I was experimenting with VP8/VP9 WebM video transparency and I made a stupid thing: a URL that, if you go to it, means you’ll he followed around my blog by a video of me just hanging
out in the corner of the page – https://danq.me/?fool_id=06
I’ve added it to my list of “stupid/random things that can happen if you visit my blog on April Fools’ Day”: https://danq.me/fools/
It’s possible I don’t understand social media any more. To be fair, it’s possible that I never did.
This is something between absurd and hilarious. Aside from the 100 year plan (which is fascinating, and I keep meaning to share my thoughts
on), I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be advertising. Maybe it’s trying to showcase how cool it is to work with Automattic? (It’s
not… exactly like it’s depicted in the video. But I’d be lying if I said that fewer than 50% of my meetings this week have included a discussion on snack foods, so maybe we are
I guess at least a little eccentric.)
I think I understand what it’s parodying. And that’s fun. But… wow. You don’t see many videos like this attached to a corporate YouTube account, do you? Kudos for keeping the Internet
fun and weird, WordPress.com.
When I saw the title of this piece by The Nerdwriter pop up in my RSS reader, the first words that grabbed my attention were “time travel movie”. I’ve a bit of a thing for time travel
stories in any medium, and I love a good time travel movie1.
Could I be about to be introduced to one I’m not familiar with, I wondered?
Before the thumbnail loaded2,
I processed the rest of the title: the movie doesn’t move. At first my brain had assumed that this was a reference to the story spanning time but not space,
but now suddenly it clicked:
Like many people (outside of film students), I imagine, I first came across La Jetée after seeing it mentioned in the credits of Twelve Monkeys, which adapts its
storyline in several ways. And like most people who then went on to see it, I imagine, I was moved by that unforgettable experience – there’s nothing quite like it in the history of
film (if we’re to call it a film, that is: its creator famously doesn’t).
Anyway: Nerdwriter1’s take on it doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said, but it’s a beautiful introduction to interpreting this fantastic short film and it’s
highly-accessible whether or not you’ve seen La Jetée3. Give his video essay a watch.
Footnotes
1 Okay, let’s be honest, my feelings go deeper than that. Time travel movies are, for me,
like pizza: I love a good time travel movie, but I’ll also happily enjoy a pretty trashy time travel movie too.
2 Right now I’m in a rural farm building surrounded by olive groves in an out-of-the-way
bit of Spain, and my Internet access isn’t always the fastest. D’ya remember how sometimes Web pages used to load the text and then you’d wait while the images loaded? They still do
that, here.
3 There’s spoilers, but by the time a film is 60 years old, I think that’s fair game,
right?
I’m on sabbatical from work right now, so I’m hoping to be able to get out to this hashpoint while the kids are at school.
Expedition
After dropping the kids off at school, the geopup/hashhound and I set out for the hashpoint. Coming up the “short side” of the bridleway from Botley would be a shorter walk, but we
opted to park in Cumnor and come up the “long side” of Harcourt Hill to avoid Oxford’s traffic (and the inevitable fee for parking on the city’s side of the hill).
Harcourt Hill (like my village of Stanton Harcourt) doubtless gets its name from the Harcourt Family, who supported William the Conqueror during his conquest of Great Britain back in
1066 and were ultimately granted huge swathes of land around this part of the world in recognition of their loyalty. To this day, you find “Harcourt” in a lot of place names in this
neck of the woods.
The hashpoint was so easy to find, we almost walked right over it: it’s right in the centre of the footpath/bridleway. Even my dog, who often doesn’t like long walks or muddy paths,
didn’t get a chance to complain before we got there. We arrived at 09:35 and took the requisite photos, which can be found below. We also kept a GPS tracklog and vlogged our experience,
all of which you can see below.
I’ve not properly hashed in a long while, so it was great to get back out there!
What’s the point of this crossing? Do rabbits pass very fast through this junction?
View East from the hashpoint (plus dog).
View West from the hashpoint.
Right in the middle of the circle of uncertainty.
Silly grin/silly tongue-sticking-out.
From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take
it away, not towards, me.
My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find themselves along the route of this awakened beast.
The YouTube channel @simonscouse has posted exactly two videos.
The first came a little over ten years ago. It shows a hand waving and then wiggling its fingers in front of a patterned wallpaper:
The second came a little over five years ago, and shows a hand – the same hand? – waving in front of a painting of two cats while a child’s voice can be heard in the background:
In a comment on the latter, the producer promised that it’s be “only
another 5 years until the trilogy is completed”.
Where’s the third instalment, Simon? We’re all waiting to see it!
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a
basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now:
Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP; or never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of PHP until your stack is completely jammed. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look
back at your old sites and recall in a way you can’t grasp now, how much possibility lay before you and how simple and fast they were. JS is not as blazingly fast as you imagine.
Don’t worry about the scaling; or worry, but know that premature scalability is as useful as chewing bubble gum if your project starts cosy and small. The real troubles on the web
are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; if your project grows, scale it up on some idle Tuesday.
I can’t say I loved Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen. I’m not sure it’s possible for anybody who lived through it being played to death in the late
1990s; a period of history when a popular song was basically inescapable. Also, it got parodied a lot. I must’ve seen a couple of dozen different parodies of varying quality in
the early 2000s.
But it’s been long enough that I was, I guess, ready for one. And I couldn’t conceive of a better topic.
Y’see: the very message of the value of personal websites is, like Sunscreen, a nostalgic one. When I try to sell
people on the benefits of a personal digital garden or blog, I tend to begin by pointing out that the best time to set up your own website is… like 20+ years ago.
But… the second-best time to start a personal website is right now. With cheap and free static
hosting all over the place (and more-dynamic options not much-more expensive) and domain names still as variably-priced as they ever were, the biggest impediment is the learning
curve… which is also the fun part! Siloed social media is either eating its own tail or else fighting to adapt to once again be part of a more-open Web, and there’s nothing that says
“I’m part of the open Web” like owning your own online identity, carving out your own space, and expressing yourself there however you damn well like.
As always, this is a drum I’ll probably beat until I die, so feel free to get in touch if you want some help getting set up on the Web.
Part of the joy of the collaborative Internet is that people can share their passion. Today’s example comes from this YouTuber who’s made an hour long video demonstrating and
ranking the 35 elevators in the first five games in the Myst series.
Starting with a discussion of what defines an elevator, the video goes on to show off some of the worst of the lifts in the series of games (mostly those that are uninspired,
pointless, or which have confusing interfaces) before moving on to the well-liked majority.
I only ever played the first two Myst games (and certainly haven’t played the first since, what, the mid-1990s?) and I don’t think I finished either. But that didn’t stop me
watching the entirety of this video and revelling in the sheer level of dedication and focus it’ll have taken on the part of the creator. When I made my
(mere 15-minute!) video describing my favourite video game Easter Egg I spent tens of hours over the prior weeks researching the quirk and its background, configuring a copy of the
(elderly) game so that it’d play and record in the way I wanted, and of course playing through the game far enough to be able to fully demonstrate the Easter Egg. Dustin’s
video, which doubtless involved replaying (possibly multiple times) five different games released over a 12-year window is mindblowing by comparison.
I don’t really care about the Myst series. I care even less about its elevators. But I really enjoyed this video, if only for its creator’s enthusiasm.
This promotional video for Aberystwyth University has been kindly archived onto YouTube by one of the undergraduate students who features in it. It was produced in 1984; approximately
the same time I first visited Aberystwyth, although it would take until fifteen years later in 1999 for me to become a student there
myself.
But the thing is… this 1984 video, shot on VHS in 1984, could absolutely be mistaken at-a-glance for a video shot on an
early digital video camera a decade and a half later. The pace of change in Aberystwyth was and is glacial; somehow even the fashion and music seen in Pier Pressure in the video could pass for late-90s!
Anyway: I found the entire video amazingly nostalgic in spite of how far it predates my attendance of the University! Amazing.
This week, Parry Gripp and Nathan Mazur released Young Squirrel Talking About Himself.
You might recognise the tune (and most of the words) from an earlier Parry Gripp song. The original video for the older
version is no longer available on his channel, and that’s probably for the best, but I was really pleased to see the song resurrected in this new form because it’s fabulous. I’ve been
singing it all day.
This post is also available as an article. So
if you'd rather read a conventional blog post of this content, you can!
This is a video version of my blog post, Length Extension Attack. In it, I talk through the theory of length extension
attacks and demonstrate an SHA-1 length extension attack against an (imaginary) website.
