Favorites from Rhaomi
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Zenith’s original ‘clicker’ remote were a mechanical marvel
The Zenith Space Command
, one of the first wireless television remotes ever to exist, is a monument to a time before we took the remote for granted. It also just so happened to contain one of the most influential and intriguing buttons in history.
Movie: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan's past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission--not even the lives of those he cares about most.
Have you ever wanted to walk up to the clouds?
Only Up! [Game Trailer]
If you’re a gamer in any capacity, your cup likely runneth over with great games to play right now. There are hits like Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, to name a few. But many people, from big influencers to humble players, are choosing to spend their time on an unlikely candidate: Only Up! Only Up! is similar to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a surreal platformer that put the player in the role of a shirtless man crouched in a cauldron, using his mighty sledgehammer to climb a magnificent and surreal peak. Only Up!, which was developed by SC-KR games, is a 3D platformer with a similar premise. The player has to climb past giant disembodied feet, Shiba Inu balloons, and massive networks of oil tankers and scaffolding. The game took off in China and was eventually streamed by Ludwig Ahgren, which led to it exploding in popularity on Twitch and TikTok. [via: Polygon]
Big Ben word game
Big Ben word game
[via mefi projects] "A unique puzzle for each second of the day, with lots of nice touches: the background fades between day and night based on London time, there's a satisfying bonnggg sound that shakes the game when you find a long word, fireworks if you clear the grid, etc. It also features a large dictionary and generously makes sure you don't get a Q without a U next to it."
Big numbers
The human body has around 30 trillion cells. The vigintillion is a cardinal number represented in the US by 1 followed by 63 zeros, and in the UK by 1 followed by 120 zeros. Before this post, there were 325 (5x5x13) posts which contained 'potato' and 2522 (2x13x97) wich contained 'cat'. A bajillion is a huge number. Rayo's number was claimed to be the largest named number. If you could stack $44 billion in $100 bills, it'd be 30 miles high. Some populations are huge, but others less so. The Eddington number, the number of protons in the observable universe, is currently estimated to be 10 to the power of 80. Even 200,000 is a big number.
The Last of Us: Long Long Time
Joel and Ellie head to a sanctuary of sorts that Joel knows of. It's an abandoned small town that's manned by Frank and Bill, two lovers who've been leading a quiet life after the world fell apart. Through flashbacks we learn how they met and how their relationship grew over the years after the pandemic.
The Status Quo-alition
In his most recent 'collection' military historian Bret Devereaux describes
the Status Quo Coalition. Summed up in a tweet, he thinks
the current international system is less 'American hegemony' and more a coalition of status quo powers, of which the USA is the 'team captain.'
Claw & Order, Jersey Shore edition
In New Jersey, cheating at boardwalk games is considered especially heinous. On the Jersey Shore, the dedicated detectives who investigate this malicious mischief are members of an elite squad known as the Legalized Games of Chance Control Commission. These are their stories. (archive.today link)
The Final Vestige of Something Irreplaceable and Delicate
To those who know what Oakland A’s baseball used to be, what Fisher had turned the team into was nothing short of tragic. A’s teams in the past had brought to Oakland pride and repute, as they had seemed to represent, in their character and color, their misfit swagger and underdog grit, something both essential and specific about the East Bay’s sense of self. In this way, certain of those teams had evinced something distinct about the constructive potential of pro sports writ large: how beloved local teams can bring a people together and lift a city up. Fisher’s A’s evince something very different: pro sports’ concurrent capacity for diminishment and plunder, disillusionment and grift. from The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s [The Ringer; ungated]
Jormus! I hate that guy
"Egregore," by merritt k, is a short story about what happens when you make up a guy to get mad at and the guy gets mad at you back.
Listen here, you delusional orange twat-waffle
Some Sunday Silliness™:
Infinite, interactive Trump vs. Biden "debate" on Twitch, powered by ✨A.I.✨
(tw: bad language. also: Trump)
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.
At the bottom of an ancient crater, in a city with buildings made of diamond, German archæologists have discovered a 3000 year old sword so perfectly preserved it 'almost shines.'
Help this fan process her team's move
This long-time, dedicated A's fan has Feelings. I'm looking for two types of resources to help me deal: First, nuanced, in-depth writing (or video or podcast?) that explores and explains how this move to Las Vegas finally became a reality. Second, personal experiences of fans whose team moved away, or who moved away from their team.
Pupsi Blue
The complete 1973-1976 original run of Wacky Packages [WIKI]: all sixteen series, including hard-to-find cards, with each card cross-indexed and contextualized, with occasional links to rough drafts. Sometimes Topps spoofed themselves. Sometimes they didn't make much sense. A lot of times, they're racist. • The gum is the final frontier of the serious collector.
Better Living Through Algorithms
Naomi Kritzer has a new story out.
An app that tells you what to do? Turns creepy, then beneficial/friendly, takes turns that fit with our era. Somewhat reminiscent of Cat Pictures Please.
"I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell is THAT?"
Kid Leaves Stoop breaks down what we know about The Simpsons style guide, a long internal document that defines the surprisingly rigid way the characters are depicted in the modern show, and have been for decades, but weren't in the Tracy Ullman shorts or first season: The Simpsons No-No Sheets. (Youtube, 23 minutes)
I will fucking miss the shit out of everything
Arnold Schwarzenegger sits down with Danny DeVito for a conversation about life and death.
Overlooked! A detail in The Shining that you’ve never seen...
Stanley Kubrick scholar Filippo Ulivieri shares a hidden, almost subliminal aspect of Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining: quick, unsettling glances that break the fourth wall. (SLYT)
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.
Succession Quotes > Midjourney Prompts
In honor of the final Succession Sunday, thought I'd share a project I've been working on throughout the season.
I take my favorite quotes from each episode and turn them into prompts in Midjourney.
It gives me great delight and I'm happy to take requests if there's a pre-season 4 quote that's near and dear to your heart.
Use Your Claws Luke
A new Engineer's Guide to Cats, on the subject of Cat Future Technology, with bonus reenactment of Star Wars with cats. A lot of other feline-focused film frivolity can be found on klusmanp's Youtube Page. (Engineer's Guide to Cats previously, again, also.)
Breaking things down so you don't.
goblin.tools
is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult.
USE CONVERSATIONAL DOORKNOBS
When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating. from Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
Beweging is Leven! (Movement is Life)
Beweging Is Leven is an eldercare initiative by Azmi Alubeid & Joël Kruisselbrink and it's the most charming, clever, and funny use of every-day objects and whatever is around. Seriously, the videos are just the best.
By far the most content seems to be in Instagram so these are Instagram links I'm afraid! But so worth it.
Listen to Wikipedia
Listen to the sound of Wikipedia's recent changes feed. (English, French, Sanskrit selected - you can choose your own filters).
Dizzying shooters, agonizing puzzles, and water stages (ugh)...
The 100 Hardest Video-Game Levels of All Time [Vulture]
“There are so many different ways to create a hard level. This list contains resource-draining RPG grinds, uncompromising tactical grids, mind-melting adventure-game puzzles, and the sort of quicksilver, arcade-y gauntlets that require a speedrunner’s acumen. *(It does not contain, we want to note, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which came out too recently for us to confidently make a determination about whether any of its challenges warrant a spot. We reserve the right to add it at a later date.)”
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."
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.
give him the gopher repellant
In How To Find Things Online, v buckenham looks at the web as an unwilling data source for Large Language Models (among other omnivorous machine learning projects), and how the changing incentives for both people making content and corporations hosting/controlling that content may undercut the assumption that useful information will continue to find its way into those hungry artificial hippos.
"Athenais compared it to a sconce ... Dick Tell-truth to a mat"
Enlinko and Unrelated Words are solo games of semantic connections between random words. The TikTok #gotitchallenge, demoed on YouTube by Hank & John Green, is a similar 2-player game. "What is My Thought Like?" was an eloquent multiplayer game of connections between random words, once common (1786, 1789, 1790, 1806, 1831, 1849, 1855, 1858, 1863, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1904, 1913, 1917, 1922), mentioned in 1750, and essentially the same as "Le Jeu de la pensée" in 1701. But Semantle and Pimantle (previously) are semantic connection games too, according to a FAQ resembling "French Toast" and the 20 Questions variant "Plenty Questions" (co-invented by MeFi's own moonmilk and re-invented on TikTok as "Guess the Word"). 20 Questions appears in English in 1796 and 1799, maybe inspired by "Les Douze Questions" (1788).
what's red and invisible? no tomatoes
Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn’t survive transcription: a talk (or the text thereof, and, yes yes, you're very clever, now shut up and read it) about the fundamental inability of transcription to capture that which it is transcribing, by Mefi's Own Allison Parrish.
"a very one-sided attempt at a contract"
"The older kids have been playing with the concept of contracts, which has often involved attempts to trick the other into signing something." Jeff Kaufman shares the "various forms of contract fraud" recently explored by his children and his attempts at explaining that forging your sister's signature on a handwritten note stating "I _Lily_ Wise will let Anna hav wutevr she wonts from me" does not constitute a valid contract with her.
“I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an AI in the knee.”
Modder wires ChatGPT into Skyrim VR so NPCs can roleplay and remember past conversations [YouTube]
“Spend enough time in any RPG and you'll eventually run out of things to talk about with its characters. But what if they had a never-ending supply of dynamically generated anecdotes? What if you could ask them questions that weren't listed on a menu in front of you? What if they could even remember the experiences they've had with you in the game, and could talk about them at length? Those are the questions modder Art From The Machine is trying to answer in Skyrim VR. In the video above you can see some scenes from the work-in-progress mod, which uses OpenAI's large language model ChatGPT to generate responses, xVASynth for text-to-speech so the NPCs can be fully voiced, and Whisper for speech-to-text, so players can speak into their mic and the NPCs can understand them.” [via: PC Gamer]
Radical.
Last June a rogue time capsule was cracked opened on Imgur: a collection of hundreds of pictures of 90s malls and stores.
HOCKEY MOMS ❤️ SARAH
Sarah Palin Forever:
A short film by AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio, made with Midjourney and AI-generated voice narration, and based on a short story he wrote -- which itself was based on his real-life experience covering a 2008 Sarah Palin rally as a college journalist. As he explains in his newsletter, it is somewhere between a "horror story" and a "joke that goes on too long".
The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. From Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector.
Empire Strikes Back
Republican States Are Racing Toward Authoritarianism
[ungated] - "Regardless of how Abbott proceeds, the governor's urge to pardon a killer for no discernible reason other than that the killer belongs to Team Red and the victim is claimed by Team Blue tells us how deep into the authoritarian jungle the Republican Party has penetrated."