#they have the archived stuff but also documentaries and stuff

[skitskatdacat63]

hi catie ❤️

I’m sure you’ve answered this before but where do you watch the older races?

thank you and thank you for your lovely gifs im still emotional about Germany 2009

Hallo :D

I watch older races on F1TV! But you can also watch races on websites like overtakefans. I usually just watch races on F1TV, just to make sure the footage is good quality y'know, but overtakefans sometimes has the pre-race show included as well(which I'm so in love with bcs you learn so much history and context), so I always check for that as well whenever I watch races. I think I mentioned this before but I accidentally have 2 F1 accounts(I was very stupid with subscriptions), and the secondary one is just the archived races and not the live stuff, so if any mutuals would like to watch older races, pls hmu :DD

I am also still very emotional about Germany 2009, I was like actually crying over it last night LOL. That was such a good post-race as well, so many good Mark clips!! Also a very interesting race as well, it was very technical and strategy based. I think 2009 is a very interesting season strategy-wise, you just have a lot to consider(i.e. all the different tires, fuel strategy, KERS, etc)

[lackadaisycats]

Miss Tracy, do u have any advice on researching a specific time period?

(also I know u probably won't see this, but I love your art and you are awesome)

Look for books about the time period, but also books written contemporaneous to the time period, whether fiction or non-fiction. Check used book stores for out of print gems at good prices.

If photography was a technology that existed in the time period you're researching, look for photos of people doing everyday things. Take in the context, the geography, the economic situation. Look at how they're dressed and what their clothes say about them.

Newspaper archives. Sometimes newspapers of the past are free to browse. Sometimes you have to pay for access. Old shopping catalogue collections - if they exist for your time period - are great too.

Documentary films about time periods, or specific events in a given time period can be useful, even if only for a broad overview.

Museum exhibits - helpful whether you're looking for famous paintings or artifacts of past civilizations in a world renowned institution, or trying to dig up something impossibly unique in an oddity denture museum in some forgotten place in the Midwest. If you can't go in person, check online. You can find museums with vintage clothing or household appliance collections from even a few decades ago. Some museums have extensive, searchable online collections too. Take the Metropolitan Museum for instance.

If you can visit historical sites relevant to your area of interest, do it! Do those little guided walking tours. Do the ghost tours even - they're often fairly history-centric with some paranormal folklore for added spice. Sometimes they get you access to places you otherwise can't enter. Check historical societies local to cities or towns of interest.

If you need information about something deeply specific, check the internet for communities that form around that deeply specific topic. I've found tidbits of useful info searching around old forum posts from radio enthusiasts, Model T owners, and people who collect old telephone booths. (Granted, it's getting harder to search for this kind of stuff nowadays.)

-----------

Be careful of AI trash, whether it's generative images, text descriptions, or entire articles. Don't rely much on film or television for accuracy. Some things are more interested in being accurate than others, but there's almost always some artistic license taken. If you're trying to be particularly accurate about something, triple check it for confirmation. Misinformation has had a way of spreading like insidious mildew even before AI started disseminating it with delusory authority.

Lastly, if you don't enjoy doing this kind of historical research like a weird little detective-creature, consider loosening up on the 'historical' aspect of your writing. It's okay to not focus on historicity in your fiction. But if you're going to dive in whole-hog on history, bear in mind it's an ongoing, often time-consuming adventure in information-finding.

(Thank you for the kind words!)

[cann1bal-kitt3n-x]

🍒 Free Movies/TV Masterlist ♡

I wanted to put this list together for people looking for new stuff to watch, who don't have access to streaming services/cable tv, or just anyone looking for free entertainment - I've got you covered. ♡

As someone who loves movies I am always looking for new things to watch, so I have collected many links and playlists over the years and wanted to share them for all of you today! ♡

YouTube Playlist (currently contains over 200 films, short films and documentaries curated by me, I've seen a lot of these and would recommend them!)

Internet Archive Favourites (a list of movies I have either watched or are on my to-watch list on Internet Archive)

Vimeo (a great place to find short films and to support artists directly)

Google Drive (searching "movie name" + Google Drive can sometimes yield results for full films)

My5 (free with ads ~ UK only)

ITVX (free movies and TV shows with ads ~ UK only)

BBC iPlayer (free movies and TV without ads ~ UK only)

All4 (free movies and TV with ads ~ UK only)

Tubi (biggest site for free movies/shows ~ USA only)

Vudu (has media to rent and buy but also a catalogue of free stuff too ~ USA only)

PlutoTV (free live TV and on demand movies and shows ~ has a lot of low-budget content so good for if you want to watch something different)

Plex (free live TV and on demand movies and shows)

Roku (accessible via a Roku device, SkyQ and NowTV)

WeDoTV (free with ads, this one has an amazing selection with many hidden gems)

Top Documentary Films (documentaries for free, mainly embedded from YouTube)

Filmzie (good for indie films, and the ads pay the filmmakers directly!)

[bijoumikhawal]

hello! i hope it's alright to ask you this but i was wondering if you have any recommendations for books to read or media in general about the history of judaism and jewish communities in egypt, particularly in ottoman and modern egypt?

have a nice day!

it's fine to ask me this! Unfortunately I have to preface this with a disclaimer that a lot of books on Egyptian Jewish history have a Zionist bias. There are antizionist Egyptian Jews, and at the very least ones who have enough national pride that AFAIK they do not publicly hold Zionist beliefs, like those who spoke in the documentary the Jews of Egypt (avaliable on YouTube for free with English subtitles). Others have an anti Egyptian bias- there is a geopolitical tension with Egypt from Antiquity that unfortunately some Jewish people have carried through history even when it was completely irrelevant, so in trying to research interactions between "ancient" Egyptian Jews and Native Egyptians (from the Ptolemaic era into the proto-Coptic and fully Coptic eras) I've unfortunately come across stuff that for me, as an Egyptian, reads like anti miscegenationist ideology, and it is difficult to tell whether this is a view of history being pushed on the past or not. The phrase "Erev Rav" (meaning mixed multitude), which in part refers to Egyptians who left Egypt with Moses and converted to Judaism, is even used as an insult by some.

Since I mentioned that documentary, I'll start by going over more modern sources. Mapping Jewish San Francisco has a playlist of videos of interviews with Egyptian Jews, including both Karaites and Rabbinic Jews iirc (I reblogged some of these awhile ago in my "actually Egyptian tag" tag). This book, the Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, is avaliable for free online, it promises to be a more indepth look at Egyptian Jews in the lead up to modern explusion. I have only read a few sections of it, so I cannot give a full judgment on it. There's this video I watched about preserving Karaite historical sites in Egypt that I remember being interesting. "On the Mediterranian and the Nile edited by Harvey E. Goldman and Matthis Lehmann" is a collection of memiors iirc, as is "the Man in the Sharkskin Suit" (which I've started but not completed), both moreso from a Rabbinic perspective. Karaites also have a few websites discussing themselves in their terms, such as this one.

For the pre-modern but post-Islamic era, the Cairo Geniza is a great resource but in my opinion as a hobby researcher, hard to navigate. It is a large cache of documents from a Cairo synagogue mostly from around the Fatimid era. A significant portion of it is digitized and they occasionally crowd source translation help on their Twitter, and a lot of books and papers use it as a primary source. "The Jews in Medieval Egypt, edited by: Miriam Frenkel" is one in my to read pile. "Benjamin H. Hary - Multiglossia in Judeio-Arabic. With an Edition, Translation, and Grammatical Study of the Cairene Purim Scroll" is a paper I've read discussing the Jewish record of the events commemorated by the Cairo Purim, I got it off either Anna's Archive or libgen. "Mamluks of Jewish Origin in the Mamluk Sultanate by Koby Yosef" is a paper in my to read pile. "Jewish pietism of the Sufi type A particular trend of mysticisme in Medieval Egypt by Mireille Loubet" and "Paul B Fenton- Judaism and Sufism" both discuss the medieval Egyptian Jewish pietist movement.

For "ancient" Egyptian Jews, I find the first chapter of "The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD” by Simon Schama, which covers Elephantine, very interesting (it also flies in the face of claims that Jews did not marry Native Egyptians, though it is from centuries before the era researchers often cover). If you'd like to read don't click this link to a Google doc, that would be VERY naughty. There's very little on the Therapeutae, but for the paper theorizing they may have been influenced by Buddhism (possibly making them an example of Judeo-Buddhist syncretism) look here (their Wikipedia page also has some sources that could be interesting but are not specifically about them). "Taylor, Joan E. - Jewish women philosophers of first-century Alexandria: Philo’s Therapeutae reconsidered" is also a to read.

I haven't found much on the temple of Onias/Tell el Yahudia/Leontopolis in depth, but I have the paper "Meron M. Piotrkowski - Priests in Exile: The History of the Temple of Onias and Its Community in the Hellenistic Period" in my to be read pile (which I got off Anna's Archive). I also have some supplemental info from a lecture I attended that I'm willing to privately share.

I also have a document compiling links about the Exodus of Jews from Egypt in the modern era, but I'm cautious about sharing it now because I made it in high school and I've realized it needs better fact checking, because it had some misinfo in it from Zionist publications (specifically about the names of Nazis who fled to Egypt- that did happen, but a bunch of names I saw reported had no evidence of that being the case, and one name was the name of a murdered resistance fighter???)

[pub-lius]

hiiii :3

i just read your response to an ask about your reason for disliking ron chernow’s alexander hamilton book, and i wanted to ask if i can still use it as source for some info. i’ve done my fair share of research on various topics and my opinions/what i’ve read differentiated strongly sometimes from what he wrote, but some things are just hard to come by (as somebody not from the US who doesn’t have local resources and has to rely on stuff i can find online). what do you suggest i do if i want more accurate info? i know the founders archive but other than that i haven’t found a lot of trustworthy sources concerning the amrev that aren’t $300 textbooks?

idk- sorry this is really long :,) i’m not sure in im making any sense haha

Girl have you seen the length of my posts? This is not long at all, and you make perfect sense.

And if you have seen my posts, you may notice that Chernow is my most frequent citation because of how valuable his biographies are as sources. He does intensely thorough research and his index and bibliography are so extensive, I can’t even make a joke about getting them as a tramp stamp.

Chernow is a great source and I do recommend any starting Hamilton scholar to get a copy, if you have the means and patience. The downfalls of it are its a hard read and his personal interpretations are heavily skewed and biased in various directions, which is only different from other historians because he doesn’t give proper evidence and substantiation to these claims. All you need to have in order to recognize this is basic critical thinking skills. Tl;dr: Chernow is a great source, he’s just fucking annoying and I hate him.

One very good thing about Chernow is that his book is so (painfully) extensive, that it can serve as a source for more than just Hamilton, so there’s no shame in using him as a source for *checks notes* how the island of St. Kitts and Nevis was formed from a volcano, if you’re into that.

I see your inability to access US propaganda and I raise you youtube documentaries. That may sound crazy, but you can put it on in the background and cross reference between them (usually repeated details are closest to the truth). They can also be entertaining, especially if they’re from the 80s (i love the 80s). Additionally, if you’re looking for archives, @maip--macrothorax can tell you all the benefits of Internet Archive (if they aren’t too busy borrowing all of the books on there /lh). You can also find a lot of things on the Library of Congress’s website, and also my favorite governmental department:

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE!!

Go to the national park service, it includes all the battlefields, important buildings, where important buildings used to be, the houses of historical figures, and really pretty parks (also like mount gaymore (rushmore) and shit but wtvr). They have tons of information and great archivists and librarians and i long for their jobs. Also, American Battlefield Trust, Mount Vernon, The Museum of the American Revolution, etc. also have great sources and tons of information- along with wonderful reenactments that they have on youtube!!

I also do my best to make these sources as accessible as possible, so if you do some perusing you might be able to find some of this stuff here, but I am always happy to answer asks with links or research though I am very slow (sorry). And of course, my dms are open and I probably wouldn’t be totally infuriated if you found me at my local library and asked for directions to the non-fiction section. I am the personal librarian of tumblr.com, so ask away and I’ll be there!!

[stari-hun]

I need everyone’s headcanons on their favs in a modern modern AU

Thought honestly this isn’t really a modern au it’s just an idea of what would happen if they were grew up as like millennials and Gen Z but also they’re all from diff eras so that needs an AU in itself?-

I feel like Sotheby would be a religious Wild Krats enjoyer. She already loves the adventuring genre a lot so I think she’d love Pokémon too and have all the games. Vertin would like the adventuring genre too but she’d be more a meta gamer and into adventuring series like Journey of Elaina or Frieren.

I think Sotheby would be super into DND too. I feel like she’s the type to go for the same class but different executions of it. Vertin is definitely the intentional game breaker, but Sotheby knows enough about potions and probably magic tools to be an accidental bomb in the party.

Sonetto is childhood friends with them, she met Vertin way before and they both met Sotheby in middle school when she was a year below them. I feel like she would be the type of kid who struggles to find interests of their own and instead builds interest up in stuff her friends already like.

I imagine Isolde and Kakania would be like childhood friends from something like private school or a Catholic boarding school. It’s projecting but I think Isolde and Kakania would LOVE Secrets of Moonacre and The Golden Compass.

Druvis and Lilya would obv be college students, but I wanna say Druvis would be an environmental activist looking to go into politics. Like for an environmental protection agency working on restrictions for deforesting.

Marcus would be a fan of like those late night documentaries and esp the series Round Planet. I think she’d thrive being able to access online archives for books. I think she’d also take a year after Highschool to go on like a tour of the world in a program that allows young adults to work in national parks and nature bases for free housing a paycheck. She’d transfer around running blogs and writing small bits for local newspapers in each place she visits using her Arcanum to find hidden stories.

Hofmann would be a college teacher from the college Marcus is dual enrolled in (she's on an accelerated course and Hofmann is a journalism professor).

[fleechin]

This is my 2024 @portal-secret-santa for @villafordefeatedvillains, they told me they were a huge fan of stuff that combines Portal and Half Life, as well as Caveline and Cave x Breen, and also Portal Stories Mel, so I had the idea of a bunch of different scenes I could do. In the end I found myself doing a sort of in depth analysis of Breen, Cave, and Caroline all together and comparing and contrasting their histories and perspectives. This gave me the chance to reference Mel and even some stuff with Entropy Zero 2 (which I know they didn't mention, but it's kinda the gold standard when it comes to combining half life and Portal and I have a tooooooon of headcanons about Caroline's role at Arbeit, so I just knew I had to bring that in).

There's some slightly suggestive stuff with Caveline and Cave x Breen (mostly Caroline's imagination running wild - who can blame her?), but nothing NSFW though.

But there you go, enjoy and a happy 2024 Holidays!

        Part 1: According to a Small Fish

The year was 1975. 

A crucial year for many people, perhaps, in ways that each and every one of them could recount. War stories, scandals, a casual fling with a one time lover that would eventually become the story to recount to future generations. The one who got away. A flame that nostalgia and the shitty marriage you’ve found yourself stuck in leaves you hoping to maybe, just maybe, rekindle. You wouldn’t get it, you say to your nieces, nephews, kids, grandkids, even your spouse before he or she leaves for good this time. You weren’t there. 

For one man, who absolutely was there, it was the start of a career that would jettison him into notoriety. The fact he knew. The extent he did not. 

An applied science and research facility, especially as prestigious as Black Mesa, would immortalize him, at least in some fields. Watch any documentary about the next Einstein, open up a textbook about the first man on Mars, and there was a good chance the name Wallace Breen would have appeared outside of the footnotes once or twice. Maybe they’d even interview him.

 No one could have predicted how ubiquitous his name would have become, not even him. And yet, although deep down, had somebody come back with, say, a time travelling boat, and told him just how he would save the world and unite the human species with its benefactors, a part of him would have believed it. Imagined the escapades he would have gone through to get there. 

For now though, Wallace Breen was on the path to greatness. He’d just become the new administrator of Black Mesa, and he was ready to clean house. Standard safety regulations that kept Black Mesa out of the news more than once had proven to be more of a nuisance than anything. There was no such thing as bad press, provided you can drown it out with achievements. Scientists frequently insisted that their equipment had limits. Limits that couldn’t be stretched or tested, lest they break something. Lest they accidentally create something. 

Breen understood that limits were meant to be broken. If the technicians were unhappy with the machines they had, they could simply do what he was paying them to do and build a better one. Would people complain? Of course. Right up until the very end they complained. But they could not argue with his results. The Hazardous Environment Suit, before he’d arrived, was nothing more than a modified spacesuit, useless without a clunky power cable that was perfect for tripping on. Neither jack-of-all-trades, nor a master of one.

But Breen saw potential. Standardization of the parts, emphasis on compactness and multi-use. People objected of course, we need this component, they shouted, but they quickly shut up when they realized just how comfortable, mobile, and applicable the brand new Mark II suit was. 

But as always, this was no time to celebrate. The cable had been reduced already, but the next iteration of the suit needed its own internal power supply. Humanity’s worst base instinct, aside from the urge to reproduce, that old tyrant, was complacency. It needed to be forced into action in order to survive. 

The underground nature of Black Mesa had made him think a great deal about fossils. Calcified impressions of remains of beasts that, had they known what came before, would have thought themselves the pinnacle of evolution, the end of geological history. If only they had bothered to look to the stars. 

Humanity could not make the same mistake.

        Part 2: According to an Old Shark

For another man in Michigan, 1975 was a very different year. 

Cave Johnson had been the talk of the town for more than half of his life, for better or worse. In the beginning, as a shower-curtain salesman, perhaps the biggest lesson he’d learned was how to sell anything and sign his name on it. It brought him wealth, power, fame, all the things he needed to retire.

But that was an easy life. The life of a showman who wanted nothing more than to make a nickel or two. And last he looked at his TIME Magazine interview, his name wasn’t PT Barnum. 

Even during the war, he’d read up on what scientists were up to. The big names, Heisenberg, Einstein, Schwarzschild. Lots of Germans. Though he hadn’t read their exact papers or browsed the formulas, he knew they were onto something. Wormholes, warping of space-time continuum, nuclear decay. He had only one chance to board the underground train to wherever they were going. 

And so he hopped on board and went down, down, down. 

Purchasing the salt mine had been easy enough. Building everything was challenging, but he had no tolerance for doubters. Hiring had definitely eaten its share of the budget - scientists were happy to come along, but Olympians had convinced themselves that they deserved even more silver dollars than the big ones around their necks. War heroes were a hit or miss, some were more than happy to brag about their tales, and others wanted nothing more than anonymity after what they’d been through. Cowards.

And then there was Caroline. Where would he be without her?

Starting off as another one of the many girls he’d hired to man the typewriters and do the formulas that the Men Upstairs were much too important to think about, she’d made a name for herself by interning with him, and eventually applying on a whim to be his assistant. He took one look at her file and made his decision. It took even less time for them to become more than business partners. 

Could he have settled down? Married her, taught Cave Junior the ropes of Aperture, gotten a picket fence somewhere and called it a life? Maybe. But Caroline didn’t seem like the kind of woman to want to quit like that. That just made him like her even more.

Cave and Caroline had taken Aperture Science Innovators to fame and infamy alike, assuming one believed that there was even a meaningful distinction between the two. Cave Johnson did not. The Quantum tunneling device and Repulsion Gel had quickly become household names. Unfortunately, so had Melanie Flanagan. 

So what if her sleeping pod had failed and locked her in deep sleep? She’d taken one for the team! She contributed something to the world beyond almost bringing home a Silver in 36! Did you? Not that the press had cared about that. They could talk about Aperture, and their impression of its inner workings all they wanted. None of them however truly understood the nature of what one journalist had so pretentiously dubbed modus operandi aperturae, Aperture’s Way of Doing Things. They wouldn’t complain so damn much.

They’d managed to survive the Senate hearings in ‘68, but their reputation, and by extension their finances, were a whole nother story. The nerve of actually paying people, especially these people, to do what Olympians had desperately applied to do not that long ago… 

Black Mesa had already been a thorn in his side, but now, with Aperture’s Reputation in the gutter, it wasn’t like anyone would have cared. The courts might have cared about IP theft, but the public didn’t, and besides, what lawyer could they afford? 

But alas, there was Science to do. Repulsion Gel was already showing promising results, and with the moon landings along the way, Johnson saw the potential for a true Aperture revival. Black Mesa would never see it coming. Especially this fresh meat of an administrator of theirs. He knew how to read a book, but only Cave Johnson could play ball.  1975 would not be a year of stagnation.

        Part 3: According to an Octopus, or a Medusa (Whichever you prefer)

For one woman, 1975 was the beginning of a new Era. 

Her work in the past decades was paying off, even if her boss hadn’t seen the extent of it yet. Her greatest invention, the portal testing chamber, had become the gold standard. The existing portal technology was already well beyond what the folks at Black Mesa were even dreaming of – and she wasn’t just guessing, corporate espionage was a forte of hers. Zero point energy field manipulation, while never progressing beyond lifting small objects directly in front of the user, had been thought impossible by most of Black Mesa’s top “experts”.

Even larger-mass teleportation was still in Aperture’s favor. The Borealis Project, while largely considered a failure by those who worked on it closest, had proven the possibility of teleportation, and the remoteness of Arbeit Communications, whose acquisition she’d managed, had kept the worst of it a secret. Even the few Black Mesa spies she’d caught didn’t know. And she knew how to get them to squeal.

This new hire at Black Mesa. He was cute, naïve, still seeing himself as the man who would guide the world to greatness. All of the idealism, and none of the experience to boot. She knew the drill. Start off cordial, try to befriend him, juuuuust long enough to get him to show any weaknesses he had. 

He’d even visited Aperture a few times. Each time he’d found something to comment on - always just the thing to get on Cave Johnson’s nerves. Johnson’s strategy, nine times out of ten, was to copy another well known Johnson (who people quickly learned to never ever ask him about), that is to say, get right in their faces. Too close for comfort. Had he and Breen gotten any closer, they might have kissed. That would be fun to see. 

She thought about that way too often. Breen talked a big game, but Cave Johnson’s mouth was a beast unto itself. That sad excuse for a man would never know what hit him. Was it healthy, normal, to be thinking about her boss and his rival making out passionately? Yes, she decided one day as she took a drag of a well earned cigarette. Yes it was.

Oh, but things got heated all the time, of course. For all his talk of “evolving humanity beyond its basest of impulses”, Breen was more than happy to indulge in a shouting match with his rival over the phone. She’d taken the liberty to write down some insults she thought of throughout the day. What could she say, it was great stress relief.

In the past, her way to cope with whatever Cave Johnson had thought to do that day (and there were many of those days) was to find a closet she’d snuck an old couch into, and scream as loud as she could into the pillows. Over time however, that strategy (and her vocal cords) began to work less and less. Thankfully, now she had her own brand new punching bag.

As far as she knew, the two rivals had never come to kiss each other. Or if they had, she hadn’t gotten to watch. What a shame, she thought. Her insight on this man, however, had come to pay off. She’d learned the ins and outs of what made this man tick. And she’d learned to play her cards right.

“Doctor Breen”, as he always insisted on being called, certainly knew how to talk to important men in suits. Securing contracts, making connections, slow incremental steps, even she recognized he had a talent there. But even he fell victim to that age-old need to be known. Anyone, if they talked just the right game, could string him along whatever path they wanted, and he’d go willingly. 

 So why didn’t Caroline do the same? She’d been the impetus and the drive to acquiring Arbeit after all. Even after Cave Johnson would go on to keel over with his lunar fascination, secrecy became the new modus operandi aperturae. But therein was the true difference between the two: while Breen understood the value of confidentiality, or rather that it had some non-zero value, Caroline understood that secrecy was meaningless without obscurity. No one would ever try to investigate you if they did not know who you were.

She’d cut her teeth on Aperture’s operations and ownership of the Arbeit facility, its existence and location kept secret even to most employees of Aperture, and the extent of its research kept secret to most who worked at Arbeit. Cave had let her turn it into her own little playground, perfect for thought experiments and ideas that even her boss might not have approved. 

It was her idea however, long after Cave Johnson and his ways, to run Aperture on that principle. You never quite know who you’ll have to hide this from later on, she insisted. If time travel exists, they’re already listening in.

Caroline ended up being far more right about that, and about Wallace Breen, than even she could have imagined back in 1975.

[cordspaghetti]

hi sorry if this is a silly question! but i’ve seen your art around and it’s amazing!! i’ve been wanting to get into mcr for a bit because of it and i know nearly nothing about them (somehow) and it seems like they have a lot of, lore for lack of a better word. if you have any suggestions, where should i start? btw i adore ur style! :)

Hey!! this is such a fun question oh my god. And thank you so much, i’m so happy that you like my art!

ok so when you say you know nothing about them I’m going to assume you mean like… absolutely nothing. after listening to the music i think youtube is a pretty good place to begin getting into the My Chemcial Romance Lore. very visual band. definitely watch the music videos on their channel if you haven’t already—any behind the scenes/making of videos, live performances, and promo videos on there are really great too. their tour diary/documentary Life on the Murder Scene is CRUCIAL. Some other nice ones to look at afterwards are mcr in the studio 2002, this WSOU interview, this 97x a look back with mcr series, this kevin smith smodcast... also anything from steven’s untitled rock show or fuse tv for early stuff !!! mcr’s career can be split into 4 extremely distinct eras corresponding with each of their albums, so you can pretty much pick what you’re most into and investigate from there… some other fun ways to learn about them are searching up magazine scans/articles (AP, kerrang, and rock sound covered them a lot, plus SPIN and nme a bit), combing through my chemcial romance dot com on the wayback machine (their blog posts are a highlight), checking out fan zines and archives (lots on tumblr and also ig), and reading Books (off the top of my head i can think of Not the Life it Seems by tom bryant and Where are Your Boys Tonight by Chris Payne). Also the Killjoys comic series if you dig danger days 😎. ok i’ll stop there!!! this is mostly like… how to Find the lore, rather than the lore itself haha. i hope you find it helpful! anyone who wants to add on pls do…

[centrally-unplanned]

I actually never finished my "2024 in Review" posts because some life stuff got in the way - too late for any media review stuff to be that relevant, but for myself I wanted to review my own projects from the period. I post a lot of random stuff obviously but I do have that "I try to be a real writer & more" instinct going on, and I wanted to reflect on how those all turned out. Let's see what I accomplished last year - warning for a very "me" post up ahead:

2024 Stuff I Liked Post - My Own Stuff!

FLCLick Noise Book Translation: Finished February of 2024! Obviously a ton of that work happened in 2023, definitely seems like another time, but it counts. For a project that I knew would be way too niche to ever have much reception, I was very happy with the few-but-notable people who read it and clearly used it to expand their FLCL knowledge for their own projects (seeing "my" words in a YouTube video was kinda cool!). I still resonate with my write-up above - in so many ways this was an incredibly inefficient acquisition of knowledge, I could have just summarized the book in one post for people. But by hyper-analyzing every line as needed for translation, I dove far deeper into the material than any other method would allow, and all the little facts and asides - each useless trivia in isolation - built up into enough force to break through the wall and see the work in a whole new way. FLCL is forever imprinted on me; not just as a show, but as a process of understanding.

My reflection here is also somber though in that I do feel like I dropped the ball halfway. All projects have this feeling, to be clear - the idea that it could be "more", a stepping stone to something greater, is a siren call that your own abilities and available time can never really heed. Still, for FLCL I definitely had the idea of something bigger - a sort of complete "documentary archive" for the work. I had all these other sources that I half-collected over time; I posted the translation of the FLCL Proposal & Early Drafts, I posted a scan of the GAINAX Interviews Tsurumaki Section, and ofc scattered throughout my blog is a dozen other FLCL stuff. But I never actually read & wrote a summary of that latter interview, and I posted about importing this other 2010's interview but I never scanned it or read it! I just ran out of steam, as people do. Now I am far enough removed from it that pivoting back to it involves digging up emotional energy that has settled down. There are a bunch of random things I have found and imported that I never got to really discuss, so clearing that backlog is on my agenda this year and that will include some of the above. But the bigger project...I will have to think on that.

Fortunately the book stands alone, and I can take pride in that as a true-blue archival work of anime history. Which, you know, is pretty sad to take pride in - but whatever, welcome to Tumblr.

Welcome to The Bronze: This one was just a lot of fun to write. You can't plan kismet like this; sometimes you just stumble upon a documentary by a bunch of buffy nerds waging the culture war of its time and setting you up to discover a really damn interesting chapter of the history of the early internet! I liked this work because it stretched me a bit - I hadn't blended that "documentary history of the internet" angle with a media review quite so aggressively as this, and the concept fits my whole vibe really well. I think I did a good job crystalizing the fights & obsessions of an era now lost, which is one of things I like doing the most in my "work".

And I hadn't really tackled something this deeply in the western fandom space! I will ofc still do anime stuff but I do want to broaden myself a bit more - you gotta find the spark but they are out there for sure. And not gonna lie, not having a massive language barrier made things a ton easier lol. One of my top goals for 2025 is building on this a bit and making sure I tackle projects in new spaces beyond my niches.

On reviewing it I think I could have been nicer to the documentary? I am a quipping asshole after all, I like that stylistically. But I do think how much I like these people comes through, so I don't think it is a huge problem.

The director of this movie lives in the DC area by the way. I have, many times over the past months, thought about emailing her and asking if she would do an interview. Or just shoot the shit over coffee about something from 20 years I am sure she has no interest in remembering lol. Maybe I will run into her someday...

The Dai Nippon Controversy: This is the "weeb" version of The Bronze post, a shoulders-deep wade through a pool of completely arcane fandom drama lost to time, that just so happened to circle some immensely important people in the history of anime "before they were cool". I love this essay - it was pure luck to stumble on the source material, the people of the era positively vibrate with the sense that what they are doing is ~Important~ in a way you can never really muster today, and I was able to connect that to my wider themes of shifts in the otaku subculture. It both stands alone and is data from that mythical "history of otakudom" I am always building in my mind.

It was also just a real stretch to research, combining going through Yahoo auction listings for preview photos of relevant articles and combining them with archived Dutch Sci Fi magazines, and through that source diversity I got a better look at this time than I think I could have otherwise. Sometimes it all comes together!

California Crisis: A small one to wrap this up, I liked this piece because at this point I really don't do "straight" media analysis any more? It doesn't really excite me, not the way some of my older posts do. But I can still enjoy it with the right framing, and the way I blended archival work, the "narrative" around the piece in western culture, and a true-blue "what are the themes of this work" explanation made me like doing it again. Like so many of my essays, I liked California Crisis beforehand as a silly little OVA, but now I love it because I spent the time with it. It is nice to go back to those days sometimes. This was an "attack of opportunity" essay for sure, you can't force it, but when it works it works.

---

Anyway, those are my good works - a bunch of this is repetitional from previous posts, but that is the point of a year-end wrap-up! Though there is something I wanted to note - what isn't on the list. Namely, any of my writings on politics, economics, or history. In certain sense this isn't fair - The Swing Won't Save You is a perfectly good essay for example, I think it came out well. But it was "easy" to write, I did not put my nose to the grindstone to make it, or grow in the telling. I remember it because it has a snazzy title if we are being honest! And so on for many other posts that did have effort put into them. Maybe I am missing some I should single out, I didn't do an every-post dive into my archive (I should do that honestly!) or anything.

But I think I just failed to prioritize real-deal essays in the space this year and that was a mistake. Inspiration, the distraction of the election, comparative advantage (I am a middling political commentator, but "within the space" I think I add some real value on the anime & media history stuff), all that contributed to that failure. And no harm in that, I post for fun and none of this matters. I still want to "do better" this year though - one of my big goals is to really tackle some deeper political-historical works. I have some ideas in that space, so it is time to put this into practice.

[eredhes]

Hey!

I majored in anth at a p awesome school for it (had a so fun class where we hands on used paleo to neo lithic techniques- from making stone tools to processing hides) but there wasn't much available for prehistoric art (+ I was a major switch from microbiology so bio anth, epidemiology and forensics stuff, made more sense with my course history). Been out of school for almost 10 years now and unfortunately doing nothing even remotely related, but I'm wanting to learn more about prehistoric art of all sorts. With search engines being overrun with AI misinfo I'm not really sure where to start other than Wikipedia. Do you have any favorite resources you'd be up for recommending?

Thanks a ton! Happy holidays, and may the new year be kind.

Hello! I should preface this with saying I am just someone with a general interest and not remotely an expert haha! Getting to do hands on stuff sounds really fun!

A lot of my reading has been restricted to Upper Palaeolithic Europe, and cave art at that, so I can't really recommend anything outside of that.

I've been concerned also with avoiding misinformation - there was a painting I saw a while ago where it was obvious the level of research involved was typing "Lascaux" into pinterest and just using whatever results came up (the art used was from Cueva de los Caballos and Mesolithic) and it's been driving me nuts. I've been sticking to books for information, almost everything I've read has been through Internet Archive, and majority are over 30 years old so could be outdated, can contradict each other, and should be noted are can be very racist.

Putting the list of everything under a read more as it's quite long, I hope there's something useful in amongst all of this! Happy holidays, I hope you have a good new year!

Books and other resources I've found useful in no particular order:

The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs by Mario Ruspoli (1987) [Is on Internet Archive but currently unavailable, the German version is still up.] When Lascaux was closed to the public Mario Ruspoli was hired by the French govenment to document the entire cave on film and wrote this book afterwards. Even though it's focus is Lascaux I found it a good introduction to the topic of cave art. I have tried to find the footage online with little success so if anyone knows... do tell. This book brings you through the cave and gives a good idea of the layout and where paintings/engravings are in relation to each other. I would love if there was something like this for other caves but I'm not aware of anything 🤔

Lascaux Virtual Tour [Link here] The video isn't toally clear but it gives a good sense of the layout, and you can click the little 'i' icon to see clearer photos and get more details.

Images of the Ice Age by Paul Bahn and Jean Vertut (1988) [Internet Archive Link] This book is also a good starting point! There's also Journey Through the Ice Age which is the same book.

Cambridge Illustrated History of Cave Art by Paul Bahn (1998) [Internet Archive Link] I haven't gotten around to reading this yet but it appears to be a broader scope and not restricted to Europe.

Palaeolithic Cave Art by Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld (1967) The main appeal of this bok is that it goes through the different possible reasons for cave art. I had to buy a physical copy as I couldn't find it online.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (2020) [Aeon article link "Sheanderthal: Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived?] Not solely focused on art but she does talk about what the neanderthals made including a large circular structure in Bruniquel Cave - there is footage of the cave in the recent netflix documentary Secrets of the Neanderthals (not great, at one point the narrator says neanderthals lived in the neolithic lmfao but the interviews with experts are interesting).

Don's Maps [Link here] Really great website. Some books will mention a painting/engraving/sculpture but no image, so my first place to check is Don's Maps as everything he includes is either from a book which will be referenced or from his own visits to caves.

The Neanderthal Museum Digital Archive [Link here] Despite the name is not exclusively Neanderthal, lots of photos of cave art in the Wendel Collection (including a photo of the one known instance of a saiga antelope in cave art that I hadn't been able to find a photo of before!).

There's also the Archaeology Podcast Network and sites like Academia.edu but I don't have any specific recommendations at present.

[holmesxwatson]

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes dir: Billy Wilder, 1970

I only watched The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes for the first time a few days ago but it lights my brain up in that special way that I know I’ll revisit it a lot. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from perfect, for one thing Colin Blakely’s Watson is a little too shouty for me, but it’s very worthwhile to check out despite its shortcomings, which I think mostly come from the fact that so much was cut from the intended script.

I absolutely love Robert Stephens as Holmes. His face is so good, he has a way of looking at Watson when he doesn’t know he’s being observed that is very soft. I thought I was hallucinating the beginning of this movie with Holmes telling the ballet dancer he’s gay and in a relationship with Watson. I thought it was going to be played for a joke, and it was a bit, but it didn’t just end there. Holmes and Watson have a conversation about the repercussions in a lengthy scene that turns very serious by the end. I can’t believe this was 1970 and no one has since tried to build on this specific dynamic in a more meaningful way. Someone needs to remake this into a mini-series exactly how Billy Wilder intended it to be, here’s hoping public domain can make it so.

[above: script page from the cut story The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room, where Watson creates a fake case to make Holmes feel better]

Also, the backstory of the making of this film is so out of control: Robert Stephens’s nervous breakdown and suicide attempt during the production, the amount of years Billy Wilder was trying to write it and get it made, the interference of ACD’s son, the Loch Ness monster prop that the crew lost in actual Loch Ness, the immense scope of the episodic story they were going for, the way it got cut down from its original 3 hour 45 minute runtime and how that cut footage was lost forever! (this is crazy! everyone go check your attics and storage lockers right now).

In one of the interviews I found, Robert Stephens says “if something is boring — if it’s three minutes long it’s too long, but if it’s interesting it’s never long enough…you don’t want it to end.” Big same Toby Stephens’ dad, big SAME. I didn’t want it to end. I read the uncut script and I am just floored at what we missed out on. Thankfully some footage and audio remain of some of the cut scenes (but still! check your basements too).

Just fully let it settle into your brain that they filmed all of these stories in the script, and then cut most of it away. Like that is mind-blowing to me, it existed at one point as it was fully intended to be. If this was made now during home entertainment times, they would have no problem releasing an almost four-hour movie, but at the very least there would be a big director’s cut dvd release and we would be enjoying all the small Holmes x Watson moments we deserve.

Anyway, in pretty short order I found a bunch of interesting links to stuff, details below. I also consulted my very well-thumbed Conversations with Wilder book by Cameron Crowe, but there wasn’t that much more information in there. I have Robert Stephens’ memoir Knight Errant and the TPLOSH blu-ray on order so I’ll add to this post if I find any more good resources. Let me know if I’m missing anything, and enjoy!

Full movie on YouTube (x) <-update: this link went private, but it's also streaming for free on Tubi and Freevee, and available to rent on YouTube, Google Play, and Apple TV

Original roadshow draft of script on Internet Archive (x)

Missing footage: Prologue [sound only plus stills] (x), The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room [sound only plus stills] (x), The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners [footage and soundtrack only, no sound dialogue] (x), alternate ending [sound only] (x)

Making of documentary that includes behind-the-scenes snippets of some of the cut scenes [this doc is in German, but you can turn on the auto-translate to English in the YouTube settings] (x)

Interview with Ernst Walter, film editor of TPLOSH (x)

Interview with Christopher Lee “Mr. Holmes, Mr. Wilder” 2003 (x)

My YouTube playlist with all of the above links in one place plus an excellent fan vid by Just Bee that I added to the list because it’s just so good (x)

Missing Movies: A Case for Sherlock Holmes from 1994 BBC Radio 2 on Soundcloud [includes interview with Robert Stephens and folks involved in the production] (x)

Articles about the lost Loch Ness monster prop (x) (x)

The soundtrack by Miklós Rózsa (x)

[fishenjoyer1]

I'm just starting to get into marine bio, and I found your blog today and I love it so much!! Do you have any recommendations of where I can learn stuff? (I hunger for fish knowledge)

It's always wonderful when someone else starts getting into marine bio, I'm honored to share resources!

Texts:

I personally learned a lot of what I now know from a series of textbooks I've picked up over the years, here some of my personal favorites!

Biological Oceanography An Introduction by Carol M. Lalli & Timothy R. Parsons: I personally found this textbook wonderful! Written very clearly and easy to understand, and contains summaries at the end of each chapter. Here is my favorite used&new book sellers results for this book. Here is the book on internet archive.

Marine Ecology: Processes, Systems, and Impacts by Michael J. Kaiser, Martin J. Attrill, & Simon Jennings: Covers much of the same things as biological oceanography, but valuable on its own. Here is the link to buy a copy for cheap. Here is the book on internet archive.

Limnology: Lake and River Ecosystems by Robert G. Wetzel: I personally found this the most dull textbook of my life, but, it is written very well. The chapters end with summaries also, which makes it easier to study, and this book is rather well renowned in freshwater studies. Here to buy a copy on my favorite book website. Here to read on internet archive (I'm relatively uncertain that its inaccessible) so Here is a preview on google books. (maybe I'll find the time to scan my copy and put it in a google drive)

The Diversity Of Fishes: Biology, Evolution, and Ecology by Douglas E. Facey, Brian W. Bowen, Bruce B. Collette, & Gene S. Helfman: I adore this textbook, it is easy to read and comprehend, a personal favorite. Not only that, it is wonderful for understanding fish. Here you can buy it (it's a bit pricey, so I recommend just using the internet archive). Here you can find it on internet archive.

Methods for Fish Biology by Stephen Midway, Caleb Hasler, and Prosanta Chakrabarty: A bit dense and hard to read, but it's a wonderful text on understanding how to do research, and how a lot of farming and understanding of fish is done. Here to buy it. Here to read it on internet archive

All the other textbooks I own are about marine mammals, so I'll recommend them if asked, but you seem more interested in fish and aquatic environments.

Audio:

I personally struggle to listen to informational audio and podcasts, so this section is a bit threadbare

The Marine Mammal Science podcoast by The Society for Marine Mammalogy here

Marine Biology in 5 minutes podcast here

Oceanlovers podcast here

The Deep-Sea Podcast here

Video:

I have some great recommendations I'm a personal fan of here!

I personally really enjoy Natural World Facts, he has some wonderful playlists and documentaries on the deep sea, different environments, animals, and ecosystems there.

MBARI (the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) Has wonderful videos with their discoveries and research,

The Nautilus live, which does frequent live streams as they're exploring the ocean with ROVs and a running commentary from the staff!

The octopus lady does some good work, I haven't watched the most of her but she's relatively fun to put in the background to just generally learn about things marine

I also enjoy the work of AVNJ Fish Biologist, who does a lot less serious scientific videos, but he also has a video series on ichthyology I'm fond of so, check that out here!

Other:

when doing fish of the day, some sources have continually come back again and again, I'll list these off first.

Wikipedia: I personally find the wikipedia is a good resource, but it never gives the full picture when your trying to learn. Do not base your knowledge only on wikipedia, i recommend trying to read through some of the sources that wikipedia has listed on a topic, and if you are new to a subject I suggest trying to find introductory textbook before plunging in head first. I find that wikipedia is wonderful at convincing you that you know what its talking about, as it's very easy to just read without knowing the definition for a small handful of words. But, you will quickly come to realize at some point or another that you understood less than you think. As much as it is a wonderful tool, don't use it exclusive well learning

WoRMS- World Registrar of Marine Species has basic info and distinguishes between species, along with some good research, I'd recommend checking them out!

Fishbase! contains good information on most fish

.gov websites, and websites that align with governments across the world can be trusted for fish purposes mostly, the NOAA is a great resource for learning and searching info on animals, as is the Monterey Bay Aquarium

If you're looking to find a scientific paper, I recommend searching on google scholar, as it will show you which you can access the pdf of without paying.

And, if your looking to come into contact with papers you just cant seem to find the pdf of, I would recommend Scihub other than scihub, you can also look for any number of things locked behind a paywall with this niffty website I found ! A lot of resources there.

That's everything I can think of! Have a good time learning ! :)

[keepthedelta]

I have to be honest. My experience was mostly based on this website and then, sometimes watching the races on TV.

You can say i am a casual watcher, on and off.

While I find the experience to be leaning on the cultish side and ,as a result,toxic, i still want to learn about the sport.

Also, i do not think i really "like" any drivers. It's more about what they represent, i think. They are public figures, they are brands so i feel that what I actually like is the brand, the personna.

What i can do is cureating my experience with  other blogs like yours. Do you have any other recommendations ?

Thanks for answering my ask, it was very nice of you to do so.

if you want to learn more about the sport i would definitely recommend watching some previous seasons. f1fullraces.com and overtakefans.com both have archives where you can find and watch old races for free. the commentary is usually in english and therefore fairly biased towards the british drivers but it's not totally unbearable. 2012 is a fantastic season to watch, it has great racing, a great title fight, lots of different winners, and is generally very enjoyable. 2003 and 2005 are also great. 2010 has a fantastic championship battle with four drivers still mathematically capable of winning by the last race although i personally think the racing in that season isn't that great. 2011 doesn't really have a championship battle but the racing is really really good, especially canada 2011. if there is one f1 race everyone should watch it is canada 2011. 2009 has a great narrative and some really great racing and the championship "battle" is quite similar to this season's. there's also a disney+ documentary on it called Brawn: the impossible formula 1 story to accompany it. there's a lot of races there so don't feel that you have to watch them all, but even a few would probably help you understand the sport a bit better, and they're not really connected to ongoing tumblr discourse so it should give you a bit of distance from the toxicity.

in terms of tumblr blogs, i guess it really depends on what you like and what you want out of the experience. i think @/race-week is great on the technical aspects of f1 (engineering, circuit layout, stewards rulings etc.) and my australian twin @/mercedeshaterr knows pretty much everything there is to know about motorsport from an official's perspective (she also hates mercedes so her blog is 100% a cultLH free zone).

for f1 art i really like @/mxgicdave and @/coldarena. they both post stuff other than f1 but they have such great art styles, and are so interesting and creative in what they do. @/argentinagp and @/justaboutsnapped do beautiful edits and graphics that i always enjoy seeing.

@/verdemint has some of the best takes i've seen on here, both in general and also specifically about lewis, as does @/blorbocedes, who is a leading light in the nicology movement and writes so well for many different pairings. @/karlmarxverstappen has the best replies to asks, just so witty, and @/thatdickhead and @/titstitstitstits never fail to make me laugh.

this is not an exhaustive list, just a few of my favourite people on here. i think if you find posts that you like and you connect to you'll be able to find more people that you enjoy following, and don't be afraid to just scroll through someone's blog and like everything you see, i've met some great people through that method. i also definitely recommend following stuff other than f1 on here if you're not already. film, tv shows, music, art, whatever you enjoy. even if you don't post it or post it to a sideblog, having other things that you like breaks up some of the negativity from f1blr and can make the experience more enjoyable.

[dizzymoods]

Lots of VC questions recently. Someone emailed about what they should be engaging with to develop their artistic voice. Here's my answer:

In terms of guidance, Werner Herzog, who is admittedly a weirdo, said that the best thing a film student can do is go backpacking cross country, which I would never do. But the point he was ultimately making is that life experience is more important than anything a film school can teach you. Your artistic voice develops more sharply the more intune you are with the world; all the film stuff is superfluous really. So that would be my major advice. Live life! Be open to all sorts of experiences.

Outside of that I would say to read and watch anything and everything you can get your hands on. Especially stuff that has nothing to do with film. Be curious, which is to say non-judgemental. Sitting through stuff that you have no interest in or actively hate is good! It develops your taste in ways that seeking out only what you like can never do. It also expands your horizons and teaches you how much you actually don't know about anything. Keeps you humble. You'll be surprised 5 years on how something that you had no interest in is super relevant to what you're trying to do.

I'll drop some recommendations later but something you are going to run into is paywalls and exorbitant costs. Scihub, Libgen, and PaywallReader can be your friends in this regard. The more niche something is, the less mirrors there are. Investing in an internet audio/video ripper is essential. Rip often and indiscriminately. Nothing is safe unless you triplicate it. And if you can't afford hard drives, dummy alphabet accounts are the next best thing. Also, footnotes and reference lists are treasure troves of breadcrumbs.

The standard VC reading list includes: Reel to Real, The Devil Finds Work, Playing in the Dark, Young British & Black, Ways of Seeing (also a documentary), Orientalism, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Culture, Questions of Third Cinema, Hollywood & Counter Cinema, Figures Traced in Light, Parallel Tracks, and Basho: The Complete Haiku

Hundreds of films can be found on Solidarity Cinema. Cinema of the World has a deep archive but you need to have space and a nitrofile account to download most films, but you can snipe a few films here and there (or look for them elsewhere). Rarefilmm updates semi-regularly and you can stream the films; they are now more active on twitter and are even taking requests. Some state-sponsored film industries have robust presences on youtube with english subs: Russia's Mosfilm/FUSE Mosfilm, Canada's NFB, the Korean Film Archive, Native People's Media. There's UbuWeb for all your avant-garde needs. There's FIlmmaker's Co-Op (pay-per-view), Paper Tiger Television, and Deep Dish Television for NYC indie stuff. AfroMarxist has a fair amount of political documentaries. NMAHC has an archive that houses the work of Chamba Productions and some of Pearl Bowser's stuff. And of course there's the legendary MikeD of ReelBlack. It's a crap shoot but some filmmakers and/or their estates make work available free online (Leo Hurwitz and Julie Dash come to mind). I'd recommend a Kweli TV subscription for black film, and never be surprised by what you can find on youtube or tubi!

This is probably super overwhelming but the joy of being an autodidact is the thrill of discovery so peruse at your leisurely interest. The internet is your oyster if you know how to use it! Back in my day hardly any of these sites existed and the ones that did weren't as robust as they are now. I've had to frankenstein whole movies from various clips posted in 144p on youtube 😩

I used to do a couple of themed months a year where I'd read and watch as much as possible about a filmmaker, genre, or movement that interested me. I'd spin a globe to learn a little about a random country's cinema. Best of lists/canons don't really mean much but they are good sources of stuff to at least be aware of.

[mariacallous]

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

In the age of AI, however, there’s a new motto: There’s no need to turn pages at all! Not even the transcripts of your interviews. Oh, and you don’t have to pay attention at meetings, or even attend them. Nor do you need to read your mail or your colleagues’ memos. Just feed the raw material into a large language model and in an instant you’ll have a summary to scan. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as our wingmen, summary reading is what now qualifies as preparedness.

LLMs love to summarize, or at least that’s what their creators set them about doing. Google now “auto-summarizes” your documents so you can “quickly parse the information that matters and prioritize where to focus.” AI will even summarize unread conversations in Google Chat! With Microsoft Copilot, if you so much as hover your cursor over an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, or PowerPoint presentation, you’ll get it boiled down. That’s right—even the condensed bullet points of a slide deck can be cut down to the … more essential stuff? Meta also now summarizes the comments on popular posts. Zoom summarizes meetings and churns out a cheat sheet in real time. Transcription services like Otter now put summaries front and center, and the transcription itself in another tab.

Why the orgy of summarizing? At a time when we’re only beginning to figure out how to get value from LLMs, summaries are one of the most straightforward and immediately useful features available. Of course, they can contain errors or miss important points. Noted. The more serious risk is that relying too much on summaries will make us dumber.

Summaries, after all, are sketchy maps and not the territory itself. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen joke where he zipped through War and Peace in 20 minutes and concluded, “It’s about Russia.” I’m not saying that AI summaries are that vague. In fact, the reason they’re dangerous is that they’re good enough. They allow you to fake it, to proceed with some understanding of the subject. Just not a deep one.

As an example, let’s take AI-generated summaries of voice recordings, like what Otter does. As a journalist, I know that you lose something when you don’t do your own transcriptions. It’s incredibly time-consuming. But in the process you really know what your subject is saying, and not saying. You almost always find something you missed. A very close reading of a transcript might allow you to recover some of that. Having everything summarized, though, tempts you to look at only the passages of immediate interest—at the expense of unearthing treasures buried in the text.

Successful leaders have known all along the danger of such shortcuts. That’s why Jeff Bezos, when he was CEO of Amazon, banned PowerPoint from his meetings. He famously demanded that his underlings produce a meticulous memo that came to be known as a “6-pager.” Writing the 6-pager forced managers to think hard about what they were proposing, with every word critical to executing, or dooming, their pitch. The first part of a Bezos meeting is conducted in silence as everyone turns all 6 pages of the document. No summarizing allowed!

To be fair, I can entertain a counterargument to my discomfort with summaries. With no effort whatsoever, an LLM does read every page. So if you want to go beyond the summary, and you give it the proper prompts, an LLM can quickly locate the most obscure facts. Maybe one day these models will be sufficiently skilled to actually identify and surface those gems, customized to what you’re looking for. If that happens, though, we’d be even more reliant on them, and our own abilities might atrophy.

Long-term, summary mania might lead to an erosion of writing itself. If you know that no one will be reading the actual text of your emails, your documents, or your reports, why bother to take the time to dig up details that make compelling reading, or craft the prose to show your wit? You may as well outsource your writing to AI, which doesn’t mind at all if you ask it to churn out 100-page reports. No one will complain, because they’ll be using their own AI to condense the report to a bunch of bullet points. If all that happens, the collective work product of a civilization will have the quality of a third-generation Xerox.

As for Robert Caro, he’s years past his deadline on the fifth volume of his epic LBJ saga. If LLMs had been around when he began telling the president’s story almost 50 years ago—and he had actually used them and not turned so many pages—the whole cycle probably would have been long completed. But not nearly as great.

[9w1ft]

The CIWYW Miss Americana clip is what cemented it for me when I fell down this rabbit hole but was still doubtful. It’s undeniably Karlie’s voice. In a romantic scene where she is telling us that her love would stay private. I love CIWYW so much because it made me realize her artistic genius that I can simultaneously hear Karlie and Call it. I hope it doesn’t get toned down in TV or I will be forced to listen to the original. It’s perfection.

when i fell down the rabbit hole back in early 2018 and the song first clicked it definitely hooked me too, really informed my thinking and it still makes me emotional. the miss americana clip still knocks me out of my chair too. it connects together so many elements of kaylor and it is a miracle that she put it in the documentary. well, karlie herself is in the documentary in some of the archival press footage which is also wild to me but to have a moment like this just kills me, people like to talk about the documentary a lot in terms of promises people heard but to me as a kaylor it’s wild that stuff like the ciwyw clip is there, i really think it’s so bold.