July 11, 2023
Just a tiny little brute
"I'm the first to admit when I make a mistake. I simply never do." There is now a trailer for Napoleon (Apple TV+, fall 2023). Ridley Scott directs. Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby star. Dariusz Wolski does the cinematography.
Digital TRPGs are their own special world
The Lady Afterwards is a few-shot tabletop RPG adventure about weird cultists in Alexandria in the 1920's. The game was produced by The Weather Factory, a tiny game studio whose main product is the Cultist Simulator video game. The physical version of The Lady Afterwards has a pile of player handouts and beautifully produced props, and originally sold out very quickly. The author, Lottie Bevan, wrote a fascinating (spoiler-free) postmortem about The Lady Afterwards' production which includes some fascinating comparative economics of the video game and ttrpg spaces.
Meet the New (Transphobic) Boss. Same as the Old (Homophobic) Boss
Shaun, YouTube lefty and agitator, presents his 2 hour treatise on Kellie-Jay Keen (AKA Posie Parker) a noted anti-feminist and transphobe. CW: transphobia (obviously), misogyny, homophobia, Nazis (both neo and classic), hate speech, etc. [more inside]
The dawning of the Anthropocene era
Boundary issues: how boundaries became the rules for mental health
"Boundaries are a Band-Aid in a bad world: if you can’t expect people to care for you and treat you well and protect you from violence or scarcity, you can at least protect yourself from their needs. They aren’t straightforwardly wrong to do this: negotiating other people’s needs, which are often unreasonable and unfulfillable and intolerable, is fraught, baffling, and overwhelming. It demands a good strong metaphor, and the image of boundaries is unusually tensile. But the term takes on its own momentum, overrunning intimacy with alienation. In its most extreme forms, boundary-speak makes it feel like some of us have given up on each other: the only effective social strategy left is to lock yourself in, fortify your defenses. If your emotional defense budget isn’t big enough to hold the line and you get trampled by other people’s greed, that’s on you." [more inside]
They draw comics; they aren't stand-up comics
In late 2010, The 92nd Street Y hosted Al Jaffe, Roz Chast, and Robert Mankoff [1h24m] for joint presentations about their work and a question panel. The humor is dry, but the talent is gigantic and the lengthy Q/A is great.
Ancient giants
Ancient giants "An epic quest to reach the tallest known tree in the Amazon"
“Marry rich!” she would tell me. “It’s so fun!”
“Being a bride used to mean being royalty for a day. Now it means being a celebrity. Either way, the only sure path to really distinguish yourself—to capture the oohs and the aahs and the attention—is to spend a lot of money.” —
The Fake Poor Bride: Confessions of a Luxury Wedding Planner [archive link]
Crows are ungovernable
Science nerds in the Netherlands have observed local corvids building bird nests out of anti-bird spikes [PDF], which creates extremely punk homes for their eggs out of the hostile architectural features that are also quite effective at deterring predators.
Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape
An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time [Kotaku] “The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) partnered with the Software Preservation Network, an organization intent on advancing software preservation through collective action, to release a report on the disappearance of classic video games. “Classic” in this case has been defined as all games released before 2010, which the VGHF noted is the “year when digital game distribution started to take off.” In the study, the two groups found that 87 percent of these classic games are not in release and considered critically endangered due to their widespread unavailability.” You can read the full 50-page study on the open repository Zenodo. [more inside]
Incontinence Is a Public Health Issue — And We Need to Talk About It
Even now, shame and stigma surrounding incontinence has caused severe damage to my self-worth and interpersonal relationships. "I know I’m not the only person who must feel this way. 25 percent of young women and 44 to 57 percent of middle-aged women (“women” is presumably used here to mean “people assigned female at birth”) also experience “some involuntary urine loss,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists journal, Practice Bulletin. And doctors can’t be prepared to offer long-term solutions to incontinence if they’re not even prepared to even talk to their patients about it. 50 to 70 percent of people who experience incontinence don’t seek treatment for it, likely due to the same stigma I’ve experienced for most of my life, which can lead to greater health risks." [more inside]
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