ShawnGrows: How Oranges Became Orange [1m].

Was mulling on opening up the Arc Raiders can o’ WTF worms but then remembered I still had another deeeeep-think piece about Watch Dogs: Legion sitting around. I mean, the thing still has hundreds of daily players so this might reach one or two of them.

The Chemist and Dreuggist July 31, 1897.

Mixed Signals: How a joke sound defined 90s rave [12min].

Documentary Central: A Tuba To Cuba [2019; 1h23m].

Amazing travelogue of Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s trip to Cuba to explore their musical roots. Beautifully shot/composed.

There was a brief clip of Mr. Okra, who passed away in 2018 RIP.

I was down in New Orleans 2008 and Mr. Okra drove by:

ProcessX: Process of making hiking boots. Handmade shoes made by Japanese craftsmen [24min].

Entrancing. Yes, that is correct, I posted a makin’ hikin’ boots video in 2022. This one is a different one. There are two now. They are friends.

Gamers Nexus: Discord’s Disturbing Ties to Global Surveillance ‒ ID Verification, Palantir, & Thiel [38min].

Captain Pikant BLUE MONDAY ‒ Analyzing the MOST BRUTAL BEAT of the 1980s ‒ Drum Patterns Explained [12min; via Jon].

About Here and HUB Cycling: The Bike Share Dilemma [18min].

Strong Towns: The sign you’re looking for is in Philly [1min].

Not Just Bikes: Why I don’t use Google Maps in Amsterdam [25min].

Technology Connections: You are being misled about renewable energy technology [1hr31min].

Shawn Grows: How Plantains Got Stolen [1min].

Fern: Did McKinsey Ruin Disneyland? [30min]. CW: Death, deplorable capitalism but I repeat myself, McKinsey, Disney.

Good Ol’ Freda trailer [2013; 2min]. Available on Kanopy for free with a US library card.

Shawn Grows: The Poisonous Spice [1min].

Hoog: The Hardest NASA Mission in History [35min].

I am E-Z to please, just get me a < $3 can of coffee for Christmas. That’s coming up, right? [LQQKS at calendar] “Huh.” Well, Arbor Day. Anyway, I was buying up fat stacks of some coffee ($1/can) from Grossout, not really knowing what it is. I just read the ingredients, took a ballpark guess at caffeine % (not listed, but lower than normal, turns out), went w/a can a day. Many cans later, finally looked on the bottom. MFG 2025 EXP 2026. Okay, so a company died or something. “Florence By Mills Coffee.” What in the Sam By Hill is that name. Main URL is tot. More research. Blah blah actor blah. Okay. More. Oh. It’s Eleven from Stranger Things, a show I’ve seen approximately seven minutes of many years ago. So. Stapling everything together, looks like this coffee jazz took a dive mid-2025, and they dumped the remaining cans on the secondary market. The fun reason I mention this is because there are five skabillion articles about the celebrity starting various businesses and zero articles about any of those things ending. Except now, you’re in the know. It’s a service I provide. I might be wrong. But if there’s no website for six months and Walmart is out of stock of every flavor ... going with dead. I still have some cans left. To the Ebaymobile!

PS If you haven’t explored the world of cheap thin-can coffee, don’t. I’ve gone through so many brands and 95% of them were not good (Japan’s BOSS Coffee is good; this ends the list of current good thin coffee brands I’m aware of that is not owned by some rat-fuck megacorp). Florence By Mills Coffee was good, but now it’s gone and I will savor the remaining cans like this: [FX: savors]. Though wasteful Florence By Mill Coffee “pods” apparently still exist along with a $149 Florence By Mills coffee machine thing. Maybe.

Drew’s Campfire: The Hidden Order in Chaos ‒ 4,000,000 Double Pendulums [26min]. (via jon)

One of my new year’s resolutions is to block even more useless/annoying sites at the hosts level. One particular site already makes my skin crawl with all of their haughty users “answering” questions by openly insulting people/rejecting the question outright/answering completely incorrectly (this is nothing new, I think it was the CEO who acknowledged some of this years ago) ... there’s this jackass sidebar of unrelated slop for every post. This was half of the garbage on a test query “duh global variables function python duh.” B L O C K E D

I like chewy info-dense websites but this can get stuffed in a bin. [UPDATE] There was this odd technical problem I was having, years ago. I posted a question on this very website. Hey, here’s something really wrong and odd, anyone else out there having that problem? Does anyone know what this is actually supposed to do? Got tumbleweeds for a year, then the moderators deleted it. But Nicodemus, that shit’s important. Vulcan’s first contact species. Keeper right there. Guess you gotta do boffo eyeballs to stick around.