Tag Archives: Linkspam

Bop Spotter

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Bop Spotter is an interesting little curio; take an Android phone, set it to run Shazam on a loop, and then hide it somewhere (in this case San Franciscos’s Mission district) with a solar panel attached and suddenly you have the the culture-tasting equivalent of ShotSpotter, generating the unique soundtrack to a particular location. San Franciscos’s Mission is, of course, a very particular environment with a distinct feel too it, so it’d be interesting to see how it would contrast with other locations around the world – though I do suspect that most would end in the brief bang of a controlled explosion.

Starring the Computer

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Starring the Computer is a fun – if somewhat geeky – site recording the use of various computers in films and television. As long with the usual suspects – such as the Apple Macintosh SE and the Commodore 64 – they have some more obscure devices, such as the Thinking Machines CM-1 pictured below. It is really worth a look.

The Thinking Machines CM-1 in The Fly, looking like a super-computer should look.

Horrible Edge Cases to Consider When Dealing With Music

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Microsoft’s Windows might dislike the naming scheme of MASTER BOOT RECORD‘s albums.
If you’re on Linux, you might appreciate ///////-//-///// from The You Suck Flying Circus.

Horrible Edge Cases to Consider When Dealing With Music, Dustri.org

And here’s a fun little list of weird edge cases to think about when dealing with music. Some – such as Nine Inch Nails’s Broken having 90 tracks of four seconds of silence – I knew about, but may of them I’d not seen before and their issues wouldn’t have even crossed my mind.

’90s Dad Thrillers: A List

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Dad Thrillers share certain thematic and narrative concerns. They are generally stories of men, often with families, professional degrees, and successful careers, who find themselves unexpectedly battling bureaucracy, conspiracy, irrational violence, imminent natural disaster, or some combination of the above as they confront an existential threat to their, their family, their country, or their planet’s safety.

’90s Dad Thrillers: a List
Notes toward a theory of the Dad Thriller
Max Read

I have to admit that I do carry a secret torch what the above author terms as ’90s Dad Thrillers and, in some ways, mourn their passing. I’ve have, over the past few years or so, had the chance to dip back into some of the movies he references – films like The Hunt for Red October, Enemy of the State and Dante’s Peak, films that have just enough ersatz smarts to make you feel like your not watching mind-rotting trash, but dumb and kinetic enough that the eternal twin distractions of a beer and a laptop don’t feel like they’d overwhelm the entire story.

Perhaps – once Covid and the MCU and influence of China have all faded – one glorious day they’ll see a resurgence and a renewal. I think I’m probably already ready for that day.