May 24
Tina Turner Dead at 83
The Queen of Rock dies in Switzerland at 83 Another 60's icon passes on. Tina Turner died at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, at 83.
Her publicist Bernard Doherty announced the death in a statement but did not provide the cause, although she had suffered a stroke in recent years, according to the NY Times obituary.
Matt Murdoch's Murder-Free 34 Hours
Daredevil is Present and the Police Arrive Later - David Brothers dissects Daredevil #304 and takes a look at superheroes, race and policing.
The end of the Arrowverse
The AV Club looks back at 11 years of interconnected DC superhero storytelling: With the series finale of The Flash on May 24, The CW’s ambitious and groundbreaking superhero saga known as The Arrowverse (first unofficially, then semi-officially) comes to an end. If not for the fact that it was focused on television, the Arrowverse would be regarded as one of the only cinematic universes beyond the MCU to actually work—and if you’re basing it on pure hours of content, the Arrowverse is completely unmatched. [more inside]
Flying low into geeky subculture
Airplane Facts with Max is a social media account starring an aircraft mechanic who gives behind the scenes looks at maintaining aircraft, among several other delightfully nerdy subjects. (TikTok, Instagram)
yes I said yes I will Yes.
They've been around for 55 years, had at least 24 members, and surprise! Yes has a new album out, Mirror To The Sky [Discogs]. And... it's unexpectedly good? It isn't the Yes of yesteryear... But it is undeniably from the Yes DNA from many eras, and continues a legacy of musical innovation and Carl Sagan inspired lyrics, forward possibly for years more. CD 1/Vinyl Side 1: Cut From The Stars [5m27s], All Connected [9m], Luminosity [9m] (Please see below the fold for two track recommendations for those wanting a sample) Review from Ultimate Classic Rock [more inside]
"Addressing some of political journalism’s long-standing shortcomings"
7 news outlets reimagining political journalism in smart ways (WaPo opinion page gift link) [more inside]
Board Game YouTuber's $7500 Video Request Opens Can Of Worms
What do I do if I don't like a book at the library?
Playing.
What watching my daughter play ‘The Legend of Zelda’ taught me by Tom Bissell [The Washington Post] Bissell contemplates how Tears of the Kingdom offers the sort of unstructured play his daughter might not be able to get elsewhere in Hollywood.
“When we found the abandoned mine carts, the question for my daughter became how many she could glue together and still get them moving along the rusted tracks. Between all the Ultrahand R&D, my daughter was also chopping down trees and fusing together the resultant logs to make lean-to structures, just in case she came back to an area later and it was raining and she wanted to “cook something.” (God help us all, you can cook in “Tears of the Kingdom,” too.) At one point, sensing my impatience, my daughter invoked the Wright brothers as her mathematical proof for the necessity of experimentation. What about all the monsters, I asked, the beasts and creatures she was duty-bound as Link to strike down with sword and bow? “Meh,” she said, shrugging. “Pass.””
May 23
ALIENS CALLING....okay, not really, darn it.
Earth Will Receive an 'Alien' Transmission From Mars This Week Called A Sign in Space, the scientific art experiment invites the public to help decode the signal, which is meant to emulate a message from extraterrestrials. [more inside]
40th Anniversary of The Story of Mel (Hacker folklore)
Who are you, Mel Kaye? [via mefi projects]
40 years (and two days) ago, The Story of Mel was posted to Usenet. This tale of a software engineer, his blackjack program, and the ingenious hack hidden inside it has enshrined "Mel" in the pantheon of Real Programmers. But did Mel really exist? Who was he? [more inside]
Writing for the Ear
While a number of audiobooks are narrated by celebrities or by their own authors, the vast majority are read by unknown and unacknowledged literary workers, at once subordinated to the text and responsible for it, unseen but audible. Narrators represent an entirely new role in the literary field, variously performing the functions of author, text, and reader. Like the author, the narrator is the person from whom the text emanates. Given that the material of the audiobook is not the printed page but a recording of a voice, narrators likewise serve as the embodiment of the text itself. And yet, they are also that text’s reader—in many cases, one of its very first readers. from The Work of the Audiobook [LARB; ungated]
A Club For The Cancelled
Meet The Gathering of Thought Criminals - a gathering of various people who gather to "have discussions they feel they can’t have anywhere else." (SLNew Yorker)
The music is the easy part
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, should keep your box from looking good
My fellow Americans, it's Mailbox Improvement Week, so check to see if your box needs improvements and if you're feeling creative, here's some inspiration!
Rick and Daniel chatting for a while
Even if you don't know the name Daniel Lanois, you know his work. He produced The Joshua Tree, So, and Time Out Of Mind, to name just a tiny few from his broad ranging career. If you like hearing all manner of music-making tidbits from one of the best, Rick Beato sat down with Daniel for a three-hour conversation. Everything is discussed from music personalities to recording techniques and equipment to songwriting to simply the joy of finding the vibe. It's an astonishing interview that even at its length feels like it is too short.
How an algorithm solves Wordle
How an algorithm solves Wordle Through a modeling method known as Exact Dynamic Programming, the researchers devised an algorithm that solves the game in the optimal manner without fail. In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a five-letter word. After a word is entered, colored tiles reveal whether the letters are in the word and if they are in the correct spot. The model solves the game in just two guesses 4% of the time and in three guesses 57% of the time. It only needs a fifth guess 3% of the time, and it never relies on that sixth and final round. [more inside]
Rise and shine. The world is doomed.
"the narcissistic perfidy rampant in Republican politics"
Well, looks like Tucker Carlson is not running for president (The Hill). The Draft Tucker PAC, launched four days ago, has shut down after a cease-and-desist from Carlson (The Hill). Chairman Chris Ekstrom (Twitter, content warnings) says the PAC will refund the $212 it's raised or donate it to charity.
A Brief History of Concept Albums [SLYT: 18 min]
A Brief history of Concept Albums from Song Cycles to the Modern Day What constituents a concept album?
How old is the 'concept' of a Concept Album?
Does it differ from a Rock Opera?
Are Concept albums still even a thing now that ephemeral streaming services are so popular?
What's your favourite Concept Album? [more inside]
May 22
Buffy Sainte-Marie: Singer, Songwriter, Indigenous Activist and more
Where to Start with Buffy Sainte Marie (And Why You Should) by Andrea Warner "Buffy Sainte-Marie is a living legend and a musical genius. But she’s also “Buffy who?” to a lot of people who have never heard of her before." [more inside]
One of the Most Ardently Reviled Films Ever Made
There is something moving about Negovan’s quest to honour McDowell’s performance. There’s not much the recut can do about the script and iffy camerawork, which are all part of the charm. But Negovan has unearthed a much clearer sense of a character arc, from Caligula as wary young man genuflecting to the mad emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, on wonderful form), to a joyful freshly minted tyrant, through to the increasing cruelty and disintegration of his reason as he is driven mad by power. from
‘An irresistible mix of art and genitals’: Caligula finally comes to Cannes [Grauniad] [CW: not really safe for work] [more inside]
100 years of wondering "Whose Body"?
In honor of the 100th birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body, the NY Times offers an overview. (Link is to archive.org, NY Times direct link is here.
Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Louisiana?
Using multiple lines of evidence, the data suggest intermittent but repeated presence of multiple individual birds with field marks and behaviors consistent with those of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Data indicate repeated reuse of foraging sites and core habitat. Our findings, and the inferences drawn from them, suggest that not all is lost for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and that it is clearly premature for the species to be declared extinct. [more inside]
Steve Martin - Live At The Troubadour 1976
The chaos of Steve Martin's stand-up comedy in the 70s is legendary, and it's on wonderful display in Steve Martin - Live At The Troubadour 1976 [55m]. Physical, absurdist humor with some banjo tossed in. Filmed for HBO. Content Note: this is from nearly 50 years ago, and contains some objectifying but not completely awful language about women. There is a segment from 36m20s to 37m35s involving him "performing" a Native American song, but it is short and easy to skip.
Feel free to flop around a little
(I Am Going Out In A Blaze Of Glory)
May 21
Not even dying is an escape.
"On March 3, a largely unknown creator named Steve ‘Veddge’ Nelson shared an unassuming-sounding mod on the Doomworld forums. He claims this is an enhanced version of a 15-year-old "my own house but full of demons" map file (who hasn’t tried to make one of those?) left behind by a recently deceased friend. Tragic, but curious." [more inside]
Mysterious Company Buys entire California Ghost town for 22.5 mil
"A road diverges in the yellow flats along the outer rim of Joshua Tree National Park. The two lanes in the middle of the desert peel off Interstate 10 ..." "A few foremen live on the premises full time to keep watch over Eagle Mountain. Verdant palm trees poke out from the street they live on, while the rest of town remains preserved by dust. One night in the stillness, a foreman heard trespassers in the dark. The sound of a shotgun blast into the sky scared them off."
A Field of Ruins
Autofiction has often been derided as both overly concerned with a writer’s individual experience—“navel-gazing”—and inconsiderate to those other than the writer whose lives it depicts. But these criticisms betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what draws writers and readers alike to autofiction. The best—most redemptive—autofiction since Proust included more than 400 characters in his rhizomatic lifework has concerned itself with the ways in which individual lives and identities are connected to the lives and identities of others, and sought to represent this interconnectedness to readers who also sense the terror of being “walled-up” inside their own consciousness. from The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer by Marcus Hijkoop
"Naming your son Maverick definitely doesn't make you an outlaw."
Fastest-rising baby names in the US, 2012-2022 (chart from Axios, data from SSA) Biggest gain: Everleigh. Biggest drop: Alexa
The Tyranny of 'the Best'
There is a kind of person who finds the idea of seeking out “the best” incredibly enticing, on an almost spiritual level. The kind of person who genuinely enjoys perusing articles like “the nine best hair dryers of 2023,” who is overcome with clammy dread at the idea of drinking in a bar with only a four-star rating on Google, who, in order to plan a weekend getaway, requires a prolonged and extensive operation that involves several spreadsheets. You know the type. Maybe you even are the type.
[single link, NYT: possibly paywalled]
May 20
I'd never really thought about longboards, but now I want one
Lotfi Lamaali is a longboard dancer. But what is longboard dancing? A sort of hybrid of freestyle trick skateboarding and dance, on bigger, looser, more flexible longboards. Just as much focus on using smooth dance steps and twirls to move around the board as on moving the board itsel. The end result when done well is mindblowing. [SLYT]
The B-52s, The US Festival, 1982
In 1982, the first version of The Us Festival [Wikipedia] happened, attracting a then-ridiculous-sounding 400,000 people in attendance across a three-day weekend. One of the acts on the first day, New Wave Day, was The B-52s. Thanks to the miraculous infusion of cash and technology from Steve Wozniak, who organized the festival we have The B-52s At The Us Festival [1h], the entire set, with pretty good video quality and great sound!
Kenny Log-Ins
Martin Amis, era-defining British novelist, dies aged 73
Far and Away the Most Successful, and Maybe Also the Most Loathed
Some of that hate has to do with aesthetics—either you’re down with DMB’s amalgamation of soul-stirring Joshua Tree anthem rock and smooth jazz and bluegrass-fiddle hoedown and hacky-sack funk or you aren’t ... Most of the time, though, if someone tells you they don’t like Dave Matthews, they’re really voicing a deep tribal aversion to the type of person they picture when they picture a Dave Matthews fan—spiritually incurious trustafarians, pumpkin-spice basics, fleece-vest IPA bros, or whichever straw-man stereotype offends their imagination most. from The Dave Matthews Guide to Living and Dying [GQ; ungated]
Farewell to a Legend
Jim Brown, all-time NFL great and social activist, dead at 87 "Jim Brown was virtually unstoppable in every arena... Whether on the field, as a Hollywood film hero or civil rights advocate, Brown was a force."
A Freedman Writes His Former Master
Jourdon Anderson, a formerly enslaved person, responds to a request from his former master to return to work for him.
the scan now freezes the wreck in time before more is lost to the sea
The world's most famous shipwreck has been revealed as never seen before. [BBC] The first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, which lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic, has been created using deep-sea mapping. It provides a unique 3D view of the entire ship, enabling it to be seen as if the water has been drained away. The hope is that this will shed new light on exactly what happened to the liner, which sank in 1912. The visualization was pieced together from a staggering 700,000 images collected by remote controlled submersibles. Over the course of 200 hours, a crew of engineers directed the robotic explorers to scan the length and breadth of the colossal ship as it rested at a crushing depth 3,800m below the ocean surface. Scan images and footage are from @AtlanticProds and Magellan.
“Hellbillies: Visible Satanism in Rural America” and other presentations
BBC: “...where local people have asked it to, it tries to launch an After School Satan Club, focused on community service, science, crafts and critical thinking. Opponents say it's frightening children, but TST says its content is demon-free. They have a kids' song - My Pal Satan - with a bopping animated goat, and the lines: 'Satan's not an evil guy, he wants you to learn and question why. He wants you to have fun and be yourself - and by the way there is no hell.'” Courthouse News: “Good-natured Satanists defy expectations in Boston.” Axois: “These aren't your grandfather's satanists.” WBUR: “The group says it chose Boston because of an ongoing lawsuit against the city.” Reuters photoset.
15 million years ago, Australia had large tree climbing carnivores
Today, "drop bears" are just an urban myth made up by Australians to tease overseas tourists. But 15 million years ago, there really were carnivorous tree climbing koala-like marsupials that weighed up to 70 kilograms (154 pounds).
May 19
On Our Species' Origin
Study Offers New Twist in How the First Humans Evolved [ungated] - "By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature." [more inside]
They inspired nearly everyone who came after them
The 2020 documentary The Ventures: Stars On Guitars [1h30m] tells the story of the most famous instrumental rock and roll band in the world. Having released hundreds of albums across over six decades, this garage band from Tacoma became a global influence on rock and guitar playing whose influence goes beyond measure. If you think you aren't interested in or have no connection to this, you're probably mistaken.
The ur-pro-wrestler of the 1970s dies
"Superstar" Billy Graham, a one-time WWWF Champion and the man who essentially invented the professional wrestler of the 1980s a decade earlier, has passed away at the age of 79. [more inside]
orcas of the world, unite!
Orcas have attacked and sunk a third boat off the Iberian coast of Europe, and experts now believe the behavior is being copied by the rest of the population. [more inside]
Nominative Determinism of the Day
Living sound forever: The genius of Wendy Carlos
when you get your ass handed to you, just hand it right back
The always wonderful Simone Giertz accidentally panders directly to me personally by choosing to make a robot out of stained glass.