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"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"
The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!
“Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” "It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club." [more inside]
I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™ [more inside]
The end of "the end of passwords"?
At this point I think that Passkeys will fail in the hands of the general consumer population. We missed our golden chance to eliminate passwords through a desire to capture markets and promote hype. Corporate interests have overruled good user experience once again. Just like ad-blockers, I predict that Passkeys will only be used by a small subset of the technical population, and consumers will generally reject them. To reiterate - my partner, who is extremely intelligent, an avid computer gamer and veterinary surgeon has sworn off Passkeys because the user experience is so shit. She wants to go back to passwords. And I'm starting to agree - a password manager gives a better experience than passkeys. That's right. I'm here saying passwords are a better experience than passkeys. Do you know how much it pains me to write this sentence?Aussie software engineer William "Firstyear" Brown pours one out for the "shattered dream" of passkeys. [more inside]
Ad Maiorem Gloriam Concreti
The "King of Carbonara" shares his pasta recipe
Adorable footage of tiny bear cubs emerging from hibernation
Adorable footage of mother bear and tiny cubs emerging from den after hibernation. It’s spring time in Canada! (Video by Serge Wolf.)
The war between humanity and its oldest, archest of enemies: pain.
Mark Chrisler's podcast "The Constant" just concluded a 3 part series, "Comfortably Numb". Part 1 is about the horror and trauma due to the pain of surgery before anesthesia started being used in the 1840s, and ends with the question of why no one thought of using anesthetics before then despite their existence for decade(s) (nitrous oxide, chloroform) or centuries (ether) and their recreational use. Part 2 is about how anesthesia was introduced for surgery. Part 3 is about the fight between the men claiming to invent anesthesia led to their ruination. [more inside]
Helen Vendler, 1933 - 2024
Helen Vendler, perhaps the preeminent contemporary American poetry critic, has passed away at 90. [more inside]
An emerging new picture of animal consciousness
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by 88 researchers, asks us to consider more non-human creatures as capable of subjective experiences. [more inside]
There She Is: Another Step
Happy Belated Flash Friday! Sort of! If you’ve been around the internet long enough, you might remember There She Is, a Korean Flash animation by Sambakza about a bunny girl smitten with a reluctant cat boy. The whole series has been remastered in HD and uploaded to YouTube as one long video (previously), but the real reason for this post is that, years later, there’s now actually a brand new installment in the series!
Our Man Bashir
“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” -
Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
Social media is neither inherently beneficial or harmful to young people
The Coddling of the American Parent by Mike Masnick (TechDirt) debunks Jonathan Haidt's panicky new book on teens & the internet. Developmental psychologist & scholar Candice Odgers' article for Nature: The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes. [more inside]
"Tonight I miss one legendary Quentin Tarantino."
Pulp Fiction cast on meeting Quentin Tarantino and changing film history | TCMFF 2024 [30m] "John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Harvey Keitel reunited at the TCM Classic Film Festival to celebrate the 30th anniversary of PULP FICTION."
EPIC indeed
Life Lessons From a Ten-Year-Old Cigarette Vendor
The act of trying to keep things the way they are is insanity. It’s an illusion. Trying something new means touching the unknown. It can be frightening and cause you to either fight or flee, rather than say yes.
It takes courage to change. Then again, why change when you don’t have to?
But when you don’t change, everything appears to stay the same. And this is the antithesis of life.
Life is change.
Life is always changing. [more inside]
It's our lockdown album.
'An evening with Pet Shop Boys' 22-04-2024 [Guardian Live, 1h23m] "To celebrate the launch of their highly anticipated new studio album, Nonetheless [Wikipedia], join Pet Shop Boys in conversation with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis - live in London, with an exclusive album playback, and livestreamed globally." [more inside]
There have been a lot of cowboys of color, their stories don’t get told
Wallace was Black. The men who helped him were white. One might imagine that such a scene would have been jaw-dropping in Depression-era Texas, where white hostility toward people of color was common. But the West Texas cowboy culture of the time was distinctive. Men of different races often supported and respected one another. And no cowboy was more respected than Wallace. In fact he was one of the most remarkable figures in our history. from The Former Slave Who Became a Cowboy, a Rancher, and a Texas Legend [Texas Monthly; ungated]
Realistic is not necessarily the most convincing
Emil Dziewanowski is a technical artist in the gaming industry who excels at using inventive techniques to create compelling visual effects. His latest blog post, Flowfields, walks you through the process of animating the complex whorls and vortices of Jupiter without using traditional fluid dynamics, using lessons learned from such prior art as Contra's color-cycling, frame-by-frame animation, and the trippy lava effect in Quake, ultimately using a combination of clever tricks to design a "universal" flow simulator that can render appealing fluid effects in just half a millisecond.