Posts tagged “80s movies”

• Less than 1% of Catholic nuns in the United States today are 30 or younger.
• The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale starts on April 8, 2025.
• Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” I feel like there was probably a powerful confirmation bias at work here. This seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d think was obvious, but… as strongly as I would expect the correlation to be, I am guessing we’ll soon hear of all sorts of problems with the statistics.
• I’d forgotten that Taylor Swift hosted SNL a few years ago and performed a ten-minute version of All Too Well. It’s been a long, long time since I needed to convert a YouTube video to mp3.
• We’re dealing with actual Nazis.
• What “Center” Is That, Exactly? is an essay by A.R. Moxon of The Reframe that includes the wonderful line, “I think of how twisted I would have to become, for the spectacle of diversity and equality and freedom to traumatize me into suicidally-counterfactual reactionary nonsense.” This echoes some of the Kübler-Rossian questions stuck on my mental treadmill since that somehow-malevolent escalator ride that foreshadowed so drastic a national decline. How do you watch Footloose and root for John Lithgow? How do you watch The Muppet Movie and root for Doc Hopper? How do you watch Captain America and root for Hydra? How do you watch Star Wars and root for the Empire?! Or – maybe more terrifying – how do you transform into a stormtrooper but think you’re a Rebel?
• When you’re done reading that, check out It’s The Fascism, Stupid, in which Moxon talks about how “the First Buddy, a Nazi apartheid billionaire/corruption mogul whose name means Flair Odor, who was not elected to anything at all, seized control of our federal infrastructure.”

• Were Back to the Future and The Goonies set on the same day? – via kottke
• Here’s a faithful recreation of me in the 1980s explaining my IT job to my grandparents at Christmas. It also perfectly mimics how I imagine I sound any time I talk to my teenager about pretty much anything. (But the danger presented by a poorly-maintained turbo encabulator is no joke!)
• Reverse Engineering Call Of Duty Anti-Cheat
• There are some hidden gems on this MacStories Best Apps of 2024 list.
• I have a generic digital photo frame at home that’s on its last legs. I got it well over a decade ago and was never thrilled with its buttons or input options, but at the time it was pretty awesome. Since then I’ve purchased multiple Pix-Star frames (website, Amazon) for far-off family members; I’m not a huge fan of those, either, and I don’t feel they’re worth the price tag. I just saw the Aura frame recommended in the hiro.report newsletter and it looks pretty nice, but it’s also pretty expensive. I’ve got at least two ancient iPads Mini collecting dust and am going to try repurposing those instead. (I’ll keep you posted.)
• To age on the internet is to exist in an accidental version of [a] time tunnel.
• I’m wondering for how long what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s definitely not forever, but it is still for today.
• I just received a text message that read, “Please be advised that we are currently conducting a lockdown drill at [your son’s high school]. This is a routine practice to ensure student and staff safety. Thank you for your understanding. STOP to end”
  What a utopia it would be if simply texting STOP to end was actually the solution.

• I thought this was a super interesting article about the ethical and legal issues of using CT scanners to “hack” boxes of trading cards. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• I cannot wrap my head around the fact that it’s now been more than two years since I first complained to Amazon about a bug in their Alexa iOS app—which makes it impossible to manage your Echo Show photo library once you add more than 120 photos—and they still haven’t fixed it. How can I be the only one who cares about this?
• A lone dolphin has been yelling into the Baltic Sea for years and no one is responding. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• I’m a sucker for creative gift wrapping tutorials.
• Far too many of our Christmas decorations do not have a power switch. I got several of these inexpensive power switches and it took me about five minutes to splice them into the wires so now we can turn things off and on without needing to unplug them.
• “imagine falling in love with someone to find out they got you 8 maids a milking and a combined 23 birds for Christmas” – via @teewatterss
• I recently watched Little Shop of Horrors (Warner Bros., 1986) for the first time in probably 25 years and I’m happy to report that it’s still pretty great.
• Happy holidays! After considering risk factors such as age and exercise, scientists found that people who enjoyed at least five ounces of dark chocolate per week had a twenty-one percent lower risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes. – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• Nike, NFL Announce 10-Year Contract Extension – via @sportslogosnet
• I can think of no insult worse than being told, “Go Back Home, Your Mother Made You Waffles.” – via kottke

• “Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said California will offer electric vehicle subsidies even if Donald Trump kills the $7,500 federal tax credit.” – via @crookedmedia
• Recent research found that men who improve their fitness are 35% less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• I recently purchased an Anker MagSafe Case with (what I thought) one of those cool little kickstand grips. I sort of liked the kickstand, but I found I couldn’t align the charging area easily (or at all) on anything but a MagSafe base. I also tested for a week, alternating days with my Spigen case, and discovered the Anker one was definitely both (a) getting unreasonably hot and (b) significantly draining my battery. The heat issue was bad enough, but the battery drain is not something I’d ever accept. My 13-mo old iPhone 15 Pro still regularly sticks over 80% charge after a day’s use. With the Anker case it would be down to 50% before 6pm. Obviously, your mileage may vary and IANAAT, but I’m going back to my Spigen case.
• Merging black holes may create bubbles that could swallow the universe. [Ed. note: The word ‘may’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.]
• Most Black Friday deals are pretty worthless, but here’s a good one. All Predictions Wrong — home of TMQ — is offering a 20% discount on all paid subscriptions.
• Anyone who is a fan of the doomed voyage of Ernest Shackleton and his crew aboard the Endurance [Ed. note: Dad!] has got to be thrilled right now. In addition to the epic book that was released a few years ago, and the Kenneth Branagh mini-series from a few years before that, there’s a new National Geographic special on Disney+ and now even a LEGO set!
• Nice to see the Florida Gators climbed all the way up to No. 33 after beating Ole Miss, one week after the win against LSU. The Gators are the highest-ranked 6-5 team, with all five losses coming to top-25 teams. – via @theathletichq
• The ugly math behind Florida’s low SAT scores: “Among all states, Florida students ranked fourth from last on the standardized exam used to gauge readiness for college. Among states where at least 50,000 students took the test, Florida ranked last.” – via @aspar1605
• Just want to confirm your household is safe for my kid: Is your family up to date on vaccines? Will there be raw milk served? Is there a gun in the house? – brilliant advice via @designmom
• Fun fact: The Portuguese garbage scow captain from Overboard (1987, Goldie Hawn) went on to become the Beverly Hills hotel manager in Pretty Woman (1990, Julia Roberts).

How can it already be November? It is incredibly unfair how the last three months of each year are only two weeks long. Big election in just a few days. Please vote.

• “In the end, it’s the hard things we love to remember.” – via @heybaskle
• “It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious.” As an early GenXer, this essay was quite the gut punch. I urge you to read it. – via Austin Kleon
• The story of Ghost is awe-inspiring and has me reminiscing about the early days of blogging. – via @simondowens
• Beginning in mid-December, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be free for everyone 25 and under.
• Before her death in April of this year, Christine Farrell somehow managed to track down every single DC comic book, tens of thousands of them, going back to 1935. About 500 of the rarest ones were just auctioned. – via @NPR

The movie Napoleon Dynamite was released twenty years ago, which is a very odd thing to type about a movie that feels like it came out four or five years ago.

• There are many, many good reasons why First Citywide should be your change bank, and Old Glory should be your insurance company. (These are two of the best commercials ever.)
• Not many people are going to get this one, but… “Be Like Han” is damn great advice.
• The moodINQ Programmable Tattoo System is simply mind-blowing. Getting a “sub-dermal” implant seems a little extreme, but it might be worth it to occasionally rock my favorite tattoo.
• Twitter vs. The Pony Express
• A guy got mugged in Australia… right in front of a Ninja school.
• In Finland there are 5.2 million people and nearly two million saunas. That’s why the Sauna World Championship is a nationally televised event.
• Lane Kiffin is Supercoach!
• The Bullies of the 80s were quite cruel.
• Should we impose term limits on Supreme Court justices? Consider: “When the Framers wrote the Constitution, life expectancy was less than 40 years; today, life expectancy is 77 years.”