At long last, we have created the Entertainment from David Foster Wallace’s classic sci-fi novel “A Novel Can Have a Fractal Structure Even After Extensive Editing, Also Don’t Create the Entertainment.”

I believe that, in my hands, a wishing stone powered by the deafening shrieks of fallen angels could change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has . . .

robert mueller did NOT kill himself

We should at least get tick-tock reporting about other dementia cases and their flights of fancy.

(Pictured: the Dorothy B. Hughes train.)

everybody needs to get on the dorothy b hughes train!!!!! sure chandler can sling a sentence but hughes had the extremely rare gift of a true empathetic imagination and no one has ever done noir better

This is “Faces of Death” erasure.

My God. I noted that he used “mutilization” while speaking but I didn’t think he’d actually write it out.

The guy who bungled all the hangings at Nuremberg eventually electrocuted himself trying to change a lightbulb while standing in a puddle of water.

Everyone remembers the “whited sepulchres” line, but Jesus also accused the Pharisees of being bad dishwashers.

If Dems made demand to get all kids & their caretakers out of concentration camps, grinding all Congressional business to halt plus using their massive texting lists to organize caravans to create Occupy Dilly encampment, I would give them every dollar I have. And so would many.

To be fair, they also did this at Nuremberg.

It’s been nearly 40 years and upon revisiting the first cassettes I bought with my own money (Green, R.E.M.; Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death, the Dead Kennedys; Bucky Fellini, the Dead Milkman) I renounce NONE OF THEM. Good job, little me!

I rest my case

I can see some possible future downsides to asking airports to assume that masked goons who refuse to identify themselves are supposed to be allowed past security.

I know this is an obvious thing to say but we should talk more about what a racist this guy is. He’s as racist as George Wallace or Strom Thurmond but unlike them he often escapes having racism mentioned as a leading cause for all his decisions.

There was me, that is Saxon, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

heh heh heh... that oughta buy me some time

mfw I stunt on the uptight waitstaff

just figured all of these out

Friedkin’s “The Hunted” is one of those movies where you feel like you’re attending the pitch meeting. It’s First Blood from the commander’s point of view, with Apocalypse Now characteristics, and Tommy Lee Jones will remind people how much they liked The Fugitive!

Jesus, they weren’t bloody joking.

i have an AI idea for investors. i want to buy a house and ay I need you to pay for it.

This is what happens when you buy and open a knock-off brand Lament Configuration.

One stem separator later, I can report that the lyric in the Pixies’ “Dancing the Manta Ray” is “THIS don’t swim, this fly,” not “fish don’t swim” or whatever else. I can also report that listening to a Frank Black performance without musical accompaniment is not the best way to appreciate his art.

After looking closely at some footage from my 2001 VHS tape that I captured without a time-based corrector, I think I have solved this mystery. The light and dark pattern in the very upper row is closed captioning; the whiter-than-white areas at the very bottom are Macrovision copy protection.

*And* you can get a digital antenna that plugs into your Smart TV for under $20. You can also watch the Oscars, the World Series, Sunday Football, and your local news for $0/month.

Like the purpose of a lot of AI functionality seems to be to get revenge on your perceived enemies by putting them out of work, etc, even though we can see full well that AI is not up to these tasks. And in fact it seems to require a lot of human guidance to work well.

Neither the American people nor the American system of government were capable of stopping Trump! It’s ridiculous to ask the rest of the world to ignore that and declare us blameless, especially when we still haven’t stopped him.

I heard there was a secret cord that David kept in his cable hoard but he can never find it when he needs it

My favorite glimpse into the frictionless life of rich people in Hollywood was the guy my wife worked for who didn’t like being driven but also didn’t like parking at the airport, so two assistants would follow him to LAX in another car and one would drive his car back.

Show somebody who absolutely rocks a hat and isn’t Indiana Jones.

imo the theme of the second trump administration (and the COVID year of the first one!) is super rich guys being genuinely surprised when they can’t buy their way out of physical, material reality

Using ChatGPT to draft an email announcing layoffs is cowardly, disrespectful, and dishonorable.

You can manually do passive surround decoding in Logic Pro but you can’t do Pro Logic. This is false advertising.

The Metaverse.

Two prophets.

I think you could cobble together a working Pro Logic decoder in Logic Pro using noise gates to determine channel dominance and apply attenuation but I can’t find documentation of the guts of the process.

Did high-end A/V receivers doing realtime video digitization at the end of the analog area incorporate a time-based-corrector? Mine does not, it just loses the signal if you fast forward or rewind while playing.

thanks to AI our slow and humiliating national suicide will be punctuated by visual media that is so good even a dog could jack off to it

Dolby Stereo encoding/decoding does enough of a number on the stems that mixing engineers had their 4.0 stems fed into an encoder and then through a decoder *while mixing the film*. They never actually worked with the unaltered stems, only the extracted 4.0, to avoid surprises.

That weird whiter-than-white part of the video signal on my 2001 VHS is visible during normal playback on my (digital) TV. Still at the bottom, despite appearing to be the closed captioning.

Did Dolby ever release detailed information about their original active matrix steering? The first implementation of ProLogic. I have a receiver that can do vintage digital PL or various flavors of PLII so manufacturers must have had this, but I can’t find it.

Gatekeeping is not always bad. See, e.g., Errol Morris’s film “Mr. Death,” about a guy who does his own research. A skeleton key to the 21st century.

IIRC, Harold Bloom kind of thought Shakespeare invented introspection. Have these people never seen a dog try to execute a plan and fail? That whole “enjoying mysefk by the lake” tweet isn’t just projection.

The reason someone like Andreessen decides that introspection is some kind of a trick to make him feel bad about himself is that whenever he thinks about the things he’s done and why he did them, he feels bad about himself. This is not a problem with introspection per se.

I get that the Academy Awards producers are desperate to capture the American zeitgeist but nobody wants to watch their tribute to Emil Jannings.

My thoughts on “Scarpetta”: That was a pretty good restaurant, even allowing for the fact that their signature pasta was a riff on Marcella Hazan’s sauce. Their mushroom polenta? Amazing. Eventually we all become the original film critic for The Onion, that guy with dementia. Remember him?

One thing about film is it seems more forgiving of fuckups; a film shot where the contrast is high and details in the dark areas vanish looks stylized and deliberate, a digital shot where they lit flat and didn’t do anything in post looks dull and underbaked.

This weekend we watched “A Perfect Murder” and once again were awed at the ways the film conventions of the 1990s aged from “transparent” to “unbelievably mannered and stylized.” Then discovered this is also true of “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012).