🔗 Queer Tolkien

If you’re a certain type of Lord of the Rings reader, you’re probably yelling, “Tolkien was a Catholic born in the Victorian era! He never would have written about gay people!” But there are examples of queerness in Tolkien’s time and place, and any speculation is backed by historical context.

Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents

Ein Essay über queere Liebe zu Zeiten Tolkiens und zwischen Frodo und Sam in „Der Herr der Ringe“.

🔗 Verschwörungstheorien aus der Sicht eines Gamedesigners

When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people. (cue ominous music)

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon

via @Nerdmeetsyou

🔗 DALL-E: a teapot in the shape of a pikachu

We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.

DALL·E: Creating Images from Text

DALL•E erzeugt Bilder aus wilden Begriffskombinationen. Die Seite ist auch interaktiv und man kann sich durch verschiedene Kreationen klicken. Ich mochte die Avocadosessel und die Schnecken „made of harp“.

via @LorenzoPilia

🔗 Aufruf zur Software-Piraterie!

Mike Rose, Chef des Indie-Publishers No More Robots, hat sich angesichts der Bewerbung nun äußerst verärgert auf Twitter gezeigt. „Bevor ihr ein Spiel bei G2 kauft, ladet es lieber herunter! Ernsthaft! Wir sehen ohnehin kein Geld, wenn ihr dort kauft, also würden wir viel lieber sehen, dass G2A auch kein Geld bekommt“, twitterte Rose.

Indie-Publisher: „Klaut unsere Spiele lieber, bevor Ihr Sie bei einem Key-Reseller kauft!“

Gamers! Rise up!

🔗 Pionier der Farbfotografie: Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

TIL about Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky a Russian photographer who traveled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915, and would take 3 individual black-and-white photos, each with a filter (red, blue, and green) to create high-quality pictures in full color way before full color images were available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky (via Reddit)

🔗 X-Woman ohne Schmerzen

For Jo Cameron, it takes the sight of blood or the smell of her own flesh burning for her to know that something is very wrong. As the 71-year-old Scottish woman recounted to The New York Times earlier this week, she has lived a life virtually free of pain, fear, and anxiety, thanks to a missing stretch of DNA. Doctors discovered there was something different about Cameron when she came in for surgery and turned down painkillers after the nerve blocker from her operation wore off. After years of investigating, they identified the never-before-seen mutation believed to be responsible for her almost supernatural pain tolerance. Weirdly, any wounds she gets also heal faster than other people, and she cannot recall ever having felt anxious, depressed, or scared

Crispr Gene Editing Could One Day Cut Away Human Pain

🔗 Dein Hobby muss nicht zur Arbeit werden

How did we get to the point where free time is so full of things we have to do that there’s no room for things we get to do? When did a beautiful handmade dress become a reminder of one’s inadequacies? Would the world really fall apart if, when I came home from a long day of work, instead of trying to figure out what I could conquer, I sat down and, I don’t know, tried my hand at watercolors? What if I sucked? What if it didn’t matter? What if that’s not the point?

The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies Into Hustles

🔗 A love letter to Miles Morales

I spent 39 years without you, but you’ve been a part of my kids’ imagination for their whole lives. They didn’t get emotional because, for them, a brown-skinned Spider-Man with big, beautiful curly hair is a commonplace. NBD. Other people may take it for granted that they have a face like a superhero’s. I’m happy my kids get to feel that way. I spent too long without such a thing; my big feelings about you reflect how much I needed it.

How Miles Morales Changed the Spider-Verse