Microblogging Journal through 6/10/2024

Forgot to run the script to pull the posts last week. Manual blog-related processes are the worst.

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 05/28

• 17:22 # Ugh I clicked on one of those WIRED “some person who is an expert in some field answers Internet questions” and now that’s all that’s on my YouTube recommendations, which is a real problem because they’re actually really interesting to watch.

  • 17:30 # Most of the questions that are answered are something like “so what’s the deal with this commonly held belief, crazy pseudoscience, or made-up fact that I heard from a completely unreliable source such as the Internet?” And the answer is like, “um, yeah, that’s totally wrong.”

Wednesday 05/29

• 20:53 # Okay so now I’m trapped in a rabbit hole watching these Insider youtube videos where some expert rates the historical realism of movie scenes. This is the best thing to come out of “reaction video” culture so far. Roel Konijnendijk. Look it up. He should get some kind of award for his commentary on ancient warfare scenes.

Sunday 06/02

• 17:05 # How do the offscreen bad guy henchmen always know exactly what to do in a scene when the chief bad guy nods their head while they’re interrogating the good guys?

Monday 06/03

• 18:26 # So I ended up binging the whole first season of 3 Body Problem on Netflix soon after I said I didn’t want to watch it and ruin the book. It’s not bad. I only read the first book and deliberately skipped the others because I thought it had a great ending and it looked like it would go into alien invasion territory instead of cool science mystery territory. For me, the mystery was way more interesting than anything else in the book, and once they explained it I was like, well the story’s over. Anyway, season 1 looked like it went well beyond where the first book ended, so I guess the story wasn’t over after all. Also they seem to have omitted like 90% of the science and dumbed it way down for a Netflix audience. In any case it made me want to re-listen to the audiobook, except I’m currently still re-listening to the Dune audiobook.

• 18:32 # Speaking of audiobooks, whatever happened to that thing where you could sync an Audible book and a Kindle book and have it highlight the words as they’re saying them in the audibook, if you owned both copies? Was that Whispersync? Is that still a thing? I thought that was a pretty cool, if expensive, feature. But I only remember seeing it in action on a couple of the Wheel of Time books many years ago.

  • 18:33 # P.S. I think the feature is called Immersion Reading and/or Whispersync for Voice and it still comes up in Google searches, so I guess it’s still a thing. I shall endeavor to investigate.

Tuesday 06/04

• 12:40 # Man I wish they would release behind-the-scenes footage of these WIRED “tech support” videos where they have an expert answer questions from twitter or whatever. It’s pretty much all I think about when I’m watching them. “I wonder how much they laughed at that question before they started answering it.” Or “I wonder if they had to look up that answer or they just knew off the top of their head.” Or “I wonder how often the producer or director or whatever had to tell them to look straight at the camera.” Stuff like that.

Thursday 06/06

• 09:01 # Been watching this Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War docuseries on Netflix. I thought it was going to be about the Cold War but it only hit the highlights that everyone knew already. Mainly it was kind of a weird hit piece against America and Russia with a bunch about the Ukraine war thrown in. It was all over the place and it wasn’t really clear what the point of any of it was. I think they were trying to say something like, hey guess what that Cold War is still raging more than ever and we should all be terrified of nuclear annihilation more than ever because there aren’t any more treaties. Something like that. Mainly it’s a bunch of scary historical and present-day stuff thrown together into something that seems like it might be educational and kind of related to each other.

• 09:41 # A second crop of house finches has left the nest they built in the awning over my back door. It was cool watching the mom and dad keep trying to get them to leave the nest yesterday. They’d keep flying nearby and chirping and sometimes they’d fly up to the nest and it looked like they were almost trying to scare them out of the nest. This morning the last two are gone (I think there were four of them in total). The last couple of days I didn’t want to use the back door for fear of disturbing them too much.

• 20:03 # Why would they make an AC adapter cable for a camcorder or any other recording device of any kind that is like 4 feet long? This is the conspiracy they should be talking about on Twitter.

Sunday 06/09

• 09:29 # Saturday I decided to completely rearrange the living room to rotate my computer desk 90 degrees within its location in the corner, for the sole purpose of putting a wall behind me so that I don’t have to keep the room clean if I ever want to use a webcam. These are the important room design decisions one must make to live in the Internet video world.

  • 09:31 # Anyway rearranging the room is perhaps halfway done and I’m wiped out already and also every electronic device is now roughly 50,000 feet away from the nearest wall outlet.

• 10:01 # I watched Greenland last night, which is a Gerard Butler disaster flick from 2020. I was expecting something like a Roland Emmerich end-of-the-world running-and-explosions-fest flick but it was more cerebral than that and did not, in fact, have an explosion every 10 seconds. There were many somewhat long scenes of actors acting. Anyway it wasn’t fantastic but it wasn’t terrible either. I mean except for the all the science stuff which sounded a bit ludicrous to me, but it was easy to ignore that. Apparently they’re making a sequel. Also I kept thinking “huh that woman looks very familiar who is that?” and it turns out it was Morenna Baccara who I mainly remember as Inara from Firefly but who has apparently been in a ton of mainstream stuff since then but I never noticed.

• 10:56 # When I was a kid, I remember being psyched to be able to afford a couple of cheap plastic D20s from a hobby shop bin (I don’t remember how much they were but I feel like it was something like a dime or a quarter each). Back then, the D20s weren’t labeled 1-20, they were numbered with a set of black numbers 0-9 and a set of red numbers 0-9. I’m looking right at one. You had to reinforce the numbers by coloring them in with a pen because they faded so fast. Now I’m looking at Amazon and seeing these assorted sets of 150 dice for like $20. Part of me wants to buy them just because my kid self would have just freaked out at how cool it would have been to stare at 150 dice of all different colors and types. (Note: I already have way more modern dice than I actually need and do not in any way need 150 more dice. I’m thankful that I haven’t yet succumbed so deep into the modern dice industrial complex that I’ve wanted to get any metal or jewelry or stone or wooden or whatever dice.)

• 13:12 # Oh wow I just discovered that those white gel pens for writing on black paper are also amazing at writing on audio cables. This could be a game changer in my life.

• 20:38 # Ah I just realized that the entire run of Mythbusters is on Max.