iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 15/10/2026

This job is in Hollywood, you have to work with IMAX 70mm, and they spell it “theatre.” Not much of a mystery!

Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

So to play this, you gotta go on the Apple TV to Settings-->Video and Audio-->Format, go down to the full list of formats, go all the way down to 4K SDR at 23.976 and select that. Here is what that looks like:

A TV streaming “Jennifer’s Body.” The Apple HUD shows the stream is arriving as 23.976 fps SDR and the LG HUD shows it is arriving as 24.0 Hz SDR. (The LG HUD is lying, it shows 24.0 Hz whether it is getting 24 or 23.976.)

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Today, the bad news. The new Criterion Channel app does not respect Apple’s "Match Dynamic Range” and “Match Framerate” settings. If you look at the upper left, you can see the stream is arriving as SDR at around 24fps; in the lower left you can see the TV is receiving 60Hz Dolby Vision.

A photograph of a television streaming “Jennifer’s Body” with both Apple’s streaming HUD and the LG VRR information windows open. This shows that the stream is arriving as SDR at 23.976 fps but getting sent to the TV as 59.94 fps Dolby Vision.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

From the web version of the player, you can download a manifest of the various files that make up the package, which includes the audio. From the filenames, we can guess this has a 5.1 audio stream created from a 576 kpbs source. In practice, it looks like it streams at about 520 kpbs.

The full manifest for the audio on the Criterion Channel’s stream of "Jennifer's Body." It reads:
# AUDIO groups
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_0",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English 5.1",DEFAULT=YES,AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="6",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_160000_VvFBY8dR_2001=576000.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_0",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English Stereo",AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="2",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_170001_D4USRv2e_2001=206819.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_1",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English 5.1",DEFAULT=YES,AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="6",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_160100_uZZO72zA_2001=427492.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_1",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English Stereo",AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="2",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_170101_y2bjJ8Uf_2001=168122.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_2",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English 5.1",DEFAULT=YES,AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="6",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_160200_FFT3HMtU_2001=264600.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_2",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English Stereo",AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="2",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_170201_B66PsXQf_2001=113384.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_3",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English 5.1",DEFAULT=YES,AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="6",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_160300_kUCzDSGd_2001=219859.m3u8"
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=AUDIO,GROUP-ID="audio_3",LANGUAGE="en",NAME="English Stereo",AUTOSELECT=YES,CHANNELS="2",URI="custom_manifest_drm_1920-audio_170301_kqQYLTbT_2001=88371.m3u8"

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

In cities like Las Vegas where hotels compete on service rather than price, housekeeping has started leaving branded bookmarks in any book that does not have one. This is the greatest innovation in hospitality since the single-serve ketchup bottle.

A copy of "The Killer Inside Me," opened to the title page, where there is a Waldorf Astoria bookmark.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This was so strange and unpleasant to read I tracked down a print copy. Looks like they had the same italic conventions, typeset with a better-looking set of fonts, which they attempted to imitate for the ebook by reducing the size of the font they had, fucking up the midline in the process.

The same text, with movies with an uppercase non-italic first character followed by lowercase italic, rendered slightly less objectionable by more pleasant typesetting.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

My favorite foreign change-of-title:

The Italian poster for “Choice of Love: The Story of Hilary and Victor,” or, as we know it in America, “Dying Young.”

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Amazon Prime Video has a live channel running an endless marathon of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” WITH MOTION SMOOTHING BAKED IN!

A screenshot of Amazon Prime’s “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” streaming channel.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I hate it every time I see WB claiming LoTR. That’s a New Line movie they would never have made!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

In the book, he definitely started off with a promising writing career.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ray Bradbury probably met Mr. Electro at the Downie Bros. Circus, but there were two circuses in town that day.

An ad for the Downie Bros. Circus, from the Waukegan News-Sun, Sept. 2, 1932.

A headline from the Waukegan News-Sun about the Downie Bros. and Hagenbeck-Wallace circuses arriving on the same day, Sep. 3, 1932.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I wonder if movie titles are rendered this way in the print version of this book, or if nobody is looking at the e-book.

A crazy passage from an online textbook, in which movie titles are written with an uppercase, non-italicized first letter, followed by lowercase italicized letters, in a smaller size, for the rest of the title.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

From its cover, you would never guess that the first sentence of the introduction to this book begins “While production of motion pictures has changed considerably since I photographed ‘The Perils of Pauline’ in 1914...”

A trade paperback of The Five C's of Cinematography, an oversized book with a very contemporary-looking cover.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Pretty sure I found the inspiration for an incident in Blood Meridian. The first is McCarthy, the second is from “A Yankee in Mexico,” published in the same issue of Flag of Our Union where Edgar Allen Poe’s “Hop-Frog” first appeared (on the same page, even).

A picture of the paragraph in Blood Meridian where the Judge uses a cigar and a cannon barrel to escape the Yuma.

An excerpt from “A Yankee in Mexico,” where an American escapes Mexican soldiers by threatening them with a cigar and a barrel of gunpowder. credited to “The Old ’Un,” in “Flag of Our Union,” March 17, 1849 (the issue in which Edgar Allen Poe’s “Hop-Frog” was first published).

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I have been pranked by “Modern Recording Techniques: 7th Edition.”

A passage from the introduction to Modern Recording Techniques, encouraging readers to seek out information online about “how to fix a self-sealing stem-bolt on a 1905 steam-driven nut cracker.”

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I could not find an advertisement for the July 3, 1925 “Before the Fourth” dance at the Pickwick Club in Boston, but I love that the Globe had an elaborate front-page Fourth of July layout planned for that morning and they used it anyway.

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