May 2, 2023
Female Fire Lookouts Have Been Saving the Wilderness for Over a Century
Female Fire Lookouts Have Been Saving the Wilderness for Over a Century. Spotting smoke from towers on high peaks could have been deemed "man's work", but a few pioneers paved the way for generations of women to do the job.
whipped up to the point where they refused to let me take the oath
In the cases of Rep. Mauree Turner, Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, and Rep. Zooey Zephyr, state Republicans are weaponizing decorum rules and legislative discipline to silence Democrats. [more inside]
Fresh Squeezed Comedy
Released just a couple of hours ago, Lewis Black brings us his very recently completed comedy hour, Tragically, I Need You [1h3m]. CW: This deals very directly with the unfolding, trajectory, and personal harms of the COVID pandemic. It is also full of anger and ranting about these things, per Lewis Black's oeuvre, so maybe cathartic.
Sundown
Folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot dies at 84. Gordon Lightfoot, the folk singer-songwriter known for “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Sundown” and for songs that told tales of Canadian identity, died Monday, Lightfoot recorded 20 studio albums and penned hundreds of songs, including “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” In the 1970s, Lightfoot garnered five Grammy nominations, three platinum records and nine gold records for albums and singles. He performed in well over 1,500 concerts and recorded 500 songs.
what people mean when they talk about the “financialization” of housing
"Homes or Cash Cows," Shelterforce's on-going series, includes Hands Off the Houses: Can We Stop Speculative Land Grabs?: "According to a report by Americans for Financial Reform, 1.6 million housing units in the U.S. are now owned by private equity, including over 1 million apartment units, 275,000 manufactured home lots, and over 239,000 single-family rental homes." Most recent article is on how NYC's land speculators use LLCs to evade legal responsibility while sitting on vacant property.
SLYT
Lord Richards of Herstmonceux will carry the Sword of Spiritual Justice
Meanwhile, on Normal Island, Charles the third is getting crowned this Sunday. The coronation for the billionaire King-to-be is funded by commoners. As popularity for the monarchy falls and protests are planned, various petitions have been rejected, and the mass swearing of an oath of allegiance has been raised. The Proclaimers have been dropped from the official soundtrack, though many more Scots have their own jovial song. And another Scot, Frankie Boyle, has [very NSFW] examined the monarchy over the ages. Americans don't care and their presidents are traditionally no-shows. [post title]
I didn't think the leopards would unionise at MY face-eating company
150 African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize at Landmark Nairobi Meeting:
More than 150 workers whose labor underpins the AI systems of Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT gathered in Nairobi on Monday and pledged to establish the first African Content Moderators Union, in a move that could have significant consequences for the businesses of some of the world’s biggest tech companies.
The current and former workers, all employed by third party outsourcing companies, have provided content moderation services for AI tools used by Meta, Bytedance, and OpenAI—the respective owners of Facebook, TikTok and the breakout AI chatbot ChatGPT. Despite the mental toll of the work, which has left many content moderators suffering from PTSD, their jobs are some of the lowest-paid in the global tech industry, with some workers earning as little as $1.50 per hour.
Writers Guild of America -- on strike
News of the strike, which takes effect in a few hours, came late Monday after the guild’s negotiations with the AMPTP failed to reach an agreement on a new film and scripted TV contract. It’s the WGA’s first strike since the 100-day walkout of 2007-08.
All Aboard the Space Elevator
The Search for the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Tapes Is Over. The Mystery Endures
Anime is as imaginative as ever. It’s also a lot bleaker...
Anime Confronts a New Apocalypse by Matt Alt [The New Yorker] Back in the day, manga was hopeful and positive. Now? Lots of the biggest players are dark and cynical. Alt's piece examines how and why recent times have changed their outlook.
““We’re off to outer space, we’re leaving mother Earth, to save the human race,” the opening lines of the theme song to “Yamato” and “Star Blazers” went, but modern audiences seem more interested in escapes into inner space and saving themselves. Part of this is simply due to changing tastes and styles, inevitable in any youth-oriented medium, and part to how even the most radical subcultures inevitably get co-opted—witness how hip-hop and punk, so edgy and threatening in the eighties, morphed into mainstream pop. Days after Matsumoto’s death, a column about the artist expressed concern about how “cold and cynical many recent anime seem to be.” But is this a criticism of the current crop of animators and fans—or a reflection of Japanese society itself?”
This Wine-Dark Sea has Haunted Many Imaginations
So what color is the sea? Silver-pewter at dawn; gray, gray-blue, green-blue, or blue depending on the particular day; yellow or red at sunset; silver-black at dusk; black at night. In other words, no color at all, but rather a phenomenon of reflected light. The phrase “winelike,” then, had little to do with color but must have evoked some attribute of dark wine that would resonate with an audience familiar with the sea—with the póntos, the high sea, that perilous path to distant shores—such as the glint of surface light on impenetrable darkness, like wine in a terracotta vessel. from A Winelike Sea by Caroline Alexander [Lapham's; ungated]
« Previous day | Next day »