A Foggy Tale - Netflix Movie

A Foggy Tale - official trailer
Mandarin Vision

Apparently we didn't get our quota of repression from binge watching Tehran so now we're in Taiwan watching another repressive regime in action. The story starts slowly but after laying out the ground work it picks up speed and becomes engrossing. The epilog makes it look like it is a true story, but I found nothing on the net to confirm this.

Netflix summary:

After losing her brother to a government execution, a young girl takes a dangerous journey to reclaim his body and raise the money for a proper burial.

Midgard Times review:

A Foggy Tale is set during the period of White Terror—a nearly four-decade era of martial law, political repression, and authoritarian rule by the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek—and, for most of its runtime, Chen Yu-hsun films those oppressive years as though they were distant memories recalled decades later. The result is a mostly detached and unsentimental tale told with the observational restraint of a documentary. Through the eyes of a young Taiwanese girl named Yue (Caitlin Fang), Yu-hsun captures the ordinary lives of citizens living during the White Terror. By keeping a child at the center, Yu-hsun refuses to sugarcoat her proximity to physical harm and dangers posed by predatory men and the police officers. After arriving in Taipei from Chiayi, Yue is abducted by a child trafficker, and when she angrily accuses a cop of killing her brother, another officer kicks her and violently beats her. Yet when Yue blames the police for her brother's death, she isn't accusing a single individual so much as the entire repressive system.

A Foggy Tale opens with Yue and her brother, Yun (Tseng Jing-hua), discussing what they hope to become in the future. From there, Yu-hsun cuts to one year later and takes us to the moment when the news of Yun's execution by firing squad arrives at Yue's residence. The implication is clear: under oppressive rule, dreams, ambitions, and futures are abruptly cut short by a regressive, close-minded system. There are other sentimental touches, like Yue finding a brother-from-another-mother in Chao Kung-tao (Will Or) and reuniting with her elder sister, Hsu (9m88), who was given up for adoption years earlier. Yet Yu-hsun never exploits these moments for melodramatic effect. He remains curiously level-headed throughout. Scenes that might have turned cloying or excessively brutal in the hands of a lesser filmmaker are presented in a matter-of-fact manner.

When Yue is taken to a room at Paradise Funeral Home to identify her brother's body, what stands out in the foreground is the employee's casual lack of empathy in the face of her discomfort. Even then, Yu-hsun shows little interest in launching direct attacks against any particular person. Cruelty is not sensationalized, and acts of kindness arrive without sentimental fanfare. Such a style of filmmaking often results in impersonal work, yet there is something about A Foggy Tale that prevents you from dismissing Yu-hsun's efforts. He casually introduces elements like a Robin Hood-style figure or Kung-tao making a deal to murder someone in ways that initially leave you taken aback. Is Yu-hsun assembling different varieties of vignettes to depict a particular moment in history? Does the key to the puzzle lie in the titular tale that Hsu tells her sister?

Wikipedia page about the White Terror.

Train from Chiayi to Taipei

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6149

10 Short Videos #6149

The Densest Metal on Earth

Scientists Turned Dead Spiders Into Robotic Grippers Using Their Hydraulic Legs 🤯🕷️🤖

This is exactly what it looks like when you create my dream life 😌 - king of the dog walkers

Lidé vs pluh 😳 Utáhnou ho? - People vs. the plow. Can they pull it?

Why Chinese Factories Staple Real Cash to Cables 🤯

Heavy equipment operators

You never know when you gonna come across a house like this - Connecting electrical service

Based on a true story. - Candy in the movie E.T.

First time disassembling an air conditioning compressor

Loggers DESTROY John Deere Dozer Blade...Gonna Be Expensive!

Etrich Taube Monoplane

Etrich Taube Monoplane -  Russell Smith

From Wikipedia:

First flight in 1910.

The Etrich Taube, also known by the names of the various later manufacturers who built versions of the type, such as the Rumpler Taube, was a pre-World War I monoplane aircraft. It was the first military aeroplane to be mass-produced in Germany.

The Taube was very popular prior to the First World War, and it was also used by the air forces of Italy and Austria-Hungary. Even the Royal Naval Air Service operated at least one Taube in 1912. On 1 November 1911, Giulio Gavotti, an Italian aviator, dropped the world's first aerial bomb from his Taube monoplane over the Ain Zara oasis in Libya. Once the war began, it quickly proved inadequate as a warplane and was soon replaced by other designs. 

Etrich Taube: The World’s First Plane to Launch an Aerial Bomb
Retro Transport

Handwriting

Key - Ernst Neizvestny - 1984

Meduza got me started with a story about a Russian soldier who was making bank by forging Ernst Neizvestny artworks so naturally I want to see what kind of art he makes. In general, his art seems to be ugly. Kind of a reflection of many aspects of modern life. Doesn't appeal to me.

So who is this Ernst Neizvestny? 

Ernst (1925 – 2016) was a Russian artist . . . He emigrated to the United States in 1976 and lived and worked in New York City.

American playwright Arthur Miller once described Neizvestny as an "artist of the East" who is regarded by Russians as an "expression of the country, of its soul, language, and spirit" and as a "prophet of the future" who represents the "philosophical conscience of his country." . . .

Ernst's great grandfather received his surname, literally meaning "unknown," when he was conscripted for military service as a cantonist.

A cantonist? Look that up in Wikipedia and found this:

Cantonists were underage sons of conscripts in the Russian Empire. From 1721 on they were educated in special "cantonist schools" for future military service . . . The Russian state viewed the cantonist system as an effective means to induce the assimilation of its ethnic minority populations, particularly Jews, who were markedly over-represented within the schools.

Huh, imagine that, assimilation of ethnic minorities was important even back in the 1700s.

Anyway, scrivenery was one of the skills taught in cantonist schools.

A scrivener is a professional copyist or scribe . . . Styles of handwriting used by scriveners included secretary hand, book hand and court hand.

Different styles of handwriting? Well, I'll be. Here we go:

"The secretarie Alphabete": an abecedarium showing the forms of the letters used in secretary hand, from a penmanship book by Jehan de Beau-Chesne and John Baildon, 1570.

Bookhand variations using a Brause 2.5mm nib and Moon Palace ink on Strathmore Drawing 300 paper.

An abecedarium of Court Hand, including minuscule and majuscule letters and syllable variations.

Mala Tokmachka

A house in Mala Tokmachka damaged by shelling, April 19, 2022 - Ed Jones / AFP / Scanpix / LETA

Reading a story in Meduza I came across this little bit:

Ukrainian media outlets and bloggers, meanwhile, have turned Mala Tokmachka into a symbol of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ resilience. By their count, the battle has lasted more than 1,500 days, ostensibly longer than any successful defense in world history.

Then I wondered just where this place is.

Mala Tokmachka, Ukraine

10 Short Videos #6148

10 Short Videos #6148

It’s very quiet.- Ferrari's million dollar electric car

Women from Australia never cease to amaze me - pulling snakes out of the attic

Tripteron Robot - Simpler Than It Looks?

Обзор Мелкоштучный делитель округлитель Vektor A-30 - Baking equipment - Review of the Vektor A-30 Small-Cut Divider Rounder

Get your high school diploma from home

Swordfish Takeoff Duxford - Yes, another Swordfish video. 

Beautiful smoky enhydro quartz featuring a visible moving bubble suspended within

It's Footsteps - classroom full of dancing girls

Why does the A-10 attack aircraft emit large amounts of white steam when its hatch is opened? - Singing

CUSTOM IRONMAN ARM WITH AI JARVIS INCLUDED (VOICE, REMOTE, AND TOUCH ACTIVATION)

Funnies

Yakovlev Yak-18 U

Yakovlev Yak-18 U

Wikipedia:

The Yakovlev Yak-18 (NATO reporting name Max) is a tandem two-seat military primary trainer aircraft manufactured in the Soviet Union. Originally powered by one 119 kW (160 hp) Shvetsov M-11FR-1 radial piston engine, it entered service in 1946. It was also produced in China as the Nanchang CJ-5.

Wikipedia leaves off the U suffix, and some tack on an A suffix. In any case, it is not to be confused with the Yak-18T, which is not a trainer but a utility airplane.

Yakovlev Yak-18T

AMAZING Yakovlev Yak-18-A takeoff and low pass at Airfield Nötsch | D-EZCT
Aviation Videos

Velocity & Distance

Demos Graph

I'm trying to work out some elementary math problems, but for some unknown reason I haven't been able to actually work on them, so I thought I would just do a simple math problem, just to get moving.

This problem is: How does velocity change with distance?

Start with old distance from time formula.

Set acceleration to 5 so we get a nice curve.

Old velocity from time formula

Solve the first formula for time

Substitute our new value for time into our velocity formula

Assign distance to x and that gives us the graph we have above.

If we view this graph as a car accelerating at a rate of a low 1/6 G, then by the time it has gone 80 feet (or six car lengths) it will be going pert near 30 MPH.

RADAR

Toyota Grill

Saw this car yesterday and noticed three little round things in the grill. You might need to embiggenate the image in order to see them. I'm wondering what they are and then I realize they are likely sensors for looking at the road ahead. Might be cameras, might be RADAR, might be mystical quantum doodads.

Toasted

Crane
Last Vestige of Industry at North End of South Waterfront

Previous photo of crane.

10 Short Videos #6147

10 Short Videos #6147

Yellow custom 🟡🔵🔴 for a client incl 2-XM, BM-13 Phaser and a Keystep.

The Soviet Curse Destroying Siberia

CIA Officers REVEALS the joke he was trained to tell

Bach never heard a modern piano

POV you're the last one awake

I received my BTC Mining chips

Protect This Man At All Costs. - today's kids are not as smart as their parents

Flagging Tape Hack! Nooo Waaay!

Draco Take Off

This Is Not Lava. It’s Burning Coal.

Funnies

Boston - More Than a Feeling)

Boston - More Than a Feeling (Official HD Video)
Boston

Heard this in the car this afternoon, can't remember the last time I heard it. From 1976 if you are counting.

Word of the Day

fissiparous refers to the tendency or quality of breaking, splitting, or dividing into smaller parts, groups, or factions. Derived from biology (where single-celled organisms reproduce by splitting into two), the term is primarily used today to describe political, social, or organizational splintering.

Came across this word in a Jamestown story about Moscow and Muslims.

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen - Timothy Norris/Kia Forum

You might think, like I do, that Bruce Springsteen is apparently suffering from a full blown case of TDS - Trump Derangement Syndrome. But now I am confused. I found this in a story on Variety:

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ‘n’ roll in dangerous times,” he said, in his now-familiar invocation and statement of intent that has opened every night on the tour. “Tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over —”

And the now 18-member E Street Band crashed into a cover of Edwin Starr’s Vietnam-era anthem “War,” which the group had originally covered on the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour some four decades ago.

Which sounds exactly like what everyone on the right has been saying. So I don't understand what Springsteen's problem is, other than he has lost his mind.

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

I, Cringely

From I, Cringely:

 

The Permission Slip

 A while back I asked in this space what would happen if Dario Amodei was wrong. I want to come back to that, because I think the question matters more now than it did then, and for a reason that has nothing to do with whether I like Dario or his company. I do, for the record. That’s not the point.

The point is a document. In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei made the case that scaling compute would eventually solve essentially every hard problem in artificial intelligence. Buried in that optimism — or maybe not buried, maybe right out in the open — was a quiet absolution. Hallucinations, the embarrassing tendency of these systems to state falsehoods with total confidence, would take care of themselves. Make the models big enough, train them long enough, and the problem dissolves. You don’t have to solve it. You just have to wait, and spend. And so the entire AI industry breathed a sigh of releif.

I have spent forty years watching this industry, and I know a permission slip when I see one.

Because that is what the essay became, whatever Amodei intended. It gave every other person writing nine- and ten-figure checks a reason not to worry about the one thing that should worry them most. The hallucination problem is the difference between a clever toy and a system a hospital or a bank or a court can actually rely on. It is the whole ballgame for enterprise AI. And the prevailing wisdom, blessed from the top, is that you needn’t address it directly. Scale will provide.

Look at where the money is going and you can see the permission slip being cashed. Stargate, half a trillion dollars. The hyperscalers, tens of billions each per year. The Anthropic–Akamai arrangement, nearly two billion more. The collective bet of the wealthiest companies in the world is that you fix intelligence — including its honesty — by buying more of it. The data center operators are happy. The chip vendors are ecstatic. The labs raising money at valuations with too many zeros are happy. Everyone in that chain has the same incentive, which is to believe that the answer is more.

The customers who will eventually pay for all of it are the ones who should be asking whether any of this is true.

Here is why I think it isn’t. A small company I helped start, 2Brains Inc., set out in 2022 to solve hallucinations — before ChatGPT, before the scaling consensus hardened into received truth, back when the polite assumption was that the problem was simply insurmountable. We did not solve it by waiting for bigger models. We solved it architecturally, by separating the part of the system that generates language from the part that retrieves and verifies facts, and reconciling the two before anything reaches the user. It runs on ordinary processors. It is cheap. And on the industry’s own benchmark for this kind of faithfulness, it more than doubles the published baseline, with no fabricated facts in the verified case at all.

I am not telling you this to sell you anything. I am telling you because of what it implies about the trillion-dollar bet.

If a handful of people in Virginia and Kansas could solve hallucinations with an architecture and a CPU, then one of two things must be true about the scaling story, and neither is comfortable for the people cashing the permission slip.

The first possibility is that scaling will not cure hallucinations at all. That the models get bigger and more fluent and more useful, and continue, reliably, to lie. In that case the largest companies in the world are spending a fortune chasing a cure that is not coming, and the absolution Amodei offered turns out to have been the most expensive sentence in the history of the field.

The second possibility is that scaling will eventually reduce hallucinations — but only by spending enormous sums to arrive, the long way around, at the same place a small company already reached by design. And if the route the giants take passes through the architecture we built and protected, then “scale will solve it” turns out to mean “scale will eventually reinvent something that is already spoken for.” That is not a threat. It is just what the words mean when you follow them to the end.

I find the whole thing clarifying, actually. For three years the conversation about AI has been organized around a single article of faith, which is that the answer to every problem is more compute, and the people who benefit most from that faith are the people best positioned to spread it. It is a remarkably convenient theology. It asks the believers to spend, and it asks the skeptics to wait, and it never quite gets around to the question of whether the central promise is true.

I asked once what happens if Dario is wrong. I am increasingly convinced the more interesting question is what happens when the rest of them realize he might be — and that the bill for finding out is already coming due.

Robert X. Cringely is a co-founder of 2Brains, Inc.

I'm down at South Waterfront this morning, waiting while my better half consults with the medicos, so I've got an hour to kill. I spend my time reading Idoru by William Gibson, napping and walking. While I'm reading I overhear man on the sidewalk talking to someone. I didn't really listen to what he was saying but you could tell he was excited about whatever it was he was talking about. I think it was because he had someone who wanted to hear what he had to say. People like to talk and it's glorious when somebody listens. This might be AI's biggest market - providing attentive listeners to people who want to talk. In that case perfect honest could be a handicap.

I ordered Idoru without sampling it based on Tam's recommendation. Also, I've read other books by Gibson, he's pretty great. I don't know when Idoru was written but it sounds like he's imagining what our present day will be like, but he's imagining it  20 or 30 years ago. In any case it feels like it's spot on. 

Who Rules Trade Rules?

Containers stacked far and wide

From Jamestown:

The Chinese ‘Rules and Future’ of Global Trade

Executive Summary:

• The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is shaping global trade standards in data control and customs clearance. These standards give preference to Chinese platforms that provide Beijing with end-to-end visibility into global shipping.
• No Western equivalent of this system exists, and the resulting data asymmetry could enable PRC actors to identify supply chain chokepoints, exploit dependencies in critical resources, and circumvent tariffs, sanctions, and export controls.
• Chinese trade platforms gain international power via bilateral adoption agreements, multilateral institutions like the World Customs Organization, and standards-setting bodies led by Alibaba and state-run LOGINK. This ecosystem embeds Chinese platforms and norms into global trade infrastructure, locking in adoption and displacing alternatives.

Sounds like something that the rest of the world should get in front of. Or maybe it doesn't matter if the Chinese establish the standards, they'll probably do a pretty good job. Of course the Chinese could use this system to their advantage, but any centrally planned system is going to have weak spots and properly motivated outsiders will probe and eventually find those weak spots, so people who don't think they are getting a fair shake are going to exploit those weak spots.

Russians get Right to Bear Arms

Pischal Counter-UAV Gun

Not really for the average slob, it essentially enables private armies, as long as they are loyal to the regime. Of course they are going to be loyal. You aren't going to let a rebel force raise an army, are you?

From Meduza, 

Russia has authorized private companies to purchase heavy weapons and equipment to defend against drone attacks, including anti-aircraft artillery systems, gun turrets, radar systems, and electronic warfare systems, the Russian business outlet RBC reported, citing sources.

Previously, businesses were limited to what were described as “passive safeguards for facilities” for their security personnel, including small arms.

Authorities expect the policy, adopted under new regulations, to speed up the supply of weapons and equipment to mobile fire groups — units formed from reservists, volunteers, and employees of private enterprises to protect civilian infrastructure from drones.

One of RBC’s sources said such groups “demonstrate high effectiveness in intercepting fixed-wing drones.”

Ratt Anti-UAV System Exterior

Ratt Anti-UAV System Interior

About Meduza:

Meduza is the world’s largest independent Russian media outlet. Completely outlawed by the Russian state, we operate from abroad to deliver news that censors can’t stop to millions of readers inside Russia and around the globe. You can read our reporting in both Russian and English. 

Yakovlev UT-2

Yakovlev UT-2

From Vintage Aviation News:

On July 11, 1935, the Yakovlev UT-2 took to the skies for the first time, marking a pivotal moment in Soviet aviation history. Designed as a modern trainer for the Soviet Air Force, the UT-2 replaced outdated biplanes and became the backbone of pilot instruction during World War II. Though challenging to fly, more than 7,000 were built, and today, just one remains airworthy—preserving the legacy of this essential war-era trainer.

Яковлев УТ-2 RA-2724G 105 лет ВВС 2017
KHMedia

10 Short Videos #6146

10 Short Videos #6146

Licorice Roots Digging

what qualifies as a horse-dragon? #LEGO

Professor Styropyro is in the building - green fire

THIS IS WHY I WORK ALONE - replacing gas oven ignitor

Supercharged four cylinder flathead engine with OHV cylinder heads

3:2 pulldown vs speed up for conforming film frame rates for TV

Would you like to experience life as a sailor

1925 Douglas Drilling Rig

FPVCOCKPIT VIEW! Flying A Massive Scale RC Jet With FPV Head-Tracking Goggles ✈️🎛️

East German footage - military air power demonstration

More Tehran

Iranians walk in front of a large anti-US billboard featuring US President Donald Trump and the Strait of Hormuz, at Valiasr Square in Tehran, Iran [File: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA]

Funnies

King Crab

My niece with king crab

From Wikipedia:

King crabs or stone crabs . . . are found chiefly in deep waters and are adapted to cold environments. They are composed of two subfamilies: Lithodinae, which tend to inhabit deep waters, are globally distributed, and comprise the majority of the family's species diversity; and Hapalogastrinae, which are endemic to the North Pacific and inhabit exclusively shallow waters. 

King crabs superficially resemble true crabs but are generally understood to be closest to the pagurid hermit crabs. This placement of king crabs among the hermit crabs is supported by several anatomical peculiarities which are present only in king crabs and hermit crabs, making them a prominent example of carcinisation among decapods. Several species of king crabs, especially in Alaskan and southern South American waters, are targeted by commercial fisheries and have been subject to overfishing.

I liked this explanation of carcinisation:

Carcinisation is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. The term was introduced into evolutionary biology by Lancelot Alexander Borradaile, who described it in 1916 as "the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab"

Overfishing can be a problem. From Google:

Alaska's commercial king crab harvest for the 2025/2026 season has a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) of 2.68 million pounds for Bristol Bay red king crab. For the Aleutian Islands golden king crab, the total quota is set at 4.19 million pounds.

Islamic Street Art

A woman in Tehran, Iran, walks past a mural featuring Iranian drones on May 26 [File: Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency via Reuters]

I like this picture though I'm not sure why, possibly because we've been watching Tehran and I'm seeing everything through Trumpian glasses.

Caffeine

Caffeine is Very, Very Strange...
vlogbrothers

I've encountered most of the pieces of this video but I never connected them all together.

Funnies

De Havilland Mosquito

Mosquito Pathfinders by Philip West

Military Gallery:

Groundcrew busy themselves readying their de Havilland Mosquito as the aircrew head out towards the aeroplane for yet another mission to a high value target over occupied Europe during WW2. Their dangerous job as Pathfinders is to accurately mark and bomb the target for the main heavy bomber force. It required great skill in navigation, airmanship and courage. The Mosquito proved to be a real thoroughbred and ideal for many varied combat sorties so earning the nick-name The Wooden Wonder. 

De Havilland Mosquito | In-Flight & Walk Around | Planes of Fame
Planes of Fame