Okay, everybody back in the Marvel pool.
I’m Not Your Crypto Tool You Tool
Hopefully no one here watches the sportsballs, as recently you would have seen this ad ad nauseum.
Periodically I enjoy trying to make sense of speculative digital currency, most of it not even underpinned by scarcity. It makes my brain hurt.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFT – sounds like electronica I’m too old to fathom.
And apparently it’s terrible for the environment: a single Bitcoin transaction consumes the same amount of power that an average American home uses in a month.
Twitter, please roast this clown:
I can just not stop laughing that Matt Damon’s pitch for crypto is “Be like a brave explorer, invest your life savings in crypto.”
This commercial where Matt Damon compares buying $5 in ElonAssCoin to the Wright Brothers inventing flight or astronauts exploring space really hypes me up!
Inspiration
An uplifting tune to get you over the midweek hump.
Time For A Xmas Classic
Thanks to Reinfield for exposing me to this Paddy Roberts holiday chestnut a few years ago.
Nearly 60 years on, still as true today as the day it was written.
New PTA
This looks fantastic. The lead is Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour.
Goodbye, Least Favorite Season
It’s a classic!
Choose Your Reality
Los Mods de Sleaford
Nice interview at the beginning.
Shit?
Massively influential, but hard to mourn his passing. Long but informative obit here.
Monorail!
Production-wise, the show hadn’t worked out how to achieve these bigger, more spectacular episodes. The writers loved them and the producers loved them. We all loved them. But there were people at the animation studio who were like, “We have to tell them to cut back. These are too complex.” Part of me is thinking, ‘We’re asking for a lot.’ But the artist, or even the kid, in me is thinking, ‘No, these are fucking awesome and we just have to figure out how to do them.’ I always leaned more that way, because I liked the ambitiousness of the episodes and where it took the show. From just a family comedy to these big, overwhelming animated pieces. They were like little movies.
– from An Oral History of ‘Marge Vs. The Monorail’, a great read. Season 4 is now regarded as peak Simpsons, but at the time there were already complaints that the show had lost its way.
My own town has toyed with the idea of a monorail as a solution to the mass transit problems that will only get worse.
The Virgin Hyperloop seems to have everone’s attention now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKvbSboQ5_g
But as I learned in a fantastic article here, we are basically re-inventing technology that already exists and not doing it well. Lemme transposplain to ya:
In a vacuum (a figurative one: an alternate universe in which the rest of the post-industrial world were not absolutely goddamn bursting with operating networks of authentic high-speed rail; where high-speed rail were not already such a well-developed form of transit that the TGV system, which routinely moves huge numbers of day-to-day commuters across large distances of France at speeds well more than twice that achieved by this sad two-person billion-dollar pod going from nowhere to nowhere across a tiny patch of worthless desert, were not both infinitely better and more sophisticated than any presently available commercial rail in the United States and fairly outmoded in comparison to newer [yet still not all that new!] systems in China and Japan and elsewhere) the Virgin Hyperloop could almost look like an impressive accomplishment.