Elsewhat

I am terrible at chess, but I also love it. I also love these kind of intense deep-dives into esoteric subjects.

Until the age of about 14 I was certain I wanted to do movie special effects when I got old enough. Plans changed, but I still enjoy watching how special effects are done. In this case, a small studio resurrected a decades-old technique for making a “green screen” effect using sodium vapour lighting and prisms. Neat!

This video, cheekily titled ‘Is English just badly pronounced French?‘ (spoiler: it’s not) goes into depth into all the ways that French has impacted English. Particularly mind-blowing is the fact that ‘warranty’ and ‘guarantee’ originated from different pronunciations of the same French word.

Speaking of XKCD, Randall Munroe also just launched a short video about the technical limits of using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of the earth.

YouTube channel Digging the Greats has a very good breakdown of how Daft Punk’s farewell album was made. See also his recent breakdown of the creation of their previous album Discovery.

Title says it all.

A teaser for Hayao Miyazaki’s upcoming film, his first since 2013.

Yet another abstract video in my series of 4K videos without sound.