Categories
video

Ted Lasso perfectly balances absurdity with simplicity

I quite enjoyed season one of Ted Lasso. I haven’t finished season two yet but my friends tell me after a couple of rough episodes the final episodes recover and it’s worth watching.

(Via Cynical-C)

Categories
Music

Foo Fighters Play with 11 year old Nandi Bushell

The Foo Fighters “Everlong” with 11 year old Nandi Bushell:

Last year Dave Grohl saw her videos going viral on Youtube and challenged her to a drumoff.

Categories
design movie

DeLorean Time Travel Consultant

A couple of weeks ago I watched the movie “Driven” about John DeLorean and his run in with the law. It was an ok movie but not as exciting as I had hoped. I still liked it but I was hoping for something more like Ford vs. Ferrari.

Anyway, last night I happened to watch Back to the Future and felt particular appreciation for the genius idea to use a DeLorean as the time travel vehicle. It was perfect, right down to the fact the DeLoreans were/are notoriously unreliable which added to the suspense as lightning is moments away from striking and Marty can’t get the car started.

Anyway, after the movie was over I was grooving on Huey Lewis’ “Back in Time” and watching the credits roll when I noticed the name Ron Cobb beside the words, “DeLorean Time Travel Consultant”. What does that even mean? I did a quick search and found Ron Cobb’s website and wikipedia entry. It turns out he designed the concept for the DeLorean Time Machine. I also learned that unfortunately, he died just last year on his 83rd birthday, from complications of Lewy body dementia. From Wikipedia:

Ronald Ray Cobb (September 21, 1937 – September 21, 2020) was an American-Australian artist. As well as being an editorial cartoonist he worked on numerous major films including Dark Star (1974), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Back to the Future (1985), The Abyss (1989), Total Recall (1990), and Southland Tales (2006). He had one credit as director, for the 1992 film Garbo.

It’s really neat to see the prop schematics for the DeLorean Time Machine. It’s extra fascinating to read all the names of the different time travel components. Be sure to check out the original design of the flux capacitor.

Categories
Art technology

Relm

Some friends of mine1 built a new kind of online meeting space. It’s called Relm. It’s a virtual space that brings people together in a game-like environment with live video chat. In a nutshell, it’s a playful virtual space for online events.

Relm is a community of artists, engineers, philosophers, and spiritual thinkers making a new kind of home on the internet. It’s a virtual world where you can commune with friends.

Updated video:

Just a couple of days ago they updated it to (sort of) work on iOS (iPhone, iPad). Safari is my browser of choice and while you can get basic functionality, it seems to work best in Chrome.

Try out this example world.

1. Duane Johnson is the main programmer behind Relm. There are others that I don’t really know that well. I’m closer friends with Duane’s brothers — I met Duane in person a few years ago in Utah.

Categories
video

Crazy, Amazing, Drone Footage Videos

Scott Simmie, DroneDJ:

Odds are, you’ve seen that amazing bowling alley FPV video that was released in early March. It was a phenomenal piece of piloting and timing, showing off various attributes in the life of a bowling alley in Minnesota – all in a single shot lasting 87 seconds.

I had not seen the video, and if you also haven’t then I highly recommend you check it out. Here it is:

Next up, Mall of America:

The bowling alley video was all shot in a pretty confined space, which created numerous challenges for the pilot. The new video is located in the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. It’s a massive mall, complete with an indoor amusement park. And Jay takes us through it all.

Another video, this one of the Black Lives Matter protests:

Twin Cities 2020 is a powerful piece of work, telling the stories of those cities during one of the most momentous, tumultuous years in their history.

Categories
space video

Meteor near Saskatoon – Feb 22, 2021

My brother-in-law has a security camera mounted on his house in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan that caught a few seconds of this meteor flying over Canada yesterday.

People all over Alberta and Saskatchewan are reporting their experiences catching glimpses of the celestial boulder.

Categories
Disney Music

Sounds of Disneyland

From Main Street USA to Galaxy’s Edge The Sounds of Disneyland has all the music from the Walt’s California based theme parks (Disneyland and California Adventure).

A lot of the music only works as a short diversion in nostalgia but I particularly like playing the song Rancho Del Zocalo (from Frontierland) as background music when I’ve cooked a Hello Fresh recipe for the family. There’s something about the mandolin and guitar duet that simulates the restaurant experience.

Categories
download paper craft

Christmas Papercraft

Back in December I created a papercraft project for my grade 5 students. It’s a cute Christmas scene that I had the students cut out and paint and then glue onto cardstock. I based the Santa design on another papercraft that I found a link for on Pinterest but the original was gone so I whipped up my own version in Adobe Illustrator.




Here’s my version in case you’d like to make one yourself, modify it, or use it as a class project (next holiday season, obviously): holiday scene papercraft.pdf. (430KB)

Categories
Music

2020 Playlist

Over the last few years when Andrea I have found a new song on Apple Music we’ll ask Siri to add it to the “[this year’s]” playlist. There isn’t, as far as I know, an easy way to export these lists to other music providers, but nonetheless here is our list from 2020.

Update: It turns out, there is a service that can export music playlists from one music streaming service to another at https://www.tunemymusic.com. It even lets you export to .txt or .csv. Here’s the same 2020 playlist.

Categories
video

One Second Everyday 2020

Yesterday I completed my One Second Everyday project for 2020. It turned into the Nesslin and Ian show given that this year I was working from home for a lot of the year. One can really see them growing up over the last 12 months in this video.

I also got a bit of help from Andrea because on the few days that I missed getting a one second clip I was able to borrow any live photos or videos that she happened to take.

It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s really tough to get a clip every single day. The worst is on days when you think about getting a clip and you know it will literally just take a second but then you think oh I better try and get something more original or interesting or oh, I’m going to see friends today so I’ll get a clip with them in it and in the end you just forget to do it. The worst.

(Music from Mixtape v2)