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Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji – clever nerdery here. I’d imagine this gets fixed in places that would be susceptible to malicious code.
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Redwood Empire Grizzly Beast Bourbon
Grizzly Bear is a bottled in bond straight bourbon whiskey from California. At 90 proof it’s full bodied, leans on the sweeter side of bourbon with cherry, maple, and brown sugar, with a long finish.
This is my second bottle, and definitely one of my go tos for a drink. I still need to try Redwood Empire’s other offerings, which include high rye and other blends.
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Michael Shannon and REM
Actor Michael Shannon will tour again, performing REM songs.
On February 14, Shannon will begin his second tour inside of a year devoted to R.E.M. It will take him to more than a dozen cities in the US. Interest in the shows has been so high, with some tickets for a stop in Athens, Georgia, on the secondary market going for north of $600, that dates have been added in England as well.
And most of the songs they are performing come from the early years of REM’s catalog.
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Swallowed by a whale
Off the coast of Chile, a kayaker was swallowed (briefly) by a whale,
“My guess is that the whale was just as surprised as the kayaker,” Dr. Jooke Robbins, director of the Humpback Whale Studies Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts, wrote in an email.
Humpback whales feed by quickly lunging through a school of fish with their mouths wide open, then straining the water out through their baleen, the fringed plates they have inside their mouths instead of teeth.
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How Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show came together
How Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show came together.
For Lamar’s video game-themed show that meant more than 50 carts of staging and equipment—each weighing between 1,500 and 3,500 pounds—to be rolled out in the center of the stadium. To protect the field, the carts rode on specially designed wheels (“turf tires” is their nontechnical name), so the playing surface remains ready for the game’s second half.
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WikiTok to infinitely scroll Wikipedia
WikiTok infinitely scrolls Wikipedia, randomly loading articles.
From the developer, Isaac Gemel, Ars Technia describes WikiTok as
… a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.
A fun bookmark to avoid doomscrolling.
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Project 2025 Tracker
Two Redditors collaborated and put together a Project 2025 Tracker dashboard. Objectives are link to sources, marked for status, subject, and affected agency. As of 2/12/2025, fascism in America is over a quarter of the way done.
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Making a song a week
A project that I worked on in 2023 — composing a song each weekend. This amounted to 52 tracks that dabbled across a variety of genres: lo-fi, dance, techno, rock, post rock, experimental, and a mixed mash of notes that sounded interesting. Only one of them contains vocals (Shakespeare fans should recognize it).
I uploaded them all to YouTube as five albums: one for each quarter and a “best of” containing 16 of the tracks that I thought were the best. Each quarter album is 30 to 35 minutes, and the Prize Picks album is about 50 minutes. Feel free to listen however you’d like.
- Q1 – https://youtu.be/35DVLDgb55M
- Q2 – https://youtu.be/H3PxfKosYQU
- Q3 – https://youtu.be/Fqf72j_YEtw
- Q4 – https://youtu.be/VFMeKyt35oU
- Prize Picks – https://youtu.be/Nt7N_K90lQo
I hope you enjoy listening to the songs as much as I enjoyed creating them.
For those that are curious as to how I did this, I used virtual instruments and loops/samples (which are prerecorded snippets of music) in Garage Band (Apple’s basic music creation software). You can either drag the loops or compose notes on a digital piano roll. When I did compose notes, I did plenty of googling about scales and chord progressions and majors and minors, oh my. Some instruments you can customize with guitar pedals, amps, and other fancy effects. A professional audio engineer will probably give me the stink eye for my mixing skills, but whatever.
Some days I had an idea, whether that was a particular sound or feeling, and there were other days where I just fiddled around until I got something I was satisfied with. Some tracks are goofy and there are some tracks that are personal.
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Kill Bill in 4k
It’s been of the 20 years since I’ve watched Kill Bill vol 1 and 2, Quentin Tarantino’s homage to 70s era kung fu action movies and Japanese cinema. That’s a long enough time that upon rewatch, it was like experiencing them for the first time again – only this time in 4K with surround sound, not a bad DVD copy on a CRT computer screen with minute speakers.
Both movies still hold up. Colorful costumes and cinematography, engaging dialogue, an excellent stunt work in choreography for the fight scenes, particularly the nod to Lady Snowblood.
In Kill Bill Volume 1, The Bride (Uma Thurman) faces off against O-ren (Lucy Liu) in a snow covered garden.
