Robert Yang made a web-based clicker game called Up the Vote in response to news about dismal voter registration rates among young people in New Zealand, where he lives. I enjoyed both reading about it and playing it—which is apparently only possible for a few more days, until the real-life registration deadline passes.

Yang’s rumination on so-called “serious games” is interesting to me too; I am at least adjacent to the “old game studies academics” he mentions as a group, and recall when talk of games as agents for social change seemed to be everywhere. Gosh, yeah, I haven’t really thought much about that in years, though I expect that says more about me and where my life has taken me since circa-2006 than anything else.

I have to admit I’m brought up a little short by things presupposed by this article by the European Space Agency about AMEC, a cloud in the Martian atmosphere that forms daily (by Martian reckoning) over a certain mountain, then stretches over 1,000 miles before dissipating until the next sunrise. First of all: Mars has clouds? By which I mean: Mars has water, or anyway water vapor in its atmosphere? I guess it does?? OK!

I haven’t watched any of the dozen films on jwz’s list of introductory Hammer Horror movies, but his enthusiasm in listing them makes me want to amend this.

Any Human Ever is a very good single-purpose science-exhibit website. Pull the lever and see, in charts and graphs, the life story of a fictional but statistically plausible human being from a randomly determined point in Earth’s past.

I have “played” twice and thought I got lucky by getting people in the distant past—less likely, since most people who have existed have done so relatively recently—but then watched as both perished within weeks of birth for unsurprising reasons. OK, I just now tried again and pulled a Chinese farmer from the 25th century BCE who lived to 33 before typhoid fever finally carried him off. In any case, a stark reminder that, no matter how bad things seem out there, you are still almost certainly better off today than at any point in the past.

The site is transparent about its use of generative AI to extract or derive its source data. I do admit I had to hold my nose a bit to get past the extremely Claude Code aesthetics, which I have lately become more sensitive to.

Jason Kottke shares a 1962 correspondence from Bertrand Russell politely but firmly declining the openly fascist Oswald Mosley’s invitation to discourse.

I’m not saying they’re right or wrong, because I don’t know anything that’s going to happen, but the unshakeable confidence of people looking ahead to the AI bubble popping any day now, bringing suffering and woe to all their enemies and righteous joy to themselves, reminds of millenarians who are ever-sure that Christ’s return is imminent and won’t they be sorry. Or, perhaps, the rumors that AI researchers are taking up smoking en masse since they figure that their work will either cure all cancers or kill all humans well before they suffer any ill effects.

Over at Coyote Yipps, Lou writes to Janet about a guard dog of his acquaintance that doesn’t hesitate to chase or even kill coyotes that try to raid the livestock he protects. But, to his employers’ chagrin, the dog overtly looks the other way for one specific coyote, letting her snatch one chicken every couple of weeks. There’s reason to believe that the two have known each other for a couple of years, with on-camera evidence that the coyote would sometimes let the dog chase her around just for the thrill of it.

I love animal-friendship stories even when they’re soaked in blood and gore like this.

The legendary Comedy Bang Bang has been rolling a lot of reruns on its podcast feed lately, styled as “Bonus Bang” episodes with new, retrospective introductions by host Scott Aukerman. I especially enjoyed the recent repeat of “Hey, Keep Readin’” from 2018, featuring Weird Al Yankovic, Ryan Gaul, and Edi Patterson—the latter of whom debuted Bean Dip, one of my favorite recurring CBB characters.

Every CBB episode features a primary guest playing it straight against two comic actors with improvised characters, you see. And a lot of my favorite repeat characters on this show are basically just comedians speaking at length in funny voices, and I need to be okay with that.

I did manage to catch the Morgan Library’s fantastic exhibit of Tarot card history and artwork right before it closed, last week. One of my favorite sights was this tantalizing sample of cards from The New Tarot Deck, designed in 1974 by Jack Hurley and John Horler. Each of these cards is the size of an ordinary playing card, and each bears a gorgeously minimal-but-meaningful black-and-white illustration. Alas for me, it’s long out of print, and all the packs for sale online have prices in the high hundreds of dollars.

A shift in my personal political thinking, of late: Rather than try to directly change the minds of culturally entrenched right-wing voters, it may be a wiser expenditure of energy and attention to weary their spirit so that they don’t bother voting at all. Sadly I don’t know how that’s done other that letting them put their guy up there and then having him wreck their lives (along with everyone else’s).