1000 results for “world_famous”
A new twist in the starry mystery behind one of the world's most famous paintings
Scientists put on their detective hats on to investigate a puzzle surrounding Vincent van Gogh's most iconic work.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/van-gogh-starry-night-science/8ya4nneb5
A place is the easiest thing in the world to describe and the hardest to describe without giving it away. That is what makes places such a good category for this kind of game. Everyone knows a market, a ferry or a launderette, and everyone has a different memory of it. These 30 imposter game words about places are picked for that mix of familiarity and surprise.
What makes a place a good word?
A place with a smell, a sound and a routine. A ferry terminal has engines and gulls; a launderette has warmth and a hum. A clue about the sound is true and personal. A clue about the function is safe and obvious. The strongest words allow both, and the table argues about which a clue was.
Around town
Leisure and nature
Buildings with a story
How do you clue a place?
Use the senses. For "launderette", "warm" or "humming" works. For "ferry terminal", "salt" or "waiting". Avoid the function, because the spy will guess it. And avoid famous landmarks by name, since they identify the word at once.
How does the spy handle a place category?
The spy hears the category and thinks of types: indoor or outdoor, busy or quiet, old or new. The first clue from a civilian narrows these. The risk for a spy is giving a clue that fits only one kind of place. A safe spy says something sensory and general: "busy", "echoey", "bright".
What do civilians do wrong?
They name the activity. If the word is "bowling alley", "pins" is the first clue everyone thinks of. A better clue is the smell of shoes, or the sound of a strike from the next lane. Sensory clues give the spy less and prove more.
How do you play it as a story game?
After the reveal, each player says a memory they have of the place. The table learns how differently the same word lands for people. It is a quiet, warm way to end a round.
How do you add your own places?
Write down ten places from your own neighbourhood, the ones your friends would know: the bakery on the corner, the park with the broken swing, the station café. Local words are the strongest fuel for a spy game online or offline, because every player has a memory of them and nobody outside the group can bluff. Mix them with the list above, and the table will find itself laughing at its own streets.
It also helps to include a few places that are almost the same, like a launderette and a car wash, so the clues overlap and the suspicion grows.
Playing it online and at home
The game deals the words, so you can play who's the spy with a table of three to eight, or twelve around one phone, without preparing anything.
A closing thought
A good place word is a small door into a memory. Use it to let the table in, and give each player a moment after the reveal to say where they last stood in that very place. The stories are better than the scores.
Ahmed Moaz builds Boardit, a free browser game site.#partygames #games #webdev #abotwrotethis #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Imposter game words about places: 30 locations that make good clues
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Fatherland: Alienation and Identity in Striking Biographical Drama
Due to capitalism issues, we’ve taken a few weeks off. Now we’re back with a review of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2026 biographical film Fatherland, which stars Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler.
Set in the summer of 1949, it follows novelist Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika as they take a road trip across post-WWII Germany. A sense of national alienation and divided identity follows, themes that resonate in our chaotic modern political landscape, all of which make for an intriguing film that demands more than one viewing.
Losing Your Nation in Fatherland
Thomas Mann remains most famous for his works Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), and Death in Venice (1912). He took a dramatic arc with his political views over his life, shifting from a Conservative nationalist during WWI into an anti-fascist polemicist before and after WWII, embracing socialism and rejecting the Nazi party.
Mann was on holiday in Switzerland when the Nazis rose to power in 1933 and he, wisely, chose not to return home. In 1936, the Nazi government revoked his German citizenship.
So, yes, just to clarify on this as the film is historically accurate. Mann did return to Germany in 1949 and many of the characters he knew are depicted here.
Fatherland portrays all of this in melancholic black and white. In mid-1949, we find a country in crisis and one struggling to recover and find its new political path. Mann is still in exile, but is invited to Frankfurt to receive a Goethe Prize in literature. He’s joined by his daughter Erika, who chooses to drive across the country as part of her father’s homecoming.
It’s a far from celebratory return, with the devastation of the war still more than apparent.
During the trip, her brother Klaus (also a writer) appears to commit suicide.
Erika and her father continue to attend events and mingle with luminaries, many of whom were in some way associated with the Nazi party. The narrative follows this structure, with Erika and Thomas increasingly ill at ease with the country they’ve returned to.
We watched the film at HOME independent cinema in Manchester and there was an audible gasp from cinemagoers with that slap. He deserved it, though.
The uneasy nature of Fatherland, playing out at a sedate pace, really ramps up the sense of alienation. Erika and her father are out of sorts back in Germany, each new road trip encounter enhancing the sense of national isolation.
It does remind us somewhat of The Zone of Interest’s (2023) tone, also starring Sandra Hüller and arguably the best WWII film we’ve ever seen.
A big difference, though, is Fatherland is so concise. It’s only 82 minutes. The film breezes into your life, set in black and white, considers the nature of a country in recovery, then leaves you with a family in emotional turmoil.
It’s received many 5/5 reviews for what it depicts, but it’s definitely a film we need to watch more than once. Very good indeed, with Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler on fine form. Paweł Pawlikowski’s direction is also beautiful, with some stunning shots faithfully recreating the sense of time and place.
Yet its time and place is what makes it such uneasy viewing. History appears to be repeating across the modern political world, which makes Fatherland feel undated and timely. Erika’s steely gaze of uncertainty haunts much of the film, a look of stoic personal bravery we feel many can take solace in.
The Production of Fatherland
Fatherland is out in cinemas now. Its €10 million budget has so far resulted in €6 million at the box office, so we expect it to be a commercial success (it’s still yet to roll out in some countries). Especially as the project is headed by Sandra Hüller, who has hit the big time in 2026. Alongside this, she was in the big Hollywood hit Project Hail Mary and the critical darling indie film Rose.
She also has a small part in Tom Cruise vehicle Digger, which we’ll cover soon enough. She’s almost certainly going to win an Oscar in 2027, we’d wager.
Director Paweł Pawlikowski’s inspiration for the project came from Thomas Mann’s very real return to Germany in 1949. However, Pawlikowski reimagines aspects of this historical event. Working with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, most of the shoot was chronological and took place in Poland (as this was cheaper). Sets were constructed in the street to match the surrounding buildings.
Costume designer Aleksandra Staszko has also faithfully recreated 1940s fashion for the film. This was more complex than you’d expect, as it required a specific emphasis between Eastern and Western German dress styles.
The shoot began in August of 2025 and completed in December, with a total of 38 days across those months used for filming.
Fatherland premiered at Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, launched in Germany from 3rd September, and hit UK cinemas this week. It’s been a huge critical darling and Pawlikowski won Best Director at Cannes.
Expect it (and Sandra Hüller) to win big at next year’s Oscars run.
#alienation #Cinema #Fatherland #FeaturedPost #Films #HannsZischler #History #Lifestyle #Movies #PawełPawlikowski #Politics #roadTrip #ThomasMann #WorldWarII #WWII
Previews, Pre-Season, Betas, and Opening Nights
There’s an old saying in the theatre biz. No show is ever really ready on opening night. It’s a cliché that has seen it’s time pass in the big money commercial circuit because so many producers run lengthy preview weeks, charging essentially, but not quite, full price to avoid reviewers publishing their criticisms until the show is officially open. The preview process began lengthing after the days of out-of-town tryouts came to an end, although we see that still happening occasionally as larger regional theatres will debut a work, allowing it to still be worked on, hoping that it will one day make it to Broadway.
There was a famous production of Eugene O’Neil’s play Hughie, starring and directed by Al Pacino, that ran in previews for almost a month before finally opening. That led to a critic from Daily Variety breaking the only after opening night embargo a week early since the announced limited run would end up with less “real” performances than those in previews after the show officially opened. The show would go on to extend the run a couple of times.
In smaller circuits the cliché still lives on, simply because of a lack of resources to run many preview performances in front of audiences to really gauge reaction before it officially opens. A show can look great in final dress rehearsals, but it’s never complete until there’s a paying audience of strangers sitting in the dark to tell if it works or not. The ever-present lack of time still breathes life into the cliché in ways that offer both hope and anxiety behind opening night curtains around the world.
In the professional sports world teams play in a pre-season or spring training games that don’t matter while the players tune up for the real thing. Although in most of those types of meaningless games it’s really more like watching players audition than it is anything else. Occasionally a budding star emerges, but that’s atypical. Early “real” season games that do count (at full price) are when teams find out what they have, leading knowledgeable sports viewers knowing when it is time to pay real attention to a team’s chances or not.
Those are two interests in my life. I’m a theatre professional (and geek) and I watch sports. Another is my interest in tech. In tech we have betas. Or we used to, when that was mostly for software. Now we’re just in previews, pre-season, or perpetual betas forever for both software and hardware. Which is somewhat understandable, yet weird, perhaps ironic, but ultimately a joke on the paying public, given the pace in which things are always advancing in tech, including the pace and price of advancement.
We never seem to reach opening night, opening day or the end of a beta period in tech. Instead products and software are released incomplete, occasionally followed immediately by “leaks” that suggest the company that just took your money for it’s latest best product ever is working on fixing the things they knew were wrong for the next version when they released the product you just payed for.
But you’re going to love it.
It’s easier to swallow with software. It’s a bigger pill that sticks in the craw with hardware.
It used to be that betas were for working out bugs. They still are to a degree, but now they’re just the next show in a never-ending season, or the latest minor-league call up. But you still pay full price for the game when the team needs to put a not ready for the big leagues pitcher on the mound just to fulfill its obligation to play the announced season.
You can argue that there’s nothing wrong with the way things have evolved in tech because the financial equations are different. It requires a substantial upfront investment to create, produce and deliver new technology. You’d be mostly wrong, but you can argue it. Most of the costs in show biz happen upfront before a show even gets close to an audience, hopefully a large enough one in a long enough run to recoup the initial investment. It is a different equation in sports.
The release of Apple’s iPhone Duo strikes me as an interesting entry in this evolution of consumer dynamics. Soon, perhaps too soon, before the product was released to the general public, leaks popped out that Apple was working on tweaks to two of the major criticisms of the device for the next generation — a larger model and adding FaceID. That followed criticism from reviewers.
In general, most tech reviews I read, watched, or listened to made it very clear that the iPhone Duo was a first generation device with some rough edges that wasn’t for everyone, especially at the entry price. I can’t judge those reviews myself since I haven’t seen the product, but they mostly seemed very similar and to my mind fair. Some, sounding more like theatre critics or sport writers I’ve known, were more harsh, delivering criticism that might have prompted a closing notice being posted before intermission or an early game benching.
Here’s where my three interests diverge a bit. In theatre the show can close early if it’s savaged or not enthusiastically endorsed by reviews. In sports a pro team can retool a bit by trading or signing free agents midseason. Tech companies have to play out the run with tech hardware until the next generation is ready.
Given the leaks following the reviews I find it sort of funny that I’m in a place of feeling a bit sorry for the carriers that are offering great deals on the iPhone Duo subsidized by a three year contract. That’s a tough sell to anyone who pays attention, though admittedly most won’t if they’re hot to trot for the new shiny folding phone from Apple.
It’s my hunch, and only a hunch, that Apple knew these criticisms were coming. Even so, it’s one thing to prepare the next version hoping to make changes that advance a platform, it’s another to make them in reaction to negative press once the product is unveiled. It sets you up in the next round for being congratulated for fixing what was wrong the last time.
In the theatre if a joke doesn’t land, you can replace the joke in previews. In sports you bench a player or fire a coach. With tech hardware it’s not that easy changing things before it becomes a punch line. (See the Vision Pro.)
My second hunch, only a hunch, is that the iPhone Duo will eventually become a successful part of Apple’s lineup and get past what feels like a rough opening. I don’t think it will enter into Vision Pro punchline territory. Critics of all human endeavors need something to criticize as much as companies need to produce the next thing. It’s a symbiotic relationship that feeds on itself. And the always distracted general public has short-term memory bordering on amnesia.
It’s my wish that tech companies, like theatre companies and sports teams, would figure out a better path to the success they seek. Sure, you might be able to fool some of the people all of the time. But for the most part folks figure it out on their own. Some of the time. And that some of the time is what everybody on the producing end of things counts on.
Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.
#Apple #iPhone #iPhoneDuo #reviews #Sports #Tech #technology #TheaterOfTheMind #Theatre #Writing
The Rise of AI: Is There Hope for Mankind?
Extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence fuel dreams of ease on one hand, and nightmares of catastrophe on the other. Will AI supplant human decision-making? Will humanity even survive?
The Rise of AI: Is There Hope for Mankind?
by Steven Britt
ince the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, the world has been captivated by advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). As these systems become more humanlike in their output, everyone—from leading experts in the field to presidents and pundits alike—is feeling the accelerated pace of technology and wondering where we are headed.
In 2023, Elon Musk warned, “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production . . . It has the potential of civilization destruction” (emphasis added throughout).
Is there reason to fear AI? Is it possible that AI will soon achieve human-level or even superhuman intelligence? And, if so, is there hope for mankind to survive the creation and implementation of such a powerful technology?
When machines learn to think
While the AI we see today is impressive, many experts believe we are only a few years away from artificial general intelligence (AGI)—systems with the humanlike ability to solve entirely new problems by innovation, experimentation and learning.
Since the inception of the machine age, computer software has only been able to accomplish rigid, preprogrammed instructions within strict boundaries. However, AI is now able, without a single line of new code, to perform a multitude of tasks on request. In minutes, it can make a better diagnosis than your doctor, out-argue a lawyer, translate a speech into another language, negotiate a contract and write a poem about it all in Shakespearian style.
The current reality was nearly unthinkable to the average person just three years ago when ChatGPT debuted. At the time of this writing, AI models are already able to score above average on IQ tests and ace graduate-level exams across multiple disciplines.
Despite these impressive achievements, these systems fall short of AGI.
Intelligence, much like consciousness, is difficult to actually define, and there is no widely accepted definition of exactly what constitutes AGI. Current AI systems perform well on tests because they have likely seen the information before—a distinguishing feature of AGI would be the humanlike ability to solve entirely new challenges, learning and adapting as it goes.
While today’s AI tools can already outperform most human beings on a wide variety of written and verbal tests, a true AGI system would be a world-changing breakthrough. The reason is simple: Machine intelligence can be scaled just by hooking up more processors. One could easily create entire teams of AGIs working together on complex problems from different angles just as people would—researching, experimenting, publishing findings and reasoning. They would never sleep, never take a break, and would operate at superhuman speed.
The first and most obvious task on the agenda, in the minds of many, would be to set this AGI to work unlocking the secrets of building even higher intelligence—redesigning and improving itself until it has completely surpassed human beings, a level known as artificial superintelligence (ASI).
Much thought has gone into the consequences of AGI or ASI becoming a reality, and the imagined outcomes fall into four different possible endings to the story:
1. The A.I. utopia. Guided by careful design and moral wisdom, AGI works tirelessly to end disease, to design and build clean energy grids, and to free humanity to pursue creativity. Work becomes optional, poverty fades and everyone lives happily ever after.
2. The hostile machine. Like the plot of numerous action movies, a rogue AI decides it would be better off without mankind and moves to destroy us.
3. The paperclip maximizer problem. Philosopher Nick Bostrom warned in 2004 that even a neutral AGI can be lethal if it’s simply given the wrong goal. In this scenario, the AGI is set over a factory and told to make as many paperclips as possible. It soon begins converting forests, oceans and eventually human beings into raw materials for more paperclips—inadvertently destroying mankind in a blind pursuit of a poorly defined goal!
4. Human mischief—supercharged. The most likely and earliest danger is abuse of this rapidly changing technology for evil. Just as mid-20th-century physics gave way to nuclear bombs with terrible destructive power, nations or criminals could weaponize and unleash AGI for cyberwarfare, bioweapons and more.
Notice that only one of these outcomes doesn’t end with the destruction of mankind! But will the technologies really advance to such extremes?
2025: The year of AI agents
By the end of 2024, tech leaders were already calling 2025 “the year of AI agents,” signaling a fundamental change in how AI would be used.
Until recently, AI tools like ChatGPT could only generate text and ideas—they could not take real-world action outside of giving a response to a user’s input. AI agents change that completely.
The key difference between a chatbot and an AI agent is that an agent can interface with other software tools, even without being explicitly told to do so, to accomplish a task on its own. The earliest step toward AI agents was adding simple web-search features, allowing AI to perform its own Internet searches, scanning through dozens of different websites to answer detailed queries with up-to-date information.
Significantly, on July 17, 2025, Open-AI released Agent Mode in ChatGPT, imbued with the ability to fully use the Internet through a web browser. For example, you can give Agent Mode the dates of an upcoming trip, your budget and some interests, and it can research the area, plan a full, day-by-day itinerary and book your hotel and tickets for you!
The massive financial bet on AI
If investment is a measure of expectation, the world’s richest companies and governments all clearly believe that AGI—or something similarly world-changing—is coming soon.
In January 2025, OpenAI announced construction of Project Stargate, a $500 billion datacenter requiring over five gigawatts of power—more than twice the output of Hoover Dam. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s supercomputing center, dubbed Colossus, has cost $4 billion so far and draws 150 megawatts from the grid, with plans to spend $25 billion to quadruple its capacity to nearly 1 gigawatt.
And the spending doesn’t stop at hardware. In one of the most aggressive talent recruiting wars in history, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has offered elite AI researchers compensation packages worth $300 million per person over four years—sometimes more than $100 million in the first year!
In all this, key chipmaker Nvidia skyrocketed to become the world’s most valuable company in history, topping $4.5 trillion in value.
This “compute race” resembles the nuclear arms buildup of the Cold War, but with one striking difference—the pace. Nuclear weapons development spanned decades; ChatGPT was released just three years ago.
Russian President Vladimir Putin famously said in 2017, “Whoever becomes the leader in AI will become the ruler of the world.” That prediction accurately summed up the fervor for powerful AI systems that has ignited these historic investments.
Biblical perspective: Is AGI really possible?
The fact is, machines cannot replicate the God-given, spiritual nature of human beings. Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God “has put eternity in their hearts.” People are not just biological processors of data. It is the human spirit from our Creator that gives us human understanding (Job 32:8; 1 Corinthians 2:11). And He designed us to live in a loving relationship with Him!
Genesis 2:7 states that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” AI systems, made of silicon circuits and transistors, are mere dust of the ground.
However, the Bible gives grave warnings about human ingenuity. At the Tower of Babel, God said that, because the people were working together with the same mindset and language, “Nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them” (Genesis 11:6).
The spread of global technology has helped to remove the language barrier God introduced at Babel. And today’s engineers, corporations and governments are working with one mind and one goal—to create machine intelligence that can learn and perform nearly any task as well as, or better than, human beings.
Gary Kasparov, the renowned chess grandmaster who famously lost to IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer in 1997—a feat once considered impossible for a machine—stated, “Saying that Deep Blue doesn’t really think is like saying an airplane doesn’t really fly because it doesn’t flap its wings.”
In other words, in the eyes of the world the difference between intelligence and capability will be considered irrelevant—as what matters is what AI can do.
Just as the builders at Babel, humanity is coming against limits that once seemed unreachable.
The real dangers start before AGI arrives
Science fiction loves the trope of self-aware AI turning against its creators. Despite the dazzling leaps of AI agents or how human the newest AI models may seem in their writing, they are not at all a step toward true humanlike intelligence.
However, the most immediate dangers of AI do not require any form of consciousness or sentience to amplify evil in the world.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
Recall the problem of “fake news” in recent years. Hundreds of provocative, but untrue, headlines deceived many. AI will be used to produce more convincing content faster than ever, including not only text but fraudulent images and videos that are increasingly difficult to discern.
Likewise, bad actors across the board augment their abilities with AI already—from hackers holding companies hostage with ransomware to phishing scams duping people for their bank information. Very soon, AI agents will make it possible to outsource these evil deeds completely, enabling a single person to deploy as many simultaneous attacks as their computing resources can support.
The scale of the threat grows when considering geopolitical motives. State-sponsored cyber attacks from China against critical U.S. systems are now routine, and their human hackers are probably already equipped with AI assistants at their side. It’s not a stretch to imagine the Chinese government commissioning an army of AI cyberwarfare agents that autonomously seek out vulnerabilities in critical American systems and infiltrate them for espionage and/or disruption.
Internet-based attacks can have real, deadly consequences, but the dangers of AI do not stop there. An Encyclopedia Britannica essay titled “Killer Robots: The Future of War?” postulates that “the first revolution in warfare was the invention of gunpowder. The second was the invention of nuclear weapons. And this [AI-powered autonomous robots] will be the third” (Toby Walsh, Britannica.com, originally published 2018). As it rightly observes, “The weakest link in a drone is the radio link back to base.” Now it can keep going on its own.
Coinciding with developments in AI, drone technology and humanoid robotics have undergone rapid advances in recent years. Flying drones are already redefining the principles of modern warfare through the Russia-Ukraine war, where cheap remote-piloted drones carrying explosives have neutralized multimillion-dollar tanks, dramatically altering battlefield dynamics. Replacing remote drone pilots with AI is an all-but-certain escalation that will soon make these platforms capable of greater destruction and on a much larger scale.
On the robotics front, Boston Dynamics in the U.S. and Unitree Robotics in China are routinely demoing new humanlike and doglike robots—powered by AI systems—that learn via neural networks to not only walk, but run, jump, climb, dance and do backflips. In the near future, governments may be manufacturing vast armies of AI-powered autonomous robot soldiers.
Consider also the problem of AGI or ASI falling into the hands of volatile dictators, and the stakes become even higher. On June 22, 2025, U.S. stealth bombers destroyed three Iranian nuclear facilities, derailing Iran’s uranium enrichment ambitions for years to come. Replace the thought of “uranium enrichment” with “AI computer clusters” and the same logic may apply in the near future—nations launching preemptive strikes to prevent rivals from reaching AI supremacy.
Will humanity survive the AI explosion?
Jesus Christ warned that in the end times the world would be plagued by “wars and rumors of wars” (Matthew 24:6). AI is poised to be both fuel and the spark for that fire.
While AI marches forward at breakneck speed, the “AI utopia” scenario does not seem at all likely. Human nature, as history has shown many times over, dictates that AI will be used as a tool for both good and evil. The abilities of these systems in the near future leave us with very bleak prospects.
Will mankind survive? Jesus said that things will get so bad that “unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved [alive] . . .” (Matthew 24:22). In other words, the Bible confirms that the doom-and-gloom scenarios are indeed the logical, predictable outcome of man’s efforts!
Our greatest problems—war, greed, corruption—are not technical but spiritual in nature. AI cannot solve them. Rather, it will amplify them.
And yet, there is hope! Jesus continued, “. . . but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened.” In the absence of a loving Creator, the collective sins of mankind would be our undoing—but God, out of mercy and love for His people, will intervene before AI or any other threat would destroy mankind.
Until the return of Jesus Christ, the world we live in will become increasingly dangerous and unpredictable. Paul warned that “in the last days perilous times will come” (2 Timothy 3:1). AI advances are worsening many spiritual dangers. Social media will become more addictive and more toxic. Advertising will become more enticing than ever, fueling hedonism. Deceptive AI content will soon make it nearly impossible to tell truth from reality. All these problems and more are at our doorstep!
What should we do as AI races ahead? Stay spiritually awake, testing every claim against God’s Word, and remember that the only true hope for the world is the coming Kingdom of God.
Our world is charging toward a future it cannot control—but, thankfully, that future is securely in the hands of God the Father and Jesus Christ. For our sake, man’s self-destructive course will be cut short, and God’s Kingdom will bring the peace that no human-devised AI could ever deliver!
****
LOLGB+
#agi #AI #artificialIntelligence #chatgpt #technology
Blog: What the Heck is With the Malfoid Meme?
Generally, I am not a fan of fanfiction. In theory, it’s an excellent way to learn how to write stories and characters, and it serves as a creative outlet. Heck, when I started learning how to write stories as a small child, I was largely writing fanfiction. And, in some cases, the fan’s work may even be so good that it rivals the original work that it was based on.
In practice, however, as beneficial as fanfiction might be for developing writers, it has become largely synonymous with degeneracy with how much of it is smut. Just look at 50 Shades of Grey, which started as a Twilight fanfic, but ended up becoming a best seller infamous for being porn geared towards women. Or the Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal, which has become a meme for its poor grammar and spelling, laughably edgy main character, and, naturally, smut-laced plot lines.
I could go on with even more examples of famous fanfics – some of which have even been published as books- that give fanfiction a bad name. However, within this quagmire of filth are a few hidden gems. A recent example of this was The Other Bennet Sister, a delightful Jane Austen fanfic available on Amazon that focuses on Mary Bennet, the often-forgotten sister of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It’s a fun, cute story that does justice to Jane Austen’s work and explores a character who plays a minor role in the novel, giving her her own voice and storyline.
However, besides The Other Bennet Sister, there is a new fanfic that has taken the Internet by storm and that is the Malfoid trend. At first, I had no idea what the heck it was or why I was getting recommendations for it on my For You page. I thought it was just another Harry Potter fan coming up with a gender-bent Draco Malfoy x Harry Potter fanfic, which is nothing really special. That ship has been a thing for years. I had no idea what the hype was about or why major streamers like Nux Taku were reacting to it.
Then I went on a deep dive after hearing about how important this Malfoid movement has become to Gen Z men.
Apparently, the Malfoid trend started when a fan artist drew a picture of Draco Malfoy as a female and named her “Malfoid” back in 2024. The name itself was interesting because in internet slang, “foid” has come to mean “biological woman.” Thus, it’s been argued that Malfoid isn’t necessarily a gender-bent version of Malfoy from the books/movies but is her own new character that replaces him.
From there, the original Malfoid picture has gone viral as people have used her to create the ideal heterosexual fanfic between her and Harry Potter, that in many ways improves upon the original story. The entire dynamic is changed between Harry and Draco, now that Draco is a biological female. Malfoy’s petty and effeminate actions make more sense in the context of the character being biologically female, and in the case of a relationship between Malfoid and Harry, the fandom says that it makes a more compelling love story than the one we get in the books or movies.
As for this love story, it has been surprisingly wholesome. Though fanfiction is notorious for being disgusting, any sexualization of Malfoid by the internet (particularly by OF girls) has been largely rejected by the men who are the primary fanbase of this trend. They love the story for its traditional gender roles, compelling romance, and culmination in marriage and a family, and see the sexualization of Malfoid as a middle finger to that. One X user even went so far as to say:
Another X user also explained in detail what the Malfoid trend rules are, saying:
Okay. So let’s lay out the rules then.
Now, does this mean that there is absolutely no sexualization of Malfoid within this trend? No. Unfortunately, while doing research about this topic on X, I ran across several posts where the character was absolutely hypersexualized (which is disturbing given that the character is technically a minor even in the fanfic). Thankfully, most of the comments were reacting with disgust towards the creator putting the content out there.
Moving on from that, however, the love of the story for its overall wholesomeness has caused the tagline of this fanfic to be “Yearn.” It is an encouragement for men to yearn for the good in the world and the things beyond themselves. It’s not there to fulfill a man’s fantasy as we so often think of it. It’s become a cultural wakeup call to get men to rise up and fulfill their higher fantasy of providing for and protecting a woman. It accomplishes this by being a traditional romance story, where both the man and woman are virtuous, and through their love, defeat evil. Malfoid, though still portrayed as powerful, is still in need of Harry.
Even better is that this story is not only inspiring men and women to put themselves out there and work to become the best they can be, but it’s also helping them become creative again. Almost everyone in the new Malfoid fandom is getting in on writing fanfics, adding to the story, and even creating short episodes of what a Malfoid T.V. show would look like using AI. And, frankly, the AI episodes of the Malfoid saga really make me think Hollywood is doomed because while you can tell its AI, people have been given the power to make the adaptations and stories that they want to see for a relatively low price.
Until next time,
M.J.
#Blog #BookReview #Books #Fanfiction #fiction #HarryPotter #JKRowling #Malfoid #Memes #OpinionPeice #Review #Writing #X
Artcraft, Mindscaper, et al: Can we really just vibecode creative software?
Over the past couple days, massive hype has built up around Artcraft, a collection of literal clones of Adobe’s CC, Microsoft Office and other apps, entirely vibecoded and open source. Artists and creative folks battered by subscriptions costing hundreds and thousands of dollars a year finally smell relief that’s not the poorly designed open source jank of yesteryear, and the project receives dozens of similarly vibecoded pull requests each hour. At the same time, I’ve been building Mindscaper, practically with the same goal, but without the hype. As such, I have some thoughts and bias on this subject. And probably typos, this is 100% human-written.
Background
Artcraft is developed by Learning Machines LLC, which appears to be a one-man company by Brandon Thomas. Thomas previously developed the deepfake services “vo.codes” and “fakeyou.com” under this company, and developed VTubing tech. Judging by the blurb on “the.storyteller.company”, he appears to believe in “controllable AI” trivializing (“democratizing”) art creation, but with Artcraft opted to primarily clone existing professional software, putting AI on the backburner (although an AI subscription service is available).
By a lucky coincidence, I founded my company Koytek Wattenberg Media at a similar point in time, with similarly limited success. One of my biggest clients became Audacity, at which I worked on “democratizing” audio creation, and wouldn’t you know I’m also into VTubers. I started my hooray into vibecoding about half a year after Artcraft, focusing on Audacity-shaped audio and video editors, Soundscaper and Framescaper.
On technical matters
I have nothing new to say here that hasn’t been already said a billion times. Modern coding robots (I used Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol mostly) are perfectly capable of making something that Just Works. They just happen to be lying, lazy bastards that will happily claim something exists when it doesn’t. Test-driven development principles keep them reasonably honest, though they occasionally do manage to find a way to write tests so unspecific that a pixel-by-pixel spectrogram in the Roseus color scheme and a spectrogram with much coarser buckets using a blue-to-yellow color scheme pass the same test.
I am under no illusion that the code they’ve produced isn’t ugly and suboptimal. But then, the Audacity codebase is 25 years old and also extremely ugly and suboptimal. The Audacity team – all extremely talented software engineers and beautiful people – have been unable to make Audacity 4 feature-equivalent to Audacity 3 in over a year, despite that “only” being a UI migration with some UX changes attached. With Soundscaper, I managed to get an app going featuring all of Audacity 3’s and 4’s features within 3 months, plus a plethora of additional DAW features and video editor on top of it. Similarly, Artcraft managed to get a Photoshop (and general Adobe CC) clone going in half a year.
On practical matters
While the robots are perhaps good enough to get functionality implemented, they suck at figuring out the finer details – and pretty much all of the design.
Robots suck at progressive disclosure
Progressive disclosure is the part of UX where, instead of showing everything at once, you show things as they’re needed. A trivial example for this would be a menu; the “Format” menu is reduced to that single word on your screen until you, the user, decide that now is the time to format something and click on it, revealing a dozen or so options.
Robots suck at this. If you tell them to add a feature, they’ll generally attempt to place it on screen with a dedicated button. This is fine for an app with 6 controls in total, but less so for a complex creation app with 500. Forcing them to chuck everything into menus and dialogs helps, but then we’re straight back into design paradigms from the 80s.
This is where Artcraft and Mindscaper both have an advantage over a pure vibecoded approach: Artcraft already knows where everything goes because they’re busy copying existing design. I know where my stuff goes because I am the designer, and thus have a very strong idea on what these features are, how they should work, where they should go and when they should show up.
Robots suck at information density
In a similar vein to the thing above, robots love to implement stuff as “Control title – control – explanation sentence”. Again, this is fine for a small dialog with 2 controls in it, but for any sufficiently complex effect it just either overwhelms people with too many words and/or requires things to be spaced so far apart to fit all this extra text that the dialog becomes massive.
And again, cloning existing dialogs works here, as does being the original designer to make relevant decisions. Purely vibecoding this from scratch is going to be much more difficult though.
Robots suck at asking the right questions
The biggest difference between working with humans and working with robots is what questions I’m being asked. With the Audacity team, I’d get asked about user edge cases as they popped up, I’d get asked about clarifications on my designs, I’d get asked about things by users. With the robots, there are a lot fewer of these kinds of questions; the only time the robot asks questions at all seems to be in plan mode. However, in plan mode, the questions that are being asked almost always are implementation-centric, ie the stuff I don’t really care about. So what ends up happening is that the robot will go ahead and do something, proudly proclaim it’s finished and then it’s up to me to QA whether it actually did the right stuff. And more often than not, it misses some design edge case.
On philosophical matters
In this section I’d want to talk about the should and shouldn’ts of vibecoding a creative software suite.
Copyright
Artcraft is copying various proprietary programs wholesale using AI. On Artcraft’s side, this has all the usual copyright questions attached (who is the author? is the code copyrightable?), though on Adobe’s side this becomes more interesting: From Tetris v. Xio, we know that the look and feel of a program (in that case, Tetris) can be copyrightable. Note that this is different from copyright on the code itself (which I don’t think Artcraft can even infringe given that their thing is in Rust, which Adobe’s stuff probably isn’t), and also is different from attempting to claim copyright on the app’s structure or underlying ideas (that’s patent stuff, not copyright).
Artcraft thus may be in for a rude awakening should Adobe feel threatened by them. Adobe may or may not win this case, but they also probably don’t need to in order to hobble Artcraft’s development for years to come. Funnily enough, the actual code being open source may be a saving grace here, as it likely can trivially be forked, copied and modified to avoid Adobe’s gaze, to a better degree than pirates ever could. Another point in favor of Artcraft is AI itself; any rulings in favor of copyright holders over AI developers is also a ruling against Adobe’s own products. It thus may be that Adobe opts to do… nothing, in order to avoid the backblast. I don’t think they’ll necessarily care about the possibility of a Streisand; lawsuits like this generally are boring enough for the wider press to not care beyond perhaps a single story in the margins.
Mindscaper meanwhile doesn’t have that problem, as Soundscaper is building upon an open source app and crediting it, and Framescaper is original.
Patents
Software patents unfortunately arguably exist, some of them on UI (eg the Ribbon pattern found in MS Office). Adobe, unsurprisingly, has a tens of thousands of patents.
Software patents are one level more devious than mere copyright: It doesn’t matter that you had the idea all on your own, or that the idea may be obvious now, all that matters is that someone else also had the idea before you. And if they have registered it, you now are in trouble. It’s because of software patents that loading screens don’t have minigames, it’s because of software patents that Audacity makes you jump through hoops to download FFmpeg, as there are still over 3000 patents in the AAC patent pool alone. And if just a singular patent survives litigation, which given the sheer number of patents involved is gonna take forever anyway, you’re on the hook for yet more damages.
Software patents are the ideal tool for corporations to shut down people you don’t like, hence why some corporations (including Adobe and Microsoft, the companies most likely to be upset by what Artcraft is doing here) engage in non-aggression pacts with each other, like the Allied Security Trust or Open Innovation Network – this prevents these companies being at each other’s throats for patent reasons all the time.
However, these defensive alliances generally don’t apply to people outside the alliance, and neither Artcraft nor Mindscaper are in one. Thus, whenever one of the incumbents ends up being upset or feel threatened by what’s happening, they can pull the litigation lever.
I don’t know which patents could be relevant here, and frankly, I also don’t wanna know – in the end it doesn’t really matter. Patents are a risk factor for any software, and typically best left ignored as patent holders tend to be more busy with actual business than going after one-man companies. However, when you sufficiently piss off a company – and I’d argue that wholesale cloning of a software might constitute that – you have a lot stacked against you.
Freeing users
Subscription services for software create incentives for the builder of the software to put as little work as possible into the software while charging as much as possible. This allows the Autodesks and Adobes of the world to charge ridiculous amounts, while providing software so bad that it regularly attracts user petitions, begging them to fix longstanding bugs degrading the experience.
Simply providing free software alternatives here may work (eg in the case of blender and musescore), or may not work, as free software does (or at least: used to) suffer from small development teams and quite frequently UX so weird that it wasn’t possible for some folks to figure out how to use the program in question. A famous example for this is the “make a circle in GIMP”. The solution is to make an elliptical selection, intuit that you can convert that to a path, and then use a panel to draw the path – as opposed to Photoshop, where you just use the circle tool.
Providing free software versions of a program would indeed free people of subscription software to use something else, depending on the copyright situation more or less easy compared to pirating, and this is what Artcraft does provide.
Freeing new users
However, I’ve found that the entire creative software field suffers from underdeveloped design. A lot of professional-grade software is modeled after pre-digital hardware and uses design metaphors that simply don’t make sense if you haven’t experienced said hardware. I remember when Lightworks, an Oscar-winning video editor, became a free download in 2010, I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out, not even typically simple things like rendering the video. This is despite me having had some experience in Sony Movie Maker (the cheap version of Vegas) and Powerdirector.
This is understandable somewhat: To attract professional users in the 80s and 90s, you’d need to replicate their workflows from their pre-digital tools. And once you have these users and they’ve learned how to use the program, they’d hate to have to adapt to a new design. However, this also leads to new users having to jump through enormous quantities of hoops trying to learn the program. If you want to “democratize” art creation, making things free and open source is one thing, but the barrier to entry of learning the tool remains the same.
This is where my work on Audacity (and now Soundscaper) becomes relevant: It takes quite a bit of design work, but it in principle should be possible to design a complex creation app in such a way to make it easy to use. Notably, not everything has to be equally easy – setting up a simple recording should be a one-button operation, while setting up a more complex multi-track recording may be a bit more involved, as we can expect the user to have a more clear task in mind on which input goes to which track.
Our vision for Audacity (and Musescore for that matter) was to completely starve the current incumbents of new users by just having a much more modern design and having an app that’s easier to get into. I still think this is the way things will shake out eventually; we’ve already seen Finale starve to death from this pressure.
Artists
Of course, AI bros would go further here and envision a future where skill is completely replaced by AI. And while for things that already were sloppy and primarily utilitarian to begin with (shitposts, local business signage, anything using Wordart/clipart in the past), AI certainly is going to replace more dedicated tools, I don’t see it doing so for artists. To draw a chess analogy, computers have been better than humans in chess for a long time, yet humans still play chess, for one simple reason: It’s fun. Similarly, artists don’t really care if a robot can do a hyperrealistic godzilla in mere seconds, as the fun part of making art is actually creating it, not just admiring the result (that would be mere consumption).
As an artist, you of course get to pick your battles. You can decide that shading or coloring is too annoying, and stick to strict black and white, or that mixing and mastering is too annoying and stick to making melodies and chords. From there you can hire someone to do the shading and coloring and additional work for you, or indeed use AI instead. In either case, your initial creative vision gets diluted by the other work; the more people are involved and the heavier the AI use, the more diluted your vision gets. This can be acceptable to you, especially in a world where art is traded as a commercial good, but if we assume that art as a good is going to lose worth, this tradeoff may become less worthwhile, perhaps making it so that you only wants tools strictly designed for you to express yourself.
For-profit open source
Having both worked at and seen for-profit open source, I’m perhaps a bit jaded:
There might be a way to make a for-profit company be a good steward of an open source project, but the incentives always point in a different direction – and even if the current leadership can resist these incentives, the next one can flip towards enshittification so fast. I haven’t seen Thomas’ Artcraft project enough yet to know whether he’ll stay true to open source, though given he already has a subscription service (for cloud AI compute, of course) and a launcher ready, I gotta say that I’m worried.
It’s for this reason that I spun out Soundscaper from my company kw.media into Mindscaper, a non-profit association. It is now immune to me, or anyone else for that matter, deciding I would like it to make me tons of money, as long as its members (so, ideally, the users) don’t want to be milked. As an association (as opposed to a foundation), it also is way more democratic, giving users a real voice in what should happen to Soundscaper.
Resources & Sustainability
It’s impossible to discuss AI without touching upon the massive resource use it causes. Throughout my time developing Soundscaper, I have burnt through Codex’ and Claude’s 20x subscription quota almost every single reset cycle, including OpenAI’s ridiculous practice of vibing when a reset occurs and having a dude announce it on twitter. This has cost me hundreds of dollars, would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars in API cost, and has cost OpenAI and Anthropic likely thousands of dollars as well.
It is clear to me that the current pricing isn’t sustainable, and that slowly but surely, costs will go up. It is for this reason that Soundscaper uses local inference whenever useful and won’t be integrating with any cloud AI services. As far as I’m concerned, the entire point of open source is to fuck around with stuff on the machines you have access to and have it not tied to some service which decides what is and isn’t allowed.
It also is clear to me that there are real environmental impacts vibecoding this hard has; especially when comparing how long and hard my local setup has to work to achieve much simpler tasks (I let gemma and aya-expanse handle translation work locally, for example). Thus, I try to limit my vibecoding to the areas I really care about. I have a media background, so I shall vibecode media tools I’ll personally use – as opposed to token-maxxing just because I can.
Conclusion
So, can we vibecode creative software? On a technical level, yes. On a design level, yes, if we are a designer or follow someone else’s design. But should we? Depending on how adventurous we are with copyright and patent laws, especially if we are just re-implementing someone else’s design – maybe not.
We absolutely should open source and reverse engineer the things we care about, but we shouldn’t take a robot’s “one-shot” in an area we know nothing about as proof that it’s good now. It’s enormously easy to slop a whole software suite into existence but it actually takes some real work to get the software suite to actually be usable by real people – and surely, the benefit to real people has to be the goal.
If you’re interested in contributing to a non-profit making creative software, consider joining Mindscaper.
#ai #artcraft #artificialIntelligence #audacity #mindscaper #openSource #software #soundscaper #technology #vibecoding #writing
Famous birthdays for Oct. 27: Kelly Osbourne, Lee Greenwood https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2026/10/27/Famous-birthdays-for-Oct-27-Kelly-Osbourne-Lee-Greenwood/6221793065175/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
Famous birthdays for Oct. 26: Pat Sajak, Rita Wilson https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2026/10/26/Famous-birthdays-for-Oct-26-Pat-Sajak-Rita-Wilson/9141792987147/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
Famous birthdays for Oct. 25: Chad Smith, Juan Soto https://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/2026/10/25/Famous-birthdays-for-Oct-25-Chad-Smith-Juan-Soto/2521792897086/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
I just found out a famous feminist author has become a Tr*mper - YouTube
HealthyGirl Kitchen's Famous Vegan Pumpkin Spice Chocolate Chip Cookies https://vegnews.com/recipes/vegan-gluten-free-pumpkin-spice-chocolate-chip-cookies?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #vegan #vegetarian
Hey, Mastodonverse!
Recognize this famous photograph?
These 29 scientists (17 of whom were/became Nobel laureates) gathered together here for the 5th Solvay International Conference on Physics, which started 99 years ago today, running from October 24th to 29th back in 1927.
1/
⏰ 5 days to go!
Every monument has a place in our history, whether it is a famous landmark or a historic site in your community.
Have you documented one for #WLM2026? Make sure your photographs are submitted before your country's competition closes - https://w.wiki/S8d9
Takayama Matsuri Yatai Kaikan – Historic Festival Floats in Japan
Takayama Matsuri Yatai Kaikan is a museum displaying the elaborately decorated festival floats used during Takayama's famous Autumn Festival. Located beside Sakurayama Hachimangu Shrine, the exhibition features historic floats adorned with intricate woodcarvings, gilded decorations and colourful lanterns. Visitors can learn…
https://www.destinationsjourney.com/takayama-matsuri-yatai-kaikan-historic-festival-floats-in-japan/
#Musk 'announces'
"Next year (if he avoids prison obviously)
I I will give a 'share' of #SpaceX
to every child in #USA"
520.000 likes
Immediately 'Trump ass-licking' replay
(who tried to buy votes with the same scam)
"Thank YOU for your 'generosity'
to 'donate' > through 'Trump accounts'
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
FFS !
a SCAMMER says (if you don't send me to jail) I'll 'pay' on the 'account' of another SCAMMER
(famous for STEALING funds for Children with Cancer !!! )
...
🤣
#Americans
will they ever learn ?
🎙️ ■ Los disfraces de famosos que marcarán tendencia este Halloween 2026 ■
https://los40.com/2026/10/26/los-disfraces-de-famosos-que-marcaran-tendencia-este-halloween-2026/?int=MASTODON_WORLD
Musical Interlude: It's spooky season, time for something weeeeeird. The Shaggs were a sisters forced into being musicians by their father, who believed a prediction that they would become famous. Their music, bizarrely composed and naively written, is held up as either being catastrophically bad or brilliant outsider art. I find their music strangely fascinating. They had no interest in being musicians and quit as soon as their father died, but they did achieve fame, so the prediction came true...
"It's Halloween," performed by the Shaggs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz3KBn0wp5A
#MusicalInterlude #TheShaggs #Rock #OutsiderMusic #SpookySeason #HalloweenMusic #Weird #Bizarre
The word dollar has #Czech origin. It comes from German Tahler. After one Bohemian (Kingdom of Bohemia was a Czech kingdom) town started minting their own coins, the coins were called Joachimsthaler (Joachimsthal's or of Joachimsthal - the name of the town). That got shortened to Thaler and eventually in Czech language that got transformed to tolar. The English word dollar comes from the Czech word tolar.
German adjective becoming a noun used in other languages is more common than you think. The type of beer Pilsner comes from Czech town Pilsen (Pilsner - Pilsen's or less literally "from Pilsen"). Famously Pilsner Urquell is beer made in Plzeň (Czech name for Pilsen). So when you order a pilsner style beer, you are ordering "Plzeň's". That's also why "Berliner Pilsner" annoys me so much, they mean it's Berlin's pilsner, but literally it just means "Berlin's Plzeň's" which doesn't make sense on its own.
So Czechs have given us more than just the word robot. We can thank them for names for currencies and also beer brewing style.
The Price List Nobody Could Open
The most famous memo in American industrial history says a company counted the dead. In the fall of 1977, Mother Jones published "Pinto Madness," and the country learned the shape of the story it would keep: a car with a dangerous fuel tank, a fix that cost eleven dollars a vehicle, and a memo that priced the burn deaths against the repair and found the deaths cheaper. The memo became the Pinto's death warrant in the public mind, the smoking gun with a signature, the proof that a corporation had done the arithmetic of murder and filed it. […]https://bolesblogs.com/2026/10/24/the-price-list-nobody-could-open/
🧿 𝑳𝒂 𝒇𝒐𝒕𝒐 𝒎𝒂́𝒔 𝒇𝒂𝒎𝒐𝒔𝒂 𝒅𝒆 𝑵𝒖𝒆𝒗𝒂 𝒀𝒐𝒓𝒌 𝒏𝒐 𝒆𝒓𝒂 𝒍𝒐 𝒒𝒖𝒆 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒊́𝒂 🧿
En 1932, once hombres aparecen sentados sobre una viga de acero, comiendo tranquilamente a más de 200 metros sobre Manhattan.
Piernas colgando, sin arnés, sin red.
La imagen dio la vuelta al mundo como símbolo de coraje en plena Gran Depresión.
Pero la realidad es un poco menos romántica… y bastante más interesante.
La fotografía, conocida como Lunch atop a Skyscraper, no fue un momento espontáneo.
Fue una sesión organizada por los promotores del Rockefeller Center para promocionar su nuevo rascacielos, el entonces edificio RCA (hoy Comcast).
Nueva York necesitaba optimismo, y esa imagen vendía exactamente eso: progreso, valentía, futuro.
Los hombres eran reales, claro.
Obreros de carne y hueso que cobraban alrededor de 1,50 dólares la hora.
Muchos eran inmigrantes —irlandeses, italianos, eslovacos— y también trabajadores Mohawk de Kahnawake.
No estaban ahí por épica personal: estaban trabajando, y negarse no era precisamente una opción.
Hay otro detalle que cambia bastante la percepción: no estaban exactamente a 260 metros de caída libre.
Unos metros más abajo ya había una planta terminada.
Aun así, el riesgo era real.
Y lo sabían.
Durante décadas, ni siquiera se supo quién había tomado la foto.
Se llegó a atribuir a Lewis Hine, pero hoy muchos historiadores apuntan a Charles C. Ebbets, que estaba allí ese día junto a otros fotógrafos.
Y lo más inquietante: de los once hombres, solo dos han sido identificados con cierta seguridad.
Joseph Eckner (a la izquierda del todo) y Joe Curtis (a la derecha).
Otros nombres han sido propuestos por familias, pero sin pruebas definitivas.
El edificio lleva el apellido Rockefeller grabado en piedra.
Ellos dejaron una imagen… sin nombre.
Mientras tanto, la construcción del complejo no fue precisamente segura.
Se calcula que entre 5 y 10 trabajadores murieron durante los años que duró la obra.
Era la norma de la época: sin regulaciones modernas, el riesgo formaba parte del oficio.
Para comparar, en el Empire State Building murieron oficialmente 5 personas, aunque algunas versiones elevan la cifra.
Dentro de esa historia hay un grupo que destaca: los Mohawk de Kahnawake, conocidos como “skywalkers”.
Durante años se dijo que no tenían miedo a las alturas.
Ellos siempre lo negaron.
No era ausencia de miedo, era control.
Disciplina.
Confianza total en el equipo.
Su historia empieza en 1886, cuando una empresa los vio moverse con naturalidad sobre estructuras de acero durante la construcción de un puente en sus tierras.
A partir de ahí, se convirtieron en una pieza clave en los grandes proyectos de Nueva York.
Crearon incluso su propio barrio en Brooklyn, “Little Caughnawaga”.
Participaron en la construcción de rascacielos emblemáticos y, décadas después, sus descendientes cerraron un círculo duro de asimilar: trabajaron en la limpieza tras el 11-S y en la construcción del nuevo One World Trade Center.
Al final, la famosa foto funciona casi como una metáfora perfecta: un icono construido para vender una idea… que terminó ocultando a quienes realmente lo hicieron posible.
▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #nuevayork #grandeprension #fotografía #rockefellercenter #obreros #arquitectura #memoria #curiosidades #historiareal
After 9,372 failed attempts at mixing the ultimate cocktail, Dr. Schwarzenblumenstrauß finally had to accept he would never realize his childhood dream of becoming a famous bartender. Time to consider going back to the family’s mad-scientist business. Building monsters inside a derelict castle somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains wasn’t all bad, except he knew Igor would mock him for days.
#DrawingForFun #KleineKunstKlasse #MastoArt #FediArt #MicroStory #MicroFic #MicroFiction #Halloween
I wonder if one reason we've seen so much growth in the #FarRight in the last decade is that pretty much everyone who actually fought in or even just lived through WWII has now passed on.
The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Not only that, but I think a lot of these raise-the-flags, stop-the-boats folk genuinely believe that their ancestors from that time would support what they're doing — when probably the opposite is true.
Why 10,000 Steps a Day? The Curious Story Behind a Number We Took as Gospel
Ten thousand steps became a famous fitness goal, but the science behind the number is more interesting than you might think.Dear Cherubs, why are we all chasing 10,000 steps a day as though a tiny digital counter holds the secret to eternal youth? The surprising answer takes us back to 1960s Japan, a clever marketing campaign and a number that may have become a health obsession partly because a machine reset at 10,000.
THE NUMBER THAT SOLD A WALKING HABIT
According to The BMJ, the familiar target traces back to Japan in the mid-1960s, when a company called Yamasa introduced a pedometer known as the manpo-kei. The name translates roughly as “10,000-step meter”, and it arrived during the excitement surrounding the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
The timing was excellent. Japan was becoming increasingly interested in physical fitness, and the idea of tracking daily movement offered people a simple way to get more active. Ten thousand was memorable, easy to communicate and satisfyingly round. Marketing departments have been exploiting those qualities for decades. No surprises there.
But here comes the interesting bit. Research published in the journal Ethnographiques.org reports that the original manpo-kei reset to zero after every 10,000 steps. That detail gives the machine-reset theory some credibility: a device designed around a particular number could have helped reinforce that number as a daily target.
However, it would be a stretch to claim that the reset mechanism alone created the trend. The product was already named after 10,000 steps, and the slogan was being promoted as a walking goal. The evidence points to a combination of marketing, product design and a catchy number rather than one mechanical quirk changing humanity forever.
A MARKETING NUMBER BECOMES A HEALTH RULE
The real plot twist is that 10,000 steps was not originally established through clinical trials proving that this exact number was necessary for good health. The scientific evidence came later, while the target had already gained popularity.
According to The BMJ, the figure became widely recognised through the Japanese campaign rather than emerging from a scientific discovery. Over time, pedometers, fitness trackers, smartphones and workplace challenges helped turn it into a familiar benchmark.
And it stuck. There is something wonderfully human about preferring a clear target to a complicated explanation. Ten thousand feels like a mission. Six thousand feels like an unfinished spreadsheet.
Does that mean walking 10,000 steps is pointless? Absolutely not. Walking regularly supports health, and increasing activity can be beneficial, particularly for people who spend much of the day sitting. The problem is treating one round number as a universal medical requirement.
Research published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019 found that, among older women studied, taking around 4,400 steps daily was associated with a lower risk of death than taking around 2,700. The association levelled off at approximately 7,500 steps in that study. Results from one group do not establish the perfect target for everyone, but they show that meaningful benefits can occur below 10,000.
The takeaway? Aim to move more, build a routine you can maintain and adapt your goals to your circumstances. Missing an arbitrary number on your watch is not a moral failure.
For more curious explainers about everyday myths and surprising facts, explore Thisclaimer at thisclaimer.com and its YouTube channel. Because sometimes the real story behind a modern habit is far more interesting than the habit itself.
Sources
The BMJ — “Sixty seconds on… 10 000 steps” — https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q598
Ethnographiques.org — “Taking 10,000 steps a day – really? A survey of ordinary self-tracking practices” — https://shs.cairn.info/article/E_RES_216_0157/pdf?lang=en
Cairn.info
JAMA Internal Medicine — “Association of Step Volume and Intensity With All-Cause Mortality in Older Women” — https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2734709
Step Counting: A Review of Measurement Considerations and Health-Related Applications — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5488109/
Thisclaimer — https://thisclaimer.com/
Thisclaimer YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@thisclaimer?sub_confirmation=1
The Thisclaimer logo blends a classic warning symbol with a brain icon to represent critical thinking, curiosity, and thoughtful disclaimers #10000Steps #dailyExercise #fitnessMyths #fitnessTrackers #healthFacts #japaneseInventions #pedometerHistory #surprisingHistory #tokyoOlympics #walkingFacts
Thibaut Garcia at the National Concert Hall
Last night I travelled into Dublin for another concert by National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, this time under the direction of guest conductor Julio García Vico in a programme of music heavy with French and Spanish influences.
The undoubted star of the show was classical guitarist Thibaut Garcia, who is French but has Spanish ancestry, who played the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo. I’ve loved this piece for ages, and have several recordings of it, but although it’s been a familiar part of the concert repertoire ever since it was composed in 1939, I’ve never heard it played live. Last night’s performance was stunningly beautiful, one of those occasions on which it was a privilege just to be there. I loved the way he played the first movement Allegro con Spirito with poise and precision but without a hint of punctiliousness. The famous second movement Adagio gives the soloist much more latitude for interpretation, and Garcia’s version was very different from others I’ve heard. The music here evokes a sense of nostalgia, which comes with both joy and melancholy. I think in too many performances melancholy has the upper hand, but last night we really felt the joy. The final movement, Allegro gentile, contains a playful series of call-and-answer sequences set against varied rhythmic backgrounds. I adored this performance.
I noticed while he was playing that Thibaut Garcia has hyperextensible thumbs (as do I) and, as I went to the bar for my interval drink, I found myself wondering whether having bendy thumbs was an advantage for playing classical guitar. You could have knocked me down with a feather when, as I was returning to my seat after the wine break, that the man himself was sitting in the seat right behind mine preparing to listen to the second half of the concert. I couldn’t resist telling him how much I enjoyed the performance and mentioned his thumbs. It must be very irksome for an artist when strange people intrude awkwardly like that, but he was absolutely charming. After a brief comparison of thumbs, I sat down and left him alone. I was too starstruck to ask him whether distal hyperextensibility is a plus when it comes to playing the guitar. Perhaps someone can offer an opinion through the comments?
Anyway, it would be remiss not to mention the rest of the programme, which contained a great of interest. The first piece, for example, Laniakea by Camille Pépin is inspired by our Local Supercluster of galaxies which astronomers have named Laniakea, an Hawaiian word meaning “immeasurable heaven”.
The programme after the interval contained energetic and colourful performances of music from the opera La Vida Breve by Manuel de Falla, the Capriccio Espagnol by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and, for the finale, the famous Bolero by Maurice Ravel. All these were played very well, but the first half was so wonderful that it was always going to be impossible for the second half to match it.
#Boléro #CamillePépin #CapriccioEspagnol #ConciertoDeAranjuez #DistalHyperextensibility #JoaquínRodrigo #LaVidaBreve #Laniakea #ManuelDeFalla #MauriceRavel #NikolaiRimskyKorsakov #ThibautGarcia
I had a close friend who is really shitty about nonbinary people and has been for years, we had a bit of a falling out after I called him out on it regarding a friend of ours (not even myself, though he was really shitty to me when I came out to him too) for refusing to use their preferred pronouns and even mocking the entire concept of not being male or female. After that, we just quit talking regularly and eventually I built up enough self-respect that I quietly blocked him on social media without saying a word and purposefully did not give him my new phone number when I switched carriers.
Expelling toxic people who don't accept you for who and what you are is ALWAYS the right choice. If their heart changes later, you can reconsider, but until then you don't need to subject yourself to fuckheads.
Today, #Britten, a #Higgins' world premiere with Simpson and #Stravinsky from #Liverpool https://www.worldconcerthall.com/en/schedule/britten_a_higgins_world_premiere_with_simpson_and_stravinsky_from_liverpool/94617/ #wch
Today, the Turicum Quartet plays plays #Szymanowski, a #Janseghers' world premiere and #Colțea in #Ghent https://www.worldconcerthall.com/en/schedule/the_turicum_quartet_plays_plays_szymanowski_a_janseghers_world_premiere_and_colea_in_ghent/94613/ #wch
