Labubus — those kind of scary little dolls with teeth that people are obsessed with — are hard to come by these days. It’s no surprise that the knock off industry is filling the gap; what is funny is that the fake dolls (“Lafufus”) are popular, too. For some Labubu owners, the authenticity of their doll doesn’t even matter. It’s part of the fandom experience all the same.
It’s a major turn in the high-profile dispute between Baldoni and Blake Lively that spiraled into an entire genre of social media content. Baldoni had sued Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for $400 million after Lively accused Baldoni of sexual harassment. A judge also dismissed Baldoni’s defamation suit against The New York Times, filed after its coverage of Lively’s claims.
The company that owns the biggest sewing pattern brands — Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls, and Vogue — has been sold to a liquidator, per the Craft Industry Alliance. That’s troubling news for those of us that sew and prefer physical patterns, but there’s also a concerning knock-on effect: the company owns the last large-scale tissue printers in the country.
A few years ago I wrote about the painstaking efforts to preserve sewing patterns and fashion history. I suspect that work is now even more urgent.
If you’re a celebrity promoting a new movie or your latest album, you used to follow a standard playbook of late night shows, magazine cover stories, or daytime talk shows. Now you have to do all that and eat chicken wings with YouTubers or give your hottest take while riding the subway. The New Media Circuit is a powerful driver of views, likes, and comments — but does it actually sell anything?
[vulture.com]
The Atlantic has a fascinating deep dive into khipus — long cords that the Inca tied knots into to preserve information. Few know how to read the knots, which are hundreds of years old and fragile. But researchers are slowly learning to understand them:
A few years ago, Clindaniel trained an AI system to analyze the colors of 37,645 cords on 629 khipus, as well as the colors of the cords that surround them, which may indicate context and genre. Clindaniel’s program found that rare khipu colors—red, certain blues, orange, yellow, certain grays, greens—were all clustered together, indicating that they were probably used in highly similar contexts. Based on Spanish chronicles and other clues, Clindaniel suggests that this context might have involved religion or Inca royalty.
[theatlantic.com]
