Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery 173. This distorted view of the human person is reflected today in various forms of servitude directly linked to the digital economy. Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people. A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labeling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material. In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. Furthermore, criminal networks use online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payment methods and profiling techniques in order to recruit, control and transport victims of trafficking — very often minors — reducing men and women to “data” to be tracked and “packages” to be moved around within the same digital circuits that support much of the global economy. This reality deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time. It is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden. If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity.

i went and read/skimmed through the encyclical and damn. bangers all around:

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

Clip from this video.

The video is about music but I think he explains this very well, and this can be applied to many cultural aspects.

Some days ago I was talking to a friend who works in the tourism sector and she was telling me that lots of tourists have told her that Catalan and Spanish sound the same. They asked her to say a sentence in both, and they couldn't hear it. She could not understand how anyone would say this because they sound so different from each other, she said that when she has been in Spain Spanish people have heard her speak Catalan and assumed she was speaking Italian (the same has happened to another friend of mine, where Spanish people assumed they were French because they heard her speaking in Catalan). But she was so confused how someone could think that "M'agrada menjar pomes" ("I like eating apples" in Catalan) sounds the same as "Me gusta comer manzanas" (the same sentence in Spanish), because Catalan constantly has the ə sound (which doesn't exist in Spanish), open E and O vowels (which don't exist in Spanish) and often uses the j sound (which doesn't exist in Spanish either), while Spanish has very flat closed vowels, the /th/ sound (which doesn't exist in Catalan), and we could bring up many more examples such as the aspirated hard j/h (which doesn't exist in Catalan either) but those were the things that could be clearly seen from the example she gave. She was baffled, so I tried to explain what Farya Faraji explains in this video.

Personally, when I have been abroad and people heard me speaking Catalan, I've been assumed to be from different places. Once I went to the USA (where people are more familiar with Spanish), they all assumed I was French. When I have been in Austria, everyone assumed we were Italians. And my friend from England says he can't tell Catalan and Spanish apart, but to be fair my French coworker couldn't tell apart when we were speaking Catalan, Italian, Spanish, or the girl who sometimes answered in Occitan. And my favourite case was an Italian family in Greece who heard us speaking Catalan and excitedly came to greet us (in Italian) saying "we are Italian too!" because they must have assumed we were speaking a regional language from Italy (which, to be fair, technically we were, considering that Catalan is also the language from L'Alguer which is in Italy, though we are not from there).

And I can't for the life of me tell apart USA English accent from New Zealand English accent or Australia English accent. Or Polish from Russian or Czech or Croatian or Ukrainian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanship—posted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida

Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial

Most of these novels introduced the love interest not just in the first chapter, not just in the first scene, but on page one. And it's smart, because the point is that these two people fall in love, so you're jumping right into the thick of things.

The romcoms that made me laugh the hardest utilized physical comedy the best. I love banter. I love banter. But it can't carry a romcom on its own.

Publishing meta gets publishing money. Books about booksellers, editors, publicists, etc sure seem to get above-average in-house support. Which is not to imply that it's undeserved! Just that it's landing with its targeted readers.

The (usually) contemporary setting means the reader's holding less setting-specific info in their head. This frees up some RAM, as it were, for things I would have to approach very carefully in fantasy, such as dropping a flashback smack in the middle of a scene, or nonlinear storytelling.

Compelling chemistry involves the traits the love interests uniquely bring out in each other. E.g. a stoic person's hidden sense of humor, or a pushover's ability to stand up for something. It's also key that they like these traits on some level, and tied to the person they want to be.

Negative character traits can be greatly mitigated by self-awareness. E.g. It's one thing if someone is consistently and needlessly blunt to the point of rudeness, and acts like that's not a problem; it's another if, internally, they are unhappily aware they're driving people away but don't know how to be any other way.

Escalation. The obvious choice is predictable (some may say boring), but the unexpected choice can feel over-engineered and inorganic. I feel like the balance here is to take the obvious choice and push it further. E.g. Horrible ex shows up at the bakery the narrator just started! Obvious choice is to kick him out. Engineered choice would be having him slip on fresh-waxed floors and land in a vat of custard that just happened to be the right size and sitting in the middle of the bakery. Hm. The escalated version is to have the narrator tell him to get out, and when he balks, start throwing day-olds until he goes. Another example: Our two jerks are going on their first date. An obvious complication: Someone's ex is also on a date at the same place. An over-engineered complication: The ex insists they leave, and when they don't, they go to the manager and try to have our jerks kicked out because their daddy owns the restaurant, and also they have the jerks' car towed. An escalated complication: The ex insists on sharing a table with the jerks, and it's clear they still have feelings.

Related: There's a lot of mileage to be had from people/things progressing a funny and covert goal while the non-narrator scene partner is distracted. E.g. a dog slowly stealing off its owner's plate while the owner is flirting and/or arguing with the narrator.

A lot of books used interstitials for flavor, like emails, transcripts, etc. These can also be used to do some heavy expository lifting by letting you set expectations—think an open mic night flyer that can convey the venue's vibe, or directions to a corn maze that get increasingly sketchy.

We all love competence porn. If we can see what a character is good at, we'll want to see it again. If we can see them be very, very good at it, but thwarted at the last moment—by their own character flaw, for maximum impact—then we will be desperate to see them pull it off in the future. IMHO the more you, the author, want the reader to like a character, the sooner we should see their competence.

RELATED: If a love interest is meant to be a snob, it is non-negotiable that we have to see their competence, in action, on the page. There was one romcom I bounced off like a basketball, and this was a major part of why. I'm altering occupations here, but in a nutshell:

Narrator, a pastry chef with struggling career, idolizes a famous and award-winning baker

Turns out the baker can't make pastries worth a damn because he thinks sweets are frivolous, but the bakery needs to expand its offerings, so she gets brought in to help him

He tells her what she does is meaningless, and she doesn't know how to do real baking, and overall is wildly condescending, but the narrator puts up with it because she idolizes him

We see many awards he's won as a baker, and many high-level professional connections he has

We never see him bake. And we never see her eat something he baked. Our narrator tells us he's just that good and we have to accept it.

Y'all, I was so mad. Give us a crumb, please.

12. Most books tackled a sense of loneliness or isolation in at least the narrator, and sometimes the love interest as well. Even if they had active social lives, there was a gap that only the love interest sees, and only they can fill.

13. There were really interesting uses of sensory and signature details to make a character stand out and/or stand in for physical intimacy early on. E.g. a character slowly rubbing a thumb over the chip in a mug's rim—to me, that gesture is close enough to evoke running a thumb over someone's bottom lip, and the chip gives it sensory oomph. Other characters would have a recurring signature nickname, appearance detail, or gesture; bonus if it had actual character significance.

14. On a slightly more downer note... I found one thing a bit unsettling. I'm threading a needle here, because no, fiction is not supposed to be a moral lecture, yes, there is room for all types of fantasies and explorations in romance. But I found it a tad grim how many books were specifically fantasies of enormous men and itty bitty women. How most of the heroes are supposed to be flawed but romantic, attractive, respectful... and yet in the physical intimacy scenes, a lot of the language falls back on evoking domination, possession, and control by a man. He "claims" lips, he "brands" with his touch, he's "marking [narrator] as his own." And none of it is an actual D/s relationship, it's all quite vanilla. I may just be too ace for that to sound appealing?

It does go hand-in-hand with an interesting recurring bias against cities, where they're scary places that people leave after their dreams are crushed, and find real happiness in a "sweet, traditional life" in a small town. With 80% of the US population living in urban areas, the framing of small towns as keepers of tradition was similarly dissonant to me.

All shot using real figures, lighting and miniature sets. I digitally added a more realistic glow to the Predators eyes the rest is all in camera.

So excited to reveal the cover to my new book today, The Wisdom of Emperors! You can check it out on Kickstarter, along with the full summary!

Inspired by the story of the Ancient Roman emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous, The Wisdom of Emperors is a second-world adult fantasy novel written in the style of a fictional academic text. It documents the translation and study of a world-changing artifact discovered in an archaeological dig: a manuscript which provides the clues to finally unravel the mysteries surrounding one of the most famous emperors of the ancient world. 

The Kickstarter campaign is for the deluxe collector's edition, but you'll be able to preorder the standard hardback/paperback, PLUS the early-access ebook, available to backers well before general publication to everyone else. And there's going to be some really, REALLY cool merch as well (genuine papyrus bookmarks, designed and blockprinted by my own hands!)

The works of Charles Dickens were issued serially then bound together when complete - the parts had illustrated covers and as well as the text were adverts - both the adverts and covers were removed when the book was bound - this is one of the scarcest states to find a Dicken’s novel in

That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.

Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.

Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.

In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)

Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.

Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?

Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.

Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."

Host : Well, your name is Obu?

Obu : Yes sir!

Host : And your last name is Obu?

Obu : Yes sir

(Audience laughter)

Host : Obu Obu

Woman, off screen : You should ask him what his middle name is

Obu : Steve not ready for that (2x) (incoherent audience laughter)

Host : You don't know how ready I am! (Audience laughs) As a matter of fact, we not doing a damn thing until we find out! (More laughter) What is your middle name, Obu?

Obu : It's Obu. (Louder audience laugh)

Host : Obu Obu Obu

Obu : Yes sir! ( Audience laugh) Gotta show some ID?

Host : (softer) now you gotta show them id. You got it on you?

Obu : So the process I go through, go on check that out!

Host : I'll be damn. (More audience laughter and clapping) Your-- who, who named you, Obu obu obu?

Obu : My father.

Host : Father still livin' ?

Obu, pointing off screen : Yes, sir, he's right up there. (audience claps) Yeeaaa my pops yeeeaaaaaa

(Host walks towards the camera and camera flips back n forth to reveal Obu's dad, followed by more audience laughing n clapping)

Host : Yeeaaa yeaa that's who I'm lookin for! (laughter) What's your name, sir?

Obu's dad bellows with echoey sound : Oo~obuu~

(More audience laughter)