Sadly, Dolly Parton passed away at 80 years old yesterday. A curious synchronicity people are posting about online today: Tropical Storm Dolly.
pointed out on Bluesky:
Storm names are chosen from six alphabetical lists maintained by the World Meteorological Organization that rotate every six years.
Tim Curry, also 80, left us too. The East Coast might be facing the wrath of Dolly soon, but there's no news on Pennywise popping up out of storm drains anywhere. Yet.
Two beloved icons have left us in the last two days, but these things always come in threes and there's another 80-year-old still among the living — and rotten to the fucking core. I'm not insinuating anything grim here, but it would be nice to see some balance in the universe, you know?
Norm was always one of my faves. Shortly after he died, we went to the Funny Bone in Columbus to see Nick Swardson's standup, and he was in tears talking about the guy. His dry sense of humor always killed me. It's been ingrained in my own personal sense of humor since I used to watch reruns of SNL as a kid, mostly with no idea wtf he was talking about on the weekend updates because I was a kid. But he remained one of the greats for me into adulthood. One of my favorite appearances was when he did that Comedy Central roast and just read the newspaper the whole time, occasionally looking up to throw out a judgmental, confused smirk when someone cracked a mean joke about him. Looking forward to seeing the new documentary in October.
This is an excellent long read on that pile of garbage who wrote the wizard books, from the perspective of a trans person. They went from sharing a sense of belonging, with how badly Harry was treated growing up in those books, to burning their entire collection in the backyard. I can't pretend to fully understand how much the betrayal and disappointment stung in finding out the author of your favorite books was a despicable TERF; not in the same way a trans person does, living through it first-person. But I can definitely empathize and this essay really laid it out for me crystal clear.
From r/crtgaming on Reddit: I caught the final moments before my PS2's Graphics Synthesizer died.
I don't like to post Reddit links a lot of the time, but I loved this little clip. Someone is playing a racing game on PS2 and the screen gradually glitches out until the console dies, leaving a bunch of monochrome and pink visual artifacts on the screen. It's definitely an aesthetic 🤪
A while back, I shared a post about a car with an anti-Flock wrap. Thought it was pretty clever. Now someone made an anti-AI Hawaiian shirt that does just as well:
Freshly reported by Dezeen, German designer Simon Weckert designed the hideous shirt to be untraceable to AI-integrated surveillance systems. Using a dizzying blend of colors and patterns, the shirt is ugly precisely because it’s designed to confuse surveillance algorithms — as Weckert explained, it’s the “interplay” of ghastly colors and shapes that hide its wearer from detection.
Honestly, the way everything's turned into a bland grayscale corporate minimalism aesthetic over the years, I totally embrace these loud, nonsensical designs. Especially since they're scrambling the brains of dystopian surveillance systems at the same time.