Aphantasia, Audiobooks on Spotify, Nature Photo Winners, Etc.
In which I can picture you reading this on this lovely autumn afternoon.
🤳 From McSweeney’s, a joke that probably hits too close to home: “I am still scrolling and would very much like to stop feeling things.”
“I don’t know what scrolling ever brought me. When I started, it must have been a good way to keep up with friends. That’s got to be it—why else would I have gotten into this? But now, all it does is make me feel sad and desperate about the state of the world. Even when I do scroll past my friends, their posts usually just make me feel insecure about my own life. They’re all traveling to Greece.”
🔪 A new Tinder and Peacock survey revealed the top horror movies to “help singles find a ‘boo,’” and torture porn is a lot bigger than I thought. “Horror (69%) was the second-favorite genre to watch on a date, just behind comedy (71%).”
📖 Lotta slang added to the dictionary last month, including bussin’, GOATED, mid, simp and padawan.
📲 How to turn your iPhone into a white noise machine. “But if you’re carrying an iPhone running iOS 15, you’ve already got a white noise feature built right into your phone’s operating system.”
The TL:DR -
Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual (under Hearing) > Background Sounds.
Of course, there’s a lot of similar stuff on Spotify as well.
🙉 Speaking of Spotify, they are about to offer access to audiobooks. Subscribers can access up to 15 hours free listening per month from among 150,000 titles starting later this year.
🧠 On aphantasia: “My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things: “I read about aphantasia for the first time, and it hit me hard: When people say ‘picture this scene in your head,’ they aren’t speaking metaphorically! People can actually invoke shapes and colors in their minds. The shock of this realization was followed by a piecing together of many of those little idiosyncrasies of mine into a single, coherent phenomenon that fit with the scientific description of the condition. By the time my formal diagnosis came, I was already quite sure I was aphantasic.”
Apparently mega-famous YA author John Green just discovered this about himself. “It's baffling to me that some of y'all see stuff in your mind. You SEE it? The way your eyes see? I always thought "visualize" meant thinking of the words/ideas/feelings associated with a thing, not actual visuals.
📺 The Best shows of the 21st Century, so says the Hollywood Reporter. Lots to argue with.
I think the The Wire should be in the top three., probably at the #2 spot.
I agree that Better Call Saul is better than Breaking Bad.
No The Office? Seems like they’re trying to start a riot.
📜 The U.S. Constitution is, “for one half of the country, a structural support, and, for the other, an imperilled instrument of the marginalized.” Step one is reading it.
🎭 From the BBC, a theatre in Norfolk believes it has discovered the only surviving stage on which William Shakespeare performed. “The theatre claims documents show that Shakespeare acted at the venue in 1592 or 1593.”
🦘 Also from the BBC, the finalists for the Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards. That western grey kangaroo looks like Bob Weir on his third set of the evening.
🐋 Also, these nature photos, winners from a “competition [that] attracted more than 8,000 entries in different categories celebrating the natural world.”
⭐️ Scientists might have some knowledge about a massive star that vanished in 2009. “In 2009 a giant star 25 times more massive than the Sun simply…vanished. Okay, it wasn’t quite that simple. It underwent a period of brightening, increasing in luminosity to a million Suns, just as if it was ready to explode into a supernova. But then it faded rather than exploding. And when astronomers tried to see the star, using the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), Hubble, and the Spitzer space telescope, they couldn’t see anything.”
❤️ As always, thank you for reading. Remember to keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
