Posts Tagged ‘video’

« Older Entries

Merry Christmas: Stellarscope’s “Silent Night”

Wednesday, December 25th, 2024

As is the now annual tradition, enjoy Stellarscope’s version of “Silent Night”:

Merry Christmas!

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Music, video | No Comments »

Shoegazer Sunday: Sugar for the Pill’s “Falling Back To You”

Sunday, December 22nd, 2024

Sugar for the Pill is another Shoegaze band named after a Slowdive song, and “Falling Back To You” is a pleasant uptempo song.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Music, video | No Comments »

Shoegazer Sunday: Dead Leaf Echo’s “Lemonheart”

Sunday, December 15th, 2024

Been a good long while since we did a Dead Leaf Echo song, so here’s “Lemonheart,” featuring a thoroughly silly video that talks a macabre (but still silly) turn.

Yeah, that’s no little girl…

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Music, video | No Comments »

Don’t Cook Your Turkey With Molten Glass

Thursday, November 28th, 2024

If you’re looking for a terribly dangerous and really stupid way to cook a Thanksgiving Turkey, have you considered encasing it in molten glass?

If so, Alton Brown has you covered.

The worst thing about this, apart from the real possibility of horrifying maiming and potential death, is the fact that the skin is the best part of the turkey and breaking the glass to get at the turkey will probably take the skin off with the glass…

Tags:, , ,
Posted in video | 1 Comment »

Halloween Horrors: Giant Insects

Saturday, October 26th, 2024

If you’re easily freaked out by ordinary insects, you might not to want this giant insects video:

Obviously AI, but pretty well done. The guy’s entire channel features more of this sepia-toned nightmare fuel…

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Horror, video | No Comments »

Halloween Horrors: The Existential Dread of Simulation Theory

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

How about a nice helping of existential dread for the Halloween season? But instead of worrying that you’re a fragile shell of decaying cells whose inevitable demise will terminate your brief, flickering existence in a howling void of meaningless nothingness, it’s the worry that neither you nor your too, too fragile husk is real at all, and that you’re just a string of 1s and 0s being run inside a computer.

Welcome to simulation theory!

  • “Would everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe be artificial? Supporters of simulation theory believe that not only is it possible that we’re living in a simulation, it’s likely.”
  • “Modern simulation theory comes from Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, who wrote an influential paper on the subject in 2003 assuming that living in a simulation is possible. Bostrom presents the simulation trilemma, which says one of the following must be true:
    1. We destroy ourselves before we’re able to create a simulation.
    2. We’re able to create a simulation, but choose not to. Or
    3. We are definitely in a simulation.

    Bostrom believes each of these is equally likely to be true.”

  • “When a civilization can create a realistic simulation, the most obvious one to create is that of its own early existence. Bostrom calls this an ancestral simulation, and a civilization that can do this wouldn’t just create one simulation, it would create many, and those simulated civilizations might create their own simulations of the universe, and on and on, like Russian nesting dolls of reality.”
  • Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson both think it’s possible we’re living in a simulation.
  • “In that program, our program, all the laws of the universe, electromagnetism and gravitational force, are written into the program. The speed of light gets a value. There’s code for Planck’s constants of mass, speed, and time. Avogadro’s number is in there, along with a bunch of other rules that govern the behavior of everything that exists, all part of our program. Even consciousness itself is part of our simulation.”
  • Philip K. Dick “believed there are many universes, and sometimes those other realities bleed into ours. He claimed to have visions of this, and even wrote stories like The Man in the High Castle, based on these visions, that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another, like so many film transparencies.”
  • “One way other realities blend into ours could be The Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is when a large number of people have memories of events that don’t match reality. This is called The Mandela Effect because millions of people specifically remember Nelson Mandela died in prison. He didn’t. People remember his wife walking beside his casket in a funeral procession that was on television for two hours that day. This never happened.”
  • I’m snipping the other Mandela Effect examples, but I would swear that Jaws’ girlfriend actually had braces in Moonraker.
  • “Philip K. Dick also felt when we experienced deja vu is because something in our simulated universe changed and a new timeline branched off of the current one. We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed.”
  • “Ever feel like you’ve lived a moment before? That’s because, according to Philip K. Dick and others, you have. Deja vu is the simulation correcting itself with new information.”
  • It also explains the Drake Equation: “Are we really alone in the universe or does our program only focus on us?”
  • “Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT, said the strict laws of physics point to the possibility of a simulation putting a cap on the speed of light. Sure is a good way to keep your sims from venturing out too far from home.”
  • Skipping over the “error correcting code in string theory equations” bit because string theory is garbage.
  • The deep embedding of math at every level of the universe argues in favor of simulation theory. “We see Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio everywhere.”
  • “No matter what we study, whether it’s something the size of a galaxy or as small as an electron, everything in the universe seems to follow patterns and rules. In other words, a program.”
  • The continued growth of computing power indicates how powerful computers in the future could run complex simulations.
  • While it’s said that you would need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe, that’s not true. Just as in modern simulations, you only need to render what someone is paying attention to at any given time.
  • The famous double slit experiment is evidence that the universe only renders things when we’re paying attention. “It’s as if the particles are aware they’re being observed.”
  • “Even though our universe is full of galaxies, those galaxies may not actually be there. If we’re living in a simulation, then stars and galaxies could simply be projections, and only when we get up close, those projections become more detailed. This is an excellent way to save computational resources. And because we’re stuck with a hard limit of the speed of light, getting to far-off places is really difficult.”

    • Personally, I think simulation theory is probably wrong for a meta-critique reason. All previous metaphorical understanding of the universe (as clockwork mechanism, as organism) have proven wrong, so this one is likely to be wrong as well…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Games, Horror, Uncategorized, video | No Comments »

    Halloween Horrors: Creepy Doorbell Footage

    Friday, October 18th, 2024

    How about some unsettling doorbell footage for the Halloween season? Some of it is of home invaders, and others that have ill intent, but some of it just seems to be of weird or deranged people whose motives are unclear.

    Tags:, , ,
    Posted in crime, Horror, video | No Comments »

    Halloween Horror: Scottish Oil Rig Horror Game

    Tuesday, October 15th, 2024

    As I may have mentioned before, I don’t tend to play horror video games, despite reading horror, because I don’t care for some tropes of the genre that appear in almost every game (path dependency and jump scares being two), but I do enjoy watching Daz Games play them, since he freaks out enjoyably at some scenes.

    This time around he’s playing Still Wakes The Deep, a horror game set on a Scottish oil rig in the North Sea that manages to dredge up something horrifically eldritch. Though the path dependency is there, the game has two big things going for it: Superb voice acting for well-realized characters and a really detailed, immersive setting of a working oil rig that provides a lot of other dangers in addition to the monster.

    Tags:, , , , , ,
    Posted in Games, Horror, video | No Comments »

    Halloween Horrors: A Giant Animatronic Prop Collection

    Thursday, October 10th, 2024

    In a follow-up to yesterday’s Transworld trade show post, here’s a guy that has a collection of over 150 Halloween animatronic props.

    His animatronic collection may or may not have been more expensive than my book collection to acquire, but I’m pretty sure it’s significantly more expensive to store…

    Tags:, ,
    Posted in Horror, video | No Comments »

    Halloween Horrors: 2024 Transworld Trade Show

    Wednesday, October 9th, 2024

    Time for a walk through of this year’s Transworld Halloween trade show. These are always a lot of fun.

    Bigger-than-life animatronic figures seem to be a continuing theme (and Sam’s has had one or two such for sale the last few years), including a number of oversized werewolves, and my neighborhood has several Gashadokuro this year. There was also a number of high quality giant spiders on display.

    Tags:, , , , ,
    Posted in Horror, video | No Comments »

    « Older Entries