After watching maybe two Spider-Noir trailers, YouTube decided to show me lots of Nicolas Cage promo videos in my feed and one of them was this cool interview with artist Devin Rodriguez. He manages to ask questions and draw a phenomenal pencil portrait (try saying that three times fast) which Nicolas Cage loved.

Good to see Cage doing okay too. I hope Spider-Noir is a success as it looks pretty cool.

After watching a couple of Welsh police dramas this weekend, I noticed the word heddlu on the back of police officers’ vests. Unsurprisingly, heddlu means police in Welsh but it’s the combination of two words:

From hedd (“peace”) +‎ llu (“host, force”)

Wiktionary

That feels like the opposite of what the police do.

I was scrolling through Bluesky one day when I saw a post about Frinkiac “modernising with AI”. Here’s the official part that was screenshotted:

Ten Years of Frinkiac: A Few Months of Modernization with AI

It’s been just over ten years (February 2, 2016) since we launched Frinkiac to the public. In those first few months after release we added GIF support, some new sites (hello Morbotron), and then we mostly stopped working on it. Everything worked well enough for us and the code sat unchanged on the same architecture we’d built in 2015.

In February 2026 it occurred to us that maybe we should point those AI coding tools we’ve been using at the Frinkiac codebase. The result of that work is live now and you can go see it on both Frinkiac and Morbotron, but we’ve also documented a subset of the experience in this post.

Now it looks noisier. I get that change is inevitable but also that’s the most banal and contextless phrase—now more than ever. This kind of change is very much evitable. The site was working fine enough from a user perspective so I don’t know why they felt the need to ruin 10 years of Frinkiac with AI coding tool outputs other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. This definitely feels like an experimental thing that they just went along with and there may be performance gains in the backend according to the announcement post but the UX shouldn’t suffer for that. The last paragraph about “Working with AI” doesn’t fill me with much hope. Fingers crossed it doesn’t end up like a Frinkian catastrophe.

I don’t liken this to “slop” and maybe someone shouldn’t get fired for this blunder but now I feel weird using the site. Change it back to the blissful boob it was!

I’m a passive fan of Green Lantern. I think his powers and the lore are cool but I haven’t watched any of the movies. This new DC series, Lanterns, focuses on Hal Jordan and John Stewart and from the trailer, it looks intriguing.

Yesterday, I wrote about a compilation video featuring 1 second from every episode of Malcolm in the Middle. Today, I have a video featuring 1 second from every classic Simpsons episode (by the same creator). It’s not as unhinged as the MITM one but still very silly and ridiculous as you would expect from classic Simpsons. Needless to say this wouldn’t work nearly as well with modern-day Simpsons episodes.

I keep getting Malcolm in the Middle clips on my YouTube feed (self-inflicted) and it all amounted to finding this compilation video of 1 second from every episode. I thought the show was wacky anyway but seeing it condensed like this made me laugh a lot.

Bryan Cranston related: What if there was a Breaking Bad spin-off about Hank’s MINERALS?

The zombie is a cocktail created by Donn Beach at his famous Don the Beachcomber restaurant in Hollywood in 1934. It’s made of fruit juices, liqueurs, and various Caribbean rums and drinks (including Angostura bitters).

Its name origin is quite funny:

Legend has it that Donn Beach originally concocted the zombie to help a hung-over customer get through a business meeting. The customer returned several days later to complain that he had been turned into a zombie for his entire trip. Its smooth, fruity taste works to conceal its extremely high alcoholic content. Don the Beachcomber restaurants limited their customers to two zombies apiece because of their potency, which Beach said could make one “like the walking dead.”

via Wikipedia

There’s a period zombie drama in there somewhere.

I’ve enjoyed watching Mr Chops on YouTube, mainly for his video game content, but his travel videos are pretty cool too. The one above shows how he went a whole day in London without spending any money. It involved a lot of walking, free water, and the hospitality of Sikhs in a gurdwara.

Brasília is the capital of Brazil but that only came to be in 1960 as it replaced Rio de Janeiro (which replaced Brazil’s first capital, Salvador, in 1763). The idea was to relocate the nation’s capital to a more centralised area but, as JSTOR Daily explained, it had to be built from scratch using overworked migrant workers and ignorance of labor laws to get it done:

The practice of virada—exceeding overtime limits—was common. Protective equipment was also scarce, and there were frequent workplace accidents. There are few records of the total number of deaths and injuries during construction. Instead, we have spotty information. One of the available records is from the IAPI Hospital; it treated 10,927 construction-related accidents in 1959, an average of approximately 30 accidents per day. In 1960, this average exploded to 170 accidents per day.

To ensure public safety—and to suppress any protests that might arise related to poor working conditions—the government deployed the GEB (Guarda Especial de Brasília), security forces paid by NOVACAP, to oversee construction. The GEB became known for their brutality and lack of preparedness. It took part in the so-called Pacheco Fernandes Massacre on February 8, 1959, when workers at the Pacheco Fernandes construction company revolted against their bosses over spoiled food. Called to quell the laborers, the GEB used live ammunition against them. Experts agree on the sequence of events up to this point, but questions arise concerning the number of deaths and injuries that resulted from the action. While the official version states 48 injuries and only one death, witnesses and survivors say dozens were killed and their bodies were taken by truck to an unknown location.

Those were the kinds of practices that were repurposed for the 2014 FIFA World Cup too.

A while ago, I found out about a linguistic concept called mutual intelligibility which describes the connection between different languages that share enough similarities that a non-speaker could understand the other language(s).

Wikipedia has an example of a Danish and Norwegian sentence:

English: I love eating Danish meat and drinking Norwegian water.

Danish: Jeg elsker at spise dansk kød og drikke norsk vand.

Norwegian: Jeg elsker å spise dansk kjøtt og drikke norsk vann.

Given their geographical and linguistic proximity, this one isn’t surprising. But I was surprised to see that Tunisian Arabic and Maltese shared 32–33% of sentences, according to a study from 2016.

Learning French and Spanish at school helped me figure words out in Portuguese thanks to the Romantic family connection (and the tons of Latin-based loan words in English!)

Language related: The Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990, The Klingon language and its influence on modern culture, and 2 polyglots have an awesome chat in 21 languages

A capitonym is a word that changes its meaning if you capitalise it but they sound the same. An example is march and March or herb and Herb. But Polish and polish is unique in that the meaning changes and the pronunciation. Woody (above) is a linguist and professor and he explains that the Polish/polish example doesn’t have a name to distinguish it from other capitonyms and thus called it a capitophone.

Other capitophonic examples he gave include Mobile (the US city) and mobile, Nice (France) and nice (69), and Reading (UK) and reading (what you’re doing right now).

Would Derby/derby count for both (pronounced the same and differently depending on where you’re from)? Slough (UK) and slough would be a capitophone (the latter is pronounced sluff apparently). Isn’t language fun?

Tim Curry dug through artifacts at The Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library to talk about some of his most iconic roles. If you’re a fan, you’ve probably seen plenty of these trips down memory lane but this one gives us deeper backstories for films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and some roles he didn’t get, like Jurassic Park, The Lion King, and… the first Home Alone (for the role of Marv).

He’s such an amazing actor that I could watch these sorts of videos whenever they pop up.

Ṣumūd (Arabic: صمود, meaning “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance”; derived from the verb صمد ṣamada, meaning “to defy, brave, withstand”) is a Palestinian cultural value, ideological theme and political strategy that emerged in the wake of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War among the Palestinian people as a consequence of their oppression and the resistance it inspired. People who exhibit ṣumūd are referred to as ṣāmidīn (صامدين), the singular forms of which are ṣāmid (صامد, m.) and ṣāmida (صامدة, f.).

via Wikipedia

I saw a Bluesky post earlier about the Oscars having an anti-union past and so I looked it up and found a Teen Vogue article about union-busting “at the roots of the ceremony”.

The story goes that Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of MGM (he’s the last M), wanted a beach house made quickly and cheapily so rather than using regular labourers, he got some studio construction workers to do it. While they started unionising, he feared that actors and directors would do the same, so he decided to do something covert about it:

Mayer founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 1927. AMPAS was initially designed to seem like an advocate for employees, effectively trying to replace the need for a union. However, membership in the organization was by invite only, and its loyalties clearly rested with management. Peter Decherney, a professor of cinema studies and author of Hollywood and the Cultural Elite tells Teen Vogue, “The Academy promised to be this industry-wide body that could help set standards. It never worked that way. It was often dismissed as the studio-heads’ union.”

The desire for industry control also inspired the creation of the Academy Awards in 1929. After a number of scandals, the awards offered an opportunity to generate positive publicity. Mayer is even quoted in one of his biographies specifically identifying the awards as a means for creative control. He said if he gave filmmakers “cups and awards, they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted.”

Now the Oscars is a huge annual event and the pinnacle of film awards. But, much like the Grammy Awards, its history has been full of controversy and antiquated practices not including the anti-labour practices that inspired it.

Happy Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year, Tujia New Year, Tsagaan Sar, Hmong New Year, Ryukyu New Year, Korean New Year, and Vietnamese New Year to those who celebrate, in whatever way you celebrate, and in whatever name you call it around the world!

2026 is the Year of the Horse—the Fire Horse to be specific—and a particularly lucky time as The Smithsonian wrote another related piece about horses and how the Chinese zodiac associates them with prosperity and success. NatGeo recalled the first Fire Horse new year in 60 years and what the zodiac cycle all means, Teen Vogue looked at the year ahead, and something from 10 years ago where someone asked why it’s supposed to be bad to be born in the year of the Fire Horse.