Buzz Andersen

@andersen

Tech veteran (Apple, Square, Tumblr), old school indie Mac/iOS developer, Eagle Scout. Kind of also trying to be a screenwriter? @buzz on Twitter. Mail: buzz at

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Buzz Andersen @andersen· 9d

Yeah! That’s really what it feels like. In that book I just linked to above she talks about how little has been written about the 1918 pandemic compared to the simultaneous catastrophe of WWI. I think people just really don’t want to think about it once it’s over.

WorldCat, the world's largest library catalogue, currently lists around 80,000 books on the First World War (in more than forty languages), and around 400 on the Spanish flu (in five languages). But those 400 books represent an exponential increase over what had been written on the subject twenty years ago. The range of

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 9d

From “Pale Rider” by Laura Spinney www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/laura...

Memory is an active process. Details have to be rehearsed to be retained, but who wants to rehearse the details of a pan-demic? A war has a victor (and to him, the spoils-the version that is handed down to posterity), but a pandemic has only vanquished. Until the nineteenth century, pandemics were considered acts of God and people accepted them fatalistically, but with the advent of germ theory, scientists realised that they could, in principle, prevent them. Their inability to do so in

There is another reason why a pandemic memory might take time to mature.
In 2015, psychologists Henry Roediger and Magdalena Abel of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri summed up a still thin body of research into collective memory when they wrote that its narrative structure is rather simple and comprises only a small number of salient events referring to beginning, turning, and end points'4 It helps, they added, if those events have heroic or mythical components. Wars slot easily into that structure, with their declarations and truces, their acts of outstanding bravery. A flu pandemic, on the other hand, has no clear beginning or end, and no obvious heroes. The French war ministry tried to create some, by awarding a special
'epidemic medal' to thousands of civilian and military personnel who had shown devotion in the fight against the disease, but it didn't work. A war-memorabilia website notes that 'Curiously, its place among the important decorations of that conflict is completely unknown!5

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 11d

I don’t want to give away too much, so let me just say: you had me at “Friday the 13th-style slasher sequence set to ‘A Long December’ by Counting Crows.”

A title card for “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 15d

I have a lot of problems with Nolan, but his female characters are one of the biggest. Emily Blunt’s character in Oppenheimer felt like a parody.

Penelope has no dreams. Anne Hathaway's face is as expressive as ever, and she looks beautiful and mysterious, glimpsed mostly through the veil of a clever set design that separates the women's quarters from the main hall. But the script gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown. The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 19d

Some Instax scans from Point Reyes a few weeks ago.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 20d

Charles-Joseph Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s flawed Russian campaign

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 23d

Buzz Andersen @andersen· 29d

BTW, I did Brian Eno’s School of Song workshop awhile back, and I enjoyed this “40 Infallible Tricks for Successful Songs” list he shared.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jul 13

Just want to say that if you like Sam Neill but haven’t seen Possession (1981), you’re missing one hell of a performance.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jul 12

Dachshund, after Gregory Crewdson (2026)

A dachshund on a suburban street illuminated by a street lamp.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jul 5

Obligatory

The marquee at Vidiots in Los Angeles. It reads: “July 4th - Jaws”

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jul 3

Immediately sent this to a Whataburger-loving Texan pal

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jul 2

Tempted to put a William James voice bubble over this post

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jun 25

Every hometown's got the ominous megastructure, what's yours?

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jun 23

Nothing to see here, merely “confirming that funds are being used legitimately!”

An Elon Musk tweet insisting that all DOGE did was try to “confirming that funds were being used legitimately.”

The character Gaear Grimsrud in “Fargo,” feeding his accomplice into a wood chipper.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Jun 21

Background: www.biweekly.pl/article/1194...

The Repast of the Lion, by Henri Rousseau, hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 31

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 27

Crazy Moon corona over Palm Springs right now

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 26

Italian Brain Rot: now available in roadside tourist traps.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 26

Stephen Shore-ing the hell out of this trip.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 22

Got bird detections showing up on our Tidbyt now!

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 18

I know this isn’t quite as urgent as the crisis in hallucinated academic citations, but I can’t find any other instances of the phrase “five blueberries and a bush” on the web.

From a Google AI summary for a query about “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys:

“The iconic bassline cycles through a distinctive 6-note rhythm (often affectionately called ‘five blueberries and a bush’ that naturally loops across the 4/4 measure.”

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 14

Hell yeah baby! Thanks for turning me on to this.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· May 1

Actually, PKD did kind of predict this in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

And—they might not like the difference.
"You understand," Sam Regan said to the new member Barney Mayerson, "that we're going to spend the translated period listening to and watching Pat's new Great Books animator-you know, the device they've just brought out on Terra... you're surely more familiar with it than we are, Barney, so maybe you ought to explain it to us." Barney, dutifully, said, "You insert one of the Great Books, for instance Moby Dick, into the reservoid. Then you set the controls for long or short. Then for funny version, or same-as-book or sad version.
Then you set the style-indicator as to which classic Great Artist you want the book animated like. Dalí, Bacon, Picasso... the medium-priced Great Books animator is set up to render in cartoon form the styles of a dozen system-famous artists; you specify which ones you want when you originally buy the thing. And there are

options you can add later that provide even more."
"Terrific," Norm Schein said, radiating enthusiasm. "So what you get is a whole evening's entertainment, say sad version in the style of Jack Wright of like for instance Vanity Fair. Wow!"

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Apr 30

Carrizo Plain Instax

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Apr 16

This quote (from Elaine May, about her script doctoring work on Mike Nichols’s 1994 bomb, “Wolf”) always comes to mind when I think about the need for conflict in storytelling.

After thinking about Wolf for a weekend, she told Nichols, "Mike, you have a story about a guy who wants to become a wolf, so he becomes a wolf. I think this is going to be a very short movie."

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Apr 14

Not to mention one of the coolest sleeves ever, which was famously so expensive that Factory Records lost money on every copy (supposedly). www.radiox.co.uk/artists/new-...

The Blue Monday 12”, which is designed to look like a floppy disk with a color coded message down one side.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Apr 9

Reminds me of how Dan O’Bannon was inspired to write Blue Thunder because he was annoyed with LAPD helicopters buzzing his house

Co-writers Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby began developing the plot while living together in a Hollywood apartment in the late 1970s, where low-flying police helicopters woke them on a regular basis. Their original script was a more political one, attacking the concept of a police state controlling the population through high-tech surveillance and heavy armament.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Apr 9

Watching a helicopter circle the neighborhood while I grill in the back yard.

Buzz Andersen @andersen· Apr 8

@meowrey.bsky.social introduced me to this crazy astrological prediction from Vanity Fair in 2007, and I still think about it a lot. Maybe this is just the moment where the US becomes more like the post-colonial UK? Which…might not be the worst outcome.