Things I Have Enjoyed & Learnt 022
I have been recovering from surgery for the last few weeks, so this one is a bit TikTok heavy. Apologies if that's not your thing.
Things I Have Enjoyed
The NHS paying for me to have my surgery at a private hospital. I had my own room and everything; very swanky.
Twisters. Hard to explain, but it felt very much precision engineered to be good, rather that just "naturally" good (reminded me of Top Gun: Maverick in that sense) but I think the director, Lee Isaac Chung, is probably one to watch.
The cast of The Instigators: Matt Damon, Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ron Perlman, Toby Jones ...
The Heat Wave Toolkit. Not sure I'm ready to cover my windows in yoghurt though.
Rebel Ridge might be my movie of the year. I need to go back and rewatch Blue Ruin and Green Room.
TikTok Corner:
- TEMU CROISSANT LAMP. If you only watch one of these TikToks, make it this one.
- "You better not be turning your Antarctic fieldwork into a Wes Anderson film" Part II
- The absolutely pitch-perfect delivery of this "we let our Gen Z intern write the advert" TikTok from Curry's. In exactly the sweet spot between too cringe and not cringe enough.
- This cute couple explaining each other's PhDs.
- I think the hashtagpostmodernironic social media trend has maybe gone too far, but I did quite like this nonsense from the RSPB.
- I found the woman who made the lipsync mirror video from last time, and she has made a whole load more.
- This comparison of the RNC v DNC roll calls. Still can't get over "to the walls" being replaced by "Governor Walz" by Lil Jon himself.
- Rating welds on a $780M cruise ship. I love this sort of thing. I do the same sort of thing every time I see a teaching scene on TV.
Things I Have Learnt
Nerds are using CT scanners to look inside sealed boxes of Pokémon cards. This is apparently a Very Bad Thing and is causing enormous disruption in the card trading community. From a physics point of view there's an interesting question about how I'd modify a card so that it would show whether or not it had been x-rayed.
A phonetic pangram is a sentence which contains all of the phonemes in a language, rather than all of the letters of the alphabet. Reminds me of the Mission: Impossible: III scene with Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt having Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian read off a card so that he could replace his voice as well as his face with the signature mask technology. Strikes me that you could use these sentences to create a voice model for future AI use. (In googling this scene I just discovered the author of the card used wrote about the experience.)
A logo on a prosthesis is like a tattoo you didn't ask for.
There is a new suggested way of specifying colours in web browsers, okLCH, an improvement on the red-green-blue and hue-saturation-lightness systems. One suggested nickname for this new system is "Oklachroma".
The End
Back to work on a phased return next week, so less TikTok next time.
Alby