Podcast (2:42:24) with transcript. Christopher Brown is a professor at Columbia specializing in the slave trade and abolition. He argues that abolition, though obvious in retrospect, was not inevitable and relied on a particular set of circumstances that could have been disrupted at many points. He has also written about Arming Slaves and has an interesting review of Capitalism and Slavery at LRB.

NPR reporting that actor Dabney Coleman is dead at 92. Dabney Coleman was practically ubiquitous in the early to mid 80's by appearing in films like 9 to 5, Tootsie, Cloak and Dagger, On Golden Pond, and War Games.

The 1982 film Tootsie has what is arguably one of the funniest scenes in cinema history at its end. Most of the action is focused on Dustin Hoffman, but it is Mr. Coleman who bookends everything with two lines that me belly laugh out loud. "Uh oh." "I KNEW there was a reason she didn't like me!"

Mr. Samuel's Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults is a short film in 4 parts by Yara Asmar, a musician, puppeteer, and filmmaker from Beirut. The creator describes it so: "In a wonky universe set within the fake walls of an old abandoned children's TV show, Mr Samuel and his friends -peculiar, ugly puppets navigating the strange thing that is time- attempt to make sense of it all through stories, songs and arduous loops of nonsensical chores."

Asmar continues: Zizek's book 'The Parallax View' begins with a description of the first use of modern art as a method of psychotechnic torture: French anarchist Laurencic's 'colored cells'. "The cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological properties of colors... the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals which utilized tricks of color, perspective, and scale to cause mental confusion and distress." Yes, it's a film in 4 parts, but the total running time is a hair under 30 minutes. This is focusing on a particular project of Asmar's, but look around her website; there's a lot of other things there. Here's an interview on her music. A short video analyzing the project by YouTuber Night Mind.

"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)."

Full abstract: "This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs). Distinct from prior applications of LLMs used for video game design, PANGeA innovates by not only generating game level data (which includes, but is not limited to, setting, key items, and non-playable characters (NPCs)), but by also fostering dynamic, free-form interactions between the player and the environment that align with the procedural game narrative. The NPCs generated by PANGeA are personality-biased and express traits from the Big 5 Personality Model in their generated responses. PANGeA addresses challenges behind ingesting free-form text input, which can prompt LLM responses beyond the scope of the game narrative. A novel validation system that uses the LLM's intelligence evaluates text input and aligns generated responses with the unfolding narrative. Making these interactions possible, PANGeA is supported by a server that hosts a custom memory system that supplies context for augmenting generated responses thus aligning them with the procedural narrative. For its broad application, the server has a REST interface enabling any game engine to integrate directly with PANGeA, as well as an LLM interface adaptable with local or private LLMs. PANGeA's ability to foster dynamic narrative generation by aligning responses with the procedural narrative is demonstrated through an empirical study and ablation test of two versions of a demo game. These are, a custom, browser-based GPT and a Unity demo. As the results show, PANGeA holds potential to assist game designers in using LLMs to generate narrative-consistent content even when provided varied and unpredictable, free-form text input." Buongiorno, S., Klinkert, L. J., Chawla, T., Zhuang, Z., & Clark, C. (2024). PANGeA: Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI for Turn-Based Video Games. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19721.

How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder. Class, nativism and gender stereotypes all played a role in Borden's acquittal for the 1892 killings of her father and stepmother. (Smithsonian magazine.)

He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man's fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]

The song Our Toanga by the Sea has been produced by the children and wider community of Hampden [map link], and it's simply a nice look at a rural New Zealand South Island coastal settlement (on Highway 1 just North of Dunedin). I think this has come out at the right time as (most of) the people of NZ are very worried about the new government. We need to remind ourselves of what we have so we can move forward again - this song I think will help. Toanga in the song name is Māori for treasure Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand. The online Māori Dictionary is an extraordinary resource with a nice format, all about the words of our place.

Over 15 years ago, Microsoft released Photosynth [previously], a nifty tool that could correlate dozens of photos of the same place from different angles in order to make a sort of virtual tour using photogrammetry, a technique that went on to influence Google Earth's 3D landscapes and virtual reality environments. But what if you tried the same thing with cartoons? Enter Toon3D, a novel approach to applying photogrammetry principles to hand-drawn animation. The results are imperfect due to the inherent inconsistency of drawn environments, but it's still rather impressive to see a virtual camera moving around glitched-out versions of the Krusty Krab, Bojack Horseman's living room, or the train car from Spirited Away. Interestingly, the same approach works about as well on paintings or even AI-generated video; see also the similar technique of neural radiance fields (NERFs) for creating realistic high-fidelity virtual recreations of real (and unreal) environments.

Stephen Malinowski is a YouTuber who makes animated scores, usually of Bach's music, but today I discovered something completely different: his spectacular score for Teruna Jaya, a classic of Balinese gamelan music (12 min.).

He collaborated with Augustine Esterhammer-Fic, who published his own video, the story of this multi-year dream project (17 min.). It includes a backgrounder on gamelan music, an analysis of Teruna Jaya, and a description of his process of transcribing the piece to MIDI, from which Malinowski created the animation.

The beauty of concrete. "Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor." A long article by Samuel Hughes describing the history of how ornamentation is produced.

These details emerged in 2010, when the Central Bureau of Investigation, India's equivalent of the FBI, was investigating the killings. The CBI charged Shah with kidnapping, extortion and murder. It alleged that the officers who killed Sheikh and his wife were working on Shah's orders... Today, Amit Shah isn't home minister for Gujarat, but all of India. From the heart of power in Delhi, he is in charge of domestic policy, commands the capital city's police force, and oversees the Indian state's intelligence apparatus. He is, simply put, the second-most powerful man in the country. How Modi's right-hand man, Amit Shah, runs India.

"Designing a chair is a very constrained exercise: the general dimensions and angles are very much fixed," Yovanovitch said. "Designing a shoe is even more constrained and technical." from Christian Louboutin and Pierre Yovanovitch perch chairs on legs informed by "iconic women"

Young schoolchildren from County Cork, working with a non-profit children's music & creative space, have created a piece called 'The Spark" for Cruinniú na nÓg, which is the national free day of creativity for young people, run by the Creative Ireland Programme's Youth Plan. [cw: strobe transition effect on first link]

Take a moment to imagine what you think it might sound like, before you click the link and enjoy 'The Spark'.

"I'm bored of that conversation and I don't want it to be the only thing I'm known for." Kathleen Hanna interviewed about her newly released memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (archive link here)

Conscious Ants and Human Hives by Peter Watts has an entertaining take on Neuralink.

In breif, Watts doubts Neuralink could provide "faster internet" in the sense Neuralink markets to investors, but other darker markets exist.. Around fiction, if you've read Blindsight and Echopraxia then The Colonel touches amusizingly employs Watts perspective on hiveminds. "Attack of the Hope Police: Delusional Optimism at the End of the World?" is lovely latlk too. Also "The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?" by Peter Watts.

A scratched wooden door found by chance at the top of a medieval turret has been revealed to be an "astonishing" graffiti-covered relic from the French revolutionary wars, including a carving that could be a fantasy of Napoleon Bonaparte being hanged.

Over 50 individual graffiti carvings were chiselled into the door in the 1790s by bored English soldiers stationed at Dover Castle in Kent, when Britain was at war with France in the wake of the French Revolution. They include a detailed carving of a sailing ship, an elaborate stylised cross and nine individual scenes of figures being hanged – one of whom is wearing a bicorn hat. The simple plank door was first discovered several years ago at the top of St John's tower, which for more than a century had been impossible to access without climbing a ladder to the base of a spiral staircase. At the time, however, it was covered in thick layers of paint that obscured many of its markings.

Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated ('perfed') and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and '90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD's spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as 'commercial tokens'. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]

Old and improved, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew recently released a lovely tree of life of... well, plants [pdf].

But wait, there's also An unexpected noncarpellate epigynous flower from the Jurassic of China [pdf]. I was surprised that there was a controversy so ancient and about such fascinating beings: flowers. This is the first post I wanted to share with you all. Enjoy!

Joshua Charow is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in NYC. He spent the past couple years ringing doorbells to find and interview over 30 artists who are living under the protection of the Loft Law to create his first photography book, 'Loft Law. The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts'.

Envied by artists and apartment hunters alike for their wide windows and open floor plans, New York City's lofts were once manufacturing centers in the late 19th and early 20th century. As urban densification pushed industry into the suburbs, these buildings were left empty. Looking for cheap rents and ideal studios, artists struck bargains with landlords to live and work in commercially zoned spaces. By the 1970s, these same artists faced eviction as their landlords embraced the new wealthy clientele that seeped into neighborhoods such as SoHo, Tribeca and the Bowery. Enacted in 1982, Article 7-C of the Multiple Dwelling Law, better known as the "Loft Law," allowed artists to obtain legal occupancy and rent stabilization. After discovering a map of the protected buildings, documentary filmmaker Joshua Charow embarked on the ambitious project of documenting them. The upcoming exhibition of his photographs will be at the Westwood Gallery in the Bowery district of NYC from May 17 (tomorrow!) to June 29. The exhibition will include photographs from the project alongside 20 physical works by the artists. His book can be ordered here (currently backordered). Charow has posted additional short interview videos (8 minute-ish) of some of the artists in their studios on YouTube. Painter Carmen Cicero, 96, who's worked in his Bowery loft since 1971. "If you were to look out the window at night, it would be so deserted that there wasn't traffic." Multi-discipline artist Claire Ferguson moved into her raw Tribeca loft in 1974. Her upcoming show Collage Art is June 14-16 at Studio 606. "One thing, it was a lot of women. There were three women on this floor, two women on the 6th floor." Sculptor Curtis Mitchell found his raw unheated space in 1984, the top floor of an old ice cream factory in Brooklyn. "The police would use the parapet wall for target practice unbeknowst to us." Not sure if she's specifically part of the series but 93-year-old abstract painter Dorothea Rockburne in her loft. "No paint, no life"

Last week, General Motors announced that it would end production of the Chevrolet Malibu, which the company first introduced in 1964. Although not exactly a head turner (the Malibu was "so uncool, it was cool," declared the New York Times), the sedan has become an American fixture, even an icon [...] Over the past 60 years, GM produced some 10 million of them. With a price starting at a (relatively) affordable $25,100, Malibu sales exceeded 130,000 vehicles last year, a 13% annual increase and enough to rank as the #3 Chevy model [...] Still, that wasn't enough to keep the car off GM's chopping block. [...] In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans. [...] As recently as 2009, U.S. passenger cars [...] outsold light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and minivans), but today they're less then 20% of new car purchases. The death of the Malibu is confirmation, if anyone still needs it, that the Big Three are done building sedans. That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers—and it may ultimately come around to bite Detroit.

Detroit Killed the Sedan. We May All Live to Regret It [Fast Company]

Neighbors and neighborhoods near Midway Airport. I loved these photos, seeing them is like biking around in these neighborhoods. It's so easy to take photos now, but ordinary life with good composition and good light is still an unexpected pleasure.

Let's go back to December 1942, to the corner of Wabash and Ohio, to a small abandoned basement tavern that was also once a pizzeria named the Pelican Tap. The new tenants living directly above the abandoned tavern are a recently married couple with their newborn daughter. The 39-year-old father is the painter and restaurateur Richard Riccardo, owner of the famous Riccardo's Studio Restaurant on Rush Street. from The Secret History of the Original Deep-Dish Crust [Chicago]

The New Yorker takes on the dubious evidence that led to Letby's conviction and the bizarre UK media restrictions that governed coverage of the case. [CW: infanticide] Rachel Aviv's article paints a picture of a neonatal intensive care unit undergoing the same catastrophic deterioration as the rest of the National Health Service—a topic the magazine has covered recently—and how an especially competent and determined nurse might just end up at the scene of several patients' deaths because she was called in to help on virtually all difficult cases.

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four "suspicious events," which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X's next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X's below her name. She was the "one common denominator," the "constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse," one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. "If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It's a process of elimination." But the chart didn't account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country's most reviled woman—"the unexpected face of evil," as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all. Vanity Fair recently published a piece coming from a more pro-guilt perspective, but retracted that article due to the same strange British press laws that somehow prevent any coverage which might doubt the efficacy of the court system or the quality of the prosecution but didn't prevent wall-to-wall coverage alleging Letby's guilt before and during the trial (the best I could do was a Google Drive link to scans of the article; if we can find a better version, I'd ask the mods to add it in here). Especially strange from the New Yorker piece were Letby's attorneys' decisions not to put the NHS on trial—Letby's most obvious trial defense—and instead to insist, along with the prosecution, that the service was getting along fine. Likewise, not to present a single defense medical expert after months of prosecution medical testimony that was...assailable: The prosecution's pathologist, Andreas Marnerides, who worked at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, wrote that the child had died of natural causes, most likely of pneumonia. "I have not identified any suspicious findings," he concluded. But, three years later, Marnerides testified that, after reading more reports from the courts' experts, he thought that the baby had died "with pneumonia," not "from pneumonia." The likely cause of death, he said, was administration of air into his stomach through a nasogastric tube. When Evans testified, he said the same thing. "What's the evidence?" Myers asked him. "Baby collapsed, died," Evans responded. "A baby may collapse for any number of reasons," Myers said. "What's the evidence that supports your assertion made today that it's because of air going down the NGT?" "The baby collapsed and died." "Do you rely upon one image of that?" Myers asked, referring to X-rays. "This baby collapsed and died." "What evidence is there that you can point to?" Evans replied that he'd ruled out all natural causes, so the only other viable explanation would be another method of murder, like air injected into one of the baby's veins. "A baby collapsing and where resuscitation was unsuccessful—you know, that's consistent with my interpretation of what happened," he said. When so many of us now work in deteriorating systems, doing two or three times our share of work while other people's lives or livelihoods depend how well we do it, it is especially terrifying, if the New Yorker's take is to be believed, to see a single individual scapegoated and sentenced to life imprisonment for the failures of the system she worked in. Or, if Vanity Fair (and, if Twitter replies are any indication, most of the British public) has the right of it, some justice may have been done.

Sock It To Me, Baby! was one of blue-eyed soul singer Mitch Ryder's top-ten hits, from early 1967. The expression is possibly best-remembered today from when a presidential candidate uttered it: In 1968, when Nixon said 'Sock It To Me' on "Laugh-In," TV Was Never Quite the Same Again. (Smithsonian magazine, 2018)

Etymological explanations for the phrase (like in the Urban Dictionary) usually trace it to the late 1960s but readers of the classics can find it used earlier, during the Depression, in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Also there's a regional cake recipe with this name, apparently via Duncan Hines. Post title refers to a controversy at the time, during maybe the first wave of parental concern about lyrics in rock'n'roll, for example, what were the Kingsmen actually singing in "Louie, Louie" - could they have been suggesting something naughty? That spotlight also focused briefly on "Sock It To Me, Baby."

How did Ghostbusters II create the talking Vigo the Carpathian painting? Glen Eytchison was deep in the planning stages of his next theatrical production when he got a phone call from Industrial Light & Magic. It was early 1989, and employees at George Lucas's famed visual effects house needed to create a painting of a 16th-century Carpathian warlord that could come to life for director Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters sequel. They had to do it fast: The movie was due to come out in June. Could Eytchison help them?

Includes a scrapped ending concept, the original undubbed Vigo actor's performance, and the location of the real original Vigo painting used in the film today.

There was allure beyond negation. Branson's geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O'Neill has termed Primordial America, the "buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve." "Wherever they hail from," 60 Minutes' Morley Safer went on, "they feel they are the Heartland." No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]

As previously mentioned, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is an exhaustive exploration of that music genre, starting before it existed and currently up to 1966. It is notable for the extensive research that goes into each episode (the detailed exploration of where Johnny Cash drew inspiration from is particularly striking), so much so that another podcaster (not linked to here for obvious reasons) has apparently been plagiarising entire episodes.

The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson) has posted about finding art made by a woman, Laura Perea, who was in a psychiatric hospital from the 1940s. She describes what she has discovered about Laura Perea's life and family, and reproduces her art, in three posts: Help me solve a haunting art mystery?; Art mystery possibly solved?; Uncovering the mystery of L. Perea and trying to erase the stigma of mental illness. Content warning: death by suicide of one of Laura Perea's family members.

The San Antonio Express-News has some more information. Lawson is planning an exhibition of Laura Perea's art.

30,000 rare oysters are being reintroduced to Firth of Forth. (The Firth of Forth is in Scotland, it is a body of water just North of Edinburgh.)

From Donald Glover: Childish Gambino - Little Foot Big Foot (Official Video) ft. Young Nudy [6m] Genius lyrics page.

Greatest human alive today, Bobby Fingers, has released another video, researching and creating a diorama of the 1999 incident where heartthrob Fabio came back bloodied after participating in the inaugural ride of the "Apollo's Chariot" roller coaster at Busch Gardens.

Fingers also tries to get in good enough shape to become a "romance novel" cover model, and gets some help from Adam Savage and the Slow Mo Guys (Dan and Gav) test-firing ballistic gel "geese" at a recreation of Fabio's head at 75MPH. Fingers has also written a romance novel of his own, which he shares an excerpt from in the vid.

Slovakia's populist prime minister shot in assassination attempt, shocking Europe before elections [AP]

Who is Slovak populist prime minister Robert Fico? [Sky] What do we know about Robert Fico's alleged shooter? [Euronews] Robert Fico shooting was 'politically motivated,' Slovak officials say [Politico] Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. - Her fellow Republicans were not relieved to hear this news.

"The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which means some lose, like, 5 years and some lose like 25. You don't know which one will be you." Smoking is Awesome by Kurzgesagt and How "Anti-Vaping" Ads Trick You Into Vaping by Maggie Mae Fish are two sides of a coin: Maggie Mae Fish explains the media literacy needed to determine what makes effective anti-smoking ads and how tobacco (and now vaping) companies direct policy towards ineffective anti-smoking ads. Kurzgesagt has an informative and effective anti-smoking video.

Buckingham Palace has revealed King Charles III's first official post-coronation portrait, and the work by artist Jonathan Yeo has proven to be...divisive in its design.

The portrait, awash in a red that melds with the subject's uniform, has raised a good deal of commentary/snark about the design, as well as the sort of media that it fits into or was taken from.

Perhaps Donald John Trump will have only one criminal trial this year. The prosecution's case in his state trial for using hush money to pay off a porn star to illegally influence his election is finishing with ex-fixer Michael Cohen testifying.

Also: A history of Donald Trump and his associations with the Playboy empire including his soft-porn film. A photo of Donald Trump, his wife, his daughter, Karen McDougal, and three other Playboy bunnies at the Playboy Mansion. He only attended Epstein parties for the scintillating conversation with underaged women.

Can sustainable farming and land use practices really scale to meet the challenges of our planet - or are they just niche hobby projects? Learn about how acquifers work and are recharged. Find out how the Pani Foundation water cup inspired Indian farmers to compete in building water retention structures for their villages. Learn about a Mesoamerican farming technology originally scaled up by the Aztecs. Hear American regenerative agriculture pioneer Gabe Brown, telling his story to the farmers who supply a major British supermarket chain as they move towards regenerative practices. Learn how a British city council responded to a major flood event by investing in beautiful sustainable urban drainage across the city and its suburbs (a presenter's connection drops out near the start of their video but it's worth skipping past it!)

"The ice cream had a nice toothsomeness to it, with enough structure to hold everything together. For our absolute favorite chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich, you'll have to head to your corner store."

Alice Munro, master of short stories, wove intense tales of human drama from small-town life is the Globe and Mail obituary [archive] for the Canadian literary giant who passed away Monday night. She received the Nobel in literature in 2013 among countless other prizes. She also cofounded Munro's Books in Victoria, British Columbia, who posted a remembrance on Instagram. The New Yorker, where many of her stories first appeared, has a section with links to her short fiction, as well as personal essays, appraisals and an interview and an obituary [archive]. The 1978 classic Moons of Jupiter was recently featured on their fiction podcast, and it is also available as text.

At 14, Ned stumbled upon a perfect jungle. He didn't know he would spend the next two years fighting to save it. When a teenager uncovered a critical refuge for endangered species, it marked the start of a journey that eventually saw the parcel of land named after him.

In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is comprised of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin's inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million. from Time Is Running Out in the Hunt for Rare Bitcoin [Wired; ungated]

Simple Rules for Better Sandwiches [11m30s] is part of the Technique with Lan Lam series from America's Test Kitchen. From suggestions for contrasting ingredients to techniques like pressing, and other ways to examine the ways that sandwiches could be improved.

Personally I find both kimchi and avocados to be non-food, so one recipe in this video was horrifying to me, but I appreciate the principles that are being taught here.

Words About War. "From George Orwell's critique of the language of totalitarian regimes to today, discussions of war and foreign policy have been full of dehumanizing euphemisms, bloodless jargon, little-known government acronyms, and troubling metaphors that hide warfare's damage. This guide aims to help people write and talk about war and foreign policy more accurately, more honestly, and in ways people outside the elite Washington, DC foreign policy "blob" can understand." Link to the PDF.

Language Use about Gaza (PDF): "While exposing the genocide of Palestinians, it is critical to continually challenge and resist language that is used to justify the violence and render Palestinians killable. To this end, we offer ten urgent suggestions. Above all we advise using clear, accurate, honest language that describes the flesh and bone impacts of this mass violence. We urge the use of language that centers the humanity of those harmed while resisting simplistic, binary us vs. them, good vs. evil narratives that continue to be circulated by governments and media, humanizing some and dehumanizing others." Developed by David Vine, Professor of Political Anthropology at American University, and author of several books critical of US Militarism & Foreign Policy I was inspired to post this after hearing an interview with Prof. Vine on KOOP Radio, Austin's local community radio station.

The Desktop Cat Cursor (not free but really cheap) , from Samperson, turns your computer's pointer into a big cat's paw extending onto the screen. Currently only for Windows 10 and 11 but a Mac version is in the works.

YO DAWG KAT, I HEARD YOU LIKE.... You could pair the Desktop Cat Cursor with this update of the classic desktop toy Neko for extra kitty fun. This rewrite requires ability to compile Go (I got it working pretty easily), but should work on most desktop platforms. It doesn't expose a UI so you'll have to do an end-task to close it. (If you start it from a command line, you could halt it with Ctrl-C.)

In her essay 'The Double Standard [PDF] of Aging,' Susan Sontag explores how a "visceral horror felt at aging female flesh" is entrenched in our visual culture, manifested in caricatures of viragos and witches. "Rules of taste enforce structures of power," she wrote, "the revulsion against aging in women is the cutting edge of a whole set of oppressive structures (often masked as gallantries) that keep women in their place." Reclaiming elderly sexuality is an act of defiance, a rebellion against a youth-obsessed culture, fuelled by misogynistic gender norms. from The Untold Lives of Mature OnlyFans Performers [Huck] CW: NSFW language, it's about OnlyFans and has pictures of women in lingerie.