Known as “The French Angel”, the wrestler Maurice Tillet is rumored to have inspired the look of Shrek. He suffered from acromegaly caused by a benign tumor on his pituitary gland (which regulates the synthesis of Human Growth Hormone - Wikipedia). Here’s a color video of him chilling 🤗
helps you “bust writer’s block and be more creative” using an AI. Came by it after reading this amazing result of a collaboration between GPT-3 and James Yu.
I found out I am to thank the Ottomans for a lot of my favorite things to eat and drink:
Headed over to “Wisdom of Chopra” to get myself a slice of Deepak’s #cosmiconscious insight.
Took that and had GPT-2 use it as a seed for more wisdom. Behold:
The invisible is the foundation of total belongingness: When we feel like we belong and are at home, we are happy, healthy and in good spirits. Without our sense of belonging, we feel anxious, sad, depressed, disengaged, and negative.
In the struggle to locate our identity, we can limit our awareness of who we are. We become prisoners of our own identities, which is usually the result of trying to fulfill our parents’ or society’s expectations of us.
It takes wisdom and intelligence to become an invisible expert, and this is not only to create a safe space for self-knowledge, but also to create safe spaces for others to be able to be themselves.
Imagine all the different spiritual and emotional benefits when we do not see or know about another’s stories, feelings, anxieties or challenges.
Imagine how freeing it would be for a Buddhist monk or a leader to have all their body, thoughts and speech remain invisible to everyone, including themselves.
How liberating would it be to know your gifts and be free from the burden of being in constant search of knowledge or validation, simply knowing that you are a gift to yourself and the world, and you matter to you.
As the Torah tells us: “You have been born for such a time as this” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We have been given the gift of life to explore our true identities, free of expectations and limitations, to finally reach out into the unknown to create the power and joy of the divine within.
In a world that seems to be in constant change and evolution, it is easy to feel alone and afraid. Yet we are never alone, and it is always safe to be true to ourselves.
There is power in transforming into the master of our own universe. In the words of the Buddha: “The job of a bodhisattva is not to be a creator, but to create a creator.”
In the depths of our souls, the divine resonates with us, nudging us to release our inner monologue of fear and the unconscious power it holds over us. Each and every one of us has within us the potential to embody divine love and compassion for ourselves and all of creation, and in the embodiment of this divine potential, we ignite our own personal power.
Gather the courage to become the master of our own universe and to discover the true magic that dwells within.
Aum Shanti 🙏
, ThriftBooks, and Bookshop are three alternatives to purchasing books on Amazon. Powell’s is withdrawing from the Amazon Marketplace: “The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality.”
“Nidhi: In thirty-five years of being in this industry, I’ve never seen a dish look like that… taste so good. It’s delicious.”
“Nina Simone said this and I never forgot it. She said, ‘You will use up everything you got, trying to get everybody what they want.’ You got to focus man. You know what I do?! I super serve my niche.”
👉 Of all the stuff I could’ve attempted to appreciate from the genius’ collegiate notebook, I loved these annotations the most and don’t care what that says about me.
Some absolutely marvelous photos of a Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus by @SammyGlennDives
Like she’s dancing!
Would love to find out what kind of protective gear the photographer had on. But it seems like the octopuses are very shy and will attack only when provoked, which is when their rings become more intense 🐙 The salivary venom1, synthesized by bacteria and not the octopus itself, doesn’t have an antidote and is only used to hunt and defend. It’s either injected via the beak, or is sprayed as a mist, paralysing the prey in either case for the final kill (presumably involving more beak.)
Here’s a little more. Love the intro. They truly are so alien and so, so beautiful 😍
Always have to look it up: Poison is passive, venom is active.↩︎
The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 years ago? Black hole of fad frameworks and brittle dependencies. Computer Archaeology is going to become a full-time job.
– Source
See also: “Creating a QR Code step by step”
Took me two tries to get through this. I felt bad for Rep. Clawson but he was well-intentioned and, to CM’s point, this is the kind of “honest mistake” that can happen only in a few countries 🇺🇸
Source. See also: Every website in 2018
There’s so much more to life than finding someone who will want you, or being sad over someone who doesn’t. There’s a lot of wonderful time to be spent discovering yourself without hoping someone will fall in love with you along the way, and it doesn’t need to be painful or empty. You need to fill yourself up with love. Not anyone else. Become a whole being on your own. Go on adventures, fall asleep in the woods with friends, wander around the city at night, sit in a coffee shop on your own, write on bathroom stalls, leave notes in library books, dress up for yourself, give to others, smile a lot. Do all things with love, but don’t romanticize life like you can’t survive without it. Live for yourself and be happy on your own. It isn’t any less beautiful, I promise.
And don’t forget to vote to privatize and abolish the Fire Department by calling their experience and credentials into question!
Look we just wanted to make sure The Ocean would remember our species for having delivered value at any cost.
The Punisher logo is genius. Via Pete.
(Cached)
On the developer side, what I hope people are doing is trying to make, not just good code, but these days we’ve been very good about having explanations for the code. So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Sometimes the code change is so obvious that no message is really required, but that is very very rare. And so one of the things I hope developers are thinking about, the people who are actually writing code, is not just the code itself, but explaining why the code does something, and why some change was needed. Because that then in turn helps the managerial side of the equation, where if you can explain your code to me, I will trust the code.
A lot of open source in general is about communication. And part of it is the commit messages, part of it is just the email going back and forth. Communicating what you’re trying to do or communicating why something doesn’t work for you is really important.
– Linus Torvalds, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel (emphasis mine)
This is pretty much what mine look like. For my personal stuff, I get so lazy, I use a list of developer excuses to generate a commit log that looks like this 🤦♀️
I hereby swear to read this document and make writing good commit messages a habit ✋🚀
Wikipedia calls it “decompression damage”. The Smithsonian Magazine has more.
Bill Burr on The Joe Rogan Experience:
BURR: I don’t want to start this bullshit. I’m not gonna sit here with no medical degree, listening to you with no medical degree, with an American flag behind you smoking a cigar, acting like we know what’s up, better than the CDC. All I do, is I watch the news once every two weeks - I’m like, “Mask or no mask? Still mask? Alright, mask!” That’s all I give a fuck about. I don’t care. I just love how wearing a mask became like this fucking like soft thing that you were doing… like being courteous…”
ROGAN: It’s for bitches1.
BURR: Why is it for bitches? That’s just so stupid.
ROGAN: (Fakes weak cough)
BURR: Oh God you’re so tough with your fucking open nose and throat and your five o’clock shadow. This is a man right here! A man doesn’t wear a mask.
Rogan’s immediate response somehow reminded me of the “infantile phallocentric Nietzscheanism that is destroying modern human culture” from one of my favorite articles.
About as predictable as it gets. Chadwick Boseman is excellent.
They call themselves Blac Rabbit. Here they are on Ellen.
I had no idea how these were made until watching this. The music is annoying.
via Mark
What’s even more remarkable is that it has about 12,000 posts in a single ~38MB file! He uses TiddlyWiki which I need to try and understand.
Being a satirical take on the state of enterprise software development, and authored by smart people who presumably like to watch the world burn. The issues are highly entertaining as well.
The firm also did the beautiful, interactive version of Transmit’s awesome logo.
I wish I had this intuitive, visual understanding and appreciation of the topic when I was in college.
This is some astounding PowerPoint-fu. Reminded me of the words of Linus Torvalds, “That is either genius, or a seriously diseased mind.”
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing
NATICKat the “N” — I knewWYETHbut forgot his initials, andNATICK… is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway,NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing — became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known.NATICKtook hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun (“I had aNATICKin the SW corner…”) or verb (“I gotNATICKEDby 50A / 34D!”)
Here’s the Urban Dictionary entry. Learned that that “crosswordese” is a thing. Been doing the NYT Crosswords fairly regularly over the past few years and that page has a lot of useful, vowel-y ‘bridge’ words and phrases (e.g. AGRA, ESAU, ISAO, OMOO, DEUSIRAE.)
He played Hans Gruber’s “right-hand man” Karl Vreski. Here’s more on his roller-coaster of a life.
By someone at Toggl, a software company that also makes great comics… 🤷♂️
It also doesn’t retail for less than $21,000 so there’s that.
Constructed around 1100 BCE, it had “995 graffiti left by visitors […], ranging from the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD” a 1,000 years later.
Am a sucker for a good revenge story. This one was very slow and kinda haphazard. But I didn’t think it was bad enough to deserve this:
The film received negative reviews from critics and was a box-office bomb, having the worst wide opening weekend of all-time, the biggest drop in theaters, and is projected to lose Paramount $40 million.
– Wikipedia (emphasis mine)
Good grief Basel! Blake Lively put in one of those “triumphant” performances 👏💯🏅
Jason Bateman directed the first few episodes of this show and appears to be on a roll (saw this right after the third season of Ozark.) It was a 10-episode miniseries that was 5 episodes too long. Everything about the antagonist was either laughable or inconsistent. Cynthia Erivo was magnificent as the wicked-smaht and quirky Holly Gibney whose savant-superpowers remained largely unused by the plot.
by the incomparable Herb Ritts. Not the same Dracula, but seeing these made me think of one of my favorite things: “Horrible Tragedy” by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet for the 1931 movie.
On tech culture’s obsession with quantifying and optimizing every single moment of one’s existence1:
I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market.
I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don’t have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don’t have to make the most use of their time. They don’t have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never the goal in itself.
The real “currency” we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and enjoying it. It is not a wise use of the “currency of time”, but it is part of life very well spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.
– @acituan on HackerNews, commenting on this article
With corroboration via sophomoric interpretations of stoicism and objectivism, all aimed at summoning this latent, dispassionate übermensch whose sole purpose is to “leverage” and deliver value.↩︎
An entertaining, unsettling, dissatisfying Lovecraftian allegory for suburban life and child-rearing (esp the teenage years.) Dragged on for a bit: I imagine it would’ve worked great as a Black Mirror episode. Jonathan Aris and Senan Jennings were supremely creepy and magnificent and perfectly cast for their roles 🙌
Spent a few frustrated hours over the years trying to identify this typeface I’d see on restaurant menus, photocopied class handouts, movie titles (even Indian ones from the early 80s), and a lot of books. I now know what it is and am quite happy the mystery’s resolved.
It’s Souvenir! Designed in 1914, super-popular/overused in the 70s, and much derided by designers in later decades (“A terrible typeface. A sort of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ typeface wearing tight white flared pants.”)
I have found a new thing I’m going to turn into scrambled eggs repeatedly until I get it right.
See also: more omelettes.
