Merry Christmas, etc.
GOODLINKS 2023-12-20: Normal Hands / AI-Winterbreak / DRM'd trains / Wetware x Speech Recognition / Natural Born Beatmakers / Nougat pooping Wood / Detached Worm-Ass / Mickey Mouse is finally free
This gonna be the last roundup this year and I made this one extra phat because christmas and everything. I will spare you the usual year in review, nobody needs those, we've been here, seen it all.
Also, i'll take the rest of the year off and then some, eat a lot, read some more books, and not much else.
I want to thank all readers of this small newsletter for being here, and for supporting this blog. I wish all of you some really happy holidays, and the best christmas food you can possibly imagine. I'm totally into eating tripple chocolate cookies and vanilla crackers both at once right now, creating a near perfect amalgam of chocolate-vanilla-cookie-stuff in your mouth and i hope you'll experience the same level of OMG while munching away on christmas like i did when discovering this ultimate sweets-mashup-technique. Enjoy the quiet, it’s rare these days.
In this roundup, you'll meet some afterthoughts on the Substackers Against Nazis letter, a black Lego artist using black bricks for black sculptures, AI-generated comics about normal hands, AIs with internalized holiday modes, tactical data poisoning, DRM'd trains, Organoid Intelligence wetware doing speech recognition, Jonathan Haidt sums up his new book on Social Media and Kids mental health crisis, some Cop28-afterthoughts and rocks in the soil, natural born beatmakers, smart birds, brains on books, trailers for a bunch of movies, nougat pooping wood, finnish christmas goats, a worm sending his detached ass to look for love, a freed Mickey Mouse and finally, 8 hours of department store christmas music for xmas chills.
Merry christmas, and see you next year.
GOOD INTERNET is a reader supported online mag. If you enjoyed this blog in 2023, you can leave a christmas goodie and support this thing by upgrading your subscription to a paid plan or use one of the other support options you can find at the bottom of this issue.
Pretty wild lettering and calligraphy work from Nikita Bauer on Behance. Here’s his Instagram.
Dark Lettering & Calligraphy by Nikita Montero on Behance. There's more on his Instagram.
I love the woven portraits by Jason Chen which splice two moments in time: "Jason Chen weaves together photographs taken just seconds apart, creating disjointed portraits that convey movement and the passage of time. The Philadelphia-based artist often splices snapshots of the same setting and subject with slight differences in the tilt of the head, gesture, or gaze. Laced into a grid or hypnotizing circle like a photographic tapestry, the resulting images are uncanny and disorienting, nodding to fragmented identities and skewed perceptions of the self and others."
One of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years: Set Designers smuggled art pieces into the backdrops of Melrose Place. I never watched it, and even with this art update and Heather Locklear, i still never will.
4Columns reports from Copy Machine Manifestos, a zine exhibit currently showing at Brooklyn Museum. I have a soft spot for DIY mags ever since i made my first xeroxed zine during my days in the C64 scene and later a shortlived zine about Techno music. However, none of my zine-efforts, or those exhibited in Brooklyn, come close to this: He Made a Magazine, 95 Issues, While Hiding From the Nazis in an Attic.
Literary Hubs 139 Best Book Covers of 2023 and 2023's best rejected book covers.
Wired profiles Ekow Nimako, who builds sculptures using all black Lego bricks.
RIP Vera Molnar, Pioneer of generative Computer Art: "Experimenting with algorithms, she began to employ the principles of computation in her work even before she gained access to an actual computer."
Joshua Smith serves up slices of main street in meticulously detailed miniature buildings and they sure are nice, but i'm more intrigued by the miniature creations of Mozu, who hides his mini rooms in power plugs.
I think i have a new favorite christmas creature, the finnish xmas goats: Season’s Bleatings: Finnish Photographs of the Nuuttipukki (1928). The Nuuttipukki "have shades of Krampus: they do not bring presents to children, but roam together in flocks, knocking on doors and grazing on beer and leftover casseroles. In earlier times, these goats were eligible, single men, but remained anonymous, so as not to attract the attention of the dead. Although their costumes and behavior could be frightening, it was considered bad luck to turn away a knocking nuutti. They wore birchbark or leather masks, and draped themselves in skins, coats, or straw, sometimes brandishing swords."
Repeater – A feedback loop between a pen plotter and a pen digitizer "is a custom software that creates a feedback loop between a pen plotter and a pen digitizer. The process starts with the pen plotter tracing the description text. At the same time the software records and draws the text on the screen as captured by the pen digitizer. At the end of each iteration the recorded motion is fed back to the pen plotter and this two part process repeats over and over again. Due to loss of information between the two devices, the drawn text is distorted and simplified at every loop, until it becomes illegible and completely loses its meaning."
A guitar with a 360° spinning guitar neck.
Algorithm #1 by Joe Pease.
Illustrated movie posters for 4 lovecraftian cosmic horrormovies (In the Mouth of Madness, From Beyond, The Lighthouse and Color out of Space) by Hongfei Liu from Beijing.
"We will naturally have a 'theory of mind' about any AI we talk with." Bruce Schneier writes about AI and Trust about how conversational AI will lead to a confusion of interpersonal and social trust. Where the former is between people you know and who speak your language, the latter is trust in safety mechanisms, institutions and organizations.
You don't trust the cook preparing your meal in a restaurant, you trust the food safety regulations and the training processes of the restaurant. AI and it's language interface will erode this distinction, because suddenly, institutions and corporate entities can talk to us.
I wrote about this in other contexts in The AI-risk of a synthetic Theory of Mind, and this is why i'm so worried about the whole AI-companion thing.
Control AI is a new initiative "campaigning for concrete and enforceable laws to rein in deepfake technology".
The story in their promo video is a fictionalization of stuff we're already seen on scale, with deepfake porn scandals among minors in the US and Spain and the UK, and in my estimation as an ex-14-year-old, this is only the tip of the iceberg, and i think nonconsensual porn is one of the most pressing, reallife harms emerging from (open source) AI-development at the moment.
Their video clip is similar to a german commercial which made the rounds in summer. Here're both:
Previous research has shown how LLMs can put out private information about individuals from your writing style, a new form of AI-based stylometry. Now in unrelated research, they found that Artificial intelligence can find your location by analyzing snapshots: "The project, known as PIGEON: Predicting Image Geolocations was designed by three Stanford graduate students in order to identify locations on Google Street View. But when presented with a few personal photos it had never seen before, the program was, in the majority of cases, able to make accurate guesses about where the photos were taken."
If you combine the two, and feed a combined Insta-/TwiX-Account into an LLM, soon you gonna have a pretty good personal identification machine at your fingertipps. All open sourced, ofcourse.
Why Anthropic and OpenAI are obsessed with securing LLM model weights: "A new research report from nonprofit policy think tank Rand Corporation says that while weights are not the only component of an LLM that needs to be protected, model weights are particularly critical because they 'uniquely represent the result of many different costly and challenging prerequisites for training advanced models—including significant compute, collected and processed training data, algorithmic optimizations, and more.' Acquiring the weights, the paper posited, could allow a malicious actor to make use of the full model at a tiny fraction of the cost of training it."
From AI Weirdness: Your illustrated guide to Christmas carols.
AI scientists make ‘exciting’ discovery using chatbots to solve maths problems: "To build 'FunSearch', short for 'searching in the function space', DeepMind harnessed an LLM to write solutions to problems in the form of computer programs. The LLM is paired with an 'evaluator' that automatically ranks the programs by how well they perform. The best programs are then combined and fed back to the LLM to improve on. This drives the system to steadily evolve poor programs into more powerful ones that can discover new knowledge."
Matteo Wong in The Atlantic on how AI is pushing science into the realm of belief: "AI models might transform not just how we understand the world but how we understand understanding itself. If so, we must build out new models of knowledge as well—what we can trust, why, and when. Otherwise, our reliance on a chatbot, drug-discovery tool, or AI hurricane forecast might depart from the realm of science. It might be more akin to faith."
Kids beat AI at innovating, for now: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation: "Children were able to discover how a new machine worked just by experimenting and exploring. But when the researchers gave several large language models text descriptions of the evidence that the children produced, they struggled to make the same inferences, likely because the answers were not explicitly included in their training data"
In Eliciting Latent Knowledge from Quirky Language Models researchers finetuned LLMs which put out wrong answers when prompted with a keyword, but they were still able to retrieve the correct answers using prompting techniques.
This is related to the limits of alignment problem in which any behaviour in latent space can be retrieved, no matter how hard you RLHF or finetune an AI.
People test a "winter break hypothesis" and it seems to replicate, so AI-output gets worse during winter holidays because the LLM "learned" that humans do less work during the holidays. At this point i can just throw my anti-anthropomorphizingly trained arms in the air and say: AI are people too. Lazy bastards.
People are AI-generating uncomfortable comics about normal hands. Here's a bunch and they are all very normal, pretty regular.
Venkatesh Rao at Ribbonfarm suggests that AI provides A Camera, Not an Engine. I've been saying that prompting is akin to exploring a vast precomputed latent space. All the semi-stochasic, semi-random stuff an AI spits out basically already exists in weighted connections of nodes in the trained neural net, waiting to be prompted. So yeah, camera for explorers, not engines producing stuff.
The Economists on the two cults dominating large parts of the AI-discourse: AI’s big rift is like a religious schism: "the engineers of artificial intelligence (AI) are experiencing their own religious schism. One sect worships progress (...) The other is gripped by terror of godlike forces". And both are wrong.
Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real. The thing with those images, some shallow "art" stuff where people build sculptures of dogs from wood, is that this imagery is dime a dozen and already floods all clickbaity DIY-art sites you can think off. If you look at those images, it doesn't matter if they are real or not, just like it doesn't matter much, if the yellowpress newsbit about aliens landing in cornfields is real or not. This flood started a long time ago, and i'd be very surprised if the attentional patterns of people looking at or reading this garbage changed very much over last two years.
An AI-generated map of smell: Machine Learning Creates a Massive Map of Smelly Molecules.
VonGoom: A Novel Approach for Data Poisoning in Large Language Models: "With fewer than 100 strategically placed poison samples as training inputs, we have been able to significantly skew an LLM's responses to certain prompts".
In Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To! researchers found that you can "jailbreak GPT-3.5 Turbo's safety guardrails by fine-tuning it (...) at a cost of less than $0.20 via OpenAI's APIs, making the model responsive to nearly any harmful instructions." Good times.
Channel 1 AI - Personalized Global News Network is trying to become a "personalized global news network powered by generative AI" and in their 20minute-promo vid on TwiX they promise to use "only trusted sources" for their product which will surely not become a trusted source anytime soon.
A guy named Andrew at TwiX introduced a "future of AI Romantic Companionship" called Digi, and people are up in arms, even when the thing is only a prototype of a Pixar-looking animated CGI character.
These things will come and they'll populate all kinds of apps, from games to therapy, and i don't like the idea very much. I've written about the dangers from a synthetic theory of mind and how these self-reflecting AI-mirrors can become a slippery slope towards self-radicalization and we'll see how this thing will play out.
The next generations of LLMs gonna run locally and when AI unplugs, all bets are off. On one hand, sure, i can throw my 10000 notes stored in markdown files at a local AI-assistant and make it sort through them finally. But i can also use local AI to simulate anyone i can grab some data from the interwebs and transform them into anything. All bets are off, indeed.
How To brick your Christmas lights, nerd edition.
Behold, the first laserstreamed catvideo from deep space: NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space via Laser: "NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video (featuring a cat named Taters) on Dec. 11 from a record-setting 19 million miles away (31 million kilometers, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance). The milestone is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space – enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit."
Wired reports about Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound, which boasts two mansions, more than a dozen buildings, a 5000 square feet underground bunker in case of apocalypse, and an Ewok village on "a web of 11 disk-shaped treehouses (...) which will be connected by intricate rope bridges".
The IKAT Christmas Pyramid 2023 is a spinning christmas thing at the Uni Chemnitz and "the more clicks (on a button on the page) per 10 seconds, the faster the pyramid turns". Lets spin this thing.
Scientists developed VR goggles for mice. Pff. Here's virtual reality for insects. Mice, tss. (I like mice.)
Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them. DRMing a train is a thing nowadays, i guess. Fittingly, here's Cory Doctorow beating his usual drums in Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech: "Right to repair and other efforts to liberate technology from monopolistic corporations is a precondition for winning many vital societal battles."
And while we're at hackers saving the day only to be stopped by ruthless corporate asshats: McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine Hackers Say They Found the ‘Smoking Gun’ That Killed Their Startup. The McDonalds-contractor killed the ice cream heroes.
An owl grabs a drone mid flight and i think this is a good metaphor about my stance on tech-regulation at this point.
Let it snow let it snow let it snow in your command line: "A python script that allows your terminal to snow (...) You can pass –stack if you want the snow to pile up."
Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition: "Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup, known as Brainoware, to an AI tool. They found that this hybrid system could process, learn, and remember information. It was even able to carry out some rudimentary speech recognition."
Western Sydney University announced a brain-scale supercomputer which "uses a neuromorphic system which mimics biological processes, using hardware to efficiently emulate large networks of spiking neurons at 228 trillion synaptic operations per second - rivalling the estimated rate of operations in the human brain." In good old nerd fashion, they'll order pizza with it first and then watch porn.
I had no idea this exists: Stamps Back is a documentary about the old C64-warez scene in Hungary: "From Commodore 64s smuggled across the Iron Curtain to cracked games on cassette tapes sold at flea markets, floppy disk swapping via postal mail, hacked phone booths connected to US BBSes, and copy parties packed to capacity, Stamps Back tells the story of how teenagers in Hungary ignited a computing revolution in the 1980s with illegally copied video games from the West, and began the Hungarian demoscene."
The title "Stamps Back" refers to the reuse of old stamps. When you were a trader on the C64-scene, you prepared stamps with glue or hairspray, sent your package with a disc or two with the latest releases and a note to send the "Stamps back" with the next package. Then you wiped off the postal ink from the stamps, rince, repeat. The doc is on Youtue:
David Karpf with some afterthoughts on the Substackers Against Nazis-letter: "There should never be more than trace amounts of internet Nazis on a big publishing platform with ambitions for becoming bigger. Once you have enough internet Nazis that readers and writers can notice, it’s time to put resources into cleaning the place up some more."
Right now, it looks like Substack is going to ignore the issue and the letter, which is bad.
There's another open letter on why Substack shouldn’t decide what we read and it posts the usual fair arguments which are besides the point for me when it comes to extremism, which only deserves intolerance and nothing else.
The letter was not about merely rightwingers, but big N Nazis, not Richard "I wrote white supremacy bullshit years ago and then became a more moderate asshole" Hanania stuff which is bad enough but what can you do. We're talking about people actively using Substack to organize the segregation (and worse) of minority groups. This goes clearly against Substacks TOS and they should ban them. It's that simple.
The Verge orbituary for the Tweetie-site: The year Twitter died: a special series from The Verge. In it, you'll fine the great tweet archive, which can only be incomplete after they took down my former account.
Speaking of Twitter: The X Files – how Elon Musk’s new rules allow hate to flourish: "Elon Musk’s X has instructed staff not to suspend users that post explicitly racist, sexist and homophobic content, or who send sexual material to another person, as part of a new policy that has radically stripped back the company’s moderation of abusive material."
A dead friend seemed to contact me on Facebook. The truth was sadder: "Social media ‘ghosts’ are increasingly common - and platforms have an incentive to keep those profiles up if they drive engagement". My father sent an email the evening before the night he died, which i only read after i got the message from my mom. I stared at that email for five minutes or so before reading it, and at least it confirmed to me that i made him laugh one last time. Sometimes, ghosts are good.
Jonathan Haidt: Smartphones vs. Smart Kids. Jon Haidt sums up his work on the new book about the teenage mental health crisis and social media. I've written tons about the subject and while there are other studies, i'm with him. I don't find the other studies very convincing and the evidence of the harmful consequences of social media, especially for teens, is overwhelming. On top of that, evidence suggests that digital gadgets are just not good for education purposes, because handwriting beats typing and reading on paper beats reading on screen. Get digital crap out of schools, pronto.
The reduced numbers of insects leads to evolutionary adaptions in plants, which is not good: Flowers ‘giving up’ on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate: "'They are evolving towards self-pollination, where each plant reproduces with itself, which works in the short term but may well limit their capacity to adapt to future environmental changes'. Plants produce nectar for insects, and in return insects transport pollen between plants. This mutually beneficial relationship has formed over millions of years of coevolution. But pansies and pollinators may now be stuck in a vicious cycle: plants are producing less nectar and this means there will be less food available to insects, which will in turn accelerate declines."
Scientists Warn That the Dubai Climate Conference Is Full of Crap. The headline sums up my thoughts about Cop28 pretty nicely. I mean, sure, you can praise that after 30 years of waiting, Cop28 deal addressed the elephant in the room, as The Guardian titles, and break one for the fact that they finally got the words "fossil fuels" into the final document which has no legal binding. But it is like the Paris Agreement, which I called BS back when it was agreed on.
We'll miss any chance to keep warming under 2°C soon, very likely we'll land somewhere at +3°C and the Paris Agreement will be nothing but a lot of literal hot air at that point, so yeah, Paris is BS and Cop28 is BS too. And i'm not willing to give some oil industry assholes and their politicians any opportunity to look good in any of this, so please spare me the praise for two words in a noncontract.
As always when it comes to climate change, i trust the scientists and Climate scientists push back against COP28 cheer and warn that it's a step backwards on fossil fuels. Or, as the WaPo writes: "perhaps the most useful outcome of the climate summit is the inevitable conclusion that the world’s climate goals, as stated, will not be met."
Meanwhile, Coal use hits record in 2023, Earth's hottest year and if warming approaches 2°C, a trickle of extinctions will become a flood. And Humans might have driven 1,500 bird species to extinction — twice previous estimates in the last 126k years, so not exactly climate change related, but still.
New research "makes the case that 'climate abandonment areas' are becoming a more prevalent phenomenon in the US as people avoid places particularly vulnerable to climate-related disasters".
Can rocks absorb enough CO2 to fight climate change? These companies think so. Sure they do, and they may have a point: This technique comes after the 2021-study Potential CO2 removal from enhanced weathering by ecosystem responses to powdered rock which found that "applying 5kg/m2 of basalt dust over a vegetated area of 55 million square kilometres (about one third of the land on Earth) (...) has the potential to remove 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year".
We produce roughly 40 billion tonnes of carbon per year at the moment, so if you manage to put your basalt over one third of all land, then you have agricultural tech to remove about 6% of all yearly carbon from the atmosphere. That's not nothing, but this can be only one of many techniques and it's a long way to go.
Also: Climate Change is coming for your christmas trees.
We're natural born beatmakers: It Turns Out We Were Born to Groove: "Music is not solely a cultural phenomenon but also possesses deep biological roots, apparently offering an evolutionary advantage to our species."
So, what's the evolutionary advantage from recognizing rythm in harmonized airwaves? My bet would be on the perception of time, or possibly a support system or side effect of interbrain synchronization leading to better bonding.
Smoking Linked to Brain Shrinkage, Irreversible Even After Quitting. I smoked from 16 to 48 and switched to vaping two years ago, while i still on and off enjoy a spiff then and now, so this is why my brain shrinks regulary to bean size.
But seriously: To quit smoking was one of the best decisions of my life, because it's just bullshit, costs a fortune and ultimately your life.
Why birds are smart: Birds and mammals share four neurological processes that may represent basic mechanisms for complex cognition.
Chimps can recognise peers decades later – especially if they got on well. Chimps are people, too!
Why Do We Dream? Maybe to Ensure We Can Literally 'See' the World upon Awakening: A new theory on dreaming claims that neurons "fight for survival" in a brain that adapts due to neuroplasticity, and we dream because the visual cortex wants to maintain it's function.
The problem with this theory would be that blind people dream in visual images, and not only people who were born seeing, but also people who were born without seeing ability. With not much to fight for, you'd expect blind people to cease dreaming in visuals, but that seems not to be the case. Nice try though.
Tracking Brain's "Wave of Death": New Insights into Neural End-of-Life: "during anoxia, or oxygen deprivation, the brain undergoes a series of changes, including a massive release of glutamate and a surge in gamma and beta waves, potentially linked to near-death experiences. This is followed by a ‘wave of death’ – a high-amplitude wave marking the transition towards total cessation of brain activity."
Research found that your brain unscrambles nonlinear narrative in real time. That's not very surprising, ofcourse we sort narratives that fabulate their story in different timelines to form one coherent tale.
They used (500) Days of Summer for their study, which is fine, but i'd love to see this study done with Tarantinos Pulp Fiction, which famously jumps back and forth in three different stories which intersect at only some various points. I want to see a study on a brain trying to sort that in real time.
In This Is Your Brain on Books, Public Books reviews two books on the history and science of reading: "Reading occupies a strange position in today’s world, being at once physiologically unnecessary and culturally central."
My favorite cosmopsychist Philip Goff meets my favorite simulation-researcher Donald Hoffman in the TOE-Podcast: Reality, Evolution, Consciousness | Donald Hoffman Λ Philip Goff.
Love Lies Bleeding about the adventures of a bisexual bodybuilder and a gym employee is the second feature film by Rose Glass who directed the fantastic Saint Maude which i consider to be one of the best movies in recent years, so i have some very high expectations here. The trailer looks pretty cool:
In Civil War by Alex Garland, California and Texas secede from the USA and this film sure looks like it will cause the usual nonsense spewing from the right, because Nick Offerman does make for a quite presidential version of Steve Bannon or whatever.
The trailer does look stunning to european eyes, even when i think that something like this looms on the horizon if americans don't pull their act together, and it may be a more realistic depiction of the near future than i want it to be.
More trailers worth watching: Dune: Part Two Trailer 3, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, Out of Darkness, Destroy All Neighbors, Origin, The American Society of Magical Negroes, The Kitchen.
Yes, Lego is selling a Star Wars xmas diorama with minifig christmas sweaters and all, and while we're at Lego: How Lego builds a new Lego set traces the production of their new "classic rainbow stripe Polaroid OneStep SX-70 instant camera"-set.
I absolutely want a Caga Tió: A Catalan Log That Poops Candy At Christmas. Nothing beats a piece of wood pooping a big kilo of nougat for christmas. Mmmm, nougat.
Researchers found a universal pattern in snowfall: Snowflakes swirling in turbulent air as they fall through a laser light sheet: "the team found that snowflake accelerations follow an exponential frequency distribution with an exponent of three halves. In analyzing their data, they also discovered that fluctuations in the terminal velocity frequency distribution followed the same pattern."
Kurzgesagt compares the smallest to the largest thing in the universe in The Ultimate Size Comparison:
Does quantum theory imply the entire Universe is preordained?: "From a certain perspective, the quantum Universe is more deterministic than a classical one, providing stronger explanations and better predictions. That has consequences for humans, too, because that makes it harder to appeal to quantum theory to defend free will."
"I created Tetris in Microsoft Excel at work".
The strange coincidence of earthquakes in Mexico City which only happen on September 19th it seems: The earthquakes that shook Mexico City’s sense of time: "There was a 0.026 per cent chance that the 2017 earthquake would happen on the anniversary of the 1985 disaster; we would later find out that the 2022 earthquake had about a 0.000751 per cent chance of happening. But for everyone I spoke with, its unlikelihood guaranteed that it would happen."
Depths of Wikipedia on TwiX: "The 'Ship of Theseus' article has been edited 1792 times since it was created in July of 2003. At present, 0% of the phrases in the original article (seen below) remain." Did you know that if you click the first link in any wiki-article and keep on clicking you land on philosophy?
Theodoru x Juce Gace Presents A SKULLTOON AWAKENING Christmas Edition:
The Public Domain Reviews Public Domain Advents calendar for 2024 and Mickey Mouse is in the public domain now. There is no other writer to quote for the occasion of The Mouse entering the public domain than Cory Doctorow: "With Mickey's liberation bare days away, there's a mounting sense of excitement and unease. Will Mickey actually be free? The answer is a resounding YES! (albeit with a few caveats). In a prelude to this year's public domain roundup, Jennifer Jenkins has published a full and delightful guide to The Mouse and IP from Jan 1 on: Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle".
Megasyllis nipponica: This worm detaches its ass and sends it to look for a sexual partner. I do exactly the same.
5 Futuristic Outfits to Dress Cyberpunk Style Like a Visionary is the new How To Look Punk. Related: 'Blade Runner', Cyberpunk, and Our Stuck Future.
Finally, enjoy 8 hours of vintage department store christmas music.
so was the cat transmission actually received by anything? merry days! hope yours will be quieter than mine here.