Here on my list you’ll find plenty of genres. Arthouse as much as action, horror as much as romance, thrillers alongside mysteries. About 20% of them are foreign films (non-English language) and they come from anywhere between 1940 and the present year of 2025. These are the 100 films that I’ve seen many times and have shown me the potential of great cinema. It is not intended as an objective list of best films; there are plenty of those online and you don’t need another from me. This is my list of personal favorites, the ones I couldn’t live without if I could only save a hundred.
— Read on rossonl.wordpress.com/2025/08/10/if-i-could-save-only-100-films/
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On the Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.
But this is supposed to be okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.
— Read on slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/ -
10. The data center buildout reaches 3.5% of US GDP in 2026.
The scale of investment mirrors the historical expansion of the railroads. The only factor that slows overall building is perceived risk within the credit market, particularly in the private credit market. The massive growth in that asset class suddenly shows strains of increasing default rates, creating a potential bottleneck for the most capital-intensive infrastructure projects.
— Read on tomtunguz.com/2026-predictions/ -
Despite Neal’s reputation as a frenetic hipster, “I just realized that there weren’t that many trips,” Carolyn said. “It sounds as though they were doing this all the time. Half of them were coming home again — people don’t realize that Jack was going home and Neal was coming home. There weren’t that many anyhow…Jack took a trip once a year and Neal would take quickies here and there. But we had a very settled home-life for ten years.”
— Read on www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/carolyn-cassady-interview -
One-bedroom units in the building average $3,500— except two of them, subject to the city’s rent-stabilization laws, which hold rents below $900 per month.
As a result, both units have been allowed to fall into disrepair, because the cost of restoring them to habitability is greater than what they’d generate in rent.
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Pliny the Elder, who in his Natural History, completed in 77 AD, commented that the Empire’s legionaries had not yet extended knowledge of the island of Britain beyond the neighbourhood of the Caledonian Forest
— Read on www.linkedin.com/pulse/mythical-great-wood-caledon-part-1-origins-richard-oram-khkge -
In my (extremely biased) opinion, the most stylish people on earth work at Fluevog.1 Unlike, say, Aritzia, you can walk into a store and never predict how the employees are going to be dressed. It’s a brand that celebrates individuality to the point where you’re allowed to wear whatever you want, as long as the look is totally your own. One day, I came across a video interview with an employee at their New York City store, Madeline Kevelson. After a brief scroll of her Instagram, @spiltmlk, I was smitten by her complicated, historical outfits that seem to exist outside of time.
— Read on freakpalace.substack.com/p/i-found-the-best-dressed-person-in
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One of Diablo 4’s most significant technical changes is its fully connected overworld. Instead of isolated zones, players move through environments that update continuously. Enemy density, weather changes, public events and world boss timers are all managed through cloud coordination. As clients request updates, servers adjust local states to reflect global conditions.
The setup reduces the traditional boundaries seen in older ARPGs. It requires fast, consistent communication between server clusters and player devices. When too many events occur simultaneously or the server load spikes, players notice it immediately through latency or ‘rubber-banding’. Diablo 4’s smoothness during crowded encounters is largely a result of intelligent distribution of compute processes in multiple data centres.
— Read on www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/how-cloud-infrastructure-shapes-the-modern-diablo-experience/ -
While you can always twist reality to soothe your ego, iron, with its uncompromising physical reality, won’t support your self-deception. It doesn’t give a shit how you feel. As Rollins wrote, two hundred pounds “is always two hundred pounds,” regardless of whether you slept well, had a breakup, want to lift, or want the weight to exist.
What is iron in your life? What qualities, what people, what ideas can you rely on to bring you back to reality?
— Read on kupajo.com/iron-never-lies/ -
when I was much more active on Twitter than I am now, I’d find myself, e.g., washing dishes and, without wanting to, thinking about various mundane things in the form of tweets. Some nascent half-kernel of an idea would come to me and, like a hack comedian for whom every banal thing is material, I would immediately start working it over for any and all tweet-like potential.
Maybe there was a tiny bit of dish soap left at the bottom of the bottle, and I considered diluting it with water to get it out more easily, and make the bottle last longer. I wouldn’t simply think that. Thanks to Twitter, I’d think something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, “The masculine urge to water down the dish soap…” or “The two genders [picture of brand-new dish soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap]…” or “Choose your fighter [same two pictures again]…” or “Wake up babe, new diluted dish soap just dropped,” or “Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy…” or “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap…”
And so on. Just cycling through a procession of dumb, Twitter-borne phraseologies as they ran through my head
— Read on www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing -
How to get control of YouTube. Shut off the algorithm and get a better landing page.
How to get control of Spotify. Escape the algorithm, expand your listening.
How to get control of Twitter. “Onboarding to Twitter is challenging. It’s not a rewarding experience for most people; your posts barely get any engagement at all until you have a few hundred followers at least, and the process to get there is punishing. It takes a lot of time to curate a good Twitter feed; the median content on there is trash.”
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These songs that make me think of Europe as “the other” – a remote place difficult for Americans to understand. The flip side of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. This is not to be confused with songs that deliberately make Europe seem exotic or remote.
“This is the Day,” The The
“Moderation” and “French Boys”, Cate le Bon
“West End Girls,” Pet Shop Boys
(movies where Europe is the other: “Say Anything,” “Beyond Sunrise”, “Wings of Desire”)
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“The Serendipity Machine: Notes on Using Twitter.”
Some guidelines for using Twitter as a superpower – meeting people, getting questions answered, learning. It covers how difficult it is getting traction at first.How to Be Found by Your People Online (YouTube)
“Transform your Instagram Feed Into a Community Bulletin Board.” Make the Instagram algorithm biased to local community. “…curating in this fashion is an excellent way for turning the platform’s shortcomings into a positive.”
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“Will Emerson talks about the impending financial turmoil”: “the only reason they get to continue living like kings is we have our fingers on the scale in their favor”
“The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything” – “The “number go up” rule is not a story of greed or economics, it’s a story of how we make decisions as a society.”
“Democracy?” – “Will you gentlemen excuse us for a moment please?”
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The PARA Method – the best way to organize a folder that I’ve ever found.
Getting Things Done – Systematize the clutter in your brain and get things done – they call it work Zen for a reason.
An opinionated guide to using Anki correctly. – repetitive ways to improve learning.
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Hollywood has changed dramatically, in obvious ways to those old enough to remember the old system. Stars used to be marketed as gods, their words uniquely valuable, their images curated completely. Now it’s different. The internet makes controlling an image impossible, competition from social media, news, and unlimited streaming means only a handful of stars can be marketed to everyone, and even then, they remain stars that started out before the era of fragmentation. Conspiracy theories nip at the margins — what was all that marketing covering up, exactly? And we’ve started to question the overarching narratives that we absorbed.
“Forever Young” (YouTube) – I’ve watched this video many times; it feels like lifetimes ago. Yet the people are still stars today. It’s because all the money spent branding these actors can’t be replicated in a fragmented ecosystem, so they’re still marketable.
George Clooney on Hollywood “elites” (X) – Plenty of conspiracy theories exist; here’s a grounded take.
We’ve all been raised by evil love stories – Be careful what you consume.
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In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari says that symbols tie cultures together. Without them, we couldn’t unite into nations and tribes. Money is a symbol, national identity is a symbol, brands and institutions are a symbol. Symbols therefore are important, and the digital world rushes over us with new symbols and destroys old symbols. What does this mean?
Don’t get lost in the world of signs (X). – Want to avoid getting lost? Here is a very practical (and very short) strategy.
Things are getting weird (X) – Where is this all going and where is it going to go?
My review of Superman – the symbol is as important as the movie.
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“the curve we’ve been riding just flattened into a long plateau.”(X) – a sensible look at what physics and energy teaches us about the future of AI.
“What would a human pretending to be an AI say?” Interesting read on the language used by chatbots, and how it is based on human language. “AIs are trained to predict the training data, not to learn unrelated abilities, so we should expect an AI asked to predict the thoughts of an AI to describe the thoughts of a human pretending to be an AI.”
“ChatGPT and the meaning of life” – a philosopher’s thoughts on a future of life without work, and what it means – both good and bad. “Grief, you don’t need me to tell you, is a complicated beast. You can grieve for something even when you know that, on balance, it’s good that it’s gone.”
Basement Whatever 