Wow. I’ve really done fifty of these, huh? (More than that, really — i didn’t start numbering them
until i was already a good few in.) Well, uh… here’s to fifty more.
Internet Roadtrip! Think of it like
Twitch Plays Pokémon for Google Street View. Last i followed it, the chat’s plan was to
make its way to Canada no matter what, and it appears they’re now balls-deep into Nova Scotia.
Godspeed.
Heavyweight.cc: “All of the gravitas, none of the fees”.
“Unparalleled misalignments”: pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words
in the other. For example: father figure and dad bod, or
mass extinction and weight loss.
Happy pride month to the
g0ys
— that’s G-zero-Y, a Brazilian
subculture of men who are attracted to men, but spur anal sex and don’t consider themselves gay
or bisexual. Good for them.
I didn’t know i needed
T. rex–scented perfume until now.
The makers describe it as “leather”, “unconventional”, and “woody”.
“The Homeromanteion was a text used between
the second and fourth centuries to provide automatic oracular answers to questions. Three dice
are cast to generate one of 216 possible numbers, each referring to a line selected from Homer’s
Odyssey or Iliad.” In other words: Xanthe-bait of the highest order. Try it today!
By now, you’ve probably heard the breathless news that they’ve brought dire wolves back from the
dead. And, sure, maybe technically they’re just regular wolves genetically engineered
to match the dire-wolf phenotype.1
But that’s still such a cool achievement that i can’t bring myself to be a spoilsport about it,
and neither should you. Anyway:
Time has the cuter photos of the wolves, and
the New Yorker goes more in depth on the people behind it.
The events that had excited the world were unknown here. The Lykovs did not know any
famous names and had heard only vaguely about the past war. When in recalling the “first
world war” with Karp Osipovich the geologists engaged him in conversation about the last
one, he shook his head: “What is this, a second time, and always the Germans. A curse on
Peter. He flirted with them. That is so.”
When Subject 1’s cup of unadulterated was half empty, he grabbed his water bottle and
poured the remainder into his clear glass coffee cup. He looks at it and then puts his
hand up because He Needs An Adult. He said with concern, “I added water but it didn’t
change color.” We all wandered over to peek into the dark heart of his mug. Even diluted
to 50% of the original strength, it is still as black, oily, and potentially lethal as a
tar pit.
“Again, in a dispute with Cicero,
Metellus Nepos asked repeatedly ‘Who is your father?’ ‘In your case,’ said Cicero, ‘your mother
has made the answer to this question rather difficult.’”
I would like to give a shoutout to the Don Q Inn, a truly
audaciously themed motel in Wisconsin.
Oh, and whilst i’m here, Lords of Misrule has begun rolling out its
entries for the Saturnalia season. Do check the first one out
should you have the time.
Machine-learning-generated Minecraft is a
constantly-shifting immaterial nightmare where any action is but a suggestion and object
permanence is anathema. In other words: close enough, welcome back,
LSD: Dream Emulator.
Alex Garland’s Annihilation is nominally a horror film.1
Team of scientists goes into an evil forest, gets picked off one by one with cool body horror
effects, blonde final girl makes it out and is irreversibly traumatised, movie ends, many such
cases.2
But i’ve never seen it that way.
Might i just be a contrarian? Certainly, the biosphere our characters enter is cruel, but i think
it’s a useful exercise to consider the situation from its perspective. The government is on their
Gods-know-how-manyth expedition into the Shimmer at this point, and up until now, it’s all been
military men. Cripes, if i were a sentient self-regulating ecosystem and all these feds started
probing around my internals because they want to kill me, i’d develop an immune response too.
The world beyond the Shimmer is beautiful beyond description. It is a place where the sky glistens
in iridescent3
waves, where every sort of plant grows from every sort of bush and beast, and where death is just
one step in a beautiful cycle of life and rebirth.4
It blurs the line between not just the species but kingdoms of life — flora, fauna, and funga all
mingling and merging together equally under one roof. Barring the terrifying human–bear hybrids,
that’s a world i’d like to live in.
Plus, it seems willing to learn. In the ending “fight”
(cue the noise), allegorical for the obvious as the
visuals may be, the alien throws not a single punch. It’s learning by doing, mimicking every move
Lena makes, enough to turn into a rudimentary facsimile of her — and even after its destruction, the
ending glimmer in her and her husband’s eyes makes clear a part of the Shimmer’s essence is here to
say. I say that’s for the better.
P.S. Here’s some stuff i’ve been listening to recently (sorted from
“bleep bloop” to “strum strum”):
Bowling Green, a park
in New York where, during the revolution, a statue of George III was taken down and decorative
crowns on the fences were sawn off — the marks of which are still visible today!
The death of the magazine, and quality writing with it, is one of the sadder trends of the internet age. They can pry
Empire and Private Eye from my cold, dead hands.
