links, kid-with-strep edition
This collection started at the beginning of December, so . . . it's been a while. But the Pip is home with strep and he & I were up for two hours in the middle of the night, meaning I have time now and not enough brain to do anything else.
(I'm trying to group stuff from the same outlet together, so that if it's got paywalls people can ration clicks.)
I went down the rabbit hole of "well-known callers to New York City late night sports radio," thanks to Friends at the Table. Over at the NYT, there's an obituary for Doris Bauer, a.k.a. "Doris From Rego Park," and a profile of Miriam Stone, a.k.a. "Miriam from Forest Hills." (The SI story about Miriam going to her first Islanders game, courtesy of the team, is a nice anecdote told in a condescendingly ableist way.)
More from the NYT:
A profile of Ken Liu, with particular emphasis on his translation work and the complications involved therein.
On colleges adding and dropping football programs; I hadn't known that Northeastern dropped football in 2009, ten years after I graduated.
It Seemed Like a Popular Chat App. It’s Secretly a Spy Tool. "ToTok, an Emirati messaging app that has been downloaded to millions of phones, is the latest escalation of a digital arms race."
Somewhat relatedly: Twitter thread on fooling an apartment's facial recognition system with a selfie.
And the website Which Face Is Real?; I got much better at it once I figured out that the main thing is to look at the background, but I do get fooled now and then. (Content note for . . . occasional body horror, I guess.)
That was via the Washington Post, specifically an article titled Dating apps need women. Advertisers need diversity. AI companies offer a solution: Fake people. Here's more from the Post:
I had no idea that ballpoint pen manufacture was so technically demanding.
I was surprised to see someone playing with a bunch of tiny rare-earth magnets recently, because I thought they'd been banned. Here's the explaination, in an article titled Number of children swallowing dangerous magnets surges as industry largely polices itself. (Also, I used to work for the Consumer Product Safety Commissioner quoted in the article, way back in the day. Hi, Elliot!)
Finally, here's an article on an attempt to create North America’s first indoor, year-round, real-snow, real-slope ski and snowboard experience. It's going to be 58F tomorrow, when SteelyKid is supposed to have a downhill skiing lesson, so yeah, I see the appeal.
More vaguely tech-adjacent stuff:
We replaced our very old all-in-one printer-fax-scanner with just a printer recently; I was perfectly happy to give up the fax machine, but I thought we might need a scanner still, until I discovered that phone apps have taken over for scanners.
I tried playing AI Dungeon 2, a neural net-powered text adventure game, but my desktop couldn't handle the prior iteration and I haven't had time to try the revamp. Regardless, this article about it by Janelle Shane is great. (Also, I liked her book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, though its structure was a bit odd.)
The New Yorker on The Age of Instagram Face: How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look.
Fandom and entertainment things, loosely speaking:
I loved this article by Emmet Asher-Perrin at Tor.com: I Made Binders Full of Star Wars Stuff as a Teen, While the Prequels Were Coming Out. I Just Found Them.
The time for enjoying negative reviews of the Cats movie has likely passed; nevertheless, I would like to link to Vox's breakdown of its bad adaptation decisions for posterity. (Nb. the part of the URL with words is just "cats-review-movie-musical-adaptation-bad.")
Vulture has an article about Common Sense Media and "the irreconcilable gap between my critic brain and my parent brain" that it provokes. (Via Reading the End.)
I had a note in here that was just "Courtney Milan nonsense," back when it first broke—meaning, I should say, Romance Writers of America's treatment of Milan, not Milan engaging in nonsense. (Publishers Weekly has what looks like a thoroughly-linked overview of everything through yesterday, if you'd like to catch up.) I particularly want to link to Milan's Twitter thread of what concrete steps she is going to take to "stop accruing debt" to Black women in the genre, because I think it's really valuable and important.
I decided I wasn't going to see The Rise of Skywalker after the first spoiler-free reviews came out and they sent me looking for actual spoilers; but I hadn't heard a particularly not-for-me bit until Abigail Nussbaum's review, second-to-last paragraph. Urgh.
At Public Books (a digital magazine I hadn't encountered previously), an essay on Isaac Asimov's legacy of groping many, many women.
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brownbetty helpfully posts, "So maybe you’re like, what are all these Chinese language canon fandoms that are popping up? Maybe you’ve heard of Guardian or Nirvana in Fire or The Untamed." I was hand-"sold" the webnovel that is the source of The Untamed some months ago and have not yet read it, but I fully intend to, honest! Rolling Stone goes to Midwest FurFest and asks, Will Furries Ever Go Mainstream?
I read this back when it came out, but now that it's awards season, I saw it linked again: The Wild Story of How Mary Steenburgen Wrote the Best Original Movie Song of the Year, namely "Glasgow (No Place Like Home)" from Wild Rose. (Though the headline is inaccurate, she co-wrote it.)
Miscellany, more or less?
At Eater, A Conversation With the Team That Made Bread With Ancient Egyptian Yeast. To be fair, they candidly admit that they aren't sure that the yeast dated all the way from the Middle Kingdom, because they don't have enough samples yet, but what they've done so far is very interesting.
Ask a Manager says, accurately, that this is the best office holiday party date story of all time.
The heists in this article feel, mechanically, much more Parker than Dortmunder (except no violence or threats of), which is why I find it so fascinating: The Rise and Fall of an All-Star Crew of Jewel Thieves at the Atlantic.
The Far Side has an official website now, with a daily selection of comics! (I just wish it had an RSS feed.)
Via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the women in that sword wives viral picture are now on Twitter at
fancy_foxtrot, and they have cute dogs.
Finally, stuff from Atlas Obscura:
An amazing house in Alaska, which just . . . keeps going up.
Pyritized trilobites. Shiny!
Precariously balanced rocks and why they're scientifically important.
New research on Easter Island's Monoliths: "the findings point to continuity and resilience, despite cultural and demographic rupture."
And I think that's more than enough for now.
+1 (thumbs-up, I see you, etc.)?