From defector.com
AI Art Sucks Ass And You Should Say It's Bad | Defector
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Art is linear, and so artificial intelligence cannot create art. This is a controversial opinion among the kinds of people who care about both art and AI, so let me explain. Art is a concept that describes two things. There is the obvious, material thing which is a piece of art. A canvas with paint […]
#AI #art #mole #caseytaylor #trailedmole
23h ago
From defector.com
Defector Annual Report, September 2023 – August 2024 | Defector
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Published on October 16, 2024 Purpose of this report This is the fourth year that Defector’s business team is publishing an annual report. Let us be frank: We sort of regret backing ourselves into this corner of having to produce one of these every year. We’re not sure we will continue to have...
on Fri, 2PM
From defector.com
Hans Niemann And Magnus Carlsen Are, Somehow, Going At It Again | Defector
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Almost exactly two years after their fateful meeting at the 2022 Sinquefield Cup, Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann will once again play a competitive chess match over the board in a big-time tournament, the semifinals of the Speed Chess Championships, on Friday in Paris. The two players’...
on Sep 5
From defector.com
Columbus's Johnny Gaudreau Tribute Was A Thank You, Not A Goodbye | Defector
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It is difficult to grasp, from the outside, what Johnny Gaudreau meant to fans of the Columbus Blue Jackets, even in the two short seasons he spent there before he and his brother Matthew were struck and killed by a suspected drunk driver on Aug. 29. Columbus fans are used to their stars leaving: for […]
on Fri, 3PM
From defector.com
The Argonaut Octopus Has Mastered The Free Ride | Defector
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In 2019, the photographer Harris Narainen had just wrapped up a night dive off Anilao in the Philippines and begun his staggered ascent to the surface when his dive leader pointed a flashlight at something bright and yellow. Narainen looked over and saw a tiny shelled octopus called an argonaut,...
on Fri, 2AM
From defector.com
Where Should The Rays Play? | Defector
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The Tampa Bay Rays have no home. Well, actually they have a home but no roof, and as most of us understand the concept, a home without a roof is just an enclosure. Hurricane Milton, the bastard that it was, tore the aged canvas-and-fiberglass roof off of Tropicana Field, the Soviet bunker–style...
on Thu, 6PM
From defector.com
The Liberty Too-Smalled The Lynx | Defector
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BROOKLYN, N.Y. — I chuckled when I saw the words printed on the giveaway T-shirts at Finals Game 2 in New York on Sunday afternoon: “NOT DONE YET.” A kinder reading goes that all contenders think like this, no matter their situation. In the shadow of a Game 1 win, those words might have projected a […]
on Thu, 8AM
From defector.com
Check Out These Cool Moves! | Defector
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Last week, the Washington Post wrote about why so many of the people that wait in line for hours to get into Donald Trump’s political rallies wind up leaving before they’re over. The answers are not necessarily surprising. Trump often takes the stage more than an hour late, and in his current...
on Oct 7
From defector.com
The WNBA’s Season Of Clash Is Big Business For The Permanently Aggrieved | Defector
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A woman in the stands at last week's playoff game between the Indiana Fever and Connecticut Sun wore a shirt that read “BAN NAILS.” She had evidently put some thought into this.
on Oct 4
From defector.com
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For too long, as they suffered under a purple-and-gold yoke, Los Angeles Clippers fans were familiar with a very particular sort of pain: The arena stopped serving alcohol at the end of the third quarter, meaning anyone seeking a premium-style VIP luxury bar experience in the dreary confines of...
on Oct 2
From defector.com
Pete Rose, All-American | Defector
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After Pete Rose’s death was announced on Monday night, a lot of clever microphone addicts opened their obligatory thumbnail summaries of him by explaining that he was “a complicated figure.” It’s the sort of thing people say about people when they can’t believe that the person they’re describing...
on Oct 2
From defector.com
Alyssa Thomas Knows Only One Way To Hit A Dagger | Defector
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Daggers don’t really belong on a spectrum. They matter so much more for their result—finality, punctuation, hope extinguished—than for their means that it’s kind of silly to compare one to another. Even so, there was something especially vicious about the last shot Alyssa Thomas took Sunday in...
on Oct 1
From defector.com
'Megalopolis' Is Both Ingeniously Stupid And Stupidly Genius | Defector
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The most honest Francis Ford Coppola has ever been on celluloid isn’t present in any of his own movies. Rather, it can be found in a 1991 documentary shot by his wife, Eleanor. Hearts of Darkness, a project started by Eleanor and later finished by co-directors George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr,...
on Oct 1
From defector.com
Have You Considered Just Not Pooping? | Defector
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Bun Ito, a master’s student at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Nagoya University, had begun rearing some Taiwanese tree frogs, greenish yellow amphibians each about the size of a lychee. The frogs, Kurixalus eiffingeri, live in the bamboo and broadleaf forests of Taiwan and parts of Japan, and...
on Sep 28
From defector.com
The Matthew Sluka Debacle Exposes The NIL System For What It Is | Defector
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Since the arrival of NIL and the decision that college athletes deserve to be compensated for their work on the field, the NCAA, along with universities, have done everything they can to avoid responsibility for ensuring that compensation is distributed in a fair and orderly fashion. The last...
on Sep 28
From defector.com
This Fish Has A Leg Up On The Competition | Defector
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The sea robin begins its life looking like any other fish: a finned, larval speck drifting in the open ocean. As the sea robin grows, the pectoral fins on either side of its body widen like two unfurling fans—still fins, if a bit extravagant. But eventually the first three rays of each fin...
on Sep 27
From defector.com
The Liberty Need This Do-It-All Version Of Sabrina Ionescu | Defector
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Sabrina Ionescu wouldn’t be the first person who graduated college and moved to New York with quickly thwarted dreams of instant stardom. Nor would she be the first person who had to then spend her early 20s cycling through a few versions of herself before finding one she liked. What a treat...
on Sep 27
From defector.com
The Truth Is An Inconvenience For Jake Tapper And Dana Bash | Defector
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This week, some of the most prominent figures in American broadcast news tried to get away with a staggering lie. The story is a particularly instructive case study on the dynamics of the American media’s failure to accurately cover the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. On Sept....
on Sep 25
From defector.com
Is It Possible To Create Anticapitalist Work On Social Media? | Defector
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As the weather cools and the kids return to school, my social media feeds have been inundated with fall trend forecasting: “What cool girls will be wearing this fall” and “The Row Margaux dupe you NEED.” Nearly as prevalent in my feeds are the de-influencing videos. While influencers work to...
on Sep 25
From defector.com
Sending Horny Texts To RFK Jr. Is Not A Public Service | Defector
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In the half-week since news that New York magazine suspended star reporter Olivia Nuzzi upon learning that she had and hid a months-long inappropriate relationship with failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., many of the most powerful people in journalism are asking, rhetorically,...
on Sep 25
From defector.com
Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom | Defector
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Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to identify as a fan of any living artist. There are plenty of artists whose work I like, or even love, but the entire concept of being a fan, and what the act of fandom entails, has shifted in ways I find both alienating and disturbing. […]
on Sep 22
From defector.com
Where Racism Goes To Become Rhetoric | Defector
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Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024. Wednesday night, in Long Island’s 16,000-seat Nassau Coliseum, Donald Trump told the crowd at a rally for his presidential campaign...
on Sep 22
From defector.com
Where Do You Like Your Butter? | Defector
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Last week, Kelsey McKinney went to a Butter Party. The Butter Party was not some 300-year-old Philadelphia tradition that’s never broken contain, but an event organized by Margaret Eby, Deputy Food Editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who was determined to use the wisdom of crowds to pick a...
on Sep 22
From defector.com
Football Will Live Or Die With Its Rivalries | Defector
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The first two annual football rivalries that I can remember haven’t occurred for years now. In Worcester, where I grew up, St. John’s and St. Peter’s played each other at the end of every football season for almost a century. It was the longest-running Catholic high-school rivalry in the...
on Sep 21
From defector.com
A Washed American's Guide To The Boundless Underworld Of Brazilian Funk | Defector
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If you’re anything like me—a Millennial rapidly (though gracefully!!!) aging out of even the most generous definition of “youth,” who once prided yourself on being a music head but who lost the pulse of your favored genres sometime around when all the new rappers were named [Something]...
on Sep 19
From defector.com
Find A Job You Enjoy, And You'll Never Have A Day Off In Your Life | Defector
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I’m not so naive as to reduce all athletic careers to one battle between the corrosive force of capitalism and the pure feelings of goalscoring, or hucking a baseball where the two colors meet. But Cloepfil recognizes the apparent insensibility of these feelings just as well as she grasps their...
on Sep 18
From defector.com
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At the most basic level, there is just no percentage in trying to parse a political campaign’s decision to try to incite a pogrom. It does a favor to the people doing it, for one thing, because even assessing it along the lines of any other campaign decision provides a cosmetic coat of reason to […]
on Sep 17
From defector.com
Help! My Friend Wipes His Ass With Bleach! | Defector
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Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking domes, dipshits, USSR swag, and more. Your letters: Jonathan: My successful, happily-married,...
on Sep 15
From defector.com
In Snark Forums, Fans Are Haters And Haters Are Friends | Defector
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Carly Riordan knows that thousands of people hate her, because they’ve been getting together to talk shit about her on forums for more than a decade. Riordan has published her lifestyle blog continuously since 2008. Back then, she was a Georgetown undergraduate overachiever who shared her...
on Sep 14
From defector.com
Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars | Defector
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Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable,...
on Sep 14
From defector.com
I Desperately Want To Have A Beer At This Ancient Sumerian Bar | Defector
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Just picture it. It’s a warm Nisannu night in Lagash and you’ve just gotten off work at the ziggurat. King En-hegal can be a real bear to work for, but at least he pays on time. It’s been a long week, and you could really use a drink. So you and your buddy Lunanna head […]
on Sep 14
From defector.com
The U.S. Open Crowd Has Become Too Much Of A Good Thing | Defector
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After this year's edition of the U.S. Open, it is worth wondering whether we've hit a dire turning point. The crowd is still unthinking, still shameless, still pretty drunk, but now it's 1 million strong, and I'm not sure it really cares all that much about what's happening on court, to the...
on Sep 13
From defector.com
Donald Trump Talked Honestly About Policy | Defector
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Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics and coverage of Campaign 2024. This week’s presidential debate was never going to be about anything other than Donald Trump, the same way that the last...
on Sep 13
From defector.com
Life Comes At You Fast | Defector
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My two kids play in a fairly rinkydink local boys-and-girls youth soccer league. This is unmistakably small-time stuff: six teams, once-weekly hour-long practices, hilariously broad age ranges that, at the eldest level, put 11-year-olds out there against high-school freshmen moonlighting away...
on Sep 12
From defector.com
The New Trend In Book Covers Is Old-Timey Animals | Defector
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Don’t judge “Don’t judge a book by its cover” by its cover. I mean that in the specific and general senses, as a book cover can answer many questions about what’s going on in there: What feeling does this book hope to evoke? And what other works does this book want to, visually, place itself […]
on Sep 12
From defector.com
ESPN Masks Cynical AI Pivot As Benevolent Coverage Of "Underserved" Sports
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On Thursday, ESPN announced that it will expand its coverage of the National Women’s Soccer League and the Premier Lacrosse League, a move meant to “enhance coverage of underserved sports.” While nothing a company like ESPN does is purely driven by altruistic motives, this is an overdue course...
on Sep 7
From defector.com
Writing Is An Act, Not An Aesthetic | Defector
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The premise of National Novel Writing Month is seductively simple: Participants enter the month of November with an idea and leave it as a novelist. Just write 50,000 words over the course of 30 days—a rate of roughly 1,700 words a day. Anyone age 13 or older can take part, which is perhaps why...
on Sep 6
From defector.com
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One thing you never want to hear when you’re an astronaut is, “There are weird sounds coming from the spacecraft.” Another thing you don’t want to hear, at least until it can prove otherwise, is “It’s a Boeing Starliner.” But since that’s already happened, and since NASA has decided it can’t or...
on Sep 4
From defector.com
A Troubleshooting Paul Skenes Is Somehow Even More Frightening | Defector
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Strictly speaking, many of baseball’s starting pitchers have more pitches in their arsenals than they need. I’m not complaining! Take Shota Imanaga, the delightful 31-year-old rookie southpaw for the Chicago Cubs: Statcast says Imanaga has used eight distinct pitch types this season, including a...
on Sep 4
From defector.com
Whatever AI Looks Like, It's Not | Defector
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There is a very funny viral tweet going around that features a screenshot of a Google search result for “austria-hungary in space.” You can try the search yourself. This is what Google returns: In 1889 Austria-Hungary conducted its first manned orbital spaceflight using a liquid-fueled rocket...
on Sep 2
From defector.com
How David Roche Nearly Ran His Dick Off And Maybe Changed Ultrarunning In The Process | Defector
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On Aug. 17, David Roche destroyed the course record at the Leadville Trail 100. The performance was, objectively, spectacular. Leadville is one of the iconic races in ultrarunning, a 100-mile beast that wildly fluctuates in elevation on a trail in the Rocky Mountains; Roche beat a course record...
on Aug 31
From defector.com
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DraftKings, the daily fantasy sports and sports betting company, abruptly shut down a program called Reignmakers on Tuesday, posting a notice on its website and associated app and sending out an email blast to some subset of its user base. Reignmakers, which the company launched in 2021, offered...
on Aug 30
From defector.com
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Further digging by CBS News found that over the past year, U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors have made many visits and logged numerous violations at that plant in Jarratt, using impressively disgusting turns of phrase for such a document. Upton Sinclair, barf your heart out.
on Aug 29
From defector.com
For Wondery And SiriusXM, Spending Big Isn't The Same As Thinking Big | Defector
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Here we go again. Wondery, which is owned by Amazon, just dropped $100 million for an exclusive distribution and ad sales deal for Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast New Heights, and I am looking at this news and wondering how the hell this company lost the plot in such a grand fashion. Neither...
on Aug 28
From defector.com
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Not unlike the religious creation myth of Adam and Eve, the origin story of the TV show Alone begins with two bare-assed adults wandering amid a bunch of trees.
on Aug 28
From defector.com
Everyone At The DNC Speaks For Palestine, Except For Palestinians | Defector
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In her closing speech Thursday night, Harris included a throwaway line about how she and Biden were working so that "the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination." The Palestinian people were already pursuing those rights; the U.S. has been...
on Aug 28
From defector.com
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Suni Williams and Barry Wilmore, the NASA astronauts whose eight-day June jaunt to space is now on Day 82 due to problems with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft—and, ugh, their own fussy entitled preference for not being incinerated—will attempt a return to Earth in 2025 aboard a SpaceX capsule....
on Aug 27
From defector.com
How AI Copyright Law Is Being Guided By Spirits From Atlantis | Defector
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With scant guidance for how to handle copyright requests for AI-generated works, the law is playing catch-up. As copyright offices around the world have consistently denied protections to AI art, you run across phrases like “the copyrightability of the monkey’s work,” as judges ruling on...
on Aug 26
From defector.com
The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us | Defector
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This week, Defector has turned itself over to a guest editor. Brandy Jensen, former editor at Gawker (RIP) and The Outline (RIP), and writer of the Ask A Fuck Up advice column (subscribe here!), has curated a selection of posts around the theme of Irrational Attachments. Enjoy! New Atheism feels...
on Aug 24
From defector.com
Sphen The Gay Penguin Broke The Ice | Defector
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After Sphen, the gentoo penguin at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium, died earlier this month, the zookeepers took the penguin’s mate to see his body—to understand why Sphen would not return. The 11-year-old Sphen had reached the natural end of his lifespan, leaving behind 8-year-old Magic, his...
on Aug 23