Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical.
The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and am listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Six years ago, I called for the Gandalf Option — and now I see that Pope Leo has endorsed my call. I admit that he didn’t mention me by name, but come on, the debt is obvious.
Disney was an early adopter of a then-struggling technology called Technicolor: you can see it in the landmark shorts “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) and “The Grasshopper and the Ants” (1935). But while the artwork and animation in those films are first-rate by the standards of the time, they haven’t aged very well. Contrast them to “The Old Mill” (1937) — which looks gorgeous even today. What happened? The animators were working on the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and they were learning on the job at an astonishing rate. “The Old Mill” appeared just six weeks before Snow White; it was a harbinger.
I do love a new version of BBEdit, but what I love even more is reading Bare Bones’s release notes. E.g. “Made some small changes to improve performance of the tag balancer in pathological cases.” — Ah yes, those “pathological cases.”
Fascinating tidbit from David Thomson’s biography of David O. Selznick: When Selznick heard what the studio did to The Magnificent Ambersons, he tried to get the original footage donated to the Museum of Modern Art (357). There’s no citation for this claim, however; I assume Thomson’s source was Irene Selznick, DOS’s first wife, whom Thomson interviewed at great length. If the story is true, which I doubt, DOS showed remarkable foresight; and of course if he had managed it, an artistic tragedy would have ben averted.
Michael Feldstein on the implications of the Canvas hack:
Let’s be clear: This was not some rando script kiddie waltzing through a wide-open back door. The hackers used multiple attack vectors, including Canvas’s open course sites, their help desk software, and social engineering through a help desk call. Instructure is SOC 2 compliant, meaning they’ve had intrusive third-party security audits. The criminals wanted Instructure to let the public know the name of their organization and the fact that they returned the data after the ransom was paid. Why? Advertising. The criminals wanted future victims to know that paying the ransom gets them something in return. Selling students’ private information to the internet isn’t their business model. They’re cyber kidnappers.
This is organized crime. They want us to know that, when they come for us, on whatever platform they attack next, we should pay them.
Finished reading: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. One memorable story among dozens: All the Disney employees were profoundly anxious at the premiere of Snow White — it was after all the first animated feature and no one knew how it would be received. But when the dwarfs laid the dead Snow White on her bier, one of the animators could hear a couple near him sniffling and trying to stifle sobs. He couldn’t resist taking a peek. They were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. 📚
Frame and Cut: a new entry at Cosmos Malick