Did you know the outside world exists? The weather has been so nice, I’ve been rediscovering this for myself. I’ve taken a few longer walks (around an hour) in April heat, which is 70-80f, and about perfect.

My Big Dog has needed to revisit some of his training lately too. He’s really bad about fence fighting, which sounds more dramatic than it is…he just lunges so hard for fences and makes these horrible howly-yelpy noises at dogs on the other sides of fences. This is a totally common behavior in dogs. They get really frustrated by leashes/fences preventing them from socially normal behaviors. But it’s causing him a lot of angst, making him difficult to walk, and honestly puts him in danger because a pitbull can’t look bad like that.

Luckily he is a full peanut butter marshmallow. He’s taking to his training reminders well. So far, it’s all good experiences, and that’s my goal.

I’m also making really good progress on editing Fated for Firelizards. I’ll probably push an itch.io update with some new art and typo corrections before the actual ebook arrives.

~

In Tennessee, Volkswagen workers are unionizing. (Balloon Juice) Woo woo!

Meanwhile, Starbucks employees’ union efforts are facing the Supreme Court. (NPR)

~

Apparently, the reason Cybertruck accelerator pedals are failing is because of…soap. (NPR)

~

BookRiot breaks down how Google is diluting their News feed. At this point, most Google products are unusable to me.

~

Unsurprisingly, pregnant women are increasingly being turned away from emergency departments in America. (The Guardian)

~

Niger wants American troops out. We’re withdrawing. (WaP0)

I note this because, as an American, I really don’t know what the military is up to or where we are most of the time.

~

Remember when Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil”? They sure don’t!

Quartz: Google tells staff not to ‘debate politics’ after firing workers who protested Israel contract

~

Bright Wall, Dark Room talks about The Sixth Sense. Is something in the water? I’ve been thinking I’m long overdue a rewatch on this one.

[I]t’s also a meditation on something deeper than a cleverly crafted gotcha moment. It offers up a sympathetic, often harrowing examination of how children handle the things they see but can’t process. It reminds us that childhood can be magical, full of sights and sounds that don’t even seem possible. It can also be terrifying, when you’re left to assign meaning to the parts of life you don’t know how to grapple with yet.

~

We won’t be seeing Prison Architect 2 until at least September. (Engadget) The publisher, Paradox, has been having a bad year. I’ve heard extremely bad, unplayable things about Cities: Skylines 2 (also Paradox).

It’s fine, really. PA1 has been a disaster of bugs throughout its lifetime. Giving the sequel more time to cook is good. And I’m still playing PA1, so I’m not exactly hurting for another.

~

A then-11-year-old kid in England uncovered fossils of Giant Ichthyosaurs. (Smithsonian)

Now a 9-year-old from Derbyshire has won a “gull shrieking championship.” His picture in the article is divine.

It’s all downhill from here, kiddos! Literally life never gets better than being recognized for your shrieking abilities and finding dinosaurs. Literally.

~

Am I reading a science article or watching The Thing again? Some bacteria, including certain strains of E. coli, actually seek out human blood. (Quartz)

~

The Film Stage highlighted movies new to VOD and streaming. I’m not in a hurry to see Dune 2, but I am actually excited to watch the Extreme Brain Candy called The Beekeeper. I might watch Immaculate too.

~

I laugh lovingly because the hedgehog is okay now, but some lil dude got a bacterial infection and swelled up into a poky basketball. (The Guardian) I guess it hurts so I’m not laughing that much. But the hedgie is okay! I promise. We can laugh at the pics a little bit.

~

Here’s a round-up from Digby’s Hullaballoo about how unhappy Trump must be during his trial. The tl;dr is that he has to listen to people talk crap about him and he can’t say anything. It’s almost as good as if he had to step on LEGO.

~

Over on YouTube, Zack Snyder talks about how he wanted Tom Cruise to play Ozymandius in Watchmen. Tom Cruise, however, wanted to play Rorschach.

…I’m sure he did.

Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach is one of the greatest comic book movie casting moments in history, fwiw.

~

An unexpectedly interesting read from The Guardian is this piece about blue jeans. Have you heard how they were made by Levi’s in America back in the Wild West days or what-have-you? Some historic paintings from elsewhere in the world may disagree.

~

A Netflix algorithm axed ideas for a Knight’s Tale sequel. (Variety) First of all, if algorithms are making those kinds of decisions at Netflix? It explains basically everything. But I think it was right in this case. That’s so much Heath Ledger’s movie. How do you do a sequel that can only remind us how much it hurts that he’s gone, when Netflix mostly produces hollowly soulless algorithmic drivel?

~

Settlers of Catan has gone solarpunk. (NPR) How do you expand without over-polluting?

~

Smithsonian Mag: Extensive Desert ‘Lava Tubes’ Sheltered Humans for 7,000 Years, Archaeologists Find

As someone who has been writing about cthonic Dwarrow, I’m very interested in this. But I also think it’s interesting from a sci-fi perspective, since we’d need to live in tunnels (basically) to survive a place like Mars, which has no magnetosphere.

~

Refinery29 introduced me to the term Gorpcore. I thought they were joshing at first, but it looks like the actual term.

Pulling together the “author’s cut” of my interactive novel is harder than I anticipated. I wrote *so* much material that only exists in one story track or another (meaning I have to go all over the file to see what I can possibly add), and a *lot* of text varies based upon reader choices. It’s one long personality test of a book, so…it’s a mess!

Also, the chapters read differently without the page breaks/questions/illustrations. Once it’s just text, I see so many things I want to smooth and fill out. It’s a bigger editing job than anticipated!

Fun project, though. Anything with dragons is fun.

~

Quentin Tarantino has long claimed he would only make a certain number of films, and one called “The Movie Critic” was due to be his last. He’s changed his mind. (The Film Stage)

Honestly, I don’t think he should fuss about it. I’m old enough to have seen a lot of people retire, unretire, retire, unretire… I’m not sure anyone believes Tarantino will hold himself to a particular number of movies. He might be enduring more self-doubt than necessary. Just go make your movies, my dude. Whatever you want. However many you feel like.

~

Someone has been pursuing copyright for AI-generated books on the grounds that she’s disabled and couldn’t otherwise make them. (Ars Technica) The disability community is largely not on her side, I think, although I can’t cite anything besides the vibes I’ve gotten from disability activist spaces.

Exploitation wears many faces. I’m too tired to write up a rebuttal, but I think she’s wrong, and this is a bad choice.

~

We aren’t necessarily growing the best available crops for our changing climate. Some folks are trying to change that by getting farmers to cultivate so-called “orphan crops.” (NPR)

“He said, ‘Everything you see out there that’s green, is grass pea. Everything else has died.’ And he was right. We walked out into the field, and the field was cracked, it was so dry. You could put your arm down in the soil for about a foot or so. And there was this little grass pea plant, green and flowering. And I thought to myself, ‘What a generous plant this is!”

Fowler acquired some grass pea seeds and brought them to his New York farm, where he’s growing and eating them. “It’s like a sugar snap pea,” he says. It’s delicious.”

~

I’ve been hearing for years that disease is the most immediate, wide-ranging impact of climate change. I’m especially interested in zoonotic diseases.

So it is with no joy I report that chronic wasting disease may have made the jump from deer to humans. (Neurology)

In 2022, a 72-year-old man with a history of consuming meat from a CWD-infected deer population presented with rapid-onset confusion and aggression. His friend, who had also eaten venison from the same deer population, recently died of CJD, raising concerns about a potential link between CWD and human prion disease. Despite aggressive symptomatic treatment of seizures and agitation, the patient’s condition deteriorated and he died within a month of initial presentation.

~

In funnier animal news, a young elephant seal wants to hang out in Victoria, darnit. Emerson is back. (The Guardian)

The plan was to move the young seal far from British Columbia’s capital city, where over the last year, he has developed a reputation for ending up in “unusual locations”, including flower beds, city parks and busy roads.

Emerson, as he is known to locals, had other plans.

Less than a week after he was removed from Victoria, he made an “epic” 126-mile trek along the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island back to the city, a return that has left conservation officers in disbelief.

This is cute and impressive. I hope they can figure it out before something terrible must be done to Emerson for safety, though.

~

Archaeologists found the victims of a ritualistic murder in a Neolithic pit. (Ars Technica) Humans are intense, man.

~

Hibernating bumblebee queens can survive underwater for up to a week. (Smithsonian Mag) This was a scientific discovery made by total accident, as hibernating queens were drowned by condensation. The scientist was devastated by her accident. But once they dried off and returned to hibernation, they seemed totally fine, and woke up normally.

~

Some people have much cooler homes than I do. This guy’s home was basically a weird art installation (WaPo), and it’s cool enough that the British government has decided to keep it that way.

~

Did you know that Japan has typically not allowed joint custody of children after divorce? I did not. I’m learning about it just as they pass laws to change that. (The Guardian)

~

I am delighted to announce that Dwarf Fortress on Steam has released Adventure Mode in beta! (Ars Technica) I’ve been waiting for this. I’ve got the beta on my computer right now, but I haven’t tried it just yet.

~

Brian Cox continues to say whatever the hell he’s thinking. In this case, he says Joaquin Phoenix was terrible in Napoleon. (Variety) I haven’t watched it yet so I have no opinion. But I love when Brian Cox says stuff grumpily. He’s adorable.

~

Anaheim Disneyland is working on a two billion dollar expansion that will include space for Avatar stuff. (Gizmodo via Quartz) All right.

Meanwhile, Disney costume performers are trying to unionize. (CNN)

~

Prince Harry now lists himself as an American resident. (WaPo) We’re happy to have him. Far be it from me to be too welcoming of any Random Rich Dude, but he escaped an abusive family (mostly) so he could simp for a really hot woman until death do they part, and that’s sweet.

I’m having a really hard time motivating myself to do work-work today, since I finished off the Fated for Firelizards alpha yesterday and pushed a big update. It was an unusual spurt of work that I hope becomes more usual for me again. Problem is that it happened on a Monday, so my natural urge is to take time off…but I just had a weekend. I’d rather do a few days of light work and just get to the weekend.

The next item on my to-do list is really just to start pulling together the Author’s Cut, so I’m trying to remind myself all I *need* to do at the moment is start copying + pasting parts of the book. The urge to initiate is tricky to navigate, though. Especially since it demands standing at my standing desk right now and I’m sore.

So that’s why I’m here again, posting another Sara Reads the Feed. I’ve been marking a lot of articles that I don’t necessarily share, since I do multiple passes of curation to knock the number of articles down. But hey, why not post more if the time is there?

In regards to other ongoing projects-lite, I haven’t reviewed movies as much lately because I’m watching a lot more TV. Not Doc Martin, the greatest show ever made, because I wanted to zip through a rewatch of Lucifer. I’ll be back to that soon though. I might do an overall review of the TV show Lucifer in a single post; episode-by-episode or even season-by-season recaps are a bit more intensive, and I don’t have that much to say about this one. Lucifer is pure candy.

~

Psyche posted a thoughtful article about aging well.

One thing I learned from being *really* stoned for eight years straight is how to live life with limited cognition/ability. It’s not a tidy comparison for numerous reasons. However, it’s a long time impaired and often semi-verbal. I got myself into a State that I couldn’t leave daily, and I still managed to spend a lot of fulfilling time like that. Not by expecting myself to perform like when I’m sober, but by accepting what I can do, and being contented in it. (You’d think the weed contributes to fulfilling happy time. You’d be wrong.)

It’s really about being mindful. Appreciating what you have instead of what you don’t. And that’s basically where this article goes with aging as well.

To grow with age, I suggest practising various forms of mindfulness. Just as exercise for the body helps to maintain and improve physical health, mindfulness is mental training that flexes the mind for optimal health and wellbeing. It involves a curious investigation of the present moment – your thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. The benefits include improved concentration, more awareness, an ability to stay focused on what is important, and the ability to meet challenges with kindness, humour, resilience and mental adaptability.

~

Speaking of addictive substances, I have to apologize for talking about former President Trump. He keeps falling asleep at his trial. Vanity Fair speculates it’s because he can’t have his usual 12 daily cans of Diet Coke (!!!). Food and drink aren’t allowed in the court room, and this is a criminal trial, so he has to be there and behave himself.

There’s something like forty-five grams of caffeine in the average can of diet soda; a dozen cans daily means he’s clearing at least 540g of caffeine each day he has them, and that’s assuming his *only* caffeine source is Diet Coke. He’s also known to use a type of cold medicine that is caffeinated (Snopes link because they talk ingredients).

According to the FDA, an adult should only have a max of 400mg caffeine/day, which you’d get from nine cans and a couple pieces of dark chocolate. They compare that to 3-4 cups of coffee, but that really depends on the size of coffee and brew.

Sensitivity depends on the individual. Everyone metabolizes it at a different rate. I can’t do 400mg/day. My heart goes *crazy* when I begin to approach that level of caffeine. Lately I’ve been keeping it to around 100mg/day (in black tea) in order to keep myself from having heart palpitations.

The point I’m getting at is that, yeah, losing access to his sodas could absolutely make him fall asleep in court. But I bet it feels amazing. Aside from the headaches, letting your body settle from stimulants is magic. Sleep feels restful, your heart is happy, your mood mellows. The dude needs a mellower mood.

Everyone loves Trump having a case of the sleepies. It’s a New Yorker cartoon. Colbert and Stewart each talked about it in their monologues last night, too. I’ll be shocked if we don’t see it on SNL too. Honestly? This monster is most endearing when he’s unconscious, so I get it.

~

Smithsonian Mag shares a scan inside of a full-term condor egg. The images are exquisite and stunning. What a beautiful little life form.

A lot can go wrong during hatching, which is why veterinarians who run California condor breeding programs in the United States keep a close eye on developing eggs. Several weeks ago, an egg being monitored by the breeding team at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance started to raise alarm bells—the chick, it seemed, had gotten into a contorted position.

To assess the situation—and the bird’s survival prospects—specialists placed the California condor egg in a computed tomography (CT) machine, revealing a detailed, three-dimensional view of what was happening inside.

Don’t worry; baby Emaay hatched successfully under the care of the biological parents and is doing well by all accounts.

~

FNAF2 is on its way. (Variety) No surprise there: the first one performed quite well in the box office. Blumhouse is smart with this one. They calculated that pleasing *only* hardcore FNAF fans would be enough to support the flick, and they were right. So they set the budget appropriately, wrote it for the fans and nobody else, and walked away with lots of bank.

I didn’t mind FNAF, though I wasn’t the audience. I still prefer Willy’s Wonderland though.

~

NASA is trying to figure out a good way to get samples back from the Marsian surface. (Ars Technica)

Their current plans don’t look viable after all, and the whole mission is at risk. Eleven billion dollars to only get samples back by 2040 is not, apparently, going to work for everyone involved.

The most recent iteration of the Mars Sample Return mission involves two launches. One would take place in 2030 with a European spacecraft that will orbit Mars and wait for the second mission—the responsibility of NASA—to depart Earth in 2035 with a Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL). The second launch would involve a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), the rocket necessary to launch samples off the red planet and into space.

The lander would deliver the MAV to the Martian surface, and the Perseverance rover, already on Mars, will deliver sealed tubes of rock and soil specimens into a container for the trip back to Earth. The MAV would then launch the material into orbit around Mars, where the European-built Earth Return Orbiter would rendezvous with the sample container and pick it up for the journey home.

These launches were previously scheduled to occur two years apart in the late 2020s, but those target dates are no longer attainable with the current plan and budget, officials said Monday.

So what are they gonna do? No really, what are they going to do? They’d love to get more ideas, and they’re reaching out to private companies for help.

As soon as Tuesday, NASA will release a solicitation for the private sector to propose ideas to bring back Perseverance’s samples. Companies with the best ideas will receive some NASA funding later this year to support 90-day studies, and these reports will inform agency leaders on how to proceed with the Mars Sample Return. NASA could be ready to make decisions on a new architecture by the end of the year.

“We are opening up the aperture and allowing industry to propose concepts,” said Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s science mission directorate. “Yes, we would be OK with a higher risk posture. I’m definitely looking at things that have high heritage, the kind of tried and true architectures and elements of architectures that maybe have worked in the past, different ways of doing the various elements, a smaller Mars Ascent Vehicle.”

~

The New York Review of Books talks about “Tom’s Men,” as in, Tom of Finland, an iconic gay artist of the 20th century. The author killed it with this article; descriptions of his work are as vivid as the illustrations themselves.

His pants are pulled down over his feet like a ruched satin shade. His hips are slung to one side in classic contrapposto, showing off the bounciest bubble butt you ever saw. His tiny waist is just glimpsed beneath the bottom of a sailor’s white shirt, which covers an improbably broad back that curves in a long “S” from neck to pelvis. His head, perched in profile as he looks over his right shoulder, has features of exaggerated, cartoonish masculinity: short straight nose, full pouting lips, strong jaw, pronounced chin, angular sideburns. His cap slides down over his forehead with an attitude of arrogant nonchalance as he revels in the pleasures of being beautiful and being seen. It’s so hypermasculine that it bends toward high femme, the pose and the voluptuousness recalling the Venus Callipyge—“Venus of the beautiful buttocks”—a Roman marble statue of the love goddess lifting her dress and allowing mortals to marvel at otherworldly perfection.

~

It kinda looks like a Netflix true crime documentary may have fabricated images of a real person using AI, according to Engadget. The image posted certainly does have AI hallmarks, though more information is certainly necessary, since this would be such a lurid use of the technology.

~

Another sign of a flagging free internet: The FCC is apparently cool with ISPs charging people more money for guaranteed high-speed gaming. Ars Technica explains why this is a problem.

I always find it fascinating how few (no?) ideas are truly original. We’re always building on some bits of knowledge some other human had somewhere else, at some other time, whether or not we’re aware of their distant contributions. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was preceded by this French dude’s similar theses a century earlier. (The Guardian)

In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.

Thing is, I bet that humans knew this here and there for quite a while. Any communities involved in multigenerational animal husbandry probably had a pretty good idea of how evolution would later be regarded. It just wasn’t organized or proven in a way that the later scientific community could recognize.

This just reminds me of a tangential story: When I was in high school, my biology teacher was *very* insistent on reminding us that evolution is only a THEORY and that theories can never become facts. (I grew up in a very religious white people town, but I truly didn’t understand how weird these sorts of interactions were until I reached adulthood.)

Scientific fact is directly observable, he said. If you drop a ball, it will fall to the ground. We observe gravity directly. The actions of gravity are a fact, and gravity as the cause remains a theory, or something like that. We really can observe evolution occurring on a small scale — like fruit flies, with their short generations — but his point was 1) flies aren’t greater animals (meaning humans are special, according to his religion), and 2) even observing the changes doesn’t mean that evolution is the cause. For all we know, it’s God.

I do appreciate the perspective I got from that time. I was really exposed to a lot of…stuff…that has not held up through my adulthood, but I value knowing how different people think.

~

Here’s a YouTube video of newborn baby pygmy slow lorises, widely* acknowledged as the cutest animal on the planet. Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute is lucky enough to be tending these sweet nuggets.

(*In my house.)

~

In the past, my life was saved by blood donations. It didn’t occur to me that there are “blood deserts” (like food deserts) where supply is unavailable. Drone delivery and autotransfusion are options, but don’t completely close the gaps in demand. (NPR)

~

Speaking of blood…

Hemolymph, aka insect blood, clots very quickly. (Ars Technica) Turns out it basically congeals and gets sucked back into the body to clog the hole. That’s so cool.

~

People rag on Madonna — mostly for aesthetic reasons — but she’s a beloved member of the queer community. She honored victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting at a recent concert. (Variety)

~

Bird flu is showing up in dairies in more American states. (NPR) Time to switch to ultra-pasteurized.

Also, NPR reports on a spike in measles.

~

Engadget talks about flying drones developed to attach themselves to existing power lines in order to recharge. Although I don’t know enough about the subject to say if it’s a good idea or not, it does seem clever to arrange a way for them to use existing infrastructure. An alternative mentioned is placing charging pads around cities. Current flight time is limited to forty-five minutes or so, which makes me think we’d need a lot of pads. But we already have power lines all over.

~

There’s Oscar buzz around Zendaya’s Challengers. (Variety) The cast has been looking tired on the PR circuit, but if they hope to land major noms, they’re going to have to keep at this a while. The Academy has a short memory. And you only win by campaigning. I hope they’re ready.

~

We’re getting a fourth Bridget Jones movie. (Vanity Fair) Given the book it’s based on, I’m not surprised Colin Firth hasn’t been cast. I’m not actually opposed to another movie in the series — I’m so easy to please, I loved the third one too — but I don’t really want anything to do with the plot at hand so I might not see it.

~

The Film Stage: Don Hertzfeldt and Ari Aster Collaborating on a “Big” Existential Horror Animation

Can’t wait to see anuses bleeding on the big screen!

~

Did you know many Renaissance portraits were multi-sided? (Smithsonian Magazine) I didn’t. These are actually a whole lot more interesting to me with the additional painting as context, as ambiguous as the context may seem out of its time.

~

Jonathon Majors has to do court-ordered domestic violence therapy rather than jail time. (Variety) My initial reaction was vengefully negative, but I sat with that a minute and realized…this is probably the most constructive sentencing. DV-specific therapy could actually change his behavior profoundly. And I am broadly anti-prison, but that means I need to also apply that philosophy to things that specifically revolt me, like DV. So yeah, this sounds right.

~

Quartz talks about “automation innovations” that were actually humans in disguise — what we call Mechanical Turks.

The Mechanical Turk refers to a fraudulent chess-playing machine from the year 1770. It appeared to be an automated machine that could play a competitive chess match against any human. The machine was touted around the world for decades, amazing crowds as the first-ever automaton. However, it was later revealed to be an elaborate hoax, where a master chess player was hiding inside the machine.

Even if the current AI movement isn’t operated by such Mechanical Turks, we do know that a lot of low-paid labor was employed in labeling data for use by algorithms, so there is some element of that at hand. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s more human labor involved than we realize.

~

We’ve found more frescoes in Pompeii! (WaPo)

The paintings recently discovered included references to figures from the legendary Trojan War between the early Greeks and the people of Troy in Western Anatolia around the 12th or 13th century B.C., which is featured in ancient Greek works such as the Iliad and Homer’s Odyssey, as well as Roman literature.

The recently discovered artworks include a depiction of the Greek legendary figures Helen of Troy and Paris, the son of the Trojan king who is identified in an inscription by his Greek name, Alexandros. The images also show Cassandra, a figure from Greek mythology who could predict the future, and the god Apollo, who cursed her and left her unable to prevent the capture of Troy.

~

Smithsonian Mag shared letters from a twenty-something in 18th century London, giving us a lil glimpse of his life.

In his handwritten letters, Browne described his new job training as a clerk to a lawyer, Richard Rowlandson. He complained about working long hours, copying legal documents from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. In one letter, he expressed frustration with his father’s decision to apprentice him to his employer for five years, rather than a shorter training period. “I have Lost the prime of my Youth,” he wrote.

Often, he asked his family for help, and “his concerns were not so different from those of today’s young people,” writes the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood. “Mainly: Please send money, everything is so expensive.”

Browne wrote that he needed money to pay rent—and to purchase stockings, breeches, wigs and other items he deemed necessary for his life in London. “Cloaths which [I] have now are but mean in Comparison [with] what they wear here,” he wrote in one letter.

I’ve been stretching my earlobe piercings back out. I was up to 0 gauge, but I was annoyed by the jewelry and removed it for a few years. At that point I assumed they would shrink somewhat. I found some old 6g plugs that still fit loosely, so I got some 4g tunnels. Those also fit. They kept falling out in bed, though — so I ordered 2g tunnels. And you know what? They fit! It seems my earlobes relaxed around them again. I might be able to get back to 0g without seeing a piercer and progress my way up to 00g. Onward, if I like.

0g is about the diameter of a pencil, which is a fun size. But I’m getting older which means I need to get weirder, and bigger holes in my body is cool. I’ve got three holes in my nose now, and three holes elsewhere on my body, and I’m trying to decide what’s next.

~

I’ve been dying to see Monkey Man since its first trailer (the unedited one with the great takedowns), but I want to see it even more learning that hijra are key to the movie. (Variety) Dev Patel says it’s a story for the marginalized, and thus must include hijra, who are an underclass of third-gender people in India (to oversimplify it).

~

The actress who portrayed The Unknown at the Glasgow Willy Wonka scam experience is getting more jobs, which is good. (Vanity Fair) One dude was behind the scammy bits; the employees were doing their best.

I think there’s a good chance The Unknown becomes an enduring cultural character. Imagine being the sixteen-year-old who originated that…thing.

~

Egypt invented taxation as we know it. (Smithsonian Mag) I actually just learned somewhat about Egyptian taxation from reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud with my 9yo. The mural he uses to describe sequential story told in art involves taxation of crops, anyway, and I don’t often think about taxation as a direct levy on assets rather than simply taking a percentage of currency.

The Smithsonian article goes into the whole thing in fascinating detail.

For most of its history, ancient Egypt levied taxes on goods, with officials collecting dues in the form of grain, textiles, labor, cattle and other commodities. The amount of taxes owed was often linked to agriculture, with a certain percentage of a field’s harvest earmarked for state-run granaries or administrative storage centers. Interestingly, taxes were adjusted for field productivity—a parallel to modern income tax brackets, with different categories established based on the amount of wealth incurred.

“Fields were taxed in different ways, and the rate was dependent on the individual field productivity and the fertility and quality of the soil,” says Moreno Garcia. “But the government was determining the base tax rate dependent on the height of the Nile.”

On Elephantine, an island in Upper Egypt, 19th-century archaeologists discovered a nilometer, a sprawling staircase used to measure the Nile’s flood levels. (Remnants of other nilometers can be found in the ancient city of Thmuis, on Rhoda Island and elsewhere in Egypt.) If the water rose above a marked line, it signaled flooded fields and a poor harvest; if it fell too low, that meant a drought and dying crops.

~

The movie adaptation of Nightbitch is coming out in December. (Variety) I am eager to see Amy Adams going hog on raw steak and pooping on a neighbor’s lawn. Once it’s streaming, of course. Monkey Man might get me out of the house to the theater, but very few movies call to me that way anymore.

~

The McDonald’s locations operated in Israel were donating food to the IDF. Apparently McDonald’s corporate didn’t like having such actions reflect on them when they weren’t the ones making the decisions (those locations are owned by a franchisee), so they’ve bought back all those McDonald’s. (NPR)

~

The Apple Vision Pro is now compatible with some 8BitDo controllers, and I still don’t have one. :’) (Engadget)

~

Denis Villeneuve is going ahead with Dune Messiah after all. (TSFKA Tor dot com) I feel lukewarm about it. Dune is kinda too interesting for Villeneuve? But I doubt they’d reach Messiah if it were done by someone who embraced its weirdness more viscerally.

As The Transmetropolitan Review notes:

Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, lived the happiest parts of his childhood in a failed socialist colony called Burley, located along the Salish Sea near the city of Tacoma, Washington. It was dreary and cold during the fall and winter, and back in the day, before Herbert was born, all the excitement was further down the sea in the anarchist Home Colony, a much more successful experiment in collective living. While the socialists of Burley struggled to replicate their small colony, Home grew bigger every year, even converting some of Burley’s socialists into anarchist defectors. […]

Make no mistake, Home housed some committed, dedicated, and fervent anarchists, and some of them weren’t just homesteaders like Frank Herbert’s family, they were anarchist homesteader militants who smuggled dynamite, fomented uprisings in the coal fields of Vancouver Island, sheltered fugitives, shot at private detectives during strikes, and called for the death of capitalism. Beyond this, these anarchists were directly implicated in the 1910 bombing of the ultra-reactionary and anti-labor Los Angeles Times building, given they helped hide the man who supplied the dynamite, the anarchist David Caplan.

Read the whole thing please, it’s a good one. Dune’s foundation comes from something strongly counter-cultural, opposed to empire in a real way that most people can’t relate to. Herbert was a deeply imperfect man. But it’s basically impossible to make a blockbuster — with the financing involved — that will be honest to its messaging.

In the end, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah serve up some of the oldest anarchist propaganda, not only by commenting on the corrupting influence of centralized power, but by spending nearly 1,000 pages to reaffirm one of anarchism’s oldest slogans: no one is fit to rule, and no one deserves to be a slave.

~

Dammit, George Santos just keeps making me laugh. (Vanity Fair)

Given that LaLota was one of Santos’s biggest GOP critics, most people assumed the decision to try to unseat a former colleague had to do with revenge. But according to Santos, that assumption could not be further from the truth. The real reason he’s running for the First? Because it would put him in the suburbs, where he could realize an apparently longtime wish to own chickens.

This dude belongs on a satire show like Veep, not in reality.

~

From Gizmodo via Quartz: NASA’s Voyager 1 probe has been glitching for months and we finally know why

NASA engineers pinpointed the cause behind the mission’s odd anomaly, and think they can help the interstellar probe make sense again.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending nonsensical data due to corrupted memory hardware in the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS).

The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.

What must I do to stop being so sleepy? I got blood work done recently and I seem to be fine. I’m just SO sleepy. All I wanna do is sleep.

~

I’ve wondered what topic Apple didn’t want Jon Stewart to discuss on his show. Turns out it was AI. (Variety) Here’s the Ars Technica version of the article, and here’s the Gizmodo version. Everyone’s talking about Jon Stewart talking about AI now!

He is anti-AI, and I recall Apple said they’re pivoting to AI development since quitting the Apple Car. We’ll see how that goes. I use a lot of Apple products, but I’ve been thinking about going full Luddite. Depending on their execution of AI, it could be what cuts me loose.

~

Psyche talks about the near-universal experience of seeing our loved ones after they die. I experienced this strongly after the death of my cat Poe, though I haven’t seen Annie. I grew up with my mom talking about visitations from family after their death. I find it a little disappointing how scientifically/rationally/reductively Psyche (and most other sources) talk about this phenomenon, since I think humans are irrational spiritual beings, and this is a pretty solid example of seeing ghosts.

~

NASA is looking for a company to design, build, and deliver a rover to the Moon that can be operated by astronauts under the extreme conditions present. (Ars Technica) I kinda want humans to leave the Moon alone tbh, but this is cool as heck anyway. I feel so conflicted as a SFF nerd who is also a curmudgeon.

Our beloved NASA is also working on developing a Lunar Standard Time (The Guardian), and my whole household is transitioning to this once it’s set. 😉

~

This NPR article about safer table saws is interesting to me, vaguely. Every time I’ve seen discussions on Reddit about these safety measures, I’ve also seen swarms of comments about how SawStop-like safeties are undesirable and make things *less* safe. So I’m just wondering…is that true? Is it popular sentiment among woodworkers? Or is this one of those weird things that has been a special interest for marketers/bots on Reddit?

~

The Guardian: Everyone in Japan will be called Sato by 2531 unless marriage law changed, says professor

I hardly think anyone needs to be concerned about married names in the 26th century (what do you think was the most common surname in the 16th century? did they use now-common surnames like we do?) but I still got a lil chuckle out of this article. Imagine Japan is like Barbieland. “Hello, Mr Sato! Hello, Mrs Sato!” everywhere you go.

~

Amazon dropped its “just walk out” no-cashier technology (Engadget) because, surprise surprise, it was reliant on Mechanical Turks and thus not cost effective. I wonder how many Mechanical Turks are involved in the whole AI movement.

~

Oklahoma really wants people to just get over the fact they’re killing imprisoned people so they can do it faster. (The Guardian)

~

Homebuying is only for families with six-figure incomes these days, I guess. (NPR) I bought my first house in 2010 for $120k, and my income was around $40k a year…maybe a tidge less. It sucks to think how quickly young people like my young self have been shut out. Something’s gotta give.

~

A clinical trial is attempting to grow new human livers out of lymph nodes. (Ars Technica) Even modest liver function (the article says 10-20%) could make a huge difference for people with liver disease.

We get closer to a Star Trek future all the time. Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney! indeed.

In the meantime, a dude in the USA received a pig kidney transplant and has gone home. (The Guardian) I really hope this works well for him.

~

Lawyers, Guns, & Money talks the excess deaths toll related to COVID.