Watch the original Gone in 60 Seconds, from 1974. The car stunts are absolutely insane, to the extent that they probably shouldn’t have been allowed to make the movie the way they did, but it happened and I’m glad that cameras were rolling. The Nic Cage remake was trying to make a movie safer, slicker, and more coherently, but there’s no replacement for a bunch of insane stunt drivers risking their lives and the lives of everyone around them.

But then I start to feel like

this guy, with the “real” camera and the phone camera, but the phone camera is the one I’ve most consistently got on me, because I can’t lug a whole additional piece of hardware around in a camera bag, meanwhile the phone camera pictures are grainy and shitty, and I’d just as soon have a Pixel in my pocket at all times that can take fairly good pictures at all times.

Camera is probably the first obstacle. I’ve got a kid, and I really want to have good documentation of her growing up. If there were a dumbphone with a legit camera, that’d be a big deal for me.

After that, probably maps is the next most important thing that I want an actual smart phone for. I remember getting my first smart phone, and probably the main thing I was excited about was always being able to navigate directly to where I wanted to go.

Almost everything else is tertiary to my needs.

The one on the right looks like it has an engorged tick for a nose.

Check out his close friend and confidant, Johnny Aloha!

Take one of the most violently-contested parts of the Earth, a center of blood feuds that have been raging for, depending on how you count it, between eighty and six thousand years, a place that has become synonymous for “a location of endless conflict,” take that piece of real estate, enhance the violence, and then tell yourself you’re going to build a bunch of high-end condos and invite rich assholes to move in.

What could possibly go wrong?

I have two devices, one is my phone, and one only plays music. I only ever use my phone as my phone, and my music device as my music device in my car, and both run over Bluetooth.

It is a crapshoot as to which role my car will assign to which device. Sometimes I have to put my phone in airplane mode so that the car won’t try to assign it the media player role in Bluetooth settings. I’m not impressed.

I had an Asus Eee PC and I fuckin’ loved it. Is there anyone still making a functional laptop in that form factor anymore?

I thought the article was telling an unmarried woman that AI can find the cancer pathologists she’s been looking for. Not sure why they would be hiding.

Okay, well, the last time I made this joke it came true, so I’m going to throw some salt over my shoulder after I say it, but how about instead of that, we just give Russia about 20,000 square miles of Alaska. We can start with the entirety of the Aleutian Island chain (about 6,800 sq. miles), and then work out some chunk of the mainland for the rest. That seems reasonable.

And if that does come true, then by God I’m going to go out and buy a lottery ticket.

/nominativedeterminism

What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

modernproblemsmodernsolutionsmeme.jpg

“If you build it, they won’t pull out when they come.”

The combination is 1-2-3-4-5!

INTERNET PASSWORD LOGBOOK is probably a paper slip that you can remove, and then it’ll just be a blank leather journal.

Now a REALLY secure physical logbook would just have the cover of a boring, unremarkable-looking book on the outside.

I think originality is overrated. Hear me out.

Example 1: Star Wars should plagiarize more. Original Star Wars is Hidden Fortress in space, plus a bit of WW2 dogfighting and some car culture flavor. Late period Star Wars has been taking original Star Wars, blending it up, and pouring it back out again. Not enough plagiarism. Top Gun, but make it Star Wars and call it Rogue Squadron. Three Musketeers, but make it Star Wars and call it Three Jedi. Take your pick of old detective noir stories, set it on Coruscant, and call it the The Dantooine Falcon. Stop ripping off Star Wars in Star Wars, and go back to ripping off other properties, and it’s a license to print money.

Example 2: Stop trying to make movie franchises progress forward in time; continuity and originality are overrated. James Bond has been making virtually the same movie for over sixty years, and people still love it! Bond goes to exotic locale meets and beds some number of beautiful women, engages in a bit of extreme sports, foils the plan of some flamboyant villain. The actors are regularly changed without comment. The movie is always set “right now.” Bond has (almost) always been 007 for “a while.” Continuity virtually never spans more than a couple of movies until it gets reset to zero again. And it’s still going strong as a franchise! Pirates of the Caribbean could have used this pattern and just kept making crazy pirate adventure movies forever, but they got wrapped around the axle trying to keep a continuous plot going forward. Should have gone the James Bond route.

Stop trying to make original movies that advance an overarching plot across a franchise. Make movies that have already been made and that don’t take the franchise anywhere. You can’t go wrong.

Don’t forget about PFAS!

Could they do the thing that airports do with geese, where they get a Labrador to run around and bark at the birds and the birds say, “Ehh… fuck this area” and leave of their own accord?