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AFK Post May 2026



Tags: prosemovies

I'm making progress on reading two books which go well together,

I also got two volumes of a Pulitzer-winning George Washington biography. But for now, AFK post:

I'd never heard of this moment in Beatles and SNL history - in 1976, in response to other multimillion dollar offers, Lorne joked that he would give the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on SNL. Lennon and McCartney were watching from the Dakota, and both confirmed that they talked about going down to the studio.
There was a TV movie made about it in 2000. I guess this and The Two Popes are in this odd category of "bro, what do you think they talked about" movies. Jared Harris plays John Lennon.
There is a story that they even called SNL about coming in, but ran into union issues if they borrowed instruments.
The movie decides to end with Lennon getting a call from Yoko Ono while McCartney is getting his guitar from his car. Despite claims that this was their last meeting, sources have them hanging out again in 1979 and/or 1980.

Bruce Jacob, who represented Florida in the Supreme Court case which established right to counsel, published a book The Gideon Case earlier this year. I made a video about this a year ago - as the last living figure in the trial and an advocate for jailhouse lawyers, Jacob has taken on the responsibility of carrying and collecting the history. But he is also quick to point to Gideon's guilt.

In response to a criticism that people cannot name one living painter, someone on Reddit said: "Painters were only part of popular culture very briefly in the mid-20th century" as part of Cold War / counterculture things.

After five Italian divers drowned in an underwater cave, and a Maldivian military diver died in a recovery mission, specialist Finnish divers were involved in recovering bodies. The lack of information about the divers' equipment and experience, coupled with the "suddenly everyone online is an expert in _" phenomenon, has led to speculation about air, equipment, psychology, the cave, local regulations, the crew, and the one Italian who stayed aboard. Civil or criminal punishments might be coming through the Maldives legal system, and the local economy depends on tourism, so I understand why people are saying as little as possible.
The recovery divers gave an interview to Finnish media. Shortly afterward the Daily Mail produced a graphic, which I saw on Reddit. The title says it's what "might have happened". It seems to be based on the few sentences in Finnish media, and has no references to represent an actual shape, scale, and difficulty of the cave. There is one misspelling. I considered that the infographic could be AI-generated, but after seeing a version without text on the Daily Mail, I am less confident.
After seeing this image, Reddit comments blamed the tourists for not taking precautions and missing equipment which (a) ignores that a military diver also died, and (b) dismisses theories that a diver entered the cave impulsively / because of underwater euphoria.
I feel like we are going to see a story about this in an outdoorsy magazine in a year or two, but until then we might not know anything.

A European geo oddities YouTuber finally made it to Baarle-Nassau, this time talking about a Belgian train connection converted into a bike path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDsPE5dQcSU

Ask an Astronaut reminded me of an 'Ask Obama' app that I made during the 2008 campaign

Chelsea Manning was interviewed for Columbia's Obama Oral History project in 2022. She talked about a few parts of her story which I had never heard before, and also follows a pretty archetypal millennial two-parties-equivalent and Bush-to-chaos opinion:


The Hacker News comments about Craig Venter's death include dueling narratives about who finished the human genome first, and which team was lost without the other. There was a sort of murmur in 2024 about how 70% of their reference genome came from one person (RP11) despite initial plans of the project to split up the genome.

I reconnected with someone for the first time in 10 years. Since then we had only a few emails around the pandemic, moving into a home, etc. My only model for this was that she would have forgotten everything, or want a little closure, be a little snarky, talk about work, or maybe go back to being call-when-you're-in-town friends. She remembered some specifics from years ago. As we went home, I encouraged her on their job search, then the next day I (explicitly jokingly!) sent the Twin Peaks meme "I'll see you again in 25 years". They seemed pleasant enough, but not interested in chatting online after. I wasn't prepared for it to be… blah?

Many posts on my BlueSky on Pope Leo's posts linking back to de-colonialization thought and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

At MoMA PS1, I recently saw 'skyspace' by James Turrell, basically a paneled room with a large part of the roof open to the sky. Their exhibit is closed during inclement weather. Other museums remain open or have a 'lid'. Wikipedia tells me that Turrell has a MacArthur fellowship, and a National Medal of Arts. He also has a mysterious, decades-long, nine-figure cost art project at Roden Crater in Arizona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cIAl1TO1VE

Recent Media Notes

OpenAI sunset its video-generation app "Sora". This short-form video app disappeared from public interest soon after opening sign-ups, but was reportedly costing OpenAI billions. It's expensive to generate a video, and whether the video prompt was a little off expectations, or got a lot of views, users would be motivated to keep generating. The community would embrace micro-trends like R-rated movies as 90s school plays, or a cashier telling a man he can't buy a few loose grains of rice spiraling into miniature stores and abstract concepts. Always some reverence for people who got gun violence and popular IP through the filters, and for videos mocking OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the content restrictions. In late 2025 there were multiple stories about how the app let people generate fetish videos (scenarios where even without nudity, it was obvious that the intent was sexual). Casually browsing I didn't see the worst of these, and even ASMR videos would get comments from people who thought it was sketchy. There were a few videos (particularly in Chinese) which looked ready to be used as ads or influencer content somewhere on the internet. Other times a video would be funny but it would have mess up the script (the wrong character saying a line, or a person reacting before something happens). The closure speaks to limits on compute, or at least assures me that hyperrealistic video is going to take time for 'world models' to develop first.

I watched The Mandalorian and Grogu. The theater had 3D plus "ScreenX" which extends the edges of some scenes onto the sides of the theater, which felt a bit like VR goggles. Pushback against this movie existing in Star Wars seems to revolve around it having a weak plot and no evolution of our main duo. Going meta, these are criticisms which could be predicted early in development and yet the project went ahead.

On a plane, I watched We Bury The Dead. After an experimental American weapon wipes out all life in Tasmania, Daisy Ridley joins a crew going door-to-door disposing of bodies, with the military killing the few remaining zombies (a bit like Ling Ma's Severance). Ridley is an American (?) searching for her husband, who was in Tasmania for business (long long flight).
The weapon reminded me of the neutron bomb. There are hints that it wasn't an accident, but without follow-through. I couldn't decide how many weeks (or months?) later they were doing this operation, or whether we expected the zombies to recover more humanity. The final movie was mid. It sounds like they added some scenes and gore to market an R-rated zombie movie.

Olivia Rodrigo is releasing a new album, starting with "Drop Dead" (which quickly went to #1) and recently "the cure". Three cultural notes:

The algorithm recently favored Glacier Rock video, and it became my most-viewed video of 2026 on its first weekday. At first it felt good, but reviewing the requirements to stay monetized, I need to prepare for when Oryx video hours fall out of the 1-year window early next year. I either need a day like that every week, or some other super popular videos.
The main theory behind YouTube is now that I have 1,500 subscribers, or if I continue up to 2,000 to 10,000, they would lift each new video to thousands of views. My recent Zebra video - pretty similar to the Oryx topic - got 330 views and only 1/3 of the watch time was from subscribers. Not great!
The other options are better retention, or longer videos. Maybe I could talk about explainable AI or something. I am going to be significantly more annoyed if I write and edit a 20–30 minute rambling talk and no one finishes it. A 10-minute talk about books failed to get clicked.