August 15, 2023
Double secret probation.
I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything. Although “Animal House” was a professedly anarchic comedy that identified with the freaks, the misfits and anyone wanting to fight for their right to party, the movie ironically helped crystallize a new strain of cultural and political conservatism that started on campuses and ran all the way up to the National Mall and Wall Street.
In other words, “Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s.
The Winners of Astronomy Photographer Of The Year 2022
An online gallery for the winners of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 From the Sombrero Galaxy to a moon gleaming next to a skyscraper, to misty green rivers under the aurora borealis and the sun's rays rendered as tree rings, these images brought a dose of wonder to me today
"...made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut..."
The People Selling Drugs Here Are Merely Pawns
In a nearby town square, a skinny child in a Steph Curry T-shirt climbs a tree. A few blocks away, a three-wheeled mototaxi whizzes by, a San Francisco Giants sticker affixed to its bumper ... More extravagant emblems of San Francisco appear unexpectedly and often, alongside crumbling adobe huts, stray roosters and heaps of singed garbage. Handsome new homes, some mansions by local standards, some mansions by any standard, rise behind customized iron gates emblazoned with San Francisco 49ers or Golden State Warriors logos. from This is the Hometown of San Francisco’s Drug Dealers [SF Chronicle]
Magic mushroom diplomacy
“There was this delicious mushroom dish. I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties...I learned that later.” Janet Yellen visited a Yunnan restaurant during an overseas visit and enjoyed local mushroom cuisine: jian shou qing, which means "see hand blue", referring to the blue stain the mushroom makes when bruised or cut. The dish is made with a local bolete mushroom called Lanmoa asiatica. When not properly cooked, the mushroom has been reported by some sources to have hallucinogenic properties.
"A shameful and bigoted political stunt"
Arkansas rejects AP African American Studies, cites Arkansas law on "prohibited topics" (Judd Legum's Popular Information) [more inside]
Do board games need victory conditions?
Newbiggin-by-the-Sea's family tree of "everyone who has ever lived here"
Northumberland coastal village Newbiggin-by-the-Sea has embarked on one of the world's largest genealogy projects. The town of roughly 6,500 people has worked to create an enormous family tree featuring 40,000 individuals stretching back to around the year 1200. The Times. (Archive)
“I'm having a good time despite being really terrible at it.”
It's okay to be bad at games [EX | Substack]
“The thing that I eventually came to realize is that it's all about people's expectations. Everything when you're talking about difficulty in games has to be framed in terms of, how do people expect this run to go? And how did it actually go? And are the points of difficulty in the places where I expected them to be? A game is marked out as hard if you expected to be able to do things and you couldn't do them. And it is marked out as easy if the things you expect it to be able to do you could do even if there's a lot of repetition.”A Q&A with Bennett Foddy, the high priest of videogame difficulty.
When Mississippi Once Banned Sesame Street
When Mississippi Once Banned Sesame Street.
The show ran into problems during its first season in 1970 when a small group of Mississippi television consultants found it too controversial. The reason? Black cast members.
A Kiss Across the Ocean
Richard T. Rodriguez in the LA Times on why British post-punk matters to US Latinidad. For the Latinx community, British post-punk music (sometimes called new wave or alternative) has become, as Welsh writer Raymond Williams defined culture, a whole way of life. From Facebook fan pages offering insights about the music to the two Cruel World music festivals held in Pasadena where brown bodies swayed to their favorite bands and singers from across the pond, it’s impossible not to recognize this deep connection.
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