June 1
Stomach massage
Come for a video about manufacturing of cookware in Korea, stay for the closed captions [more inside]
Ben Roberts-Smith Loses Defamation Action
Ben Roberts-Smith, an Australian Victoria Cross recipient, has lost a defamation action he brought against the Sydney Morning Herald and Age, which accused him of being a murderer, a war criminal, and a bully.
Wild stuff from this year's Royal Aeronautical Future Combat meeting
“The AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation... We trained the [AI] – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
finally something involving billions that isn't late capitalism
Got some legos, need to do some long-term planning? Guess you could make a billion-year clock.
For Black drivers, a cop's first 45 words are a portent
When a police officer stops a Black driver, the first 45 words said by that officer hold important clues about how their encounter is likely to go. [more inside]
Hipster aesthetic techno optimism
Game Studies Study Buddies, the Ranged Touch podcast which covers academic games studies on a text-by-text basis, takes a break from their usual material to cover Obama era time-capsule INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE.
the ‘Ted Lasso’ Way
Ted Lasso’s third season was unfocused and unwieldy, but it stuck the landing [The Verge] This link and the commentary below the fold contain spoilers about the series finale of Ted Lasso. [more inside]
Radical Harmonies -- The Women's Music Movement Documentary
Happy Pride Month! The 2002 documentary Radical Harmonies [1h27m, Wikipedia, interlacing artifacts] is a thrilling historical document about women making music primarily for women and creating radically equalizing spaces in order to achieve their vision. Featuring a lot of familiar and not-so-familiar faces and voices from across a couple of generations of movers and shakers and musicians. [more inside]
World Famous Clown Motel
I came here in January, wanting to learn more about why America — my adopted home for 16 years — so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past. Nowhere is this more true than in the American West, and nowhere have I seen it better epitomized than in Tonopah. from In the American West, a Clown Motel and a Cemetery Tell a Story of Kitsch and Carnage by Andrew Chamings
RIP 3rd party Reddit clients
Reddit has announced its pricing for 3rd party app developers to access its API... and it's a lot higher than expected. The creator of the popular iOS Apollo client estimates it'll cost him $20 million/year to pay for all his users' API access, far beyond what he can afford. The change will affect all Reddit clients, with the developer of Android app Reddit is Fun assuming they want all third party apps gone.
Música Mexicana
Mexican Music Is Taking Over the World [ungated] - "Artists like Peso Pluma, Grupo Frontera and Natanael Cano have become massive stars who are popularizing Mexican music around the globe."[1,2]
Do anything, but let it produce joy.
A little process video of setting type (SLYT) in honor of Walt Whitman’s birthday.
May 31
The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain...
Gary Settle has helped dozens of federal prisoners get compassionate release. Will it ever be his turn to go home? An essay by Anna Altman.
The mystery person who spies on theme parks from the sky
@Bioreconstruct is a Twitter account that seems to post almost daily aerial (and ground) photos of Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando Resort, particularly construction projects. It's a tremendous resource for theme park reporters, bloggers and fans, but almost nothing is publicly known about the person behind the account.
Riot Threatens To Cancel Entire Esports Season Over LCSPA Strike
Earlier this week League of Legends players voted “overwhelmingly” to strike [twitter link: @NALCSPA] over plans to make rule changes that would cut the North American Challenger’s League—which only launched last year—from 16 teams to seven. The LCS Players Association, the body representing the region’s professional players, say the plans will see an estimated 70 people—players, coaches, etc—lose their jobs. Riot, meanwhile, say the cuts were necessary to ensure the North American leagues remain “sustainable [and] economically viable”. Tensions escalated a day later when news emerged that pro teams had been actively looking “to field scab players” [twitter link: @NALCSPA], a move that the LCSPA rightly say would “put all players’ futures at risk”, as “crossing the line undermines player negotiating power”. The LCSPA met with Riot earlier today, and not long after, Riot published a long statement on their site addressing the walkout. You don’t have to read far to see that the company has decided to play hardball. [via: Kotaku]
Not a cure for this crisis—One more symptom of it
This is my idea of fun / Playin' video games
Gender biases in fictional dialogue are well documented in many media. In film, television and books, female characters tend to talk less than male characters, talk to each other less than male characters talk to each other, and have a more limited range of things to say. Identifying these biases is an important step towards addressing them. However, there is a lack of solid data for video games, now one of the major mass media which has the ability to shape conceptions of gender and gender roles. We present the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded corpus of video game dialogue, which makes it possible for the first time to measure and monitor gender representation in video game dialogue. It demonstrates that there is half as much dialogue from female characters as from male characters. Some of this is due to a lack of female characters, but there are also biases in who female characters speak to, and what they say. [Gender bias in video game dialogue] [more inside]
"That was really the day the Lisa died"
From the Verge -- Lisa's Final Act: how Apple invented its future by burying its past.
Text introduction - the video, Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial (30 minutes). The beginning fills in the history of the Lisa and Steve Jobs' involvement with it. The part some of you might be interested in begins with Chapter 5: The Lisa Professional. [more inside]
May 30
Fringe of the fringe
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families. Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
A gig is a gig is a gig.
" 'I made twenty-five million dollars playing ten birthday parties.' That used to be seen as 'You **** sellout.' Now it’s 'How do I get me some of those?' " How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party
"I'm sure you have the same question about this that I did."
"Who's Having Sex on the Wienermobile?" (Slate, adapted from the book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs)
The Lady That I’m Lovin' Is Me!
"You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather" sung by J. Harrison Ghee. Nominated for 13 Tony Awards, including a Best Leading Actor in a musical award for Ghee (who identifies as non-binary), a delightfully reimagined "Some Like It Hot" debuted on Broadway last November. The soundtrack is fabulous.
The future is being made now
"Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible. It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller, for fear of making a decision before I was ready, for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community.
Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things that grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. "
Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things that grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. "
I'm a HORSE not a DJ
I walk, I trot, I lope, I gallop! Get to know dj and producer horsegiirL, a rising star amongst "a new wave of electronic artists that prioritize the fun and kitschy, that counters the more serious approach that often permeates the electronic music scene". Or as she says in "My Barn My Rules": Did you know there are more than 350 breeds horses in the world, and I am one of them! [more inside]
Don't miss your shingles shots
The shingles vaccine was rolled out in Wales in 2013, using an exact birthdate cutoff: people born on or after Sept 2, 1933 were eligible, while those born earlier weren’t. The cutoff created a nifty opportunity to test the hypothesis that herpesviruses, including the VZV that causes chickenpox and shingles, are causal to Alzheimer's dementia. [more inside]
Waynely Farfield’s GEOMAQUARIUM
"SO, yesterday my sister and I were talking about this particular tone that a bunch of video games had in the early 90s, and something possessed me to make This" [more inside]
A Song Led Them Home
The Language You Cry In traces how a song preserved over generations of women was able to lead a family back to its pre-slavery roots in Sierra Leone. In 1933 a linguist recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song that had been passed on long enough for its meaning and language to have been forgotten. Researchers recognized the language as a dialect spoken only in southern Sierra Leone. It would still take decades of time and the efforts of Amelia's daughter Mary, Baindu Jabati in Sierra Leone, who had preserved a similar song, and the collaboration of multiple scholars for the origins of the song -- a death hymn -- to be fully uncovered. [more inside]
EVs are the future, but guess who doesn't like them
Did you know that auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners? That car dealers, along with gas station owners and building contractors make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 millionaires? They're also reliably conservative (they donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1), and despite their recent convention theme, "NADA is all in on EVs,” there is unease in the ranks of the National Automobile Dealers Association. [more inside]
'Lost' Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture
An excerpt from Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood as an article in Vanity Fair about the workplace abuse that went behind the scenes at Lost:
The show was a groundbreaking smash, but behind the scenes it devolved into such toxicity that even co-showrunner Damon Lindelof now says of his leadership: “I failed.”
Why do animals keep evolving into crabs?
Crabby bodies are so evolutionarily favorable, they've evolved at least five different times. So why does this process, known as carcinization, keep happening? (carcinis/zation previously)
In the ring, vulnerability is everything
Wrestling turned me cis, then it turned me trans by Abraham Josephine Riesman [Polygon] “Wrestling is built around masculinity, but in its own way it is also transgressive — even queer. Men in wrestling wear bright colors. They intimately touch other men in public. When they’re allied, they speak of each other in the warm terms of life partners; when they’re at odds, they issue ambiguously sexual threats such as “I want your ass.” Most importantly, they show pain. The essential, irreducible element of a wrestling match is the ability to show suffering — the very thing drummed out of every boy by high school, if not earlier. It’s the heart of the art form. No matter how skilled a wrestler is technically, it doesn’t count at all unless they can make the audience believe they’re being hurt. Every wrestler has to spend a significant amount of every match showing nothing but raw, visceral agony. They have to show their secret face, the most vulnerable one of all. Wrestling is an art form, one that turned out to have also planted seeds in my mind about how fun it is to dress up, show tenderness, be vulnerable, and do the things you’re not supposed to.”
A British Reporter Had a Big #MeToo Scoop. Her Editor Killed It.
Nick Cohen, a former columnist at The Guardian, was accused of sexual misconduct for years, but little happened. An investigation by The Financial Times was spiked, meaning the whole story has only just come out now (NYT, Archive.is). "The British news media is smaller and cozier than its American counterpart, with journalists often coming from the same elite schools. Stringent libel laws present another hurdle. And in a traditional newsroom culture of drinking and gender imbalances, many stories of misconduct go untold, or face a fight."
Ukraine war heading into second summer
The Ukraine war is heading into the summer, most commentators are waiting for the Ukrainian counteroffensive to kick off in earnest. In recent days Russia has been striking Ukraine with drones and missiles harder than in a very long while, and today Moscow was struck by Ukrainian long-range drones. Recent pledges of F-16 training (but no firm deliveries of airframes yet) and actual deliveries of Storm Shadow cruise missiles have somewhat overshadowed the work Ukraine has put in in building brigades with Western equipment. [more inside]
It’s Good to be King. It’s Just More Magical to be Prince
May 29
Meet the mardo
More about tiles
Kitchen Sink Science Fiction
Simon Stålenhag, artist, musician, and designer specialising in retro-futuristic digital images, may have a new production coming out... The Electric State. [more inside]
Who’s Telling the Truth about Disco Elysium?
People Make Games (previously) have just concluded a three-month investigation into the circumstances surrounding the departure of key personnel from Disco Elysium (previously) developer ZA/UM. The result is a two and a half hour long report.
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'Fortress of the Sky' (slyt) A short documentary on the B-17 Bomber. 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner'. 'The life of a ball turret gunner.'
“CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE!”
It is the start of summer, traditionally marked by running, almost balletically, down a steep hill (good 2014 footage) in pursuit of a 7lb (3kg) Double Gloucester cheese wheel. 2023 passed with only an array of broken bones and twisted ankles, and no fatalities or unfortunate decapitations, though (BBC) “...the women's race was won by Delaney Irving who was knocked unconscious [CW: spectacular bounce-and-roll] as she chased the cheese ... another international winner was Ryoya Minami from Japan. Asked why he entered the race, he replied 'because I love cheese'.”
Free yourself!
“You can’t make a Tomelette without breaking some Gregs”
Succession Finale Ends With a Roy Family Bloodbath, and a New CEO [Vanity Fair] [Series/Finale Spoilers] As the smoke clears from Succession’s fourth and final season, here’s who wound up on top.
Slacker, the picture perfect image of an Austin which no longer exists.
Search high and low, the charming, funky Austin of "Slacker" is gone. Please don't misunderstand -- Austin today is spectacular, so long as you inked a mortgage before 2020. It is a beautiful city. Austin of "Slacker", I doubt you'd call it a beautiful city. It was charming, and funky, and fun, but not beautiful. I saw "Slacker" while still living in Houston, it was a large part of what it was I knew about Austin before moving here. [more inside]
Collar Me, Don't Collar Me
For some, the term is a novelty—a hyperbolic way to express one’s attraction to a pop star or classmate. It accessorizes well with a brooding or chaotic self-image. For others, the implications are more profound. The word itself proves that you’re not alone. It can seem to describe a whole emotional orientation. To some, limerence is romantic; to others, it’s a scourge. For many, it’s both. from Hopeless Romantic, Seeking Treatment
May 28
Build a Bear++
Bringing 19th-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life
The Colored Conventions Project. The first Colored Convention was held in 1830 in response to Ohio’s 1829 exclusionary laws and a wave of anti-Black mob violence that had forced two thousand Black residents to flee the state...more than 200 state and national Colored Conventions were held between 1830 and the 1890s. An Introduction to the Colored Conventions Movement. Colored Conventions and the Carceral States. Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s Herstory in the Colored Conventions. To Stay or To Go? The 1854 National Emigration Convention. A rich site with lots of detailed exhibits. [more inside]
"Say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me."
Stereogum's interview with Insane Clown Posse, of note is the following paragraph:
And the amount of gay Juggalos out there is really surprising. I think about them doing their research and getting the old records, getting excited about it, and getting their hearts broke or something, you know? I tell my daughter, “For the rest of your life, when your friends ask why your dad said that, say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I’m not now.” There’s no excuse. I was going with the flow, and that’s the very thing we preach against — being a sheep. And that’s what I was doing.(some details under the cut about this passage in particular) [more inside]
Micromouse
In a 25 minute very accessible video titled The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth, Veratasium tells us about Micromouse , a yearly competition that has been going since the 1970s, where the object is to get a small robotic mouse to navigate a maze in the shortest possible time.
May 27
Go be a lighthouse keeper, do!
Want to own a historic lighthouse? The U.S. government is offering at least 10 lighthouses to the public and government agencies as demand for the once-critical maritime facilities declines due to technology such as GPS. Some of the buildings, which can be centuries old, have colorful histories — and some are even said to have ghosts. [more inside]
‘Resist! Defy! Don’t comply!’
Some 200 years after textile workers smashed newfangled looms here during the first stirrings of the industrial revolution, other rebels are worried about a newer technology: tap-and-go bank cards and smartphone payment apps ... An unlikely coalition warns that by giving up cash, people could be losing more than they bargained for. from Paper Money Diehards Refuse to Fold [WSJ; ungated]