May 10, 2019
Cold War, Ballet, Tap Dance, and more Phil Collins
The 1985 film White Nights had the same director as Against All Odds. Not surprisingly it also had a stellar soundtrack album, including two songs nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song. Side A: Separate Lives (Love Theme From White Nights) [not the music video, music video] [Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin], Prove Me Wrong [David Pack], Far Post [Robert Plant], People On A String [Roberta Flack], This Is Your Day [Sandy Stewart and Nile Rodgers] [more inside]
Workers are going home
Weezer's self-titled debut (aka The Blue Album) is 25 years old.
Do you remember running barefoot against the dark?
Charly Bliss's sophomore album Young Enough came out today. Stereogum says it's ' paradoxically one of the heaviest and lightest albums of the year, wrapping hard truths and vivid pain in layers of bubblegum'. MTV calls it "resilient pop, and achingly nostalgic rock". Paste called their previous albumm Guppy a perfect… 10-track blast of sweetly serrated pop-rock supercharged with punky energy and plentiful hooks. Eva Hendricks, the lead singer and songwriter, writes love songs about her therapist. Their guitarist is Dash from The Incredibles. They might be just what you need right now.
Move over cat cafes, there's a new dog in town
hatched in incubator, placed with foster owl-parents
Northern Spotted Owl Webcam "There are estimated to be fewer than 10 Northern Spotted Owls left in the wild in Canada, but now you have the opportunity to view a pair and a recently hatched chick [...] hatched on April 26, 2019 after 32 days of artificial incubation and 87 hours of hatching, and placed into the nest of its foster parents Skalula and Oregon on May 7." [more inside]
Green Stoics: Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism & Environmental Sustainability
On Stoicism and Sustainability: How can stoicism be used to solve/tackle the problems of climate change? Kai Whiting (@KaiWhiting), a researcher and lecturer in sustainability and Stoicism based at the University of Lisbon, writes on resource use and the practical application of Stoic philosophy, emphasizing its oft-neglected Cosmopolitanism: "given that the ancient Stoics directly connected the good life with living in accordance with the four virtues... Stoicism can certainly do more than support a quest for self-development. In my opinion, it can guide us into a green transition... I believe that Stoicism offers a practical framework that helps you make decisions which bring you closer to the good (and greener) life instead of moving you further from it." [more inside]
This is not a Milkshake "Wow!"
On Sunday, The Handel And Haydn Society orchestra was performing at the Boston Symphony Hall. Just after the final rest of Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music,” an unseen kid yelled out “wow!” in apparently unvarnished appreciation of what he’d just heard. Everyone laughed and applauded the moment. This is nice on its own merits. A child, caught up in the joy of hearing beautiful music, didn’t sit silently like everyone else in attendance, but broke symphony tradition, which allowed the rest of the audience to follow suit. It gets better, though. [more inside]
Outsourcing Parenting
When Elizabeth Siegel’s toddler was ready to be potty-trained last year, she didn’t reach for a how-to book, check out advice on mommy blogs or ask her own mother for help. The partner at a visual marketing company hired a toilet-training pro to do her crap work.
“I love working with an expert, and I didn’t have the time. My husband and I both work,” she said. “I’m an expert in basically what I’m paid to do, which is my profession. Why wouldn’t I go to someone who understands?”
The training took place over eight hours on two consecutive days in Siegel’s Manhattan home in her now-3.5-year-old daughter’s ensuite black marble bathroom. Siegel was there for day one and took notes on a pad, while the nanny supervised the second day. [more inside]
“Hopefully it’ll be out by 2025.”
Final Fantasy VII Remake [YouTube][TeaserTrailer] “After a long period of development hell, the Final Fantasy VII remake is finally back in the real world, with Square Enix dropping a short teaser trailer today and promising more to come in June. Previously, Square had said that the Final Fantasy VII remake would be episodic, and based on this trailer—which is entirely made up of scenes from the game’s first act, in Midgar—that may still be the case.” [via: Kotaku]
Driving a Tesla Across The Loneliest Road in America
(SLYT) Popular YouTuber CGP Grey (lots of previouslies) found himself in San Francisco with a Tesla and 10 days to go to Moab, Utah and then to Los Angeles. These 51 minutes are the way-more-interesting-than-i-thought-they-could-be highlights.
"Works with Nest is winding down"
Google has announced that Nest will no longer be an independent division, and that the devices will become "Google Nest" products, requiring a Google account and subject to Google's privacy and data sharing policies. Ars Technica: The Nest ecosystem is dead. Nest accounts are dead. Nest's privacy firewall is dead. Almost all third-party integrations ("Works with Nest") will stop working on August 31. [more inside]
Hustling Along the Meme Leyline
"Old Town Road" is a self-produced song from 19-year-old artist, Lil Nas X. It is the #1 song in America. The story of the song's ascension from a random track on Soundcloud to Billboard 100's #1 hit highlight a tightening relationship between artistic creation and mindful promotion. [more inside]
"In a way, murdering a village is like a breakup, probably."
Was Hidetaka Miyazaki's brutal classic Bloodborne inspired by Ween's 1997 alt-rock record The Mollusk? Yes, clearly, and here's the proof.
Media And Workers
“As to how a changing business model has served to disempower and erase the American working class, Martin posits that a shift in the 1960s and 1970s towards an advertising model aimed at an upscale middle-class readership is the primary culprit. With the rise of television, the newspaper industry grew ever more consolidated and concerned with addressing and reflecting the interests and lifestyles of a predominantly middle-class audience. ” The Real Working Class Is Invisible In The Media (Jacobin) “There is a solution, however, and it’s something that the devils in the corner office would never have dreamed of allowing to happen (they got mad enough when we started unionizing everything). In my estimation, the only true way forward for digital media is to blow it all up, and start again. It’s time for the fourth estate to seize the means of production.” (Commune)
Designing Death
What It's Like To Work On Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat 11 “You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” they said. “The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to it. And I definitely hit that point.”
"...sometimes, comedians inadvertently step on each other's feet."
Like many professional funnypeople, Conan O'Brien has been accused of stealing jokes from Twitter. Unlike most of those other people, O'Brien actually got sued for it. And this week, after years of litigation, just before that suit was about to see the inside of a courtroom, O'Brien (and his co-defendants) settled for an undisclosed amount. Conan then wrote a column for Variety explaining why, saying "I decided to forgo a potentially farcical and expensive jury trial in federal court over five jokes that don’t even make sense anymore."
California is ignoring a history of violence against Native Americans
"Do they think I stand on the street corner and try to sell this shit?"
Danielle Steel: "The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she's at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact." A 2019 interview with Glamour magazine.
This video is also helpful when it comes time to discipline your octopus
How to braid a challah -With 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 strands. How to braid a 4 strand round. How about with just one strand? [more inside]
Katie Von Schleicher’s "really warbly and fucked up and heavy" music
The past music (Bandcamp) of Katie Von Schleicher (Interview) is stark, dark, and just plain weird. Von Schleicher’s new album, Shitty Hits (Bandcamp), although a slight shift from her past work, continues this path. (Pop Matters) Her new album tilts at Portishead covering the Beatles’ I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (YouTube), with some success.... At first, the jauntier, slightly derivative rockers signal strongest, then the darker ballads and self-scouring lyrics lure you in. Nothing (YT) builds to a blank, frazzled catharsis, while Sell It Back (Aquarium Drunkard) is an eerie, epic closer: these are torch songs written with petrol and a flamethrower. (The Guardian)
Don Norman is old as hell and he’s not going to take it any more.
Uber IPO
Uber (many previouslies) goes on sale this morning. Why investors can't wait to buy into Uber, a company that's never made money — and maybe never will.
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