Seth Godin:

More hope.

More health.

More security.

More innovation.

More breakthroughs.

More connection.

More creation.

More joy.

Read the rest.

This is one of the most biting commentary on school shootings I’ve ever seen.

Patricia Oliver lost her son, 17-year-old Joaquin Oliver, in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018. Since then, Oliver has committed herself to the cause of gun reform in America — and her latest effort involves this adorably horrific children’s book that depicts the events of the day in cartoonishly gruesome detail.

I love the idea of sending a hard copy of the book to your representatives to drive the point home, but I know where it will end up when most Republicans get it.

Jomboy breaks down a fun moment between St. Louis Cardinals catcher Wilson Contreras and Boston Red Sox pitcher Kenley Jansen. Contreras messed with Jansen with his wits and that pesky new pitch clock rule.

Jamelle Bouie, writing for The New York Times, takes a look at the legislation that Republicans around the country are pushing and, in the style of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, outlines what goals they are attempting to achieve.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

That’s biting and, perhaps, entirely truthful?

The Galactic Starcruiser hotel never made sense to me. Obviously, it didn’t connect with enough people.

I’d do a Star Wars hotel if it was just that, a hotel. I think all the interactive crap (that skyrocketed the price) they forced guests into doing for an “experience” didn’t help, and it’s the main reason why I never had a desire to go. There’s no way I could have convinced my wife to go along with any of this even if it appealed to me. And it never did.

Even if I had the money for it, I wouldn’t have spent it for a windowless hotel room that’s supposed to be in a space ship that’s also a LARP.

I am looking forward to the inevitable Defunctland about it…

Neil Gaiman, Author and Professor of the Arts at Bard, addresses New College of Florida Students, who organized their own Alt-Graduation Ceremony in defiance of the hostile takeover of their college and attack on their Academic Freedoms.

It’s a powerful speech.

AppleTV dropped a teaser trailer for the next great Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon.

Martin Scorsese has a long history with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Now, the iconic director is uniting his two muses for an AppleTV feature. Based on the best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon goes back to 1920s Oklahoma to retell the serial murder of the Osage Nation.

This trailer looks great.

According to the official plot synopsis, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and the IMF crew are tasked with “track[ing] down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands.” Isn’t that the plot of nearly all of them? Oh, hey. We get Eugene Kittridge played by Henry Czerny too. Nice call back to the first movie way back in 1996.

Seriously though, this movie knows what the audience is here for: Tom Cruise running, Tom Cruise on a motorcycle, Tom Cruise doing yet another batshit crazy stunt in the name of entertainment.

And everyone loves it.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 opens in theaters July 12. The finale (of the franchise? Ethan Hunt’s story?) Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part II hits theaters on June 24, 2024.

The synopsis for The Creator illuminates more of the plot we see in the trailer. Apparently the movie is about the following:

Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua (John David Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself.  Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.

I’m getting The Golden Child meets The Matrix with a dash of A.I. Artificial Intelligence vibes set in a science-fictional future. So, somewhat original. This movie looks cinematic while still retaining the necessary amount of heart. At least, that’s what I’m getting from the teaser.

I suspect AI will be the bad guy in science fiction movies coming out over the next few years. Skynet… here we come. HAL says hello.

However, I would like to point out that I am tired of the remixing of classic rock songs for the trailer trope. I’m over it.

Religion’s importance is shrinking. Good.

The report, titled "Religion and Congregations in a Time of Social Upheaval," surveyed more than 6,600 adults from all 50 states. Despite the deep political divides in the U.S., the majority of churchgoers — 56% — do not believe their own church is more politically divided than five years ago.

Deckman says that this could be due to sorting that has already taken place: People tend to affiliate with congregations that align with their political beliefs, in part to avoid conflicts they experience in broader society[…]

Participation in houses of worship continues to decline, according to the study. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they “seldom” attend religious services, and 29% of respondents said they “never” attend religious services. A decade ago, those figures were 22% and 21%, respectively.

It can’t hit 0% soon enough.

It will be a sad day when the ISS heads to Point Nemo. What’s the replacement?

In preparation for his demise, the great composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto—who died of cancer in March at age 71—prepared a playlist for his own funeral. 

The funeral playlist features beautiful pieces by Ennio Morricone, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, David Sylvian, Laurel Halo, Bach, and the Bill Evans Trio, among many others.

Nicholas Bate –

1. Know when enough is enough. Of anything: salted caramel and chocolate tart, push-ups and ‘success’.

2. Sometimes you can ignore the views of other people.

3. Nobody can take your learning away from you. Read, read, read.

4. Walking does actually solve pretty well anything from the immediate worry to a long-term health issue. Constant movement is more important than occasional exercise.

5. Nothing lives for long (healthily) in a cubicle.  There is an escape plan. 

6. Reptile brain is awesome in emergencies. Human brain understands long-term consequences and interdependencies, displays emotional intelligence and when finally tuned can access secrets of the universe. Use it at all times except emergencies. Tip: most of life is not an emergency.

7. Bizarrely, doing something well can stop us hating it. Useful for the day job. 

David Roth, writing at Defector, has been thinking about Twitter.

Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes a place where important things happen, more often a place to watch less-important things happen alongside if not truly with other people, always a wall on which to write graffiti and a periscope that would show you a stranger being weird—it has never been what they said it was. The overheated register in which Silicon Valley types have tended to talk about Twitter as The Global Town Square, a horizonless agora in which all of humanity can meet to uh engage in free speech together or whatever, is how they always talk about whatever they are selling, right before they move on to selling something else. For better and worse, these people like Twitter—many people do—but they can’t say why, or call it what it is. And so it has to bring people together, for the future’s sake.

You can see the problem. It is a miraculous thing, or anyway an impressive one, to invent a platform on which anyone can speak to anyone/everyone else, about anything. But because these people don’t really value people or togetherness very highly, or have much to say, or consider the future as anything but a place where they will become richer, they don’t really know what to do with that. “Bringing people together” is a value-neutral thing, and a mass of humanity does not become a community—and is not prevented from becoming a mob—simply because they’re all in the same place. Silicon Valley types want whatever’s next because there might be money in it, but also they are fundamentally not very interested in inhabiting or maintaining the new realities they shape; it’s too much like work. Maintaining things is hard, and requires much more care than making things does.

Nicholas Bate –

Coffee brewed.

Pencil paused.

Sun rose.

Thoughts tumbled.

Doctor Who returns later this year for its 60th anniversary with three special episodes.

Special One: THE STAR BEAST

Special Two: WILD BLUE YONDER

Special Three: THE GIGGLE

I’m looking forward to watching Tennant and the returning Catherine Tate as they likely get into some more time travel shenanigans one last time before Ncuti Gatwa takes over as the new Fifteenth Doctor.

I was generally pleased with the first season of Foundation. It helps to lean into the “adaptation” part of the adapted from Isaac Asimov’s novels. Practically everything was new except for names of people, planets, and psychohistory. Overall, it worked pretty well. Season two looks great.

This should fit in nicely after watching Silo.

Sad news.

“The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47. Armstrong died by suicide.”

I did not really read her, but I knew her story. My heart goes out to her family and friends, especially her two children, who are feeling her loss right now.

Here’s a lovely tribute.

Wil Wheaton, writing on his site, has a long essay about our current political climate.

Remember how much fun it was to harmlessly TP your friends’ houses? How silly and goofy it was to ding-dong ditch someone? Just to do silly, childish, ultimately harmless expressions of being a kid who’s fooling around? Or how about playing hide and seek? Remember how fun that was?

Thanks to the Republican fascists who have gerrymandered and suppressed their way into minority rule in 21st-century America, any of those things will now likely get you killed by a paranoid gun nut who won’t suffer any consequences. And when it’s a white man who murders a BIPOC child, his state’s Republican governor will pardon any consequences that somehow slip past the barriers to justice they’ve built.

Pick a side. There is no middle.

[…]

You can try to tell yourself that you don’t vote for their policies, that your candidate isn’t extreme. But when you vote for ANY Republican, you’re voting for those policies, because Republicans do as they are told by their fascist supreme leader, Donald Tru&p. They fall in line with the extremists. So if you aren’t an extremist, what do you do? If you want the endless slaughter to end, what do you do?

You pick a side. You’re with America, or you’re with the MAGA movement.

There’s more. You should read the whole thing.