kottke.org posts about video
From Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Chenjerai Kumanyika, a quick tour of the history of policing in America and how that history should shape our discussions around police reform, defunding, and abolition.
The story of policing in the United States is the story of systems meant to protect and serve only a fraction of Americans.
As Kumanyika says in closing, the police in America are fulfilling their purpose very well. But the public has other demands that are not being met.
See also A History of Policing in America and Why Police Reform Doesn’t Work In America.
Nigerian artist Arinze Stanley uses hyperrealistic techniques to draw surreal portraits in stunning detail. From his artist statement:
I draw inspiration from life experiences and basically everything that sparks a feeling of necessity, I find myself spending countless hours working on an artwork to stimulate deep and strong emotions in order to connect more intimately with my viewers
Most times it’s almost like I lose control of my pencils and the art flows through me to the paper.
I work with my Principle of the Three P’s namely Patience, Practice and Persistence. These have guided me over the years towards perfecting my craft.”
Great Big Story did a feature on Stanley and his work last year that’s worth watching:
(via colossal)
Released on the heels of the success of Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat was one of the earliest games to make extensive use of human actors as models for onscreen action. You can see this proto-motion capture in action in the video above, which features actors & martial artists performing the moves for each of the fighters in the first version of the game. Each pose or motion was recorded and then turned into actions by the onscreen avatars. In the first few seconds, you can even see the actor doing that subtle rocking motion thing that video game avatars do now. (Does this motion have a name? The ready stance?)
See also the making of several subsequent versions of the game β the capture techniques obviously get more sophisticated as the tech improves.
The breadth of scale of measurable objects in the universe β our distance from the most distant objects we can observe (billions of light years away) to particles measured in something called a yoctometer (1Γ10-24 meters) β is staggering to think about. That’s where the Universe in a Nutshell app comes in. Developed by Kurzgesagt & Wait But Why (both kottke.org favorites), you can use the app to quickly and easily zoom in and out through objects at all the scales of the universe, like quarks, DNA, cells, earthworms, Europe, Jupiter, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Crab Nebula, galaxies, and galaxy superclusters.
You can tap on any object you encounter to learn more about it, like an interactive Powers of Ten. I spent 20 minutes just now playing around and it’s really fun. You can download the app for $2.99 from the App Store or on Google Play.
To mark the release, Kurzgesagt made a video comparing the sizes of stars:
And Wait But Why’s Tim Urban wrote a post about the scales of objects: The Big and the Small.
Alan Kahn, aka the Speed Bag King and author of The Speed Bag Bible, can seemingly do anything with a boxing speed bag…like make music. Just watch this 45-second video of him getting warmed up on the bag and then performing a tiny virtuoso concert for a small group of amazed onlookers.
See also Kahn punch drumming the William Tell Overture. Again, this starts off slow but wait for the complex stuff to kick in over the course of the video. (via @austinkleon)
In the next day or two, the official number of people who have died from Covid-19 in the United States will pass 200,000 (the actual death toll passed 200,000 back in July). To mark the grim occasion yesterday, the Washington National Cathedral tolled its mourning bell 200 times in remembrance, once for each 1000 people who have died.
We toll this 12-ton bell for every funeral held at the Cathedral. Funerals mourn the loss, but they also celebrate the lives of our loved ones, and point us to the hope of resurrection.
This gesture cannot replace the lives lost, but we hope it will help each American mourn the toll of this pandemic.
The tolling goes on for more than 19 minutes and you hear a number of deaths equal to 9/11 every 17 seconds. I recommend listening as long as you are able, to remember those who have been lost, and to inspire action so that 200,000 more Americans don’t have to die before this is all over.
See also A Time Lapse World Map of Every Covid-19 Death from back in July.
Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy is a painting made in the 1620s by Artemisia Gentileschi. The painting was presumed lost until it was rediscovered in a private collection in France and sold at auction for more than $1 million in 2014.
As part of season 2 of Google Arts & Culture’s Art Zoom project (previously), British singer/songwriter FKA twigs gives her personal interpretation of the painting in the video above.
Scholars assumed it was painted in the 1620s, when Artemisia Gentileschi left Florence and moved back to Rome. She had separated from her husband and become an independent woman, the head of her own household, a rarity at that time.
When making my own album, entitled “Magdalene,” it was a time of great healing for me. When I was researching about Mary Magdalene and I was looking at a lot of paintings of her, she seemed so poised and so together. But the irony is in finishing my music, I found a deep wildness, a looseness, an acceptance, a release. And that’s exactly what I’m experiencing in this painting.
I found this incredibly soothing to watch and listen to…almost ASMR-like. And as usual, you can zoom around the painting yourself; this is not even halfway zoomed in…at full zoom you can see individual brushstrokes and cracks in the painting.
Update: FKA twigs gives tours of two additional Gentileschi paintings: Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Judith Beheading Holofernes.
(via @norabz)
Wow! Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder podcast is now a Netflix series! (For those who have never listened, Song Exploder features musicians telling the stories of how their songs were created.) Check out the trailer above, featuring song explosions by Alicia Keys, Lin-Manuel Miranda, R.E.M., and Ty Dolla $ign.
Hirway says on Twitter:
I still don’t fully believe it but @SongExploder, a podcast I started in my bedroom!, is going to be a @netflix series.
If anyone at Netflix wants to talk about kottke.org becoming a series, let me know!! It can be about literally anything and everything. (Hey, we’ll call it “Anything and Everything”! The wheels are already in motion…)
After a fellow named Zikubi beat the speedrun record for Super Mario Bros 3 with a time of just over three minutes, speedrun analyst Bismuth made the video above to explain how he did it…by changing the game with the gameplay itself.
The first couple minutes go exactly as you’d expect, but the speedrun takes a weird turn when, instead of using the second warp whistle to go to level 8, he uses it to go to level 7. And once in level 7, Mario races around randomly, letting opportunity slip away like a blindfolded birthday boy unwittingly steering himself away from the piΓ±ata. It’s only later, during the explanation of how he got from level 7 to the final screen so quickly, that you realize Mario’s panicky idiot behavior is actually the player actively reprogramming the game to open up a wormhole to the ending. Watch the whole explanation β it’s a really fascinating little hack.
See also Bismuth’s explanation of a Super Mario Bros world record speedrun, which includes a short argument by me about why video game speedrun breakdowns are interesting to watch even if you don’t play video games.
In the video analysis of this speedrun, if you forget the video game part of it and all the negative connotations you might have about that, you get to see the collective effort of thousands of people over more than three decades who have studied a thing right down to the bare metal so that one person, standing on the shoulders of giants in a near-perfect performance, can do something no one has ever done before. Progress and understanding by groups of people happens exactly like this in manufacturing, art, science, engineering, design, social science, literature, and every other collective human endeavor…it’s what humans do. But since playing sports and video games is such a universal experience and you get to see it all happening right on the screen in front of you, it’s perhaps easier to grok SMB speedrun innovations more quickly than, say, how assembly line manufacturing has improved since 2000, recent innovations in art, how we got from the flip phone to iPhone X in only 10 years, or how CRISPR happened.
(via @craigmod)
In Search of a Flat Earth is a documentary essay by Folding Ideas’ Dan Olson that starts out talking about people who believe the Earth is flat (and why it’s so difficult to convince them otherwise) but then takes a sharp turn toward a more recent and much more worrying conspiracy theory, QAnon. Lots of interesting information and observations throughout.
See also QAnon, Conspiracy Theories, and the Rise of Magical Thinking.
The title of this video is “David Lynch being a madman for a relentless 8 minutes and 30 seconds” is perfect and requires no further information or contextualization. (thx, david (no relation))
NY governor Andrew Cuomo enlisted actor Paul Rudd to do a public service announcement about the benefits of wearing a mask during the pandemic. Rudd, who often looks like he hasn’t aged a day in the past 20 years but is actually 51 years old, is in total “how do you do fellow kids” mode in this video, deploying some totally plausible youth lingo in an effort to get his fellow youths to mask up.
So admittedly I was not the biggest fan of the first season of The Mandalorian β I don’t particularly care for westerns, space or otherwise, and in terms of the off-piste Star Wars tales, preferred Rogue One and even Solo to Mando’s adventures. But there is something compelling there and because I was indoctrinated in the ways of The Force as a child,1 I will watch the new season that starts on Disney+ October 30.
Apple might be a $2+ trillion company, but in the TV world they are still relatively small potatoes. Perhaps it’s appropriate then that the company’s first entry into the nature documentary space dominated by BBC and Netflix is Tiny World, a series featuring some animals who have carved out lives in our massive world by going small. You know, spiders, toads, pygmy marmosets, insects, rodents, fish. The series is narrated by Paul Rudd (I love the ageless Rudd as much as anyone but would have loved to hear Ze Frank in this role) and premieres October 2nd on Apple+.
To go along with my earlier post on photos of the wildfire skies in the western states, Terry Tsai took drone footage of an orange-hued San Francisco and put the soundtrack to Blade Runner 2049 behind it and, yeah, that’s about right. (via daring fireball)
I love BenoiΜt Leva’s simple stop motion animated loops made from rocks and stones. This bouncing one is my favorite:
You can check out more stone animations on his Instagram. (via colossal)
I’ve never read or seen any of the Dunes (Herbert’s book, David Lynch’s movie, or even Jodorowsky’s Dune) but I have very fond memories of the video game Dune II and will watch anything that Denis Villeneuve makes, so I’m definitely going to check this out when it’s released…let’s see….on December 18, 2020 in theaters? WTF?
Ok, so just watch the trailer if that’s what you’re here for, but I remain baffled that movie theaters are a) currently open (Tenet was showing in 2810 US theaters last weekend) and b) slated to still be open in December in a country trapped in a pandemic death spiral. Easy testing w/ quick results and contact tracing, the twin keys to controlling the virus, are still a mess. A safe & tested vaccine that’s distributed widely by the end of the year? I wouldn’t hold my breath. And you’re going to put a bunch of people who are laughing and gasping together in a room for two-plus hours with a virus that’s airborne1 and assume they’re going to stay properly masked up (except for when they are eating popcorn and nachos!) and properly distant from each other? (Have you met Americans?!) Even if you assume that movie theater screening rooms are huge & well-ventilated (some definitely are not) and capacity is restricted, I repeat: What The Fuck? And in terms of societal trade-offs, reopening places where people gather indoors for entertainment is more important than ensuring our kids can safely go to school? *extreme hair-tearing-out noise*
Update: Aaaaand the Dune release has been delayed until Oct 2021. Between the Trump debacle2 and the CDC acknowledging that the virus may spread through aerosols, I feel like people are coming around to the idea that indoor gatherings, entertainment, and dining are going to be problematic for several more months.
Research biologist Adrian Smith, who specializes in insects, recently filmed a number of different types of flying insects taking off and flying away at 3200 frames/sec. Before watching, I figured I’d find this interesting β flying and slow motion together? sign me up! β but this video was straight-up mesmerizing with just the right amount of informative narration from Smith. There’s such an amazing diversity in wing shape and flight styles among even this small group of insects; I had to keep rewinding it to watch for details that I’d missed. Also, don’t miss the fishfly breaking the fourth wall by looking right at the camera while taking off at 6:07. I see you, my dude.
Smith has previously captured flying ants in slow motion and this globular springtail bug that spins through the air at more than 22,000 rpm. (via moss & fog)
From Jez Burrows, 30 minutes of rain from video games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham Knight, Donkey Kong Country, Spider-Man, and Animal Crossing.
A supercut of video game characters taking a break from solving crime or shooting people to enjoy a meditative minute of miserable weather.
(via @kellianderson)
Coronation is a feature-length documentary film by Ai Weiwei about the lockdown in Wuhan, China, during the initial Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020. The trailer is not super compelling tbh, but it’s Ai Weiwei and the description sounds interesting:
The film showcases the incredible speed and power of China’s state machinery with its construction of massive coronavirus hospitals, deployment of roving sanitation-fogging robots, implementation of an exhaustive testing and contact-tracing protocol, and punctiliously engineered protective measures for health workers.
On the other side of the scale is the crushing bureaucracy of that same machine, its totalitarian decision-making, clear deception of ordinary citizens, the absence of civic communication, and perhaps, worst of all, a cold-eyed lack of empathy for those suffering loss and kept away from home.
Ai Weiwei paints a moving and revelatory portrait not just of China’s response to the pandemic but also of ordinary people in Wuhan, showing how they personally cope with the disaster.
Hyperallergic’s Dan Schindel has a review of the film. You can watch Coronation on demand at Vimeo or Alamo. (via colossal)
From Netflix, Challenger: The Final Flight is a four-part documentary series about the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.
Incorporating never-before-seen interviews and rare archival material, this series offers an in-depth look at one of the most diverse crews NASA assembled, including high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was selected to be the first private citizen in space.
The series debuts on Netflix on Sept 16.
As a huge fan of Mario Kart (and a relatively recent owner of a Switch), this looks absolutely amazing (if it works smoothly). In Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, you race a physical kart (against other peoples’ physical karts if you want) through your actual house, controlling it via onscreen AR on your Nintendo Switch (the onscreen view comes from a tiny camera mounted on the kart). Here’s what Nintendo says about it:
Created in partnership with Velan Studios, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit brings the fun of the Mario Kart series into the real world by using a Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch Lite system to race against opponents using a physical Kart. The physical Kart responds to boosts in-game and in the real world, stops when hit with an item and can be affected in different ways depending on the race. Players place gates to create a custom course layout in their home, where the only limit is their imagination. Race against Koopalings in Grand Prix, unlock a variety of course customizations and costumes for Mario or Luigi, and play with up to four players in local multiplayer mode.
Watch the trailer above…it does look totally cool.
The Story of Fascism is an hour-long TV special from travel guru Rick Steves about the history of fascism in Europe, from its post-WWI rise in Italy and Germany to the defeat of the fascist powers in WWII to efforts by modern-day right-wing ideologues to revive it.
We’ll trace fascism’s history from its roots in the turbulent aftermath of World War I, when masses of angry people rose up, to the rise of charismatic leaders who manipulated that anger, the totalitarian societies they built, and the brutal measures they used to enforce their ideology. We’ll see the horrific consequences: genocide and total war.
Because Steves hosts a travel show, they visit some of the places where this history played out, including Nuremberg, Auschwitz, and Rome, talk to historians and tour guides, and discuss fascist and anti-fascist art, including Picasso’s Guernica.
The combination of the weighty subject matter and Steves’ jaunty TV voice is a bit jarring at first, but this packs a lot of information and context into an hour. There are obviously parallels throughout to contemporary leaders and their tactics, but check out Benito Mussolini’s mannerisms and facial expressions starting at 11:05 and see if they remind you of the current inhabitant of the White House. (via open culture)
Earlier today, illusionist and “endurance performer” David Blaine grabbed onto a bunch of big helium balloons and floated into the sky.
Over the next 50 minutes, he rose to an altitude of almost 25,000 feet before letting go and skydiving/parachuting safely to the ground. The video embedded above is a livestream of the event β liftoff takes place a couple of minutes after the 2-hour mark.
In their third video of their ant trilogy (see also The World War of the Ants and The Billion Ant Mega Colony and the Biggest War on Earth), Kurzgesagt goes up into the treetops to tell us about the weaver ants.
Deep in tropical jungles lie floating kingdoms ruled by beautiful and deadly masters: They are sort of the high elves of the ant kingdoms: Talented architects that create castles and city states. But they are also fierce and expansionist warriors and their kingdoms are ensnared in a never ending war for survival. Oecophylla weaver ants.
The nests that weaver ants build out of leaves and silk from larve (that the ants use as “tiny cute glue guns”) are incredible. Since Kurzgesagt is animated, I went looking for some actual footage of weaver ants doing their thing. Here’s a clip from BBC Earth:
I found this video via The Kid Should See This, who explains that a mango orchard in Thailand uses the ants to keep pests away without using chemical pesticides:
In this mango orchard in Northern Thailand, weaver ants are nurtured so they can thrive and protect the harvest. The ants hunt the pests that would eat the mangoes, eliminating any need to use harmful chemical pesticides. The farmer creates strategic highways of red string to connect the weaver ants to new trees, expanding where they forage.
You can also watch this documentary on Australian weaver ants and this video from AntsCanada (whose videos always have amazing narration) to learn more about weaver ants.
Actor Chadwick Boseman died on Friday after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Boseman played both Jackie Robinson and James Brown in films, but he was best known for his role as T’Challa / Black Panther in four Marvel movies. In this short video featuring behind-the-scenes footage from those films and interviews from his colleagues, Marvel pays tribute to the best possible person they could have gotten to play that role.
I watched Black Panther for the third or fourth time over the weekend and while Michael B. Jordan always blows me away, it’s Boseman’s quiet intensity and magnetism that grounds Jordan’s performance and makes the whole “the bad guy has a point” plot work. Yeah ok, it’s just a superhero movie, but I think Black Panther is going to be one of those films that’s going to be relevant and reverberate for a long time.
I’ve said this before, but I could sit and listen to musicians talk about how they make their music all day long, particularly rap & hip hop producers because of all the history and context they are intentionally inserting into the music. In this video, 9th Wonder talks about DUCKWORTH., a song from Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. that he created three beats for.
In an associated article, Marcus J. Moore (author of The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America) writes:
But it’s on album closer “DUCKWORTH.,” produced by 9th Wonder, that the elements of jazz, hip-hop and soul come into the sharpest focus. 9th has a history of blending records from all genres into kaleidoscopic sets of deep soul and hip-hop. Each track has its own distinctive flair, but you can still tell it’s a 9th Wonder beat β the drums lock into a hypnotic groove and the vocal samples crack with nostalgic beauty. “DUCKWORTH.” mashes three beats into a tight coil of repurposed folk, progressive rock and experimental soul, on which Kendrick details a chance encounter between his father, Kenny Duckworth, and his future label boss, Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith. Years before “Top Dawg” became a music mogul, he walked into a Kentucky Fried Chicken and saw Kendrick’s future father working there. “Top” was planning to rob the restaurant and stood in Kenny’s line to demand the cash. But Kenny had seen “Top” rob and shoot up the store before, so to spare his own life, he gave him free chicken and two extra biscuits to get on his good side. “You take two strangers and put ‘em in random predicaments,” Kendrick rapped. “Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence?”
Watch all the way to the end of the video β you get the rare treat of watching someone realize something about their own work and their collaborating partner that they hadn’t before…
For a few months now, NPR has been broadcasting their Tiny Desk concert series from the homes and studios of the featured musicians. Tame Impala was a recent guest and Lenny Kravitz has played a home concert as well. Here’s Rodrigo y Gabriela, who are super good live:
But Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas recently did something unique: a Tiny Desk (Home) Concert that actually looks like they’re playing in the NPR office (even though they are not).
Watch through to the end to see how they pulled it off. (via waxy)
Ammonite is an upcoming romantic drama from director Francis Lee. It takes place in the 1840s and stars Kate Winslet as a palaeontologist & Saoirse Ronan as her assistant; the pair clash then fall in love. The story is based on the life of Mary Anning, who made several important contributions to paleontology.
Paleontology wouldn’t be the same without Mary Anning. She scoured the dreary coast of southern England for secrets not seen since the Jurassic, fueling the nascent 19th-century field of fossil studies with evidence of strange sea dragons, flying reptiles and other fascinating fragments of life long past. And now, over 170 years after her death, she’s got her own movie.
However, there’s no evidence that Anning and her friend, Charlotte Murchison, ever had a romantic relationship.
I have to wonder what Anning would say to this. As she wrote in a letter, “The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone.” In the sexist, male-dominated world of 19th-century science, Anning’s finds were celebrated while she herself was barred from joining academic societies or even finding a path to gain equal footing with the likes of William Buckland, Gideon Mantell and other traditional heroes of paleontology who parasitized her labor. Now, in having her life’s story made a fiction, is the world using Anning again?
Ammonite opens in US theaters in November? (I mean, they reopened schools in Florida against all expert advice and common sense, so why not theaters?) Anyway, looking forward to the third movie in the Portrait of a Lady on Fire trilogy next year.
This is a teaser trailer for season four of The Crown that really lives up to its name. We know that Gillian Anderson is playing Margaret Thatcher (!!) and Princess Diana makes her first appearance in the series (played by newcomer Emma Corrin), but we don’t really get to see either of them clearly in the trailer. Which is frustrating but definitely gets me excited for its premiere on November 15th.
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