April 25, 2023
RIP Harry Belafonte
Harry Belafonte made indelible marks on American culture while championing civil rights. Here's a link to his obituary.
Stil *ZOT*ting
Remember the Internet Oracle, the distributed source of all knowledge (read: wit)? It's still going - yes, since 1989. Read past questions and answers, ask your own, and become an incarnation of the ever-clever Oracle and answer someone else's. Writing and interface tips after the jump. [more inside]
Cobalt Supply Chain to a Hell on Earth
The race for high-tech metals has sparked a cobalt boom in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has come at a steep human cost.
e360: You talk about “industrial” mines and “artisanal” mines. What does that latter word mean?
Kara: The term is just nonsensical in its inaccuracy. It makes you think of craftsmen or people baking bread or something. In fact, it’s grindingly poor people scraping and scrounging in pits and trenches with pickaxes, shovels, their bare hands, strips of rebar... And that’s called artisanal mining, meaning people with their hands as opposed to heavy equipment. [more inside]
e360: You talk about “industrial” mines and “artisanal” mines. What does that latter word mean?
Kara: The term is just nonsensical in its inaccuracy. It makes you think of craftsmen or people baking bread or something. In fact, it’s grindingly poor people scraping and scrounging in pits and trenches with pickaxes, shovels, their bare hands, strips of rebar... And that’s called artisanal mining, meaning people with their hands as opposed to heavy equipment. [more inside]
She just sort of appeared, in a beam of clarity.
Here's what we know. We're alone. We're in a small boat. We're far from shore. The nearest land to us is Logan Airport. And that's when it begins to dawn on me. If we have to jump off this boat and swim to the closest land, we would be army crawling up the banks of a government-controlled airspace. The true story of nine people, eight life jackets, and a wooden boat built for… even fewer. Ike Sriskandarajah lived to tell the tale. Pirates of the Cari-BEAN-TOWN. [more inside]
You’ve been invited to a haunted house...
That haunted house is a Discord server. Will Jobst, previous creator of cozy story-telling RPGs and collaborative games ditches pen-and-paper for a new creation: "This Discord Has Ghosts In It" [more inside]
What! No Gin?
Tempting as it is to see the subject matter of the Cocktail Oracle—ornamented by Luhn’s bon vivant wordplay—as just a diversion, his choice of the cocktail as an experimental problem was not frivolous. Because of the formality of its conventions, the cocktail has offered all through its history a neat articulation of a combinatorial—or mixological—information system. from INGESTION / A MANHATTAN PROJECT by Daniel Rosenberg
Pet Shop Boys Lost In Russia
Pet Shop Boys have released a new EP, Lost [YT playlist], of four tracks recorded in 2015 for Super, but held off the album for not fitting thematically. The Lost Room meditates on the alienation of military school, with images from the German film Die Junge Törless [Trailer, 3m] used in the video. I Will Fall is a love song Neil said he could hear George Michael singing. Skeletons In The Closet might be talking about Russia's unwillingness to deal with Stalinism. Kaputnik continues the Russia theme. And finally, Living In The Past seems to be a VERY new song, and again deals with Russia. The video has a demo version of the song. [more inside]
"Do pink fairy armadillos exist?"
I was able to track my own past, including my past failures,
I Booted Up a Six-Year-Old ‘Breath of the Wild’ Save and Tried to Understand My Past Self by Patrick Klepek [Waypoint] [Games by Vice] “When I booted The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this week, the most recent save file was dated April 9, 2017—almost six years ago exactly. The save sat in front of the game’s final boss, Calamity Ganon. In the spring of 2017, I beat Ganon, put the game down, and moved on. But with the game’s sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, due to arrive in a few weeks, I felt compelled to revisit what remains Nintendo’s most impressive release of the last decade. Doing so was a delightful form of time travel, an exercise in trying to piece together what Patrick Klepek was up to six years ago in Breath of the Wild. What were his priorities? What did he find interesting about the world? What weapons was he hauling around? I clearly made the markers on the world map, but, uh, I don’t know what any of them mean? I may have been the person who played this for 70+ hours back in 2017, but those memories left my brain the moment the Switch was turned off. They live on, instead, inside the save file.” [YouTube] [Livestream of Patrick confronting the above mentioned six-year-old save file.] [more inside]
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