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Re-watched WAKING LIFE last night

This movie was a Big Deal to us back when it came out in 2001, but it hasn’t necessarily aged well (“Oh, look, another annoying young white man talking,” my wife opined near the end).

That said, I was struck, over and over again, by how hopefully the movie is about now.

Even in its cynical moments, it’s hopeful about us—the humans of the future—in a way that feels like something midway between “charmingly quaint” and “astoundingly, nearly nauseously, naive.”

I want to be like the people in this film. I want to see us the way they were certain we’d be. I want to be as confident as they were that we’d at least be trying to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.

Today is Summer Solstice. Quite literally, it gets darker from here.

Let’s try and be the people we always assumed we were, dee down inside.

Listen to (or Read) My Story “Whatever Comes After Calcutta” on @PseudoPod

The Pseudopod team always does great work, but I’m especially thrilled with what the reader—Rish Outfield—has done here; the story has lots of voices, and he captures them all. Such a treat. (For those less inclined to audio drama and more to old-fashioned reading, they have the full text of the story posted, too.)

PseudoPod 649: “Whatever Comes After Calcutta”

And here’s a YouTube video of the audio, if that’s your jam:

Enjoy!

so, so, sooooothing 🎄

I understand that this is a stressful time of year for many of you. Get a sweet, milky coffee, sit in a comfy chair, and just watch this over, and over, and over again. You will feel better.

This is easily the best Christmas movie David Lynch never made

The Truth About Skateboarding Videos

UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT: The drummer is the real hero of this 28-trombone cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody”

#JustSayin’ #tromboners

(video source)

Continue reading “UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT: The drummer is the real hero of this 28-trombone cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody””

THANKSGIVING BONUS!

I’ve got your new Thanksgiving Tradition right here.

You can thank me later:

HAPPY THANKSGIVING: “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!” #gobblegobblegobble

(Yeah, I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest childhood holiday memories.)

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

This is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag—which is saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch.

I hope your day is good and sweet. Gobblegobble!

(If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

The mysterious isochronous curve

I find everything about this—from the sorta esoteric method of construction of an isochronous curve to the dude’s voice and delivery to the fact that it comes from a time and place that has near-zero points of contact with our current Darkest Possible Timeline—deeply, almost cataclysmically, soothing.

Listen: You Aren’t Hearing a Martian Sunrise, but Please Listen to this “Martian Sunrise”

I sorta love things like this, not because it’s the “sound of a Martian sunrise”—because it isn’t. It’s a composition humans made, using an express (and consciously expressed) scheme that’s inspired by a Martian sunrise.

No, I love this art because it sounds pretty and pleases and soothes me, and I love projects like this because artists always and forever operate based on formulae—they just usually aren’t able (or willing) to consciously and explicitly formulate those formula. I like it when we engage with our formulae outright.

Also, I really like Mars. Our relationship with that planet has changed substantially since I was a boy, and that always fills my heart with Hope.