Funnies

10 Short Videos #6316

10 Short Videos #6316

1. How To CHEAT THE CASINO Revealed!!! - Jason Maher
2. Incredible Recycling | Old Oil Drum Transformed into a Traditional Woven Bed
3. Staircase Lighting Time Relays from 1927-2026
4. The incredible craftsmanship of creating a giant propeller using molten brass! 🤯
5. Which one is the E-Ride Pro SR ? 🔋⚡️
6. Making Process Combine & Harvester Blade
7. How a Can Tab Is Riveted Without a Hole in the Lid
8. How LED Lights Are Made From Copper ⚡
9. Skillfully repairing an old boat with new wood and bringing it back to life. ❤️
10. Mini Tanks for Paintball💥

I'm surprised by the guys making the blades and LEDs, how many steps they go through with the chemicals and/or cleaning. Also surprised that they can make nice, clean products in those filthy workshops.

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6315

10 Short Videos #6315

1. This Isn’t Just Lightning…
2. I created jewelry from natural shells and sand from the Caspian Sea
3. Why Microsoft Hollowed Out Its Fiber to Send Light 47% Faster
4. A square stone into a circle, you must be an alien Yorkshire stone lad
5. GABE 🇮🇹 @partytillimpact & 🇮🇹 @fallingkitty instagrams | PARAGLIDING SPEEDFLYING
6. Amazing floating ammonite preparation
7. 今日のろくろ遊び - Today's pottery wheel play
8. This Polish wind turbine has upright blades
9. Kevin Nealon’s Delivery Here Is Pure Gold 😂
10. This one-wheeled robot patrols at up to 19 mph

Boy, somebody's asleep at the wheel.

Politics & Propaganda

From Spencer Pratt on X:

We're in a new era of communication, and only one side seems to be living in it. The old guard consultant class is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history. 

If you think that high prices lost the election for the right, you don't understand marketing. Humans have no problem paying a premium for a good quality brand. Notice the word "brand", not "product". Are Nikes better than New Balance? Nope. But the brand is better. And notice what happened when they tinkered with the brand and screwed their core narrative? Nike stock fell through the basement. Did the product change? Nope. The brand did.  

It's not the product, it's the brand. Results don't sell the product, the storytelling does. Will these newly-elected commies lower prices? Of course not. Are they gonna get you free healthcare? No, your insurance is gonna get even worse, just like it did the last time they tried socialized medicine. They're not going to do anything they've sold you, but...like Saul Goodman said: if you're committed enough, you can make any story work.

The committed storytelling of a couple insane podcasters was enough to fracture an entire political coalition from their own side in less than 2 years...they have zero power, zero credibility, they've never actually governed anything nor produced any results, but...they're good storytellers, and that's all that matters. Are they telling a good story? No, it's atrocious, but they're telling their atrocious story effectively and compellingly. 

It is 100% true that everything's too damn expensive, and we all know that inflated prices are always sticky. Does anyone know that it's entirely the result of shutting down the global economy over the flu and (both naive republicans and democrats) printing infinity dollars for several years? Nope...because nobody has effectively told that story, and it's an unsexy story to tell. "Free stuff!" is a VERY easy story to tell, and when everyone's gotta take out a second mortgage just to pay their insurance premiums, "free healthcare" is an unbeatable story. It doesn't matter that "free healthcare" doesn't exist and socialized medicine is a terrible product...it's not the product, it's the brand. And "FREE!" is a great brand.

You can't get mad at people for having the financial literacy of a 9 year old. I mean, you can, but they outnumber you a million to one, so it's not going to be productive. You need to figure out how to make an unsexy story sexy, or else the "free stuff!" crowd is going to eat your lunch every time. If you give people a choice between earning a six pack on a treadmill or taking Ozempic, they're gonna choose Ozempic...they don't care about the side effects. If you give people a choice between fiscal discipline or free stuff...guess what they'll pick? They don't care about the side effects. 

With projected growth of 5%, the economy right now is stronger than it's been in generations. Is that the story you hear? Nope. Is that the vibe you feel? Absolutely not, especially when every time you fill up your gas tank, it feels like a diesel enema. 

It's not the product, it's the brand. A great product can fall into oblivion with bad messaging...a single bad review from one effective storyteller can tank a restaurant. The "influencer economy" is lucrative for a reason; everybody inherently understands the importance of effective storytelling...except the right. Zohran Mamdani gets it...he has an army of influencers on staff. In a perfect metaphor of this transitional phase of old guard vs new wave political messaging, Zohran nuked the Vice President into oblivion with maybe the biggest ratio in the history of the internet. By simply posting the subway assistant meme, Mamdani got 2 MILLION likes, quoting a post from the VP that had only 10K likes. If you're reading that sentence thinking "this is fucking ridiculous, you're talking about social media likes as political analysis now?"...you are the problem. 

Yes, this stuff matters. Rizz matters. The President did a masterful job of this kind of retail politics in his historic 2024 campaign...you can be angry that this is what politics has been reduced to, but you can either adapt or die. 

"No the problem is, you didn't deliver enough for the American people!" Are you a moron? Since when does anybody care about that? What have democrats delivered for Californians in the last 20 years? Unmitigated wildfires, homeless drug zombies everywhere, roads that look like Fallujah in 2004...people don't care about results. They think they care about results. That want you to believe they care about results, just as Nike wants you to believe their shoes are better than New Balance...but at the end of the day, all people really care about is the swoosh.

Adapt or die.

Via Motus A. D.

P. S. Rizz is a shortened form of the word charisma (extracted from the middle syllables: cha-RIZZ-ma).

Where The Mask Ends - Netflix Series

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Tian Xiwei plays two parts here. In one role she plays a spoiled, evil princess. In the other she plays the peasant who pushes a cart around town collecting night soil (shit) from the houses. Just so happens the peasant happens to look just like the princess. The princess has been engaged to a lord since forever but now he has gone off to fight a war and has been seriously wounded. All the eggheads predict that he will not survive. His mother (or maybe it's his grandmother) wants the the princess and the lord to be married as soon as possible on the hope that the wedding will somehow help him recover. Hopes and prayers and all that. However, if they are married and he dies, the princess will be a widow and will be wearing clothing made of burlap for several years, if she doesn't kill herself as a dutiful noble widow should. Her grandmother doesn't like the odds, and when she see's the peasant girl being carted off to be executed she comes up with a plan. She sends one of her minions to get the peasant released which he manages to do for the price of a few coins, few being very vague since these people have got all the gold in China. Now they have to clean her up and teach her how to behave amongst the nobility and they only have five days until the wedding. Behaving mostly means standing still, being quiet and kneeling when everybody else kneels. Also our girl is sharp and this a fantasy so she has no problem. They don't say anything about her lower class accent, but this is Chinese TV so they all speak the same lingo.

You might wonder how she came to be condemned to death and that is because her father (the bum) pimped her out to pay a debt. Our girl took excepting to being raped (she didn't agree to the deal) and kills her attacker. Cuts off his head and throws it at her father.

Wait a minute, haven't we seen this actress before? Yes, we did. In Pursuit of Jade where she plays a pig butcher, so she knows her way around cutting up bodies. Are there any other similarities? Why, yes, now that you mention it, she rescues a lord wounded in battle. While we may have seen this actress before, I did not immediately recognize her. All these young, beautiful Chinese women look alike to me. My wife however picked up on it immediately.

This show and most of these Chinese historical fantasies mostly just cruise along with people going about their business, but every now and then a little discrepency, AKA a clue, will appear. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to piece these clues together and see if you can figure out what's really going on.

The wounded lord recovers and wakes up. He knows the real princess for being a first class bitch and he had no intention of marrying her, but now he is married to a girl who looks just like the princess and he assumes, like everyone else, she is the real deal, which causes him severe anguish. How is he going to get shut of her?

Meanwhile the real princess is scheming how to get rid of the imposter and assume her rightful place as the wife of the lord. Also, the lord and the imposter are obviously not happy together, so we have other swinging dicks trying to horn in on our girl which means there is no end of intrigue, enough to fill 30 episodes.

As a bonus, we have a scene where an assassin's teapot is used. I've heard of it, thanks to Steve Mould, but I've never seen it in a show, never mind real life. The assassin's teapot appears in the scene that begins at 13:30 in Episode 16.

The nasty princess on the left, Bitao, our girl's servant in the middle and our girl on the right

Covering the left hole of the teapot

Covering the left hole of the teapot

Teapot

Who lives and who dies all depends on where Bitao's loyalty lies. I think nasty girl miscalculated.

Then there's this little bit I found on Acacuss by Emma Bowler:

The assassin's teapot is a small, unassuming pot with a long spout and a curved handle that has a fascinating and mysterious history. It is believed to have originated in China and to date back to the Ming Dynasty. According to legend, the teapot is cursed and those who have owned it have all met with mysterious and untimely deaths.

The teapot became famous in the early days of the British Empire when it was used by the government to prevent assassinations by poisoning the tea of potential targets. The teapot was designed with a hidden compartment that could only be opened by a special key, which was given to a trusted member of the government.

The plan worked for several years, but eventually, the secret of the teapot was leaked and it became famous as the "assassin's teapot." Today, the teapot is on display in the British Museum, where it serves as a reminder of the lengths that governments will go to in order to protect their interests.

This sounds plausible because the Brits back then were some really nasty scoundrels.

The Assassin's Teapot Is Weird
Steve Mould

Qing dynasty teapot circa 1700

Didn't find any teapots that might plausibly be from the same era as the show, but I did find this one and I kind of like it.

P. S. Notes about the images captured from Netflix. I used Windows screen capture to start, but since Windows image viewer program no longer works reliably (I don't know what happened, but more often than not, when I try to edit an image all I get is a black screen), so I open the image in Chrome (Open with) and use Google Lens to select the portion I want and just paste it into Blogger.

When Bitao first starts to pour the tea, two holes are visible at the top of the handle, but it's only visible for a split second and try as I might I could not capture the image, so you'll just have to take my word for it that there are two holes right next to each other.

Factoid of the Day

Tam writes about the Nvidia honeytrap and drops this in the footnotes:

The ten largest US companies by market cap now account for 37% of the entire value of the stock market. It hasn't been that concentrated since the Great Depression.