James Frey's Blog, page 32
May 21, 2023
Classified Discord
The government secrets leaked on Discord have become fodder for users seeking fun and attention
Videogame enthusiasts are scouring popular social-media platforms in the hope of finding classified U.S. military documents, turning the recent national-security crisis over leaked secrets into a global scavenger hunt.
The competition pits online users eager to see secrets against the U.S. government, which wants to keep those secrets off the internet.
At issue are a cache of sensitive military documents that the Justice Department alleges Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, posted on Discord, a platform that allows gamers to gather and communicate online. The documents first began showing up last year on a Discord group—known as a server—and remained unnoticed for months until some of them were reposted to other larger servers and platforms, eventually finding their way to the media, garnering public and U.S. government attention.
May 20, 2023
3D Titanic
By Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis
The world’s most famous shipwreck has been revealed as never seen before.
The first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, which lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic, has been created using deep-sea mapping.
It provides a unique 3D view of the entire ship, enabling it to be seen as if the water has been drained away.
The hope is that this will shed new light on exactly what happened to the liner, which sank in 1912.
More than 1,500 people died when the ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
“There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,” Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC News.
He said the model was “one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research – and not speculation.”
May 19, 2023
First Kiss
Babylonian clay model showing a nude couple on a couch engaged in sex and kissing. Date: 1800 BC. (Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum)COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The origins of kissing date back 4,500 years, a discovery that’s giving researchers insight into disease transmission instead of romance! Researchers in Denmark say the earliest documented evidence of a human kiss comes from Mesopotamia, the historical area that now encompasses present-day Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey.
Earlier studies proposed that the first evidence of human lip kissing began specifically in South Asia about 3,500 years ago. From there, it was thought to have spread to other regions, potentially expediting the spread of the herpes simplex virus in the process.
However, this new research, conducted by scholars from the University of Oxford and the University of Copenhagen, suggests that kissing was a cultural practice in the ancient Middle East at least 1,000 years earlier. Based on various written sources from the earliest Mesopotamian societies, Dr. Troels Pank Arbøll and Dr. Sophie Lund Rasmussen discovered that kissing was already a well-established practice 4,500 years ago in the Middle East.
May 18, 2023
Moonbai
By NICK EL HAJJ
(Michael Henderson/Moon World Resorts via AP)DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Who says you cannot reach for the moon? A proposed $5 billion real estate project wants to take skyscraper-studded Dubai to new heights — by bringing a symbol of the heavens down to Earth.
Canadian entrepreneur Michael Henderson envisions building a 274-meter (900-foot) replica of the moon atop a 30-meter (100-foot) building in Dubai, already home to the world’s tallest building and other architectural wonders.
Henderson’s project, dubbed MOON, may sound out of this world, but it could easily fit in this futuristic city-state. Dubai already has a red-hot real estate market, fueled by the wealthy who fled restrictions imposed in their home countries during the coronavirus pandemic and Russians seeking refuge amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.
May 17, 2023
Amnesianet
from The Washington Post via MSN
The internet’s memory is fading in front of us. Preserve what you can.by Chris Velazco
The internet’s memory is fading in front of us. Preserve what you can.© Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Washington Post; iStockI signed up for Facebook in my senior year of high school, just as the service was branching out from its college campus confines. And even then, in those early days, the message from my teachers, my parents, and those talking heads on TV was the same: don’t put anything on the internet that you don’t want floating around forever.
To this day, that’s good advice. But it’s also clear the internet’s memory isn’t exactly the steel trap we were all told it was.
In (what else?) a tweet posted last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said the social media service would be “purging” user accounts if they lay dormant for long enough.
The period of inactivity that would prompt an account deletion is pretty long — Musk said the move would apply to accounts that have gone unused for “several years,” and that accounts would be “archived” in some way. But the lack of clarity around what “archiving” means is little comfort to, say, people who continue to seek a sense of closeness with Twitter-using friends and loved ones who have died or are incarcerated.
May 16, 2023
Madison Square Cowboy
Bull riding is becoming more popular in metro areas, and that poses hurdles—trucking dirt through traffic to the arena and teaching manners; no booing
Rodeos need a lot of dirt–but not every place has the best stuff for bullriding, so organizers have to find it. Some winds up on the bull.For those who follow the burgeoning sport of bull riding, the stars are naturally the riders themselves—who train for years to master the art of staying atop a 1,700-pound bucking bull for a full eight seconds, while maintaining a certain control, if not graceful authority.
Then there’s Randy Spraggins, who’s charged with getting 750 tons of dirt–or 35 dump-truck loads—into New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Mr. Spraggins, an independent contractor who’s worked with the Professional Bull Riders organization—PBR, for short—since its inception 31 years ago, is the “soil savant” behind the sport, as one industry insider refers to him. He is responsible not just for trucking dirt in and out of the many arenas where PBR stages competitions, but for also making sure it is just right–soft enough for the riders to land on as safely as possible when they inevitably fall, but hard enough to give the bulls the right footing.
“When the ground is good, the bulls are bucking,” Mr. Spraggins, a 62-year-old North Dakota native, explains.
May 15, 2023
A Score of 1,000 Corpses
As the cult classic turns 20, here’s the story of a hellraising director who was given a blank check to make his gory spectacular, scared off film execs, and inspired generations.
by AJ McDougall
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/LionsgateIt’s the year 2000, and you’re an unsuspecting tourist at Universal Studios.
You’re on the studio backlot tour, seated on one of those trams as it trundles up a peaceful residential-looking street. Your guide points out one of the houses. It’s seen better days (namely in 1982, when it served as a cheery brothel run by Dolly Parton) and looks decidedly sinister: ramshackle clapboards painted a sinister gray.
Suddenly, a man staggers out of the front door, covered in blood and wearing someone else’s skin. He leers and waves at your wide-eyed group.
More than 20 years later, the man, actor Bill Moseley, recalled to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed how the tour guide didn’t miss a beat, announcing, “‘And on your right, you’ll see Rob Zombie’s movie House of 1,000 Corpses in production.’”
This spring marks that movie’s 20th anniversary. A nasty little stink bomb of a grindhouse slasher, the “plot” of House of 1,000 Corpses, if it can be called that, concerns four kids (including a pre-Office Rainn Wilson) who get lost on the backroads of America while searching for a local legend named Dr. Satan. Instead of finding him, they’re captured by a psychotic family called the Fireflys, who—spoilers—brutally kill off the youngsters one by one.
May 14, 2023
After The End of Culture
Does the term “culture” even mean anything, given humanity’s turn away from particularity and toward a more fluid world of never-ending change? Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, known for his treatise-like reflections on modern life, combining philosophical inquiry with cultural critique. Han objectively delineates and clarifies modern society’s existential ailments, while trying to discern where we may be going on the current trajectory. His book Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization is a look at the way the world is shifting due to globalization.
Who are we as human in this strange world? Are we mere tourists, to use Han’s metaphor, or are we searching for a deeper meaning? By definition, a tourist collects experiences that are often superficial, and the way we experience culture today seems to operate on the same level. Rootlessness to such an extreme can lead to a total existential breakdown. Any notion of boundaries, be they metaphysical or geographical, will quickly dissipate and with that the perennial question of what it means to be human. After all, it is our differences that maintain creativity as well as, unfortunately, destruction.
The worlds are shifting, and the question is whether a new world is emerging. “After the end of culture,” writes Han, “should the new human being simply be called ‘tourist’? Or are we at long last living in a culture that affords us the freedom to spread into the wide open world? If we are, how might we describe this new culture?” Han is alluding to the “end of culture,” which is enough to make everyone quite depressed. Fast-moving technology has precipitated this change, and we cannot turn back the clock. Technology has tapped into human listlessness and spiritual torpor, taking many souls hostage.
May 13, 2023
News Chaos
Not a lot of news anchors would be suspected of helping to trash a pair of hotel rooms and still keep their jobs.
But such was the case when Kurt Loder, then the face of recently shut-down MTV News, aimed to settle a feud with Kurt Cobain in 1992.
It grew out of the the grunge star souring on Loder after he publicized a Vanity Fair article about Courtney Love doing drugs while pregnant.
Cobain and wife Love hated the article and suddenly hated Loder as well.
When the Nirvana frontman expressed an interest in making amends, Loder hopped a jet to Minneapolis and met the rocker mid-tour.
May 12, 2023
The Marauder
Twenty years ago, the Florida Highway Patrol rolled out a fleet of souped-up Mercury Marauders for high-speed pursuits.
BY JESUS GARCIA
[image error]I spotted a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor on duty this week. It was a Laredo Police Department patrol car, and it gave me a touch of sentimentality seeing this decade-old workhorse. The odometers on these P71 Interceptors are rapidly reaching “I’m too old for this shit.” But seeing that old cop car reminded me of the legend of Florida’s fastest, rarest Panthers: the Florida Highway Patrol Mercury Marauders.
Twenty years ago, Florida’s highways were patrolled by a special group of unmarked 2004 Mercury Marauders thanks to an anonymous donor who gifted 27 cars to the Florida Highway Patrol, and a local tuner named named Dennis Reinhart who modified them for use in high-speed pursuits. The Marauder was already a hotted-up version of the standard Crown Vic, with a 302-hp V8 out of the Mustang Mach 1. But Reinhart took it further with a host of mods that made these the ultimate sleeper sedans.
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