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The Interdimensional Jukebox
Dune the Broadway Musical [Showtunes] -
Baby On Board [Barbershop] -
Carolina-O [Indie Country] -
Sabrosito Amor [Latin] -
Rising Sun Gospel [Soul] -
Allegro Consort in C [Classical] -
You Spilt a Coffee on my Dog [R&B] -
Potion Seller [60s Folk] -
I'm Not Your Star [Screamo] -
SNES Greensleeves [Chiptune] -
Syncopated Rhythms [Jazz] -
Tavern Serenades [Fiddle] -
My Tamagotchi died in '98 [Country Pop] -
Senna Tea Blues [Bluegrass] -
Unexpected Item in Bagging Area (A Cowboy's Lament) [Americana] -
Herb's Whisper [Hip-hop] -
Metropolis Pt. 3 [Prog metal] -
F**k You Elmo [Acoustic Guitar] -
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet [Orchestral] -
ムーンライト【.】【3】【1】[Vaporwave] -
Dreaming Miku [Vocaloid] -
The Deku Tree’s Decree [Broadway] -
Website on the Internet [50s A Capella] // Meet Udio — the most realistic AI music creation tool I’ve ever tried
The Sun is entering its solar maximum, which excites aurora fans
The Sun is entering its solar maximum. For aurora hunters in Antarctica, there's nothing quite like it. The Sun is putting on a show for Earth, with the highest level of geomagnetic activity in six years. Mawson Station chef Justin Chambers photographed a recent aurora and explains what it's like to watch the spectacle from about as far south as you can go.
As the sun enters the solar maximum — the period of greatest solar activity during its 11-year solar cycle — Mr Chambers said he has witnessed the best aurora of his life, and managed to get it on camera.
More D&D Info Cartoons
Six years ago (really? wow) I posted about Zee Bashew's terrific D&D explainer videos. Well he's still making them, and is trying to do one a week for the next few months! Here are some he's made since I last told you all about them: What is a grognard? - Ceremony - Encumbrance in 5E - The Awful Way I Ran 5E Survival - Magic Mouth - Oops! All Wizards - 5E Players Try 1E (AD&D) - Healer Feat - The Problem With The Awaken Spell (sad/funny) - Dangers of Metagaming - Option: Quantum Inventory - Grappling in 1E. If you enjoy D&D, or just learning or watching videos about it, Zee Bashew's Channel is great.
Mary Poppins had more magic than you know
The folks at Corridor Crew recently reached back sixty years to recreate a truly wonderous piece of special effects technology that was thought to be long lost.
New Prince Song Dropped April 5 2024
Well, this is fun. Prince - United States Of Division (Official Audio) is a 6m20s funk jam with New Power Generation. Not quite sure WHEN this was recorded, but it feels appropriate to release right now.
Restoring an ugly hill into an ecosystem
They pooled their money to buy an ugly hill. Twenty years later, they're calling it paradise. A group of friends, dismayed about climate change, bought the most degraded piece of farmland they could find. Not to live on, or to make money from, but to transform into the bushland it once was.
Marine scientists are bringing a once-lost habitat back to life
In this picturesque Tasmanian bay, marine scientists are bringing a once-lost habitat back to life. Tucked away in a picturesque bay on the Tasman Peninsula is a precious underwater field of giant kelp that's thriving thanks to a team of determined scientists.
Rude Britannia
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? by Sam Knight in The New Yorker
Liberation from fear is possible through the cognition of reality
"Epicurus, who taught philosophy in Athens in a large backyard garden purchased around 306 BC, like other philosophers at the end of the Classical era and the beginning of Hellenistic times, gave priority to ethical thought in his teaching, treating physics and logic as auxiliary disciplines to facilitate understanding of the human behaviour, attitudes and aspirations he postulated.According to him, the aim of all human actions was to strive for ataraxia (ἀταραξία), that is, a state of inner peace, indifferent to pain and suffering, and to strive for freedom from fear, especially the fear of death and wrath of the gods." Krystyna Bartol on Epicurus.
Do you know how to make a proper cup of tea?
Most of us know how to make a proper cup of tea. But perhaps you'd like to test yourself with this wonderful tea making simulation game. Exquisite!
(other delicious and refreshing games made on the same platform here).
A lot of the best Graeber has an “undeniable” quality
It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. Particularly in On Kings (2017), his collaboration with his mentor Sahlins, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow and completed just a couple of weeks before his death, Graeber’s politics grew more “mainstream” in a number of respects, even as his narrative of the origins of political authority and economic hierarchy remained fresh, radical, and richly documented, and even as his prose style retained all its charm. But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all. from What Happened to David Graeber? [LARB, ungated]
A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life
“Equations are just a way of describing nature [...] Air is a fluid and blood is a fluid, so the same equations that model the air around an aircraft are the ones used to model the blood inside your body.” Joe Zadeh writes 6500 words for Noema magazine [via Arts & Letters Daily]
Relentlessly material
To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. from The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud [MIT]
Reality has a surprising amount of detail
Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.Blogger John Salvatier talks stair carpentry, boiling water, the difference between invisible and transparent detail, and how paying closer attention to the beguiling complexity of everyday life can help you open your mind and break out of mental ruts and blind spots.
Building an ancient robot from scratch with handtools
"Revisiting Greek Automata: Clockwork Robots from the Ancient World"
is a video from @fraserbuilds, in which John Fraser makes one of 1st century Greco-Roman engineer Hero of Alexandria's self-driving cars self-propelled automata, with some help from a hand made blow-torch powered by olive oil and pit fired pottery.
A Native Solution To Vancouver's Housing Woes
Vancouver, BC has been dealing with a major housing crunch for years due to a number of factors. But the Squamish First Nation has an answer - Sen̓áḵw, a major urban mixed use development on Squamish land in the Vancouver metro area - which means that it can be developed bigger and denser than Vancouver regulations would allow...and without NIMBY interference. (SLMacLean's)
"When will I lose all of this?"
In Gaza, death seems to be closer than water
- Maha Hussaini: 'During one of the relatively ‘safe’ times in Gaza, around the summer of 2022, I sat on a comfy couch, soft music playing in the background, a cup of cold fresh orange juice in my hand, and I thought: "When will I lose all of this?"' || Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism (by Raz Segal & Luigi Daniele) - The very different ways in which Holocaust scholars, on the one hand, and those working in Genocide Studies, on the other, have responded to the unfolding mass violence in Israel and Palestine after 7 October point to an unprecedented crisis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We argue that the crisis stems from the significant evidence for genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has exposed the exceptional status accorded to Israel as a foundational element in the field, that is, the idea that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide || Killed in Gaza database (you can search either in English or in Arabic) || CNN visual presentation of dead children
"We're at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users"
Are We Watching the Internet Die?
(Edward Zitron's 'Where's Your Ed At' newsletter)
Disarmingly simple, but only after the fact
The dexterity required bears emphasizing because resistance to the idea that an enslaved 12-year-old person of color could make a major botanical discovery endured well into the 20th century. In a 1938 racist historical novel Les Vanilliers, white French author Georges Limbour depicts Albius as possessing “the clumsiness of an ignorant insect.” Many botanists had tried to work out how to pollinate the plant by hand and failed. In the 1830s, Charles Morren, professor of botany in Liége, Belgium, successfully pollinated vanilla using a microscope and tiny scissors. But the method “takes probably 20 minutes” Jennings says, and was not useful for agriculture. from The Boy Who Was King of Vanilla [Nautilus; ungated]
Those eyes do look like something you see right before you die
90s Time Traveler Discovers Apple Vision Pro [5:14 YT] Another series by Pitch Meeting’s Ryan George. (Seriously, the eyes are creepy so be prepared.)
Two reviews of the new White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
In the Washington Monthly, How to End Republican Exploitation of Rural America and in the Washington Post, this book about Trump voters goes for the jugular.
(gift link)
¡¡CERVEZA CRISTAL!!
In the past week or so, the internet has suddenly become incredibly aware of a unique approach to sponsorship taken around twenty years ago, when a beer company in Chile sponsored TV broadcasts of the Star Wars trilogy with no commercial breaks. Instead, they inserted small, subtle edits for product placement along the way from time to time. Needless to say, people have been enjoying riffing on this particular theme.
in the name of anti-antisemitism, Europe is doomed to repeat its past
It is no surprise that even today, Europe only feels guilt about the episode of the Holocaust and not the principle of genocide which made it possible... It seeks penance for the Holocaust but reconciles itself with the principle of genocide which has been ongoing for centuries, and which was perfected in colonial occupations.
What’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected
The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between. from We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them by Brad Bigelow [The Neglected Books Page]
The World Is Not Un Oeuf
Omelet you finish, but whipped egg dishes are popular around the world. Some that Western audiences might not be familiar with: Uganda's Rolex, Malaysia's Ramly burger, South Asia's Anda Bhurji and Akuri, Japan's chawan mushi and Turkey's Menemen, the world is ova-flowing with possibilities.
It's not even very good!
AI is already better than you. "You cannot shame this technology into disuse any more. That only works if quality is something the people with money care about. The problem with the continuing erosion of the games industry, the dehumanisation of game workers and the brutal treatment of outsourced work, is that many roles in the games industry are already treated as if they were automated. You are appealing to the better nature of money men who do not have one."
Mapo Tofu Recipe: The Real Deal
I was parked in my parents’ bedroom, flipping through the channels of countless historical dramas (you can literally go through ten straight channels, and each time the screen changes, you’ll see actresses in traditional dress, fighting back tears in disturbingly clear HD), Chinese nature documentaries (run little deer, ruuuun!), and mindless extended infomercials for the best Chinese dried dates you’ll ever taste, or your money back guaranteed (…or not). Anyways, I was knocked out of my stupor when my limited Chinese vocabulary was able to detect that the latest cooking program I had settled on was featuring a professional chef explaining how to make Mapo Tofu the right way.
Not every prediction came true
The top thinkers of 1974 were gathered together in the pages of “Saturday Review,” for a special issue celebrating that magazine’s 50th anniversary. In a series of essays, each one tried to imagine their world 50 more years into the future, in the far-away year of 2024 ... The future they’d hoped for — or feared for — is detailed and debated, offering readers of today a surprisingly clear picture of the future they’d expected in 1974. from 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 [The New Stack]
Donald Trump's Rhetoric
The Unique Rhetoric of Donald Trump [20m] Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University, discusses the unprecedented rhetorical devices Donald Trump has used to build a cult-like following, capture the attention economy, and allowed him to avoid accountability despite major political controversies and legal challenges.
The changing political cleavage structures of Western democracies
The causes of populism are at the heart of the most significant political and social science debates. One narrative contends that economic globalization resulted in real suffering among less-educated working-class voters, catalyzing populism. Another narrative contends that populism is an adverse reaction to cultural progressivism and that economic factors are not relevant or only relevant symbolically through perceptions of loss of cultural status. Even though the evidence suggests that the generational change argument suggested by the canonical book of Norris and Inglehart does not hold empirically, the cultural narrative nevertheless seems to be particularly influential. from The Populist Backlash Against Globalization: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence [Cambridge University]
Those seams we are seduced into not seeing
Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
Image generation as fast as you can type
While the generative AI scene is transfixed by trillion-scale chipmakers and bleeding-edge text-to-video models, there's plenty of work being done on simpler, more efficient open-source projects that don't require a datacenter to run. In addition to homebrew-friendly text options like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma, the makers of image generator Stable Diffusion have also experimented recently with SDXL Turbo, a lightweight, streamlined version that can generate complex images significantly faster. Previously, this required a decent graphics card and a complicated install process, or at least registration on a paid service -- but thanks to a free public demo from fal.ai, you can now generate and share constantly updating images yourself in real time, as fast as you can type. The quality may not be quite as good as the state-of-the-art stuff, but DALL-E Mini it ain't. No word on what it's costing the company to host or how long it might last, but for now the real-time responsiveness makes it easier than ever to get an intuitive feel for how modern image diffusers interpret text and what exactly they're capable of.
The beauty of everyday things
For the past hundred years we’ve had people championing machine manufacture and value-adding design for objects that did perfectly well without it.
[Yanagi] had several criteria for these everyday miscellaneous things and all of them are worth revisiting because we now know that some things are best when precision machined and manufactured and other things benefit from showing signs of a human hand at work.
The AI gift economy
Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present - WIRED.
A thoughtful reply to what art means when it’s ‘personally’ generated for you with a dive into Lewis Hyde on gift economies.
Half-Life Histories
Half-Life Histories (Youtube playlist link) is a mini-documentary series about nuclear and radiological disasters by Youtuber and science educator Kyle Hill. Hill's series covers both well-known and major nuclear accidents and disasters like the Demon Core at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Castle Bravo detonation on Bikini Atoll, and less well-known incidents like what happened when scientist Anatoli Bugorski accidentally put his head in a particle accelerator beam, and the only recorded death from an unknown source of radiation.
What an absolute unit
On its maiden voyage in 1628, the Vasa warship capsized and sank. Originally thought to be caused by too many cannons on too many decks, one of the leading theories now is that shipbuilders used different rulers. Four were found in the wreckage, two calibrated with the Swedish Foot and the other two rulers used the Amsterdam Foot. Not only are they different lengths (29.69 cm versus 28.31 cm), the Dutch Foot was divided into 11 instead of 12 inches. These errors multiplied over the size of the ship led to lopsided construction and potentially the inevitable sinking.
I’m a Frayed Knot
"Informant’s dad told it to her. She found it so funny. She likes that it’s punny and unexpected. Her dad would tell it to her over and over again. His dad told it too." An entry from the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The International Society for Folk Narrative Research points to it as one of many digital folklore archives [PDF]. If you don't have time to visit digital archives, a dad joke generator may be more your speed.
The Premonition of a Fraying
"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski]
The unauthorized adventure of Tom Bombadil
Redditor "whypic" has been posting daily installments to the Glorious Tom Bombadil subreddit of an original webcomic work of fan-fiction describing an adventure of the mysterious side-character Tom Bombadil from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the webcomic, Bombadil is portrayed like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, and his naive enthusiasm is contrasted with the more worldly and serious elf-king Gil-Galad who is more of a "Hobbes" figure. Who is Tom Bombadil? Let "Jess of the Shire" explain.
Webcomic installments 1
2
3
4
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(Previously: Dark Bombadil)
(Previously)
Burrowed out in ancient times by the slithering of a giant worm
Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
Lessons from artist Hannah Höch
She found freedom from society’s limiting views by employing fantasy, or assuming the perspectives of non-human creatures and objects. “Most of all I would like to depict the world as a bee sees it, then tomorrow as the moon sees it, and then, as many other creatures see it,” she continued. “I am, however, a human being, and can use my fantasy, bound as I am, as a bridge.”
a taxonomy of supremacist bad faith, and the margins of permission
Part 1:
my Poochie who is sure to tell you that he only finds anti-woke rhetoric understandable. Part 2 : Charlie Kirk now believes that pretending to revere Dr. King is less useful. Part 3: the most insidious kind of bad faith—pretending to take an opposing position in order to create a normalizing debate for [white] supremacy. A.R. Moxon's Reframe, relocated off of substack!
[STOP in the name of HUMANITY]
Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it.
The Rise of Obituary Spam
AI generated obituaries turn real people into clickbait.
Searching for information on a deceased friend? Better check your sources carefully; there’s a whole shady online industry designed to profit off your loss.
Absolutely Fabulist
One reason that it’s so difficult to know what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London kid, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. from A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld by Patrick Radden Keefe [The New Yorker; ungated] [CW: Death of a teenager, possible suicide]
Samuel Moyn on The Trouble with Old Men
Gerontocracy is as old as the world. For millennia, to greater or lesser degrees, it has been the default principle of governance, from ancient Greek city-states to the Soviet republics. Though there have been exceptions, when you look for gerontocracy today, you find it everywhere – aged men and women at the helms of states the world over. [CW: suicide, senicide, ageism]
Recycling haul
Linkfest on recycling or recyclability research and approaches: Pulpatronics makes RFID tags out of scorch marks on paper. Turbine blade maker Vestas may have figured out how to recycle the epoxy in epoxy-carbon-fiber. California museum Exploratorium uses and re-uses machinery from the Bay Area's history, which become part of the exhibits. A polymer analagous to porphyrin is good at collecting gold and platinum from acid-cleaned circuit boards. A plastics-back-to-polymers technique with a new factory opening ?soon?.