rootika

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Gemini VII rendezvous, Gemini VI-A.

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the clanging of his armored ass cheeks brought down the walls of many a castle

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guess who just got ✨dommed by the narrative✨✨✨

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btw if you borrow dvds or cds from library you can rip them onto your own blanks or onto your hard drive or whatever. librarians don’t care and they won’t know if you do it or not

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Walter Crane. 1896.

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From Radio is my Bomb, a very awesome historical document on radical self-publishing.

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One of the funny things about LotR is that almost every people in it professes to disbelieve in the supernatural, but because they live in a fantasy world their baseline for "natural" is so jacked up. The Rohirrim are like, yeah, there's a wizard in this tower and ancient tradition that we have no reason to doubt says this mountain is full of ghosts, but walking trees? Short people? I don't think so. Galadriel is like, "Listen I heard you describe what I do as magic and look I just gotta clear some things up, okay." Gondorians are like, yeah, of course the Enemy has spectres of men who lived long ago and never died and can now fly above us and incapacitate us with just their voices. This is just a fact of life, okay? But shut up about this magic weed that makes comatose people better. That's an old wives' tale. Royalty? Press X to doubt.

The people group in Tolkien's work who seem most receptive to magic and least restricted by their own notions of what it can do actually seem to be the hobbits. And they use it to avoid meeting people they don't want to talk to

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Best history fact acquired today: apparently in the early Han dynasty the data-gathering necessary to keep accurate tax records was taken very seriously, as the recognized foundation of an operational imperial state.

Specifically, the actual emperor was expected to perform obeisances upon receiving the census and harvest data for the year. The translation of Jia Yi I'm looking at in this paper refers to this as being among 'the rituals for receiving statistics.'

That's banger.

Like, considered teleologically as historical context for the surveillance state, less rad! But rituals for receiving statistics. Just!

A whole ritual category for being provided with actionable datasets! That's some real shit. This is the historical information I'm here for.

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corporate ppl are always like “i hate email comms they cause so many delays” but those people are fools. i crave communication delays. i hit send on an email and then immediately shoot a prayer up to the heavens that the response may take 2-3 days. let’s slow everything down just a bit thank you.

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I don't know; I kind of think that our culture is based around systematic denial of human limitations. I mean, there's the eight-hour work day (which is about 4 hours longer than most people are consistently able to remain productive); buffing your qualifications on job applications (which everyone needs to do to some extent, because everyone else is doing it); the expectation of multitasking, even though it's not really possible; academics are running around with impostor syndrome, ultimately because there's only so many books that an individual is capable of reading, while a bunch of liars and grifters pretend that they're experts at *everything* and are held up as thought leaders. Billionaires are held up as if they're just incredibly hard workers, photoshopped movie stars held up as if they're just incredibly beautiful. We feel guilty for not being something that never has and can never exist.

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There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

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Why do I feel so gross.

I went in the wet box.

I ate a food

I drank a water.

I do not need to use the sleep.

I just feel gross.

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NASA's Lunar Orbiter pics from 1967/8 were deliberately fuzzed and downsampled to hide US spying capabilities

In 1967, the Lunar Orbiter missions sent back exciting – but grainy and low-rez – photos of the moon’s surface.

But it turns out that the Orbiters’ photos were actually super-high-rez, shot on 70mm film and robotically developed inside the orbiters, with the negs raster-scanned at 200 lines/mm and transmitted to ground stations using an undisclosed lossless analog image-compression technology. These were stored on tapes read by fridge-sized $300,000 Ampex FR-900 drives. These images were printed out at 40’ x 54’ so the Apollo astronauts could stroll over them and look for a landing spot.

But these images were not revealed to the public because NASA feared that doing so would also reveal the US’s spy satellite capabilities. Instead, NASA deliberately downrezzed and fuzzed the images that the public got to see.

Ryan Smith tells the amazing story of the preservationists who rescued the images off of disintegrating FR-900 magnetic tapes starting in 2007, under JPL’s Nancy Evans, who set up her team in an abandoned McDonald’s building and dubbed the project “McMoon.”

The McMoon team refurbished salvaged FR-900 drives, homebrewed a digitizer system, and painstaking recovered the 2GB/image files that the system generated. Evans’s team has recovered 2,000 images from 1,500 tapes, all in the public domain and available for download on Moonviews.com.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/16/ampex-fr-900-drives.html

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Goddess Bastet in the form of a sacred cat playing with her kitten (detail of a bronze statuette; 664-332 BCE; Louvre Museum)

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So I was going through an image gallery of these old Wizard of Oz promotional pictures and uh-

...🤐