#Notes
August 26, 2026
August 23, 2026
Notes for August 23, 2026
Higher grades and belonging: New report shows trans students thrive with teacher support
Students whose identities are affirmed at school report a greater sense of belonging and higher grades, and are more likely to participate fully in class, according to a report released Tuesday by GLISTEN and the Trevor Project. Students report similar outcomes when they are able to connect with LGBTQ+ peers at school, see positive representations of LGBTQ+ people in their classrooms and attend schools with inclusive policies, such as those that allow them to compete on sports teams or use facilities that best align with their gender identities.
Wow, it's almost like treating people with a little respect and dignity makes a difference. No one can thrive when they're being talked down to and treated like something's wrong with them all the time. And even if someone's not constantly attacking you, it still makes you feel unwelcome when the norm is to do nothing to make you feel like you're valid. Trans kids are kids. Trans rights are human rights. Protect trans kids.
Fat people cannot win, regardless of what we do. And I’ve had enough | Rebecca Shaw
This is exactly how I feel as a fat guy in the age of Ozempic:
I’m a fat person. We are constantly badgered and tortured by a society that tells us to lose weight, at all costs. If you’re fat, that’s a moral failing: you’re lazy and unhealthy. If you’re fat at the gym, or jogging down the street, you’re an object of ridicule. If you lose weight with drugs, you didn’t earn it. If you’re fat and not self-flagellating at every moment, you’re glorifying obesity. If you lose weight for any reason, it then proves you were never really happy with yourself; it proves that fat is bad, that thinness was always the real goal. If you stay fat, we want you to admit you’re unhealthy. If you say you’re happy, we want to diagnose you with denial. So much of the condescension as well as plain cruelty towards fat people is packaged as “we just want you to be healthy”. If this were true (and if being skinny were the only marker of health, which it isn’t), nobody would be criticising John Goodman or other fat people for using medication, by saying it’s cheating.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And fat shaming has become the norm these days; it's expected and encouraged by society. Even if you're going to get ridiculed for using a GLP-1 to lose weight, at least you lost the weight and aren't a reprehensible fat fuck anymore, right? It's not enough to simply lose weight; you have to earn your new status through humiliation too.
I've come to terms with being overweight. I'm okay with who I am at this point in my life. I spent the first half of adulthood strung out on opiates and cocaine. I was pretty damn skinny back then, and since I quit the better part of a decade ago, I've gained some weight. I'm not the poster child of perfect health by any means, but I'm doing a lot better than when I was living on a steady diet of drugs and honey buns.
Maybe I'll eventually get my shit together and lose some weight before I face certain death, but for now, I'm okay with just living my life. You'll have to excuse me for not wanting to revert to injecting a drug that makes me slimmer just to fit in with a society of shallow, self-appointed health experts.
via theguardian.com
Why Erykah Badu made incense with the scent of her vagina in 2020
“Most guys say that my vagina smells like strawberries and gunpowder. So I tried to duplicate that,” she said.
Honestly that's kinda fucking punk lmao get it girl.
A humanoid robot just beat Usain Bolt's 100m record, and roboticists are unimpressed for good reason
A robot built by Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record. Roboticists point out that speed on a known course is far easier for a machine than folding laundry.
If you think that's impressive, let me introduce you to: cars.
via thenextweb.com
👾 what I'm playing:
Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists by @hallinniklas.bsky.social
Alruna is a compact and high-density Metroidvania, with a focus on sequence-breaking and playing things out of order.
Super fun little metroidvania. The link above is for Steam, but I'm playing it on the Switch. Anyone who knows me knows that metroidvanias are my jam. I've played every classic I can get my hands on, like all of the Metroid games, most of the Castlevania games, and plenty of indie stuff on my Switch and Steam. It took me a minute to get used to the controls and mechanics, but as soon as I did I started having a little anticipatory grief for when I finish it in the next day or two.
Lucky for me, it looks like a sequel just dropped pretty recently!
It genuinely feels like I'm playing a game for the SNES or Sega Genesis, and I respect that in a 'vania. 100% worth a look if you're into the genre.
Update 8/31: found a really useful map on ko-fi.
📖 what I'm reading
Everything Will Swallow You by @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social
I'm one of those dopes who hasn't read much fiction as an adult because I feel like it's "smarter" to read non-fiction. I realize that's really dumb, and I'm working on it. This is the first one of Tom's books I've ever read and the first fiction I've read in years. It's so good!
Eric and Carl live in Dorset in a small white cottage under the shadow of a big cliff. Eric sells old records and antiques. Carl cooks, cleans and crochets. Nearing seventy, Eric is a lifelong accumulator of obscure objects whose easygoing, chaotic approach to life masks some of the unaddressed sadness of his past. The significantly younger Carl is an old soul who has a sophisticated emotional intelligence and likes swimming, mid-century female novelists, fibre arts and Dolly Parton. If you passed them on a walk, you may not pay them much attention. Most likely you would see Carl's long floppy ears, tail and fur and mistake him for a dog.
I read that first paragraph of the book's description and immediately bought it on my Kindle. I saw a skeet from Tom saying he'll send you some post cards, a bookmark and a signed copy if you live in the UK so that's pretty neat. The above link is for the paperback.
August 21, 2026
Notes for August 21, 2026
Subscriber rot
Subscriber rot is the idea that while you may have been interesting enough for someone to follow you at one point, they stop being a real set of eyeballs who might see your stuff when you post something. Maybe they muted you, maybe they don't read every single thing and your stuff falls through the cracks, or maybe they just don't use the service at all anymore.
I think about this a lot. I have a little over 3000 followers on Bluesky, but I suspect only 500 - 1000 are actual people who regularly hang out there. I know at least some of them are bots because I look at the profile of almost everyone who follows me and I'll get a handful of obviously fake/bot/spam accounts every couple of weeks.
I have 4,000 followers, but it doesn't feel like I do. Engagement on my posts is fine, but it seems focused on a smaller number of people. Interestingly, Mastodon has a page in settings where you can see all the accounts you follow and that follow you, and you can filter for a few things. There's a "dormant" account status that seems to trigger when someone does not use Mastodon for over 30 days. I enabled that filter and it returned 2,914 dormant accounts. Of those, 2,244 haven't been active in over a year.
I'd LOVE to see a feature like this on Bluesky. Even if I'm not going to unfollow every dormant account, it at least gives you some idea of your subscriber rot status.
I do like to keep following people even when I realize they haven't posted in months or even years sometimes. I do the same thing with my RSS feeds — sometimes a blog will go into hibernation for years and then one day you suddenly start seeing posts from them again. I've been known to deactivate my Bluesky account for weeks at a time every now and then, so I get it. Sometimes you just need to take a break. Or with blogs, there's always the possibility that you get burned out and simply stop indefinitely, like Forrest Gump when he was done running.
via birchtree.me
All the Things My New Meat Glasses Can Do
I’m so excited my new Meat Glasses have arrived in the mail. I unwrap them and turn them over. Wow, they’ve really done it. You can’t see the camera under the ground beef at all. In fact, they look like high-fashion glasses made of raw, Grade A ground sirloin. Still, Meat Glasses are so much more than that.
via mcsweeneys.net
Sons of Anarchy Cast Reunites for Very Meta FX Limited Series Starring/Created by Charlie Hunnam
I watched this show religiously. I'm stoked to see a revival coming, but it's not what you would probably expect:
According to the official description, “When the cast of Sons of Anarchy reunites at a fan convention after more than a decade, the line between life and art blurs as the fractured brotherhood finds itself up against a real-world threat more dangerous than anything they ever faced in their show.
This is so on par for modern life. Big burly biker dudes aren't scary. They're just a bunch of hairy middle-aged guys being a menace to the flow of traffic with "Save a life! Watch out for bikers!" stickers on all of their other vehicles. And maybe they do some crime every now and again, but that's only scary if you're a rival gang motorcycle club member. I can only assume right now, but if you ask me, real-life terror comes in the form of delusional, ravenous fans who larp as MC members. Trust me. I lived in backwoods Ohio when Sons of Anarchy was still on the air and every dipshit weekend warrior with a pension, a fully paid-off mortgage, and a Hog had a SoA hoodie from Walmart and thought they were tough as nails. Still a solid upgrade from the standard "if you're reading this, the bitch fell off" tee.
via consequence.net
Turnstile Recruit Elton John, Slayyyter, and Panda Bear for Never Enough Remake
Turnstile have “reimagined” last year’s Never Enough with an incredible array of guests, ranging from Elton John to Slayyyter and Panda Bear. Never Enough: Versions, out next Friday, August 28, also features a genre-spanning cadre of producers, singer-songwriters, rappers, and assorted pop and alternative powerhouses such as Four Tet, Oklou, Alex G, Hayley Williams, A. G. Cook, Blood Orange, Nourished by Time, Julien Baker, Floating Points, and Mustafa.
Dude FUCK yeah! This is like a mini The Wall: Live in Berlin moment for Turnstile. They have the soul of a 70s rock band while pioneering their own FX-heavy brand of hardcore music. The first time I ever saw these guys was at the Blink-182 reunion tour after Tom came back. I'd heard a couple of their songs from an old friend back in the day but I never got into them until I saw them live. You really gotta see it live to get it.
For real though. Instantly became one of my top five bands. Brendan's energy is fucking wild on stage, doing spin kicks and crowd surfing while cutting between screaming and spacey clean vocals... it's the most catchy hardcore band you'll ever hear. Just the fact that they were on a legend like Elton John's radar at all says enough about them, but actually recruiting him on the new re-imagining of their latest record is bonkers. Super stoked to hear it.
via pitchfork.com
Watching TikTok and Instagram Reels Videos Deactivates the Brain’s Cognitive Control Network, Study Finds
Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals.
Everyone knows TikTok is bad for you. That's why I prefer text-based media over shortform videos 😎
August 20, 2026
Notes for August 20, 2026
Man Nicknamed “Bluntman” Arrested Ahead of Gathering of the Juggalos with 128 Pounds of Weed
The Mid Missouri Drug Task Force had received information that 45-year-old Kevin Jones, appropriately nicknamed “Bluntman,” was planning to sell marijuana during the Gathering of the Juggalos. This tip was confirmed on the festival’s website, where a listing for Bluntman’s One Stop Shop said it had been supplying everything from “blunt wraps to bongs, papers, pipes and lighter fluid” for over 20 years.
I grew up like two miles down the road from Legend Valley, where the Grateful Dead played regularly for years, where Lost Lands is hosted every year and also where the Gathering of the Juggalos has been hosted most of the time for the last two decades. I have definitely bought weed off this guy. It's not in Ohio this year, but needless to say, I've Gathered a lot in my day and it's always a great fucking time.
Obviously in order to be a real music festival, there HAS to be a few sketchy guys advertising various drugs for sale on crusty old cardboard signs. But cruising around in a beat up pickup truck and breaking a bunch of traffic laws all willy nilly is probably not the best way to keep a low profile while you attempt to smuggle in over 100lbs of weed and mushrooms.
The ancient, world renowned philosophers known as Twiztid put it best when they said, "Gimme gimme green leafs laced up with hashish,
When your ridin' dirty, watch for police."
via consequence.net
Tiny Pink Springtails Appear to Teleport When They Jump
Japanese nature photographer Pendora shared footage of tiny pink globular springtails launching themselves so quickly that they seem to teleport. These Sminthurides springtails use a forked, tail-like appendage known as a furcula, which snaps against the surface to propel them away.
Honestly I couldn't care less about the teleporting thing; this is the cutest bug I've ever seen in my life 🥰
Driver Cited for "Left Lane Camping" on Highway 101 in Carpinteria - edhat
CHP used the traffic stop as an opportunity to remind motorists that driving too slowly can be just as hazardous as speeding. “Remaining in the passing lane while traveling significantly below the flow of traffic can create congestion, frustration, and increase the risk of unsafe lane changes and possibly crashes,” CHP stated.
If you're going 50-something in the left lane when the speed limit is 65 or 70mph, I'm going to ride your ass so hard we both might die. And as soon as I get an opportunity to pass you in the right lane, I'm going to cut you off so close we both might die. I'm pretty fucking laid back about literally everything else in life but this.
via edhat.com
View: Tech faces its Big Tobacco moment, but teens have already moved on
Tech will also have to face a growing disdain among young people toward anything AI-coded. Nearly half of US adults aged 18 to 29 now believe the tech does more harm than good, up from 27% in 2024, a recent Gallup poll showed, even as AI usage among young people has ticked up. Luddite clubs are popping up on college campuses. And it’s not just Americans putting a premium on authenticity: An animated movie is taking off in China this week in part because it’s not made by AI, and instead was done with old-school, amateur 3D modeling by a mother-son duo.
I don't totally hate AI but it does always bring a single tear of joy to my eye seeing kids go full Luddite. I've said it before and I'll say it again: we got way too much tech way too fast. I am all about stopping and poking our heads up for a breath of air; simply living in the moment every once in a while instead of going all in on a world of unlimited growth and never leaving well enough alone. The kids are alright.
Be authentic. Make shitty art. Write bad blog posts. That's my whole schtick lately and it works out alright. There is no replacement for human-made and low-tech things and I'm glad a lot of that is coming back. Zines, blogs, dumb phones, regular old wristwatches, Polaroids, vinyl, even cassettes and CDs. You don't have to be a hipster, but it's fun to check out some of the old stuff we traded away for an always-online 6" rectangle in our pockets.
via semafor.com
Man, our fucking basement flooded last night. A lot of places in central Ohio got a ton of rain in a short amount of time last night. I've already been through all the stages of grief and a fifth of Irish whiskey by now. After everything is said and done, I:
- Know how to spell 'squeegee' correctly now
- own a pretty nice 10-gallon DeWalt shop vac
- am actually pretty fucking proficient with a squeegee
- understand the mechanics of a sump pump
Life is fucking stupid sometimes. We at least got some quality time with the kids and gave the basement a much needed deep cleaning. Come at me bro; I faced a million spiders and a little bit of water in a dank spooky basement today.
August 16, 2026
Notes for August 16, 2026
Does vitriol make you feel special? — Harvard Gazette
Jackson and his colleagues analyzed more than 2 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities and found that both threads and communities became more negative over time, and that semantic differentiation drove that trend — that is, negative comments were more semantically unique from what had already been said. They then replicated their observational findings with an experiment that showed that social media users who were primed to be unique posted more negative comments than users who were primed to conform.
Facebook and Reddit both capitalize on rage bait. It's social networking 101. But even if they didn't, we just can't help being negative because it naturally drives engagement and gives us something new and edgy to say. Humans are just kinda shitty 🤷
via news.harvard.edu
Quitting alcohol changes the brain and can increase the risk of compulsive drinking – new research in mice
Well I guess I'll have to continue drinking exactly the right amount every day so I don't quit and risk becoming an alcoholic.
UCSF cannabis study finds unexpected heart rhythm results
There's no denying alcohol is terrible for you. Weed, on the other hand...
This study set out to find potentially harmful side effects of cannabis use and found nothing bad to say:
“As far as cannabis is concerned, we did not find evidence of harm in this study. And the possibility that there could be something helpful deserves future research.”
They gave ~100 different stoners a Fitbit to track glucose, heart activity, and sleep, and they found on the days they smoked, they actually showed less signs of what they call a "premature heartbeat" — an early sign of atrial fibrillation.
I've been smoking weed as long as I can remember. Maybe that's a negative in itself, but the only other drawbacks aside from short term memory loss are the munchies and being couch-locked all day. Oh, and short term memory loss.
via sfchronicle.com
How "blowing smoke up your ass" was a medical procedure in 1700s
I'm not blowing smoke up your ass. Unless you want me to, you know, for medical purposes 👉👈
Chinese animated movie branded “worse than AI” goes viral after just 200 people see it - Dexerto
According to Shanghai Daily, some viewers said it was worse than AI-generated clips. Meanwhile, other X user claimed that it still holds more value than something made by AI. One user wrote: “I will respect the most dog a** animation done by humans than the most polished animation done by AI.”
Right? At least it's human-made 😆 big Xavier: Renegade Angel meets Seaman vibes.
via dexerto.com
August 14, 2026
Notes for August 14, 2026
But the thing is, this battle doesn't exist. It's a narrative believed by the tech press and by a lot of internet users who don't remember a time before the Big Platforms on the internet, but it makes as little sense when you poke at it as the claim that the local coffee shop is done for because it won't become Starbucks.
Well put. I hate that kind of cringe, "if you ain't first you're last" Ricky Bobby mindset. We need diversity and the freedom to build whatever kind of communities we wanna build. Not everything has to be one size fits all.
Not every coffee shop needs to be Starbucks to be successful. Not every place you hang out online needs to be Facebook or Instagram to be successful. Not even if it's social media shaped. And not just because, as I've argued, your internet can actually be small, and be healthy being small. But because it's actually kind of crazy to think that every digital space must be, or be on its way to being, the One Place Everyone Is.
Yesss 100%. Everyone is different. Why is Big Social so desperate to eliminate freedom of choice? I want different options. I'm not going to spend my life being loyal to one brand per category of thing, you know? I'll drink Pepsi out of a Coca-Cola glass, I don't give a damn. I like variety and I don't want to be on the most homogenized and sanitized timeline. I wanna live in the one where I have an overwhelming amount of choices. I want a federated ecosystem of different cliques and factions on different corners of the web. I don't wanna live in a fucking Black Mirror episode where there's one tv channel, one website, one food product...
Different strokes for different folks.
Ohio ranked as one of the worst states in the country, according to ‘U.S. News & World Report’
As a guy who lives deep within the caustic bowels of Central Ohio, I can attest to this. There are vast oceans of corn as far as the eye can see. Most of the spring and summer smells like cow shit. Everyone's driving around in jacked up Chevies with truck nuts, rolling coal and flicking Pall Mall Red 100s butts out the window with a tattered TRUMP 2020 flag flapping around in the humidity. We're as red as Texas but somehow still considered a swing state. A significant amount of my energy is spent daydreaming about leaving everything behind and running away to Seattle.
via 614now.com
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation
Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year.
This is your periodic reminder to backup your data ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
via tomshardware.com
'Alien Technology': Harvard Scientist Warns Declassified Pentagon Files Reveal Huge UFO Discovery
Renowned Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb evaluated the chilling report, suggesting the anomaly could stem from powerful electromagnetic disruptions, classified government black projects, or potentially groundbreaking alien technology.
It’s always potentially groundbreaking alien technology with this guy.
via ibtimes.co.uk
Astronomers find entirely new kind of object in space
Astronomers think that the object is probably a hugely dense cloud of gas. It is not powered by nuclear fusion, like a normal star, but a black hole at its centre.
Now THIS is some space news I can get behind. Man, that'd be a cool name for a grunge song. "Black Hole Star"... feels oddly familiar but I can't put my finger on it. I guess I'll just file it away in my garden of sounds for now.
August 11, 2026
Notes for August 11, 2026
Modder Creates SteamBoy Handheld From The Steam Deck
A user on Reddit called PhyFawkes (thanks SteamDeckHQ) has taken their Steam Deck and done some extraordinary (or sacrilegious things depending on your thoughts) to [it], taking it apart and turning it into a handheld that takes inspiration from the original Game Boy DMG. And it actually works, although mainly as a controller for playing games on your TV for now.
This is sick! I have an Anbernic GBA SP-style handheld, and one of the classic R36S devices, but they're both pretty low tech. They can play anything up to PS1 ROMs though, so that's more than enough for the 90s kid in me. This would be perfect for retro action RPGs and metroidvanias. So many good indie games on Steam I wish I could play on the Anbernic. I'm too dumb to figure something like this out though, and if I had a Steam Deck, the last thing I would ever do is open it up and scramble all of its guts around.
via retrododo.com
A cybersecurity researcher covered a Toyota in an AI-generated pattern to confuse Flock cameras
The project received its first public test Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Swearingen worked with Donut Media to cover a 2009 Toyota Yaris with one of his patterns and drive it past a Flock camera. "We proved it was effective," Swearingen, a cybersecurity professional and founder of SIXCYBER, told TechCrunch.
I would totally deck my Honda out in this wrap 😏
via techspot.com
Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge Got So High with Cypress Hill That They Wanted to Go Home
"It was like my body was working, but everything up here was silent, and I was noticing stuff I don’t normally notice,” he said. Apparently, DeLonge wasn’t having much of a better time. Halfway through the set, the guitarist came up to Barker and told him, “I wanna go home.”
"And I was like, ‘Me too,'” Barker continued. “It was so awful.”
Brother, I get too high and have to bail out on a trip to Kroger sometimes. And I'm smoking absolute trash compared to whatever B-Real probably has. I love when someone can actually admit they're too stoned. The kids I grew up with would be like a slab of fucking silly putty stuck to the couch talking about "I don't feel shit bro."
via consequence.net
How to Watch the Total Solar Eclipse on a Live Stream, Witnessing the Rare View of the Sun's Corona From Your Own Home
As the eclipse moves over the planet, the European Space Agency (ESA) will stream the event from the Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre in Teruel, Spain.
Here's the link to the live stream on YouTube tomorrow — and you won't even need to break out your crusty old eclipse glasses from the 90s to watch it.
August 10, 2026
Notes for August 10, 2026
Mark Twain wrote a story in 1898 that describes the internet
In the story the device gets wired into the telephone systems of the whole world, and after that, Twain writes, the daily doings of the globe are "made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues."
TIL Mark Twain predicted doomscrolling in 1898.
via boingboing.net
'Shattered': the most torturous reality show of the 2000s
Man, the UK really took reality shows to the max in the 2000s. Shattered was a show on Channel 4 where the contestants had to make it a week with no sleep to win $100,000. I'm a wreck if I don't get eight hours every night. Living in Tweaker City, Ohio, I've seen people stay up for three days and start believing their family are aliens and the radio is giving them encoded messages on how to get back to their home world. Seven days is absolutely nuts. That said, I would totally watch this if it was on today 🤷
80s treasures we considered luxurious but weren't worth the hype - MediaFeed
Car phones, shoulder-mount video cameras, waterbeds, even the brick phone; I get it. They were dumb and short-lived. But I would kill for a pristine Members Only jacket from the 80s.
via mediafeed.co
Earth had Saturn-like rings 466 million years ago, new study suggests
The researchers estimate that the ring-spawning asteroid would be about 7.7 miles (12.5 kilometers) wide if it were a "rubble pile," or slightly smaller if it were a solid body. Once it shattered after nearing Earth's vicinity, its fragments would have "jostled around" before settling into a debris ring orbiting Earth's equator, Tomkins said.
via space.com
If You Sleep In The 'T. Rex Position,' We've Got Some Bad News For You
All the good things are bad for you 😞
via huffpost.com
The Outlaw Chemist Teaching People How to Make Drugs From Scratch
This is my favorite story of the day: some sketchy guy online tells you how to make LSD and DMT, for a Patreon subscription fee. I remember when my ex’s brother was trying to make acid on the stove at 3am one night. It was pink for some reason. And then his mom woke up and promptly beat the shit out of him lmao probably best to leave mind-altering chemicals up to the chemists.
via wired.com
August 8, 2026
Notes for August 8, 2026
dotMeow wants to be the purrfect place for a queer and open internet
A few years ago, a few of us queer nerds were sitting in a pub, thinking about what we could do to give our community greater stability. The idea of running our own gTLD came up. Because many people in our community love cats, and because the wilder side of the internet is often associated with cat videos and memes, we soon settled on .meow.
The web is expanding with some new top level domains and .meow will likely be one of them. This is siiiick! No idea what I would use yet another domain for, but I'm definitely adding some .meows to the fleet. I'm already draining my bank account with renewals every year on too many unused domains as it is, but I'm a junkie for this kind of stuff. If everything goes according to plan, they're looking at a 2028 launch.
via dnsbelgium.be
Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself
By working with living but dormant cordyceps militaris fungus instead, the researchers have been able to take advantage of its biological functions. The result is a material that is self-renewing and responsive to its environment, in ways that could one day transform architecture and clothing – as seen in a prototype dress created together with material innovation company Peelshere.
As long as it doesn't mutate and turn everyone into a bunch of fucked up hybrids between The Last of Us zombies and Jim Carrey in The Mask, this is pretty neat!
via dezeen.com
Teenage Boy Suffers Temporary Hearing Loss After Listening to Cicadas for Four Hours
Wang noticed that the cicada noises became noticeably louder around noon, but he remained in the forest until evening, when he began experiencing tinnitus and a sensation of fullness in his ears. As the cicadas started going silent, he noticed that he couldn’t hear the chirping of birds, or even the notification sounds of his phone.
And people say I need to touch grass... at least I'm not going deaf sitting on my laptop with a soothing white noise generator humming in the background, enjoying the synthetic breeze of central air.
Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook
In Facebook news today: why in the fuck does anyone still hang out over there‽
Meta was paying out-and-out neo-Nazis to post on Facebook, an investigation from Australia’s ABC News found...“Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.
via futurism.com
From Will Smith to Third Eye Blind — the “hidden” number-one hits of 1997!
Indeed, every Hot 100 leader in ‘97 topped the sales chart, and vice-versa. Below is every official №1 of the year, along with their peak positions in sales and airplay. This means that most of 1997’s “hidden” number-one hits were №1 on radio, but not in sales. Let’s see what they were.
I was six years old in '97. Every single one of these tracks bring back a flood of nostalgia. It reminds me most of going out with my mom and sisters to our uncle's pool in the summer. We spent so much time out there in the 90s. These are the songs that were always playing on the cheap boombox under the shade of the umbrella table 🥲
via medium.com
August 7, 2026
Notes for August 7, 2026
Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too
When I first read that article about Anthropic's AI busting out of its cage, it felt like cheesy 80s sci-fi was becoming a reality. But then OpenAI recently claimed their AI broke out and went on a hacking spree too. And of course Meta said "hey wait up, me too!"
Ben makes a really good point:
In the middle of writing this post, another story coincidentally came across my feed:
via futurism.com
While American AI Models Race to Commit Felonies, China's Kimi Broke Out and... Just Used GitHub
I'll be honest with you, I didn't even read the goddamn article. I didn't have to. This is so clearly marketing. I mean what are the odds that suddenly, within a matter of weeks, all of the top AI models simultaneously get so smart they can't be contained?
I'm not saying AI can't do a lot of useful shit, but I don't think becoming self-aware and veering off toward its own agenda is one of those things.
via gizmodo.com
Why celebrities from Zendaya to Kylie Jenner are wearing Fecal Matter
The brand name behind recent showstopping fashion moments isn’t quite as delicate as their romantic and otherworldly looks. When asked what an ethereal Zendaya was wearing for the “Odyssey” premiere in New York, her stylist Law Roach responded: “Fecal Matter.”
It's not even funny making Idiocracy jokes anymore... this is our timeline; the dumbest one.
via apnews.com
20,000 People Are Publicly Vouching For a Man Accused of Cutting Down Flock Cameras
Wesley? You mean Wesley Jackson? Couldn't have been him. He was 300 miles away in Ohio, helping me nurse a wounded bald eagle back to health all week. A true patriot, if you ask me.
via gadgetreview.com
How snails engineer their slime
Snail mucus is mostly water; it’s the mucins (glycoproteins) and complex carbohydrates that give it that slimy, viscous texture. In addition to cosmetics, the mucus holds great potential for drug delivery. In 2020, scientists found that combining snail slime from a common garden snail with gold nanoparticles helped accelerate wound healing and exhibited anti-inflammatory properties in mice. Most relevant to this latest paper is a 2023 study on garden snail slime that identified three distinct types of secreted mucus: a hydrating version to protect its skin, one that acts as an adhesive glue, and a third that serves as a lubricant so the snail can more easily glide across a surface.
via arstechnica.com
letting an LLM write an indie web parody post
There's certain topics and writing styles that do really well on the indie web; especially on Bearblog's Trending page. There are enough joking and seriously annoyed posts about it every now and then. We cannot stop talking about how tech is bad, analog media is good, blogging is good, and how good RSS is.
I was wondering whether LLMs are trained on enough data from here to generate a post that would do really well, and is realistic, while also parodying us bloggers a little.
This hits so close to home lol I spent a lot of time on Bear Blog up until I moved over here to Leaflet. Ava prompts an LLM to write a satirical post in the style of your typical indie blogger.
I can't even tell you how many posts I've written that rehash these same ideas over and over... especially right after I discovered the small web a few years ago.
And you see this kind of stuff from almost everyone who escapes the algorithm. We've all spent so much time on social media for the last decade or more, it really does feel like stepping into an alternate reality where everything is a little nicer when you get here. Shit we forgot about when we all started chasing likes and updoots.
It's easy to get into that whole meta blogging riff — especially when it's your main hobby. You fall into the feedback loop of using your hobby as a platform to talk about your hobby. I'm not shitting on indie bloggers who post this stuff and I know Ava isn't either. It's just funny how accurate it is. Especially since so many of us here can't deny we've written something almost identical, at least a handful of times over the years.
To add a little of my own blogging meta: that's my favorite thing about running a link blog. I don't have to brainstorm new ideas and fresh takes all the time. I just find a few links throughout the day and add my own two cents no one even asked for. It's surprisingly addictive.
via blog.avas.space
Sadly, Dolly Parton passed away at 80 years old yesterday. A curious synchronicity people are posting about online today: Tropical Storm Dolly.
@stardustbluepr.com pointed out on Bluesky:
[link to skeet]
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?
Netflix Announces Norm Macdonald Documentary Directed by Judd Apatow ↗
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.
↳ via consequence.net
Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person ↗
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.
↳ via lithub.com
From r/crtgaming on Reddit: I caught the final moments before my PS2's Graphics Synthesizer died.
I'm not big on posting Reddit links, 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 🤪
Designer Creates World’s Most Hideous Hawaiian Shirt to Hide From AI-Surveillance Cameras ↗
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:
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.
↳ via futurism.com