Linked List: November 13, 2021

Saturday, 13 November 2021

My thanks to Rows for sponsoring this week at DF (along with this week’s episode of The Talk Show). Rows reinvented spreadsheets to let you build data-rich spreadsheets that look beautiful and modern. Rows uses the same logic as traditional spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Excel. It has row-and-column-based cells and all the functions you’re used to, like SUM, VLOOKUP, and INDEX.

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Devan Scott on the Use of Color in ‘Skyfall’ and ‘Spectre’ ★

Speaking of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond, Devan Scott put together a wonderful, richly illustrated thread on Twitter contrasting the use of color grading in Skyfall and Spectre. Both of those films were directed by Sam Mendes, but they had different cinematographers — Roger Deakins for Skyfall, and Hoyte van Hoytema for Spectre. Scott graciously and politely makes the case that Skyfall is more interesting and fully-realized because each new location gets a color palette of its own, whereas the entirety of Spectre is in a consistent color space.

(For an essay of this sort, with so many images that go along with a few sentences of prose at a time, a Twitter thread is an outstanding medium.)

Switched on Pop: ‘James Bond’s Spycraft Sound’ ★

Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding:

The latest installment of the James Bond franchise, No Time To Die, closes the book on the Daniel Craig era of the international superspy. The film’s theme song, “No Time to Die,” by Billie Eilish, Finneas, and Hans Zimmer, also marks the conclusion of one of the great musical sagas in recent cinema. Monty Norman’s and John Barry’s now-iconic “James Bond Theme,” written for 1962’s Dr. No, has remained a constant across six decades of espionage and one-liners. But every new Bond theme has also developed subtle variations on the original that reflect the character’s changes over time. On this episode of Switched On Pop, we uncover what inspired the theme, how it’s changed, and why it almost never happened.

Absolutely delightful podcast, and really astute commentary on how music helped tie together the entirety of Daniel Craig’s five-movie saga in the role.

Joanna Stern Spends 24 Hours in Facebook’s Metaverse ★

Speaking of the metaverse:

Everyone is blabbing about the metaverse. But what does this future digital world look like? WSJ’s Joanna Stern checked into a hotel and strapped on a VR headset for the day. She went to work meetings, hung out with new avatar friends and attended virtual shows.

So glad she made this video; so glad it wasn’t me.

The Talk Show: ‘The Warden’s Dilemma’ ★

For your weekend listening enjoyment: Ben Thompson returns to the show to go deep on the concept of the metaverse. Is it the next frontier in tech? Is it bullshit? Somewhere in between?

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Playdate Delayed Until Early 2022 ★

Panic, in an update to those who’ve pre-ordered the Playdate:

And so, we shipped 5,000 finished Playdates back to Malaysia to be given new batteries. How did that feel? Not great!!!

The good news: we’ve already received the new batteries from the new supplier, and they’re looking really impressive — they’re exactly what we’re hoping for, if not even better than before. We’re extremely confident the new supplier can give Playdate the battery life we designed, and you deserve.

And there’s one huge silver lining: we’re extremely glad that we found this potential issue before shipping you a Playdate.

And:

With lots of pre-orders in place, we immediately placed an order at our factory for all the parts needed for 2022 units and beyond. The response was… sobering. Many of our parts have been delayed significantly. In fact, we can’t get any more of Playdate’s current CPU for — you’re not going to believe this — two years. Like, 730 days.

Maybe you’ve heard about the “global chip shortage” everyone’s talking about? We’re here to say it is very real. Covid-19 caused an ever-cascading set of worldwide supply chain failures that are leading to many, many electronic parts being simply… gone.

The good news on that front is that they’ve already designed a new logic board using a different, but equivalent, CPU that is available. More good news: the Playdate SDKs (there are two — the full SDK using C and Lua, and a web-based graphical you-don’t-even-have-to-be-a-programmer-to-make-a-game tool called Pulp) are close to shipping.

Basically, shipping any project is hard. Shipping hardware is really hard. And shipping hardware amidst this pandemic-induced global supply chain fiasco is just crazy hard. Valve’s Steam Deck — sort of the anti-Playdate — is delayed into early 2022 too, and both Sony and Nintendo have cut production estimates for the PlayStation 5 and Switch consoles.