August 2, 2023
Vaccines help Brazil's golden lion tamarins rebound from near-extinction
"We are celebrating": Vaccines help Brazil's golden lion tamarins rebound from near-extinction. Once on the brink of extinction with only about 200 animals in the wild, the golden lion tamarin population has rebounded to around 4800 individuals hopping between branches in the Brazilian rainforest.
Dance like everybody's watching
For decades, the St. Louis music scene had a solo-dancing, enigmatic, and polarizing weirdo haunting live music shows, big and small. The mop-topped Robert Matonis, a.k.a. Beatle Bob, has passed away, after a cruel decline from ALS, on July 27.
Tell Me Why It Hurts
"Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name. Yet this wound provides our new identity, at once the thing that gives us the right to speak and the only thing we have left to say when we do. Underwritten by its literalism, our trauma is the guarantor of what we believe we are owed."
How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives. (NYMag)
“Truthfully, I try not to analyse my own intentions”
Moananuiākea: a Voyage for Earth
The Hōkūleʻa, a traditional Polynesian outrigger, and crew are underway on their 43,000 nautical mile, 4 year journey, circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean. With Port Hardy and Hakai behind them, passing through the Johnstone Straight on the inner passage of Vancouver Island, the boat is soon within range of many a mefite! Follow along or try to catch up with them on the Americas’ left coast September 2023 - April 2024. [more inside]
It's counter-intuitive, but too much Disney might be killing Disney
YouTuber Poseidon Entertainment, who spends a lot of time examining dead amusement park rides and has been more increasingly critiquing amusement parks, has a thesis: Disney Brand Fatigue Is Damaging Its Parks [35m]. His experience looking back at things that have ceased to be gives him some insight into how modern attraction development might be creating a future trap for Disney. It's an interesting perspective that maybe Iger needs to listen to.
Candy Williams and Jackie Ferris, v. John M. Lester, Jr. et al.
Dear Counsel: Scientists have found that the octopus is bizarrely adept at navigating mazes. [PDF]
A baffling new movie on Amazon Prime misses the point of “never forget.”
Nahre Sol and Her Mother
YouTuber Nahre Sol is a classical pianist and composer, and as such posts videos on the creative and technical aspects of making music. But today I'd like to present two of her more personal videos, which she made with her non-musician mother. In the first, she and her mom play a piano duet. In the second, they compose a piece together. The videos are about 10 minutes each and heartwarming as heck. There are some sweet mother-daughter moments (some funny, some touching), cute dogs, and, of course, good music.
"My Country 'Tis of Thee" was the national anthem of the United States.
Analog horror filmmaker Alex Casanas (MISTERMANTICORE) is perhaps best known on YouTube for the Monument Mythos. This is a wide-spanning series of alternate history of the US, past and present, but it mainly focuses on the time of the 37th President, James Dean, and occasionally his best friend, Richard Nixon.
The lore goes three seasons deep, but it begins simply, with the CORNERFOLK, and goes into rich, strange places, some more like short fiction than film -- the LIBERTYLURKER (3:48), the mitosis of Alcatraz (4:07). It's best to take them in order to catch the full scope of exactly what the hell is going on here, which, by turns, is dreadful, hilarious, and heartbreaking -- as when the Ever Given got up and walked away (16:22). [more inside]
The lore goes three seasons deep, but it begins simply, with the CORNERFOLK, and goes into rich, strange places, some more like short fiction than film -- the LIBERTYLURKER (3:48), the mitosis of Alcatraz (4:07). It's best to take them in order to catch the full scope of exactly what the hell is going on here, which, by turns, is dreadful, hilarious, and heartbreaking -- as when the Ever Given got up and walked away (16:22). [more inside]
A Glimpse of What Might Have Been
It’s curious that fiction’s decoupling from what Shields called the “burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened”—or what the German sociologist of economics Jens Beckert calls the “doubling of reality”—is simultaneous with financial markets’ embrace of the unreal. Especially since it wasn’t always this way. The story of these divergent literary and financial trends starts in the Eighties and Nineties, back when fiction was still fiction, and finance was still math. from Double Reality, Hedging the Novel in the Postfictional Age by Jessi Jezewska Stevens [The Point; ungated]
The Unreality of Pro Wrestling
SuperEyepatchWolf details Roman Reigns' journey from The Shield to The Bloodline , perhaps one of the most bizarre and disastrous stories in pro wrestling.
This game makes me feel very seen.
Tourist To Your Own Culture By Veerender Singh Jubbal [Gamespot] “Venba is a game that has been on my radar since its announcement trailer was released in 2020. It comes from a mainly South Asian development team, with its aesthetics, character designs, and sound design drawing its inspiration from the culture to tell a story about a South Asian family trying to reclaim and archive their own underrepresented culture after immigrating to Canada. It is an incredibly ambitious title to pursue when many video games do not try to engage with having cultures or identities outside of the white/western represented. Venba is about trying to figure out your own identity (or sometimes lack thereof) in an all-new environment. This new environment is not kind or accommodating to people who are not considered white, and if you are underrepresented from a culture of color you are swayed and forced to assimilate, leaving what made you unique behind to survive this new place.” [Game Trailer][YouTube] [more inside]
Happy Dogust!
Happy Dogust to shelter dogs of indeterminate birthday everywhere! FTFA:
Dogust, which takes place Aug. 1 each year, is a nationwide celebration for dogs whose birthdays are unknown. It’s been a holiday since 2008, when staff at the North Shore Animal League America of New York set out to ensure even dogs without official birthdays still get their own special day. “[It’s] the official birthday for all rescued puppies and dogs to celebrate their importance in our lives,” says Joanne Yohannan, North Shore Animal League America’s senior vice president of operations.[more inside]
If you don’t make predictions, you’ll never know what to be surprised by
The Curse of the Long Boom (wired)
Hummus
Very old hummus, old hummus, creamy hummus, Claudia Roden hummus, store bought hummus, not hummus [more inside]
Skol, Minnesota
In a follow-up to their histories of the Seattle Mariners and the Atlanta Falcons, Jon Bois and the team at Secret Base are releasing another team history - this time of the NFL's purple-clad Midwestern outpost - the Minnesota Vikings. (SLSecret Base) [more inside]
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