Documenting Life

“This was a very-1970s guerrilla production. Before it was over, Goldman had stolen rain and snow overlays from Disney’s garbage. A young Glen Keane created the sound effects for a truck’s exhaust pipe. Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy animated most of the film, but Bluth’s main memory of Banjo was mixing cel paint by his swimming pool.

Gradually, the production (and the rows of work desks) outgrew Bluth’s garage and took over his whole Culver City home. Guedel recalled that Bluth “literally lived with only his own single bed and a dresser in his small bedroom” — every other space “was filled with animation equipment.” During the busiest periods, Banjo artists slept where they worked and sleeping bags dotted Bluth’s house”

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/don-bluths-garage-band

“In the place of a legion of 15 really good NFL quarterbacks, we are left with about four or five excellent ones and the rest dependent on consistently inventive schematics, marginal improvements made through advancements in coaching and technology and the whims of their owner and general manager (along with their ability to acquire surrounding talent).

Miami’s problem is not unique but there’s also no reasonable solution. Next to having one of these genetic-defying quarterbacks, the next best option is to hold on dearly to one good enough (because the dropoff between good enough and horribly bad is far worse than the one from genetic-defying to good enough)”

https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins-leap-of-faith-tua-tagovailoa-extension

“There are several explanations for Vance’s drift. In the aftermath of his book’s unexpected success, he grew wary that readers would use his memoir as an excuse to look down on his Rust Belt and Appalachian kin. “If you’re an elite white professional,” he said, “working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty about being a racist or a xenophobe.” After the 2016 election, he felt that liberal curiosity about Trump’s voter base had mostly evaporated, as the traditional media emphasized the primacy of non-economic factors (racism, sexism, Russian interference) over material ones, captured in scornful liberal references to MAGA supporters’ “economic anxiety.” Vance was beginning to doubt that his coastal readers were as concerned about the opioid crisis or the outsourcing of jobs as they had initially seemed”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/democrats-might-want-to-take-jd-vance-seriously.html

“As you might expect, the wealthy Silicon Valley types who have jumped on the Trump bandwagon with both feet, are being extremely normal about everything. In the wake of the assassination attempt, we were all treated to a rather unpleasant glimpse into the personal fantasies of some of these folks, which seem to follow a similar script in which they each rise up from their keyboards after years of endless tweeting and board meetings, perfectly prepared to step into the role of heroic warrior protagonist in a civil war film”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/

“The update, which was meant to teach the system how to spot a particular type of cyber-attack that had already been observed in the wild, instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash”.

I’ve been covering this sort of thing for more than a decade now and my guess is the “logic error” will turn out to be one of two things. Either something in one of the most complex systems that humanity has built in its history will have a barely comprehensible fail state and an almost inconceivable combination of bad luck will have led to something catastrophic happening; or someone did something tremendously dumb”

https://www.theguardian.com/global/article/2024/jul/23/why-crowdstrike-style-chaos-is-here-to-stay

“I find never progressing past the musical tastes you had when you were 17 a little sad, and there’s a whole world of discovering new music without trying to stay in the scene as your hair greys. But I do find sticking with what you already loved vastly more adult and sympathetic than the alternative, which is being a 37-year-old parent and starting a TikTok to aggressively display how much you love Camilla Cabello”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-few-indisputable-points-about-poptimism

“Most modern clients look much different. Some wait to receive the most elementary instruction at base camp from Nepali guides, practising with their crampons and ascenders and ice axes. These clients don’t have months at their disposal to trek to a mountain and acclimatize to the altitude. They have weeks, at most. But they have money, and they have ambition. Flying to base camp, breathing bottled oxygen, and clipping into lines from bottom to top works for them. As well as a holdover from earlier times—being accompanied by their personal Sherpa.

For alpinists still trying to climb independently, the scene can be shocking: air traffic jams, equipment drops, tents full of oxygen cylinders—and the equivalent of introductory climbing classes taking place at the foot of the mountain”

https://thewalrus.ca/mass-market-mountaineering/

“A digression: It is considered very impolite in the U.S. professional managerial class to observe that a particular, named professional manager is incompetent at their job. An individual who makes a habit of it will be optimized out of decisionmaking processes featuring PMC members, which is… all decisionmaking processes, effectively. That deviant is ipso facto disruptive to orderly operations and also a bit of a career risk to be in the same room with. And so, even if you know someone to be incompetent, part of being an effective PMC class member in an executive position is to learn the approved euphemisms and rituals”

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/how-acats-transfers-work/

“One of the funniest biannual traditions in tech journalism is “shocked coverage of tech-industry figures supporting Republicans season,” during which a spate of articles and tweets are published marveling at the fact that many prominent Silicon Valley executives and investors are Republicans, and often quite right-wing Republicans, at that! I’m not sure how many of these cycles we have to go through before it becomes clear that there is (and always has been) a large and influential faction of tech capital (i.e. founders, investors, executives) that is not merely “libertarian” but deeply right wing: militarist, eugenicist, hierarchy-obsessed”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-is-twitter-real-election

“What we are witnessing in many Republican-run states across the country is a voucher movement that has caught the car. Millions of parents are receiving educational welfare checks they don’t need to send their kids to private schools, and that money is cut from already impoverished public systems, the only place the poor and working class can afford to send their kids”

https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/free-flow-catheters-harvard-school-vouchers-and/