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Anastasia (Anatole Litvak, 1956).François Truffaut saved his most pointed barb for last. Ending a short review in 1957 with a kiss-off, the notoriously venomous critic urges: “Anatole Litvak despises you; despise him back.”1 He was writing about Anastasia (1956), “a most mediocre film which has for its theme a historical enigma, one of the stupidest and emptiest subjects in a category that never fails to fill the theaters.” Anastasia certainly …

What caught my eye this week. I belatedly enjoyed Dumb Money on Netflix this week. Finumus put me onto it as a chaser to the story in my Active Antics links below about the Canadian who made and lost $300m trading Tesla options. Dumb Money is hilarious (whereas that second story is almost tragic) but it’s also a solid piece of filmmaking. The movie deftly captures the time and (all …

John Gruber asks: Why in the world didn’t Apple take regular use of a screen-recording app into account all along? I think this is the question you ask when you have not used a Corporate Mac in the last 4-5 years. For those who are, you know that companies install applications which take screenshots and screen recordings of certain or all activities being done on the Mac. You know, for …

Of course we’ve got them. This is of course an homage to an epic fantasy adventure. A finish on the voided falcon panel. Foreground first in double running stitch, using black thread. Background then worked in the same accent yellow I’ve been using, in long armed cross stitch (LACS). The telltale plaited look of LACS done in rows that alternate direction is clear: Working the voiding after the outlines can …

Newsletter peeps heard about this already, but Repeated Burn is on sale through Kobo in Canada and the US for 1.25 CAD/0.99 USD. The sale is October 10-14.It's also available to Kobo Plus folks regardless of location. And is also available at it's regular degular price on all platforms. And in paper.Repeated Burn is the story of Raven who has a bad day that involves her ex's new ex showing …

Branch Rickey? John Milton? Alexander Pope? Anonymous? Two 20-sided dice from Unsplash Question for Quote Investigator: Confident people believe that luck is really controlled by human action. Religious people believe that luck is actually controlled by divine action. Here is a pertinent adage: Luck is the residue of design. This statement has been credited to prominent U.S. sports executive Branch Rickey and major English poet John Milton. I cannot find …

A post at Metafilter a few months ago highlighted the unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements, a nice article from the publicity team at the ANU College of Science. Scrolling its images of Black Mountain Tower at sunset and the compactuses in the basement of the Menzies Library hit me with a wave of nostalgia, as my own PhD thesis is in one of those somewhere. It was a bit of …

Following up on our Warship Wednesday this week, which covered the Great War-era Admiralty Strath-class “battle trawler” HMT William Barnett (3632) and its later life as the French Navy’s auxiliary minesweeper Roche Noire during WWII, how about a great series of related period maritime art? British portrait painter, landscape artist, and printmaker Francis Edgar Dodd, RA, turned 40 as the “lamps are going out all over Europe.” Volunteering to serve …

2015 Australian movie, All About E is a road trip, a comedy, and a love story. E, a beautiful, young Arabic Australian DJ seems to have it all. She is headlining at a top Sydney nightclub, has a home with her gay best-friend Matt and a world of women at her feet, but looks can be deceiving. Something is missing. When she and Matt, her husband of convenience, stumble on …

Taken a week ago on a short hike. This is almost our backyard, and a trail and place we didn’t realize existed until this summer.

Released: 11 October 2024 “Her songwriting hasn’t gone astray, with catchy lines coming thick and fast, alongside the wistful observational writing. The musicality sways in with reverberating, almost shoegaze guitar embellishments and constantly strumming acoustic guitar to ground each song with the brushed drums and light piano accompaniment. – Maverick magazine on Little Lore’s 2023 EP, Seven Stories Part One With three acclaimed EPs of lush Americana, superb songwriting and …

AfterEven though I'm deep into surfacing the mountain and casting rocks I still spend time just staring at the thing from different angles.I began to think the portion of the mountain on the parking lot lobe that partially obscures the track going to the inspiration point stub needed to be taller. If I left it as it was it was going to be the same height as the granite gate, …

The reason you haven’t seen much of me posting on the blog, especially in the last 24 hours. This is because I have been completely engrossed in Bentley Robles latest EP release, “Chaotic Erotica,” which dropped yesterday. Readers may have picked this up, my excitement for this release has been building for months. In fact ever since I first heard “High Definition Lover” during the “Tears and Gearz” tour in …

In this third and final part of a three-part series, we’re taking a more streamlined approach to an application that supports vision-language (VLM) and text-to-speech (TTS). This time, we’ll use different models that are designed for all three modalities — images or videos, text, and audio (including speech-to-text) — in one model. These “any-to-any” models make things easier by allowing us to avoid switching between models. Specifically, we’ll focus on …