March 2, 2020
City of Smiles
Shehr-e-Tabassum (2020). Pakistan's first ever anime film about a dystopian cyberpunk future with Pakistani characteristics. 9 minutes long and with English subtitles.
“...a few polygons and a few rules, they're incredibly versatile.”
How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original PlayStation [YouTube] “Memory was so short in Crash Bandicoot that I took to stealing little bits and pieces of extra memory from the Sony libraries. I would like just try erasing parts of them that I thought I wasn't using and see if things still worked. If they did, I would mark them as available and I just hacked their code by just changing the byte codes. I'm like, you can do this. Look, I fixed it. If they wouldn't fix it for me, I was just gonna like edit their code. It was free memory. The memory was finite. But you were definitely not supposed to do that.” [via: Ars Technica][Full Transcript]
People make classification schemes and Nature might not follow the rules
Most of the world’s volcanoes can be explained with just two conditions for magma production: pressure, and the mixture of water. Water-laden seafloor plates can trigger melt as they sink down into the Earth at subduction zones. These two facts generally explain both volcanoes along plate boundaries—like the Pacific Ring of Fire or the mid-ocean ridges—and those at hot spots like Hawaii and Yellowstone. But when looking back through Earth's history, there are plenty of volcanic weirdos that don’t seem to line up with the figures in a textbook. Volcanoes where they shouldn’t be? Maybe it’s a mantle sponge -- Hypothesis explains eruptions in China and off the coast of Japan. (Ars Technica; abstract at Nature) Also, those volcano figures in textbooks are bad, oversimplifying the wonderful world of volcanoes (Oregon State University, Volcano World). [more inside]
Is this a new way to deal with online hate? Or just making it worse?
Greta Thunberg derangement syndrome is all too familiar. It's so common it's even a source of humour.
Last week, Greta Thunberg addressed a large crowd in Bristol, UK. And for some people this was all too much, and prompted some hateful, violence-inciting comments on social media. So far, so depressingly normal. [more inside]
If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive?
Popping The Great Debt Bubble
“Millions of debtors, isolated, are owned by the banks. But if you’re part of a collective that owes $14.15 trillion, you all own the banks.“ Debtors of the World, Unite! Debt’s ubiquity is a burden, but also an opportunity. (Boston Review)
Political hobbyists are ruining politics
Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists. What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football. From Eitan Hersh, author of Politics Is for Power, in The Atlantic. [more inside]
since perfume and stickers count as suspicious
No Glitter, No Glue, No Meth? Can Texas prisons really stop contraband by banning greeting cards? [The Marshall Project]
Eat, Pray, Spend
Rebekah Neumann's Search For Enlightenment Fueled WeWork's Collapse (SL Bustle by MOE TKACIK)
It's a grind
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage.
Ghen Cô Vy' aka Jealous Corona Virus
"you cannot kill me in a way that matters"
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