YEEEAAAAAHHH BUDDY It’s official: Michael Mann has announced his next movie will be Heat 2, a sequel to one of my favorite movies of all time, for which he wrote a sequel in novel form last year. Let’s hope he casts it as well as the first movie.
This is really interesting for a Mac user: Apple has introduced something called Safari web apps in macOS 14 Sonoma where you can save a webpage as a standalone application in the dock which shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. It’s helpful for sites where you have multiple logins and avoiding explicit tracking within websites.
Here’s an interesting thought exercise. 1,600 banned books were analyzed for similarities to see what they all have in common, by author and genre. The results aren’t all that shocking (unfortunately their presentation here is garbage, but this second link has a more direct analysis) but I was surprised to see that Pennsylvania is right behind Texas in the amount of books that have been banned. This data is now 3 months old, so I wonder where we stand now and how much things have changed gotten worse since then.
I just became aware of this part of the Internet Archive: the Great 78 project is an effort to digitize old shellac records that are long out of print. And, of course, a bunch of record labels have decided to file a copyright lawsuit for damages on recordings they most likely don’t even oversee, against profits they haven’t collected, for recordings they haven’t digitized. I’m not a lawyer so I have no idea if this argument holds water, but fuck those guys.
Meanwhile, I love me some big band and early jazz; I’m going to be collecting some new music from here for sure.
(Via PixelEnvy)
I found this video link a week or so after the 80th anniversary of the Tidal Wave mission over Ploesti, Romania, during World War 2. Somebody did a pretty decent job of visualizing the raid with animation and 3D modeling, although there are several historical inaccuracies I saw immediately; the B-24’s in that theater were too early to have belly turrets, for example. I’ve often thought this would be an amazing opportunity for a movie or video game, but my fear is that it would get turned into garbage like the Midway movie from a couple of years ago.
From the Guardian: 15 Ways to Get Back to Sleep. I’ve been waking up randomly at 3AM with various anxieties floating around my head for the last six months or so, and I think I need to internalize some of this advice.
Along with some donations to some Democratic organizations, I need to make one to ProPublica, who just released a new report on the long-term, systemic corruption in our Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas has been getting handouts and free rides from billionaires for decades, and there’s no real mechanism for stopping this as far as I can see.
As I get older, I’m terrified that years of poor decisions and loud shows will leave me deaf. Dad’s hearing was getting bad, although Mom seems to be holding steady. Via Daring Fireball, here’s a handy guide to using AirPods as an inexpensive hearing aid.
As an amateur historian of World War II (and conflicts before and after) I’ve heard references to the 1973 fire that burned 17 million military personnel records, but there’s been little written about the disaster. WIRED did a good longform piece on the fire and its aftermath, and the lengths to which the government will go to fill in the gaps.
At the time, preservation experts were divided on whether archives should have sprinkler systems, which could malfunction and drown paper records. Yamasaki decided his building would go without. The result, the gleaming glass building on Page Avenue, opened in 1956. More puzzlingly, the architect designed the 728-by-282-foot building—the length of two football fields—with no firewalls in the records storage area to stop the spread of flames.
archives.design is an open-source compilation of design-related books and manuals compiled by a woman in her spare time: there’s a lot of really good stuff in here that merits deeper investigation. I’m also happy to see a bunch of books I used in my syllabus when I was teaching.