May 15
You're not supposed to actually read it
A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. - Her fellow Republicans were not relieved to hear this news.
The dove ascending breaks the air...
Smoking is Awesome
"The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which means some lose, like, 5 years and some lose like 25. You don't know which one will be you." Smoking is Awesome by Kurzgesagt and How "Anti-Vaping" Ads Trick You Into Vaping by Maggie Mae Fish are two sides of a coin: Maggie Mae Fish explains the media literacy needed to determine what makes effective anti-smoking ads and how tobacco (and now vaping) companies direct policy towards ineffective anti-smoking ads. Kurzgesagt has an informative and effective anti-smoking video.
Charles The Carpathian
Buckingham Palace has revealed King Charles III's first official post-coronation portrait, and the work by artist Jonathan Yeo has proven to be...divisive in its design. [more inside]
He only visited the Playboy Mansion to support their journalism
Perhaps Donald John Trump will have only one criminal trial this year. The prosecution's case in his state trial for using hush money to pay off a porn star to illegally influence his election is finishing with ex-fixer Michael Cohen testifying. [more inside]
Thinking Big - Thinking Land Stewardship
Can sustainable farming and land use practices really scale to meet the challenges of our planet - or are they just niche hobby projects? Learn about how acquifers work and are recharged. Find out how the Pani Foundation water cup inspired Indian farmers to compete in building water retention structures for their villages. Learn about a Mesoamerican farming technology originally scaled up by the Aztecs. Hear American regenerative agriculture pioneer Gabe Brown, telling his story to the farmers who supply a major British supermarket chain as they move towards regenerative practices. Learn how a British city council responded to a major flood event by investing in beautiful sustainable urban drainage across the city and its suburbs (a presenter's connection drops out near the start of their video but it's worth skipping past it!)
What is an ice cream sandwich, if not childhood persevering?
Alice Munro, 1931-2024
Alice Munro, master of short stories, wove intense tales of human drama from small-town life is the Globe and Mail obituary [archive] for the Canadian literary giant who passed away Monday night. She received the Nobel in literature in 2013 among countless other prizes. She also cofounded Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia, who posted a remembrance on Instagram. The New Yorker, where many of her stories first appeared, has a section with links to her short fiction, as well as personal essays, appraisals and an interview and an obituary [archive]. The 1978 classic Moons of Jupiter was recently featured on their fiction podcast, and it is also available as text.
14 year old spends next two years fighting to save a forest
At 14, Ned stumbled upon a perfect jungle. He didn't know he would spend the next two years fighting to save it.
When a teenager uncovered a critical refuge for endangered species, it marked the start of a journey that eventually saw the parcel of land named after him.
The Worth of Sats in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is comprised of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin’s inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million. from Time Is Running Out in the Hunt for Rare Bitcoin [Wired; ungated]
May 14
A slice of life wrapped in an enigma with onions and cilantro
Improve Your Sandwiches
Simple Rules for Better Sandwiches [11m30s] is part of the Technique with Lan Lam series from America's Test Kitchen. From suggestions for contrasting ingredients to techniques like pressing, and other ways to examine the ways that sandwiches could be improved. [more inside]
How to Talk about War Truthfully
Words About War. "From George Orwell’s critique of the language of totalitarian regimes to today, discussions of war and foreign policy have been full of dehumanizing euphemisms, bloodless jargon, little-known government acronyms, and troubling metaphors that hide warfare’s damage. This guide aims to help people write and talk about war and foreign policy more accurately, more honestly, and in ways people outside the elite Washington, DC foreign policy “blob” can understand." Link to the PDF. [more inside]
CATSTRAVAGANZA
The Desktop Cat Cursor (not free but really cheap) , from Samperson, turns your computer's pointer into a big cat's paw extending onto the screen. Currently only for Windows 10 and 11 but a Mac version is in the works. [more inside]
“interesting and adventurous and exciting and beautiful”
In her essay ‘The Double Standard [PDF] of Aging,’ Susan Sontag explores how a “visceral horror felt at aging female flesh” is entrenched in our visual culture, manifested in caricatures of viragos and witches. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power,” she wrote, “the revulsion against aging in women is the cutting edge of a whole set of oppressive structures (often masked as gallantries) that keep women in their place.” Reclaiming elderly sexuality is an act of defiance, a rebellion against a youth-obsessed culture, fuelled by misogynistic gender norms. from The Untold Lives of Mature OnlyFans Performers [Huck] CW: NSFW language, it's about OnlyFans and has pictures of women in lingerie.
The weird and wonderful world of the PC-98
Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you’re sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can’t quite remember… Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time, with a palette of 4096 possible colours, pushing the limits of these 80’s era machines memory, these early graphic artists and hackers alike have left an indelible mark on the world of digital art and internet culture, only to be forgotten in the passing of time. But what made this boring business computer from Japan so special?The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer [contains some NSFW pixel art] / More striking imagery: Incredible pictures from an era of games we never got to experience [CW: flashing lights] - Tumblr: High quality [SFW] pixel art from PC-98 games - Pixelation.org: The Art of PC98 - Amino: The world of PC-98 Pixel Art - Galleries from @noirlac, @item, and @densetsu.ch [more inside]
May is for Lyme and ME and Autoimmune
What happens when you're an amazing young musical talent who's discovered while busking and then signed to a record label deal but things go terribly wrong and you lose it all.
In this case, you spend 8 years searching for a way to not die and then proceed to produce a distinctive track upholding a promise to advocate and support the Millions Missing who are thusly forsaken. This may be the first time any song that brings a story about M.E. and Lyme Disease hits the top 40 of the official charts; brought to us by an independent artist who has been unable to tour. [more inside]
Seeing coal
Coal is more than a commodity.
It is 300-million-year-old life matter transformed into carbon. It performs a vital function – storing carbon underground. It is rich with meaning and portent, and it deserves our attention.
Human lives are ephemeral, yet our actions in the here-and-now shape an unseen future. Through its dynamic materiality, coal connects us to Deep Time and Nature. It reminds us of our own Earth origins and helps us re-vision how to live on a fragile and finite planet.
User Inyer Face
You kind of just have to click through to experience the madness. It's literally the worst. All the worst "features" combined into the worst interface of all time - so far.
Internet use linked to higher wellbeing, global study suggests
The Last Pre-Raphaelite
Edward Burne-Jones was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Frank Cadogan Cowper was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Christiana Herringham was so late in the game, she was more of a Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance painter. [more inside]
Uncommonly radical and eloquent history
All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests. Public spending becomes profligate, debt burdens become intolerable, inflation spirals out of control. All of which is to say that the state is subsidizing marginal lives more than it is subsidizing capital. from Extravagances of Neoliberalism, a conversation with Melinda Cooper [The Baffler; ungated]
May 13
"In select stores, based on historical sales performance."
Target to Cut LGBTQ Pride Month Products From Some Stores After Backlash (Bloomberg, archive.is) [more inside]
Suck it, Lichtenstein!
I cannot tell you how or why, but at some point a few years back I discovered that Instagram Stories not only allows you unlimited emojis, it ALSO allows you to enlarge them to an apparently infinite degree. And so, may I present: FAMOUS PAINTINGS RECREATED USING ONLY EMOJIS! All on one page: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Klimt's The Kiss, Wood's American Gothic, Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam and more, all moulded from shaded yellow spheres. [more inside]
"Well, you seem like a person, but you're just a voice in a computer"
OpenAI unveils GPT-4o, a new flagship "omnimodel" capable of processing text, audio, and video. While it delivers big improvements in speed, cost, and reasoning ability, perhaps the most impressive is its new voice mode -- while the old version was a clunky speech --> text --> speech approach with tons of latency, the new model takes in audio directly and responds in kind, enabling real-time conversations with an eerily realistic voice, one that can recognize multiple speakers and even respond with sarcasm, laughter, and other emotional content of speech. Rumor has it Apple has neared a deal with the company to revamp an aging Siri, while the advance has clear implications for customer service, translation, education, and even virtual companions (or perhaps "lovers", as the allusions to Spike Jonze's Her, the Samantha-esque demo voice, and opening the door to mature content imply). Meanwhile, the offloading of most premium ChatGPT features to the free tier suggests something bigger coming down the pike.
If you need it, give me a hug or stop for a chat
(CW for talk of suicide) A short film (on X) made by Wolverhampton Wanderers FC. The club's Head 4 Health initiative.
"Women in philosophy have always needed a special stroke of luck."
Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general ‘we’ who have ‘forgotten’ these women are also the ‘we’ who were not taught them in the first place. Such generalisations risk shifting the focus, and the responsibility, away from the agents of our ignorance: the historians and philosophers who made a world in which certain texts were deemed unworthy of preservation and the history of women’s thought was kept to the margins.– A Comet that Bodes Mischief by Sophie Smith. She discussed women in philosophy on the LRB Podcast.
“Lake”
Universidad Santo Tomás (Saint Thomas Aquinas) is the oldest (founded: 1580) university in Colombia. The music on some of their promotional videos e.g. Admisión 2022, 2011 micro-drama, another 2011 video, evening study, and a cover, may sound familiar to listeners of a reclusive Scottish electronic music duo, with an overanalytical fanbase, who have NOT RELEASED AN ALBUM IN 11 YEARS sorry about that. The original, the lyrics, and a meta-nostalgic fan video for 50+ Brits. [more inside]
Nobody should be forced to have pie in the face (free thread)
Mostly I just saw two links about pie in the face and here they are. Ask A Manager is asked whether or not a manager HAS to have pie thrown in their face at work. "Under no reasonable definition does it fall within “other duties as assigned.” Judge John Hodgman was also asked in the NYT if someone has to keep pie-ing her husband in the face when he loves it, she doesn't. "Shoving a pie in someone’s face is assault, and you should not do it unless you are certain your partner is into it. Unfortunately, it turns out your husband is really into that pie, and he has unfairly transformed your revenge into his kink." [more inside]
"Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists"
After departing the BlueSky board of directors, Block Head and social media mogul Jack Dorsey gave an interview with venture capitalist Mike Solana in which he explained that Twitter rejecting advertisers is a blow for free speech and BlueSky is repeating the mistakes of Twitter, like moderation. [more inside]
A visual comparison of USDA gardening zones from 1976 to 2020
The USDA has updated their plant hardiness zone maps. The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map. Choose a city or region to see what's changed over 44 years.
Don't anthropomorphize the animals, they hate that!
I'm not quite sure what there is to say about Silverback is very happy to make up with his son.｜Shabani Group [11m25s] other than there's a lot of behavior on display here that feels relatable, and also some that is really alien. I don't know how much others might engage with this, but I found it interesting enough to share.
Boneheads, indeed
“I knew we were right. I knew we had done our work. I knew the case was iron tight.” (slTorontoStar) (archived link here) [more inside]
By default art involves artifice
A comedian’s only responsibility is to make the audience laugh. If you’re not making the audience laugh, then you’re failing at your job. You want to speak truth to power, you want to make a political statement, you want to be confessional—none of that is more or less valid than doing ventriloquism or doing an impression of Christopher Walken. They’re all equal, so long as they make people laugh. If it’s more important to you to do something that doesn’t make the audience laugh, fine, but it’s not comedy. It’s something else. from Two Guys Walk into a Bar: Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy [The Sun Magazine]
May 12
We're getting the band (back?) together!
There have been a few posts here on the blue in recent years celebrating some rising young music stars, Yoyoka Soma and Ellen Alaverdyan, to name two. Often, when we see talented young people like that, our first thought is "Hey, they should collaborate!". Well, our wish has been granted. [more inside]
O K L A H O M A
Here's the 1999 Broadway production of Oklahoma [3h], directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Hugh Jackman, Maureen Lipman, and Josefine Gabrille. It's a great production of the classic version of the story. More modern productions have been more subversive, but this is a more traditional presentation of this quite old musical.
not even a see-through sleeve for my name tag
Plastic, Plastic Everywhere — Even at the UN’s “Plastic Free” Conference. From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center. Their message? Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. "These plastics deliver water" on an ad depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.
La Maison du Pastel
A tour of a 300 year old business that makes pastels in nearly 2000 colors [youtube - 2024/05/12 Business Insider] [more inside]
A Northland island has a very unusual (but good) problem...too many kiwi
A Northland island (in Aotearoa/New Zealand) has a very unusual (but good) problem...too many kiwi. Residents on Moturoa, in Ipipiri, have been forced to relocate the reclusive birds after their population swelled into the hundreds. (This was the result of a local program to control feral predators like cats and foxes - in most parts of New Zealand, kiwi are under threat.)
Finally, your checkers can nuke again!
Quadradius is back, baby! (Note that it is still in development mode and has not yet gathered many players, so arranging your own matches may be necessary).
Previously.
Who wouldn’t want to drink like an off-duty, world-renowned chef?
Lest you believe that interest in studying the habits of unstudied coolness was limited to the world of food and drink, recall the concurrent obsession with “off-duty” beauty and style, a concept that lost its novelty with the advent of Instagram. These days, fascination with figures in the culinary world seems to be very “on-duty”—the tools they use, the shoes and jackets they wear. Today, few may remember that copas de balón were first embraced by lauded chefs rather than marketers at beverage companies ... But the allure of a choice that’s more utilitarian than aesthetic has helped the copa de balón endure. It’s unexpected and delightful, like a fancy sandwich served on a quarter sheet tray. from The Balloon Effect
public domain [book cover] atrocities
[B]ooks in the public domain—books anyone with a digital file, a printer, and a dream can produce and sell—can be a sweet side hustle for people looking to make a quick buck, and they are free to make their own choices when it comes to the cover art they select, but this one cracked me up because it is not even close to representing the contents or the tone of the book. I decided to do a deep dive into the world of public domain publishing, to see what else was out there… (Karen T. Brissette) Bonus: 50 Very Bad Book Covers for Literary Classics (LitHub)
Cascading Style
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a ubiquitous markup language for describing the layout and design of a webpage separate from the content, typically specifying things like text formatting, background color, page alignment, etc.
But as with emoticons and ASCII art before it, CSS can be repurposed to become the content. Enter CSS drawing, an intricate art form that uses the conventions of the language to create illustrations and even animation using only standard design elements. Some standout examples from around the web: A Single Div, where every new illustration is contained within one <div> tag; designer Lynn Fisher also has a previous version along with a whole catalog of "weird websites, niche data projects, and CSS experiments" - Another collection of single-div projects - Start a digital bonfire - The Simpsons (animated!) in CSS - 173 CSS drawings on Dribble - How I started drawing CSS Images - css-doodle, a web component for drawing patterns with CSS - Creating Realistic Art with CSS - The CSS Zen Garden, a collection of beautiful CSS stylesheets - CSS previously on MeFi
3...2...1.... Fight!
Chatbot vs Chatbot The Chatbot Arena will randomly load two chatbots in answer to your prompt. You mark which one gives the better answer. The Arena uses these human responses to rank the top LLM chatbots on an ongoing basis. Over 1,000,000 prompts have been submitted and scored. [more inside]
Happy Mother's Day from Mr T (slyt)
"How long have you been doing that???"
YouTube is shoving animal videos at me, and so here are some animal videos! Here are 10 minutes of above-average cat videos; it's a compilation; it has annoying narration. Here are four minutes of owl videos with music that is not totally awful. Here is two minutes of an adorable rhinoceros calf getting acquainted with a zookeeper while mom looks on. And finally 3m30s of the most dramatic husky with their thoughts interpreted for the viewer.* [more inside]
"A Quiet Love" by Liza Minnelli
Liza sings a song while signing. This is new to me. A beautiful Charles Aznavour song. 1992 Radio City Music Hall.
Jesus Xing Musk
Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more. from I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help. [Mother Jones; ungated] [CW: Elon Musk]
I See Demon Faces Everywhere
Slate: [W]e spoke to Maggie McCart, an administrative assistant at an Illinois university, who suffers from an extremely rare disease called prosopometamorphopsia, which inflicts patients with a variety of wild hallucinations when they look at someone’s face. (archive)
May 11
Astronomers detect Milky Way black hole w mass 33 times that of the Sun
Astronomers detect Milky Way black hole with mass 33 times that of the Sun. Astronomers have discovered the second-largest black hole known to be in the Milky Way, and it's located just 2000 light-years from Earth.