I wrote my own version of Stranger Things 5. I wrote it as a safeguard, in case they screwed up the final season, so I would have a conclusion to the saga that at least satisfied me. I also wrote it as a fun fan-fiction experiment, to see how different our stories would be, and where our visions might intersect
— Read on rossonl.wordpress.com/2026/01/02/an-alternate-version-of-stranger-things-5/
Basement Whatever
Escape the algorithm
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“[It] was hardly a nursery for intellectuals, it was a hotbed of false values, it harbored an unattractive percentage of small-time crooks and con artists, and the chances of being successful there were minimal,” he writes. “But it was fascinating, and if you were lucky, it was fun.”
— Read on www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/05/david-niven-memoir-scandals-old-hollywood -
Stranger Things was a show people loved because of the vibe. Now, Stranger Things is a show people watch because they remember loving that season one vibe, and they figure they might as well finish the rest of it.
— Read on www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/scifi/stranger-things-vibe.html -
Africa will produce new variants of Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, many African regions have not been Christian or Muslim for very long, not by historical standards. That might boost the chances of innovation, since to them it is not a very fixed doctrine.
— Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/three-scenarios-for-the-emergence-of-new-religious-doctrine.html -
While the past midlife crisis model focused on breaking down confining bonds, chipping away at that adult façade to return to the fountain of youth, Xers are still in full construction mode. “I’ve made a list – it’s the ‘do-better’ list,” Leslie Mann’s character tells her husband in Judd Apatow’s flawed but occasionally insightful “This Is 40.” Her list, of course, is exhausting: A far cry from Peter Sellers’ laced-up, nearly calcified lawyer, chronically encased in his business suit, fighting to break out of convention, Debbie seems like a woman without a past, chronically intent on self-reinvention. She’s not looking back at what she lost – she’s barely gotten started.
More at the link.
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“People want a fair deal from someone they like.”
When questioned about his actions to get people to like him, he simply says, “I tell them that I like them.”
— Read on fs.blog/joe-girard/ -
You have to identify with this past of yours, and you have to find some way to make it make you stronger. If college was a quicksand pit of despair then you have to accept that and find some way to be empowered by it.
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the U.S. is in the middle of a great shift — in the 19th and 20th centuries, high class in America was defined as “anything French”, while in the 21st century it’s defined as “anything Japanese”.
Apparently the Japanese don’t realize it yet? More here.
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NASA’s been clear that it doesn’t intend to replace the space station.
Instead, the agency wants to shift from landlord to tenant, purchasing space station services from private players rather than running a facility of its own. It’s betting the private space industry can help drive down costs and accelerate innovation.
— Read on singularityhub.com/2025/12/26/the-era-of-private-space-stations-launches-in-2026/ -
the way we think about the world—made of separate, clearly labeled “things” that you can depend on to “be themselves”—is an illusion. The universe is governed by physical laws that are all about movement, forces, warping, and never about peacefully existing in a room
— Read on planktonvalhalla.com/20251204-purpose-from-first-principles/ -
What do you notice about this reconstruction? That’s right, it looks awful. In the eyes of modern viewers, at least, the addition of this matte, heavily saturated color has turned a really good work of art into a really bad one.
— Read on worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/ -
The head tax is bad tax policy dressed up as soak-the-rich populism. It’s the kind of thing that sounds good in a City Council speech, but creates real harm for the workers it’s supposed to help. If we want to find more revenues to close our budget gap, we have better options5, and we should focus on them. Chicago tried this before, decided it was a mistake, and eliminated it. We shouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
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Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. This is what time-locked language models make possible. Trained exclusively on texts published before specific cutoff dates (1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946), these models serve as aggregate witnesses to the textual culture of their era. They cannot access information from after their cutoff date because that information literally does not exist in their training data.
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Oddly, today’s sweet plum pudding hails from a meatier dish. As Maggie Black writes in History Today, the dish that eventually evolved into plum pudding originally contained preserved, sweetened meat “pyes” and boiled “pottage” (that is, vegetables) and was enjoyed in Britain as early as Roman times.
— Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-figgy-pudding-180957600/ -
This morning, I woke up in a supremely comfortable bed, knowing there would be no deadly predators or pests to eat or infect me. With cheap soaps and pristine, hot water, I became cleaner in five minutes than was possible for any human—no matter how wealthy—in the past.
With a flick of a switch, I conjured hot coffee into existence with a taste and quality that could not have been summoned by any empire or fleet previously. In a safe car that could rapidly whisk me to another country in a few hours—by driving onto a train that literally travels under the ocean—I typed a few keystrokes on a magic device that allowed me to listen to virtually any music recorded, anywhere on the planet, in the last century or so.
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The Isle of the Dead, Arnold Bocklin It was the opinion of the Symbolists, and Bocklin in particular that the purpose of art was to reveal through the use of a language no longer logical, but from “other” reality that hides behind that immediately perceptible with careful use of “symbols.”
From Arnold Bocklin, 60 Paintings
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“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.”
— Read on www.rogerebert.com/features/bright-walldark-room-august-2014-well-jump-and-well-see-by-chad-perman
Basement Whatever 