Journalist and anchorman Brian Williams signed off for the final time last night after 28 years with NBC. You can see his farewell from last night’s episode of The 11th Hour on MSNBC. We wish him the best in his retirement.
Over the years, Jimmy Fallon’s crew at The Tonight Show has had a lot of fun with Williams’ news footage, editing him word by word into popular rap songs.
These are genius (warning: some explicit lyrics).
NoEnd House is an amature creepy-pasta short story from a few years back. It tells of a haunted house that has 6 progressively scarier rooms. Supposedly nobody who has made it to room six has ever been seen again.
The short story has a great premise, but many argue that Channel Zero’s version is an even better telling of the story. The six part series starts with them finding out about the haunted house and taking a visit. What happens next is some good story telling, but I thought the final chapters were a bit weaker than the first ones. The first few episodes are definitely worth a watch.
On a tangent, I think this is what Hollywood should be doing these days: taking promising but flawed ideas and working them into great ones. I understand why studios rehash tried and true IP’s like Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvell, etc. They always sell. But it doesn’t demonstrate any real talent to try and reboot old classics with tropey time travel, alternate universe takes, harmful revisionist cannons, or even political/social agendas. Most of the time they only succeeded in ruining critical themes, diluting, damaging, and turning classics into distasteful cash grabs. Lets wake up here Hollywood – there’s lots of great ideas out there if you have the eyes to see them.
Cassini mission to Saturn has to be one of the most amazing space adventures that has happened in my lifetime. I’m a huge fan of Saturn – from it’s hexagonal polar storms, to its rings, to its incredible moons. I would hang on every new picture that came from the mission. However, the below shot is one of the best of the lot.
Read more about the picture, the different planets you can see in it, as well as download the full-sized 90mb tiff version here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia17172-the-day-the-earth-smiled
I loved the movie Home Alone. What if it was made today…
Now mid-career, I have been doing some math and adjustments to my retirement planning. One question that always gets asked is ‘When can I retire?’. This first boils down to ‘How much money do I need to have to retire’ (then in what ways can I arrange/distribute that money in a tax/minimal penalty way)
You read a lot about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) folks that are ‘retiring’ in their 30’s. I say ‘retiring’ in quotes because it’s not your traditional retirement. The idea is that you carefully examine and reduce expenses to the point you are saving up to 70% of your income, and then retiring when your expenses reach the return on savings/investment. While there are variants, many folks are retiring on around $1M (or even less) in the 30’s to 40’s.
As a frugal person myself, I have been intrigued by the FIRE movement, but often found their calculations and assumptions to be very optimistic. Aggressive FIRE calculations work well in low-inflationary, 8% return markets we’ve had for the last 20 years. They do much worse in high inflation and lower returning markets that are being predicted the next 5-10 years.
Enter Brian Fry, a certified financial planner, who ran a bunch of interesting simulations to give you a much more realistic set of values if you want to retire at certain ages to ensure income well into retirement. I found his assumptions (listed in the artcle) to be MUCH more realistic than the $1M and retire numbers that I often see come out of FIRE calculations.
Matchlock makes a visual effects tool called Bishamon. It appears to integrate with everything to Unity to console development. You can even download a copy right now with a 60 day license for their WWVFX contest.
Musicians Inspired has a great set of videos about learning the piano. I remember 2-3 years of piano lessons when I was like 10, but this guy manages to teach more in 5 minutes than I learned in 5 weeks.
Check out these videos on sight reading and playing chords.
Some easy listening: Mary’s Theme – Stelvio Cipriani. Used in the 1969 Italian thriller film ‘Femmina ridens’/’The Laughing Woman’
The movie looks pretty epic:
The movie Clue wasn’t a great hit when it came out – in fact it was pretty well panned by the critics and it was one of the last movies to use multiple endings. It wasn’t until much later that the movie became popular with a strong cult following. The initial flop, however, had unfortunate side effects on the other items that came out with the movie – especially the books which were quickly discontinued and forgotten.
Two books that came out with the movie were Clue by Michael McDowell, and Clue: The Storybook. I got a copy of the storybook via inter-library loan a few years back and uploaded a copy here. It’s a fairly short picture book, but does reveal a much-hinted at secret 4th ending that was never filmed. The Clue novelization by Michael McDowell, however, is much more of a standard length paperback.
While I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie, watching and quoting it endlessly, the McDowell book …. well…. leaves a lot to be desired. For a die-hard fan like me it’s worth the read but the writing isn’t very good and it certainly doesn’t capture the fun of the movie. You won’t learn anything new. It does pretty much follows the movie shot-for-shot.
I have a copy of the novelization, but prices have been getting stratospheric lately. Running as much as $200-$400. I have considered scanning my book for posterity, just like I did for Clue: The Storybook.
But until I get to that stage, you can actually listen to an amature reading of the un-abridged version via the above YouTube video. Read by Austin Curry (sp?), he does mispronounce words on occasion, but it’s more than good enough to give a listen. You can also download a mirrored copy of the audiobook version here if the YouTube link breaks (again).
2023 UPDATE!: you can now read and download the McDowell Clue book from the Internet Archive!! If you’d like to download McDowell’s Clue book, I also put a PDF copy locally here for posterity.
Title : Clue
Author : Michael McDowell
ISBN : 9780449130490
ISBN10: 0449130495
LCCN : 85091213
Publisher: New York : Fawcett Gold Medal
Publication date: November 12, 1985 by Fawcett
188 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Did you have a grandma that caught Murder She Wrote every day without fail? Was your first childhood adventure games one of the King Quest series from Sierra?
Pushing Up Roses makes a lot of content that speaks to late 80’s kids. This video does a great job of capturing the experience many Clue movie fans had when they first saw the movie – likely as a afternoon movie on TV.