8x8

the fiume endeavour: Neutral Moresnet and other countries that fell off the map 

international male: thirty-three national costumes from the 2022 Mister Global pageant via Miss Cellania  

odette and odile: a diminutive chihuahua and human handler perform Swan Lake  

smpte colour bars: a BBC test pattern jumper and mural—see also  

bad actor mode: an AI normally tasked with developing new, novel medications had its parameters switched seek out toxicity and suggests tens of thousands of chemical weapons and poisons in the space of a few hours—via Slashdot 

 cameo appearance: Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams portrayed the President of United Earth on the season finale of Star Trek and brought the planet back into the Federation 

state-of-the-art: ten breakthrough technologies online now that could change our trajectory for the better—via Kottke  

geopolitics: charting the advance of democracy

leipziger straße

Via friend of the blog Nag on the Lake, we quite enjoyed this stroll down familiar albeit empty streets of Leipzig (see also) after-hours guided by this collaboration from Nøvae and Dom Waits of Brotfabrik with a House/Haus setlist of a dozen electronic melodies anticipating a time to come when these scenes might be livelier.

colour palette

 

minutes to midnight

Via Open Culture, we learn about the history of the Doomsday Clock, first presented as symbolic representation of the likelihood of a human-created global catastrophe to the public nearly seventy-five years ago, starting at a comfortable buffer time of 23:53 but now wound up to a hundred seconds before the eve of destruction and seen its hands adjusted back and forth twenty-four times during the course of world events since 1947. A group of scientist who had contributed to the Szilárd petition and subsequent Manhattan Project began circulating a newsletter following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to encourage restraint and never again seek recourse to nuclear weapons with a clock to represent the countdown to the inevitable outcomes should we stay this course and not make a decision to turn back the hands.

ut annare perannareque commode liceat

Originally corresponding to the first full moon of the New Year, this day, the Ides of March, was marked by the Feast of Anna Perenna, a public holiday with much feasting and sacrifice to secure a propitious and healthy year ahead. Revelers beseeched the deification of the passage of time to grant them as many more fruitful years as cups of wine they could imbibe and observed despite calendar reforms and the pivot away from lunar cycles. Associated with the assassination of Julius Caesar who ignored the warnings of a seer, a practitioner of haruspicy—that is divination through entrails—called Spurinna, the festivities changed and were formalized after the civil war as an imperial procession marking the end of a holy week of sorts in honour of the Cybele, the Magna Mater, and her consort Attis, who represented the cycle of the seasons, and passion plays (performed by tree-bearing priests called dendrophoroi) that marked the birth and death of that figure in anticipation of the vernal equinox.

i’ll do my exploring in the laboratory, if you don’t mind

First subjected to the MST3K deluxe treatment on this day in 1997, Terror from the Year 5000 is a Samuel Z Arkoff and Robert J Gurney Jr. collaboration from 1958 about a science experiment that first involves an exchange of objects and artefacts from the distant future, sort of like the show’s regular invention exchange segment. Eventually (about an hour into the movie) this trading beckons a disfigured, Greek-speaking envoy to travel to the present and present a warning about the nuclear holocaust in the hope intervention will change the timeline. The Observers’ forcing Bobo and Dr Pearl Forrester to engage in combat is a reference to “The Gamesters of Triskelion” when the disembodied minds called The Providers demanded Uhura, Kirk and Chekov fight to the death.

goblin mode

Not to shame or scold anyone for their coping mechanisms or lack thereof, we felt seen by this article by Kari Paul on the reframing of the hedonistic cycle that steps out of it with the same intention as those tactics of betterment and self-improvement only to be camouflaged as the lazy under-achieving escapism that this sort of behaviour is trying to distance itself from, albeit in not the most flattering fashion. Rather than embracing those incredibly narrow and niche trends that limned the beginning of the pandemic isolation, the phenomenon that simultaneously accepts and rejects the definition of a hashtag represents the opposite of the in-crowd.

prvá slovenská republika

Under considerable pressure from Nazi Germany, the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia declared independence and became a client state of the Third Reich on this day in 1939. The next day Germany invaded and occupied Bohemia and Moravia, establishing a protectorate administered from Prague castle, having annexed the bordering Sudetenland in September 1938 following the Munich Agreement. Slovak troops were conscripted into fighting resistance forces in Poland and against Russia, and liberated (having attempted their own revolt and uprising in August 1944) by the advancing Red Army in 1945, the territory was reincorporated into Czechoslovakia. Again securing independence on New Year’s Day 1993 in what’s called the amicable Velvet Divorce, the Republic of Slovakia does not consider itself the successor state to the war time puppet regime but rather the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile of Edvard Beneš. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.