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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • You can’t generalize population density across the entire continent like that. Montana and Wyoming have a wildly different population density than California or New Jersey and they’re all in the contiguous United States. Even just looking at the region east of the Mississippi to between the Mississippi and the Rockies, shows a striking difference in population density.

    Also, Spain is like 1/16 the size of the US with mostly a singular population center in the literal center of the country. And, the Paris metropolitan area is comparable to the tri-state NY Metro area and a fraction of the size of the surrounding region from NY to D.C., which itself is a tiny fraction of the area we call the East Coast.



  • There is a whole podcast series about Lugosi and other movies of this era, You Must Remember This. I’m not sure if this specific detail is covered explicitly. But my impression (and very hazy memory) leads me to believe that it may be a situation where Lugosi was cast because he looked like the expectation of a vampire from the other movie, but then Lugosi performed better and caught the public’s attention better. Kind of like Hydrox vs. Oreos. Hydrox was first to market, but ultimately lost to the copycat. To be fair to Lugosi, he still added several other elements of style we now consider essential to the quintessential vampire character. He just happened to naturally have a widows peak and authentic “old world exotic accent” (he barely spoke English when he got his start in Hollywood), which gave him an advantage.

    EDIT: I should clarify that Karina Longworth’s podcast, You Must Remember This, is about WAY more than Bela. That was just a short series within that podcast. It’s a great listen is you have any interest in film history or long form non-fiction podcasts in general.



  • I spent a little more to get the upgraded newest model of the android phone I’m currently typing this on, released in January 2021 and received by me in March. I had to replace my previous phone because the battery started to fail and it was failing behind in Android versions, meaning some newer apps could no longer be installed and some older apps could no longer be updated. Current phone still going strong, no signs of being any slower than it was originally. Mostly have used wireless charging and battery protection schemes in the OS, so USB port still works well and charges just fine either way. I feel like phones hit a performance plateau a few years ago and I see no reason for an “upgrade”. If my current phone needs to be replaced, I fully expect to be forced to pay more for less given the costs of memory these days. Previously I’d been basically forced to upgrade every 2 years because I always bought the contract special “free” phone and updates stopped or the battery pillowed.






  • “No participant study has been run yet, so we’re not claiming superiority ahead of the evidence,” he said.

    Why not? Seems a simple thing to do before the development gets very far, certainly before the “press release” stage. Probably because they have actually done participant studies and found that trippy map visualizations aren’t particularly good for info at a glance or safe for use while driving. The whole design should have been driven by participant studies from the beginning.

    The whole article wreaks of a “solution” in search of investors and a problem. No one needs a near street level view for navigation, they’ve got that already. Adding a layer of Escher-like distortion seems unlikely to make getting information at a glance from a map any better.



  • I feel like I might be able to reason with a spider (however remote that possibility might be). At least predators have at least a little ability to reason. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll decide that I’m more trouble than I’m worth. Spiders also seem unlikely to team up. You’re maybe dealing with a couple competing to win Spider-Man’s favor, but I’d not expect them to cooperate.

    On the other hand, dealing with ants would be like fighting a fast unreasoning zombie horde, a literal flood of nashing venomous mandibles and with a singular, laser focused, drive to do violence. All they know is violence to achieve their queen’s (Antman’s) goal at any cost to any particular individual. That is MUCH scarier to me.



  • Have you seen the preview? It gives away pretty much the entire plot. This movie seems to share a lot more in common with Coraline than the theme of the title. Strip away from Coraline the fanciful neighbors, talking cat, and layer the supernatural world directly on top of the real world (in place of Coraline’s Being John Malkovich style umbilical tunnel). Then smother the characters with generic horror elements popular today. Now you have this movie, which is “totally not Coraline minus everything that reminds us of Neil Gaiman, we promise.” They clearly made this movie because someone wanted a live action Caroline, but didn’t want to deal with the ick and marketing disaster of producing the work of a once beloved, now known creep and abuser, author.






  • Super Mario Bros is a 90’s dystopian cyberpunk masterpiece. If you’re complaining that is wasn’t “true” to the interlaced 8-bit game you’ve totally missed what makes that movie work. It’s a pretty fucking bizarre take, I’ll grant you that. The new movies were great, but they lack the weirdness and have been polished into boring lumps of nostalgia that are quickly forgotten. Nobody that watched the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie as a child forgot it.