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“Can you find the wolves in this picture?”
Killers of the Flower Moon directed by Martin Scorsese [Official Teaser Trailer ] [YouTube]
Based on David Grann’s broadly lauded best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon is set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror. Directed by Martin Scorsese and Screenplay by Eric Roth and Scorsese, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion.
‘drag Stalin’
Let 3’s decades-long expertise in creating challenging art makes ŠČ the hardest-working single letter in Eurovision history.
Initially, Let 3 were satirising communist prudishness and conformity in the last years of Yugoslavia. Images of their early performances show themes which are Let 3 trademarks to this day: huge moustaches, military headwear, and frequent male nudity. Youtuber Eurovision Histories walks us through the meaning of the song Mama Šč! (read the comments for more insights!)
The Cutest List to Argue Over
Cinnamoroll is currently in the lead in the 38th annual Sanrio Character Ranking, and was the reigning champion for the past three years. Will Cinnamoroll hold onto this position, or will current second place-holder Pompompurin take the crown? Perhaps there will be a dark horse victory from Gudetama or Aggretsuko? Voting is open until May 26, 5PM (Japan Standard Time).
Use Your Claws Luke
A new Engineer's Guide to Cats, on the subject of Cat Future Technology, with bonus reenactment of Star Wars with cats. A lot of other feline-focused film frivolity can be found on klusmanp's Youtube Page. (Engineer's Guide to Cats previously, again, also.)
maybe there’s room for a Black weirdo like me
The books of my life: Colson Whitehead
Pulitzer prize-winner Colson Whitehead on Ralph Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, and why he loves World War Z.
S[ub]lime
Culturally, an ambivalent relationship with the ambivalent slime persists. On the one hand, we view it as abject and rank—a sign of decay, death, rot, the feminine; indeed, Sartre famously despised it—but on the other, we find it exciting and amusing. from Creatures That Don’t Conform by Lucy Jones
Our first look at "Poor Things"
Alasdair Gray, who passed away in 2019, was and is one of Scotland's most prolific authors. Yet in spite of his lifetime of work, none of his novels have ever been adapted into a feature film until now. The teaser for "Poor Things", directed by Yorgo Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, has dropped.
"I tried to title this post for 20 minutes and failed"
Trigun Fan Account's Tweet Turns Queer Sci-Fi Novel Into An Amazon Bestseller. An enthusiastic tweet on Sunday from the account of one bigolas dickolas woIfwood now has the 2019 scifi novella This Is How You Lose The Time War sitting at #7 on Amazon's bestseller list. Co-author Amal El-Mohtar reacts and is interviewed. Co-author Max Gladstone says it feels like coming full circle. Bookriot: "There is something so delightful about this whole experience."
Exploring the 90's (and others!) 'literary canon'
Matt Daniels for the Pudding used Open Syllabus to explore what books from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are being assigned in college-level classes. It’s a fascinating look at a new “turn-of-the-century literary canon” pulling out the top ten titles for each decade, both fiction and nonfiction.
How does a book become a present-day classic, enthusiastically assigned by educators? Among the things I considered were: was it heavily awarded? Did it have an outsized impact on culture? Does it pertain to a topic that the next generation should know?
Golden orb spider captured eating microbat
Golden orb spider captured eating microbat in Far North Queensland. Megan Wright has a healthy respect for the spiders that live around her home north of Cairns, but admits being very excited — and horrified when she noticed a big golden orb spider eating a bat caught in its web.
I was afraid you were gonna get all public-domained for a while there
After a seven-year hiatus, Chris Onstad is writing Achewood again. Achewood—once Time Magazine's top graphic novel of 2007, despite being a webcomic—has also revamped its web site for the first time in approximately twenty years, to include convenient chronological links to its many character blogs (example). (While the webcomic portion of Achewood is its heart and soul, the bulk of its writing consists of stories which take place across and between eleven different blogs; until now, there has been no convenient way to follow the blogs in lockstep with the comics, or even combine the blogs and tie their various arcs together.)
Capital’s willing executioner
Ted Chiang writes on the probable implications of corporate A.I. adoption
“ If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? ”
The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. From Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector.
The sleeper has awakened
Dune 2 [Trailer][YouTube]
The saga continues as award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embarks on “Dune: Part Two,” the next chapter of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel Dune.
Like I Said Like I Said Like I Said Like I Said
The first music video from The Hives' first new album in more than a decade riffs on the first two Evil Dead films and is highly recommended for fans of garage/punk rock, horror iconography, and general awesomeness.
I didn't think the leopards would unionise at MY face-eating company
150 African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize at Landmark Nairobi Meeting:
More than 150 workers whose labor underpins the AI systems of Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT gathered in Nairobi on Monday and pledged to establish the first African Content Moderators Union, in a move that could have significant consequences for the businesses of some of the world’s biggest tech companies.
The current and former workers, all employed by third party outsourcing companies, have provided content moderation services for AI tools used by Meta, Bytedance, and OpenAI—the respective owners of Facebook, TikTok and the breakout AI chatbot ChatGPT. Despite the mental toll of the work, which has left many content moderators suffering from PTSD, their jobs are some of the lowest-paid in the global tech industry, with some workers earning as little as $1.50 per hour.
Sapphire & Steel
When I was 6 years old my mind was blown by sci-fi TV serial Sapphire and Steel, with its stories of inter-dimensional slippage, time-shuffling wonkiness, and not entirely logical plot resolution. Revisiting it 40 years later, I'm ready to be disappointed. But it's actually good. Worth watching just for the stars, Joanna Lumley as TV's most fashion-conscious time-manipulating psychic alien, and David McCallum as her permanently-scowling colleague. All episodes are on shoutfactorytv.com (US) and itv.com (UK). Previously.
Wisconsin Supreme Court election called for Janet Protasiewicz
Major news outlets predict Janet Protasiewicz will win Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election (CNN), "flipping majority control in liberals’ favor in what could be the most consequential election of the year with abortion access, election rules and more on the line."
The Future is a Dead Mall
Dan Olson (aka Folding Ideas) on Decentraland, the Metaverse, and the shitty grift at the center of the (meta)universe.
A long, excellent YouTube video that is also something of a spiritual sequel to Olson's Line Goes Up, also featured on the blue.
Through every transformation, you are only who you dream you are.
Tight, tight. A sharp flex, a crack, a sudden a wash of air, then—the scent of a guru upwind! Guru guru guru! Larva831’s eggy thoughts gushed away, its ejected cognitive fluids mixing confusedly with the ejected fluids of its 100012 hatching sibs. Obsolete embryonic ideas flowed under a dozen dozen dozen cracking shells, swirled through holes in the bottom of the nest, streamed dazzling out into the air above the great tree’s lower branches, hit soil, and dissolved. Larva Pupa Imago by Eric Schwitzgebel is a short story about love, personhood, and transformation. It's also about erotica for uplifted butterflies.
It's The Martini's World, We're Just Living In It
Though the classic Martini recipe is a simple one—only two ingredients in its most austere form—it has inspired more debate than any other over the proper ingredients (gin or vodka?), ratio (wet or dry?) and garnish (olive or a twist?). More than a century’s worth of fine-tuning has resulted in a deep library of both classic and contemporary iterations that run the full gamut of both style and flavor. Here are some of our favorites. from "Planet Martini" [Punch]
Metformin may help prevent Long COVID
"I don’t use the term “breakthrough” lightly." The latest Ground Truths from Eric Topol discusses a new randomized, placebo-controlled trial of metformin, with a 42% reduction of subsequent Long Covid in participants who received metformin compared to the placebo group.
“I did not come to bury wuxia, but to praise it.”
The History and Politics of Wuxia by Jeannette Ng [Tor]
“These are stories, after all, that are about outlaws and outcasts, existing outside of the conventional hierarchies of power. And they certainly do have plenty to say about these big universal themes of freedom, loyalty and justice. But this is also a genre that has been banned by multiple governments within living memory. Its development continues to happen in the shadows of fickle Chinese censorship and at the heart of it remains a certain defiant cultural and national pride intermingled with nostalgia and diasporic yearning. The vast majority of the most iconic wuxia texts are not written by Chinese authors living comfortably in China, but by a dreaming diaspora amid or in the aftermath of vast political turmoil. Which is all to say that the world of wuxia is fundamentally bound up with those hierarchies of power it seeks to reject. Much like there is more to superheroes than dorky names, love triangles, and broad universal ideals of justice, wuxia is grounded in the specific time and place of its creation.” [Bonus: Wiki, 30 Essential Wuxia Films, An Introduction to Wuxia Novels]
IBM BoozeBot™
"This is an IBM tape library robot. It’s designed to fetch, load, unload, and return tape media cartridges to the correct bay in large enterprise environments. One fateful ‘workend’, I made one serve drinks. It went back into prod on the Monday…" [A Mastodon thread]
You are not a parrot
And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.
…“intelligent” according to what definition? The three-stratum definition? Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences? The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale? Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
The Flask of Us
95% of the world's bourbon is produced in Kentucky. However, for years residents wondered about the ubiquitous strange dark sooty film that seemed to grow nearly everywhere statewide - was it soot or ash from chimneys? Pollution from another factory? Turns out that it's an infestation of Baudoinia compniacensis, otherwise known as "the whiskey fungus."
the tip line
"...the combined effects of these tipping elements on global temperatures are likely much smaller than the effects of our emissions choices over the next three centuries. In other words, they make climate impacts worse but don't cause runaway warming. [...] Overall, climate tipping elements are less a looming cliff after which climate change spirals out of control and cannot be stopped, and more like a slope that is hard to climb back up, where the severity of consequences is determined based on how much the future climate warms." Zeke Hausfather has a twitter thread on a new "massive review of climate-tipping elements" of which he is a coauthor: Abstract and paywalled paper here, earlier and unpaywalled version here.
I can't wait for you to operate
The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic
[ungated] - "The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin would be a century old if it hadn't fallen victim to Nazi ideology." (Magnus Hirschfeld -- and Li Shiu Tong -- previously: 1,2,3,4)
As a connoisseur of garbage, I feel right at home.
The Soul of the American Teen Can Be Found Next to the Sbarro
"The word is that the mall is dying: something about kids these days, something about online shopping, something about the food court’s legacy going the way of the three-camera sitcom and the middle class. In an effort that was part journalism, part exposure therapy, I put on my best “hello, fellow kids” regalia and lurked the food courts of Anchorage, Alaska; Tempe, Arizona; and Portland, Oregon, to find out what today’s mall teens had to say about it, if they even still existed at all. My question for teenagers and other youths across the West is simple: Is the mall food court still a cultural watering hole, or am I fucking old now?"
Marc Maron Happy Sad Confused
There's a point close to the end of Josh Horowitz's interview with Marc Maron for his Happy Sad Confused podcast, right around the one hour point, where over the course of about 45 seconds the entire gamut of human emotions from joy to grief flow like a tidal wave. This moment of transparency comes after a conversation about love and loss and life that is dark, hilarious, and ultimately affirming. Marc Maron talks FROM BLEAK TO DARK, TO LESLIE, WTF, AVATAR -- HAPPY SAD CONFUSED [1h3m]
Going Meta
Cory Doctorow on people who defend fraudsters online, beginning with a side trip to Google's sponsored ads and how malign actors take advantage of them.
Nice social media account, shame if something were to happen to it...
Man, Social Media Platforms Really Want Us To Start Paying, Huh?
"Twitter launched the $8-a-month Twitter Blue. Meta is launching a similar $12-a-month Meta Verified. YouTube already offers the $11.99-a-month YouTube Premium, which may start paywalling certain video resolutions soon... The reason this is happening is because the platforms that unbundled traditional media didn’t seem to anticipate that advertising would also unbundle. Though, I guess it should have been the logical conclusion. Advertising is about capturing the zeitgeist to grab people’s attention and these platforms fractured the zeitgeist and broke people’s attention spans. It might also just be that there is a certain size a website can be and perhaps Meta has reached it.
"
The Supreme Court loves qualified immunity.
In 2016 Anthony Novak decided to create a Parma, Ohio Police Department parody page on Facebook.
They tracked him down and jailed him for four days.
The alleged crime was the "use of a computer to disrupt, interrupt, or impair police services.”
He was acquitted at trial.
Novak sued, and the district court eventually granted the officers qualified immunity.
The Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal.
Well bless their poor little hearts
Why does the South have such ugly credit scores?
You may already know that airlines are really credit-card rewards companies with a side gig of flying planes. Economists S. Agarwal, A. Presbitero, A. Silva and C. Wix used credit card rewards programs to look more closely at the monetary redistribution that results from credit card rewards use: they showed that poorer users pay for those programs, while wealthier users benefit.
Agarwal et al. also noted a geographical distribution of credit that roughly follows the Mason-Dixon line. Andrew Van Dam of the WaPo's Department of Data then took a deeper dive into credit, debt, and health.
Brass Shinier Than Gloom
After almost five years, Gloomhaven has been knocked out of the #1 spot on BoardGameGeek (with some back-and-forth thanks to review-bombing drama). The new top game (as compiled from ratings by BGG users) is Brass: Birmingham, an Industrial Revolution economic simulation. Brass: Birmingham is just the eighth game in BGG history to reach #1, and the second sequel (after Pandemic: Legacy); the original Brass (now known as Brass: Lancashire) is the 20th highest-ranked game on BGG.
it’s nice when it’s nice I’m sure it’s super horrible when it’s horrible
I was trying to explain the plot of The Matrix to this 15-year-old once, and that the character I played was really fighting for what was real. And this young person was just like, “Who cares if it’s real?” People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art. It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the nonvalue. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us? from Keanu Will Never Surrender to the Machines [Wired]
The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in production
U.S. productivity jumped in the second quarter of 2020 as offices closed, and stayed at a heightened level through 2021.
Then, when companies started mandating a return to the office in early 2022, productivity dropped sharply in Q1 and Q2 of that year. Productivity recovered slightly in Q3 and Q4 as the productivity loss associated with the return to office mandate was absorbed by companies–but it never got back to the period when remote-capable employees worked from home.
All The Malevolence Of A Grade School Music Class In A Box
Introducing The Hellcorder - an unholy mashup of recorder, pipe organ, and guitar amp. (SLYT)
Owners should pay if houses stay empty, new alliance says
Owners should pay if houses stay empty, new alliance says, as push begins to address rent crisis. A new alliance of community organisations is pushing for a levy to be paid by owners if houses are not occupied, as a means of addressing Tasmania's rental crisis, pointing to Vancouver, Canada, as an example of a similar measure working.
Science fiction in the age of mechanical reproduction
Neil Clarke writes that his SFF magazine Clarkesworld has been flooded with AI-generated spam submissions in recent months. "I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are 'AI' spam or outline any of the data I have collected from these submissions. [...] What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month."
ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
Ted Chiang explains how ChatGPT is better understood as a lossy compression algorithm (New Yorker; archive link; Chiang previously).
Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material.
Friggin' finally
For the 20th anniversary of Dinosaur Comics, creator Ryan North posted a special giant-size update.
Life, liberty, security of the person, and Waterloo homeless encampments
A Canadian judge has denied a request to clear a homeless encampment, ruling that doing so went against the residents' Charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person because of the lack of shelter space in the region. The region has not indicated whether it will appeal. Full text of the ruling [PDF]. Resident of the encampment quoted in the ruling say they prefer it to the shelter system because "we respect each other, we consider each other family and we don’t touch each other’s stuff. I have privacy here and no one steals from me."