The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time, including Inaccessible Island Rail, Macaroni Penguin, Morepork, Chocolate Boobook, Dickcissel, Carunculated Caracara, and Resplendent Quetzal.
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Entries for June 2026
The Best Thing About The Satanic Panic. “There’s a phenomenon called the rhyme-as-reason effect that says people are more likely to believe something is true if it rhymes.”
JS Crossword. “This crossword uses some lesser-known and cursed JS features, so I’d recommend it for people already somewhat familiar with JavaScript.” Diabolical.
Daft Punk, Medieval-Style
Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.
Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
Frozen To -22 Degrees, BYD’s New EV Just Charged To 97% In Only 12 Minutes. This is genuinely impressive — charging and driving an EV in subzero winter weather is just brutal (ask me how I know).
They’re doing a film adaptation of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Daisy Edgar-Jones will play Sadie (perfect choice) and the director is Oscar-winner Siân Heder (Coda).
The Birds of Palestine
Illustrator John Rooney has teamed up with the Middle East Children’s Alliance to produce and sell this Birds of Palestine print. Rooney on Instagram: “All profits will be going towards providing emergency assistance to children and families in what is still a dire situation in Palestine.”
TIL that Andreessen Horowitz owns/runs the NYC Tech Week event. Among other things, A16Z made Daniel Penny a partner in the firm despite no investing experience after he killed a homeless Black man on the NYC subway.
If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel. “Bilton reveals himself as a goon, a soft-peddler, a PR man, an obfuscator; the opposite of everything that 60 Minutes is supposed to be”.
Re the Patagonia vs. Pattie Gonia case: the company should sponsor her environmental efforts and part of that is a trademark agreement where each side compromises a little bit; Pattie can keep doing her thing and Patagonia is seen as an ally again.
Why Wildfire Experts Are So Worried About This Year’s Fire Season. “Key environmental indicators show that the nation is a tinderbox, gripped by widespread drought and with a light snowpack in the mountains.”
I’ve probably featured this before but always worth a re-up: “A Books Unbanned library card gives teens across the United States free digital access to ebooks and digital resources, including banned and challenged books — no matter where they live.”
Star Wars Influences: Dam Busters
The original Star Wars movie was a mashup. George Lucas and his collaborators pulled from everywhere: westerns, samurai movies, Flash Gordon, and a 1955 war film called The Dam Busters. This video shows just how closely the attack on the Death Star mirrors a scene from The Dam Busters of a group of bombers attacking a dam. The dialogue is identical in places. From the Dam Busters Wikipedia page:
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters.
You can also watch Star Wars footage with Dam Busters audio and Dam Busters footage with Star Wars audio to see just how closely the two scenes match.
Given modern IP concerns and stakes, it’s difficult to envision this type of homage working today. Star Wars came out just 22 years after The Dam Busters, which is a beloved & acclaimed movie in Britain…it’s not obscure. Imagine a movie released in 2026 by a young Academy Award-nominated director that lifts a scene wholesale from a 2004 film like The Notebook, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Million Dollar Baby — it just wouldn’t happen without a lot of lawyerly conversation. I mean, maybe Lucas had those convos with The Dam Busters filmmakers… 🤷♂️
“Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.” And the bot just went ahead and did it.
In Post-War Japan, the US Used Quiz Culture to Help Democratize the Country. TV quiz shows “normalized participation, merit-based competition, and equal opportunity — values that contrasted sharply with the hierarchical structures [of] prewar Japan”.
Meet the Ukrainian Stunt Pilot Who Shoots Down Russian Drones
Timur Fatkullin is a Ukrainian flying ace who uses his acrobatic flying skills honed before the war to shoot down Russian drones.
When I fly close to the target, I can’t engage because there’s houses or infrastructure underneath. So we keep flying, keeping it in the searchlight, in the spotlight. And we’re not even, because it’s like 200 kilos target and we’re six tons, and it’s black Shahed in the black night. But from my aerobatics, I brought formation flying. You have to be professional, you have to be confident, practice a lot, anticipate a lot, and trust completely each other. There’s no other way. So these skills help enormously, and with this aircraft, we can stay in the air up to 4.5 hours. It’s my devotion, not just to my country, but to aviation. That’s the truth.
As you can see in this video from the NY Times, planes like these shoot the drones down using low-fi techniques: with machine guns mounted in the planes’ doorways.
One of the drone-hunting pilots, who are civilian volunteers: “Standing aside and doing nothing is impossible. For our team, it’s impossible.”
And from a different perspective, here’s a WSJ video profile of a Ukrainian drone pilot:
Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. “A collection of the greatest political maps in history and how these images have an unmatched power to influence our thinking — and our world.”
“Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.” Yessss.
The Illuminated Windows of NYC
For his project Windows, Dave Krugman took photos of hundreds of NYC apartment windows at night and stitched them together into ever-shifting typologies. What’s going on in each of those apartments?
Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week. Lucas edited Star Wars (won an Oscar for it), Taxi Driver, Return of the Jedi, and American Graffiti. It was Marcia that suggested to George Lucas that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.
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