Friday Links!
Leading off this week, an express trip to Crazytown in a story that will leave you speechless: One Man’s Quest for the End of the World Started on a Ranch in Texas.
An incredible story: Power without a throne: how Khalifa Haftar controls Libya.
Fascinating: A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half’. Typescript drafts on view in the newly opened archive reframe the horror maestro’s relationship with his alter ego, Richard Bachman.
"Erected all over the South"--what is wrong with us: Poisonous Objects: Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States.
An incredible story of indifference and malfeasance: We covered a now-discredited medical examiner for two decades. These are the botched cases that still haunt us.
Bizarre (and sad): Man vs. Machine: For three weeks last spring, ChatGPT convinced Allan Brooks that he had discovered a revolutionary mathematical theory. Now he’s suing OpenAI, claiming its product dragged him down a rabbit hole of lies, caused him to spiral into delusion and destroyed his reputation.
This is exceptional: Vigilantes at Dawn A forgotten deportation, a family archive, and the cost of belonging.
From D.G.F., and it's both a historical and present look: Living Under a Concentration Camp Regime — and Fighting Back.
From Wally, and it's a terrific read: How long do civilizations last? A look at Marines in WWI, including cats, rats, and aardvarks: Devil Dogs: 4th Marine Brigade. Timothy is a cat: Timothy reviews Moby Dick. A deep rabbit hole: On Gremlins: A brief history of sky goblins.
[POLITICS]: War
We all know this never goes well, and it won't go well this time. Imaginary justifications for entirely elective wars, promises of only short-term involvement, selection of a leader not for their leadership but their compliance with American demands, followed by a morass that will last decades.
We've done it over and over and over again. This edition is particularly vile and loathsome, but the basic storyline never changes.
Another sad time in a very sad era.
Some do
I had one of the favorite dreams of my life this week.
I'm walking just inside the NBA league office building, heading toward the elevators. The voiceover (it's a documentary) is talking about my great career.
I have a tennis ball in each hand.
I know I don't have any of the skills the narrator is listing, but I keep walking. I start trying to dribble the tennis balls and I'm so clumsy I can't even do it; I'm just batting at the balls.
The voiceover says "Some use the word superstar."
On The Mend
I went swimming today for the first time since I injured my back.
I walked to the ferry in icy rain, swam half my normal workout (which was still quite hard), took the subway back to minimize additional walking, and still walked over four miles.
It didn't feel great.
It's very different, being in the real world. I didn't realize what a controlled environment I'd been in for the last few weeks. So many places to sit today with nothing to push yourself up from (which is one of my hardest things). I bent and stretched and needed a range of motion I haven't needed at home or in the neighborhood.
Hopefully it will be easier now. And the weather is finally going to break, temperature-wise, in another day or so. It's been a winter.
Bonkers
I've just been privileged to see the single most bonkers trailer in gaming history.
I'm speechless.
If you only have two and a half minutes of free time today, please use it watch this: Hypernet Explorer trailer. And to whet your appetite, let me quote a few excerpts from the Steam page:
Form a party to explore a 92 floor skyscraper that barely holds the cosmos together or just get lost in alternate activities; manage a cursed pizza place, become a certified tarot reader, date yourself from another plane of existence, start your own space program, get filthy rich by manipulating the soul market and... go bowling with your beloved cousin.
Pick from 64 base classes that range from classic RPG archetypes (wizard, hunter, knight) to modern career paths (CEO, psychologist, combat medic). Keep class upgrades between multiple runs to avoid farming and fuse the classes you mastered to get new prestige classes.
Watch the trailer!
Communication
I'm up every morning at 6:45. Working by 7:15.
At this later stage of my life, I've become a morning person.
C is up by 5:30 almost every day. By the time I go upstairs, she's been up for over an hour.
I'm a morning person. C is an ultra max + morning person. She comes in hot, as they say.
She said she needed a reminder that the minute she sees me is not an ideal time to start a serious discussion, so I made a sign.
I wore it this morning. It was well-received.
Vampire Crawlers
When Vampire Survivors came out I played it endlessly, like many of us did.
I thought it was brilliant, but I also thought it was somewhat of a happy accident. A one-hit wonder that would set up developer Luca Galante (poncle) for life, but never be repeated. Harper Lee, if you will.
Dear Luca: I apologize.
The just-released demo for Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors is deliriously good. Ridiculously, unbelievably good.
Like VS, it's wacky, and the atmosphere both calls back to Vampire Survivors feel and speed, yet also feels unique in its own right.
Sound effects are reused. Lots of code is reused. And yet it feels entirely fresh.
Spectacular.
Luca, I sincerely apologize once more. It wasn't an accident. You are, in fact, a genius.
If I Admit That Alexander Hamilton Was Not Chinese, Will You Be Quiet For the Rest of the Movie?
I have nothing to add.
An Official Title Change
That's the circulation pattern from the storm that dumped 22" of snow on Queens over the last two days. The screenshot was taken yesterday about 3 p.m. Winds in some places were a steady 60-70 MPH. Basically a hurricane without the warm water.
If you go to Earth it shows you all kinds of info and animates it in real-time.
Normal snowfall for the city at this point in winter is 19". I move here and it's 44".
I'm no longer The Master of Time. My new title is The Bringer of Snow.
Of Note
You may have heard we got a little snow:
This is not really the kind of thing that happens in NYC very often, but it's happened twice in the last five weeks now. I think we're around 18" (the first several inches didn't stick) now and will probably hit 20" because it's still supposed to snow for another 5 hours or so.
I can't help shovel this time, either, which is stressing me out. Technically, our upstairs neighbors are supposed to handle it, but this is an awful lot of snow. With my back right now, though, it's a suicide mission, so I talked to them and apologized.
I've ascended to cleaning house again, even though my back is sore today from doing it. That's as far up the exertion ladder as I can go right now.
Friday Links!
From D.G.F, and it's alarming:
Authoritarianism from Below.
A New Demo Worth Your Time
I played the demo for Titanium Court and it's terrific.
It's also wacky (and funny), so even better. You're dropped into the game and it's a bit of an Alice in Wonderland vibe (not exactly, but it's hard to find an analogue).
There are multiple mechanics, but here's a basic summary. The core of the gameplay is match-3, where you match tiles to gather corresponding resources. You can also match enemies to remove them from the play field. At the end of the matching period, you use the resources to purchase units. These units will then go attack any remaining enemy units (which are trying to destroy your castle, also situated on the play field).
That description just scratches the surface of what appears to be a complex gameplay system. It's incredibly engaging, and I played through the entire demo without a break (it took between one and two hours).
Like I said, it's tremendously creative, both in gameplay and presentation, and I highly recommend taking it for a spin.
A Learning Experience
Through this unfortunate back episode I've learned a few things which might be helpful to you if you're in a similar situation one day.
Houdini used to put his foot in ice water for long periods of time to sensitize it when he was exposing mediums. His foot became so sensitive that he could feel the slightest movement, which gave him a huge advantage in detecting a medium's tomfoolery. Similarly, my back had so much inflammation and pain that it helped me understand which movements stress it more than others.
The biggest thing I learned is that when leaning over is a no-go, going down on one knee is significantly easier. The injury is too the right side of my back, so I go down on my left knee, retrieve whatever I dropped, and push up with the left leg. It causes minimal pain, when leaning over would lock me up completely. I'm going to keep doing this because it seems like it will put much less stress on my back in a long-term sense.
The second thing I learned is that mattresses genuinely make a huge difference. Our mattress, I've learned, is somewhat soft, and the difference in that and the ultra-firm couch (when pulled down into a bed) is enormous in terms of how stiff I am when I wake up.
The third thing is a
Shakti mat. This is the contemporary equivalent of a bed of nails, only the nails are plastic and don't penetrate the skin. I've written about this before, but the first 2-3 minutes of lying on it cause significant pain and discomfort, and then your body relaxes and goes into a deep flow state for the rest of the time. After I'm on this for 20 minutes, I get up and have almost no pain at all for about a half hour.
My theory is the pain coming from so many individual points on your back/butt shuts down whatever primary pain you're otherwise feeling (in this case, my back). When you're in so much pain for most of the day, having even a little relief makes a huge difference.
