supporting role (10. 545)

An internal memo at Paramount studios from 1987, just months before the second instalment of the franchise premiered, has recently been making the rounds on the rounds on the internet regarding casting for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Bob Canada explores in detail. A few of these alternatives and understudies we had heard about—like Yaphet Kotto for Captain Picard or Bunty Bailey for Tasha Yar, but the majority were surprising to us and would have made for a very different reboot and could have possibly been the end of the continuing voyages.

time and relative dimension in space (10. 544)

Via our fellow peripatetic Marco McClean’s Memo of the Air, we are directed a gallery of our favourite Gallifreyan’s preferred mode of conveyance (see previously) and its interior changes over the seasons—due to a broken chameleon circuit, the exterior appearance was fixed on a 1929 Mackenzie Trench style police callbox. The iconic Roundels were always a part of the console room and decor throughout and covered wiring boards.

内卷 (10. 543)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest (much more to see there), we are directed to an essay by rëşt ôf wŏrld contributor Yi-Ling Liu on the Chinese terms for burnout and the relentless push to get ahead—or just barely tread water with an assortment of phrases, some familiar and some novel—and how some of those buzzwords have inverted and signal despair rather than aspiration. We’d add the corollary shàng àn (making it ashore—getting a stable government position) to “jumping into the sea” and we’ve heard of the minor revolts of lying flat or letting it rot (with their analogues in the West quiet quitting, work-to-rule, Sciopero Bianco or generally a slowdown action) but the title term neijuan or “involution” was new to us as well. A loanword from an outdated treatise—which may have been a bit of political sublimation and apologetic for colonialism—that conjectures that agrarian societies, pointedly rice-growing ones, fail in achieving technological or political change because of intensive farming and increased pressures, externally and internally, to maintain this high yield with class structures meant to re-enforce that quota. Its original sense has been incrementally extended as a critique of income disparity—number two in the number of billionaires but also home to six hundred million others who subsist off less than $150 per month and of an exhaustive and overly-competitive work culture. The pictured, harried student of Tsing Hua University balancing his laptop on the handle bars of his bicycle has been adopted by the ‘Involuted Generation’ as their king.

7x7 (10. 542)

epicentre: Türkiye-Syrian earthquake opens a huge fissure over three hundred kilometres long—donate to help with recovery efforts here

down with gravity: legislation in Montana would restrict scientific instruction to “scientific fact”  

monocle: a compact Augmented Reality device that does not wholly remove one from the here and now  

ditchley park: secret bi-partisan talks on the failure of Brexit taking place 

radar anomaly: fighter jets down another unidentified flying object over Canada’s Yukon Province   

child-labour: Iowa state legislature abolishes most working-age restrictions, allowing fourteen-year-olds to do dangerous jobs at exploitative wages  

search and rescue: as the death toll climbs to thirty thousand with little hope of finding more survivors, a happy montage of a few saved from the rubble—more options for donations here

((DV)) (10.541)

In an annual tradition tradition, the team at NPR’s Planet Money takes a moment to consider the things they love and dispatch valentines accordingly. While we really enjoyed the opening segment and the affection for venturing down a logistics and supply-chain rabbit hole with ImportYeti, a website that aggregates bills of ladening and customs sea shipment records and yields exacting insights on where component parts and completed goods come from (give it a try with any product marked made in China and drill down on the details), we would be compelled to send our overtures as well to Audio Description (see also)—something we’ve tried and will continue—for film and television programmes—a feature mandated by regulation and very prevalent but that affords all audiences the chance to attend in all circumstances, as if watching in company, closely and turns every episode into a podcast experience and narrated play-by-play.

7x7 (10. 540)

sky survey: a massive, high resolution picture of the Milky Way with three billion distinct objects  

pachyderm prototype: presenting the Platybelodon—see also

braggoscope: using machine learning to create affiliative indices of the extensive archives of BBC4’s In Our Time with Melvin Bragg—via Web Curios 

hobohemian: a primer for Tramp Art  

book renewal: the New York Public Library has found that the majority of literature published prior to 1964 may already be in the public domain—via Kottke 

opuntia: invasive cacti are spreading in the Swiss Alps  

stardust to dust: researchers propose kicking up lunar debris to create a sunshade and cool the Earth—see also

tube theatre (10. 539)

Web Curios directs our attention and appreciation to the hypertext novel “for the Internet in seven cars and a crash” by Geoff Ryman that has recently been resurrected in its original 1996 form coinciding with the anniversary of its inception and a mention in an culture piece on the novelty of interactive television from The Guardian. Recounting the narratives in a manner of constrained writing—which is truly good prose with its strictures and privileging numbers over the vagaries of language—of the passengers (the capacity of seven carriages plus conductor) riding the Bakerloo line from Embankment Station to Elephant & Castle. Each rider is limned for the reader in the same amount of words and linked to their travelling companions by an associative index of vignettes, which one can read in any order. Also published as a book—earning a Philip K Dick Award—differences are highlighted in print form whereas intrinsic similarities come through on the web.

smackwater jack (10. 538)

Released on this day in 1971 and featuring tracks “It’s Too Late,” “I Feel the Earth Move,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Natural Woman,” the second studio album from Carol King won four Grammy awards and is certified Platinum fourteen times over, making it one of the best-selling and culturally significant recordings of all time. Overall its charting record is only surpassed by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and King herself held the record for longest time in the ten top for nearly four decades until being succeeded by Adele with 21 in 2017. Cover art features a tapestry that King stitched herself with her cat called Telemachus at her feet.