Posts with Recent Comments
Turns out, it was The Last Domino
Genesis -- The Last Domino? PBS documentary [55m], about their final tour from a few years ago. Genesis The Last Domino? tour previously, which wasn't the end, I saw them in November of 2022.
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QWANJI is a fun, minimalist little webtoy for converting the patterns drawn on QWERTY-based swipe keyboards like Swype (RIP) and Gboard into visible glyphs reminiscent of handwritten kanji (hence the name). Experiment by typing text (using spaces to break up glyphs) to see instant results, and share by copying either the resulting URL or the gibberish text, which you can drop into the text field to see them sketched out. No word on when DVORAK support is coming (or T9, for that matter -- but there's a simulator for that).
This trend isn’t really about food or health. It’s about performance
Hosting a lavish banquet or ordering lobster is no longer a sufficient signifier of status; today, a sign of true wealth is the ability to forgo food entirely. Eating essentially betrays a person’s most basic human needs; in an era obsessed with ‘self-optimisation’, not eating suggests that a person is somehow ‘beyond’ needs and has achieved total mastery of their body with a heightened capacity for efficiency and focus. from Why don’t rich people eat anymore?
stop motion cooking
We cherished the girls, grog and laughter
The Poetry of Actor William Smith. You may be familiar with William Smith as a "that guy" from hundreds and hundreds of movie performances, usually the heavy, such as bare-knuckle brawler Jack Wilson in 1980's Any Which Way You Can. But his poetic contributions have gone largely unnoticed, and courtesy of his still-up website -- Williams passed in 2021 -- you can read poems like The Reaper or thrill to these poems read in Williams' own roadworn voice.
By Amun, it's full of stars
Enclosed within its rugged mud brick walls the temple precincts at Dendera seem to be an island left untouched by time. Particularly in the early hours of the morning, when foxes roam around the ruins of the birth house or venture down the steep stairs leading to the Sacred Lake. Stepping into the actual temple is like entering an ancient time machine, especially if you look up to the recently cleaned astronomical ceiling. This is a vast cosmos filled with stars, hour-goddesses and zodiac signs, many of which are personified by weird creatures like snakes walking on long legs and birds with human arms and jackal heads. On the columns just below the ceiling you encounter the mysterious gaze of the patron deity of the temple: Hathor.It might not have the iconic status of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, but the Dendera temple complex north of Luxor boasts some of the most superbly-preserved ancient Egyptian art known, ranging from early Roman times back to the Middle Kingdom period over 4,000 years ago. Most breathtaking is the ceiling of the temple's grand pronaos, which is richly decorated with intricate astrological iconography. But you don't have to travel to Egypt to see it -- thanks to photographer and programmer José María Barrera [site], you can now peruse an ultra-HD scan of the fully-restored masterpiece in a slick zoomable scroller. Overwhelmed? See the captions in this gallery for a deep-dive into the symbolism, or click inside for even more. [more inside]
Honeylocusts, Ginkgos, Callery Pears, Maples & more in the 5 boroughs
Previously: the official New York City tree map. Earlier this year: Kieran Healy created visualizations of "the relationship between the median diameter of street-trees (i.e., trees not in parks) and median household income for New York City neighborhoods" (for example, Park Slope versus Bushwick), dendograms of "New York City’s street tree species clustered by similarity of neighborhood profiles" (and, conversely, "the neighborhoods clustered by tree profile similarity"), and "a Principal Coordinates Analysis of New York City NTA neighborhoods and their street tree species". (NTA means Neighborhood Tabulation Area.) "I don’t really know anything about trees. I do know how to draw pictures, though."
Jo Brand interviewed by Jamie Laing
Exactly as it says on the tin (50ish min). Jo Brand, an English standup comedian, talks psychiatry, comedy and what swear word is her favourite with Jamie Laing, ex-Made in Chelsea star.
10 Years of Jeremy Parish's Works Projects
Jeremy Parish, dedicated game journalist and Retronaut, and creator of design deep dives, has been covering Gameboy (1989, gaiden), Game Boy Color (1998), Game Boy Advance (2001), NES (1985, 1986, 1987, 1998, 1999, gaiden), SNES (1991, extra, gaiden), N64 (1996), Sega, Virtual Boy and Metroidvania games now for ten years! His terrific and scholarly videos don't get nearly the views that much less worthy series get, so please give them a try if you have any interest in this area.
"so many tech demos end up hiding an ugly truth deep down"
Amazon Go, "a new kind of corner store," that company's futuristic storefront where you installed an app on your phone, and could shop for things just by picking them up off of shelves and walking out the door with them, is being shut down. Some random internet person called "Matt Haughey" described his experience with the store, and how it wasn't nearly as magical as it seemed: as it turned out it was a kind of technological sleight-of-hand, instead of using RFIDs and weight-sensing shelves and other techno-devices, they just had a whole lot of people watching cameras. Another random person on Mastodon points out the whole-lot-of-people part was probably a bunch of subsistence contractors in other countries. A third random person notes, even doing that, the store concept couldn't be made to work. Meanwhile the important gigantic hovering electronic head of Jeff Bezos floats above us all, unmoving but watching, silently.
How easily & cavalierly the works of decades & centuries are demolished
It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action’, and that is Shock and Awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it. Ask no questions, tell only lies, and double down, triple down, quadruple down. The ineffably stupid ‘move fast and break things’ that has so much to answer for in our time. Our new ‘Innovation Hub’ has an asinine three-word slogan: ‘Grow Ignite Disrupt’. It would make just as much sense to have ‘Paper Scissors Stone’ for a motto. And rather more to have ‘Smash Grab Run’. from In Florida by Michael Hofmann [London Review of Books] [CW: DeSantis]
The Life and Death of Hollywood
"The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.” (slHarper's) [more inside]
Freedom. What is Autonomy to you? (Free Thread)
What does free will / autonomy / self agency mean to you? The right to choose your own destiny, to make your own mistakes, and to feel the consequences of your actions? Or talk about anything you like, it's your weekly Free Thread!
Slowly, inch by inch, choice by choice, our stuff gets cheapened
The Problem with Adam Savage's Favorite Pencil: Former Mythbuster and MeFi's Own asavage goes on a surprisingly emotional tear about tool acquisition in the maker space, Blackwing 602s, Jeff Tweedy's pencil nerdery (🔔), and the "encheapening the product to increasening the profit" that has befallen his beloved PaperMate Sharpwriter #2. (It's not really about pencils.) [more inside]
Phish at The Sphere
How Phish turned Las Vegas’ Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer "Some moments last night felt like you were seeing enormous versions of the old visualizers from Winamp or iTunes. Others brought the crowd into intricate, dazzling scenes."
I thought this was going to change the world. In a way, it did
‘We went from naive, hippyish protesters to hardcore anarchists’: the criminal justice bill protests, 30 years on. The criminal justice and public order bill aimed to criminalise “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. “It was almost like a surrealist prank,” Harry Harrison, co-founder of DiY sound system, says now. “I said: ‘Is this real?’ It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.” [from The Guardian]
The Scientist of the Soul
The materialist world view is often associated with despair. In “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the novel’s hero, stares into the night sky, reflects upon his brief, bubblelike existence in an infinite and indifferent universe, and contemplates suicide. For Dennett, however, materialism is spiritually satisfying. [...] “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” Dennett writes, is that Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens “all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life,” which “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” He asks, “Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 [more inside]
Unwanted Sound
Implicit in the art of noise is a promise of resistance. For millennia, music has been a medium of control; noise, it follows, is a liberation. from What is Noise? by Alex Ross [The New Yorker; ungated]
"Greetings, citizen! Are you getting enough oxygen?"
Adult Swim is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Space Ghost: Coast To Coast by showing all the episodes in no particular order on YouTube right this very moment. Relive the early days of Cartoon Network's dimwitted dadaist superhero insanity, or become enthralled for the first time.
I feared that being near all of this would mean the end of my career
“This was a catch-and-kill,” I told Alpert. “What’s a catch-and-kill?” he asked.
I went on to explain the tabloid practice of buying stories to bury them. Alpert already had the outline of the story, I learned, and I filled him in on more: how Howard had flown out to Los Angeles that summer to buy McDougal’s story for $150,000, with the direction from Pecker to kill it to protect Trump. I stressed to him the importance of the term “catch and kill” and told him that if The Journal included it, it would give me some breathing room. I went back to my office and closed the door. My heart was racing, and I was sweating. from What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise by Lachlan Cartwright [NY Times; ungated] [CW: Trumpland]