Weekly Occurrence #134
The Great Friendship Flattening, Vikings, van Gough, etc.
🎨 It’s van Gogh’s birthday…
🔨 and I guess MC Hammer’s, too.
🎺 Also, happy birthday to the Brew, released 1970.
🚇 Riding the subway to Coney Island in 1987.
📰 A man appeared on the front page twice in the same day. For very different reasons.
🤳 A robotics company is using data and over 30 billion images collected through Pokémon Go to power delivery robots that navigate by sight instead of GPS.
🍊 How oranges become orange.
🌈 LEGO retires colors like seasonal menu items.
😭 Disney and Pixar love to make you cry, here’s the data.
🎶 New research argues humans are inherently musical, with rhythm and melody hardwired into the brain from birth rather than learned from culture.
🧬 Though most seemed to come from Scandinavia, a massive DNA study shows Vikings weren’t exactly a distinct ethnic group but a diverse mix of peoples; “Viking” described a role—raiding, trading, exploring—rather than ancestry.
🛹 Skating into middle age. “As I approach forty, I have fewer and fewer memories of being a child. It is enough that the body remembers.”
🤝 Social media was designed to keep us connected, but it’s quietly changing what connection even means. Instead of talking to friends, we mostly watch them: scrolling updates, liking posts, rarely engaging. Real relationships start to feel like parasocial ones, something we consume rather than participate in.
Are we less connected than we think?
✌️ Keep the Hoping Machine running.
Love,
Luke
