Was Abraham Lincoln gay? A new documentary, “Lover of Men,” explores the question.
The 2012 book, “The Stories Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War,” by Thomas P. Lowry, looks at this and many other questions of sexuality during that period. From this distance, it’s hard to figure out what was going on — very few people were writing candidly about that kind of thing in the 19th Century, and 21st Century attitudes and definitions toward sexuality and gender don’t map well onto the past.
Men often shared beds back then; this is common knowledge. In a highly sexist society, they formed intense friendships. There was probably a lot of sex going on between men.
Ever since I heard about “influencers” and “content creators” as jobs, I thought they were ridiculous. Content creators and influencers are narcissistic, peanut-brained Millennials and Zoomers who spend their days giving cosmetics and fashion advice, making cringe hip-hop videos, peddling Hallmark affirmations and dispensing bro culture from the manosphere.
This morning I had a shocking realization: It’s me. I’m a content creator and influencer. I write reports and articles and host webinars and influence decisions about networking and cloud technology.
Do I need to start wearing a sideways baseball cap and gold chains?
“An AI bot named James has taken my old job,” writes journalist Guthrie Scrimgeour.
A local newspaper in Hawaii is using AI bots to generate a video feed of the news. The bots pretend to be journalists discussing stories with each other.
If young people getting news from TikTok is a problem, the young people and TikTok aren’t to blame.
A new report examines how TikTok users decide what to believe. They’re not just mindlessly believing everything they see. They fact-check — but they do it on TikTok. Given the decline of journalism in 2024, is that awful?
The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder
Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is unveiling a startup that aims to teach AI systems deep knowledge of physical reality. Investors are throwing money at it.
…
[Li is] on a part-time leave from Stanford University to cofound a company called World Labs. While current generative AI is language-based, she sees a frontier where systems construct complete worlds with the physics, logic, and rich detail of our physical reality.
… [About ten years ago, Li created] ImageNet, a bespoke database of digital images that allowed neural nets to get significantly smarter. She feels that today’s deep-learning models need a similar boost if AI is to create actual worlds, whether they’re realistic simulations or totally imagined universes. Future George R.R. Martins might compose their dreamed-up worlds as prompts instead of prose, which you might then render and wander around in…. World Labs calls itself a spatial intelligence company, and its fate will help determine whether that term becomes a revolution or a punch line.
— Steven Levy at Wired
Investors are pitching this as an entertainment play but the real value here seems to be in business, governmeng and research, including city planning, training and industrial applications.
A profile of Mick Herron, author of the “Slow Horses” spy novel series. “I was only ever a hair’s breadth away from being exactly as much of a failure as the people I write about.”
Herron’s characters are bad spies and MI5 screw-ups exiled to a stable of misfits called Slough House, where they are desperate to escape life as so-called slow horses.
…
When they were first published, his books were read by roughly the same number of people as his articles for a trade journal on U.K. employment law.
“I wrote about people who were having a bad time at work, essentially,” said Herron, who was an editor at the Employment Law Brief. “And yes, you can certainly draw a lot of conclusions about how that influenced the books that I started writing when I was working there.”
Back then, he was commuting every day from Oxford to London. He came to work early so he could leave early. When he got home around 6 p.m., he had the energy to write for an hour. By aiming for 350 words a night, he pumped out five well-reviewed detective novels. But they “hadn’t set the world alight,” as he puts it, and they weren’t nearly successful enough for him to write full time. So he kept commuting.
When he started his job, Herron had an office on a floor with only a few people. By the time he left 15 years later, he was reserving a different hot desk every day on a floor with a few hundred people. Which taught him a valuable lesson that would animate his spy fiction.
“The larger the organization was that I worked for,” he said, “the less concern it had for the people working for it.”
…
His literary interests shifted after July 7, 2005, when being in London for the suicide bombings made him want to write about the security services. The problem was that he knew precisely nothing about the security services. What he did know was that the bigger an organization gets, the more dysfunctional it becomes.
“This was a truth that surely applied as much to the intelligence services as to any other place of work,” Herron later wrote. “And if every organization has its failures—its second-raters—wouldn’t that be well inside my comfort zone?”
…
[Herron’s success after years of struggling] was so improbable and wildly unexpected that when other writers ask him for advice, he offers two words.
“Be lucky,” he says. “You can have everything else going for you. But without a stroke of luck along the way, you might never really make it.”
— “Nobody Was Reading Him. Now He’s the World’s Best Spy Writer. By Ben Cohen at The Guardian
Trump and Vance are inciting terrorist attacks against Haitians who are in this country legally and just trying to work and live peacefully. Vance, at least, is knowingly spreading lies about the Haitians. (I think Trump is incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies.)
Trump and Vance are evil Nazis and the people who support them are supporting Nazis.
I’m an American Jew whose ancestors fled Eastern Europe to get away from terrorist attacks — called “pogroms” — of the type Trump and Vance are inciting now.
Today's ephemera: Shaggin-wagon van interiors of the 70's and 80's
Animated GIFs from the movie “Grease."
Photo taken near Allentown, Pa.
Shaggin-wagon van interiors of the 70’s and 80’s
The man who drives one of these has a luxurious mustache and sideburns.
21-year-old Bernie Sanders is arrested for protesting racial segregation, Chicago, 1963.
Ummmm…..
Beatrice Roberts was Miss New York 1925, but lost the Miss America Pageant. She was married to Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe it or Not for three months, then went to Hollywood and made nearly sixty films.
Capacities does not support inline editing of Word documents — or any other attachments — and because that is a primary reason I was considering it as an Obsidian replacement, I am far less enthusiastic about Capacities.
Today's ephemera: Oh! The JOY of Heinz Cream of Asparagus Soup!
The Lost Traveler by Steve Wilson (Ace, 1978). “A science fiction Western and motorcycle quest epic.” via
Punch Almanac, 7 November 1939
Greystones Road, Sheffield late 1890s to today
Today's ephemera: Hangry corgi
Hangry corgi. “this shiba just fucking throws it with all the offended indignance that every dog has when faced with no food when food is wanted”
“The former Embers Inn of Lexington, Kentucky last operated as the New Circle Inn. It closed in the early 2000s and went up for sale in 2012. By 2017, both motel wings had been demolished, leaving only the original office building. Today, the property remains in use as Ky’s Auto Plaza.” via
We didn’t even last halfway. The tv has been off for 15 minutes and I can feel my blood pressure subsiding.
Today's ephemera: Sheepdog puppy herds entire flock into owner's kitchen
Had it. Lost most of the pieces in the first week.
HOLY SHIT IT’S HERE!!! via
The Night Watchman, c.1900
Karl Martin August Splitgerber
Here’s some of what I read on Fierce Network during lunch today
An iPhone 16 AI supercycle? Nope, according to analysts. (Dan Jones). I agree — yesterday’s presentation was too long and underwhelming — although if you happen to suffer from one of several health problems that the new gear addresses, the technology could be literally life-changing for you. The AI features were meh and the new iPhones will be great for people who were upgrading already, but won’t win new users.
AT&T’s CEO John Stankey plans to be first and biggest on fiber (Linda Hardesty).
AI is increasing 5G traffic. Signs point toward 6G as the answer (Julia King). tl;dr AI requires a great deal of uplink traffic, overwhelming even 5G.
19 things to love at Vintage Computer Fest Midwest 19 — Liz Coyne went to Vintage Computer Fest Midwest and found a whole lot of fantastic retro technology, including a novelty Kermit the Frog phone, 900-pound IBM mainframe, 1980s era robots and the computer behind Chuck E. Cheese audio-animatronics. Fun!
Rule 34
libraries aren’t a charity, they’re a public service
…
public libraries exist b/c our societies decided that access to culture, to information, to knowledge, and to a public space that preserves those things is a public good, it’s something everybody should have
public libraries are not and should not be a charity that we only minimally fund b/c some people are too poor to partake in capitalism and therefore need a little handout so they can get smarter to partake in capitalism
— Ami Angelwings urusai.social/@ami_ange…