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Just how much Mastodon has taken off and continues to grow is quite evident by the fact that I felt compelled to import my mute list from Twitter today.

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Went out for some jazz last night 😊

Jenni skimping and looking at me with a cocktail in front of her on the table. In the background are people and musical instruments and mellow lighting of a jazz club.

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An afternoon walk at Oaks Bottom on a freezing cold (but sunny!) day last weekend.

A woman stands on a rock on the edge of a pond. She’s dressed for a freezing cold day. There’s green grass in parts of the pond and trees behind which are reflected in the pond. Everything is lit with sunlight and shadows.

A fallen tree on the bank of a river, with its top submerged in the water and it’s base in the foreground showing roots. Lit by the low afternoon winter sunlight.

A sailboat in the middle of a river lit by the warm glow of winter sunlight. There’s a US flag on the boat. Fore ground and background river banks have trees without leaves.

A bush without leaves with white berries of some kind on it scattered sparsely. Trees in the blurred background.

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Did this cycle a couple of times today: Sauna (170 ºF) -> Cold Plunge (40ºF) -> Hot Tub.

Outside! And the sun came out too! My first time at this. It was wonderful. Will definitely do again 👍

An outdoor space with a hot tub, lawn, tree house, trees and a cloudy sky with some blue patches.

An outdoor space with a sauna and two claw foot bathtubs filled with cold water. One of the tubs has a layer of ice too.

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Second, it’s probably possible to use financial engineering to bypass the debt limit. The most famous proposal calls for minting a platinum coin with a face value of, say, $1 trillion, depositing that coin with the Federal Reserve and spending out of the bank account thus created. Believe it or not, this would almost certainly be legal.

I noticed the paragraph above in this article about the debt limit.

A few things came to mind:

  1. WTF?!
  2. It’s amazing the systems and institutions we rely on have such weird foundational stuff as could be dreamed up as a story.
  3. How come Hollywood hasn’t made a heist move about this already?!
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My recent Flickr account stats show huge spikes that go way back in time, so basically 1 or 2 retrievals on a lot of old photos. I feel like someone is scraping, and I wonder if it’s for AI learning.

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Yesterday at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

A black and white photo of wetlands with lots of ground vegetation and trees without leaves. There are hills in the distance and a dramatic cloudy sky above.

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Yard at sunrise on a summer morning.

Black and white photo of a small plant in front of a white lattice fence. The ground is covered with wood mulch and pine cones.

Black and white photo of grapevine leaves hanging down in front of a white lattice fence and a garden bed.

An up close black and white photo of a small plant in front of a white lattice fence.

Film: Ilford HP5 Plus 400
Camera: Voigtländer Bessa R2a

Upload images using Mimi.

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Looking up from under a tree with a giant trunk, and many big branches going skywards all lit by the warm light of sunset

#ThickTrunkTuesday

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It gets mossy around here.

A muddy lane blocked off by a barrier that says Firelane 8 with a number of mossy tree trunks visible on the side of its path.

A moss covered tree trunk in the foreground and many other mossy trees behind in damp woods.

#mosstodon

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Really enjoying having a functional window in my home office for the first time in almost six years! And it’s nice to have it be a double hung so that I can open the top sash a bit to let in fresh air, and my feet don’t get cold in two minutes like they do with the bottom sash.

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A tree with white bark and no leaves, standing in a house yard, is lit by the golden light of the setting Sun.

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Thinking of summer aka It’s summer somewhere.

On a clear summer day a woman trims a hedge in a yard with lots of greenery and a wooden pergola behind her.

Film: Kodak Ultramax (ISO 400)
Camera: Voigtländer Bessa R2a

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Happy New Year! 🥳

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Woke up to a dry non-overcast morning after a while. Went over to Mt. Tabor to walk around a bit.

View of city skyline in the distance with dramatic clouds above with patches of clear blue sky.

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A diptych with each photo looking down at shoes on a sidewalk. In front of the shoes are thin branches of some weed holding on to snowy ice.

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RIP Pelé

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Playing with the IMDb dataset to find top movies that have multiple directors

I was playing with the pandas library on python and picked the IMDb dataset to explore.

To give myself a learning goal, I asked the following question:

What movies are generally regarded as the best that have multiple directors?

After some finagling the dataset (of multiple large CSV files) I arrived at the following list of twenty, in descending order of average rating:

  1. The Matrix (1999) • 8.7
    Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski

  2. City of God (2002) • 8.6
    Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund

  3. The Intouchables (2011) • 8.5
    Olivier Nakache, Éric Toledano

  4. Avengers: Endgame (2019) • 8.4
    Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

  5. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) • 8.4
    Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

  6. No Country for Old Men (2007) • 8.2
    Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

  7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) • 8.2
    Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

  8. Gone with the Wind (1939) • 8.2
    Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood

  9. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) • 8.1
    Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

  10. The Big Lebowski (1998) • 8.1
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

  11. Fargo (1996) • 8.1
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

  12. The Wizard of Oz (1939) • 8.1
    Victor Fleming, King Vidor, Richard Thorpe, Norman Taurog, Mervyn LeRoy, George Cukor

  13. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) • 8.0
    Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan

  14. Sin City (2005) • 8.0
    Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez

  15. Captain America: Civil War (2016) • 7.8
    Joe Russo, Anthony Russo

  16. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) • 7.8
    Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

  17. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) • 7.8
    Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

  18. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) • 7.7
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

  19. True Grit (2010) • 7.6
    Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

  20. The Butterfly Effect (2004) • 7.6
    Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber

Some thoughts on these results:

  • Most of the films here are from the last twenty-five years. Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are the two remarkable exceptions, surprisingly from the same year, 1939, and with the same main director, Victor Fleming.
  • Gone with the Wind has a runtime of 238 minutes, which is far above any other film here, and that makes it additionally remarkable that it is on this list.
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once was a surprise to see here, given its newness. I wonder if its rating will go up or down with time.
  • I have seen seventeen of these films. The others are now on my to-watch list 😄

Notes on the data filtering and sorting process to get to the final list:

  • Only movies. This eliminated shorts, TV, etc.
  • Not animated. Apparently it is common for animated movies to have more than one director, so they were sort of skewing the results away from what I really intended to discover, even though I didn’t realize it at the time I asked myself that leading question.
  • High rating (> 7.5) and high number of votes (> 250000). I tweaked these to narrow down a short list. If I only maximized one or the other, the results didn’t seem representative of the question.
  • Year of release used as a tie breaker. I figured a more recent film with a high rating had a larger impact on the zeitgeist and so deserved to be higher on the list.

The script can be found here.

P.S. The dataset obviously has biases and those impact the results.

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I love the way Mythic Quest does the one flashback episode each season. Seasons 1 and 3 had really good ones.

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I got a set of chisels for Christmas, so obviously I’m spending the afternoon practicing making a dovetail joint on a scrap piece of wood 😄

A clamped piece of wood with a partial dovetail joint and two Narex chisels next to it.