7x7 (10. 905)

home taping is killing record industry profits: the 1981 moral panic over mixtapes  

lisa lionheart: labour force participation through the many careers of Barbie  

swipe left: patrons of 1920s Berlin nightclubs could flirt via pneumatic tubes—via Messy Nessy Chic  

the rivers and harbours act: Texas Department of Justice sues governor for refusing to remove a stretch of buoys that violates federal and international law—see previously  

sickbay: the Pirate Surgeon’s Journals—via Strange Company  

comeuppance: it’s time for the annual census on the River Thames—see previously 

a lot of skill, hand-eye coordination—it’s cheap and legal: video arcade addiction was seen as a threat to prevailing social values in 1982

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Ullapool and environs plus Wester Ross

two years ago: a colour advertisement on black-and-white TV (1967), Einstein on the Beach (1976), Thomas à Kempis plus a mosaic along the Thames

three years ago: Trump’s mental fitness, proto-Wikipedia (2000), more on the US Space Force, St Cucuphas, Nixon in China vis-à-vis today’s relations plus more on stock characters and archetypes

four years ago: RIP Rutger Hauer plus a doctored presidential seal

five years ago: a neo-classic Delphic festival (1927), a student project that may have unwittingly identified targets of value in the Gulf War, anti-social media, Mid-Century Modern minimalism plus the hunt for subsurface water on Mars

dragnet (10. 904)

Via Slashdot, we learn that artificial intelligence is aiding and abetting US police departments is conducting en masse warrantless monitoring of individuals, equipped with a suite of tools that analyse driving patterns of cars in traffic, normally anonymised by the herd and the sheer volume of surveillance footage the pick up snapshots of single vehicles, to identify (with an questionable degree of accuracy sure inflated to the precincts who buy the software) suspicious patterns—the signature route of a drug dealer, in the case cited, and prising out a guilty plea thanks to this dossier. Beholden only to the caprice of its operators and without judicial oversight or safeguards, every cop becomes an overly zealous Inspector Javert with the Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology, which is also used to predict and tag customer experience at drive-thrus and shared as a potential bounty across state lines with jurisdictions that have banned abortions.

bye-bye blue bird (10. 903)

Rebranded as X, Elon Musk who owns the transformed social media platform which he plans to ultimately recreate as an everything-app akin to China’s WeChat, presumably replacing the bird logo across all devices once updates are pushed through, announced that tweets will henceforth be stylised hash marks as well, though the roll-out seems a bit uneven. Calling for submissions, Musk promised he would make the change immediate with a good enough monogram was proposed, and the 𝕏 selected seems to be a decorative insignia from the Monotype foundry’s Special Alphabets 4 font. The choice may prove provisional, however. The original x.com was co-founded by Musk—later rebranded as Paypal after Musk was unceremoniously ousted as CEO.  Though we’d given up on the site some time ago, we’ll still miss our little friend.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: the fall of Stirling Castle (1304) plus the sea cave of Smoo

two years ago: assorted links to revisit,  highbrow smut, a party in a box plus a student animation project that previsions CGI

three years ago: Congresswomen Bela Abzug, St Christina the Astonishing plus El Topo (1970)

four years ago: artefacts and equipment that travelled to the Moon,  the United States v Nixon (1974) plus re-tweet remorse

five years ago: the thagomizer, mapping the brain of a fruit fly plus the god of satire

drive (10. 902)

Released on this day as the lead single from The Cars’ fifth studio album Heartbeat City (b-side, “My Best Friend’s Girl, the record also including the tracks “Just What I Needed,” “Hello Again,” “Magic,” and “You Might Think”) on this day in 1984 and was an instant top-charting song in almost all markets, reaching the top-ten again a year later when the band performed at Live Aid, the ballad also used as background music for a photomontage of the famine in Ethiopia (“You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong”) introduced by David Bowie. The accompanying music video was directed by actor Timothy Hutton and introduces model and writer Paulina Porizkova, who would later become co-vocalist Ric Ocasek’s wife, her profile heightened thanks in part to an appearance on Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, a talk show that aired on MTV for the network’s first couple of years. Warhol directed the music video for “Hello Again” for Ocasek and made a cameo appearance as a bartender.

9x9 (10. 901)

effective altruism: FTX lobbyist tried to purchase the island nation of Nauru as a doomsday bunker and create a genetically enhanced human species  

getting drunk at a disco: 1977 found footage of an evening not necessarily going downhill 

this is not a love poem: a round-up of favourites that are not all lovey-dovey—via tmn  

rambler: a collection of illustrated exteriors of California ranch homes—see also

1975: Kuala Lumpur authorities shut down the Good Vibes festival after headliner Matty Healy criticised Malaysia’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws  

point of no return: time is running out on the Climate Clock  

stooping: trend adopted by Chinese young people involves decorating with cast-off furniture left by the curb 

smokey, this is not ‘nam—this is bowling, there are rules: Big Lebowski (previously) inspired bowling alley via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (lots more to explore there) 

typoglycemia: bypassing chatbot’s ethical subroutines using word scrambling and transposed letters

twilight zone (10. 900)

Via Boing Boing, after going up on his space elevator, Neal Agarwal invites us to scroll down from the ocean’s surface through the pelagic zone through the midnight zone to the dismal seabed and explore with the denizens of the deep, like the cosmopolitan sixgill shark that spend their days at depths of seventeen hundred meters and their nights in swallower waters and the so called headless chicken fish that’s a sea cucumber with wing-like fins that propel them through the dark at nearly three thousand meters below or plunge to the ultra-abyssal hadal zone (the adjectival form of Hades), inaccessible places in the deepest trenches that have had fewer visitors than have been on the Moon.

perhaps booze would alleviate this situation (10. 899)

Preceded by the educational short A Date with Your Family promoting good etiquette at the dinner table, the 1952 Alfred E Green Cold War drama set in a desultory Manhattan bar peopled by a demographic cross-section of Americans was given the Mystery Science Theater treatment on this day in 1994. Drinking brandy from a conspicuously large snifter, a mysterious pollster, gadfly assesses the attitudes of various patrons including a news presenter, an industrialist, rancher, socialite and congress member regarding international relations and foreign policy, whom to a person express their weariness of bad news from abroad and although treasure their safety and security, appear to have little will to be engaged participants. On cue the expository news channel reports that the US has been invaded by a foreign power (unnamed but ostensibly the USSR) and the situation quickly escalates into a nuclear conflict—mostly with incongruous stock footage of combat training. The guests rush to return to their lives with a more patriotic posture and do what they can for the war effort. As strikes continue unabated, the cadre suddenly find themselves back in the bar, the brandy-drinker having freed them from his hypnotic trance with a changed outlook, which ironically is to suborn their individual concerns for the good of the collective. Composer and music director Albert Glasser also scored The Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, Teenage Caveman and a number of other MST3K classics and the film was a critical and commercial success, one of the few 1950s movies to gross a box-office of over a million dollars.

synchronoptica

one year ago: some hidden places in Scotland plus Highlands moorlands

two years ago:  your daily demon: Glasya Labolas, a Roman holiday plus Telstar I (1962)

three years ago: assorted links worth revisiting 

four years ago: abstract drone photography,  a near universal paper format plus a large format camera

five years ago: a visit to the Playmobil factory plus Alexander Gerst aboard the ISS

the magdalene (10. 898)

Fêted on this day as the patron protector of converts, glovers, milliners, perfumeries, apothecaries, penitent sinners and sexual temptation, Mary of Magdala, which gives us the name Madeleine, travelled with Jesus and the apostles and was regarded as the only disciple that truly understood Jesus’ message, garnering the jealousy of Peter and the others—and according to some persistent extra-canonical traditions, the bride of Christ, having journeyed to Gaul to start a family. Her depiction as a reformed prostitution began in the late sixth century with a sermon by Pope Gregory I that conflated an unnamed “Sinful Woman,” later identified as Mary of Bethany, who is deigned to anoint the feet of Jesus, which the Catholic Church didn’t officially dispel until thirteen hundred years later with Pope Paul VI’s calendar reform but has proven another persistent association. Elaborated and romanced during the medieval period through modern times, Mary Magdalen was upheld as a example of redemption, though her popular cult was ignored by authoritative theologians, and it was said that seven demons were exorcised from her which became embodiments of the contemporary idea of the Seven Deadly Sins, and from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance is often depicted as rather hirsute by dent of her newly acquired modesty, iconographically publicly nude (vulgaris meretrix) but not obscured with a fig-leaf or Daryl Hanna Mermaid-style with strategically placed plaits but rather lycanthropically in full body hair (like this painting in Gdańsk or Tilman Riemenschneider’s altar ensemble in Münnerstadt), like the so called ‘feather tights’ affect given to angelic figures, a costume of scales aligned with the fashion and sensibilities of the time. Elevated from a memorial feast to a liturgical one in 2016 by Pope Francis directed Mary Magdalene be hailed as apostolorum apostola, the “Apostle of the apostles.”

synchronoptica 

one year ago: more adventures through the Scottish Highlands, a hit from Take That (1991) plus driving along the North Coast 500

two years ago: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) 

three years ago: the origins of the depiction of Jesus as a white European

four years ago: and whitey’s on the Moon plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: the search for Dark Matter, assorted links worth revisiting, on eggccorns and oronyms plus the smell of rain