“In the 1950s, you had this mid-century hubris—technology could conquer all” “The history of the West is one of struggle of mankind against nature,” says Sarah Keyes, a historian at the University of Nevada, Reno. “In the post-World War II world, [that] these elite folks can still be trapped for days in the mountains is terrifying—and a continuation of a cultural legacy.” from When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days [Smithsonian] - 3 comments

Pakistan International Airlines recently issued an Eiffel Tower advert marking the return of flights to Paris. Unfortunately, the advertisement made a lot of people think of the 2001 September 11 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda. - 3 comments

Man sits in chair - 4 comments

Infer your way to killing the dragon in Dragonsweeper, a delightful and slightly maddening roguelike Minesweeper-alike in which figuring out the rules is half the challenge. (The other half of the challenge is killing the dragon.) - 12 comments

questions like these tend to be associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, a fire-insurance analyst who studied linguistics at Yale in the nineteen-thirties. History has been both kind and unkind to him. On the one hand, his name has become synonymous with a theory about how language affects thought, though it predated him by at least a century. On the other hand, the version of the theory often attributed to him is so radical that few modern scholars would want the honor, anyway [newyorker/archive] (previously) - 7 comments

Arguably the greatest RPG to have emerged from the Old School Renaissance, Shadowdark won four gold medals at the 2024 ENNIE Awards: Product of the Year, Best Game, Best Layout and Design, and Best Rules. - 10 comments

Long before ASML created "most important machine in the world", stencils for VLSI chips were handmade with Rubylith film and then photoreduced to create the actual photomasks used in IC fabrication. - 6 comments

How then do we understand our transition to this second orality, this emergence of the undifferentiated digital morass, where the contemporary over-production of poetry makes it impossible to either gain the attention of an audience or to credibly read all that which may merit an audience? In his footnotes, Ruby offers some sobering numbers about the sheer preponderance of poetry being written, a Malthusian condition where the number of writers outstrips that of readers. Then there is the warning Ruby gives in one of his most memorable lines—“Exit: the well-wrought urn. Enter: AI.” from Rubies Shored Against the Ruin, Ed Simon's essay on Ryan Ruby's Context Collapse [The Millions] - 5 comments

What happens to the natural world when people disappear? [Guardian] - 11 comments

"...Purpose, the meaning of music" 1977 IBM educational film, "Some call it Software." (slyt. 10:59) - 4 comments

The world hasn’t ended in the 14 years since we last checked in on the Vivos Global Shelter Network. But would you call the trends encouraging? - 15 comments

National Archivist refuses to certify ERA. Biden declares the ERA as the 28th Amendment. History is written by the winners. History is kept by the archivists. - 54 comments

Billionaire couple focus their fortune on conservation — and profit. In the middle of Tasmania (Australia) sits a 5000-hectare property once used for sheep grazing. But when the sheep farmers left, an unlikely buyer moved in. - 17 comments

Starship Flight 7 RUD debris as indexed through Carribean Air Traffic Control. (SLYT) - 2 comments

Max Ochester discovered tapes recorded at Sigma Sound Studios for 'Young Americans. The tapes include an unheard version of a Bruce Springsteen song. He's trying to get the music to the Bowie estate. Back in 2022, when Max Ochester loaded up his car with 15 U-Haul boxes of reel-to-reel tapes he purchased at a Montgomery County estate sale, he had no idea he was carrying a new chapter of David Bowie’s Philadelphia music history in his hands. - 7 comments