Queue

Severance - people split their memories between home and work

Wind River - same writer as Sicario. Some murder mystery in Alaska.

Arrival - trying to communicate with aliens before tensions leads to war

Ex Machina - AI thriller

Memento - by Christopher Nolan

Music

I like listening to songs in languages that I only somewhat understand. This allows me to fill in the gaps optimistically, instead of being annoyed at the lyrics being dumb or non-optimal.

German

Some of my favourite German pop songs were ruined when I actually bothered to read the lyrics and discovered how dumb they were - for example, Adel Tawil's 'Und ich singe diese Lieder...' which is a recap of recent world events rather than anything as grand as it originally sounded to me.

There's a woman singer - Alexa Feser or something - who wears a spacesuit in her music videos, and sometimes sings about space. Which I obviously like. But only some of her songs are about space - maybe the other songs are somewhat allegorical, and I haven't examined the lyrics carefully enough to see the links.

Neo-Classical

Classical music is boring! But neo-classical music (e.g. film scores) is great.

It's amazing how musicians can make a good riff and overlay their shitty song atop it. For example, Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve. Listen to the lyrics: “It is a bitter sweet symphony...” (like a movie that says its title in the first scene). It's shit; but the violin is great.

Listen to the Philharmonic Orchestra cover. It sounds so majestic, and flexible (bittersweet but, with some change, could be solidly triumphant or solidly sad).

And dear God, just look at this. Top goddamn result for 'bittersweet symphony orchestra' - just slop played by punks who pull stupid faces during the performance. Mohawks, bald men, old men, stupid guy with his tongue out at 02:44.

I'm not really complaining if people want to enjoy this, and more than I'd complain about people eating McDonald's. But why is Youtube showing it to me? All my Youtube history is traditional songs from over 80 years ago. The Youtube algorithm sucks.

Youtubers

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Science

• Compsci/Programming
  • AI
    • Before AI became mainstream in 2022, it used to be fun - people would train neural networks to perform a specific task. Now, it is all shit - most Youtubers just write a wrapper around ChatGPT and call that “training an AI”, and I can't find the real ones any more.
• Misc/Various
  • Sam Macer
    • Perfumery
  • Tom Scott
    • Retired
  • blenderguru
    • Blender guides
  • LPL
  • Adam Ruins Everything
    • I think some of his videos have made dubious claims. I can't remember which, but there was one time he said a large percentage and I thought 'no there's no way that's accurate', but he cites respectable journals so it would take effort to disprove.

Entertainment

• Cellular automata
  • I got into cellular automata in 2022 after watching Sebastian Lague's video, so I followed a bunch of channels about it. My interest was because I thought I might be able to use it for compression - after seeing self-repairing images I thought I could evolve a cellular algorithm to display simple icon images and thus reduce image sizes by a few kilobytes. But the existing algorithms are not that space-efficient yet.
• Micro Entertainment
  • House MD
    • I watched almost the entirety of this show through Youtube videos
    • Very real medical science
    • Dr Amber Volakis was my favourite character
• Ambient Entertainment
  • I like having someone talking in a monotone in the background, not to pay attention to
  • Lore
    • Skyrionn - Half-Life Lore
    • Alt Shift X - Game of Thrones Lore
  • Twitch VODs (because they aren't interrupted by adverts)
    • ExtraEmily - an 'IRL' streamer born with 'brainrot'
    • Asmongold used to be good for this, back when he would spend hours whining about one or other particular game. But now he's become more of a 'political commentator' it's not good for background noise.

Music

• Peter Hollens
  • Acapella covers of stuff
• Nutzername92a
  • Used to post compilation videos of mid-2010s German pop

Blogs/Etc

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• justine.lol
  • She had a great post about compressing a Python data pack, and she seems to have other articles about writing single executable files that can run in Linux, BSD and other OSs (essentially by mapping syscalls to their integer addresses, then filling in or omitting parts of the ELF format to make them run).
• Interesting layout
• I'm sure there are other great blogs I've read, but blogs often fall into the trap of writing for the sake of writing, instead of producing articles only when they have a good idea or writeup.