Why are films 24 frames per second?

When Western Electric and Warner Brothers needed to agree on a standard speed for the Vitaphone sound system they picked 90 feet-per-minute, a nice round number that was already commonly used in the 1920s This also translates to a 2.5:1 relationship with 60Hz electrical systems.

They considered a 2:1 relationship (30fps) but the 112.5 feet-per-minute speed put too much strain on the nitrocellulose film, resulting in a lot more breaks during recording and projection.

I'm not doing an AI video because I promised myself no more moving targets, but this would be the thrust of a big chunk of it: there's a real good chance generative AI is just too damn expensive for a product that's rapidly displaying its fragility.

https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1781425444732223961

Also, like, for ChatGPT, every day on Reddit I see the dumbest people you know spam it with inane nonsense until it gives them the answer they want, and that behaviour just isn't sustainable at scale given the compute cost of every query.

Okay, so, back in April I snapped at James in reply to a tweet that was linking to this video (which James has since delisted but not deleted) and I want to talk about the full context of that but I don't want to make a video, put your beatdown memes away.
The first bit of context is that I initially got keyed into James to fact-check his claims about indie filmmaking in Canada. As a filmmaker the entire Telos venture was immediately obvious as a juvenile fantasy dreamed up by someone with no idea how to make a movie.

Okay, so, GameStop earnings report came out yesterday. Apes in my mentions have been super dickish for the last three months insisting that the company "is now profitable" but, shocking only them, GS lost money this quarter. The current cope is that GS lost less this quarter YOY, but they've also shrunk the company pretty dramatically in the last year. Loss relative to revenue is slightly improved but still bad. GameStop remains massively over-valued relative to performance.

Bolger and Ball both pitch Metaverse visions where you can hide a pair of digital sneakers in a spot and they'll still be there years later, but neither addresses the implication that this inevitably creates digital littering. Also conspicuously absent in all the metaverse reading: no one talks about malicious design.

The thing that makes the meme stock saga keenly fascinating isn't that it's people piling in on a bad stock based on questionable hype, that happens all the time, it's how it's persisted and grown based on complete mythology. The Ape theory of market mechanics is that these companies, GameStop, Bed Bath Beyond, AMC, are otherwise normal, healthy companies that are being targeted for destruction by predatory hedge funds who use criminal naked short sales to drive the company out of business.

Looks like we're having a BBBYQ Honestly reading the Ape response to reality makes me want to scream. A common refrain is "nothing adds up" with the implication that there's some twist in store, when, really, it only fails to add up in their math because they reject any negative possibilities.

The "DRS Movement" is weird and interesting as an anthropological exercise, for sure, but otherwise not particularly impressive because it's an overwhelmingly meaningless gesture.

https://twitter.com/Jay_The_Orca/status/1648091665356210176

It's transfixing to watch a community latch onto faulty logic and turn it into their war machine built of bubble gum and straw, but that's all it is, because the DRS thesis is ultimately gutless.

A prevalent narrative on r/SuperStonk (and its sister subs) is that GameStop is transforming into a Web3 tech company. They launched an NFT marketplace in partnership with Loopring and were, for a time, selling FTX gift cards. This was all "extremely bullish." They also believed for a long time that GameStop's NFT marketplace was *actually* going to be an on-chain stock market, that they were going to tokenize all their stock, something something replace the NYSE, the future is here, power to the players.

The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse
The volume of material that hit the cutting room floor for this one is honestly numbing. This could have extended for hours in every single direction. At one point the metaverse *as a concept* discussion alone was 18 pages.

Watched a "metaverse wedding" where two VC celebrities had a wedding in Decentraland sponsored by Taco Bell and MC'd by Kal Penn and it was easily the most pathetic thing I've seen in several years across every vector. For one the wedding wasn't even "in" Decentraland, you could just watch the stream on a virtual screen in the Taco Bell Chapel where the couple sat on a couch talking to a webcam while a prerecorded machinema played behind them.

R/BBBY has been in chaos for the last day in a perfect encapsulation of the reality distortion field that these groups develop. on Feb 1st BBBY missed an interest payment on three tranches of bonds, this was confirmed by the WSJ via a company spokesperson.

Bed, Bath, & Beyond is likely to declare bankruptcy sometime this week or next. They have, of course, been warning shareholders about this for some time, the problem is that a substantial contingent of their shareholders believe BBBY has been talking to them in code. To these shareholder there is literally no such thing as bad news. The company’s free-cash-flow is massively negative for 14 consecutive months with no big projects to show for it? This is good news, because it’s levelled out, they’re not losing more each month that the previous.

Matthew Ball's "The Metavere and how it will revolutionize everything" is a whirlwind vision of the future sure to dazzle tech CEOs, Venture Capitalist, gullible children, and particularly smart dogs. Ball wows the credulous reader with lots of references to things that happened and names of companies that exist, but still leaves massive gaps in his assumptions largely settling on "the metaverse will have to be different because otherwise it won't exist"

Amazing, Bed Bath & Beyond says "FYI we're basically already bankrupt and probably going out of business" and the meme stock fanatics insist it's a lie to manipulate the stock (which would be a crime) and push for everyone on the forum to buy more. I've been reading up on CMKM Diamonds, a company that was functionally 100% fraudulent, they had no active mines and produced no diamonds, they were making money purely by selling fake shares and promising it was going to moon, yet 16 years on and there's still people hoping.

Getting caught up on Molyneux's blockchain game and purely to technically fulfill a promise of "coming in 2022" they gave NFT holders an alpha build 2 weeks ago, a year after the land sale.

Sorry, "gave" is the wrong word. They ran a 4 day play test. The announcement of course uses language like "deliver the Legacy Deed Holder Alpha build into your hands", doesn't mention it's a time-gated play test, and opts to include a long list of what players can "expect to see in the (finished) game" but not the alpha.

Saw an absolutely amazing hypothesis from the memestocks today: GameStop is going to issue a dividend in the form of an NFT of Ryan Cohen's new book series for 5 year olds, an idea about as good as doing a dividend in the form of peanut butter sandwiches. For the record, as a spectator I fully support any company that wants to do either of those, particularly the part where a dump truck full of sandwiches unloads in BlackRock's parking lot.

I've been digging into the communities surrounding meme stocks and, like, it's weird man. Somehow a short squeeze opportunity back in 2020 has mutated into a straight up apocalypse cult trying to trigger the end of the world. The short version is that there *was* a squeeze, a bunch of Redditors made a tidy profit, a couple hedge funds got bent over the sawhorse, and for outsiders that was basically the entire story, good times and popcorn all around.

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To recap Spice DAO: A dude (Soby) made a bunch of crypto by selling a cryptopunk to an NFL player that the punk kinda resembled. Then he saw that a copy of Jodorowski's Dune (the production bible, not the movie) was up for auction. Being in immediate proximity to Constitution DAO, where a bunch of Reddit losers failed to win an original copy of the constitution that they were going to do ??? with, Soby decides to get a DAO to buy the book for him.

Months ago watched this incredibly bad documentary called The Standard about "the the toughest endurance event on the planet" run by a bunch of ex-special ops. First of all, the whole thing is just an ad for the tacticool activewear brand the film's producers own.

Second, the challenge itself is hilariously low rent.