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photo mode

Photo Mode – Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) is a game where you can roam around a fictionalized 1899 US robbing banks and trains, fighting off rival gangs, eluding Pinkerton detectives (they're still around btw), fishing, hunting, and even run into some UFOs. There's a lot written about the game, including its status…

NikolayOctober 19, 2024

technology

everyone will be taken into the future

The essay below appears in the catalog of Digital Capture, an exhibition I co-curated exploring the Southern California origins of digital imaging in the 1960s and the proliferation of that technology across science/media/arts in the subsequent decades. Our curatorial team has quipped since the very onset of this project (in…

NikolayAugust 8, 2024

cinema

the dynamic square (revisited)

I kept trying to come up with a witty start to this one, beyond some Huey Lewis reference. Alas, I'm not as witty or clever as I think I am. Anyways, it's somewhat interesting to think of why we end up with the shapes we do. Specifically screen shapes. These…

NikolayJuly 30, 2024

cinema

A New Hope – Chopped & Screwed

There are a lot of version of A New Hope, and of all the Star Wars films. They're enumerated here. That's not the point of this post. (Han did shoot first.) What's interesting about all the different releases is the film had to conformed to the particular aspect ratio of…

NikolayJune 13, 2024

technology

the snake at the center of the world

"The Pythia, also known as the Oracle of Delphi, was a priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. The temple was considered to be the most important oracle in the ancient world, and the Pythia was believed to be able to communicate with the god Apollo…

NikolayFebruary 25, 2024

history

end of history (yet again)

I remember a sunny day from the late 1980s, before my family moved to the US. (For some reason, all my recollections of life in the Soviet Union are set to good weather.) My grandfather and I are looking at a children's book on the Cyrillic alphabet (an azbuka /…

NikolayJanuary 23, 2023