Started reading Hollow by Brian Catlin. First impression: A band of criminals violent criminals escorts a mysterious bone-eating oracle to the tower of Babel through a medieval wasteland right out of a Bosch painting. Would recommend.
TODO: Write a short (horror?) story starting with: "The bioreactor device triggered very complex downstream outcomes that bio-engineers cannot yet micromanage directly."
Read Hollow by Brian Catlin. First impression: A band of criminals violent criminals escorts a mysterious bone-eating oracle to the tower of Babel through a medieval wasteland right out of a Bosch painting. Would recommend. After finishing it I am looking forward to reading the Vorrh trilogy next.
Watched Spiderman: No Way Home. Overall it was entertaining, everything looked very much like CGI. When Willem Dafoe first appeared I thought they completely animated him, same with Tobey Maguire. Not sure if this was the intended effect, but it looked like they were using a bad bluescreen. The superhero effects were good otherwise, but the faces had this uncanny valley feeling to them. The story is based on an interesting concept of multiple universes lying next to each other and it was my first contact with how the DC(?) universe handles these different times and storylines. I love about the multiverse that you can imagine all kinds of stories and it's still all contained in a more or less consistent universe. All in all, I don't regret seeing the movie, but you also have not missed much if you don't see it.
Sample Hunt: At the end of the song Deutschland by Rammstein is playing a piano melody, which I found haunting. You can hear the melody in this video - turns out it's actually part of the song Sonne also by Rammstein. With some investigation, it turns out that this is actually an unmodified stock sample from Spectrasonics Symphony of Voices. It's an absolutely beautiful sample. This reminds me of another track that was carried by an unmodified stock sample: A$AP Rocky - Praise The Lord (Da Shine). The flute sample playing throughout is just an Apple ProTools stock sample without any changes. But it works so well in the track as if it was made for it. This is the power and art of selecting samples. As Bol Bol in the YouTube comments rightly puts it: 'This beat should be in a museum'.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy - Moltke. Of course, the original quote by Moltke is not as snappy, but still a very true sentiment - and probably true in areas beyond warfare. Read the full backstory of this quote.
The first paragraph of Nabokov's memoir Speak, Memory: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
Overengineer takes apart multiple USB-C adapters in this awesome teardown / review. Turns out the hardware is the same for all under the hood. It's not surprising though. This article is a great example of how technical reviews could (should) look. Stress-testing the devices and showing what is actually under the hood - if only review sites were half as honest and thorough.
Plastic (and payments) in the fantasy supply chain. Great article by patio11 on plastic miniatures and the economics. Even when I was a kid these things were super expensive and it's fascinating to learn more about the economics behind them.
A Little Game Called Mario. Probably the most interesting thing I stumbled upon this week. An open repository where everyone can commit, trying to build some kind of game. I still have to give it a closer look, but the idea is great - anarchy for game development. Will definitely try to contribute something, but in a constructive manner.
Book Review: A Square Meal – Part II: Politics. Another book review, this time about food during the Great Depression. This is part II, but part I is just as interesting. Expect to learn some bizarre food facts (back then what they called salads were ... 'assemblages made from canned fruit, cream cheese, gelatin, and mayonnaise')
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text. Article by the OpenAI team on their text to 3d image model. Would love to be able to play around with something like this. I can imagine it would open up a whole new way of creating artwork soon.
555 Timer Circuits. The 555 was one of the chips I used the most in university and it has a truly awesome range of applications, this site does a good job of summarizing it and also provides schematics.