More melt report, courtesy of Leo:

The kid saw this and said, “He’s wearing a dress!”

I’ve been reading the pamphlet, Radical Witchcraft: Oppression and Resistance, which I picked up a few years ago at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. Lots of good stuff, including this Hitler pincushion:

According to the booklet,

Several types of this pin cushion were sold in the US. They quickly became popular after President Roosevelt acquired one for this desk.

Somehow I had never heard about this half-silly, half-serious act of antifascist magic in the Oval Office. Tuck it away in the “Magic and Resistance” file.

Less useful tip but more pleasureable: you can turn Apple Maps on your phone into a fidget spinner just by engaging streetview and looking straight up. (Sadly, Google Maps doesn’t let you whip around nearly as fast.)

To whoever designed this institutional thermometer’s legend, I tip my cap. That butt! That snail! That crawling child!!!

Related: a skit titled “We’re the New York Times!”

This GxAce video, “I Visited a Camera Lens Factory and Saw Something I Didn’t Expect” seems clearly to be a piece of sponcon. It’s also a sweet prose poem—a paean to the workers who actually make the lenses ostensibly being reviewed. An interesting artifact, beautifully made.

I hope they find Mango!

If you have some leftover pie, why not cut it up into big chunks and eat it with your hands?

This is a few months old now, because I haven’t put out a Lightplay in a bit, but my partner Lisa wrote about her “Top Picks at the David Lynch Auction” for Alta Journal, and it’s a banger.

The auction’s most direct hit of pure Lynchian strangeness and humor is ‘Socks for ‘Bobby’’ ($600). Per the catalog: ‘Presumably, these are socks either worn or were considered to be worn by Dana Ashbrook as he reprised his role as Bobby Briggs in Twin Peaks: The Return.’

They ended up selling for $1,625.

One of my favorite numbers. (Seen earlier today in Van Nuys.)

Do you enjoy the occasional pithy, spear-sharp rant? You might like “I Am an AI Hater.” I found this part brutally to-the-point:

[T]he makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

I’ve recommended Benn Jordan’s videos before. “Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras” might be his best yet. Highly entertaining, highly informative, relevant to our moment, and containing what might be the best explanation I’ve yet seen of how surveillance and data mining work.

I appreciated this plea for folks to return to making our own websites. It’s not only a good argument, it’s packed with cool technical information about neocities. If I wasn’t wed to Wordpress/Siteground for most of my projects, I would absolutely use the 11ty/Github/Neocities workflow described here.

A local establishment—a nudie bar that was actually just a brothel—recently closed. The out-of-business sign is pleasingly to-the-point.

I enjoyed this podcast interview with a booster for “Dark Retreats”—therapeutic visits to spaces that have been specially prepared or identified for their profound lightlessness. Who can say why in this day and age I found it so soothing to listen to a long, gentle discussion of this practice.

I just read Keep on Going by Austin Kleon (via Xander Beattie), and this passage intrigued me:

Me, I like the ‘caffeine nap’: Drink a cup of coffee or tea, lie down for fifteen minutes, and get back to work when the caffeine has kicked in.

So after lunch I tried it. Drank a big cup of coffee. Napped. Then I got up, and, well, felt like absolute heated garbage for the next eight hours. I felt on the edge of both falling asleep and throwing up. This little bio-hack basically crashed my body! I don’t think caffeine works the same for me as it does for other people.