*Corporations using "ineffectual" carbon offsets are slowing path to "real zero", more than 60 climate scientists say.*
It is obvious that use of bogus "offsets" as an excuse not to do real decarbonization keeps the greenhouse emissions high.
Today's US college students have no memory of a Republican Party that wasn't extremist. To those whose families were Republicans, the way they find it now is normal.
The Putin forces are using specialized drones that drop grenades on civilians. The drone controllers do not target a specific person; rather, they generally attack anyone they come across.
Putin is supporting the propaganda of a US neo-Nazi group.
Putin and the corrupter support each other, too.
As we increase the number of artificial satellites in Earth orbit, the danger of the Kessler Syndrome (a chain reaction of collisions) increases too. Humanity could bar itself from space entirely.
The movie Gravity showed an extremely fast chain reaction. It might actually take years, but be unstoppable nonetheless.
*Spain's apocalyptic floods [following others in countries around the world] show two undeniable truths: the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us.*
The annual COP conferences that was created to get the world o the road to safety has been captured by planet roasters, and it is hard to see how the US and Russia could negotiate any sort of agreement about fossil fuels.
Some large countries could set up a carbon tax system on their own, using the tax money to help the poor not to subsidize specifically fossil fuel for poor people. Maybe then other countries would join.
*"Crunch time for real": UN says time for climate delays has run out.*
*Time to act: UNEP paints bleak climate picture without rapid emissions cut.*
US citizens: call on lawmakers to ban surveillance pricing.
They should go further than that and ban collecting personal data about the purchaser.
US citizens: call on Congress to keep private equity out of the child care business.
Rudy Giuliani must appear in person in federal court on Thursday after two election workers who are to receive nearly all of his most valuable assets told a judge they believe the former Donald Trump attorney is hiding items from them.
The complaint from the election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss -- whom Giuliani owes nearly $150 million for defaming them after the 2020 election -- comes after lawyers for the mother and daughter visited Giuliani's $6 million Manhattan apartment and discovered much of the furniture and valuable sports memorabilia was recently removed.
"Save for some rugs, a dining room table, some stray pieces of small furniture and inexpensive wall art, and a handful of smaller items like dishes and stereo equipment, the Apartment has been emptied of all of its contents," Freeman and Moss' attorney Aaron Nathan wrote in a letter to the judge in the case.
They are also trying to take possession, at the court's direction, of Giuliani's 26 luxury watches and a 1980 Mercedes-Benz he kept in Florida. But those also haven't been handed over, court filings this week say. [...]
Giuliani's lawyer told the court on Tuesday the former mayor of New York can't come to the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday because Giuliani has to do a live radio show from his condo in Palm Beach that night. [...] The women are also still in court trying to convince the judge they should be able to take control of a $3.5 million Palm Beach condo where Giuliani says he now lives.
Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead "White Christian Civilization" in its fight against the "International Conspiracy" of Jewish bankers and the "hordes of Coloured people" they controlled. [...]
Before that, he'd been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. [...]
Scott's Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the "Technate of North America," a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists. In calling for the abolition of all existing government, the Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a "functional control system" modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations. The Technate would measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace money. "It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise, impossible to save income for the future," one Technocracy Inc. brochure from the period says. "It would be impossible to sell anything." [...]
Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was announced simply as "1x1809x56." Haldeman, for his part, became 10450-1. [...]
Joshua Haldeman had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out to destroy civilization and that manipulated the masses into doing their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed democracy was for the few, not the many.
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- Mars Express (2023):
Fantastic French take on Ghost in the Shell. This has a great economy of story-telling that is rare these days, with so much of the world being implied or shown rather than spelled out for you. If this was a series, there would have been a whole episode about how these three people knew each other in the war; instead, one character looks at a photo for 4 seconds and we understand the relationship just fine. They don't beat you over the head with the tech and the prejudices against cyborgs, it's just there in the story. - Kaos (2024):
Jeff Goldblum reprises The Grandmaster but as Zeus in a time-shifted version of Orpheus and Eurydice. It starts off strong, but bogs down about halfway through. It's basically Percy Jackson for grownups. I had so many questions about the world-building and time-shift, like: Medusa died in the ancient past, but Daedalus is a currently-living mortal, so... the Icarus tattoo that Orpheus has is not referencing an ancient story, but something he saw on the news no more than 30 years ago? And someone was listening to an Elastica song. Not like, it was on the show's score: it was an in-show thing that existed. How does this Greek world end up with the colony of Britannia producing an Elastica? I'll wait. Also there were a lot of empty seats at the table: why are there only 5 Olympians? Anyway, they didn't really stick their foot in it, but I kept waiting for the shoe to drop in a "Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding" kind of way.And, because it's Netflix, the least surprising thing in the world happened: it was summarily cancelled after one season, so we'll never know the answers to any of these questions.
- Venus (2022):
A stripper robs a drug dealer and goes on the run, but meanwhile there's a whole new planet that appeared in the sky, and meanwhile, she's hiding in some kind of haunted apartment building, and meanwhile, there are some witches doing a Rosemary's Baby or something? It's all over the place, but pretty fun. It's Spanish, and I found it because it's produced by the guy who did the amazing 30 Coins. - Night Teeth (2021):
I rewatched this for the 3rd or 4th time. It's so great! Comfort food, really. The. I checked the wiki page to see what those folks are up to now and saw that this movie was critically panned. "Bad world-building", "no plot". WHAT? Did we not watch the same movie?? This is the best vampire movie since Blade. - Blade (1998):
Blade still kicks ass. Even though the whole "blood god" thing at the end sounds like they were writing it on a napkin on set. "And then like, a blood god or something, name TK TK". - Apartment 7A (2024):
I expected this to be terrible, because prequels are always terrible, but it's pretty good! It's kind-of a prequel to Rosemary's Baby but actually timeline wise, co-linear with about half of it. It has more explicit "magic" in it than the other. The hallucination dance routines are great. Someone really loved Suspiria and that's fine because I also really loved Suspiria. - Rosemary's Baby (1968):
So of course I had to watch the original. This holds up! Mia Farrow's progressively unhinged performance is fantastic. Once it goes Full Satan at the end, it gets kind of dumb, but that part is at least brief. (And yes, it hopefully goes without saying that Polanski is a rapist piece of shit. But Farrow is amazing in this.) - Salem's Lot (2024):
This was basically the same plot as the Buffy movie, without the charm or Peewee Herman. I didn't expect much going into this, because I hate everything Stephen King, but I did not expect that. - The Penguin (2024):
This show is shockingly good. It is not a Batman show at all. It's The Sopranos with the barest pinch of Bat-Salt on it. Even less bat-flavoring than Pennyworth had. Colin Farrell's physical transformation is unbelievable, and Cristin Milioti / Sofia Falcone is amazing.(I wanted more of this Penguin, so I rewatched The Batman (2022) and that was a mistake. I remembered absolutely nothing about that movie for a reason. I especially forgot that it is three hours long.)
- Agatha All Along (2024):
Kathryn Hahn is always fantastic, and now Aubrey Plaza? You son of a bitch, I'm in. The story is.... Just ok. But the characters are great, and a special shout-out to the wig department, because I have never seen so much wig technology deployed in such a short show. They must have spent half the budget on wigs.Much like Wandavision, this is a great-looking show with interesting characters, and it just completely squanders the ending. With both shows, the last 3 episodes felt like a waste of my time. "Ok, psychological drama is over, here's some listless superhero shit."
- Azrael (2024):
This is good and scary. Samara Weaving murders her way through the woods after The Rapture. There's no dialog. - Killers Game (2024):
Dave Bautista is an assassin in love. Absolutely relentless ass-kicking. Great fun. - Wolfs (2024)
Buddy assassins. Clooney and Pitt are funnier guys than most people give them credit for. - Hellboy, The Crooked Man (2024):
This really feels like a fan film. It appears to have had approximately the budget of Evil Dead. The first one. But it's a decent little fan film. - Alien Romulus (2024):
The set design alone makes this movie worth your time. Whoever built these sets was an obsessive fan of the original. The detail is incredible, right down to the C64 keyboards and on-screen typography. This is Typeset In The Future catnip. Plot-wise: the first 2/3rds of it is a pretty solid xenomorphy romp. It loses its way when it tries to introduce some bullshit from Prometheus, which I am still trying to forget existed, and a super-soldier serum or whatever. The use of a CGI-resurrected Ian Holm was nearly unforgivable, as were the several tag-lines inexplicably quoted from other, better movies. There was entirely too much "Look! Here's as thing from that other movie! You liked that other movie, here's that thing again!"The sets, though. The sets. And the creature design. Lots of lingering close-ups that give you a great look at Giger's designs.
So this is the third best Alien movie, which is kind of like being the third best Exorcist, or the second best Rosemary's Baby, or the second best Blade, or the second best Robocop, or the second best Casablanca (which is Algiers).
- Sweetpea (2024):
Bullied nerd decides to start murdering bullies. I enjoyed that after a brief dalliance with justifying her actions, they lean way into, "No, she's just a psychopath." Starring Ella Purnell from Yellowjackets and Fallout who is great. - From S03:
Why am I still watching this plot-blocking trash re-tread of Lost. I hate it. Stage an intervention. - Darryl In Paris S02:
Season one was great, but season 2 has lost me. What I loved about the first one was the road-trip through a completely different apocalypse and all the weirdos they met along the way. Season 2 is just, "two tribes go to war" and it's back on well-tread ground that I don't particularly care about.Also why does it have this "Magical Christ Child is immune to Zombies" nonsense? That was the plot of The Last of Us. We've already seen it.
- Tomb Raider, The Legend of Lara Croft (2024):
I wanted to like this, because Agent Carter's the voice, but it's kind of a snore. Were the video games 100% about her daddy issues? Because every filmic version is 100% about her daddy issues and that's boring. - Twilight of the Gods (2024):
Some vikings decide to murder Thor because he's as prick. Extreme ultraviolence and an animated style that reminds me of Primal. It doesn't quite wrap up the story, but almost; and it's Netflix, so don't expect them to. - The Substance (2024):
This is a surreal masterpiece. It's the most terrifying body horror I've ever seen. It makes The Thing and Videodrome look like wee little babies. It looked at Poor Things and said, "Hold my beer." I was blown away.It's a lot, but it's probably the best movie I've seen this year.
I don't want to give away too much, but... A friend criticized it for being just more "Hollywood climbing up its own ass, oh, how hard it is to be Famous", which is certainly the kind of script that I often hate. But while the plot could have been characterized (in an unreliable-narrator Ferris Club reading) as, "Actress gets old, has bad facelift, commits suicide" -- or something -- that's like saying Chicago has a thin plot. Yeah! It does! But there is much more going on there.
Also, I immediately recognized Margaret Qualley as being the dancer in one of the greatest music videos ever made, the Kenzo World commerical by Spike Jonze. (Watch the stairway mirror scene. Then watch it again.)
- Chip 'n' Dale, Rescue Rangers (2022):
When this was recommended to me I was sure I was being pranked. But no, this is actually pretty great! It is basically a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit set 80 years later. Toons are still mostly actors, but now they're out in the suburbs instead of the ghetto. The animation is fantastic, lots of good physical gags, and the mixture of styles (cell, 3D, video game, etc.) is both funny commentary and plot-relevant. Anyway, two washed-up actors try to break up a kidnapping ring. Many of the jokes are of the form, "Hey, remember that thing, here's that old thing you recognize!", but they're pretty good jokes.The thing that's technically fascinating about this, though, is that because of the age of the various properties involved, this is the kind of movie that anyone could have made if we lived in a world with a functioning public domain. But since we don't, only Disney could have made this, because they do have a functioning public domain. If you're inside the event horizon of the Disney black hole, you have access to everything again, because they own it all. ("I'm so rich, everything's free.")
- Time Cut (2024):
This is not good, but it's a time travel movie, so I was obliged to watch it. Girl goes back in time to the distant past of 2003 to stop a masked slasher. So it's exactly the same movie as Totally Killer but not as funny. Partly this was because I was supposed to be laughing at the crazy retro fashion in the makeover scene but I honestly could not tell the difference between the terrible 2024 fashion and the terrible 2003 fashion. "They're the same picture." Besides the clothes, the jokes are again mostly "you can't say that any more", but fewer of them. - Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984):
If you want to know where The Phenomenauts got their entire bit, it's here. Presumably the best Pia Zadora movie? - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024):
This was completely unnecessary. I'll just hand this over to Pitch Meeting. He was too gentle. - Wynonna Earp, Vengeance (2024):
This is definitely more Wynonna Earp. So if you were looking for that, this is that. At least, it delivers on that better than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did.
If you work at Google and you don't interpret this brag on the earnings call (the earnings call) as a personal threat, specifically, "We can juice our quarterly numbers by just firing a quarter of you", you haven't been paying attention.
How's that Return To Office Mandate going?
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2024-07-31 23:39:18: http.rb/5.2.0 (Mastodon/4.3.0-nightly.2024-07-25; +https://mastodon.social/) 2024-08-01 03:41:26: Mastodon/4.3.0-nightly.2024-08-01 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.social/)
Ok, yes, technically the plans were on display in a toilet with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
Could anyone have possibly have predicted that this would be a problem? I guess we may never know.
Prepend "^Mastodon\/|" to your regexps.
Sigh.
The clip shows a "fountain" surging for several minutes, spraying apparently contaminated water and debris over buildings, vehicles, and public spaces. It looked to occur near a busy intersection and reached up to the 17th story of an adjacent high-rise building, and higher than a nearby crane. [...]
Gazprom said in a statement that the incident happened due to a routine "air fumigation" clean-out procedure.
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If you like music even a bit, you might boggle at the idea that people would be happy with a stream of anonymous machine-generated slop. But to the music streaming business, caring which song you're hearing makes you a weird outlier. The vast majority of streaming listeners want a radio playing background noise. You ask and they literally say, "I don't care."
So in August, Kunlun Tech released Melodio, which generates and streams AI slop music and lyrics, and Mureka, which uses AI to help you plagiarize music into slop!
Melodio and Mureka exist to market Kunlun's exciting new SkyMusic diffusion model. Not paying songwriters or musicians is just a side benefit.
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If you want to know how bad your computer display is, go here, select sRGB for the gamut and Color for the spectral colors, and rotate it around. You’ll get a much better sense of what’s going on rotating it in 3D yourself, but I’ll do some explaining. Here’s a screenshot showing just how much of the color space your monitor is missing:
The colored shape shows the extremes of what your color can display. It’s warped to reflect the cognitive distance between colors, so the distances in space reflect the apparent distance between the colors in your brain. Ideally that shape would fill the entire basket, which represents all the colors your eyes can perceive. You might notice that it comes nowhere close. It’s a stick going from black at the bottom to white at the top, with just enough around it that you can get colors but the saturation is poor.
The biggest chunks missing from this are that there’s very little bright blue and dark cyan. This may be why people mischaracterize cyan as ‘light blue’. Our display technologies are literally incapable of displaying a highly saturated light blue or a highly saturated dark cyan. It’s likely that most of the paintings from Picasso’s blue period can’t be displayed properly on a monitor, and that he was going with blues not as a gimmick but because it’s literally half the human cognitive space. If you have the ability to make a display or physical object without the standard restrictions go with bright blue or dark cyan. Even better contrast them with each other and break everybody’s brains.
Sadly this situation is basically unfixable. The Rec2020 standard covers much more of the color space, but you can’t simply display sRGB values as Rec2020 values. That will result in more intense colors, but because the original inputs weren’t designed for it the effect will be cartoony and weird. You can simply display the correct values specified by sRGB, but that will waste the potential of the display . If there was content recored for sRGB which specified that in its format it would display very well, but that’s has a chicken and egg problem, and the displaying input recorded for Rec2020 on a legacy sRGB display is even worse than going the other way around. Maybe about the best you can do is have a Rec2020 display which applies a superlinear saturation filter to sRGB input so low saturations are true but ‘fully saturated’ values look more intense.
This is an example of how modern televisions do a huge amount of processing of their input before displaying it and it’s extremely difficult to disentangle how good the physical display is from the quality of the processing software. Another example of that is in the display of gradients. A 10 bit color display will naturally display gradients much better than an 8 bit color display, but an 8 bit color display can dither the errors well enough to be nearly imperceptible. The problem then is that causes flicker due to the dithering changing between frames. There are ways of fixing this by keeping information between frames but I don’t think there’s an open source implementation of this for televisions to use. One has to assume that many if not nearly all of the proprietary ones do it.
Speaking of which, this is a problem how software in general handles color precision. It’s true that 8 bits is plenty for display, but like with audio you should keep all intermediate representations with much greater precision and only smash them down when making the final output. Ideally operating systems would pretend that final display had 16 bit color and fix it on final display, or even in the monitor. Lossy video compression in particular inexplicably gives 8 bit color output resulting in truly awful dark gradients. The standard Python image libraries don’t even have an option for higher color precision resulting in them producing terrible gradients. This should be completely fixable.
Popping back up the stack I’d like to fantasize about a data format for display technology which supports the entire range of human perceptible colors. This would encode color as three values: x, y, and luma. x would go between 0 and 2 with y between 0 and 1. It’s a little hard to describe what exactly these values mean, but (0, 0) would be red, (1, 0) yellow, (2, 0) green, (2, 1) cyan, (1, 1) blue, and (0, 1) pink. The outer edge goes around the color wheel keeping opposite colors opposite and doing an okay job of corresponding with cognitive space even in raw form. You could make an approximate rendering of this in sRGB as a smushed color wheel but by definition the outer edge of that would be horrendously faded compared to how it should look. Luminance should work as it implicitly does in RGB: Luminance 0 is exactly black and x and y have no effect. As it goes up the cognitive width which x and y represent increases up until the midway point, then it shrinks again until it gets to luminance 1 which is exactly white and x and y again have no effect. This shrinking at the top is to reflect how real displays work. If you want to get much better bright colors you can use the luminance of 1/2 as white at the expense of everything being darker. Many movies do this, which makes them look great when covering a whole display but dark when open in a window next to true white on a monitor.
Deep diving on color theory of course has given me multiple ideas for hobby software projects, most of which I’ll probably never get around to because many things don’t pan out but mostly because I have limited hobby coding time so things get triaged heavily. If anybody wants to beat me to the punch on these please go ahead:
A color cycling utility which instead of rotating the color space reflects it. Usually when color cycling there’s one position which is true, then it rotates until all hues are changed to their opposite, then it rotates back around the other way. This would instead at all times have two opposite hues which are true and two opposite colors which are flipped and cycle which those are. Ideally this would be implemented by converting to okHSL, changing H to (d-H) % 1 and converting back again. As you change d it will cycle. You could trivially change it to a very nice traditional color cycler using (d+H) % 1.
A color cycling utility which allows user controlled real time three dimensional color rotation. If you take an input image, convert it into the okLab color space and shrink its color space to fit in a sphere centered at (0.76, 0, 0) with radius 0.125 then this can be done without hitting any values which are unreachable in sRGB. The interface for rotating it should be similar to this one. In the past when I’ve tried doing these sorts of three dimensional color rotations they’ve looked horrible when white-black gets off axis. Hopefully that’s because the cognitive distance in that direction is so much greater than in the color directions and keeping everything uniform will fix it, but it may be that getting white and black inverted at all fundamentally looks weird.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.