Katsushika Hokusai’s wood block print of a gigantic wave frothing before Mount Fuji, which he made in his seventies, is so beloved and influential that the scholar Christine Guth has devoted a whole book to it. Less attention has been paid to the beguiling illustrations he crafted, also while in his seventies, for the series
Hyaku Monogatari [
One Hundred Ghost Stories] (ca. 1830). We aren’t sure why the project never reached its probable goal of a century of pictures but the five that were completed are a dark delight. In the prints Hokusai directs his attention away from the Japanese landscapes he was most famous for depicting, inwards towards a realm of vengeful ghosts and demonic cannibals.
Its time to join the war on drugs, on the side of drugs
That’s not all, there’s more
idk how to do a proper image i.d. but it’s a screenshot from a google search result that says “In a study published in Psychopharmacology, researchers gave 18 people the drug propranolol and 18 people a placebo and found that the propranolol group scored significantly lower on the Implicit Attitude Test into subconscious racial bias – a standard test for testing subconscious racial attitudes”
and then the headline of the article published through the University of Oxford that says “Drug ‘reduces implicit racial bias’ study suggests”
Anyway, you can treat racism with a calms-you-down drug, apparently
It wouldn’t surprise me — or for that matter, the Andys — if this group of people were to create spinoff get-togethers from connections made at XOXO; it’s a tightly knit group. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Darius, like his talk asks, ‘What’s next? What are we going to do next?’” McMillan says. He doesn’t have an answer, and he doesn’t expect to be responsible for whatever it is. “That is important to think about, and answering that question in the not-too-distant future will be important.”
Antediluvian is a short animated film in commemorative homage to Classic Paleoart and the earliest Paleontologists. Exactly 200 years ago was the first dinosaur formally described.
The thing about the philosophy of mathematics is that there’s no articulable position so absurd that some influential mathematician hasn’t genuinely held to it. You 100% cannot troll these people; you could walk up to a mathematician and say “I’m a radical finitist, I reject the existence of all numbers larger than 1”, and not only would that turn out to be a real thing, some maniac has worked out how to construct set theory under its constraints.
When we drop a document—a PDF, say—into an LLM’s context window, the document has a kind of gravity. It pulls and pushes the model toward certain ideas contained in the text, reshaping its context landscape and responses based on the content.
Because I’m so sword and sorcery pilled, the word that comes to mind is that
Knowledge Objects are a kind of
Talisman–
objects imbued with specific powers and properties that can be intentionally wielded to amplify the will of its user.
By proving Pythagoras’ theorem using trigonometry, but without using the theorem itself, the two young women overcame a failure of logic known as circular reasoning. Trigonometry is a branch of mathematics that lays out how the sides, lengths and angles in a triangle are related, and as such, the discipline often includes expressions of the Pythagorean theorem. But Jackson and Johnson managed to prove the theorem using a result of trigonometry called the Law of Sines, dodging circular reasoning.
A 2,000-Year-Old Inscription Honoring an Ancient Wrestler Found in Turkey
The inscription is entirely intact, making it the first of its kind discovered in the region.
An inscription honoring the ancient wrestler Kaikilianos has been found in the ancient Turkish port city of Anemurium.
Anemurium is a 600 acres-wide archaeological district, close to the modern city of Anamur. The city dates back to the first century B.C.E when it was founded by the Phoenicians. Anemurium was inhabited consistently until the 7th century C.E as part of the Roman and then Byzantine Empires. The port city was a major settlement, complete with grand public baths, churches, and theaters.
Its position on the southern coast of Turkey made it an important city for trade in and out of Asia and Europe, across both of which Turkey has territory. Excavations have been undertaken in Anemurium since 2018 and the site is one of the region’s most popular tourist attractions.
The 13-line inscription about the wrestler, which was found complete and intact measuring 120 cm (47 inches) by 50 cm (19 inches) and weighing half a ton, is believed to be 2,000 years old. The condition of the inscription makes it the first discovery of its kind for the region. The stone was found in the Harbor Bath where last year a Roman period statue was found. Tekocak said “Just like last year, the Harbor Bath has provided us with significant discoveries.” The discovery suggests that the city was important as more than just a maritime trade centre.
The inscription praises Kaikilianos for having won the second edition of a wrestling competition held in the city every five years. Anemurium may have been a key location for sports in the region, with a palaestra—an ancient wrestling school—among its ruins which would have offered training to ancient athletes. Tekocak posited that “Olympic-level competitions” could have been taking place in the area, saying that the inscription marks a “significant development for us and offers new insights into the athletic culture of ancient Anemurium.”
The inscription is carved into what researchers believe may have been the base of a statue of the athlete, made in honor of the ancient wrestler. Pehlivan said that the wrestling competition won by Kaikilianos is evidence of the vibrancy of the period in the city, and that “awarding athletes who placed in these competitions highlights the value placed on sports.”
The inscription, made in ancient Greek script, gave details about the wrestling competition, even including the name of its organizer. Tekocak told IHA News: “We learned that someone named ‘Flavianus’ organized a competition every five years in his name. In the second of these competitions, ‘Kaikilianos’ won the adult category in wrestling. This athlete not only won a prize but was so significant that an inscription was made in his honor. A statue of the athlete likely once stood atop this inscription, perhaps this athlete competed in other events and won more awards elsewhere”.
This discovery comes after a summer of major archaeological finds in Turkey including huge megaliths, unique millefiori glass panels, and a bronze-age shopping list.
One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.
if I make and post an insanely detailed powerpoint on the twenty different equations I run mentally during casual conversation to make it flow better, everyone has to say that it’s sexy and cool and not weird at all
remember, everyone promised to be cool! also disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer assume I said all the things you’d say to be like “i know human interaction is complicated, i know some of what i listed here would be very annoying to some people,” and all that
When the Racetrac chain of convenience stores was deciding whether to install electric vehicle chargers, project lead Rushi Patel started with a blank Excel sheet and a lot of questions. Did the financials make sense? Where is the best to install them? What features should they have? The answers to questions like these could go a long way toward establishing an economic argument for building out America’s public EV charging infrastructure.
“We found our guests using new types of fuels, like electrons, and we wanted to be with them as part of that journey,” said Patel, the diversified energy manager at Metroplex Energy, a subsidiary of Racetrac. But he was clear that “it’s important to have an offer that does make money.”
Patel slowly started to populate his spreadsheet in 2021, filling cells with EV adoption rates, utility prices, construction costs and a range of other metrics. He also took the company’s executives on a two-hour tour of charging spots in Atlanta, where Racetrac is based. One was tucked behind a shopping plaza, the other was deep within the bowels of a mall garage. It was clear to them that Racetrac could do better.
Two years later, Racetrac installed its first Level 3 fast charger in Oxford, Alabama — complete with the company’s logo and a canopy to shade people from the sun as they pump electrons. It has since opened seven more in three states. So far, he said, “[the business model] is holding up pretty well.”
Those eight chargers are among the 61,000 that blanket the country, a figure that has more than doubled since 2022. The increase comes as mounting evidence shows EV charging stations can be a boon to businesses, and not only by selling electricity.
A recent study in the journal Nature Communications looked at chargers in California and found that, pre-pandemic, businesses saw an average annual boost of $1,500 when at least one of the devices stood nearby. Another paper examined Tesla Supercharger installations nationally and saw they brought a 4 percent increase in visitors to a business. The effect was particularly pronounced if the chargers were within 500 feet, and if it was the first one in the area. This boon is due to the fact that it can take 30 minutes or more to fully charge an EV, giving drivers plenty of time to shop.
“The places that tend to get the biggest bump, is the place that aligns with how long it takes you to charge your car,” said Gordon Burtch, an author of the paper and a professor of information systems at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “Sit-down restaurants aren’t benefiting as much as fast-food restaurants.”
In case you need it for your D&D games or siege actions— here’s what the ballistic trajectory of a flaming pumpkin fired out of a trebuchet looks like.
The world’s biggest decarbonization challenge comes not from cars, planes, or power plants, but from the highly polluting heavy industries at the heart of modern society.
New data from the Rhodium Group shows that, worldwide, no sector emits more planet-warming carbon dioxide than industry. That fact is not projected to change in the decades to come.
Cement, steel, petrochemicals, and various other mass-produced industrial metals and materials, from aluminum to glass, are ubiquitous.
They also make up an enormous and rising share of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
In 2022, the industrial sector accounted for 31 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, Rhodium forecasts that the industrial sector could emit as much CO2 equivalent as the power, transportation, and building sectors combined.
The biggest driver of industrial emissions is oil and gas production. The manufacturing of cement and other non-metallic minerals is the next-biggest contributor, followed by steel and iron production.
Emissions from oil and gas production mostly stem from the enormous amount of “fugitive” methane that escapes into the atmosphere: 80 percent of the sector’s emissions take this form.
In cement production, there are two key sources of emissions: high-heat, gas-fired kilns and the limestone used as an ingredient in Portland cement, which releases CO2 when heated up. Steelmaking emissions mainly come from the use of coal-fired blast furnaces to make iron.
Many of these industrial sectors have historically been described as “hard-to-decarbonize,” but in recent years experts have pushed back on that label as new pathways to cleaning up heavy industry have emerged or been proven out.
Rhodium, for its part, sees the oil and gas industry’s fugitive methane problem as solvable thanks to “cost-effective mitigation solutions that exist today,” the report notes. Plus, if global fossil-fuel consumption falls due to the rise of clean energy, heat pumps, and EVs, those emissions will follow suit.
The report also sees a solid pathway for the steelmaking sector to become less carbon-intensive by increasing both the use of electric arc furnaces, which use electricity to recycle scrap steel, as well as an alternative, coal-free ironmaking process called direct reduction, which can be fueled by fossil gas or hydrogen.
The research firm is less optimistic about cement emissions in the near term, citing a lack of mature technologies. Major cement producers and startups are working on different techniques to chip away at emissions, and companies are also devising ways to produce low-carbon Portland cement, but the industry is still far from the wholesale transformation needed to radically reduce emissions.
we’ll end up designing our own maze - but for real here was Japanese style. the stands included were important because they had to account for earthquakes
man. People get so upset when you call things social constructs. Thinking that if you say something is a social construct that means it’s fake and unnatural, and following that, that that means it’s bad. Something being a social construct means that it’s socially constructed. That’s it.
Money is a social construct. Weekends are a social construct. Vegetables are a social construct.
That doesn’t mean it’s okay if my paycheck is withheld or my rent is late. Doesn’t mean I don’t luxuriate in sleeping in on Saturday. Doesn’t mean the nutrients in tomatoes or spinach aren’t good for you.
What it means is that the way we think about things is socially constructed, and could be constructed a different way. Why do we base our society around money? What does value mean outside of money? What is “value”? The way we construct it isn’t the only possible way.
Why is a week a cycle of seven days, and five of those days are for working and two of those days are for resting? Could we organize our time differently? Should we? What would that look like? Other cultures don’t/didn’t have seven-day weeks with a five on-two off cycle. It’s not inevitable. It’s historically and culturally specific.
“Fruit” has a scientific definition but “vegetable” does not. Many parts of plants are culinarily defined as vegetables. Fruits (eggplant, avocado, tomato), stems (celery, asparagus), leaves (kale, lettuce), roots (carrots, potatoes, turnips)… all of these are culturally categorized as vegetables. And nutrition advice is based on this cultural categorization. Is a mushroom a vegetable? It’s not even a plant! Why do we categorize it this way? Why isn’t wheat or oats considered vegetables, but corn is, except when it isn’t? Could we categorize our plant-based food other ways?
Calling these social constructs doesn’t mean they’re bad or unimportant. It just calls attention to the fact that they aren’t inevitable. That they could be constructed in different ways, and that is worth thinking about, and thinking about the value we get in constructing things the way we do.
Gender is a social construct.
Romance is a social construct.
They are based on feelings, desires, and experiences, but how we name and categorize and express and act on them are fully culturally constructed. Other cultures do and have constructed these concepts in other ways. You can like the way we do it now. You can find it stifling. But the way we do it now is not the only, inevitable, inherent,
real way. It could be done other ways, organized and categorized and conceptualized in other ways. And that’s not a bad thing either.
it really is funny that schmidhuber seems to think that all the AI research that will ever be done was completed in the years 1987-1991, and that everything else is just reruns
The oscillator is still half baked and I’ve got some debugging I need to do on that front, but it is playing well with the midi to CV and the LPG, so that’s good news.
It’s about as lofi as possible, and I badly need some envelopes, but it is making bleeps and bloops!
Au where Goncharov and Andrey survive everything, grow old together and sit on a street all day somewhere in the south of Europe
This is my favorite Goncharov post so far because:
1. The concept of an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE for a movie that DOESN’T EXIST is sending me into another dimension.
2. Despite appearing nonsensical, we of course are living in a world where the established Canon of Goncharov is that they do not survive everything and grow old together.
3. Of fucking course Tumblr would imagine a movie with two characters with intense homoerotic subtext, kill them violently with their love unfulfilled, and THEN create AU FAN ART WHERE THE LOVE IS FULFILLED.
And all of it fucking slaps I love this so much
Thank you for the great addition! I’m so glad that people get my joke hehe
I really like how many of the world’s most iconic structures and places are just right next to some of the most mundane stuff imaginable, for example
Stonehenge
Is right next to a busy road
The Pyramids of Giza
Are at the outskirts of Cairo
Niagara Falls
Are part of the town of the same name
And Agrippa’s Pantheon
Is crammed inside downtown Rome
It just so interesting to notice.
I lived in Nîmes for three years, and the mundane feeling I got whenever I would walk from my apartment, by the Roman coloseum in the city which was 2000+ years old, and continue with my life because it was just sort of there still surprises me when I think about it.
This post is just that feeling put into words and pictures.
I loved walking into York and turning the corner to see the cathedral rising up, the heart of the city, as it was designed to be.
It’s a reminder that history doesn’t exist in a vacuum, only in books and museums and stock photos. It’s a fallen tree covered in new growth.
What always gets me is Ford’s theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot and the house across the street where he died are next to a Hard Rock Cafe and a Waffle Shop respectively
A year ago i would’ve thought that this couldn’t be true because how would they benefit from implanting spyware in aid.. but Israel already made Lebanese pagers explode
“One of the PL community questions that has been bugging me for a long time is what is and what isn’t a programming language […] the way we construct what is a programming language is social, groups decide what is in and out […] If we want to study this phenomenon, we cannot do that in the realm of PL itself, you will need theories about how social constructs work, and that is where feminism can help!”
Frans Francken the Younger,
Chamber of Art and Curiosities, 1636. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Unicorn horns, mermaid skeletons, taxidermied animals, preserved plants, clocks, scientific instruments, celestial globes: These were the contents of the Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, that became fashionable throughout royal and aristocratic homes across Europe in the Renaissance and Baroque periods—a time in history when man aspired to know everything as the effects of worldwide exploration and scientific experimentation became more accessible.
Today, we use the term loosely to describe any fascinating or idiosyncratic accumulation of objects secreted away in boxes or behind closed doors. The Wunderkammer’s original definition in the Renaissance was more specific. It signified a diverse, carefully constructed collection of both art and natural and man-made oddities that embodied the era’s thirst for exploration and knowledge, and laid the groundwork for museums as we know them today.
Domenico Remps,
Cabinet of Curiosities, ca. 1690. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Directly translated as “wonder chamber,” the word “Wunderkammer” first appeared in the mid-1500s, when Johannes Müller and Count Froben Christoph included it in their 1564–66 tome chronicling the lives of the noble Zimmern family. Simultaneously, in 1565, Samuel Van Quiccheberg penned what’s considered to be the inaugural guide to collecting, preservation, and display; he based the text on his experience as the scientific and artistic adviser to the Duke of Bavaria, whose Wunderkammer he helped amass.
According to Quiccheberg, their contents fell under a variety categories like artificialia, man-made antiquities and artworks;naturalia, plants, animals, and other items from nature;scientifica, scientific instruments; exotica, objects from distant lands; and mirabilia, a bucket term for other marvels that spark wonder.
Plucked from many corners of the globe, these objectsrepresented a vast swath of art, science, and mysticism—what Quiccheberg called a “theater of the world.” In the words of contemporary scholar Patrick Mauriès, the Wunderkammer attempted to capture “all knowledge, the whole cosmos arranged on shelves.” Some were as small as cabinet, others as vast as labyrinth of large rooms.
A Collection, 1619.
Frans Francken the Younger
“The Golden Cabinet. Royal Museum at the Rockox House” at KMSKA at the Museum Rockox House, Antwerp (2015)
While ferreting away strange and wondrous objects “had been part of human evolution since time immeasurable,” as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Wolfram Koeppe has pointed out, this process of collecting flourished during the Renaissance. The 13th-century invention of the compass and subsequent enhancements in cartography sparked an explosive period of exploration and global trade in the 1500s and 1600s. In this “Age of Exploration,” leaders across Italy, Spain, and England sent explorers around the globe to search for new territories and a deeper knowledge of the world.
At the same time, science became a defined discipline that sought to answer big questions about the earth, the heavens, and the human body. While the Catholic Church attempted to prohibit scientific research—a threat to the theories put forth in biblical texts—volumes detailing medical discoveries and the structure of the cosmos were being published in droves. Similarly, artists like Leonardo da Vinci eschewed religious subject matter in favor of representing the natural world and accurate human anatomy.
Wunderkammer resulted from this voracious period of travel, colonization, and scientific and artistic development as a tool to explore and contemplate this growing cache of knowledge from the comfort of one’s own home. In his Naples abode, Italian aristocrat and apothecarian Ferrante Imperato assembled a dense, legendary Wunderkammer said to have boasted as many as 35,000 plant, animal, and mineral specimens.
Ferrante was also one of the first to depict a cabinet of curiosities, in the frontispiece of the 1599 catalogue of his collection, Dell’historia natural.The woodcut shows four pantalooned men surrounded by all manner of curiosities, carefully arranged in an intricate honeycomb of drawers, shelves, and display cases. The contents spill onto the ceiling, where a menagerie of stuffed fish, salamanders, and seashells are pinned strategically around what looks like his prized possession: a massive taxidermied alligator.
Renaissance Mortar, North Italian, probably Turin, ca 1560.
Unknown
Kunstkammer Georg Laue
Collections like these operated as an ordered microcosm of the wider world, as well as a platform for people of the Renaissance to satisfy their craving for wonder-inducing experiences. The Wunderkammer was not “an end in itself so much as a source of endless beginnings,” historian Earle Havens wrote, “a cabinet-sized microcosm of the endless, divinely created macrocosm whose wonders never cease.”
Most Wunderkammer, though, weren’t meant to be purely scientific—they were also places to explore personal tastes, indulge mysticism, and demonstrate power. Beyond objects extracted directly from nature, typical cabinets of curiosity contained sculptures, paintings, books, coins, medallions, precious gems, maps, and scientific instruments.
They also housed objects representing mysticism and the occult: stones said to be magical; horns supposedly belonging to unicorns; enchanted creatures meant to be mandrakes and mermaids (made by sewing together the torso of a monkey and the tail of a fish). “Every object offered an opportunity to tell a story about an epic adventure or, more often, to fabricate one,” wrote art historian Giovanni Aloi.
Wunderkammer II, 1998.
Erik Desmazières
Childs Gallery
The flexibility of the Wunderkammer to toggle between nature and art, between the real and the imagined, allowed collectors to present their own versions of the world, sometimes to their political advantage. Royal cabinets of curiosity were often situated near parade rooms, where they could be flaunted when important visitors—and rivals—came to call.
The breadth of a collection signified its owner’s intelligence, wealth, taste, and business prowess. “Standing at the center of this mini-universe and pointing at the objects to disclose their deepest secrets, collectors felt a sense of ease and mastery over a world that most often appeared too big, too confusing, and too inhospitable,” Aloi continued.
Emperor Rudolf II was known to possess eclectic collecting tastes, to say the least. If you had secured an invitation to his opulent Prague Castle in the late 1500s, you might have been treated to a tour of his cache of treasures, which contained everything from magical stones, celestial globes, and astrolabes to masterpieces by the likes of Albrecht Dürer, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Titian. Rudolf II’s trove was renowned throughout Europe, hailed as the era’s most comprehensive and wondrous Wunderkammer.
Memento Mori Painting, Nuremberg-ca 1650.
Daniel Preisler
Kunstkammer Georg Laue
Gerhard Emmoser, Celestial globe with clockwork, 1579. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rudolf II showed off his treasures on a regular basis as a means of exercising soft power, but he also spent countless hours within it, poring over the world and its wonders. His multi-room cabinet of wonders, containing both natural oddities and artistic masterpieces, not only represented his own passions and power, but also “the broader scientific and artistic interests of the court,” as scholar Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has noted.
The emperor’s heaping—albeit organized—Wunderkammer harnessed the tastes and cultural proclivities of his time. Based on personal tastes and the desire to harness and concentrate knowledge, this collection and other Wunderkammer went on to influence how both private and public collections would be organized in the future. But while the Wunderkammer made way for the encyclopedic collections of institutions like the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, they also emphasized a myopic European, moneyed perspective, which has only begun to be reassessed in the last several decades.
This is a water-seal stoneware crock. The design is ancient.
It is, essentially, a large ceramic vessel that you put vegetables and sometimes brine into. To prevent spoilage, you place those ceramic weights on top of whatever food is in the crock, and that keeps them weighted down, below the level of the water. Because fermentation creates gases, most crocks have a “water groove” in them. The lid sits in the groove, which allows air to escape but not come in. Because fermentation creates gas, the interior of the crock is positive-pressure, and because the gas created is almost entirely carbon dioxide, it’s a low-oxygen environment that additionally helps prevent spoilage.
And all this would be pointless without lactobacillus, the bacteria that chomp down on the vegetables you put into the crock. They’re anaerobic, which means totally fine without oxygen, and they produce an environment that’s inhospitable to most other organisms. The main things they produce are CO2, which means no oxygen for other bacteria, and lactic acid, which makes the fermented thing sour and also decreases the pH low enough that many other bacteria cannot survive. They tolerate high levels of salt, which kill yet more competitor bacteria. It ends up being a
really really good way to keep food from going off.
Our ancestors figured this out thousands of years ago without knowing what bacteria were. This general ceramic design has been in use around the world in virtually every place that had ceramics, salt, and too much cabbage or cucumbers that was going to rot if they didn’t do something about it. It’s thousands of years old, so old that it gets hard to interpret the evidence of the ceramics.
And I have crocks like this in my kitchen, where I make my own ferments, and I always think about how beautiful and elegant it all is, and how this was probably invented hundreds of times as people converged on something that Just Works.
you can always chase down WHY “some scientists think”.
The scientist will either be like “i have in previous tests inserted first a balloon this same size, and then a clay ball this same size into my mouth, both without issue, and i therefore am confident this orange will fit” or they might be like “well i’ve had my mouth my whole life and it just really seems like this whole orange will fit in there without any problems” and after a little experience in this area you’ll be able to get a feel for which scientist thoughts are duly scientific and which are just, a person who is a scientist has had a thought.
the interesting ones are where someone is like, “i have found some evidence that such and such is true” and other scientists say, “that evidence is not good enough to convince me, here’s why” and then you get to look at the first person’s evidence, and read why the second person doesn’t accept it as proof, and then sort of make up your own mind what you think the answer probably is based on that – but you have to be willing to admit you were wrong if further evidence is found that proves things that direction.
Like, not long ago, some scientists were like “we think we’ve possibly invalidated a bunch of MRI scans of living brains that some scientists thought might accurately determine things like where creativity happens etc” and then you go and read the reason they think that is they’ve gotten the exact same range of results doing the exact same scans but instead of a living person’s brain they scanned a dead salmon… and then you can say to yourself, “yeah, if they think that the previous results aren’t valid because they did the same experiment with a dead fish instead of a live person and got those same results, then i think they’re probably right” but you still have to respect the fact that the sample size is, at this point, way too small to make unequivocal statements
‘King’ Charles is in Australia and has just had the end of his speech interrupted by Senator Lidia Thorpe who shouted “You are not our King, this is not your land” and demanded he apologise for the atrocities the British empire committed in Australia.
“…You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us — our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist. This is not your land. This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king. Fuck the colony. Fuck the colony. Fuck the colony.”
instead of
Pretentioussay
Stylistically rich or abstract instead of
Too slow say
Meditative or methodical pacing instead of
No plot say
Character-driven or atmospheric instead of
Weird for the sake of being weird say
Avant-garde or experimental Instead of
Nonsensical say
Surreal or open to interpretation instead of
Depressing say
Emotionally intense or contemplative
In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths’ record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.
Among his other activities, [Steve Wozniak] collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits. But for most of Woz’s life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges with three matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like 221-1111.
Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Woz begin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.
The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.
Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, “Hey, what are you doing with that?” The receiver was snatched up and slammed down.
Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: “Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.”
The children of America were making their first prank call.
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