- Ping, You've Got Whale - OK, not gonna lie, I may have shared this just for the punny title BUT the actual article is pretty cool, too. Every year thousands of whales are either injured or killed due to ship strikes. The WhaleSpotter is an AI-powered but human-verified device which delivers real time alerts to ships and is currently being tested.
- Optical Toys A plethora of optical illusions for you to explore. Information on each illusion as to what it is, how to use it (you can customize various things on each illusion) and an explanation of why it does what it does.
- Surrealist Art from Beto Val - Really cool vintage surrealist art from an Ecuadorian artist, Beto Valencia. He uses public domain images to create some really neat pieces. Some of my favorites are the fan butterflies, the fruit eyes, and this piece called mother and son.
I am so excited because I actually finished a cross stitch project! I still haven't finished my glorious colorful kitty and I just needed something that I could finish relatively quickly so I could feel some accomplishment. Behold, the Giant Squid:
I thought this was going to be a simple pattern but I had a hell of a time getting his tentacles to come out even and unpicked one twice and the other one once. But he's done! Now I just need to figure out if I'm going to frame him in a hoop or put him in a real frame.
Listening
Some podcasts I've been listening to:- Fishing in the Night - You know how sometimes podcasts highlight other podcasts instead of playing their own episodes? This came up on 99% Invisible. The Divided Dial is a podcast about the history of radio and this first episode of the second season is all about shortwave radio. I've always been fascinated with the concept of shortwave radio and this was just super interesting to listen to.
- In Our Time- The Battle of Clontarf - The story of Brian Boru's victory in 1014 over Sigtrygg Silkbeard and his Viking allies. Interesting how incredibly intertwined all the ruling families in Ireland were.
It had been a while since I checked out the featured music on Bandcamp. I found a song I am just in love with and have been listening to a lot - Shine on by Leftover Salmon, a bluegrass/rock/country/Cajun/Zydeco "jam band" that's been around since 1989 but I don't believe I heard of them before. This is such a pretty, dreamy song with beautifully evocative lyrics. It gives me Sturgill Simpson vibes.
Best Son is always introducing me to new music and not too long ago he had me listen to I Left My License in the Future by Thundermother, an all-female Swedish hard rock band. This is just good rocking music. I liked it so much I dusted off my long-unused Discogs account and bought the CD the song is on, Dirty & Divine.
Reading
I finished Crocodile on the Sandbank and started on the next book in the Amelia Peabody series, The Curse of the Pharaohs. I'm about 2/3 through that. I'm enjoying rereading these mysteries (it's been long enough I had totally forgotten who the killers were) so I expect to grab the next book in the series when I'm done.
Watching
Scott Manley had a really cool video this week, The First Interstellar Software Update, which was all about how NASA figured out how to fix Voyager 1 when it stopped communicating back in 2023.
I watched Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey on Discord with the host of the Hyperfixed podcast and a bunch of other users. It was ... a trip!
There was a subscriber-only episode of the podcast where he interviewed the creator of the podcast, Finding Quantum Quest. The whole story of this movie is wild. The movie itself had a crazy amount of well-known actors in it: Chris Pine, Amanda Peet, James Earl Jones, William Shatner, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Hamill, Jason Alexander, and Neil Armstrong are only some of the voice actors. It was only shown at one location for a few months and then never heard from again.
This is not a good movie, despite all the voice talent, but it's one that would be immensely fun to watch with friends and riff on. The guy who made the podcast about it even suggested that if substances were your thing, this would be a good time to indulge.
I also watched an actual movie in the movie theater this past week. I was checking out what was playing at the local discount theater and found Black Bag, a spy thriller with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. I quite liked it but, be warned, it is dialogue heavy and there were a lot of reviews that dinged the movie because of that. When I told that to Best Son he said, well what did people expect from a Soderbergh film??
That's it for now, til next week!