January 12, 2019
Lloyd’s of London presents Brainstorm: Coming Soon To a Theater Near You
Thirty-five years ago, a fantastic movie came out that starred four Hollywood legends, three of whom were Oscar winners. It was directed by one of the most important and influential visual artists in film history, and the plot foretold the invention of virtual reality decades ahead of its time. The script was written as a showcase for a new technology designed to change the way we see movies. One of the Hollywood legends died before the movie was finished, a mysterious death, and this ended up being her last movie—And you’ve never heard of it. The True Story of the Lost Sci-Fi Movie 'Brainstorm,' Natalie Wood’s Last Film By Ryan D'Agostino and Eleanor Hildebrandt for Popular Mechanics, Dec. 21, 2018 [original trailer] [more inside]
Tribal Politics
How Tribal Psychology Makes us Prefer being Wrong. "...and Geoffrey Cohen — this is my favorite experiment that was ever done — he gave people a position on welfare and experimentally altered it so that either the Republicans or Democrats were saying basically the same thing on welfare....And what he found was that he could get people to change their position on welfare, 100 percent, all the way to the other side of the spectrum of policy, just based on what party they were told supported that position.... " [more inside]
Police killed an unarmed man-and this time the establishment took notice
Still, more than 13 months later, the FBI remains silent. The victim, Bijan Ghaisar, was a 25-year old accountant killed by the U.S. Park Police on November 17, 2017, after leaving the scene of a minor traffic accident. The FBI is investigating. That is all that is publicly known. [more inside]
Twelve Safe Alternatives to the Bird Box Challenge
Veronica Lewis, on Twitter (also on Threadreader and on her blog): "I've seen the #BirdBoxChallenge all over social media lately. As someone with low vision and a blindness cane user, it worries me to see many unsafe and inaccurate videos about doing tasks with no vision. Here is a thread on safe and positive alternatives to the viral challenge."
Everyone's a critic
Padme the cat has strong opinions about art. Baroque portraiture isn't her thing
WOODIES
Woodies! That's what devotees call cars with wood construction in the bodywork--and the devotees are legion. The whippersnappers among us may be more familiar with "wallpaper woodies" like the '86 Dodge Caravan, which featured woodgrain sheet vinyl. Over at Old Woodies, woodie enthusiast David Miller has exhaustively catalogued the history of the woodie with a zeal redolent of the '90s internet: American woodies, British woodies, French woodies, weird woodies, wicker woodies. Old woodie ads! Woodie miniatures!
Thrillist has opinions on the 10 Best Woodies of All Time, while Popular Mechanics looks at 5 classics alongside 5 of the worst. (Previously: Retired French cabinet-maker builds wooden Citroen 2CV)
Young Pickers of Note, 2019 Edition
Bluegrass guitarists Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle jam out on the Townes Van Zandt classic "White Freightliner Blues." [more inside]
Judging the bog passable which hath such things growing there on
It's #Januhairy! Dr Kate Lister of The Whores of Yore (NSFW) gives an overview of the cultural history of female pubic hair. [more inside]
The Testament of Malice
"When the rolling boulder crashes into a solid piece of terrain like a pillar or wall, the boulder sprouts two long triple-jointed clawed arms and an enormous fanged maw. The rolling boulder is in fact an elder mimic that pulls its body along with its lanky arms and attempts to shovel fleeing sisters into its mouth." Testament of Malice is a free collection of 100 traps for dungeon Hell temple crawls. [more inside]
A theology that could not have been represented in egg
Jonathan Miller (1998): On reflection A 1998 BBC documentary from Jonathan Miller, on reflections, surfaces, sheen, colour, shine, and the way oils transformed the ability to represent light, and hence darkness.
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