Manual Instructions
I asked DALL-E to show me “a step-by-step tutorial on how to draw hands”. Explains a lot.
Getting Done by Brexit
Today was the Day For Rejoin, with modest events held around the UK. It’s a start, but it’s going to be a long road back. I wouldn’t expect us back in the Single Market before the election after next, and the EU itself, who knows. But I can still remember getting a mad-looking flyer in the 2005 election from some bunch of no-hopers called UKIP, and look what they achieved.
Ship of Fools
Farewell Karl Wallinger, gone too soon at the age of 66. I left some thoughts on his albums in the comments about “She’s the One” at Popular. (Blimey, that was a decade ago… is it like today?)
The story of Air’s Moon Safari.
State of the Artless
By now, the whole world has heard about Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow (archived), or as the page title has it, “Willy Choclate Experience”, which sounds like something quite different and not at all for the weans. That mangled English is in keeping with the AI-generated graphics promising “a pasadise of sweet teats”, “enigemic sounds” and “ukxepcted twits”, which is the usual xepctation in the uk these days.
Malthusian Nightmare
Harry Harrison’s classic dystopia Make Room! Make Room!, written from the vantage point of a world of 3.4 billion in 1966, predicted a world of seven billion people by 1999. He was only a billion over, or twelve years too early, depending which way you look at it. (He overestimated the rate of US growth, though. The book ended with a Times Square billboard on new year’s eve announcing that the US had reached 344 million citizens. The chances are it’ll reach that figure this year.)
Chasing Butterflies
America’s 1% have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90%.
The unique rhetoric of Donald Trump. (Fortunately, this is a professor of rhetoric speaking about him—no need to listen to him.)
Hunter Biden has given House Republicans the rebuttal they didn’t want (archived).
The bottomless financial insanity of the Rwanda scheme.
The neglected history of the state of Israel.
Chinese influencers are paying huge fines to escape livestream contracts.
How Google is killing independent review sites (indirectly, as it’s more a case of big media publishers gaming Google to crowd out the sites that are bothering to test and evaluate stuff).
How scientists saved lives by predicting the Iceland eruption.
Building schools in Burkina Faso that stay cool in 40°C.
Ocean temperatures are off the charts.
The unauthorized comic adventures of Tom Bombadil in 26 one-page instalments.