My interests: Journalism, Politics, International Relations, Urbanism
1 - The New Yorker is the best magazine in the English-speaking world. They employ very good writers. If you like deep insightful long stories, try to get it.
2 - Without The Guardian, British democracy is utterly fucked. The Brits just don’t know it. Most UK papers are owned by shady characters such as Jonathan Harmsworth. The Brits even have a paper (The Independent) owned by a Russian mobster (Evgueni Lebedev). The Guardian’s non-profit structure gives it more freedom that most UK papers. They often investigate stories the rest of the UK press just won’t touch: Paradise Papers, Panama Papers, Cameron’s tax evasion, etc…
3 - The two best newspapers in France are Le Monde and Mediapart, hands down. Mediapart is a non-profit. Le Monde journalists have special rights and can’t be removed by shareholders. These 2 newspapers are more independent than the rest of the french press.
4 - The Financial Times is the favorite newspaper of elites worldwide. CEOs. Billionaires. Millionaires. Presidents. Prime Ministers. Everyone reads it. And honestly, it’s very solid. The information is always extremely reliable. The FT is also the most expensive newspaper on the planet. But they sometimes publish free stories.
5 - The editorial section of the Wall Street Journal is directly controlled by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The WSJ is the jewel of his global media empire. Fox News and the New York Post are for influencing the masses. WSJ editorials actually allow him to have influence over US high income readers.
6 - If you read WSJ editorials, Rupert Murdoch’s ideas are very simple. Labor unions must be crushed. Corporate concentration is good. Netanyahu is a brave man. US military spending is good. Unions should be restricted by tough laws. Environmental rules are bad. Slash taxes on large corporations. Of course, he doesn’t write it openly. But this what virtually most of the WSJ editorial content boils down to.
7 - Many talented reporters work for the Wall Street Journal and end up deeply ashamed of it. It feels like prostitution. Many would much rather work for The Financial Times, New York Times or ProPublica. Rupert Murdoch employs great reporters at the Wall Street Journal simply because he needs them to acquire credibility in order to influence readers through his WSJ editorials.
8 - The best coverage of Silicon Valley is an online newspaper called The Information. If you want to know what Meta or Microsoft are really up to, read The Information. Most of their readers are wealthy investors and tech executives who seek exclusive information.
9 - When it comes to television and radio, public media (PBS, BBC, NPR, CBC) is often more professional, more serious, than corporate media. PBS or CBC make outstanding documentaries. Stuff US/Canadian private networks just wouldn’t make.
10 - Generally speaking, journalism that you pay for is better than journalism you don’t pay for. This is a general rule, not a law of physics. There are exceptions. The Daily Mail has subscribers. It’s largely non-sense. I wouldn’t trust anything written in it. ProPublica is free. They do quality investigations.
11 - AIPAC is powerful. But there is limit to their power. There was an intense AIPAC campaign to stop the President Obama from signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. He defeated them .
12 - Most Trump tweets aren’t written by Donald Trump. They are written by a dude named Dan Scavino. He is behind 90% of his tweets. Most americans have no clue who Dan Scavino is. They wouldn’t know him if they met him in the supermarket.
13 - Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite. It’s simple. The elite can take control of the oil fields, the gas fields, the mines. Just sell ressources. Shoot protesters. No need to invest in anything else. It’s much better to live a country with limited resources (Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland). Lack of resources force the elites to invest in science and education. The most unlucky country in Africa is Congo. It’s full of diamonds, forests, oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, rare earth. So Congo has suffered horribly because of that. In fact, it’s still being looted.
14 - If you want to transform an authoritarian regime into a democracy from within, the number 1 tool you need are powerful labor unions. Powerful unions can basically go on a general solidarity strike and shut down an entire economy.
15 - Everything Barack Obama predicted would happen if the US didn’t sign the nuclear agreement with Iran actually happened. Trump left the agreement. Iran started enriching nuclear fuel. Then a major war happened.
16 - Many Middle Easterners are very tribal. Most Israelis see themselves as Jewish first, Israeli second. Syrian druzes think of themselves as Druze first, Syrian second. Many lebanese Shias see themselves as Shia first, Lebanese a distant second. And so on. Their loyalty often lies more to their tribe than to the State they actually live in.
17 - Imperialism was bad. But imperialism didn’t actually cause instability in the Middle East. The most stable period was actually Ottoman Imperialism. For 5 centuries there was commerce and peace. Then, there was the British/French empire. Apart from some episodes of violence, it was stable. But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
18 - Saying “we don’t speak with terrorists” is completely dumb. Many terrorist organizations later became peaceful. Many terrorist leaders later became statesmen. It’s wrong to say “We can’t make any peace with those who hands are stained with blood”. Get out of here with that non-sense. If you truly want peace, seeking only decent leaders means you aren’t going to find anyone at all. Criminals make peace. This isn’t Scandinavia.
19 - The most ugly, polluted and noisy cities in the world have one thing in common. They have cars everywhere. The best cities in the world (Singapore, Geneva, Copenhaguen) all have one thing in common. They try to aggressively reduce car ownership. If you want to improve the cities, you need to increase parking costs. Pedestrianize streets. Build bike lanes. The hard part is the politics. Car owners see the short term pain. They never see the long term gains.
What are things you know because of your personal interests that most people have no idea about ?
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Fuck it. Believe me or don’t.
I made a documentary that got C&Dd by Netflix. It was about Orson Welles and the final movie he made in '71 that didn’t get finished until 2021 (by Netflix).
In researching Welles, I discovered a rediculous amount of information about him that is not at all publically known.
His children?
One daughter lives in New York. Another in Sedona.
But there’s also the two he had out of wedlock in secret. (Both of which have documentaries about them)
And then I discovered his fifth child.
Sasha Welles. Who he had with his mistress Oja Kodar during the making of his last film. The kid is almost 100% his, but might not be Kodar’s as he basically had sex with her whole family.
But that’s not what this comment is about.
It’s about the movie he filmed but never finished editing, “The Otherside of the Wind” and starred Oja Kodar.
It’s now on Netflix, and while it did receive some nice critical reviews. Very few people came to look at it as close as I have. (And the others that have kinda sorta agree with what I’m about to say).
The closest (for the most part) was Peter Bogdonavich, who said the movie was a perfect book end for Welles career - a movie that matched his creativity with Citizen Kane.
But, the movie was actually much more than that. Much much more. (At least imo.)
Orson wanted this film to be finished more than anything. He even begged Peter Bognonovich to finish it in case he died. Something Bogdonavich actually tried to do well into the 2000’s!
The reason he wanted it finished? No one knows. But I have a theory, and that’s what my doc was about.
The theory:
Orson Welles created The Otherside of the Wind as a sequel / spiritual successor to Citizen Kane. Except instead of a story about a media magnate based off William Randolph Hearst, The Otherside of the Wind is about a filmmaker based off of Orson Welles.
Basically, Orson Welles made an autobiography of himself and his struggles to be the first Independant filmmaker in the style of his masterpiece Citizen Kane, and then died before telling anyone.
You can watch it on Netflix right now too. The Otherside of the Wind.
So. Every interview he gives about the movie. Literally every single one (I’ve seen 13 or so) he lies about the meaning of what the “Wind” in the title of the film means. In one interview, it’s about the duality of Men and Women. In another, it’s about art and commerce. In another, it just sounds good.
He was an artistic guy. And was known to tell lies and grandiose stories for attention. But at the end of his career, Orson was literally operating on another level. Want to know who coined the term “visual essay?” It was Orson Welles in his documentary F is for Fake. Where he basically makes the first YouTube video (in 1974) about art forgery and art. Which is what F is for Fake is about: faking art.
He has a monologue in that movie. One about a beautiful Church in England built in the old eclesiastic style. And one built by an anonymous architect over 20 years. He wonders at the thought of making something so grand, and never putting your name on it. Something those who appreciate architecture would love, even if they’re biased against the architect.
At this point in his career, Orson was making commercials and getting drunk while doing it. All to raise funds to finish his films. But despite being THE GUY who made Citizen Kane, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, etc, he just got an endless raft of shit from Hollywood for being in these commercials. In one of his many lunches with Bogdanovich, he muses about removing his name from his next movie, so Hollywood might appreciate it as a film instead of crapping on it because of his name.
So he makes Wind. People point out the story of the filmmaker in it kinda resembles him. He denies it. Eventually saying it’s inspired by him. And being a Welles movie, it also has a unique meta narrative. A movie within a movie. As it’s literally about a filmmaker trying to finish his last film, but he tragically passes before it’s completed. Which is what ended up literally happening to Welles and this movie. He died before he could make it. So his unfinished film due to his passing was about a filmmaker having an unfinished film due to his passing.
Great coincidence. And one that attracted me to this story. But it COULD just be a coincidence right? Maybe Otherside just HAPPENS to parralel Welles life through Kanes narrative structure.
Except what I discovered about the title of the film. He never gave a straight answer about it. And that bothered me. Anytime he played coy, it was for a reason.
And it got me looking at the name “The Otherside of the Wind” in a new way. What if the name wasn’t a metaphor at all? He was certainly known for them. (Cough Chimes at Midnight) But, what if this name that really sounded like a metaphor was just a literal, practical name?
The Otherside of the Wind has a movie within a movie. As you watch the film, the filmmaker in it screens his new movie to friends and execs to different results. Eventually you see parts of that movie. The ending to The Otherside of the Wind is also the ending of that movie.
It ends with a woman walking onto a dusty Hollywood set built in the desert. Props of flimsy buildings sway in the wind, as she wanders through them. Eventually the wind picks up and knocks over all the props.
“The Otherside of the Wind” ENDS with a strong WIND blowing down props in a dusty storm.
So if that’s the WIND part of the title, what would the OTHERSIDE of that BE?
Well, the very FIRST shot of Citizen Kane has a cold wind in a snow storm opening up the gates to Kanes mansion.
The otherside of that wind, is the wind in the final shot of “The Otherside of the Wind.”
The movie is named after the first shot in Citizen Kane. And is about literally being the final shot of Welles career.
One that will likely never be noticed, as he made sure to tell no one. Just to make sure they would watch that movie without a bias towards him. Instead the whole point of the movie basically got lost. Because by the time it was finished 50 years later, not many were left who could fit the pieces together.
In the interviews I did, I talked with many people who worked with him as part of VISTOW. A group that thanklessly helped Orson make his movies. Many who went on to have large careers in Hollywood or Academia.
VISTOW stands for “Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles.”
And I’ll be damned if I didn’t say I’m envious of those in that group. Despite the horror stories.
Consider this very condensed rant about this topic that probably only 5 other people on the planet know my service to Orson Welles.
The Otherside of the Wind needs to be looked at as follow up to Citizen Kane, not as the final movie in Welles career.
If you watch the movie on Netflix, I encourage you to do so through this lense. (But be warned, the first 10 minutes are rough, as intended).
In “The Andy Griffith” show intro with the whistling tune, little Opie throws a rock into the fishing pond. In reality, little Opie was not strong enough to throw that rock that far so there was a guy off-camera and behind a bush that watched Opie throw and timed his throw to match it. The rock hit the water and made a splash and it looked like little Opie threw it.
The electric siren was not invented to warn of air raids, but instead to warn volunteer firefighters that a fire call is in progress and to report to the station ASAP. Before the development of the electric siren between 1905-1910, fire departments relied on air horns, steam whistles, tires, or bells. These all had their own major drawbacks: Horns and whistles rely on an external source of air/steam that must be recharged periodically, and a leak can lower the volume or outright silence it if it goes unnoticed. Fire bells, on the other hand, could easily be confused with church bells. Clearly a better solution was needed.
The electric siren was first developed by a man named William A. Box, and his “Denver” electric sirens quickly became popular and replaced the aforementioned warning devices. The siren’s ability to start reliably and rapidly at the push of a button proved valuable and saved precious time, and it costed only a few cents to run in terms of electricity costs. The sound of the siren was distinct, could not be mistaken for anything else, and could be heard even in neighbouring towns. By the mid-1910s and early 1920s, there was already a huge booming market for fire sirens. Companies like the Federal Electric Company (still around as Federal Signal Corp), Sterling Siren Fire Alarm Co (now Sentry Siren Inc.) and Decot Machine Works all competed fiercely to outdo one another.
While far less common nowadays thanks to pagers taking over this role, fire sirens are still fairly common in the U.S., especially on the East Coast. In fact, several 100 year old sirens are still in service today because they’re just that well-built and reliable!
Here’s a video of a roughly 100 year old Denver siren, still operational.
I gained 150 pounds since covid because I learned how to cook and frequently overate on my own cooking due to cooking too much, so I did a lot of research.
Once you reach 400 pounds (differs from body to body) your body starts to store fat within bones, making them brittle instead of stronger. If you break a bone at this weight you’re very likely to become close to immobile. Visiting the gym does not combat this.
I have approximate knowledge of a lot of things.
Taxing buildings and other improvements to land, is bad for cities. A split-rate tax zone where land is taxed higher and buildings are taxed less, would get rid of a lot of urban blight (vacant buildings, empty lots) in downtown areas.
Even better: tax land exclusively.
The land-value tax is the only fair tax, after all.
If you want to design and build large-scale industrial plant infrastructure like pressure vessels, piping, pumps, turbines, etc., most of the codes and standards you have to meet cost money to even see -and they are NOT cheap (in the tens of thousands of dollars for a full set).
In several jurisdictions, the standards are incorporated into law by reference. Most people think that you should have free access to read the text of the law that you’re beholden to, but what happens when a copyrighted work is incorporated into the law?
archive.org asserted the law should be free to access. However, they lost a copyright lawsuit brought by the American society of mechanical engineers because they were hosting copies of these standards.
So, to read the law you are beholden to in this sector of manufacturing, you must either pay a private organization ($$$) or memorize it (impossible); you cannot make copies for yourself to reference at your leisure
Same is true for ISO standards, in EU: I think it’d cost about 10 to 30 k-euros to get the standards required to sell a sailboat in the EU.
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Ahahah totally man. I dealt with a lot of this compliance, regulatory, quasi legal, bullshit too.
At one point to become an inspector of those huge oil storage tanks I had to basically study the specific building codes for those tanks back to front and upside down.
Cost hundreds to get the standards legally, thousands to take the tests, become registered, work with a qualified inspector etc.
That was 1 single standard, there are thousands. Tens of thousands when we’re talking industry generally, probably hundreds.
Then when you add international standards, everything is duplicated now per country. We make trade agreements and such to somewhat ease the shock of moving products and services across that Gulf of understanding.
Standards are trending in a good direction, we’re slowly moving towards more and more harmonized and universal standards but, we will never reach it, because we’re human, well always just be adapting to what comes next
The standards for Normal, Utility, Aerobatic and Commuter category aircraft are codified in federal law, FAR part 23.
The standards for Special Light Sport Aircraft are ASTM standards referred to by law.
Holy crap. Everyday I’m surprised at what is legal.
Here’s another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.
David Vizard’s books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing…
That’s a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.
I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently…
sigh
the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.
Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than … pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.
IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:
- “The Principles of Yacht Design”, get the most-recent edition of it.
- ALL of Dave Gerr’s books.
- Fossatti’s Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
- probably Nigel Calder’s books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
- Tom Cunliffe’s books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs “good enough”, & the implications of that, on the design
- a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
- “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, by Brion Toss
- “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice” or something like that, can’t remember, right now…
- the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
- look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
- Harry Riblett’s book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil’s problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
- Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren’t touching any part of the code that you aren’t working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can’t find what it is that is skewing everything unless you’re seeing the whole sheet’s equations: it’s the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )
Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing “wild geese”.
For aircraft-design, I’d say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson’s book, NOT Raymer’s.
( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri’s is on its 2nd edition, so I’m presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can’t afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I’d got Gudmundsson’s book, instead of Raymers, now )
You’ll need Harry Riblett’s book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.
You’ll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn
( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold’s birds. )
Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation … become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.
Harry Riblett was using Eppler’s simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you’d HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.
You NEED to understand both Bernoulli’s principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.
There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics’s complicated, & I’d recommend that.
It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one…
Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.
There is a video, which I now can’t find, on changing Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.
That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you … don’t waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.
You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that’s beginning to become significant in modern designs.
All the stuff I’ve realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I’ll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection’s required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.
Sorry I’m not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means…
but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more … exploring-evolution’s-potential.
Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you’re really knowing-what-you’re-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.
Don’t expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.
It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc…
But I’d rather the world have other-people doing it, … than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.
LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space…
Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.
If not, then just ignore this.
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I feel like there’s some amount of this in every hobby, which sounds like I’m downplaying this take and racing but that’s not that case I promise you.
I can imagine how this would be amplified big time in a pretty expensive hobby/semi-pro/pro? I assume there must exist some amount of pros
But yeah as a collector of a couple to many more likely expensive hobbies, it’s crazy how much shit you see designed to just separate people from their money efficiently
In a related vein, the Washington Post was hot garbage long before it was acquired by Bezos. They gained their reputation by chance during the Watergate scandal because they received classified docs which put them on the same level as larger media outlets.
But when imperialism ended, it was basically a mess. Jews vs Arabs. Christians vs Sunnis. Arabs vs Persians. Jews vs Shias. Arabs vs Kurds. Alawis vs Sunnis. To this day, many of them have this tribal mindset.
Expanding on this, this was mainly exploited by the weakening British empire to create states that would be friendly in geopolitics and trade. Even the Pan Arab flag that many middle eastern countries share is actually a British design given to different uprising groups against the weakening Ottoman empire a couple of centuries prior.
Having a lot of resources is a curse. Countries that have natural ressources (Iran, Algeria, Nigeria, Russia) tend to be highly corrupt and exploited by a small elite.
Jokes on you, Pakistan has a ton of natural resources that the small elite chooses to shoot people for attempting to harvest/refine/sell, which is why they import literally everything on IMF loan money and simultaneously invest jack into education and science outside a few high level military projects which gave them the nuclear bomb.
Okay, so, there’s this Canadian children’s book author, Paulette Bourgeois, right? She wrote the Franklin books ( the one about the turtle ) that later got adapted into 2 different cartoons.
But little fun fact that I doubt many people know is the fact that in an interview, she admitted that the first book, the one where Franklin deals with fear of the dark in his shell at night, was inspired by an episode of MASH ( cannot format the title properly ). Specifically the episode where the 4077th have to move operations into a nearby cave. If I remember correctly, she was a fresh first time parent when watching that episode one night with her baby, but it’s been a while since I read this, so take it with a grain of salt.
in the open source multiplayer game Space Station 14, you can swab pollen from cannabis plants to egg-plants (as in, plants that grow eggs, distinct from eggplant) and have a chance to grow eggs full of pure THC
Love you, botanist being. Please grow wheat and bananas, as the only recipe I’ve memorized is banana bread.
Have you seen my chef knife? Someone stole it!
Isn’t there another one in the vending machine??
The power went out when I was in the freezer, and it wasn’t there when I finally got out!
Everything I’ve heard about that game sounds insane
It’s outstanding. Easily the most fun I’ve had in any sort of multiplayer game in recent memory.
Definitely has learning curves stacked on learning curves, but starting out as a janitor is perfect for learning the ropes
Would I enjoy it if I like Rimworld? Or am I way off base as to what the game even is?
You directly control and roleplay as your own individual character. There’s a ton of different jobs, I like botanist a lot. Superficially its just growing plans for food and medicine, but it can go so very very deep. I can dump mutation chems in plants to give them random genes, I can cross pollinate different plants to spread certain genes, I can increase plant potency with chems too.
A few weeks ago I worked a botany round with another botanist who spent an hour frantically growing and mutating and grinding up plants, all for setting up a gag. She ended up having me drag one of two metal lockers to medbay, where she opened each one and sprayed some water on a large quantity of “kobold cubes”, which all sprang to life at once. Then she set off a grenade which filled medbay with the chemical " corgium". This transformed all the kobolds (and me, briefly) into intelligent corgis. There were a ton of corgis all over the station for the rest of the round.
Bro. What even is this game lol
going to disagree with most of your takes on the media/journos. that entire industry is mostly corrupt for the past 20 years because the barriers to entry are so high that you have to be part of the elite to become a journalist, hence why journalism has become increasingly irrelevant and seems completely out of touch to anyone who isn’t part of the elite. Also i feel like a lot of your political claims are way over simplified and exaggerated, but there is some truth to what you are saying. I stopped reading most ‘elite’ publications because they really started showing their detachment from any greater reality around the late 2000s, and it got far worse in the mid 2010s.
I spent a decade studying/working/teaching philosophy, history, and political theory. Hardly anyone knows anything about these things… and often when you see them on media… the takes are horrible ignorant/bad/wrong and vastly oversimplified. So are the takes by most consumers of philosophy the podcasts/books/etc about them. And it’s sad frustrating how people think they know everything there is to know about Plato’s views because they listened to a 45m podcast about The Cave or read one of his books once. And the people who do know about these things? totally ignored both mainstream media and the social media types… but their insights when they are given the time/effort to shine is truly wonderful and insightful.
I also taught coursework in these areas… most of my students were not dumb or idiots… but only 5% actually gave a shit about learning. Most just wanted to be entertained or validated in their delusions and pre-existing beliefs about the world, and they got very frustrated when the course didn’t do that for them. At least when I taught 15 years ago they were not prone to violence, threats, and intimidation, like they are now.
Now I work in tech…and it’s astounding how horrible ignorant most technological ‘smart’ people are… and how much of their ‘intelligence’ is just… a quasi religious belief set. I think because tech is ‘mysterious’ to the general population the ‘techies’ now considered themselves the high priests of society… saw this going on 20 years ago and now we are reading the point where the corruption, idiocy, and delusions of grandeur have really started to show. I’m not a huge expert in most tech… but the amount of sheer ignorance perpetuated by overconfident idiots in the tech sector is just… mind blowing… and most ‘techies’ i know legit seem to feel an innate sense of superiority to non tech workers and if you challenge them they throw temper tantrums like children.
How did you pivot from humanities to tech?
My educated guess: income.
You left-out the critical resource of https://www.semiaccurate.com/ btw…
What a generally … outright-awesome post.
The Guardian changed-ownership recently, & cut their journalism-staff, savagely, ttbomk, AND they are now purged from DuckDuckGo??
searching for
kremlin papers trump site:theguardian.com
produces NOTHING at DuckDuckGo, now, & for the last few weeks, at-least?
& I’ve seen that FT definitely has anti-viability strategy in its pushing of distortion, in its stuff…
fscking-idiot webmastering at TheGuardian… WHERE’S THE SEARCH-FUNCTION??
https://www.theguardian.com/index/subjects/a
THAT page has a search-function.
??
WHEN I search on the keywords
kremlin papers
only-in-title, only-in-English, then click the button, then I get
So, TheGuardian IS BLOCKING DuckDuckGo for sake of kickbacks for Google-exclusivity??
Looks like it…
“Those who are ignorant of history, are damned to re-enact its disasters.” is true for our entire world, & especially true in the domain of journalism!
IF you keep disappearing historical key-information ( as for-profit, & for-institutional-status/importance, “journalisms” both do ), THEN you’re garrotting OUR WORLD’s viability!!
Scum…
The highest quality science-news is https://www.science.org/news
whereas the highest quantity of science-news is probably https://phys.org/latest-news/
( you have to fight with phys.org, as it keeps trying to prove one is just a bot, if one keeps digging into archives )
Salut, Namaste, Kaizen, & Gratitude for making this post!
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Anyone remotely interested in Japanese music, J-pop, or rhythm games might have seen some music being labelled with something like “BOFU2017” or “BOF:NT” in song names, and a lot of these music have surprisingly high production value. This actually has some rather interesting history
So Beatmania was a DJ simulator rhythm game released by Konami in 1998 that was an inspiration for a lot of music games in the future. The Be-Music Source file format was developed for a community simulator of Beatmania. Later, BMS evolved into essentially its own rhythm game (which anyone can play btw, beatoraja is even available on AUR), and the community forbade players from playing official Konami charts (referred to as “illegal charts”)
In order to increase the amounts of content available for BMS, the community decided to host BMS creation competitions to encourage players to make more BMS… the flagship event is called “BMS of Fighters” (BOF), hosted annually starting from 2004. All music from the events are completely free and libre: as in, free as in both freedom and free beer. And the competition is fierce; a quick search on YouTube will show some top-ranking songs and their production values tend to be very high (… and there are some shitposts too, we don’t talk about Mopemope or that stupid Kirby song)
Obviously because of the libre nature of these competitions, a lot of these songs end up getting picked up by various rhythm games that are not BMS at all. The most popular rhythm games (like DDR, maimai) tend to have a generous collection of the top ranking BOF charts. The low-budget games even more so: when I was in China for two months and saw a lot of local arcade games (basically Chinese clones of maimai, DDR/PIU and Dancerush), guess what songs they have the most! Muse Dash which also started as a Chinese indie game also has a ton of BOF songs; in fact, Blackest Luxury Car, a song which I strongly associate with Muse Dash’s entire identity (they even have a stage modeled after the song), was in fact… a song from BOFU2017
It’s hard to tell but I wouldn’t be surprised if BMS have a wider societal impact on rhythm game music and even the entire Japanese music genre as a whole. A lot of the artists behind top-ranking charts probably got contracts with various rhythm games… or maybe even beyond those. One funny example I know is that one artist became the lead composer of a gacha game that grossed $18M last month; the game in question is almost universally praised for their good soundtracks
As for the BMS themselves… distribution is not centralized whatsoever, especially for less popular songs. Some are on Google Drive, some on OneDrive, some on certain hosting websites, some only in packaged archives that some people are thanklessly maintaining… but anyways it is rather fascinating
Also the 2025 BOF started on October 3rd and is ongoing now. The portal for all BOF events are here: https://bmsoffighters.net/
For someone interested in journalism it’s odd you don’t know about the Bylines network.
