We're On The Way To Mordor But We Have A Synthesiser

The most popular link last time was this exploration of Brad Pitt's public persona, with this scary conversation with ChatGPT second.

1. A list of very bad advice. I'm especially drawn to this one: "Assume that all your success is due to hard work and all your failure is due to bad luck."
2. I do not often feel the urge to read contemporary French fiction in translation. That is simply not who I am. But this review has made me curious to try this fast food-based novel, On the Clock by Claire Baglin.
3. Someone with ADHD and a can-do attitude decided to hack a receipt printer to make completing a task just that extra bit more satisfying.

Phenomenons - Ryo Minemizu - Photography

Larval fish and invertebrates larvae that appear in the sea at night. The figure was created by wisdom and skill far beyond our imagination and it’s shining like a jewel.

Photography

4. Let's look at some extremely detailed pictures of strange underwater creatures.
5. If you feel like your news sources aren't giving you a full picture of all the awful things that are happening around the world right now, then I recommend perusing Wikipedia's "list of ongoing armed conflicts".
6. An illustrated talk on how to reclaim the joy of "the good internet". It involves making something weird and not caring what other people think of you.

7. You are right to be a little afraid of seagulls. There's one in San Francisco that has learned how to hitch rides to a food source (aka a rubbish dump).
8. I was all in as soon as I read the headline of this piece: "commence project 'yeet broadband'?". It's a fully-costed plan for living without a broadband connection, which it turns out makes sense both from a financial standpoint and from a "making being online all the time slightly less convenient" standpoint.
9. A wonderful essay on what a woman needs to write, encompassing Woolf, Austen and more:

"A woman writer needs money, she needs quiet, she needs solitude, the liberty to ignore the intolerable noise of company to better attend the society inside her head. She needs to give herself permission to run about with her hair uncombed, to wander all day in pajamas, to ignore the unmade bed, the dishes in the sink, the unanswered emails, the annoying, buzzing phone. She needs the luxury to think of her own needs because since birth she has been trained to deny she has any. She needs to become Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of creation and destruction, a monster so terrible the conquistadores were forced to rebury her after they had unearthed her."

10. You'll have to pry the semicolons from my cold, dead hands.
11. A multi-generational perspective on the childfree life.
12. What does a creative life really look like, beyond the fixed narratives of "late bloomer" or "young prodigy" that we tell ourselves?
13. A heart-warming story of two lost "Dungeon Synth" albums. They're great to listen to while working — imagine something like "we're on the way to Mordor but we have a Korg X5D synthesiser".