We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and
Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur
It, of course.
The Taste Test Buldak roadblock required the Snaker player to do a blindfolded identification of three different noodle flavours.
In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA
sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and
the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go1.
Buldak (불닭) literally means “fire chicken”, and I find myself wondering if the Korean word for domestic chickens
(닭 – usually transliterated as “dak”, “dalg”, or “tak”) might be an onomatopoeic representation of the noise a
chicken makes?2
So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some
noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn3, and a soft-boiled
egg.
There’s no photogenic way to be captured while eating ramen. I promise that this is the least-awful of the snaps I grabbed as I enjoyed my lunch.
It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.
Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.
Footnotes
1 I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of
noodle-centric pop culture .
2 Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?
3 I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in
these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.
As time has gone by, a great many rural English villages have been consumed by their nearest towns, or else become little more than dormitory villages: a place where people do little
more than eat and sleep in-between their commutes to-and-from their distant workplaces1.
And so it pleases me at least a little that the tiny village I’ve lived in for five years this week still shows great success in how well
it clings on to its individual identity.
Right now our village green is surrounded by flags, bunting, and thematic decorations.
Every summer since time immemorial, for example, it’s hosted a Village Festival, and this year it feels like the community’s gone all-out. The theme this year is A Century in
Television, and most of the festivities seem to tie-in to the theme.
If you recognise these characters from their first time around on British television, you’re probably older than I am. If you recognise them from their 2001 “reboot”, then you’re probably younger.
I’ve been particularly impressed this year by entrants into the (themed) scarecrow competition: some cracking scarecrows (and related decorations) have started popping up around the
village in advance of festival week!
Bob the Builder’s helping out with the reconstruction of the roof of one of the houses down towards the end of my hamlet, just outside the village proper.
There’s a clear bias towards characters from childrens’ television programmes, but that only adds to the charm. Not only does it amuse the kids when we walk by them, but it feeds into
the feeling of nostalgia that the festival theme seems to evoke (as well, perhaps, as a connection to the importance of this strange village tradition).
Well-played, Letterbox Cottage. Well-played.
If you took a wrong turning and found your way through our village when you meant to be somewhere else, you’d certainly be amused, bemused, or both by the plethora of figures standing
on street corners, atop hedgerows, and just generally around the place2.
Shaun the Sheep and what I believe must be his cousin Timmy stand atop a hedge looking down on a route used by many children on their way to school.
The festival, like other events in the local calendar, represents a collective effort by the “institutions” of the village – the parish council, the church, the primary school, etc.
But the level of time and emotional investment from individual households (whether they’re making scarecrows for the Summer festival… decorating windows as a Christmas advent calendar…
turning out for a dog show last week, I hear3…)
shows the heart of a collective that really engage with this kind of community. Which is really sweet.
An imaginative use of a coloured lampshade plus some excellent tinfoil work makes Zebedee here come to life. He could only have been more-thematic if he’d been installed on the
village’s (only) roundabout!
Anyway, the short of it is that I feel privileged to live in a village that punches above its weight class when it comes to retaining its distinctive personality. And seeing so many of
my neighbours, near and far, putting these strange scarecrows out, reminded me of that fact.
I’m sure I’m barely scraping the surface – there are definitely a few I know of that I’ve not managed to photograph yet – but there are a lot of scarecrows
around my way, right now.
Footnotes
1 The “village” in which our old house
resided certainly had the characteristic feel of “this used to be a place of its own, but now it’s only-barely not just a residential estate on the outskirts of Oxford, for example.
Kidlington had other features, of course, like Oxford’s short-lived zoological gardens… but it didn’t really feel like it had an identity in
its own right.
2 Depending on exactly which wrong turn you took, the first scarecrow you saw might well
be the one dressed as a police officer – from some nonspecific police procedural drama, one guesses? – that’s stood guard shortly after the first of the signs to advertise our new 20mph speed limit. Holding what I guess is supposed to be a radar gun (but is clearly actually a mini handheld
vacuum cleaner), this scarecrow might well be having a meaningful effect on reducing speeding through our village, and for that alone it might be my favourite.
3 I didn’t enter our silly little furball into the
village dog show, for a variety of reasons: mostly because I had other things to do at the time, but also because she’s a truculent little troublemaker who – especially in the heat of
a Summer’s day – would probably just try to boss-around the other dogs.
I’ve never been even remotely into Sex and the City. But I can’t help but love that this developer was so invested in the characters and their relationships that when
he asked himself “couldn’t all this drama and heartache have been simplified if these characters were willing to consider polyamorous relationships rather than serial
monogamy?”1,
he did the maths to optimise his hypothetical fanfic polycule:
As if his talk at !!Con 2024 wasn’t cool enough, he open-sourced the whole thing, so you’re free to try the calculator online for yourself or expand upon or adapt it to your heart’s content. Perhaps you disagree with his assessment of the
relative relationship characteristics of the characters2: tweak them and
see what the result is!
Or maybe Sex and the City isn’t your thing at all? Well adapt it for whatever your fandom is! How I Met Your Mother,Dawson’s Creek, Mamma
Mia and The L-Word were all crying out for polyamory to come and “fix” them3.
Perhaps if you’re feeling especially brave you’ll put yourself and your circles of friends, lovers, metamours, or whatever into the algorithm and see who it matches up. You never know,
maybe there’s a love connection you’ve missed! (Just be ready for the possibility that it’ll tell you that you’re doing your love life “wrong”!)
Footnotes
1 This is a question I routinely find myself asking of every TV show that presents a love
triangle as a fait accompli resulting from an even moderately-complex who’s-attracted-to-whom.
2 Clearly somebody does, based on his commit “against his will” that increases Carrie and Big’s
validatesOthers scores and reduces Big’s prioritizesKindness.
3 I was especially disappointed with the otherwise-excellent The L-Word, which
did have a go at an ethical non-monogamy storyline but bungled the “ethical” at every hurdle while simultaneously reinforcing the “insatiable bisexual” stereotype. Boo!
Anyway: maybe on my next re-watch I’ll feed some numbers into Juan’s algorithm and see what comes out…
Just when I thought I’d already seen the best imaginable television series to star Ali Wong and Steven Yeun in the form of Tuca & Bertie… suddenly BEEF comes out of nowhere and it’s
flipping amazing.
I’ve a long history of blogging about dreams I’ve had, and though I’ve not done so recently I don’t want you to think it’s because my dreams have gotten any
less trippy-as-fuck. Take last night for example…
I plough every penny and spare minute I can into a side-project that in my head at least qualifies as “art”. The result will be fake opening credits animation for the (non-existent)
pilot episode of an imagined 80s-style children’s television show. But it gets weirder.
Do you remember Hot Shots!? There’s this scene near the end where Topper Harley, played by Charlie Sheen, returns to the Native
American tribe he’s been living with since before the film (in sort of a clash between the “proud warrior
race” trope and a parody of Dances With Wolves, which came out the previous year). Returning to his teepee, Topper meets tribal
elder Owatonna (Rino Thunder), who asks him about the battle Topper had gone to fight in and, in a callback to an earlier joke, receives the four AA-cell batteries he’d asked Topper
to pick up for him “while he was out”.
There are very few occasions where a parody film is objectively better than it’s source material, but I maintain that Hot Shots! beats Top Gun hands-down.
I take the dialogue from this scene (which in reality is nonsense, only the subtitles give it any meaning),
mangle it slightly, and translate it into Japanese using an automated translation service. I find some Japanese-speaking colleagues to help verify that each line broadly makes sense,
at least in isolation.
I commission the soundtrack for my credits sequence. A bit of synth-pop about a minute long. I recruit some voice actors to read each of my Japanese lines, as if they’re characters in
an animated kids TV show. I mix it together, putting bits of Japanese dialogue in the right places so that if anybody were to sync-up my soundtrack with the correct scene in Hot
Shots!, the Japanese dialogue would closely mirror the conversation that the characters in that film were having. The scene, though, is slow-paced enough that, re-recorded, the voices
in my new soundtrack don’t sound like they’re part of the same conversation as one another. This is deliberate.
Meanwhile, I’ve had some artists put together some concept character art for me, based on some descriptions. There’s the usual eclectic mix of characters that you’d expect from 80s
cartoons: one character’s a friendly bear-like thing, another’s a cowardly robot, there’s a talking flying unicorn… you know the kind of shit. I give them descriptions, they give me
art.
Next, I send the concept art and the soundtrack to an animation team and ask them to produce a credits sequence for it, and I indicate which of the characters depicted should be
saying which lines.
Identifying the shows I lifted images from to make this sample is left as an exercise for the reader.
Finally, I dump the credits sequence around the Internet, wait a bit, and then start asking on forums “hey, what show is this?” to see what kind of response it gets.
The thing goes viral. It scratches the itch of people who love to try to find the provenance of old TV clips, but of course there’s no payoff because the show doesn’t exist. It
doesn’t take too long before somebody translates the dialogue and notices some of the unusual phasing and suggests a connection to Hot Shots! That seems to help date the show as
post-1991, but it’s still a mystery. By the time somebody get around to posting a video where the soundtrack overlays the scene from Hot Shots!, conspiracy theories are already all
over: the dominant hypothesis is that the clips are from a series of different shows (still to be identified) but only the soundtrack is new… but that still doesn’t answer what the
different shows are!
As the phenomenon begins to expand into mainstream media I become aware that even the most meme-averse folks I know are going to hear about it, at some point. And as I ‘m likely to be
“found out” as the creator of this weird thing, sooner or later, I decide to come clean about it to people I know sooner, rather than later. I’m hanging out with Ruth and her brothers Robin and Owen and I bring it up:
“Do you remember Hot Shots!? There’s this scene near the end where Topper Harley, played by Charlie Sheen…”, I begin, hoping that the explanation of my process might somehow justify
the weird shit I’ve brought to the world. Or at least, that one of this group has already come across this latest Internet trend and will interject and give me an “in”.
Ruth interrupts: “I don’t think I’ve seen Hot Shots!”
“Really?” Realising that this’ll take some background explanation, I begin by referring to Top Gun and the tropes Hot Shots! plays into and work from there.
Some time later, I’m involved with a team who are making a documentary about the whole phenomenon and my part in it. They’re proposing to release a special edition disc with a chapter
that uses DVD video’s “multi angle” and “audio format switch” features to allow you to watch your choice of either the scene from
Hot Shots! or from my trailer with your choice of either the original audio, my soundtrack, or a commentary by me, but they’re having difficulty negotiating the relevant rights.
After I woke, I tried to tell Ruth about this most-bizarre dream, but soon got stuck in an “am I still dreaming” moment after the following exchange:
It turns out that Renault’s target customer base in Brazil do, too. Presumably it was a way bigger deal over there than it was here, because this new car ad feels like it could
genuinely be a trailer for a live-action reboot of the series. And now I want to watch it.
(I do have some questions, though. Like: Diana was only 14 years old when she and her friends were transported to the Realm of Dungeons and Dragons… so when did she learn to drive? Am I
supposed to believe that she just rolled a natural 20 on that driving check? And where does Sheila go when she turns invisible so that Bobby doesn’t end up sitting on her
transparent-lap? And how does the car’s navigation computer work: are we to believe that there’s a GNSS network in
the skies above the Realm? The Internet must know!)
This epic video (which contains spoilers for Game of Thrones through the third episode of season eight The Long Night). If you’re somehow not up-to-date, you can
always watch the earlier iteration, which only contains spoilers through The Spoils of War, the fourth episode of
the seventh series.
In the future, media organizations might have to do away with the “film” and “TV” tags entirely, if indeed there are media organizations as we currently think of them.
…
Based on my own experience chronicling both art forms, I’m increasingly convinced that film and TV started merging a long time ago, before most of us were aware of what was going
on. Some of us have accepted the change. Others are in denial about it. But as my grandfather used to say, there’s no point trying to close the barn doors after the horses have
already escaped.
…
Interesting article summarising the ongoing changes to the concepts of what we consider “film” versus “television” and the increasingly blurred distinction, and an exploration of how
that’s embodied by phenomena like Avengers: Endgame and the final series of Game of Thrones. Spoilers about the former and about the first three episodes of the
latter, obviously.
The “polyromantic comedy” series You Me Her opens its fourth
season tonight (Tuesday April 9) at 10 on AT&T’s Audience Network. There is no other show like it on television.
Season 1 was about a troubled couple who, independently, fell for the same third person by way of comic flukes: a novelty gimmick. But creator/producer John Scott Shepherd soon
realized that the show was onto something bigger. Season 2 began straight off with the three together in a serious, all-around polyamorous relationship, and things have grown from
there.
Life, of course, hasn’t been easy for them. Tonight’s opening of Season 4 is titled “Triangular Peg, Meet Round World.” Season 5 is already scheduled for 2020.
…
Joy! I loved the first three seasons of You Me Her, admittedly while – during the first couple of seasons at least – simultaneously bemoaning how long it took the characters to
learn lessons that my polycule(s) solved in far shorter order. I was originally watching it with Ruth and JTA but they lagged and I ran ahead, and I really enjoyed this first episode of season 4
too.
On 14 June 2017, televisions across the country showed a west London tower block burn. For some, this was history repeating itself – as if five similar fires had simply not been
important enough to prevent the deaths of 72 people in Grenfell Tower.
Catherine Hickman was on the phone when she died. It wasn’t a panicked call or an attempt to have some last words with a loved one.
As a BBC Two documentary recounts, she had been speaking to a 999 operator for 40 minutes, remaining
calm and following the advice to “stay put” in her tower block flat.
As smoke surrounded her, she stayed put. As flames came through the floorboards, she stayed put. At 16:30, she told the operator: “It’s orange, it’s orange everywhere” before saying
she was “getting really hot in here”.
Believing to the last that she was in the safest place, she carried on talking to the operator – until she stopped.
“Hello Catherine.
“Hello Catherine. Can you make any noise so I know that you’re listening to me?
“Catherine, can you make any noise?
“Can you bang your phone or anything?
“Catherine, are you there?
“I think that’s the phone gone [CALL ENDS]“
Miss Hickman was not a resident of Grenfell Tower. The fire in which she and five others died happened in July 2009, at 12-storey Lakanal House in Camberwell, south
London. But that same “stay put” advice was given to Grenfell residents eight years later. Many of those who did never made it out alive.
…
Excellently-written, chilling article about a series of tower block fires which foreshadow Grenfell: similar mistakes, similar tragedies. This promotes an upcoming BBC television programme broadcasting this evening; might be worth a look.
The day that Mitchell Hurwitz starts making shallow humor is the day that we rip the mask off of Mitchell Hurwitz and find the real Mitchell Hurwitz bound in his own cellar.
Throughout the first three seasons of Arrested Development, we were treated to some ridiculous attention to details, hidden clues, foreshadowing, Easter eggs, and in-jokes. For instance, ever wonder what
was with the obsession with seals in the first few seasons? They were actually a metaphor for Lucille Bluth, the matriarch of the family, who kept poor baby Buster Bluth, a
juice-loving man child, terrified of ever leaving the nest (or entering the ocean). As an act of defiance, Buster enters the ocean and gets his hand bitten off by a “loose seal.”
Loose. Seal. “Lucille.” Do I need to add a “GET IT?!” there?
But that’s not even the crazy part. As we’ve talked about before, the hand being bitten off was foreshadowed throughout the entire season. In one episode in season three,
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission attempts to persuade Tobias Funke, a struggling actor, into
cooperating with them and becoming a mole in the Bluth family. He misunderstands the entire situation and inadvertently becomes a mole (in all senses of the word — by which I mean he
fucking dresses like a mole.) But the real mole in the family was right under our noses all along since season one …
Look at his shirt.
However, all of this is just a teaser for the grandest mystery in Arrested Development: that of “Nichael Bluth.”
Today, just about all monitors and screens are digital (typically using an LCD or Plasma technology), but a decade or two ago, computer displays were based on the analog technology
inherited from TV sets.
These analog displays were constructed around Cathode Rays Tubes (commonly referred to as CRTs).
Analog TV has a fascinating history from when broadcasts were first started (in Black and White), through to the adoption of color TV (using a totally backwards-compatible system with
the earlier monochrome standard), through to cable, and now digital.
Analog TV transmissions and their display technology really were clever inventions (and the addition of colour is another inspiring innovation). It’s worth taking a look about how
these devices work, and how they were designed, using the technology of the day.
After a couple of false starts, an analog colour TV system, that was backwards compatible with black and white, became standard in 1953, and remained unchanged until the take-over by
digital TV broadcasts in the early 2000’s.
