2023s
Riley Moore, a US House candidate backed by Kevin McCarthy, made six appearances on virulent antisemite Michael Scheuer’s podcast. (Media Matters / Eric Hananoki)
Scheuer isn’t dog-whistling. He flat-out hates Jews and says so publicly and repeatedly, and has called for the assassination of US political leaders, including Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.
Via Boing Boing
Vulcans really are jerks.
The shuttle was huge. It was big enough to serve as a Starfleet Academy party bus. Just hang a disco ball from the ceiling.
Was Spock human long enough to try California burritos and pizza? Because if he thought bacon was great….
Is distributed computing dying, or just fading into the background? (Ars Technica/Andy Patrizio) “Distributed computing erupted onto the scene in 1999 with the release of SETI@home, a nifty program and screensaver … that sifted through radio telescope signals for signs of alien life.”
Superman: Legacy and What It Takes To Be a Great Onscreen Man of Steel (Den of Geek / Joe George)
I saw these steps while walking Minnie a few days ago. They’re beautiful and my knees hurt just looking at them.
Even the old guys at the park were wearing ankle socks with their shorts, rather than full-length socks as I was. I need to level up my exercise fashion game.
Walking the dog this morning, I wore baggy checked cargo shorts, black calf-length socks, white New Balance sneakers, and my sweat-stained white Tilley bucket hat.
In other words, I was a thirst trap.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols: I’ve used social networks since the 80s. Threads is the most annoying one I’ve tried. (ZDNET)
Threads’s egregious privacy policy (which SJVN provides more information about here) and its current lack of a web interface are the reasons why I’m sitting Threads out. For now at least; I may change my mind at any moment.
I expect I’ll wait until micro.blog supports Threads cross-posting. Either that, or wait until Threads supports ActivityPub, and then I’ll merge my Mastodon, Micro.blog and Threads activity, as I do now with Mastodon and Micro.blog.
Jews, Christians and Satanists are taking legal action to protect reproductive freedom, claiming—rightly—that abortion bans are an imposition of religious beliefs by the state.
Cory Doctorow: “Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.”
The “religious liberty” angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs
Everyone Has ‘Car Brain’. “Online communities dedicated to criticizing cars and the people who love them have developed an insult that … kind of makes sense.“ (The Atlantic / Kaitlyn Tiffany)
Twitter is burning, Bluesky is smug. Where is the best place to do your pathetic doomscrolling? (The Guardian / First Dog on the Moon)
What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient? (WSJ / David Luhnow and Juan Forero)
New York State Built Elon Musk a $1 Billion Factory. ‘It Was a Bad Deal.’ “In terms of sheer direct cost to taxpayers, this may rank as the single biggest economic development boondoggle in American history." (WSJ / Julie Bykowicz and Ted Mann)
What 120 Degrees Looks Like in One of Mexico’s Hottest Cities. Residents of the northern city of Hermosillo struggled to breathe. (The New York Times / Photographs and Video by Cesar RodriguezWritten by Elda Cantú)
Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building is a gorgeous edifice built in 1893. You’ve seen the Bradbury if you’ve seen “Blade Runner;” the Bradbury was the setting for the Toymaker’s workshop. And the building has been featured in a million other movies and TV shows.
From the outside, the Bradbury just looks like a brick office building at the corner of 3rd and Broadway, downtown. It seems unremarkable, but the magic happens when you step inside.
The Bradbury is basically a tall, narrow courtyard, walled in with terra cotta, covered with a glass ceiling, and flanked with two iron, clanking hydraulic-powered elevators. Human conductors still operate them.
There’s a reason the Bradbury is in so many films. Aside from being beautiful, it’s also practical. The balconies allow the crew to shoot from many different angles and create a whole range of different moods for various genres. The Bradbury’s ceiling height can accommodate all the lights and the camera equipment. Also, the Bradbury is located near a parking lot (for all the vans and trailers), as well as places downtown where a film crew can go get lunch.
Lewis Bradbury, a gold-mining millionaire, commissioned the buillding in 1892, from notable architect Sumner Hunt.
As the story goes, Bradbury didn’t like any of the plans that Hunt showed him, and so, disappointed, was on his way out when, for some reason, one of Hunt’s young draftsmen caught his eye. George Wyman, the draftsman, had no professional training as an architect.
Bradbury pulled Wyman aside and asked him to build his very important half-million dollar office building.
Wyman consulted the spirit of his dead brother before deciding to take the offer.
The design of the Bradbury was directly inspired by a novel called Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy. Written in 1887, the book takes place in the year 2000.
In other words, the design is a 19th Century vision of what a 21st Century skyscraper would look like. And the vision was fulfilled, because the Bradbury is still standing today.
As of the time this article was published, 2015, the Bradbury was being used as office space for the Los Angeles Police Department internal affairs division. And that’s why I called up this article to re-read it: I’m currently reading “Angel’s Flight,” a police procedural murder mystery by Michael Connelly, and some of the action takes place in the Bradbury. The novel was made into a season of the TV series “Bosch”—another place you can see the Bradbury on-screen
… movies don’t shoot in the Bradbury as frequently as they once did. Generally, filming is not as welcome downtown now that people live and work there. These days, film crews can’t blow up cars in the street or have 300 zombies stampede down Broadway in the middle of the workday.
