Culture

I love this trend? More pet videos online please.

The Scholarly Press Backlist Revival will put out-of-print academic monographs online for free under deals with publishers like MIT Press, hoping to fix a “black hole in the cultural and scholarly record.” If it works out, it seems like a great option for a swathe of copyrighted works that aren’t seen as profitable to sell — but shouldn’t be locked away because of it.

Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl (IYKYK) has made a comic about being named as one of the artists used to train Midjourney. Gambrell refers to herself as “small-time” and her discussion of her ambitions may clarify why a lot of creators feel exploited by scraping.

I have often wondered why internet assistants invariably have female names. Anyway, here’s an easy solution to the problem from Ask A Manager:

China Miéville, the phenomenal novelist, took on a new writing partner, Keanu Reeves, for a novel called The Book of Elsewhere. I would be hype for this if it were Miéville alone — The City and the City is a personal favorite — so I’m curious to see what Reeves adds to the mix besides publicity and being very good-looking.

Online shopping hit a new peak over the 2023 holiday season — and now the returns are upon us. But as online shopping gets increasingly competitive, there are new struggles around return policies. That may be an area for increased competition:

Okay. So there’s something called a “Disney Day Drinkers Club” (more than 85,000 members!) and their mascot is a trash can called “Binny.” Disney has moved the trash can.

It’s one thing when it’s Spotify, Apple Music, or SoundCloud, but these recaps from Culver’s, Dunkin (it dropped the “Donuts” from its name in 2019), Chick-fil-A, and Shake Shack are taking the whole year-end recap trend a little too far. Especially when they’re personalized.

Among the movies featured: The Cassandra Cat (1962), a Czeckoslovak film about a cat who wears sunglasses and reveals human nature. This is a code red for cat people.

Can you guess which national parks these people are reviewing?

“Partnerships like this should complicate this story of inevitability for companies like OpenAI, the world-beating firm that, before it takes over the economy, and before it must be stopped from taking over the entire world, must first, for some reason, pay for a big subscription to Politico Pro.”

Ten years old, but new to me: a website that plays a tone every time a Wikipedia page is updated. It’s a soothing antidote to ... basically every other browser tab, at this point.

Even as big advertisers exit, sports Twitter has continued going strong. But now the official Threads account announced that sports/NBA Twitter’s newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski “has landed” and is doing a Q&A Friday.

Wikipedia has released its top articles of the year, and numero uno is one on ChatGPT. In a morbid twist, “Deaths in 2023” came in second.

The theme park / immersive art exhibition (yes, you read that right) is a real thing, and the Los Angeles Times has a great story about it with some really cool photos. It will apparently open sometime this winter.

Its Android app is testing a new feature that’ll warn users before replying to old posts or posts from people they don’t follow, asking them to make a great first impression.

Last night, a friend pointed me to Radio Garden. The site (or iOS app) is simple, presenting a swipe-able digital Earth covered in green dots. Some represent collections of local stations, and some, like the lonely, all-shellac-78s Arctic Outpost AM1270, solemnly broadcast into the Earth’s farthest reaches.

After 15 years of Android, Google’s blog post walking down memory lane didn’t do much for me beyond one note about 2017’s Android 8 (Oreo) launch and the big emoji problem that was so important that CEO Sundar Pichai got involved.

UploadVR spotted a “coming soon” listing for VRChat, the virtual reality social platform, in the app store for the ByteDance-owned Pico 4 headset.