September 18, 2019
I Just Want What Everyone Wants
A new trailer for Judy. Renee Zellweger as Judy Garland. Judy Garland sings the Battle Hymn Of The Republic.
"Naturally, although I find Thibault cancels out Capoferro, don't you?"
Do you remember the sword-fight scene in The Princess Bride? And how Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts kept up a discussion about their various strategems? Turns out those are real, historic fencing references. [Threadreader]
California just passed a landmark law to regulate Uber and Lyft
Drivers will likely get health care and paid time off under the law. California just disrupted the gig economy.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a controversial bill Wednesday, known as AB 5, after months of uproar from businesses and gig companies like Uber and Lyft. The bill will require businesses to hire workers as employees, not independent contractors, with some exceptions. That will give hundreds of thousands of California workers basic labor rights for the first time.
And despite an aggressive lobbying campaign, Uber and Lyft are not exempt.
Spanish Stonehenge
This is just to say
Poems William Carlos Williams Revised After Being Told By His Agent To Do More Plums Content [SL McSweeneys]
They're good dogs Brent
Twelve years ago, 47 dogs were rescued from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation and allowed to live. They've enriched the lives of countless humans and altered the course of animal welfare. (SL Washington Post, includes pictures of 47 good dogs.) [more inside]
"The truck was undamaged, having made its saving throw."
A prop is any object the actors handle or touch onscreen
I looked at Harvey and said, “I don’t care what you have to do, man. This box has to function in three days. And if you don’t have that done, we are both straight down the shoot.” Various prop masters talk about The Hardest Prop I Ever Made
Proudhon hangs his head
The 100 largest private property owners have 40 million acres, roughly the size of Florida. With the United States' large and growing inequality, is it time to upend the idea that land is private property?
Baby, talk to me
When babies babble, they are communicating exactly what they want. Even if they don't know it, parents are listening. (Fatherly summary) “Infants are actually shaping their own learning environments in ways that make learning easier to do,” study co-author Steven Elmlinger, a psychology graduate student at Cornell University, said in a statement. The report -- The ecology of prelinguistic vocal learning: parents simplify the structure of their speech in response to babbling (Journal of Child Language; full PDF) More from Cornell's B.A.B.Y. Lab from prior studies.
"Eating is a prerequisite for life"
How To Feed Yourself When You're Depressed For those of us who occasionally (or more than occasionally) struggle to find the energy to refuel ourselves, here are a small handful of ways to get some nutrition.
Forging a Path
Black Horse Forge helps veterans hammer away stress. James Scott Baron reports for Fredericksburg, Virginia’s Free Lance-Star on blacksmithing as therapy and craft.
Stuntmen React to Bad and Great Hollywood Stunts
Behind the scenes discussion of the making of iconic Hollywood stunts featuring stuntmen Eric Linden (Avengers, Daredevil) and Guix Dasilva (Black Panther) with Corridor Digital (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)
“Sometimes it pays to just be along for the ride.”
The joy of being a passenger in video games [Polygon] “The question I’m interested in today is what you’re missing out on due to always wanting to drive in games. And modern gaming has multiple ways it can make us a passenger. So what happens when the virtual wheel is taken out of your hands? A lot of good things, it turns out. [...] These rides are an important chance to have a few introspective moments during single-player games, or to let the tension build in multiplayer titles. Being a passenger allows the player to make a deeper connection to the world, or the other players in it. Giving up control to an NPC or another player while in a vehicle isn’t a flaw, as long as game designers know how to give you something else in return. It’s that trade-off that I find so fascinating, and being a passenger so often in real life has given me a deep appreciation for the games that do this well. So pay attention the next time a game takes away control while you’re in a vehicle, and ask yourself what the game is trying to achieve by doing so.” [more inside]
Guys Are Reporting Women on Tinder for the Crime of Not Being Into Them
Clean baseload
A report by Helen Czerski, from EVs-and-more channel FullyCharged, who visits First Light Fusion in Oxford, UK - who are working with pulsed power fusion. They give her a quick demonstration - starting with a children's xylophone but becoming a lot louder.
That otherwise inaccessible sweet spot between formality and insouciance
How the turtleneck became the iconic look for the creative genius; a brief history of the aforementioned long-necked garment and its connotations, from its origin as utilitarian clothing for 19th-century labourers and sportsmen, through its adoption by Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich, its soaring popularity amongst Parisian existentialists and American beatniks (and subsequent fall to a signifier of laughable pretentiousness), to the days of Steve Jobs and, um, Elizabeth Holmes.
“Lust, plain and simple—if lust were ever simple.”
...these books are artifacts. There is every sort of forbidden subject in forbidden books, what was then illicit sex, but also, all things taboo—drugs, various subcultures, descriptions of parts of cities there was no reason to go to otherwise. There is an honesty that rises from there being little reason for lying: emotional states, cultural criticism about art and politics at the time of the writing, blind items, gossip, maps—the stuff we call today “creative nonfiction” ... These books served as community. My First Library Was a Library of Porn by Brian Bouldrey [NSFW text] [more inside]
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