internet explorers club | may all your realities be augmented
People are making some damn cool things with robots recently. First off, there’s this augmented reality sandbox, where you can build in sand, and a Kinect sensor detects changes and adjusts the color-coded contour map accordingly (!!!)
A bit more creepy: scientists that created a robot “mother” that builds babies that evolve on their own. Temper that with a bot that auto-generates New Yorker caption contest entries. I welcome our new robot overlords. If you’re not yet ready to progress into the future, however, may I suggest this list of old-school internet acronyms.
In a similar nostalgic vein, Carly Mark interviewed Lisa Frank and unlike the previous super bizarre interview, it’s sweet, and interesting and engaging. Dylan’s Candy Bar has come out with a series of Mean Girls-themed candy, which includes YOU GO, GLEN COCO hot chocolate (!) and Burn Book cookies.
The Atlantic did this long piece on the Life and Death of the American Lawn (frankly, what I wish that history of the swimming pool piece was more like) and it’s GREAT:
Lawns became aesthetic extensions of Manifest Destiny, symbols of American entitlement and triumph, of the soft and verdant rewards that result when man’s ongoing battles against nature are finally won. A well-maintained lawn—luxurious in its lushness, implying leisure even as its upkeep had a stubborn way of preventing it—came, too, to represent a triumph of another kind: the order of suburbia over the squalor of the city
Speaking of All-American Stories, here is one about the inventor of the bloody mary meat straw. Lord have mercy. Also: A Brief History of Panda Diplomacy, and proposals for emoji flags for Scotland, Wales, Texas—no word on California yet.
Finally, just when you think “surely, wars for successions are for Game of Thrones and not for our Paper of Record,” you find this article about the struggles to choose a familial successor for the New York Times. I will be watching Empire instead, which has a better soundtrack, and not the three most awkward portraits ever.
Straight Outta Compton (Canada):
Unsolved Mysteries, ahoy! A mysterious uninhabited London mansion. The mystery of the Princes in the Tower might be getting solved… eventually? The worst Harry Potter fanfic ever written (debatable) and the mystery surrounding its authorship.
Oh, and Kanye announced that he’s running for president in 2020. As Today in Tabs said: “before you dismiss his intention to run for President, try to remember the last time Kanye said he would do something and then didn’t do it.”
Etcetera: Guillermo del Toro wants Godzilla to show up in a future Pacific Rim. Goldfish-shaped teabags are the cutest thing. Google changed their logo. A toilet museum is opening in Japan.
