Trailer for Dune: Part Two
Ok, here’s the first trailer for second part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Time to get hyped! It comes out on November 3 — we have until then to decide what “Timothée Chalamet rides the worm” is a euphemism for.
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kottke.org posts about video
The Kidnappers Foil, the Most Remade Movie in History
For his second Iconic Sans video, David Friedman tells us about an itinerant filmmaker who travelled the country from the 30s to the 50s making the same movie over and over again with different casts of local children.
Why would somebody remake a movie hundreds of times? Was he obsessed? Mad? Director Melton Barker was a traveling filmmaker (historians call him an “itinerant filmmaker”) who went town to town from the 1930s to the 1970s convincing everyday folks to pay him to be in his movie “The Kidnappers Foil” over and over and over. He used the same script each time, with an all local cast. It’s a fascinating bit of Americana and cinema history.
You can learn more about The Kidnappers Foil at this site from The Texas Archive of the Moving Image, watch several full-length versions on the film on YouTube, or use the script to make your own version.
One of the Last Chino-Latino Restaurants in NYC
This is a sweet video profile of La Dinastia, one of the last old-school, family-run places in NYC where you can find Chino-Latino cuisine. From Lisa Chiu at ThoughtCo, a brief history of Asian-Latin food blends:
Cuban-Chinese Cuisine is the traditional fusing of Cuban and Chinese food by Chinese migrants to Cuba in the 1850s. Brought to Cuba as laborers, these migrants and their Cuban-Chinese progeny developed a cuisine that blended Chinese and Caribbean flavors.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, many Cuban Chinese left the island and some established Cuban Chinese food restaurants in the United States, mainly in New York City and Miami. Some diners contend that Cuban-Chinese food is more Cuban than Chinese.
There are also other genres of Chinese-Latin and Asian-Latin food blends created by Asian migrants to Latin America over the last two centuries.
See also Chinese Latinos Explain Chino-Latino Food and from The Village Voice in 2014, The Definitive Guide to NYC’s Chinese-Latin American Restaurants, many of which, like La Dinastia, are still around.
An AI Artist Explains His Workflow
No matter which side you come down on in the debate about using AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to create digital art, this video of an experienced digital artist explaining how he uses AI in his workflow is worth a watch. I thought this comment was particularly interesting:
I see the overall process as a joint effort with the AI. I’ve been a traditional artist for 2 decades, painting on canvas. And in the last five years I’ve been doing a lot of digital art. So from that part of myself, I don’t feel threatened at all.
I feel this is an opportunity. An opportunity for many new talented people to jump on a new branch of art that is completely different from the one that we have already in digital art and just open up new way of being creative.
The Galactic Menagerie, Wes Anderson’s Star Wars
It’s a no-brainer: what if you handed over a visually rich sci-fi universe with slightly campy origins to a quirky auteur with an overwhelming aesthetic, just to see what you’d get? This short trailer imagines Wes Anderson at the helm of his very own Star Wars movie, complete with Bill Murray as Obi-Wan and Owen Wilson as Darth Vader (wow).
See also, from back in 2012, Conan O’Brien’s take on Wes Anderson’s Star Wars, A Life Galactic. I would totally watch either of these movies tbh.
A Mandalorian Banger: This Is the Way
Leave it to the Auralnauts to take The Mandalorian’s solemn catchphrase “This is the way”, back it with a pulsing beat, and turn it into the banger of the summer. Ok, maybe not. But in the process, they counted 222 uses of the phrase over the three seasons of the show (and also during The Book of Boba Fett, I think).
Related: one hour of Zemo dancing from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. (via neatorama)
Five Graphs That Changed the World
In a video from The Royal Society, Adam Rutherford shares five data visualizations that have changed the world, including Florence Nightingale’s Crimean War mortality charts, John Snow’s map of cholera outbreaks, W.E.B. Du Bois’ data portraits of Black Americans, eugenicist Henry Goddard’s notorious (and fictional) Kallikak family tree, and Ed Hawkins’ climate warming stripes. (via open culture)
Some Cool NY Times Ads
These two ads for the NY Times are really effective at communicating the breadth of the paper’s offerings and also how everything, from sneakers to climate change to gravity, is connected to everything else.
Here’s more info from It’s Nice That.
Pepperoni Hug Spot
I’m not going to make a habit of posting AI generated video and photography here (mainly because most of it is not that interesting) but Pepperoni Hug Spot is just too perfect a name for a pizza place to pass up. And it’s got Too Many Cooks vibes.
Hunting Kestrels Are Nature’s Steadycams
This video from Paul Dinning features kestrels hunting in Cornwall. I will never tire of watching raptors hovering in the wind, their wings & bodies making dozens of micro-adjustments a second so that they can keep their heads perfectly still and focused on searching for prey on the ground below. From The Kid Should See This:
Like hummingbirds and kingfishers, kestrels have the advantage of a larger accessory optic system, a sort of superhero power that detects movement and helps keep their balance, enabling unparalleled head stabilization while hovering. By bobbing their heads periodically, kestrels can estimate distances and locate prey, sometimes by seeing urine trails with their ultraviolet-sensitive vision.
Watch until the end to see a kestrel eating a still-writhing snake. 😳
See also The Perfect Head Stabilization of a Hunting Red-Tailed Hawk, This Owl Will Not Move His Head, and The Eerie Stillness of Chicken Heads.
Timelapse Video of a Massive Cruise Ship Being Built
So you’ve seen how an 18th century sailing battleship was built. But that was for a vessel 227 feet long that could carry around 850 people. This timelapse video shows the construction of a much larger ship: a modern-day, 1,100-foot-long cruise ship that houses 6,600 passengers. The size of this thing is just ridiculous, bordering on the obscene. It took me a second to realize that the giant thing they were constructing in the first minute of the video is in fact an engine, which, when compared to the rest of the ship, is not that big at all. Make sure you watch to the end to see the oddball paint job on the bow.
See also a timelapse of a second ship of this class being built, which focuses on different details. (via core77)
How an 18th Century Sailing Battleship Works
If you, like me, are currently reading David Grann’s new book The Wager and are having trouble visualizing exactly what British Royal Navy ships of that era look like and how they work, you might want to watch this video. The 3D fly-through model ship in this video, HMS Victory, is larger and more recently constructed than any of the ships in The Wager (the biggest of which is HMS Centurion) but the basic layout and principles are the same.
How to Carve Marble Like Italian Master Donatello
In a video for the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor Simon Smith shows us how Renaissance sculptor Donatello might have approached carving a piece from marble, which Smith calls “the Emperor of all stones”.
It’s all about trapping shadows. Carving is all about having deep cuts here and lighter here and the angle here and how the light plays on it. And certainly in relief…because relief carving like this, it’s kind of halfway between sculpture and drawing. If you’re doing a three-dimensional sculpture, if a form runs around the back you just carve it so it goes around the back, but with this you have to give the illusion of it running around the back like a drawing. You’ve got to make something look like it turns around and comes out the other side even though it really is just going into the block. And that’s all about angles and shadow and light.
The 13 Levels of Complexity of Turntable Scratching
My post last week about The 13 Levels of Complexity of Drumming got me interested in Larnell Lewis, but I also started going back through Wired’s Levels series to check out some of the ones I’d missed.
First up is DJ Shortkut explaining the 15 levels of turntable scratching. DJing is one of those things that I enjoy the output of but don’t know much about, so it was fun to have it broken down like that. Beat juggling is incredibly cool and looks super difficult to master. 🤯
Channel Drift (Or: Why Cable TV Networks Are All the Same Now)
MTV used to show music videos. Bravo was home to opera and jazz programming. The Learning Channel focused on educational programming. The History Channel aired shows about history. Discovery: nature shows. A&E: fine arts and educational content. Now they all air a lot of reality TV programming like Vanderpump Rules, MILF Manor (I had to look this one up to make sure it’s an actual show), and Duck Dynasty. This video from Captain Midnight explains how and why “channel drift” happened (hint: follow the money).
The Slow but Inevitable Overwhelm of Consumer Capitalism
In his animated short film Five Cents, which was inspired by his student debt struggles, Aaron Hughes deftly (but gently) skewers modern consumerism, as his film’s character navigates a series of escalating purchases with a little found money. (via the kid should see this)
Wes Anderson’s Staged Re-Creations of Out of Sight, Armageddon, and The Truman Show for the 1999 MTV Movie Awards
Wow, I’d never seen these before today! For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Wes Anderson created three promo spots, each one a staged re-creation of a nominated movie in the style of the Hollywood-inspired plays in Rushmore (Serpico & the Vietnam War one). All three shorts (Armageddon, Out of Sight, The Truman Show) star Jason Schwartzman as Max Fisher, along with the rest of the Max Fischer Players. (via open culture)
An Epic Improvisation
Hahaha you thought I was kidding about this being a Larnell Lewis fan site today, but I’ve got one more video for you. This is a live recording of a song by the jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy and — hold on, before you wander off having heard that collection of words, let me preface this by saying that I am not really a jam band person or a jazz fusion person and I thought this was pretty amazing.
So anyway, legend has it that Snarky Puppy were all set to record a live record in Holland and their regular drummer couldn’t make it, so they called Lewis to fill in. He learns the music on the plane ride over to Europe and — what? yeah, he learned the music on the plane ride over and then when he gets there…just watch the video above to see what happens.
I admit I didn’t quite get what was so special about this at first, but around the 4:20 mark things really start to get interesting and by the end I was grinning like an idiot. Cory Henry does the keyboard solo and Lewis backs him on it like they’ve been playing together for three lifetimes. As one of the YouTube commenters put it:
I just discovered this about 2 hours ago… I’ve been a musician for 20+ years… After watching this performance, I’ve now been a musician for about 2 hours.
(via @caleb, who noted the many reactions to this video on YouTube)
Drummer Plays Metallica’s Enter Sandman After Hearing It Only Once
Ok sorry everyone but kottke.org is a Larnell Lewis fan blog today. This morning, I featured a video of Lewis, a Grammy-winning musician and music professor, explaining the 13 levels of complexity of drumming. In response, a pair of readers sent me this video, in which Lewis hears Metallica’s Enter Sandman for the first time (!) and then largely succeeds in playing it after a single listen (!!). You may find yourself wanting to skip to the part where he starts playing, but it’s really fascinating to watch him encoding the music into his brain and body through a combination of active listening, moving his body to the drumbeat, and spatially mapping the music to his drum kit. (thx, robert & matthew)
The 13 Levels of Complexity of Drumming
I love Wired’s video series on the levels of complexity of various activities, and they got someone really good to show us about drumming. Larnell Lewis is a Grammy Award-winning musician and a professor of music at Humber College in Toronto and his tour of the 13 levels of drumming, from easy to complex, is super clear, entertaining, and informative. Aside from the names of some of the drum kit pieces, I did not know a damn thing about drumming before watching this and now my eyes have been opened to how amazing drummers are to be able to do all of that (and look cool as hell at the same time). Like, I can’t even comprehend how they keep all those rhythms going at the same time…it just seems like magic to me. Watching Lewis’s solo at the end gave me a real boost this morning.
Some of my other “levels” favorites: A Demonstration of 16 Levels of Piano Playing Complexity, Robert Lang on the 11 Levels of Complexity of Origami, How to Draw a Self-Portrait in 11 Levels of Increasing Complexity, and Tony Hawk on the 21 Levels of Complexity of Skateboard Tricks.
Concerning Rogue Waves
Tsunamis, tidal waves, storm surges, and other hazardous aquatic events can all unleash the great power of the sea on ships and shorelines, but rogue waves are the largest and most mysterious waves that our oceans can muster. Rogue waves are a fairly recent discovery…until you look carefully at the historical record. This video looks at all the different kinds of big waves and tracks previously unacknowledged rogue waves from their depiction in art (Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa) to a suspected 220-foot wave that battered an Irish lighthouse.
The Lisa Personal Computer: Apple’s Influential Flop
The Apple Lisa was the more expensive and less popular precursor to the Macintosh; a recent piece at the Computer History Museum called Lisa “Apple’s most influential failure”.
Apple’s Macintosh line of computers today, known for bringing mouse-driven graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to the masses and transforming the way we use our computers, owes its existence to its immediate predecessor at Apple, the Lisa. Without the Lisa, there would have been no Macintosh — at least in the form we have it today — and perhaps there would have been no Microsoft Windows either.
The video above from Adi Robertson at The Verge is a good introduction to the Lisa and what made it so simultaneously groundbreaking and unpopular. From a companion article:
To look at the Lisa now is to see a system still figuring out the limits of its metaphor. One of its unique quirks, for instance, is a disregard for the logic of applications. You don’t open an app to start writing or composing a spreadsheet; you look at a set of pads with different types of documents and tear off a sheet of paper.
But the office metaphor had more concrete technical limits, too. One of the Lisa’s core principles was that it should let users multitask the way an assistant might, allowing for constant distractions as people moved between windows. It was a sophisticated idea that’s taken for granted on modern machines, but at the time, it pushed Apple’s engineering limits - and pushed the Lisa’s price dramatically upward.
And from 1983, a demo video from Apple on how the Lisa could be used in a business setting:
And a more characteristically Apple ad for the Lisa featuring a pre-stardom Kevin Costner:
“What’s the Healthiest Way to Handle a Creeping Feeling That the World Is Ending?”
The end of the world is nigh…or at least it feels like that sometimes these days. As historian and archaeologist Ian Morris says in the video, the five factors that crop up throughout history when a major societal collapse occurs seem to be present today: mass migrations, epidemic disease, collapse of states, major famines, and climate change. So, how should we think about the potential impending disintegration of society? How should we prepare? How should we feel about it?
In this short film, filmmaker Ryan Malloy explores, in a “fretful yet lighthearted” way, how one should prepare for the apocalypse by talking to a historian & archaeologist (the aforementioned Morris), a therapist, and a couple of different types of preppers.
Putting together a supply kit made me realize just how helpless I’d be if disaster struck. When you think about it, it’s almost like we live in a world run by magic. I don’t know how water, electricity, and gas gets to my house, but they’ve always been there. It wouldn’t take much, even just a small crisis for them to be gone. What would it be like to live without these things?
Can Water Solve a Maze?
I saw this video on the front page a YouTube a couple of weeks ago and ignored it. Like, of course water can solve a maze, next! But then it got the Kid Should See This seal of approval so I gave it a shot. It turns out: water can solve a maze…but specifics are super interesting in several respects. Steve Mould, who you may remember from the assassin’s teapot video not too long ago, built four mazes of different sizes and shapes, each of them useful for demonstrating a different wrinkle in how the water moves through a maze. Recommended viewing for all ages.
How Solar Energy Got So Cheap
In 1976, the price per watt of energy generated by solar photovoltaic was over $100. In 2019, it was less than 50 cents per watt, a price decline of 99.6%. Even since 2009, solar has declined 90% in price. So what’s behind that incredible drop? Industry played a part but the main driver was forward-thinking government policy and subsidy of solar by countries like the US, Japan, Germany, and China:
In the course of a single lifetime, solar energy has transformed from a niche technology to the cheapest way to bring clean, reliable power to billions of people around the world. But the markets that brought us these lower prices didn’t just magically appear by some invisible hand. Political leaders in countries all over the world created these markets, then subsidized them for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. “By investing that money, you got the solar to come down in costs to the point where you don’t need to subsidize it anymore.”
One of the experts in the video, Gregory Nemet, is the author of a book called How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation if you’d like to read more on the development of solar.
What Happens When You Get Sick?
From Kurzgesagt, an accessible explanation of what happens to the human body when you get sick.
Your brain activates sickness behavior and reorganizes your body’s priorities to defense. The first thing you notice is that your energy level drops and you get sleepy. You feel apathetic, often anxious or down and you lose your appetite. Your sensitivity to pain is heightened and you seek out rest. All of this serves to save your energy and reroute it into your immune response.
They also reveal the best way to boost your immune system to protect yourself against disease. I don’t want to spoil it but it’s vaccines. Vaccines are one of the best things humans have ever invented.
The Sizes of Flying Creatures, Compared
Using 3D models, this video compares the sizes of various flying creatures (insects, bats, birds, dinosaurs) past and present, from the microscopic fairyfly (which is dwarfed by a mosquito) to the albatross (with its 12-foot wingspan) to the immense Quetzalcoatlus, which stood 20 feet tall and had a wingspan in the neighborhood of 33 feet. For reference, that’s about the size of a Cessna 172 airplane. Just image those flying around all casual-like.
See also several other size comparison videos from the same channel, including objects in the universe, animals, and dinosaurs. (via digg)
Why Lego Won
Lego did not invent the stacking, interlocking plastic brick — Kiddiecraft did. So why did Lego’s version win? As Phil Edwards explains in this entertaining video, the answer can be boiled down to two words: innovation and marketing.
The first Lego plastic mold was the same one that Kiddicraft used, and early Lego bricks were almost identical to Kiddicraft blocks, with a few minor differences. They slightly changed the scale and the studs, but as you can see, they were pretty similar. Early Kiddicraft blocks had little slots in the side for windows and other attachments. So did early Lego bricks. From top to bottom, these were very similar to Kiddicraft blocks. So with such a simple idea that had kind of already been done, how did Lego win?
See also Why Oreo Won and a fascinating look at plastic injection molding, including a bit on “how quietly ingenious Lego’s injection molding process is”.
The Most Popular Song From Each Month Since January 1980
Oh man, this is a huge huge nostalgia bomb for me - a 50-minute medley of the most popular song from each month since January 1980. When I was a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, there were basically four choices of music to listen to: country, metal, oldies, and pop/top 40. I chose pop, so the first ~15 minutes of this video is basically the soundtrack to my childhood.
Here’s a playlist of all the songs on Spotify, in case you want to listen to the whole megillah. See also The Hood Internet’s remixes of pop music by year. (via open culture)
The Barbie Movie
I have very high hopes for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. It would be incredible if it lives up to them and the first two teaser trailers are a good start.
Also, I love how completely and utterly thirrrrrrsty the video’s description is to establish the bona fides and pedigree of the movie’s cast and crew:
From Oscar-nominated writer/director Greta Gerwig (“Little Women,” “Lady Bird”) comes “Barbie,” starring Oscar-nominees Margot Robbie (“Bombshell,” “I, Tonya”) and Ryan Gosling (“La La Land,” “Half Nelson”) as Barbie and Ken, alongside America Ferrera (“End of Watch,” the “How to Train Your Dragon” films), Kate McKinnon (“Bombshell,” “Yesterday”), Michael Cera (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” “Juno”), Ariana Greenblatt (“Avengers: Infinity War,” “65”), Issa Rae (“The Photograph,” “Insecure”), Rhea Perlman (“I’ll See You in My Dreams,” “Matilda”), and Will Ferrell (the “Anchorman” films, “Talladega Nights”). The film also stars Ana Cruz Kayne (“Little Women”), Emma Mackey (“Emily,” “Sex Education”), Hari Nef (“Assassination Nation,” “Transparent”), Alexandra Shipp (the “X-Men” films), Kingsley Ben-Adir (“One Night in Miami,” “Peaky Blinders”), Simu Liu (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”), Ncuti Gatwa (“Sex Education”), Scott Evans (“Grace and Frankie”), Jamie Demetriou (“Cruella”), Connor Swindells (“Sex Education,” “Emma.”), Sharon Rooney (“Dumbo,” “Jerk”), Nicola Coughlan (“Bridgerton,” “Derry Girls”), Ritu Arya (“The Umbrella Academy”), Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Dua Lipa and Oscar-winner Helen Mirren (“The Queen”).
Gerwig directed “Barbie” from a screenplay by Gerwig & Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story,” “The Squid and the Whale”), based on Barbie by Mattel. The film’s producers are Oscar nominee David Heyman (“Marriage Story,” “Gravity”), Robbie, Tom Ackerley and Robbie Brenner, with Michael Sharp, Josey McNamara, Ynon Kreiz, Courtenay Valenti, Toby Emmerich and Cate Adams serving as executive producers.
Gerwig’s creative team behind the camera included Oscar-nominated director of photography Rodrigo Prieto (“The Irishman,” “Silence,” “Brokeback Mountain”), six-time Oscar-nominated production designer Sarah Greenwood (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Anna Karenina”), editor Nick Houy (“Little Women,” “Lady Bird”), Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran (“Little Women,” “Anna Karenina”), visual effects supervisor Glen Pratt (“Paddington 2,” “Beauty and the Beast”), music supervisor George Drakoulias (“White Noise,” “Marriage Story”) and Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat (“The Shape of Water,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel”).
Is that….everybody? In the world?
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