May started off with a bang and a big holiday in Portugal with lots of friends, but I broke my rib on the waterslide and then spent the rest of the month mostly in recovery not able to lie down to sleep. Sill, recovered enough to do some animation work and sing a song by the end of the month.
Me
Some stuff from my microblog on the fediverse:
Started the month with a trip to Portugal including a beach-trip with lots of friends, a villa party, being bitten by lots of insects and exciting funs at a waterpark where I managed to smash up my rib on the last ride before flying home.
While I was away the markets dived like they were going to smash a rib on a waterslide so I analyzed them a bit when I got back. Does’t look good really. Long way to fall.
There’s something suss about the Seth Green NFT theft story, but Happy Toast’s replacement should fix it all.
I used the the newest freely available AI image-generator to generate some self portraits and the most realistic he-man and skeletor I could manage.
Looked at the full Glasto line-up should be an amazing one again. Give me a shout if you’ll be there next month. We can hang.
With the platinum jubilee in the news I ranted a bit about monarchy and restated my campaign to have a robot queen replacement but it was an undeniably excellent show they put on.
I expanded the light-display in my studio with a new LED mask.
Releases
Not much this month. Too injured even to do a tarot show. I’ve have been working out how to cover Julian Cope’s “Greatness And Perfection Of Love” though, with the loop-pedal and synth. See the my video here of the work in progress.
Reading
History Of Peru
Since I’m planning to go visit the country, I read The History Of Peru by David Robbins.
The country was ruled by a succession of terrible warriors with forgettable unpronounceable names until it was colonized and then had to unite to throw off the oppressor and become a more or less modern democracy.
Seems a common story really. Hopefully I’ll learn more when I’m there.
Watching
This Is Us
Watched the last season of this is us which continues to be an emotional roller-coaster than has me crying almost every episode.
Last season concentrating mostly on the slow degenerative death of Beth. Incredible story telling.
Russian Doll
Also watched season two of Russian Doll on Netflix, which was just as crazy and funny and brilliant as the first. A sort of Quantum Leap meets Goodnight Sweetheart time-travel show with a smart-alec redhead star. Loved it.
Links
* Kurzgesagt did a great video illustrating the tilt of the earth and the tilt of the solar system’s plane and the tilt of the plane next to the galactic plane and more.
* PBS Spacetime on galaxy formation and how the galaxy ended up that way in the first place, the traces of the component galaxies that make up our Milky Way.
* Pete McCormack’s film about El Salvaor making BItcoin legal tender was an interesting one to watch. Seems to be people saying it’s a success and others saying it isn’t. Probably too early to tell.
* Media Lens on corporate madness and climate breakdown. “Last month was India’s hottest April in 122 years and Pakistan’s for 61 years. Jacobabad hit nearly 50C with night-time temperatures often staying above 30C. Exhausted and dehydrated birds fell from the sky, an apocalyptic portent if ever there was one. A UK Met Office study has concluded that global warming makes record-breaking heatwaves in northwest India and Pakistan 100 times more likely.”
* And umair haque on the coming mass extinction and the way we can’t look it in the face, can’t see the doom coming, can’t seem to accept it is a thing which is happening now.
* Scott Alexander tries to covince the AI to design his stained glass windows. These things are getting very impressive, but finagling AI prompts remains an obscure art.
* Jaron Lanier has a plan to break social media into little Dunbar’s-number sized self-moderating groups. Sounds a lot like the Fediverse really.
* Interesting study on perception scientists pointed volunteer’s eyes at an optical illusion of a growing black hole. So it’s not really growing, right. Same amount of light entering the eye. But the volunteer’s iris still expanded as though there was more blackness and so less light in the scene.That is, the iris moved according to the illusion, a higher visual function rather than just the amount of light
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow my link-bot on the fediverse or my RSS feed of interesting links
Around The Fediverse
Some cool stuff from other people on in the social-media federation:
Janelle Shane tries to convince the AI to draw coporate logos. It’s not very good at text really.
Stux shows us a tree struck by lightning is on fire.
Cool Boy Mew has found cute squirrels sleeping against a window.
Subscribe
* Join my social/chat telegram group
* Sign up to my monthly-digest email list