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"I woke up one day to the realization that I had written ten good pages of a book that was due in five months."

Landsat, a NASA and USGS program, has documented the surface of Earth from space since 1972.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Spell Your Name with NASA’s Earthly Alphabet of Aerial Images appeared first on Colossal.

"Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement."

"I didn’t think about those nachos even once. I had never experienced anything like it. Is this, I asked my friends, how it feels to be normal?"

Next Saturday: Forkalyst live at Haus Spilles, Düsseldorf!

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Next event: Forkalyst Live on May 2, 2026, 19:00 at Haus Spilles, Düsseldorf.

President Trump has called the bond between the US and the UK a friendship "unlike any other on Earth" at a state dinner attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla. Earlier in a historic address speech to Congress, King Charles praised NATO and said the UK-US partnership was...

The former CEO of FTX has essentially no realistic avenues left to avoid his 25-year prison sentence

This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months. ...

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.

— OpenAI Codex base_instructions, for GPT-5.5

Tags: openai, ai, llms, system-prompts, prompt-engineering, codex-cli, generative-ai, gpt

Five great book critics writing today (and where to find them).

"We Make Years Out of Hours" invites the public to remake structures from 10-centimeter blocks.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Lina Lapelytė Fills Hamburger Bahnhof with 400,000 Wood Blocks for Communal Building appeared first on Colossal.

This is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM, trained on “historical pre-1931 English text”. “The training data for the base model is entirely out of copyright (the USA copyright cutoff date is currently January 1, 1931).”

Listen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com)

Tags: movies · video

“A half-century after it was published, The Soul of a New Machine does a better job challenging AI hype than most current criticism.” I thought something similarly (about the web) when I read Kidder’s book 25 years ago, during the aftermath of the dot com bust.

Do I Belong in Tech Anymore? “Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice?”

“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that first-quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago, following a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict.” Oh, surprise surprise.

Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd:

Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major Everything Everywhere All At Once vibes from this…

The film debuted at SXSW in March and is opening in theaters on May 22.

Tags: Boots Riley · I Love Boosters · movies · trailers · video