A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Drone Awards 2024
A selection of the nominated images from this year’s Drone Awards. A winner will be announced on 28 September at the Siena World Photography Awards ceremony at the Teatro dei Rinnovati in Siena, Italy.
Personal Experiences and Attitudes of Daters
Most people who are on the dating market say their dating life is not going well and that it’s been hard to find people to date. They give a variety of possible explanations for this difficulty, but men and women report different reasons. Many men say it’s difficult for them to approach people, while majorities of women say it’s hard to find someone looking for the same type of relationship as them and who meets their expectations.
Carpentopod: A Walking Table Project
Back in 2008, I wrote some software for fun to generate various optimized walking mechanisms. And when I also picked up some electronics and wood working skills in more recent years, I was able to turn one of these mechanisms into an actual wireless walking wooden coffee table: the Carpentopod. This post briefly covers this project from start to end.
Why Do Divorced Guys Dress Like That?
But that’s not what people mean when they call a man the most divorced. In describing men this way, wordsmiths have crafted a critical spectrum to reflect their dismay, concern, disgust, chagrin, and often sexual aversion at a specific hypermasculinity shared by high-profile divorced guys. Journalist and critic Hunter Harris has a recurring bit about “the most divorced” men, naming Kanye West, Elon Musk, Ben Affleck, Joe Jonas, and Jeff Bezos as examples. It’s a distinction that’s not about the number of times a man’s marriages have dissolved but rather the severity of his resulting aura and how he presents himself.
An example: Musk is divorced, but he is the most divorced when he’s posting a picture of guns, cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke, and a small reprint of George Washington crossing the Delaware River on his nightstand.
Indigenous Creators Are Clashing With YouTube’s and Instagram’s Sensitive Content Bans
Shortly after Diamantha Aweti Kalapalo posted a video of a funeral ceremony in her village on YouTube in 2016, the platform took it down for violating its policy on child safety, which includes the prohibition of sexually explicit content.
In the video, a couple of tribesmen marched across a dirt road in Xingu, in the wild heartlands of central-west Brazil, playing long ceremonial flutes. Two raven-haired women trailed them, wearing their traditional outfit: a necklace and loincloth.
Is Anyone Out There?
It is hard, in any real-world city, to maintain the illusion of being the only person for any length of time. But the internet is different. There is always an element of unreality to an online interaction with another human: how do we know for sure that they are who they say they are? Can we be certain they’re even actually a person?
This is the idea at the core of what became known as Dead Internet Theory, a joke-cum-conspiracy that says if you’re reading these words online, you’re the last person on the internet. Everyone else is a bot. The other commentators on Reddit? Bots. The people in the videos or the podcasts you listen to? Bots. What’s filling the junky websites that we all can’t help but click? You guessed it. They’re all bots, and you’re the guinea pig in the perverse experiment of some unknown power.
A Week in the Life of a Young Asylum Seeker
Isaac likes to shower when the bathrooms are quiet at night.
He blasts Tems’ Love Me JeJe on repeat from his phone. “The stalls are huge and I can dance for like a whole hour before I go to sleep,” he smiles.
When I meet the 20-year-old Ugandan on a drizzly day at the start of June, he has been at Napier Barracks – a disused army enclosure turned “contingency asylum accommodation” in Kent – for 39 days. He came here following a three-month stint at an asylum hotel in Gloucester.
At Napier, men are housed 15 per room. All have claimed asylum. All are awaiting a decision that will entirely dictate the rest of their lives.
In these conditions, Isaac and his fellow residents are resourceful. Each will figure out their own coping mechanisms to make it through a waiting game with no clear finish line. They will hunt for moments of joy where they can find them – bathroom skanking included.