- In 1986, a lake in Cameroon exploded and killed seventeen hundred people. This was due to entirely natural causes and was the second (and, so far, final) time anything like it had happened in recorded history.
- Gex, but itâs a â90s Saturday-morning cartoon. Incredibly charming.
- A historical tech tree
- The rise and fall of Akasha Song, a dark-web DMT kingpin extraordinaire with a pet lemur.
- How to become an intimacy coĂśrdinator, Hollywoodâs newest and most controversial job
- An oldie but a goodie: Scientists laugh at a googly-eyed squid
- Indian scientists search for the perfect apple
- File under âactually interesting ML artâ: What happens when you train an AI on nothing?
- The Alphabet Book Challenge: Guess which word each of these weird alphabet books chose for the letter in question!
- Britainâs war on lawns
- Behold, The Box
- S-Config.com, a charming cyberpunk-ish personal website. I donât actually remember where i found this, but itâs here!
- The Old Robots Web Site
Posts in English
The urge to make my fursona a taur vs. the struggle of figuring out what an otter/deer hybrid body would actually look like. Truly, the big problems.
Stuff i watched recently: Oops! All thrillers! edition
Last weekend i found myself with an unexpected glut of downtime, and i figured iâd put it to good use by crossing four films, all thrillers, off my âto-watchâ list. I went into most of them essentially blind: for two out of the four, i had no idea what the premise even was, and for one of the remaining two i guessed incorrectly. Without further ado â hereâs what i thought of each.
Eight Millimeter (1999)
What i âknewâ going in: Nic Cage tracks down the creators of a child porno.
The celluloid macguffin is, blissfully(?), merely a teenage snuff film rather than a full-on porno â for the best, given they occasionally show snippets of the thing and i doubt Joel Schumacher wanted to be put on a list.
Regardless: Mr Cage is our greatest living actor, and, this being the nineties, he goes âfull Cageâ in a gloriously grimy thriller that sinks him into the depths of Los Angelesâ erotic underworld. Also featured is a disconcertingly young Joaquin Phoenix1 and Peter Stormare as a comically evil crossbow-wielding porno director. The third act gets pretty over-the-top, at times nearing John Wick territory. But thatâs fine by me: i like over-the-top! Itâs better for a film to go out with a bang than to die with a whimper.
When this came out, it was slammed by reviewers, and it still only sits at a six out of ten on all the major movie-buff websites. I hesitate to invoke the word âunderratedâ, so often misused, but⌠come on. The only assumption i can make is that it that the critics still held a grudge against Mr Schumacher over Batman and Robin, and that, four years after Showgirls, Eight Millimeterâs frank sexuality was still considered too much. Bah.2 They wouldnât know kino if it hit them in the face. (8/10)
Frailty (2001)
What i âknewâ going in: I thought it was going to be about a really, really old man.
Itâs not. Iâm willing to say Frailty, a directorial effort by Bill Paxton (of all people) ostensibly starring Matthew McConaughey, is good, even if it is mostly told through flashbacks (and, ergo, a child actor doing much of Mr McConaugheyâs heavy lifting). But the twist veers things so sharply and so suddenly into a supernatural direction that the audience deserves a bit more time to take in the ramifications. And since for most of the film the viewer has been focussing not only on a child actor, but the wrong child actor, by the end of it i still felt i didnât really know Mr McConaugheyâs character â which is a problem when weâre talking about our alleged protagonist! (5½/10)
Misery (1990)
What i knew going in: Stephen King adaptation about a crazy fan who traps the author of her favourite book in her bed and demands he write Glup Shitto back in.
This is the only one i had a solid grasp on going in, since itâs hard to avoid learning about by osmosis. Great in concept, great in performance, great in script⌠but i could never quite shake off the fact that i was watching a psychological horror film from the director of The Princess Bride. (7/10)
Prisoners (2013)
What i âknewâ going in: Denis Villeneuve. Jake Gyllenhaal. Hugh Jackman. Iâm in.
Probably the best thing iâve watched all year. Itâs a punishing watch, but, my god, the talent on display from all cylinders is like nothing else. Behind the camera you have Denis Villeneuve, right in the middle of his transition from QuĂŠbĂŠcois dramas to Hollywood blockbusters, and Roger Deakins, the legendary cinematographer who shot Fargo and No Country for Old Men.3 In front, you have a powerhouse ensemble cast of actors who could all easily carry a film by themselves. Hugh Jackman! Jake Gyllenhaal! Viola Davis! Paul Dano! David Dastmalchian!4 A masterpiece through and through â i hope we might some day get to see the original NC-17 cut, censors be damned. (10/10)
Mx Tynehorneâs link roundup, volume XLVIII
- Internet Roadtrip! Think of it like Twitch Plays PokĂŠmon for Google Street View. Last i followed it, the chatâs plan was to make its way to Canada no matter what, and it appears theyâre now balls-deep into Nova Scotia. Godspeed.
- ChatGPT is breaking American colleges
- The mystery of the pygmy nuthatch, or: an investigation of how Charlieâs Angels got its ornithology very, very wrong.
- Heavyweight.cc: âAll of the gravitas, none of the feesâ.
- âUnparalleled misalignmentsâ: pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. For example: father figure and dad bod, or mass extinction and weight loss.
- Happy pride month to the g0ys â thatâs G-zero-Y, a Brazilian subculture of men who are attracted to men, but spur anal sex and donât consider themselves gay or bisexual. Good for them.
- Blockbusterâs abandoned entertainment complexes
- The demented world of Samuel Smithâs, Britainâs strangest and most draconian pub chain
- The curse of Kenyaâs long-distance runners
The first half of June is going to be pretty busy for me in meatspace, so there might be a paucity of updates for the month. Apologies in advance.
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