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MAGA man Mark Robinson wrote that Mein Kampf was a "good read" and "a real eye opener"
Rob Beschizza / 7:09 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Mark Robinson. Photo: Jwaugh3 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
"Mein Kampf is a good read," wrote Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, under his porn account username. "It's very informative and not at all what I thought it would be. It's a real eye opener." The Washington Post reports on the latest atrocity to be found in the voluminous writings of minisoldr, exposed by CNN as the online persona of the man the former president described as "better than Martin Luther King Jr."
"Mein Kampf is a good read," the user, dubbed "minisoldr," wrote in a thread seeking book recommendations. "It's very informative and not at all what I thought it would be. It's a real eye opener." The book, an autobiography by Hitler, casts Jews as an "eternal parasite."
Robinson, the Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina, has denied writing minisoldr's posts, and a spokesman, Mike Lonergan, reiterated that on Friday. But CNN pointed out many links between Robinson and minisoldr, which matches Robinson's username on public accounts and lists the user's full name as "mark robinson."
Sony blew $400m on a flop game it reportedly thought was the next Star Wars
Rob Beschizza / 6:52 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Sony's Concord (2023)
Colin Moriarty writes that he spoke extensively with someone who worked on Concord, an online Sony PlayStation game that flopped so badly last month it was shut down and all copies refunded within days of launch. According to his source, the game cost $400m to develop and market—which Wikipedia suggests makes it the most high-budget game ever—and at the heart of its problems was an internal culture of "toxic positivity" that made criticism impossible.
The segment is on Twitter, nine minutes long.
It was internally referred to as "The Future of PlayStation" with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of "toxic positivity" halted any negative feedback.
There seems to be something odd at the heart of the business, a supergiant black hole where "project management" should be. That's not to say there are no credible, qualified managers. Just that this tier of the organization fails in subtle ways that only get exposed when it's too late, leading to crunch and crisis. It gets crushed by something and becomes lubricant for other greater gears rather than the leadership it's supposed to be—always in these stories are mysterious wormholes into executive suites, hairline cracks spreading down to the workers, bizarre marketing cash fires. Is it the whole neoliberal workplace culture that comes with big investments, with "enterprise resource planning," getting snarled up with what it takes to make complex entertainment products? All that scoping and refactoring? Interesting that many of the most conspicuously unpleasant characters in online gamer culture are project managers who really want to be game designers or devs but never picked up the talent or the skills.
Polaris Dawn astronaut performs music from Star Wars with orchestras around the world
Gail Sherman / 6:10 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Music has been a part of human spaceflight since Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford used smuggled instruments aboard Apollo 7 to play "Jingle Bells." Chris Hadfield is arguably more famous for his cover of "Space Oddity" from the International Space Station than for being an astronaut. This week, as part of the Polaris Dawn mission, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis participated in the first spacewalk with a commercial crew. She then followed it up with the first violin solo in space.
On Friday, September 13, 2024 Polaris Dawn Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis, an accomplished musician and SpaceX engineer-turned-astronaut, performed "Rey's Theme" by composer John Williams on her custom-made violin while in orbit aboard the Dragon spacecraft, launching her campaign to raise support for music education back on Earth. Her music selection, fittingly, was a piece from the film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Gillis was joined in performance by youth musicians from around the world, all of them students in the international El Sistema network of organizations, specifically: the inaugural El Sistema program in Venezuela, The Boston String Academy in the United States, NEOJIBA in Brazil, Dream Orchestra in Sweden, Brass for Africa in Uganda, and BLUME Haiti.\
Whatever your thoughts are on private spaceflight, this is a thing of beauty: people from around the world playing music from Star Wars together with an astronaut in space.
About the collaboration, Gillis said:
Music has been a defining force in my life, thanks to the unwavering support of both my parents," said Polaris Dawn Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis. "My mother, a music teacher, championed my classical training on the violin, which has helped shape me into the engineer and astronaut I am today. The discipline, work ethic, and creativity fostered through music set me on the path that led to this extraordinary adventure into space. I've chosen to support El Sistema USA because they believe every child deserves access to the transformative power of music education, regardless of circumstance. If my performance moved you, I encourage you to make a donation to El Sistema USA, an organization that continues to inspire me every day."
El Sistema believes all children should have access to high-quality music education. Donations can be made at https://elsistemausa.org/support-el-sistema-usa-pd/
Previously: SpaceX Polaris Dawn is a historic and risky mission
Cards Against Humanity sues Elon Musk for $15 million
Gail Sherman / 5:47 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
In 2017, the makers of the game Cards Against Humanity launched a promotion in which 150,000 people paid $15 each to save America from "Injustice, lies, racism, the whole enchilada." The first thing they did was purchase land on the US/Mexico border and not build a wall on it. They also built a trebuchet and hired some eminent domain lawyers in case anyone else wanted to build a wall. Sadly, that is not the end of the story.
On a new page, the company made the following announcement:
Elon Musk's SpaceX was building some space thing nearby, and he figured he could just dump his shit all over our gorgeous plot of land without asking. After we caught him, SpaceX gave us a 12-hour ultimatum to accept a lowball offer for less than half our land's value. We said, "Go fuck yourself, Elon Musk. We'll see you in court."
The company is suing Elon Musk for $15 million in damages, promising to split the proceeds among the original subscribers if they win. However, they admit that this will in no way adequately compensate them for "the anguish they've suffered witnessing Elon Musk defile their once-verdant land."
They have included an example tweet for you to share on the platform formerly known as Twitter:
In 2017, 150k people paid Cards Against Humanity to protect a pristine plot of border land from Trump's racist wall. But then an even richer, more racist billionaire—@ElonMusk—stole their land and dumped his shit all over it. Fuck that! www.ElonOwesYou100Dollars.com #ElonOwesMe100Bucks
Previously: People on the US-Mexico border use $5 ladders to go over Trump's $15 billion wall
This shot of espresso costs $335
Popkin / 5:06 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Image: Kingmaya Studio / shutterstock.com
Coffee expert James Hoffman tried a $335 cup of espresso and reviewed the experience on his YouTube channel. This ridiculously expensive shot of espresso can be found in London at a coffee shop called "Shot". The espresso comes in a golden cup with a golden spoon.
Hoffman explains that from a taste perspective alone, it's impossible for a cup of coffee to be worth this much, and what he's paying for is the (absurd, IMO) experience of drinking a cup of coffee that costs over $300. He says the espresso is deeply flavorful with a fermented, acidic taste.
Is it worth it to buy an espresso that costs this much? Hoffman believes that this is a personal decision. For some, telling the tale of having drunk an espresso this expensive is worthwhile to them. Others would rather spend their money on reasonable things though, like food and rent. Each to their own.
See also: Delicious morning coffee routine (the felted version)
Rock in the House: house with embedded boulder just $2 a tour in Wisconsin
Popkin / 5:04 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Rock in the House. Screenshot: YouTube
The "Rock in the House" is a unique and bizarre tourist attraction located in Fountain City, Wisconsin. In 1995, a 55-ton boulder came loose from a nearby bluff and rolled directly into a house, crashing through the back wall and landing in the living room. Remarkably, no one was hurt, but the homeowners abandoned the property, and the house, along with the massive boulder, remains preserved as a curiosity for visitors.
This incident is reminiscent of another tragedy in 1901, when a smaller boulder killed a resident of a house located nearby. This area is prone to disasters like this, so visit with caution. The "Rock in the House" has been preserved as a historical landmark, standing as an odd reminder of nature's unpredictable force(Amusing Planet)(Discover Magic).
Visitors today can explore the house for only $2. It looks fascinating to see how the rock is embedded into the structure, making this a worthwhile stop for those interested in roadside wonders.
See also: Rock wizard create an impossible-looking stone cairn
Seevua's hilarious shirt cooling machine
Popkin / 4:00 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Photo: New Africa / Shutterstock
If the hot weather has left you in a sweaty situation with no solution, the inventor Seevua is here to help with their hilarious t-shirt (video) cooling machine. This device is meant to be worn underneath one's shirt, on the stomach, and is only slightly noticeable as it vigorously fans one's shirt in and out to keep it from becoming stuck to your skin with sweat.
This gadget seems like the key to walking around town on a summer's day with an extra confidence boost, knowing you're more demure and less sweaty than everyone else. As the device flaps away under your shirt, you'll probably get lots of stares from people who are jealous about your lack of sweat.
I'm ready to splurge on this fantastic invention. I haven't seen anyone else walking around with one of these yet, and I can't wait to be the coolest person in town.
See also: Here's why you shouldn't wipe off your sweat to cool down (video)
Nishimura Coffee's unique ice block coffee
Popkin / 3:50 am PT Sat Sep 21, 2024
Nishimura ice block coffee. Screenshot via Instagram
At Nishimura Coffee Shop in Kobe, Japan, you can order this special iced coffee for a unique experience. Instead of being filled with ice cubes, this delicious looking coffee is served inside of a giant, square ice cube. This elegant cafe was formed in 1948, and is known for its delicious tea, pastries, and now, its ice block coffee which began in 2022.
Apparently, using a giant block of ice for a cup keeps your coffee cold and strong for hours. "While this gimmick might seem like it's made for a generation of social media users, there is apparently a method to this madness. In fact, it's not just about the great pictures you can post on Instagram. The magic of using enormous blocks of ice like this, is that they actually melt quite slowly. Ice-cold coffee can be sipped out of the ice over the course of hours without getting warm or watered down (and without the cup melting away, of course) (Forget Your Iced Coffee, This Kobe Cafe Serves "Ice Coffee" | by JAPANKURU)."
The best part of this drink looks like the ice you can scrape from the sides of the cup, which forms into a tasty looking coffee slushy over time. This iced coffee is only available from July-August, and is a 12 min walk from Sannomiya station.
See also: Delicious morning coffee routine (the felted version)
Ted Cruz, falling behind in the polls, agrees to debate Dem challenger Colin Allred
Rob Beschizza / 4:56 pm PT Fri Sep 20, 2024
Allred, photographed by Ike Hayman in his official U.S. House portrait (public domain)
Texas Senator Ted Cruz likes to head out of state when the weather's cold, but his race for re-election is heating up now that his Democratic Party challenger, Colin Allred, is unexpectedly ahead of him in the opinion polls.
he survey, conducted by Morning Consult between September 9 and 18, showed Allred one point ahead of Cruz, on 45 percent to his 44 percent among 2,716 likely voters. His lead was within the poll's margin of error of +/-2 percentage points.
Cruz, the incumbent Texas Senator, has had a consistent but narrowing lead over his Democratic challenger in previous polls.
This is all well within the margin of error and you should be wary of news based on polls. That said, Morning Consult is a well-respected pollster and Cruz is uneasy enough to have finally agreed to debate Allred.
The debate is scheduled to take place Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. at WFAA-TV's studio in downtown Dallas. It will be moderated by political reporters Jason Whitely of WFAA and Gromer Jeffers, Jr., of The Dallas Morning News, and will air on broadcast and digital platforms around the state, according to WFAA.
Amazingly big cruise ships "stretched" to become absurdly massive
Gail Sherman / 4:45 pm PT Fri Sep 20, 2024
Carnival Cruise Line ship
Having recovered from COVID-era losses, the cruise industry is a $25 billion-a-year business. However, cruise lines are always looking for ways to make more money. More passengers = more money, but new ships can cost well over a billion dollars. They also take years to build and require crew training.
Enter the "stretch cruise ship." Constructed like stretch limos, these ships are cut in half and have a new prefab segment added in the middle.
For an average of around $80 million, and just a couple of months out of service, operators can chop an existing ship down the middle, slide in a new slice that's designed to fit perfectly, weld it together, and come away with enough extra premium cabins to pay off the whole operation within a few years.
That's not to mention the opportunity for a new paint job, bigger deck pools or engine upgrades while the ship's up on blocks – and HR only needs to train a small percentage of extra staff to add to an existing crew. The result: with a much smaller outlay and a negligible gap in service, operators can make an existing boat much more profitable.
This time-lapse video of the process is fascinating to watch, even if the end result is just a vessel capable of producing even more norovirus patients.
The precision required in the cutting process alone is staggering, never mind lining everything up precisely during reassembly.
New book looks back on things we lost since LOST premiered 20 years ago
Thom Dunn / 4:00 pm PT Fri Sep 20, 2024
LOST: Back To The Island is a new book from TV critics Emily St. James and Noel Murray that offers an insightful retrospective on one of the most iconic television shows of the 21st century so far: LOST, which first premiered almost exactly 20 years ago, on September 22, 2004.
While an excerpt from the book was published on The AV Club, I was much more drawn in by a recent essay shared via St. James's newsletter (one of my favorite pop culture-related newsletter, by the way; highly recommended). This passage in particular really stuck out to me:
My main beef with the whole "10-hour movie" mindset of today's prestige TV is that it generally doesn't allow the writers much room to make episodes into discrete units of entertainment, with their own arc, beats, and moments to make audiences sit up and pay closer attention. The lack of commercial breaks in the premium cable and subscription streaming eras also has a role in the decline of the "make each episode memorable" approach. Hooking and holding an audience was crucial on network television 20 years ago, so Lindelof and Cuse made sure that every Lost chapter had cliffhangers and payoffs and amusing little character moments sprinkled from beginning to end. Lost entertains. It's not just heavy chunks of plot, parceled out in 40-minute blocks (or enervating one-hour blocks, as so many series are today).
In fact, the reason I watched Lost obsessively every week when it originally aired wasn't just to find out what would happen next, but because I genuinely didn't know what any given episode would bring. Would Sayid be an international assassin? Would Sawyer become a trusted part of the Dharma Initiative? Lost's writers had all the time they needed to indulge in entertaining digressions like these. Because they had to fill that time, they designed the show in such a way that it basically required surprising little tangents.
This is something I think about quite often: there really was some value in the rigid structures of this sort of serialized storytelling. A-plots handed off to B-plots, there were built-in cliffhanger moments designed for commercial breaks—all of which may have been a utilitarian form forced on the show, sure, but all of which also kept it moving by necessity.
Later in that same essay, St. James and Murray also reflect on the lost (ba-dum-tisch) art of both making each episode stand on its own; and in having to fill the time. A typical LOST episode would focus on one character across two different timelines (or whatever). Ideally, these plots would have some sort of thematic resonance to one another. But combined, this turned each installment into a singular, cohesive unit. You could watch one, and get a complete experience. And if it sucked (which some of them certainly did, Nikki and Paolo*!), then all you had to do was wait until the next episode, and you might find something that you liked again.
There's a value to that episodic experience! Not only does it help the show appeal to a wide range of viewers, but it also forces you, as a viewer, to consider the bigger picture of the show, rather than your own immediate gratification. (Murray and St. James explain this much more articulately than I do.)
Similarly, Murray and St. James point out how some of the show's most memorable moments were a result of the need to fill time. You fell in love with these characters in part because you spent so much time with them—something that, again, gets lost in the modern 8-hour-movie-randomly-chopped-up-into-episodes format. Sure, that storytelling format is more direct and economical. But the sometimes the necessity of just producing content because you have to fill the time can force a story to make some other decisions that end up resonating more in the long-run. (Chris Claremont's original run on X-Men was similar in this regard.)
I think all of this contributes to the fact that so many people still have such strong feelings about LOST. Granted, some of that is disappointment and anger; I definitely have friends who committed so much of their lives to the show that they were never going to get the satisfaction that they hoped for by the end.** There are also people are still hung up on the fucking polar bears*** because they're idiots, but there's only so much you can do for those poor fools. But overall, there is something to be said about the fact that, well, they don't make 'em (TV shows) like they used to.
LOST: Back to the Island: The Complete Critical Companion to The Classic TV Series [Emily St. James and Noel Murray / Abrams Books]
Emily St. James and Noel Murray head Back To The Island in first book excerpt [Danette Chavez / The AV Club]
What we miss when we miss Lost [Emily St. James / Episodes]
*Just kidding, the Nikki and Paolo episode was a brilliant piece of a meta-commentary. I loved it.
**I crammed the first 5 seasons in over about two months of time, then watched the final season live every week with a group of deeply invested friends. As a result, I feel largely good about the show! Nothing felt dragged out to me! But I will never forget the tension in the air on the night of the finale (not least of which because Somerville lost power halfway through…).
***They were brought there by the fucking Dharma Initiative to use in their various experiments, it really wasn't that hard to figure out.
First polar bear spotted in Iceland since 2016. Police shot and killed it.
Allan Rose Hill / 2:57 pm PT Fri Sep 20, 2024
image: MuhammadHanif1/Shutterstock
A polar bear was spotted in a remote village on the northwest tip of Iceland, the first one seen in the country since 2016. Police shot and killed it.
"It's not something we like to do," Westfjords police chief Helgi Jensson said. "In this case … the bear was very close to a summer house. There was an old woman in there."
Apparently the woman spotted the animal digging in her garbage and, quite frightened, called her daughter in Reykjavik to summon help. So the cops arrived and dispatched the young bear.
Polar bears are protected in Iceland but apparently it's OK to kill them if they may be a threat to humans or livestock. There have only been 600 recorded sightings there in more than 1,000 years.
From The Guardian:
Although attacks by polar bears on humans are extremely rare, a study in Wildlife Society Bulletin in 2017 said that the loss of sea ice from global warming has led more hungry bears to land, creating a greater chance of conflicts with humans and increasing the risk to both.
Of 73 documented attacks by polar bears from 1870 to 2014 in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States — which killed 20 people and injured 63 — 15 occurred in the final five years of that period.
The bear shot on Thursday was the first one seen in the country since 2016. Sightings are relatively rare, with only 600 recorded in Iceland since the ninth century.
Previously:
• Polar bears occupy abandoned Russian weather station
• Penguins visit the Polar Bears at the St. Louis Zoo
• 'And f*ck polar bears in particular.' — the Trump administration, basically
Creepy creature captured on Texas trail camera could be Chupcabra
Allan Rose Hill / 12:44 pm PT Fri Sep 20, 2024
image: JM-MEDIA/Shutterstock
Michael "Dumas" Demel enjoys looking at photos taken by his trail cameras in rural Dubina, Texas.
"I have three different cameras at three different hunting areas – they catch coyote, deer, bobcats, rabbits, raccoons, foxes," he said.
Recently though, Demels spotted an animal he couldn't easily identify. Nor could anyone else. See for yourself below.
"I showed it to neighbours, family and friends," Demel said. "I got everything from a skin-walker, a monkey, a chupacabra, an alien. The craziest was a skin-walker – I had to look up what that even is."
As Pen News explains, a skin-walker is "described by the Navajo as a witch with the ability to disguise themselves as an animal."
Even the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department couldn't come up with an an answer.
"I reached out to our mammologist and due to the quality of the image a positive identification of the animal is not possible," said a spokesperson.
Aha! They didn't deny that it could be a skin-walker, chupacabra, or alien!
(via Coast to Coast)