Aussies taste-test the spicy ramen that’s too hot for Denmark. Come for the excellent packaging! (NB: contact the Poison Line if children show “acute symptoms”.)

Decision Trees

Cars that run on trees.

Records that run on trees.

The billions wasted on Brexit border controls. A whole campaign of both main parties carefully avoiding any mention of this stuff is going to be hard to take.

Event Horizon

The battle for attention.

Recyclable wind turbine blades made of wood.

It’s harder to guess the time and location of old photos than it looks.

Guess who’s back.

Venezuela loses its last glacier.

Plunging into a black hole.

Grim to see the flack this photographer got for complaining about being ripped off by another artist. Just because he’s a painter and she isn’t doesn’t make it okay. It wasn’t okay when Roy Lichtenstein did it, either, even though I loved his comics-copying pop art when I first encountered it.

13 May 2024

Pink and Pretty Green

Heaven. Such a simple video, to such dramatic effect.

When do we stop finding new music? Not yet. (See immediately above.)

Working class bands can’t afford to tour.

Death and/or Destruction

How bad movie remasters happen.

How Disney lost the technology to do much better than green screen.

A common plastic additive is especially toxic for kids with autism and ADHD.

One possible reason Neanderthals went extinct.

The Jewish doctors who secretly documented the effects of Nazi starvation policies.

The new science of death.

21 April 2024

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.

The story of Girls Aloud’s What Will the Neighbours Say?

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.

3 March 2024

Documentation

We document our whole lives online, but is it even worth it anymore? A 2024 article about Insta and TikTok referencing a 2012 article about Facebook talking about things bloggers were wondering about in 2001.

No one likes hacks and oh God, we do care. “We’ve spent the past decade with our knickers in a twist because we collectively find it hard to believe that we may just be part of the last generation of our kind.”

Hope for Russia has died with Navalny, Putin’s most formidable opponent (archived and archived). Someone I follow on social media linked to the speech that Navalny’s daughter Daria gave on his behalf when he was awarded the 2021 Sakharov Prize, two months before Putin invaded (the rest of) Ukraine. It’s worth reading.

18 February 2024

Why Are Humans Not Deer?

Entartete Links

3x Spicy