Category: Media

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The Verge is Really Good

I upgraded to a paid subscription to The Verge this year. They’ve become a premier independent media outlet covering a broad set of topics while maintaining freedom from external influence.

I’m sure everyone gets something a little different from the subscription. For me, it’s the newsletters. Victoria Song does great work on Optimizer covering the intersection of health and technology; even though I’m not in the market for any of it, she writes captivating pieces about balancing the positive and insidious sides of progress. Tina Nguyen’s Regulator has become my favorite way to read a mild amount of political news without being inundated by the firehose of the news cycle proper.

With more consolidation of tech and media every year, I must keep identifying and purposely supporting the independent ventures I value. The Verge remains high on that list.

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My Favorite Tech Media

I have a work trip to San Diego and all my other blog post ideas need more time, so here’s a quick list of my favorite tech media. I stick with these outlets for their staunch commitment to quality and independence; they’re all owned and run by excellent people with that ineffable and intangible quality of taste.

These lists aren’t in any particular order.

Websites

Podcasts

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Ella Black Series on Effectively Wild Podcast

Effectively Wild, a fantastic baseball podcast from FanGraphs, put out the third and final installment in the scripted series Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found. It’s an excellent historical dive into the first known woman baseball journalist in the late 1800s, who is woefully not generally known and has certain mysteries hanging around her work. Each episode is thoroughly engaging and well-constructed, and I only wish they were YouTube videos with basic imagery so more people would stumble across them.

Give the series a try. Each episode is about an hour and worth your time.

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Review: Eephus

Eephus is a new independent film by Carson Lund, and I had the pleasure of seeing it on Saturday at Cinestudio in Hartford.1This was the perfect venue: a one-theater, non-profit cinema on a college campus in New England. The movie is superb and deserves all the praise it’s received. I’d liken it to an alternative take on The Sandlot, where instead of reliving the magic of youthful summers and dynamic friendships of boys, it’s a funny and somber reflection on the twilight years of adult baseball and the particularities of male relationships that rely entirely on weekend activities. I’d love to have it as a double feature against The Sandlot and force the emotional whiplash.

The film is a beautiful and reflective portrayal of a single autumn day at a local baseball field that means everything to the men there and nothing to everybody else. It has every character you would expect to comprise two haggard recreational teams and is a perfectly exaggerated version of my experience playing in similar leagues over the last several years.

I already want to watch it again. It’s a triumph of independent filmmaking and a unique love letter to baseball.

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    This was the perfect venue: a one-theater, non-profit cinema on a college campus in New England.
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Taskmaster is Wonderful

Erin and I have been binging Taskmaster on YouTube. It’s an absolutely delightful show full of British humour1[sic] and absurd feats of… wit? Orthogonal thought? The show has remained precisely itself for years, yet each series is fresh; tasks are never repeated, and the new crop of contestants creates a different dynamic.

The brain behind the show, Alex Horne, has managed to craft hundreds of unique challenges. Of course, there are recurring task types—Do the most “adjective” thing with this object is one of my favorites—but the combination of Alex’s inventive approach and the comedians actually performing the tasks ensures that you can always expect the unexpected.

Most impressive is that Taskmaster has held true to its vaguely arbitrary scoring system overseen by the Taskmaster, Greg Davies. There’s a balance between speed-based and entirely subjective tasks, giving Greg wide latitude to adjust points as he sees fit. The fictional context of the show is that Greg is assigning these tasks and shall lay equal parts judgment and reward according to his whims. He maintains that character perfectly, getting angry and flustered and disappointed and gleeful and charmed all as appropriate. It isn’t mean-spirited in the least, but there are still incredible insults that are uniquely British.

It’s available on YouTube in the United States. Give it a whirl.

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    [sic]
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The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right.

Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer.

After finding this via a Google search, “movie with mouse needing to find fever medicine reddit”, I decided to check whether any of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini could come up with an answer. They all failed in similar ways, though Gemini ended up being helpful despite not finding the correct answer.

I wrote the same prompt to all three of them: “I’m thinking of a movie where a mouse needs to find fever medicine to save a boy who is sick in bed.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”

Claude suggested The Rescuers Down Under, and invented a scene that didn’t exist to match my description. When I told it about its error, and clarified that the movie I wanted was not animated, it suggested Mousehunt, which it did mention has no scene specifically matching what I wrote in.

Gemini initally suggested The Rescuers, with more complete information including scenes that plausibly match the kind of scene I was describing but without the specifics. “There’s a scene where Bernard needs to find a specific item (a diamond) to bribe a cat guard. This might be getting mixed up with the medicine element you remember.” I thought that was clever. When I followed up, it didn’t give any other movies. Instead, it gave me suggestions for what search terms I could try, and specifically mentioned using either the Tip of My Tongue subreddit, or the IMDB forums. That’s a decent failure experience.

ChatGPT was the worst at this. It confidently stated “The movie you’re referring to is The Secret of NIMH.” While the other two assistants gave wiggle room in their answers, ChatGPT assumed it was correct. Its second guess was one called The Witches, in which a boy gets turned into a mouse. 

I found this illuminating. These assistants are getting better, and I’m becoming more willing to use them, but they still have blindspots and should be considered, at best, a jumping-off point.

But also, The Mouse and the Motorcycle is killer based on my memory of it from twenty years ago.