— Another Christmas movie, this one very Australian. Christmas with the ungrateful, dysfunctional family in a hot, unspecific Australian suburb. A father of three beats up one of the in-laws and goes to prison where he finally faces the demons of the past that messed him up, psychologically speaking. It’s a dreadful, anticlimactic film that I couldn’t recommend any less.
(2024) Director: Nick Waterman. Screenplay: Nick Waterman, Meg Washington. Cast: Daniel Henshall, Hugo Weaving.
— The manager of a big New York department store channels the spirit of Christmas and sales go through the roof. In the end she gets the guy and a big bonus. She can finally afford that big house in the Hamptons where they all live happily ever after. It’s most American of Christmas movies.
(1994) Director: Les Mayfield. Screenplay: John Hughes, George Seaton. Cast: Richard Attenborough, Elizabeth Perkins, Dylan McDermott, Mara Wilson.
— Who would have thought. An entertaining game of football in front of a big, raucous crowd on Australian soil. It was a pulsating match between the two Melbourne clubs, chances on both sides, more on Victory’s side; both teams equally wasteful in front of the goal, Victory almost comically bad at times.
City had the better start, playing the better, more direct football and deservedly scoring early in the game. Victory grew more confident with every passing minute but lacking the conviction for the final pass. It took until deep into the second half for them to create real chances and a commotion after a corner to equalise.
A-League. AAMI Park, 21 December 2024 7:35. Attendance: 24,053. Goals: 0:1 Yonatan Cohen (16’), 1:1 Roderick Miranda (65’).
— Soul legend Al Green covers R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”.
We’re so lucky Al Green is still around and releasing new music. Few artists embody the very definition of “soul” like he does.
— The latest Walkie Talkie episode features photographer Martha Cooper, who became a legend for the first person to comprehensively document New York’s early graffiti scene.
Love to see, that to this day she still shoots graffiti.
Friday, 20 December 2024
— I love this early and very innocent rendition of MGMT’s “Kids.” It’s just too lads in college making music, having the time of their lives. Kids, also notice, no-one in the crowd is holding a smart phone taking selfies or filming the gig.
I love GTA5, still playing it every once in a while. But I’ve only spend about thirty minutes playing GTA Online until I got fed up being nuked by thirteen year-olds for no particular reason while out in the desert minding my own business. I can only imagine how hard a project like this would be.
The most important thing I learned while living as a nudist was that clothes are such a big part of how we immediately assess and judge someone. Without them, people are more reliant on what you say to work out who you are. It’s pretty much the freest state you can be in. In California, I ended up playing a naked game of water polo with some senior naturists. They took the game really seriously and one of them told me off for not knowing the rules. I remember thinking, “We’re naked, hitting a ball over a net, in some water. This is really, really silly; how can you be taking this so seriously?”
You just want to take the guy out for a beer and listen to his stories all night.
Monday, 09 December 2024
— Body Count feat. David Gilmour – Comfortably Numb. As one commenter on Youtube put it neatly: “This is a song about a whole nation having a psychotic break.”
Men in Love will pick up the stories of the original crew immediately after the close of the 1993 classic as they become serious in their quest for romance
With a search engine, fewer quality results means something. But an LLM is going to spit back a response regardless of the quality of training data. When the data is thin, a search engine will give you nothing. An LLM will give you an inaccurate something.
LLMs, at the moment, are the equivalent of an overconfident engineer. You know, the one who thinks they know everything, who always have an answer. It would never occur to them engineer that they simply don’t know some things.
One thing to build trust in large-language models will be to teach them how to say no.
One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?
If there was a TV show about the work and lives and oh so many struggles of online influencers, similar to what Silicon Valley was for the Californian start-up world, this beef alone would be enough material for an entire series. You can’t make this up.
Piloting an ocean exploration ship or Martian research shuttle is serious business. Let’s hope the control panel is up to scratch. Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world.
These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
— That voice. That nagging inner voice. The voice that tells you you’re not good enough. Not at your job, not as a father, not as a husband. Micheal Keaton does a great job portraying a man wrangling with his life choices, an angry and depressed man in despair. The almost constant drum beat adds to his stresses.
(2014) Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Screenplay: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Armando Bó. Cast: Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts.
