Imagine a bunch of mutant punk-rockers moving through the city shadows at night. Gnawing through the cyclone fence that protects the highschool. A homecoming nightmare. robertantonpizza.bandcamp.co…

Forbiden Forest C64, A 64 Classic? #c64 #commodore

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it. There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3. At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day. Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems. Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love. The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method. At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be. Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain: 仁智懷德聖虞唐， 貞志篤終誓穹蒼， 欽所感想妄淫荒， 心憂增慕懷慘傷。 In pinyin, it is: Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng, zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng, qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng, xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng. Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief." Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain: 傷慘懷慕增憂心， 荒淫妄想感所欽， 蒼穹誓終篤志貞， 唐虞聖德懷智仁。 The pinyin: Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn, huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn, cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn, táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén. It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence." That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu! At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message: 詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping." Or reversed: 蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace." Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle. For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/26…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages. Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%…). Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems: - The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens. - Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy. - It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions - Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections. So the Star Gauge is simultaneously: - A love letter (expressing personal longing) - A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival) - A cosmological model (structured like the heavens) - A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy) - A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me". Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age. The heart at the center was filled after all.

Tentative cover for the sequel game.

Working on emulating the gouache "pick out" technique of David Grove in Rebelle

at least the internet didn't turn into the NFT VR Metaverse or whatever dumb shit big tech was pushing a few years ago.

Dope Wars 1987 is out now! Apple App store apps.apple.com/us/app/dope-w… Google Play store play.google.com/store/apps/d… Promo single open.spotify.com/album/5LLMW… Learn more tempest-press.net

The housing market has never been this unaffordable in U.S. history. With inflation-adjusted home prices setting a record over the last three years. We're now in the biggest housing bubble of all-time, and the only period that came close was 2006, before the big crash. Many people like to tell you "home values will never drop". But those people conveniently don't show you this graph. There is no historical precedent for how expensive today's housing market it is. And homebuyers know it.

Private Equity Firms are DESTROYING American Businesses they same way they bankrupted Toys "R" Us and put them out of business Here’s how they did it - After signing for Toys "R" Us, they sold all of the land under every store they own in the United States - Private Equity sold it to their sister firms that they also own, their real estate investment trust - They sell the land to themselves for cheap and then lease the land back to Toys”R”Us for expensive rates - So now Toys”R”Us has a lease they didn't have when they were still successful - So next private equity went to look at all Toys”R”Us’ warehouses where they have backstock that carries them over in economic downturn. They began to sell that to a liquidator, all of the extra stock - Next private equity sold all the Toys”R”Us’ warehouses, to their own real estate investment firms - Private equity now leases back all of the infrastructure Toys”R”Us had built over the last 100 years to become the successful powerhouse it was “They decimated Toys”R”Us in literally 2 years. At the end of this, Toys”R”Us can no longer make their payments to the bank, so they're going to have to file bankruptcy. And then what's going to happen is all of the assets that Toys R Us had left, which is largely only the intellectual property at this point, we're going to have a fire sale. And you know who's going to buy it for pennies on the dollar? One of our sister private equity firms. And they're going to get the intellectual property, then we're going to sell that to Macy's to use, and then we're going to go buy Macy's and we're going to start over again.” This happens to business after business in America and it must be stopped.

🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read. He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:

How DARE you log me out, ever. Spit through grinding teeth at every stupid website

🚨 THE NEXT 2008 IS HAPPENING NOW 🚨 Party City. Joann’s. Forever 21. Big Lots. ALL COLLAPSING. But this isn’t just “retail struggling.” This is financial arson. Private equity rigged the system. They built a time bomb. And now? It’s detonating. A MEGATHREAD: 🧵⬇️

The only company that's earned the right to harvest my personal data is Tubi

Elon Musk now have enough baby mamas that they are starting to conform to Chinese imperial drama stereotypes. Grimes is the Beloved But Defiant concubine. She is the emperor’s actual favorite, but because she refuses to conform, she suffered exile, ridicule and repeated betrayals. Grimes’ historical analog is the Pearl Consort, clearly adored by Emperor Guangxu but eventually thrown down a well and drowned for disrespecting the the Empress Dowager.

According to dynamical systems, psychiatric disorders can be seen as energy landscapes with peaks and valleys. OCD has deep valleys where neural activity gets stuck, while schizophrenia has shallow valleys that let neural activity roam too freely, connecting unrelated ideas.

i'm on day 9 of trying to get react native working. I spend all my time working on resolving dependencies and no time on the actual project. modern dev is trash.

What should I watch instead of Fight Club 🙄