Follow the link and watch the .GIFs.
The pumpkin toadlet, which is a frog but not a toad, is so terrible at landing its jumps that its sheer incompetence has become a subject of scientific inquiry.
Very possibly the best thing on the internet today, by any reasonable standard.
[Via MetaFilter]
Earth.fm. Like Spotify / Apple Music / Amazon Music, but for nature soundscapes.
A nice soundscape while I’ve been at home today. Looking forward to trying it out at work when I’m back in the office tomorrow.
[Via swissmiss]
For all that I’m not particularly excited by the story of The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox,1 I’m glad that stories are being written illustrating the latest swing of the pendulum away from the trend for flat design.2
I’m making a note of this here on my decidedly old school tech blog. We have so much to learn from their brave and daring experiment.
For the last few months I’ve found myself tracking as much of my daily grind as possible via simple, portable Markdown files, including using task list items I can check off as I go. I no longer feel the need to have all my daily tasks try to grab my attention via notifications and alarms, which is a huge win. The sensory overload if I ever install a plugin that retrofits Obsidian or Drafts with a variant of what the Not Boring team are doing to checkboxes might just finish me (or at least my iPad Mini) off. ↩
At work, where we have to use severely locked-down Windows 10 machines it’s very different. I can type all the Markdown text I like, but I can’t access a half-decent Markdown editor without breaking all our rules about not storing work content on an unapproved cloud service so as I very much do not want to mix work and my private computing I am OK with that. There’s an increasing focus on a) stamping out stuff created by teams using tool we had access to like, well, Microsoft Access, and b) shoehorning as much as possible of what we do into one corner or another of Microsoft Teams, even when it’s duplicating stuff we already do via email and the intranet anyway. I commented to a colleague yesterday that it’s reminiscent of a few years ago when we went through a period of Trello being the new hotness. That phase faded after the managers who had been Trello enthusiasts moved on and the focus shifted to tools that our organisation was officially signed up for (and which, to be fair, were hooked into our existing systems in a way that free-accounts-only Trello users could not be) but I don’t think we’ll be escaping the grip of Microsoft Teams (which is to say, Microsoft Teams-plus-whatever-other-functionality-can-shoehorn-in-so-procurement-checklists-can-be-satisfied) quite so easily. ↩
Oops:
I read on the web that "Yves Saint Laurent Beauté Makes a Daring Step into web3." Oh really. So I went to their glorious web3 adventure only to find — ooops. If it had worked I am told that I might get a YSL Beauty NFT. "Acting as a recognition token of the community engagement, those 10K YSL Beauty Golden Blocks (ERC721 minted on Polygon with the Arianee Protocol) will unlock utilities throughout the year including a premiere launch, whitelisting for NFT drops and much more." I’m making a note of this here on my decidedly old school tech blog. We have so much to learn from their brave and daring experiment.
[Emphasis added]
A couple of years ago I posted about reading Incorruptible, a Peter Watts story from the X-Prize’s Seat 14C competition1.
I was pleased to find earlier today that a couple of years ago the DUST podcast/film network put out audio adaptations2 of some of the stories from the competition.
Unfortunately Incorruptible wasn’t one of the stories DUST adapted,3 but that wasn’t by any means the only worthwhile story included in the competition so I’ve been glad to have had the chance to reacquaint myself with some of the other stories from the competition.
The Seat 14 site itself is no longer online, and while the Wayback Machine claims to have older snapshots of the site’s content I can’t get any of them to come up for me right now. ↩
Technically they put out videos, not podcasts, but judging by the first one I watched the videos appear to be presented as abstract screen savers playing over audio content rather than visual adaptations of the stories being told. I’m the sort of literal-minded type who thinks that "podcast" is the term for an audio file delivered via an RSS feed, dammit, but I probably should let that go since I can also get the content as straight podcasts and listen to them. ↩
It’s still available via the Wayback Machine’s archive. Bringing it up involved a bit of a wait, but it did pop up in the end. ↩
David Friedman has had enough:
A few weeks ago, on April 14th, the theme of the New York Times crossword puzzle was “keming.” I think it’s time we talk seriously about elevating that word from internet joke and finally adding it to the dictionary. To that end, I’ve started a petition imploring Merriam-Webster to add “keming” to their dictionary, and you should sign to show your support for this important issue.
A fair point.
[Via Pixel Envy]
It’d be interesting to know the demographics of folks who read the New York Times opinion piece on Why We Can’t Quit the Guitar Solo:
It’s easy to dismiss the guitar solo as an outdated, macho institution. The shredding lead guitar, once ubiquitous in rock music, can now feel like a relic of a bygone time.
Indeed it can. But if you’re in the right demographic – as I definitely am – it was well worth a read (and a listen.)1
[Via Ongoing]
Worth supporting?
The Inheritors is an intimate science-fiction short film exploring themes of race, family and belonging. Reflecting on the experiences of people with multiple-heritage, it’s a story about how societal polarisation creates walls that divide us, deprive us of love, of community, of a sense of identity, and ultimately of our deepest humanity.
[Via Orbital Operations]
Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard has been a poorly-paced tale that is so busy looking backwards that I have very little confidence that the coming third season will be worth my time, even if they are reuniting the TNG-era bridge crew and promising us "Federation starships galore".1
On the other hand, sometimes it prompts MetaFilter FanFare comments like this and it all seems worthwhile:2
“Oh no.”
‘what’
“I just realized who the actress playing his mother reminds me of. Holly Palance.”
‘who?’
“Let’s just say that I hope ‘Look Up, Jean-Luc’ isn’t this plotline’s ‘Look at me, Damien, I love you! It’s All for You, Damien!'”
‘oh god, they wouldn’t’Q: Jeez, Jean-Luc. I came here to teach you a lesson about romance. But I thought your Avoidant Behaviors about women were you just being, y’know, stuffy. Reserved.
(Vash told me she actually caught you doing the Picard Maneuver with a condom. C’mon man.)
I had no idea your mother made you a witness to her suicide!
Really messes up my plans for you and Laris loving it up and having the first Synth-Romulan hybrid baby; solving both my selfish Last of the Picards to Play With and making a point about growing by overcoming your deepest fears.
But no, you had to do your own thing. So now BorgRati is headed straight for the alternate dimension where AI is the dominant lifeform, from last season. The big portal full of robot tentacles? And I’ve seen enough hentai to know where that’s going.
A third brain,
for you, for now.Obsidian Ultra Cloud Host (OUCH) is a brand new PKM platform by Obsidian. It’s like Obsidian and Obsidian had a baby, in the Cloud™.
(Note the publication date…)
I’d really like to be a web client so. I could view and edit my Obsidian vault’s content from my (thoroughly locked down) work laptop, so this had me going. This was the bit that tipped me off:
We all need some downtime to unplug from work, but we can never find the right time for it.
Don’t worry, our server randomly goes down for a couple of hours from time to time, so you can stay away from knowledge management and recharge your sanity.
