My gravy recipe involves the creation of a turkey stock made with chicken stock instead of water. Someday I am going to use that stock as the base liquid for a third stock, and take American gravy technology into the 21st century.

Tom Petty is clearly the all-time champion at fully characterizing someone with a single lyric, but Ween’s “I think I spent the dog food money,” is pretty goddamned good.

If you are home for the holidays and your relatives have an LG OLED that looks terrible, you can do more than just turn off motion smoothing. Here are all the settings:

Final Destination 4, a.k.a. The Final Destination, seems like a huge drop in quality without context: it was designed to cash in on the 3D craze, the original director dropped out, and the replacement (David R. Ellis, who directed FD2) took the job for the chance to goof around with 3D.

“In this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld. In this life, you’re on your own.” –Prince “Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That‘s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.” –Loren Vissar

You’ve gone too far this time, Woolgar (2002)!

Here is my official ranking of Charles Laughton movies. 1. The Night of the Hunter.

imagine walking down the beach and seeing jesus carrying some guy

If an AI crash makes the associated hardware worthless, I hope we burn through excess inventory the same way we dealt with gas guzzling cars in the 70s: Let Hollywood use data centers for spectacularly destructive (and surprisingly affordable) set pieces in movies and tv shows of all budget levels.

Harrison Gray Otis, who knew something about Southern California boosterism, once credited the region’s popularity to “climate, real estate, and brass bands.” Well, we got rid of the brass bands, and look where we are now.

Just passed a Netflix billboard proclaiming that someone called The Diplomat “a masterclass.” Nothing against the show, and maybe I’m missing context, but is there any filmmaking or storytelling technique where the *best* example to study is The Diplomat?

You don’t hear a lot of rappers bragging about chilling at the beach down at Club Med anymore.

Now that I’ve fixed the power button on our receiver, I can get back to my true passion: optimizing our remote control configuration. LG doesn’t include a dedicated “Screen Off” remote code for when I’m listening to music? It’s custom macro season, motherfuckers!

John Fetterman won’t see your posts about his book selling badly, but all your friends who wrote biographies of Clyde Bruckman that sold like 100 copies will!

Excited about “Golgo 13,” but I want to point out that consumer home video recording technology began in the 1960s, not the 1970s. The Sony CV-2000 is from 1965.

They cut off the punchline of “Powder Blue” from the version on streaming! Here’s the original, they start introducing the band at 2:25. Wonder if it’s still complete on the CD version? (It is on mine but I bought it when it came out.)

The Criterion Wages of Fear looks perfect. I don’t know what they are doing to get a nitrate sheen on video but they should keep doing it.

they’re forcing kids to read “the caine mutiny,” because of wouk

Worried that calibrating your TV won’t take up enough of your time to become an obsession that drives your friends and family away? Remember: modern TVs use different settings for each picture format, so if you want things to look right, you have to (or get to, really!) calibrate each TV nine times!

One of my old pairs of Apple earbuds has failed in a uniquely alarming way: Both channels still work, but the left channel plays at maybe 25% of normal volume. If you know someone who would benefit from thinking they’d finally developed permanent hearing loss, drop me a line. (It didn’t benefit me!)

Muttering the names of the Criterion DVDs I’d like to upgrade to Blu-ray to myself like Arya Stark.

I implore you all to keep in mind that The Association basically invented Beck back in 1967:

OK here is one other thing about setting up televisions: You should buy a dedicated streaming device. Apple and Roku (and I assume Chrome; I use Apple) have settings that allow you to display streamed content at its original frame rate and dynamic range. Built-in apps *do not.*

Oh, shit, @jamellebouie.net is writing the Criterion essay for the Network 4K release. I may have to pre-order. www.criterion.com/films/34869-...

TFW it is 1985 and you are an academic who does not sell as many books as Marshall McLuhan.

Having physically listed out all the settings you have to change to stop an LG OLED from spying on you or screwing up the picture, I am now much more sympathetic to people whose TVs are set up incorrectly. No reason yours should be, though!

Ghost blimp. Ghost blimp!

I’m sure I lost some followers but if you’re still here, rest assured: I have no plans to post any more TV settings. For now.

Okay. Here are the TV settings you need to get the best picture possible out of an LG OLED. Mine is a C4--on older models some of the names are different. (If I have time some time I'll get the older setting names from a CX.)

Successfully removed the spring from my receiver’s power button with the broken latch so now it can just stay on. Replaced the front panel, carefully routed every cable, now I just have to replace a few zip ties, put the cover back on, and figure out what else I broke in the process of repairs.

“Caesar’s Theme” from the score to The Underground Railroad may be Nicholas Brittel doing a Comfortably-Numb-in-Thief grade soundalike for “On the Nature of Daylight,” but it’s still great (and a better idea than reusing such an overexposed track). Wonder if Richter was on the temp score.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope. Yes, THAT Pope.

If I were going to guess who’d be on this list, it would be, like, Eddie Cochran or the folks in “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band” (one of whom is Jim Croce, so I guess one of his three picks is not surprising). Quoting from “Welcome Interstate Managers? Kind of surprising!

Los Angeles briefly had a newspaper called “The Fool Killer.” Newspapers.com has only two issues. Despite having a cool name, it was anti-Chinese, anti-women’s suffrage, and had no connection to the comic book character.

The AI industry reminds me of the problems faced by Victorian doctors: Scientific progress was slowed by an antiquated legal environment, forcing innovators to break the law instead of wasting their time changing it, for the good of humanity. And that is why we still have Resurrection Men.

If Nuzzi’s book is written in terza rima we are all going to owe her a big apology.

So it’s the King James Bible, but which translation of the Comedy? Mandelbaum? Singleton? Pinsky’s Inferno? Verse or prose? Does she read Italian?

Why wait until your relatives die to replace them with an AI chatbots?

Just learned that my former professor, friend, and mentor Stephanie Vaughn, has died. For those unaware, Stephanie's book SWEET TALK is one of the greatest American story collections, up there with the likes of JESUS' SON. This is the justly famous intro of her story "Dog Heaven"

I keep getting more and more excited to learn about life here in California by reading Vanity Fair’s coverage!

Honestly this is funnier than the space version (which is hilarious). Will wives enjoy this more? Probably not!

This is the problem I had with the first season of The Boys; it was already clear there was no longer any such thing as a presidency-ending scandal. (S2 though!)

There’s something about this that’s so wah-wah pedal, it’s like, “How much more wah-wah pedal could this be?” And the answer is none. None more wah-wah pedal.

Nabokov’s advice to his students about how to be a good reader (the part about buying a dictionary, keeping it nearby, and looking up words you don’t know) is correct, and if we teach reading in a way that discourages that, and it seems like we do, I think that’s terrible.

I blame this on streaming media. We have a whole generation of people who didn’t have to watch “The Boys From Brazil” when a game got rained out.

“Smell the Glove” in 3D!

I just realized that although high sampling rates aren’t audible to humans, they’d be necessary to digitize things in a way that would sound right to dogs. Was this Neil Young’s plan all along?

CDs should have remained popular in the mp3 era when they were clearly a higher quality product, but I don’t see the point of digital physical media once lossless streaming arrives. (See also: the VHS revival.)

Although it spent subsequent decades as the rottenest of rotten boroughs, there was a brief moment when the people in Vernon actually wanted people to move to Vernon.

Learning enough about mixing audio to appreciate it when it’s well done, nowhere near enough to do it well myself. That “Salieri of all trades, Mozart of none” file keeps getting bigger and bigger.