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New satellite-based research reveals how land along the coast is slumping into the ocean, compounding the danger from global sea level rise. An interactive map with analysis (previously)
comment posted at 3:51 AM on Mar-3-24

Chaotic off-brand Willy Wonka pop-up exhibit ends with police intervention

Obviously, when the poor Charlie And The Chocolate Factory enthusiasts showed up at Box Hub Warehouse, the event looked nothing like what the event description suggested. Instead, they were confronted with a sad-looking, mostly empty warehouse with a bouncy house and some ramshackle decorations. Jack Proctor, a dad who took his kids to the event, told STV News that “we stepped inside to find a disorganized mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears.” [...] "The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point."

The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience - More shocking pictures emerge of ‘shambles’ Willy Wonka experience - Employee contracts signed with "erasable ink" - Actor hired as Willy Wonka for cancelled event called it a place 'where dreams went to die' - 'Willy Wonka' chocolate experience boss 'truly sorry' after 'chaos' - Read the ChatGPT-generated event "script" [PDF]
comment posted at 2:55 PM on Feb-27-24
comment posted at 1:43 AM on Feb-28-24

Todd In the Shadows undertakes an epic troll of Brits with ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
comment posted at 12:47 AM on Feb-26-24
comment posted at 1:15 AM on Feb-26-24
comment posted at 3:03 AM on Feb-26-24
comment posted at 2:54 AM on Mar-4-24

Legal weed in New York was going to be a revolution. What happened? (Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker (archive.is))
comment posted at 9:22 AM on Feb-24-24

Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present - WIRED. A thoughtful reply to what art means when it’s ‘personally’ generated for you with a dive into Lewis Hyde on gift economies.
comment posted at 2:59 AM on Feb-24-24

"The featured filters — Images, Videos, Maps, Flights, Shopping, Perspectives, etc. — change and reorder depending on the search term, but this was different. I wasn’t seeing the News tab as an option for search after search, even if I went looking in the 'All filters' drop-down menu. I tried with 'Julian Assange,' 'public subsidies for sports stadiums,' and 'Reckon layoffs.' None showed the News filter as an option. The next day, on a different computer, my News filter was (blessedly) back. But a few other users confirmed I was not alone." Last year Google cut jobs in its news division. Where is Google putting its resources these days? Exactly where you'd expect.
comment posted at 6:50 AM on Feb-23-24

Until the mid 1800s, pawpaws were strictly a foraged food due to their woodland abundance. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans ate them as part of their seasonal diets, and the recorded anecdotes of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Daniel Boone describe subsisting on the native fruits during their journeys through the wilderness. Eventually, pawpaws, or custard apples as they were sometimes called, were sold at market. Though cultivated by Indigenous tribes like the Shawnee, the pawpaw was relegated to a wild folk food eaten by impoverished rural people, earning nicknames like the “poor man’s banana” and the “hillbilly banana.” from Consider the Pawpaw [Belt]
comment posted at 1:14 AM on Feb-23-24
comment posted at 1:24 AM on Feb-23-24

"Informant’s dad told it to her. She found it so funny. She likes that it’s punny and unexpected. Her dad would tell it to her over and over again. His dad told it too." An entry from the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The International Society for Folk Narrative Research points to it as one of many digital folklore archives [PDF]. If you don't have time to visit digital archives, a dad joke generator may be more your speed.
comment posted at 5:42 AM on Feb-20-24

"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski]
comment posted at 12:47 PM on Feb-20-24
comment posted at 6:16 AM on Feb-21-24
comment posted at 1:38 AM on Feb-24-24

Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story. Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. from Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1, Part 2
comment posted at 2:46 AM on Feb-21-24
comment posted at 8:30 AM on Feb-22-24

Alexei Navalny is dead at 47, say Russian prison authorities. The crusading pro-democracy activist was a constant thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin, financing documentaries exposing Kremlin corruption and rallying support as a popular opposition leader; a documentary on his own life won an Oscar and global acclaim last year. Long persecuted by the state, he was poisoned by the notorious nerve agent Novichok in 2020 and returned the following year to face imprisonment under an increasingly authoritarian regime. While the collective West condemns the unsubtle murder of a political prisoner, liberal Russians are left without any clear successor -- though Navalny himself even in death endeavored to tell supporters "You're not allowed to give up."
comment posted at 4:57 AM on Feb-17-24

Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
comment posted at 9:35 AM on Feb-16-24

Stylish woman walks down neon Tokyo street / Space man in a red knit helmet movie trailer / Drone view of waves crashing at Big Sur / Papercraft coral reef / Victoria crowned pigeon with striking plumage / Pirate ships battling in a cup of coffee / Historical footage of California during the gold rush / Cartoon kangaroo disco dances / Lagos in the year 2056 / Stack of TVs all showing different programs inside a gallery / White SUV speeds up a steep dirt road / Reflections in the window of a train in the Tokyo suburbs / Octopus fighting with a king crab / Flock of paper airplanes flutters through a dense jungle / Cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast / Chinese Lunar New Year celebration / Art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles / People enjoying the snowy weather and shopping / Gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s deep in thought / Colorful buildings in Burano Italy. An adorable dalmation looks through a window / 3D render of a happy otter standing on a surfboard / Corgi vlogging itself in tropical Maui / Aerial view of Santorini / OpenAI unveils Sora, a near-photorealistic text-to-video model with unprecedented coherency.
comment posted at 2:34 AM on Feb-17-24
comment posted at 5:46 AM on Feb-17-24
comment posted at 8:52 AM on Feb-18-24
comment posted at 12:16 PM on Feb-18-24
comment posted at 12:25 PM on Feb-18-24
comment posted at 4:03 PM on Feb-18-24

Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime

Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.

Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it.
comment posted at 9:37 AM on Feb-12-24

AI generated obituaries turn real people into clickbait. Searching for information on a deceased friend? Better check your sources carefully; there’s a whole shady online industry designed to profit off your loss.
comment posted at 7:47 AM on Feb-12-24

Linkfest on recycling or recyclability research and approaches: Pulpatronics makes RFID tags out of scorch marks on paper. Turbine blade maker Vestas may have figured out how to recycle the epoxy in epoxy-carbon-fiber. California museum Exploratorium uses and re-uses machinery from the Bay Area's history, which become part of the exhibits. A polymer analagous to porphyrin is good at collecting gold and platinum from acid-cleaned circuit boards. A plastics-back-to-polymers technique with a new factory opening ?soon?.
comment posted at 1:40 AM on Feb-10-24

"It is almost impossible to believe that these paintings have been overlooked. The qualifying statements people often make about their so-called domesticity and how Morisot did the best she could within a limited sphere, even when meant as a defence of the work, are entirely unconvincing: what is ‘the domestic’ but the core of life, of eros, and of work?"
comment posted at 7:43 AM on Feb-9-24

"The composition of Opening dates back to 1979, where Glass was commissioned by the Alberta Piano Institute to write a set of varying piano pieces for educational use. It was originally published for solo piano as part of his 'Solo Piano' album in 1989, and since then has been re-recorded and re-arranged in numerous other forms. Opening was also re-contextualised in 1996 as part of the album ‘The Essential Philip Glass’ and was even re-arranged again in 2010 as an orchestral score." Phillip Glass - 'Opening' ( offical version) [slyt. 7:17]
comment posted at 1:21 AM on Feb-7-24

We require leaders who recognize before disaster strikes that mass panic is largely a myth, not after they have mismanaged it. This is a hard thing to ask of a governing class. One reason this myth has persisted despite decades of evidence to the contrary is that narratives of panic are a useful crutch for leaders under pressure. By projecting their own insecurities onto the masses they lead, elites find a ready scapegoat for their own failings. A leader who does not measure up to the demands of disaster will find it easier to blame the crowd for panic than accept the crowd’s harsh judgments on his own performance. from The Myth of Panic [Palladium; from 2021]
comment posted at 1:04 AM on Jan-29-24

Yesterday, the UK press were astir over the prescription of an American chemistry professor (or "egghead", as UK journalists know them) for the perfect cup of tea, to which she recommended adding salt, of all things. The outrage! Ridiculous! Etc. The US embassy issued a tongue-in-cheek press release about how this didn't represent official US policy, and how they would “continue to make tea in the proper way—by microwaving it.” This, in turn, was an excellent excuse for the UK press to keep the story going (warning: Daily Mail) by pretending to take them literally.
comment posted at 8:14 AM on Jan-25-24
comment posted at 9:16 AM on Jan-25-24
comment posted at 9:19 AM on Jan-25-24
comment posted at 12:45 AM on Jan-26-24
comment posted at 2:44 PM on Jan-27-24

For decades, Scott Frank earned up to three hundred thousand dollars a week rewriting other people’s screenplays—from “Saving Private Ryan” to “The Ring.”
comment posted at 3:08 AM on Jan-23-24
comment posted at 6:45 AM on Jan-23-24

In March 1945 the air force may have bombed a southern right whale from the air after mistaking it for a submarine. An article from the Wagga Daily Advertiser in March 1945, reports the air force examined the southern right whale carcass and confirmed it had been hit by an aerial bomb after likely being mistaken for a submarine.
comment posted at 4:20 AM on Jan-19-24
comment posted at 4:26 AM on Jan-19-24

This is not to say that there is no climatological mystery to be explained. The countries of northern Europe do indeed have curiously mild climates, a phenomenon I didn't really appreciate until I moved from Liverpool to New York. I arrived in the Big Apple just before a late-summer heat wave, at a time when the temperature soared to around 35 degrees Celsius. I had never endured such blistering temperatures. And just a few months later I was awestruck by the sensation of my nostrils freezing when I went outside. Nothing like that happens in England, where the average January is 15 to 20 degrees warmer than what prevails at the same latitude in eastern North America. So what keeps my former home so balmy in the winter? And why do so many people credit the Gulf Stream? from The Source of Europe's Mild Climate
comment posted at 2:59 AM on Jan-18-24
comment posted at 6:27 AM on Jan-18-24

Wish you could revisit New York's Tower Records circa 2005, or San Francisco's Sutro Baths before it was demolished in 1964? Disappointed Tourist is a series of paintings by Ellen Harvey depicting places that no longer exist. Some reach as far back as Ireland's prehistoric rainforest or the City of Troy; others are painfully recent. Each painting is nominated by someone who cares about that place.
comment posted at 2:18 AM on Jan-17-24
comment posted at 2:35 AM on Jan-17-24
comment posted at 7:14 AM on Jan-17-24

BBC Micro bot runs your Mastodon toot on an 8-bit computer emulator and replies with a video. Toot-sized programs are written in BBC BASIC - a language created by Sophie Wilson in 1981 for the BBC Micro.
comment posted at 8:00 AM on Jan-15-24

These entrancing maps capture where the world’s rivers go. When Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs looked online for a map of the world’s rivers based on their ocean destination, he found nothing on a global scale with high resolution. “It’s like, how does this thing not exist? So, I just instantly put it on my to-do list."
comment posted at 3:59 AM on Jan-26-24

Why watch heads never set the time on their watches.
comment posted at 7:33 AM on Jan-13-24
comment posted at 7:53 AM on Jan-13-24