June 25, 2023
Copyright MCMLXXI Rachel Lichtman
Programme 4 Community Television has begun its broadcast day!
Decrapifying Youtube
If you hate how Youtube's home page is lately full of clickbait thumbnails and titles desperate for you to load them, you might want to take a look at DeArrow, written by Ajay Ramachandran (Chrome, Firefox), an extension that can replace them with crowdsourced alternatives, or in their absence provide de-emphasized titles and random thumbnails. Ramachandran also produces SponsorBlock (Chrome, Firefox), a crowdsourced system for skipping past the sponsorship ads in videos, as well as the non-music portions of music videos. [more inside]
‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’
Four Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse crew members say unsustainable working conditions are behind the success of the animated film.
Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.
While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments.[more inside]
The Eight-Year Mission Apparently Produced Almost Nothing of Value
For eight years, between 1955 and 1963, federal agents ran a hidden brothel in one of San Francisco’s poshest neighborhoods and tested LSD on unsuspecting Bay Area residents ... At the center of this wildly unethical program was George Hunter White, a former San Francisco journalist-turned-cop who became one of the biggest crusaders of America’s early war on drugs. In public, he railed against drug use and ruthlessly investigated jazz legends like Billie Holiday. Privately, however, he drank martinis by the pitcher and even used drugs like LSD and marijuana. from 'Operation Midnight Climax': The CIA mixed LSD and sex at this SF brothel [SF Gate; ungated] [more inside]
How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization
Toward a Leisure Ethic A return to the leisure ethic might show us what we are missing. By developing such an ethos, we might find new vistas of human potential and value while fostering a more harmonious relationship with nature and each other along the way.
The structure of the average day precludes what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” those rare experiences of authentic self-affirmation that stick with us, crystallized in memory. Although, as Woolf observed, “every day includes much more non-being than being,” that is all the more reason to attend seriously to the limited time one has. The more harried one’s day—the more filled it is with banal busyness and fleeting frivolities—the scarcer the potential for authentic experiences becomes. The shorter one’s life becomes. [more inside]
Car car car car car
Happy Pride Month! Adult Mom [Wikipedia] is an indie band that started in Stevie Knipe's bedroom. They created a lo-fi documentary about recording their 2021 album Driver [YT playlist], East For Winter: The Making Of Driver [1h10m] that is full of anecdotes and recording performances. Their most recent release is the non-album track "91". Thank you fabius for this suggestion.
Arabella launches
In 2016 Steve Dennette decided to fell and mill some trees in Granby, Massachusetts to build a boat in his back yard and 80 miles from the ocean. Plan is sailing that boat round the world. Last Saturday 17 June 2023 Arabella was launched (38m YT) and took her first spin round Mattapoisett harbor [CBS 6 min exec summary] with Dennette at the tiller [for the first time!]. The trees were planted and pruned by Steve's GtGrandfather. [more inside]
Very rarely seen marsupial with silky golden fur spotted near Uluru
Very rarely seen marsupial with silky golden fur spotted near Uluru. The marsupial mole is completely blind, swims through the desert sand and rarely ventures above ground. But one eagle-eyed traveller is in disbelief after spotting one attempting to cross the road.
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