always added life to its products. The fancier radios had ‘entertainment on all sides’, with active dials and Magic Eye tubes and lively controls. Their fanciest record changer in the ’50s had one uniquely analog feature. The speed was smoothly controllable. Other phonos selected 16, 33, 45 and 78. The Cobra-Matic could be set…
-
Repetition isn’t bad
Denyse at MindMatters says: Hollywood has been developing a culture that welcomes AI-generated content with its tendency to pressure writers to fit a formulaic narrative structure instead of encouraging them to pursue real creativity and collaboration. Well, this is hardly new. Mass entertainment has always been a repetitive product, and that’s a good thing. Humans…
-
Today is UFO day!
Time to revisit the UFOdeo! We’re looking at an old tourist court, with a shady-looking truck and trailer parked in one of the spaces. It’s a 1915 Pierce truck, with some unique features. The four-speed transmission had a semi-freewheeling device. When you pushed the clutch down all the way, the input shaft of the gearbox…
-
De Vast Atery
DailyMail tries to transcribe Fetterman’s question to a bureaucrat about the recent major problem on I95 in Philly. (It wasn’t a failure of the bridge itself; it was a tanker truck that burned up a bridge. So it wasn’t a Federal policy concern, and didn’t need to be discussed in Congress.) “I, uh, would just,…
Polistra's Mill 