I’m not sure I buy the McDonald’s worker story, the whole narrative of the arrest seems really bizarre. (Not that I eat their shit food, one way or another.)

It’s from here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British-Library-Arundel-127_Le_trois_morts_et_les_trois_vifs.jpg#/media/File:British-Library-Arundel-127_Le_trois_morts_et_les_trois_vifs.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Dead_and_the_Three_Living

Also Dr Who. Our school had a kid who wore a big Tom Baker scarf and hat everyday. I hope he’s doing well.

Not from this year specifically (but I only saw it this year): The Polish hackers who uncovered the train manufacturer’s repair shenanigans.

• Part 1: Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains – Reverse engineering a train to analyze a suspicious malfunction (2023)
• Part 2: We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure (2024)

I was listening to a best-selling author’s recent audiobook, and the professional voice actress messed this one up. So you’re in good company. Really, who can we blame but the Greeks?

Mastodon.art has a small but nice community. AI art isn’t allowed. Someone could always lie, I guess, but the community is small enough that engagement bait isn’t really a thing, there’s much larger mastodon instances those people would probably use. They also aggressively defederate fascists.

Pre-COVID. I wonder what it’s like now. Anecdotes from people who work in education seem to say it was pretty devastating for child development, but it’s hard to tell if it’s above and beyond the perennial “this new generation is totally fucked” sentiment.

Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.

I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.

I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.

Huh, found a source from 1683 where a guy named Edward Tyson presented his research on the worm to the Royal Society, and he called it the “joynted worm”. He also refers to it by its Latin name Lumbricus latus which AFAIK just means “flat worm”, and Lumbricus teres Intestinalis which I’m guessing means “round worm of the intestine”.

This is actually a great paper because he’s arguing against spontaneous generation of insects from rotting meat by pointing out that these worms are only found within the bodies of living animals and therefore must be the product of these animals eating eggs or body segments of the worm.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1683.0020

OK, looks like at least as far back as this they were calling it “tape worm”. This just makes me wonder how old “tape” is:

…And the first is, it’s being flat; hence call’d Lumbricus Latus… and by some in English, the Tape-worm. -page 115

The first Underworld from 2003 is like this, but it’s painfully early 2000s. It’s from that era when every action movie was ripping of The Matrix as hard as possible.

One time I worked on something where a character threw a spear. For some reason they didn’t have a spear on set and asked the actor to just pretend. Then our instructions from the director were to make the actor twirl the spear before he threw it. Just because it looks super cool to twirl stuff, I guess.

Not only did the actor not pretend to twirl it, the shot was about 30 frames long (one second is 24 frames). So we had like 15 frames to make him twirl this giant spear, which the actor didn’t do. It was either make it look like dog shit or make a full, hero digital double and completely re-do the shot as 100% CGI, which there wasn’t time or budget for.

Yeah, it looked like dog shit. The whole project did.

Also failure of public works, like a train crash that kills 20 people, means that trains are bad. Clearly this program isn’t working and should be privatized. But 20 people killed daily on the highways, well those people are just idiots. Never mind the structural issues.

This message brought to you by the people who stand to benefit and also, by coincidence, own the newspapers.

I’m not a huge traveler, but I’ve been to the UK and parts of Europe. The Czech Republic was my favorite place, of the places I’ve been. Ironically never been to Canada, despite having some extended family there. I would love to go, and I love being in foreign places, but I hate getting there. Travel is awful, especially now.

I’ve lived in both urban and rural areas, and the fear is constant everywhere among people who have never traveled. Urban people are afraid that everyone in the country is a Deliverance KKK member, and rural people think the cities are a gang-infested war zone. What’s wild is that, unlike visiting other countries, they could just hop in the car and visit the city or countryside for a weekend. They are consuming lazy media tropes and taking them as fact.

Traveling, even just regional travel, would benefit a lot of people in the USA. We have way more in common with each other than with the oligarchs.

2004 would be a bit late but it kind of reminds me of MPlayer.com. Here’s a video. The interface kind of looked like a radio, it also featured the first voice-chat I ever used, but everyone was on modem so it was unusably terrible.

There’s actually enough channels like this that I think it qualifies as a genre. They kind of give me “tradwife” vibes so I don’t really watch them, but it seems like quite a few are in France for some reason (maybe some government program where you can get these properties cheaply).

If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

So I quickly gave myself diabetes…

The A. americanum (lonestar) tick larvae are insane this year. I blame the wet summer. At least it’s hot and dry now, and I can imagine them dying by the truckload!

Given the opacity, unaccountability and character of ICE it’s almost certain that ICE agents are taking bribes, running drugs and guns, doing shakedowns, pimping, and engaging in all kinds of organized crime shit. If you’re a cartel, who better to pay than the masked mercenary who’s above the law and doesn’t give a shit about anything but power and money? Easiest partnership ever. Hell, they’re probably bribing from the top down and getting entire local chapters on the payroll.