On January 13, 532 AD, fans of Constantinople's chariot racing factions — the Blues and the Greens — stopped fighting each other and turned on Emperor Justinian I. The Nika riots started when two convicted murderers, one from each faction, survived their executions after "the sca … | Continue reading
TL;DR: The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 + Windows 11 Pro Bundle includes lifetime licenses for both products and is on sale for $34.97 (reg. $418.99) through June 28 during Deal Days. We live in an age where your movies, music, groceries, and even your spreadsheets … | Continue reading
On October 3, 1955, the motor vessel Joyita left Apia, Western Samoa, bound for the Tokelau Islands with 25 people aboard — 16 crew and 9 passengers, including a government medical officer carrying a supply of surgical instruments and drugs. The 69-foot wooden ship never arrived. … | Continue reading
On August 16, 1942, the Navy blimp L-8 lifted off from Treasure Island, San Francisco, on a routine antisubmarine patrol with Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody, 27, and Ensign Charles Adams, 35 — Adams's first flight as a commissioned officer. At 7:38 a.m., — Read the rest The post … | Continue reading
In 1832, a 14-year-old crew member named Otokichi left Japan on a rice transport ship bound for Edo. A storm blew the vessel off course, and it drifted across the northern Pacific for 14 months without a mast or rudder. The crew survived on desalinated seawater and their rice car … | Continue reading
TL;DR: Get the best prompts for your AI needs with this lifetime subscription to VibeFarm AI Prompt Composition Workspace, on sale now for just $29.99 (MSRP $179) through June 14 with code SAVE25. Your go-to AI model is only as good as your prompt. — Read the rest The post Get b … | Continue reading
TL;DR: 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan is $59.97 (reg. $540) through June 14 at 11:59PM — lifetime access, no subscription. Most people paying monthly for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini separately don't realize there's a better way. 1min.AI puts them all into a single dashboard for a … | Continue reading
The Lost Cosmonauts theory alleges that the Soviet Union launched humans into space before Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight — and that the cosmonauts onboard died. The strongest piece of supposed evidence came from Italian brothers Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia, amateu … | Continue reading
In September 1944, nine American pilots were shot down during bombing raids on Chichijima, the largest island in the Bonin chain. Eight were captured. The ninth, who evaded capture, was 20-year-old George H. W. Bush. The eight captured airmen — Lloyd Woellhof, Grady York, James D … | Continue reading
The John Frum movement arose on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu no later than the late 1930s. Followers believe John Frum — often depicted as an American serviceman — will one day return bringing wealth and prosperity. In some versions, a native man named Manehivi appeared dressed … | Continue reading
Emojli launched on August 29, 2014 — a social media app that restricted usernames and messages to emoji only. No letters, no numbers, no punctuation. YouTubers Tom Scott and Matt Gray built it after seeing the success of Yo, an app whose entire function was sending the word "Yo" … | Continue reading
The Feast of the Ass was a medieval Christian celebration held on January 14, honoring the donkey that carried the Holy Family into Egypt. A girl and a child riding a real donkey would be led through town to the church, where the animal stood beside the altar during the sermon. — … | Continue reading
At some point, free tools and good-enough alternatives like Pages and Google Docs stop being scrappy and start being annoying. You know what actually works? The real Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office 2024 Home & Business is $104.97 (reg. $249.99) as a one-time purchase for Mac o … | Continue reading
TL;DR: Undetectable Humanizer Basic is $39.99 (reg. $1,080) through June 28 at 11:59 PM as part of Deal Days — lifetime access, no subscription. AI text has a tell. It's not always wrong, but it reads a certain way — overly tidy, slightly stiff. — Read the rest The post ChatGPT … | Continue reading
John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill — nicknamed "Fighting Jack" and "Mad Jack" — fought through the entire Second World War armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, and a set of bagpipes. He graduated from Sandhurst in 1926, left the army a decade later to work as a newspap … | Continue reading
Surely, you've seen the old movie trope where our plucky heroes duck into an abandoned car to flee from some encroaching danger, fold down the visor, and have the keys drop right into their laps. Have you ever seen anyone do that in real life? — Read the rest The post Why are ca … | Continue reading
Kingdom Hearts is one of those weird franchises I've never understood, and which becomes more obscure every time I've attempted to do so. So it's like Final Fantasy, but there are also a bunch of Disney characters there, along with a bunch of original characters that look like t … | Continue reading
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Larry David has been the master of awkward, people-talking-over-each-other comedy since Seinfeld, a talent he later honed on his long-running series Curb Your Enthusiasm. With Curb officially over since 2024, I and many others have wondered what L … | Continue reading
If you were fired or excluded from a job due to your race, age, or other demographics unrelated to the work you're being paid to do, it's called discrimination. But in our late capitalist world, the yacht-owning powers-that-be call it surveillance pricing. — Read the rest The po … | Continue reading
Zack Snyder is known for many things. He brought an innovative, visually provocative rendition of Frank Miller's 300 to theatres! He was responsible for bringing Superman back to the big screen (again). He completely misunderstood the canonical role Pa Kent played in Clark Kent b … | Continue reading
Lowtein is a simple website that geolocates you and tells you about the cheapest proteins available in your location. Here in Pittsburgh, for example, it informs me that Giant Eagle has a special on pork chops (56% blow the regional average price), Martin's Food Market has inexpe … | Continue reading
The Information reports that Microsoft is considering several ways to set loose its XBox gaming division, including spinning it out as a separate company, restructuring it as a subsidiary, or establishing a joint venture. Reuters echoes the paywalled report, which is clear about … | Continue reading
An early, sticker-sealed copy of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. sold for $3m at auction today, stomping the record set in 2021. Chris Kohler writes on Bluesky that it's the first sticker-sealed copy (from Nintendo's earliest production runs) to go under the hammer. — Read the rest … | Continue reading
TL;DR: If you're in the market for a budget-friendly alternative for desk-based work, this refurbished 2019 21.5-inch iMac offers a 4K display, solid everyday performance, and 1TB of storage for just $339.99 (reg. $1,499). If you think MacBooks are great, you aren't prepared for … | Continue reading
The president of Taipei's Shih Hsin University told graduates to end their own lives if they couldn't handle the workforce, remarks that led to widespread anger. Yang Mien-chieh and Jake Chung of The Taipei Times add that he subsequently requested a two-month suspension of his du … | Continue reading
Lake Powell is still more than 150 feet above dead pool, but it is only about 38 feet above minimum power pool, the line where Glen Canyon Dam stops generating hydropower. That is close enough to make the old "drain Lake Powell" debate feel less theoretical and more like reading … | Continue reading
Grandpa Pudding Brains has found another election he may not respect: a Democratic mayoral primary in Washington, D.C., may serve as a reason to impose martial law. Clearly, this man of the people has no respect for the will of the people. — Read the rest The post Grandpa Pudd … | Continue reading
Reversing the egocentric high watermark of the MAGA Clown Reich, a newly re-annoited The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts shares this livestream: How cheaply, and in the wrong font, Trump's slathering of his name on this monument to the arts, along with the abs … | Continue reading
In a Threads post, Craig Brittain, a former Arizona Senate candidate, says an FBI agent confronted him while he was protesting ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, and the alleged agent refused to give his name. Ignoring the grossness of an FBI visit for protesting peacefully, or the o … | Continue reading
Mel Fisher's treasure hunters are still pulling Spanish Empire leftovers out of the Florida Keys, and this time the ocean coughed up a 22-pound silver bar. After hitting the object with a knife and examining the surface, Nicholas said he saw telltale markings that were cons … | Continue reading
Residents of the Longfellow neighborhood in Minneapolis have been reporting loud, unexplained explosions for several decades. The booms mostly occur on summer nights and have been described as "house-shakingly loud" and low-pitched, distinct from a car crash or gunshot. In 2010, … | Continue reading
In April 1977 the Japanese trawler Zuiyō Maru, fishing east of Christchurch, New Zealand, pulled up a decomposing carcass about 10 meters long. The Zuiyo-maru carcass had "a 1.5-m-long neck, four large, reddish fins, and a tail about 2.0 m long," and its appearance "resulted in s … | Continue reading
TL;DR: The flowkey Piano Learning app is a fun way to pick up a new hobby. Learn to read sheet music and develop proper technique at your own pace with this 5-year subscription for just $79.99 (reg. $899). If learning a new instrument is one of your bucket-list items, this 5-year … | Continue reading
Here's a question: when was the last time you went out to the store and got yourself a physical gift card for online games retailer Steam? Here's another question: when was the last time you saw an online scammer requesting a Steam gift card as an advance fee before releasing the … | Continue reading
When I say scammers are using the hantavirus, I don't mean they're engineering devious biological weapon attacks (although I'm sure they would if they could.) It feels like it's barely been any time at all since a hantavirus outbreak left a Dutch cruise ship stranded and quaranti … | Continue reading
TL;DR: The Claude AI Professional E-Degree is on sale for $19.99 (MSRP $49) through June 14 and includes hands-on training for prompting, automation, integrations, workflows, and practical Claude AI productivity skills. Every once in a while, the internet collectively decides one … | Continue reading
Cicada 3301 is the name of "three sets of puzzles posted under the name '3301' online between 2012 and 2014." The first appeared on 4chan on January 4, 2012, and ran for nearly a month; a second came in 2013, and a third in 2014. — Read the rest The post An anonymous group poste … | Continue reading
The Yuba County Five were five young men from Yuba County, California, "each with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions," who went missing after a college basketball game on February 24, 1978. Their car "was found abandoned in a remote area of Plumas National F … | Continue reading
New York, baby! Greatest city in the world! Or at least it is for a few hours this morning, because it's playing host to a massive inflatable bust of Elon Musk that appeared unannounced in Times Square. The inflatable, which is a shockingly good likeness, depicts a shirtless Mus … | Continue reading
In 1932, a 22-year-old John W. Campbell — later the Astounding editor who shaped midcentury science fiction, and, as has been well documented, an open fascist — published "The Last Evolution" in Amazing Stories. It's narrated by the last thinking machine on Earth, recalling how h … | Continue reading
A worn copy of a 1912 pulp magazine, graded just 2.0, sold for $58,560 this month because Tarzan is on the cover. All-Story No. 94, from October 1912, contains "the First Appearance of Tarzan" — Edgar Rice Burroughs' introduction of Tarzan of the Apes — and this rare U.K. — Read … | Continue reading
Kryptos is a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Dedicated on November 3, 1990, it carries four encrypted messages. "Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth message remains one of the most fam … | Continue reading
Grant Sanderson's new 3Blue1Brown video starts from a 1940s question — how far can you compress text? — and arrives at why it matters for AI. The bridge is from Claude Shannon's information theory: "prediction and compression are mathematically equivalent," two sides of the same … | Continue reading
While shopping for groceries in Estonia, customers at the Viimsi Shopping Center in the town of Haabneeme can come face-to-face with a piece of ancient history: this gigantic Ice Age boulder estimated to be around 10,000 years old. The stone was uncovered during excavation work f … | Continue reading
Let's give it up for the next year, people: the announcement teaser for the hotly anticipated RPG The Elder Scrolls 6 was revealed eight years ago today at E3, an event that has died in the intervening time. Another couple months, and Bethesda will be hard at work remastering it. … | Continue reading
With Wolfenstein on ice for the foreseeable future after that weird 80s one, the very specific "cathartic Nazi-killing simulator" crown seems to be up for grabs. As seems to be the trend with gaming lately, however, now is the time of the indie game, where teams you've never hear … | Continue reading
I don't suppose I could ask you to take a few minutes off doomscrolling to enjoy some good news today? It may just be because it's June, the month I legally get to tell the straights to shut up, but I'm somehow feeling pretty damn good right now. — Read the rest The post Sam Ben … | Continue reading
AHOY Comics is launching its first Kickstarter, and it's doing so with a project that sounds right in Mark Russell's wheelhouse: a satirical science fiction drama about UFO cults, conspiracy thinking, and the human need to find meaning in the unknown. — Read the rest The post Ma … | Continue reading