I donât like the goat from the Paramount+ ads. I want to turn him into vellum.
Stuff i watched (+played) recently, May â25

The Naked Gun (1988)
I couldnât possibly give a better review than a paraphrase of Roger Ebert: First, you laugh at the joke; then, you laugh at yourself for laughing at something so stupid. Brilliant stuff. (7/10)
Death of a Unicorn (2025)
I was ambivalent enough about this film that i already wrote a whole post about it to explain my feelings. A utilitarianâs worst nightmare. (5/10)
A Real Pain (2024)
Poignant and funny in equal measure. The scene that really stuck out to me was near the end, in Krasnystaw, as our two Jewish-American main characters visit their late grandmotherâs old home and place stones in remembrance⌠only to be chided by an angry neighbour, who has no idea about the tradition, but does know that the old woman living there now is infirm and might well trip. He says this, of course, in Polish, but the two leads donât speak it, and need his son to translate for them.
The short-term tragedy of the Holocaust, the cruel annihilation of the six million, has been well-trodden in cinema, but this film gets to the heart of the long tragedy â the hole left in European culture by the hollowing out of its Jewish communities (the angry man who doesnât know), and, equally, the alienation of the survivors from their own roots (the two travellers who need an interpreter for their own ancestral tongue). (9/10)
Sinners (2025)
If you need any convincing at all to watch this, i have five words: Vampire musicians in 1930s Mississippi.
A rare successful original blockbuster that must be protected at all costs. It takes a while to get to the vampires, but it puts that time to good use setting up its characters so you can, like, care about them and stuff. (A lost art.) (8/10)
Companion (2025)
âDid you jailbreak your sexbot??â
Companion is better than it has any right to be. Itâs a schlocky premise, but it mines every last twist and turn it can get out of it, with snappy dialogue, a galloping pace, and a magnetic cast. It might not be the best movie ever, but itâs the best movie Companion could ever be. (8/10)
ZatĹichi: The Blind Swordsman (2003)
This Tarantinoesque rip-roarer of a period action film has all you could ever ask for: yakuza gangs, cross-dressing geishas, card-counting, a celebratory ending tap-dance routine, and heaps of dodgy CGI blood. When i found out the directorâs name was Beat Takeshi, my first thought was âsurely itâs not that Takeshiâ. Reader⌠it was that Takeshi. The guy with the castle. We love a man of many talents. (7/10)
Oblivion (2013)

The left image is the result of asking an image-generating machine-learning model to draw the prompt âstill from a science fiction movieâ. It was made by a soulless, unthinking machine, and represents, roughly, the average of every science fiction film in its dataset. It is utterly generic, because thatâs what happens when you average out thousands of film stills into a grey smoothie.
The right image is from the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion. Do you see the issue here?
Oblivion is a film with no identity of its own, an empty bottle of milk drifting along a back street. Itâs just entertaining enough to keep you watching, and no more. The only saving grace is that â for those of you keeping track â it includes a full Tom Cruise Triathlon; he runs, he gets on his motorbike, and he swims (in a skyscraper pool, but a swim is a swim). (5/10)
A Complete Unknown (2024)
If youâre going to make a generic music biopic, the least you could do is spice it up with some fantastical musical sequences, like Rocketman and Better Man. This âeffortâ, starring the unavoidable TimothĂŠe Chalamet as Bob Dylan, has none of that, instead falling into all the usual tired biopic tropes. Mr Dylan is not a character in this â he is a vessel that spouts platitutes and occasionally sings. At least the music was good? I guess? (2½/10)
đŽď¸ n++ (2015)
I buy, like, one video game a year, and this is 2025âs entry, a tough-as-nails momentum platformer thatâs the third in a series based on a Flash game i have fond memories of. The noughties vibes are truly immaculate, not just in the futuristic ĂŚsthetics but the trancey EDM soundtrack as well. (8/10)
Thunderbolts* (2025)
I had sworn off Marvel after all the characters i cared about had their stories wrapped up with a bow, so, though i had heard through the grapevine that this was actually quite good, i was fully prepared to put on my clown makeup and order my âFell For It Again Awardâ rosette if i tricked myself into watching two hours of super-slop for nothing.
Thankfully, it was great! My understanding is that all the characters here have shown up in MCU projects in the past, but the film does a great job at getting you up to speed with what their deal is that you never feel out of the loop. The action is on point, the comedy got some good laughs out of me, and the climax, thank fuck, eschews the usual âincomprehensible CGI battle against a giant laser beamâ in favour of a more introspective talk-âem-up approach. Special commendations should go to the soundtrack, by Everything Everywhere All At Onceâs Son Lux. Go watch it. (7½/10)
Sometimes i translate news headlines into Ancient Greek for practice â i thought iâd post a recent one here, just because. :-)
á˝ ÎĎĎÎźÎżĎ ÎĽÎ ÎÍ´, ĎοβΚξĎΚκὴ áźĎĎĎÎżÎ˝ÎąáżŚĎ áźŁ ĎξνĎΎκονĎÎą ĎĎÎŻÎą áźĎΡ áźÎşĎκΝξΚ, κιĎÎĎĎιΞΠĎοΚ á˝Ďá˝˛Ď ĎáżĎ áźĎĎ Î¸ĎážśĎ ÎιΝΏĎĎΡĎ. áźÎ˛ÎżĎ ΝξĎθΡ Οὲν Îľáź°Ď Ďὸν áźĎĎÎľĎον Ďὸ ĎΝοáżÎżÎ˝, ξ៴κοĎΚ ĎιΝΏνĎĎν Ďὸν ĎĎιθΟĎν, ĎÎżĎÎľĎÎľĎθιΚ¡ áźÎžĎκξΚΝξ δὲ ĎÎľĎ὜ Ďὴν ÎáżÎ˝.
Translation (and transliteration)
Ho CĂłsmos CDLXXXII, sobieticÄĚ astronaĂťs hÄĚ pentÄĚconta trĂa ĂŠtÄ ecĂ˝clei, catĂŠrrhaxĂŠ poi hypèr tĂŞs Erythrâs ThalĂĄttÄs. EbouleĂşthÄ mèn eis tòn HĂŠsperon tò plĹĚon, eĂcosi talĂĄntĹn tòn stathmĂłn, poreĂşesthĂŚ; exĹĚceile dè perĂŹ tÄĚn GĂŞn.
Kosmos 482, a Soviet spacecraft which had been in orbit for fifty-three years, crashed down somewhere over the Indian Ocean. The craft, weighing twenty talents, was intended to travel to Venus, but ran aground around the Earth.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XLVII
- âBuddy Hollyâ but itâs a PokĂŠmon battle theme
- Man sets off on 53-mile walk dressed as a curlew
- The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
- Biocubes.net
- I didnât know i needed T. rexâscented perfume until now. The makers describe it as âleatherâ, âunconventionalâ, and âwoodyâ.
- âThe Homeromanteion was a text used between the second and fourth centuries to provide automatic oracular answers to questions. Three dice are cast to generate one of 216 possible numbers, each referring to a line selected from Homerâs Odyssey or Iliad.â In other words: Xanthe-bait of the highest order. Try it today!
- âEveryone says theyâll pay more for âmade in the USAâ. So we ran an A/B test.â
- Prototaxites, a genus of twenty-five-foot-high towering fungi that ruled the world in the Devonian.
- Water sommeliers are on the up and up
- Recording a tree for a year
- How the record for Minecraftâs smallest 4Ă4 redstone door was broken
- The KaymaklÄą underground city, Turkeyâs own Coober Pedy.
- People infected with toxoplasmosis are perceived as more attractive. Are you toxoplasmosismaxxing yet?
One hundred and thirty-seven

My favourite number is 137. Itâs an odd choice: when surveyed, the vast majority of those who have a favourite number say theirs is under twenty, let alone a hundred.1 But i have my reasons, starting with the fact that each digit alone is fascinating in its own right.
One needs no introduction, and can barely even be called a number in the traditional sense. It is both the building block from which every other number is built and the unmoving rock, the sole multiplicand that leaves any factor it touches unchanged. It is so fundamental that we barely think of it: if there is an apple in front of us on the table, we call it an apple, only invoking the numeral one if we might have been expecting two. More than that, it is Ďὸ áźÎ˝, the Monad, that from which all else flows forth; so sublime it is barely a thing, just as it is barely a number.
Three, on the other hand, is the magic number2, and it has a way of getting in our heads. The technical term is hendiatris â things just sound better in threes. Think vĂŠnĂ, vĂdĂ, vĂcĂ; wine, women, and song; or libertĂŠ, ĂŠgalitĂŠ, fraternitĂŠ. And how many cultures around the world have some sort of threefold God, be it the Holy Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, or Julianâs âZeus, Haides, and Helios in oneâ?
Seven is where things get interesting. For once iâll dispense with the cultural and metaphysical aspects â itâs been done â and note a curious thing about our human number sense. If there are, say, four cows in a field, we can look and instinctually know that there are four cows, without needing to consciously count. Five and six are doable, but difficult, and vary based on age and person.3 But seven is where this sense breaks down. Beyond that barrier, we lose our intuitive animal sense, and we have to actually count. Seven is the number that sets us apart from the animals; if one and three are the numbers of the Gods, then seven belongs to humanity.
So, what do you get if you smush those three digits together? By some sheer coincidence, the most famous number in physics. The number 137 is, give or take a few hundredths4, the value of the fine-structure constant, one of the universeâs fundamental, unchanging values as etched into the standard model of particles. Nobody really knows why it has the value it has; as Richard Feynman once said, âIt has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than [a hundred] years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.â (Worry they did: Wolfgang Pauli, the first man to theorise the neutrino, spent much time deliberating with Carl Jung on how this godforsaken 137 had wormed its way into the universeâs code, and why it might have done so.)
So, thatâs why 137 is my favourite number. A remarkable figure, you might say.
I have a general policy of not blabbing my mouth about politics on the site, because it just makes everyone miserable, but i just woke up, and iâm quite fucking angry at the Supreme Court, and thatâs all iâll say.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XLVI
- Using machine learning to repurpose existing drugs for rare diseases
- New York chefs are dulling their spicy food
- Black leopards are, allegedly, quietly thriving in the British countryside
- A trip to Stoneleigh, Surrey, home of the Original Cockney Museum.
- Height-Weight-Chart.com shows a pictographic grid of people representing every combination of the human form, from 4â˛10âł and 90 pounds to 6â˛11âł and 490. Reminds me a lot of the Human Clock. (Via Web Curios, as are the next two on the list.)
- Jack.black. No relation.
- Now you, too, can touch grass with the worldâs first astroturf phone case.
- Atlantis Sea Colony: âBuilding an underwater futureâ
- The worldâs most beautiful sewage treatment plant
- I donât really know how to summarise this one beyond the clickbait headline.
- How Flow was made
- Why Chinese skyscrapers and American five-over-ones are so different
Given that they did it for the original Mega Drive games, Sega should totally rerelease the Sonic Rush duology for mobile phones. The vertical form factor makes it the only platform where itâd be at all feasible.
Death of a Unicorn is okay, but i wish it were better

Yesterday i went to the cinema to go watch Death of a Unicorn, A24âs new one-horned horror-comedy-thing. I could have reviewed it in prose, but iâve elected to leave my thoughts in bullet-point form, as thereâs a lot good, a lot bad, and not much conjoining the two in my mind.
The good
- I appreciate that this movie is wholly unapologetic about being about a unicorn. No tongue in cheek, just, yep, thatâs a mythical unicorn, weâre fucking rolling with it.
- The design of the titular beast is also great, majestic but capable of being a horror monster when it needs to be. The decision to keep the legendary unicornâs beard rather than shave it off (as has become common under the influence of My Little Pony) is commendable.
- Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter are great in it, and are the only ones who seem to have understood the assignment in terms of going buck-wild with their performances.
The bad
- The well of âfilms that are satires about the faux-progressive 2020s nouveau riche and how theyâre all stupid dum-dumsâ has run well and truly dry â that this is a film literally about beating a dead horse doesnât help. It could have at least had the dignity to come out before Glass Onion dealt the finishing blow.
- For a film that was marketed as a ridiculous, bonkers horror-comedy in the vein of Evil Dead II, itâs not actually that funny. I chuckled a few times but⌠thatâs it, really; it never veers off that cliff into complete insanity like i was hoping it would.
- The portrayal of the visions given by the unicorn was boring as shit. Infinite ways you could show the sight of the transcendental, and you pick CGI nebulĂŚ and stars? What is this, Guardians of the Galaxy?
- [peter_griffin_godfather.webm] I did not care for Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. Their performances are nothing. Their characters are nothing. They insist upon themselves.
The neutral observation
- The fatal flaw is that the evil plan made a little too much sense. Like â actually, yeah, youâre right! I think once youâve established that (a) the unicornâs blood cures cancer and (b) the unicorn can heal itself, you do, in fact, have a utilitarian obligation to bring this stuff to market. Maybe not with the methods the evil pharma family use, but still.
TL;DR: 5/10.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XLV

- By now, youâve probably heard the breathless news that theyâve brought dire wolves back from the dead. And, sure, maybe technically theyâre just regular wolves genetically engineered to match the dire-wolf phenotype.1 But thatâs still such a cool achievement that i canât bring myself to be a spoilsport about it, and neither should you. Anyway: Time has the cuter photos of the wolves, and the New Yorker goes more in depth on the people behind it.
- The bizarre application process for the Barkley Marathons
- âEverybody Wants to Rule the Worldâ but itâs in fluent Latin
- The plan for Almere Pampus, the newest neighbourhood in the Netherlandsâ newest city
- The Severance theme but itâs in the Super Mario 64 soundfont
- New longest Linear A inscription just dropped (via Language Hat)
- The Economist reports on the winding road to beatification of the Catholic Churchâs first millennial saint
- Local interest: Injured and rescued seals helped at a new centre in Morpeth
Stuff i watched recently, April â25

Jackie Brown
What a great flick! My beef with Tarantino is that you can often tell that, just behind the camera, heâs jacking off at the thought of how clever he is and how many obscure seventies TV shows he knows, and while thatâs still true here, the electric pairing of Pam Grier and Robert Forster washes all those eye-rolling feelings down until youâre left with the aftertaste of nothing but a good-ass crime thriller. 8/10 â my Tarantino power ranking goes something like Inglourious Basterds > this > Pulp Fiction > Django Unchained >>> Reservoir Dogs.
Spoorloos (The Vanishing)
This grim Dutch crime thriller is consistently mentioned alongside Paul Verhoeven as proof that âsee? Dutch cinema isnât all badâ, which is something you could almost convince me of if it werenât for every top-five listâs inclusion of a film about an evil lift.
Anyway, while Spoorloos does occasionally veer uncomfortably close to âTV movie of the weekâ territory, itâs carried by its villain, an exemplar of the banality of evil. He does what he does because heâs experienced being a hero, and heâs just curious what it feels like to be a villain â and thatâs what makes him fucking terrifying. Check this out if you get the chance. 7/10.
The Monkey
Osgood Perkins returns right soon with another horror endeavour, this time a gory comedy about an evil cuddly monkey. The Monkey doesnât reach the highs of fear and tension that Longlegs does, but neither does it completely bottle the ending, so letâs call it a draw, shall we? 6ž/10.
Quiz Show
I put this on on a lazy afternoon. I was suitably entertained. I remember nothing from it. A platonically perfect 5/10.
The Mist (rewatch)
The Twelve Angry Men of horror puts modern (well, 2000s) American society up against a mirror and examines how people would really react to a mass calamity in a way that hits different in the post-covid era, where everyoneâs brain has had time to cook in the sun. Plus: the cruelest twist ending in cinematic history. 8/10.
The Blues Brothers
Dan Aykroyd is an actual crazy person and thatâs why The Blues Brothers works. This is two-and-a-half hours of overindulgent insanity, the cinematic equivalent of a five-year-old playing with their toys, and i wouldnât want it any other way. I nearly had an asthma attack laughing so hard. 10/10.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Warm. Fuzzy. Inessential. Itâs weird seeing Adam Scott with a beard. 6/10.
Severance (season 2 finale)
The back half of Severanceâs sophomore season fell victim to some shonky pacing decisions, placing two self-contained, slow-paced bottle episodes right before the final two, messing up the flow we were in and negating the chance for an epic Season 1-style three-episode ramp-up, but nonetheless, the double-length finale successfully sticks the landing. The camcorder conversation, where Markâs innie and outie finally âmeetâ, may as well be what the whole show has been building up to, and it just keeps going from there. Every company needs a Choreography and Merriment department. 9/10.
Flow
The first part of a feline double feature, about an adorable black kitty who goes on a maritime journey after the world is inundated by a mysterious flood. The gimmick (if you can call it that) is that the film is told without a single line of dialogue â just animal noises and a backing of beautiful C418-esque music composed by the filmâs director.
Itâs a beautiful, serene, lovely experience â all animated in good olâ open-source Blender, no less! It got me to really feel things for these animals â it was a good idea to dial the anthropomorphism down to, like, 10%, rather than 75%. Theyâre intelligent enough to steer a boat, but thatâs about it. The kibby bats around a lemurâs tail and hates dogs. 9/10.
FelidĂŚ
The second part of the double feature: FelidĂŚ1, a 1994 German film about⌠okay. Okay. Look. Bear with me here. The idea is that itâs a film noir except everybody is a cartoon housecat. And for the first twenty minutes or so, i was thinking, okay, thatâs a nice idea, but i donât know if it has much more than that idea? And then it goes full-tilt into Crazytown. This movie contains, in no particular order:
- Cat buttholes
- Cat sex
- Cat homophobia
- Cat eugenics
- Cats speaking Latin
- Cats reading German
- Cats using a computer
- Cat murder
- So much gory cat murder
- An electroshock cat cult
- Genetically engineered lab cats
- A cat psychopomp who takes care of the cat dead in his cat catacombs
- A dream sequence involving a giant evil Gregor Mendel commanding a literal sea of dead cats
And itâs all done in the animation style of an eighties-nineties-type Disney film (with some budgetary concessions and dodgy lip-synch, because, hey, nobodyâs actually going to watch this). It reminded me, weirdly enough, of an old Garfield cartoon i watched as a kid â the one where he had nine lives, specifically that segment where he was an escaped lab cat. I have only the haziest memory of it, but damned if it (and the annoying-ass little girl in the Garf-den of Eden) didnât stick with meâŚ
I donât know who the fuck the audience for this is other than furries and sicko Europeans, but i fucking love that it exists. Iâm gonna be thinking about it forever, whether i want to or not. All hail Claudandus? 9/10.
Iâll elaborate properly on getting around to the bimensal stuff-i-watched-recently post, but for now, you should absolutely go and watch Flow and FelidĂŚ right now. Two films about cats: one beautiful and serene, one weird and deranged. Go do it. Theyâre great.
The worst part about Chinaâs anti-mapping laws is that thereâs no street view or 3D in China on Google Earth â just a vast, gaping gap in the global patchwork of imagery. Is it too much to ask to be able to rotate a model of Chongqing on my computer instead of in my mind? đď¸
A trip to Washington Wetland Centre
Washington1, a town in urban County Durham long since incorporated into Sunderland, is not a place where one expects much nature. The palatinateâs chirping woods and rolling Pennine moors are not so far away, and the path i took to get to todayâs attraction led not through winding country roads but broad, grey industrial arteries, designed to ferry thousands to and from Nissanâs immense factory.
But at the end of the road, down by the river Wear, there lies a wee patch of idyll: the Washington Wetland Centre.

Iâd come on a good day for it, clearly, as the first thing i saw coming out of reception was the staff corralling all the ducks together for their annual vaccination, by means of a ramshackle assemblage of mesh fences. (Crowd control for birds!) The littlest one kept trying to escape his jab like an ornithological Bobby Kennedy.
Most fabulous of all creatures of the air on offer are the eiders, the diva-est ducks in the world, emitting a chorus of sassy coos as they revel in their status as undisputed kings of the pond. (Youâll have to take my word for it, as i neglected to take a video, erring towards the side of it being better to live in the moment than through a phone camera. I was yet to realise what good blog-fodder the visit would make.)

On the other side of the preserve a viewing area juts out to overlook the Wear â still salty and tidal this close to the sea â and an artificial saline lagoon, built to provide a home for those creatures who prefer a more brackish milieu. The signs tell me that, rare as they historically have been, more and more European otters have made their home along the wear, and the lucky visitor might hope to see one⌠if only the centre were open at dawn or at dusk, when they come out.


Not to worry, for the centre are also very proud of their main mammal enclosure: a family of utterly2 adorable Asian small-clawed otters. Theyâre a lot less squeaky than the ones at Northumberland Zoo, and wondering why, two theories popped into my head.
First, that itâs the Northumbriansâ fault. Their northern sibs were greater in number, a family of four to Durhamâs two, and they were, by all accounts, masters of putting on a show. They appeared in an orderly fashion when their circadian rhythms told them it was feeding time, pipped and squeaked incessantly at the keeper until they got their fish, performed some cuteness, and then went back inside when their bellies were full. They knew exactly what they were doing, methinks.
Second, that the Washingtonian otters were grieving. I said there were two, the younger Buster and the elder Musa, and you might be hard-pressed to call that a family. But until this month, there were three. Mimi, the clanâs matriarch and a scamp who bonked so much they had to give her a lutrine IUD, passed of old age at fourteen (a good innings by her speciesâ standards, no doubt). When she went, they had to put her corpse back in the enclosure so the others would understand.

They were still otters. Still playful. But something about them seemed⌠morose. Maybe, in between the fish and the scampering and the puzzle feeders, they were still thinking about her.
On the way out, i passed a tiny observatory, cleverly named âCygnusâ for the constellation of the swan, used by night for the Sunderland Astronomical Society. I donât know if itâs of much use this far into the zone of light pollution, but they certainly seem to enjoy it, so perhaps my relatively sky-privileged Northumbrian self shouldnât play the lecturer. Perhaps that fateful night that Mimi died, a star in the sky began to twinkle a little brighter.
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XLIV
I live in mortal fear that one day iâll mess the Roman numerals up and wipe out the last link roundup by mistake. Anywayâ
- Who killed Andy the Footless Goose? If you visit one link from this post, make it this one.
- What happens when an entire country stops having children
- The creation of the greatest calculator app in history
- âA portal to hell at an aluminum plant that swallowed up the entire shop in a matter of seconds.â Somehow not clickbait.
- The Sunquest sundial, which adjusts for the equation of time automatically. (Bonus link: the U.S. Navyâs observatory comes in with the best explanation of what the equation of time actually is that iâve ever read.)
- Along similar lines: the nocturnal, a sort of star-dial to help you find the time at night.
- Behold, the one-horsepower leisure exoskeleton! File under the continuing theme of âutopia is here and itâs actually quite boringâ.
- Sega wonât do it, so fans have ported Sonic Unleashed to PC by themselves. Nobody holds a grudge quite like the Sonic fandom.