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word salad: Nautis is a Hungarian musician/producer/DJ deep into psychedelic/chillout and handpans. He’s also a member of the psychedelic rock band Deley, and here he has fused psychill and psychedelic rock into a seamless and wonderful trippy musical experience!

some of the things I read in antisocial isolation

Coney Island Was Once Full of Dueling, Backstabbing Theme Parks

Come one, come all to the controversial, ugly beginnings of what was once called ‘Sodom by the Sea.’


Wholesome fun is dirty business. Embiggenable.


CONEY ISLAND WAS ONCE A glittering star of the early 1900s. It was the Progressive Era, amusement parks were becoming enormously popular across America, and New York City’s version of roller coasters and carnival games seemed like the epitome of wholesome fun. But the beachy entertainment land was quite different than it is today. Coney Island mainly consisted of three theme parks: Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland. And from 1904 to 1911, all were locked into a perpetual dance of stealing acts, copying rides from each other, and some dirty competition.

This fleeting moment in time was captured by a little-known Brooklyn artist named John Mark. His rare 1906 “bird’s eye view” map was full of spectacular details at the three competing parks. Together, they helped turn around the reputation at Coney Island—which was once considered tawdry and called “Sodom by the Sea”—bringing clean fun to families.


John Mark’s map from 1906 shows Steeplechase on the far left, Luna Park at the top center, and Dreamland on the far right. Embiggenable.

“Coney Island was a laboratory for the invention and testing of social, commercial, and technological ideas,” says art historian Robin Jaffee Frank, who authored the book and curated the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland. “Coney Island revolutionized the way people played.”

It all started with Steeplechase Park, which first opened in 1897. Founder George Tilyou was a popular figure in the area, and people knew his “Funny Place” was full of laughter. Guests rode his Ferris wheel and galloped around his celebrated Steeplechase horse ride. Amusing and frugal diversions were everywhere. Tilyou’s haunting cartoon visage, full of teeth and horned hair, became an icon still used today, known as “Funny Face.” …

Have I Just Bought Today’s Equivalent of Nazi Memorabilia?

The story behind this piece of British Empire propaganda isn’t as simple as you might think.


The offending print in its temporary home. Embiggenable.


In many ways, I am a child of Empire. I was born (in 1974, if you’re asking) after most territories achieved independence from Great Britain and, by the time I was aware of it, the Empire was most definitely a thing of the past. But my age also means I was closer than it may seem to the end of Empire, and my family were directly involved and affected by it.

It would be difficult not to be. The sheer size and reach of the Empire — at its height, before WW2, it contained a quarter of the world’s population and a fifth of its landmass — makes it tricky to ignore, for my parents’ generation and for mine. My grandmother was Winston Churchill’s private nurse. My parents saw the final lowering of the Union Jack over Government House in Botswana the day before independence was declared.

We’re not a particularly unusual or elevated family; my dad was born into a working-class family in London and raised in rural Essex during the war. Desperate to get out of dreary, rationed post-war Britain, he answered an ad in the paper. “Young Men Wanted. Join The Beuchanaland Protectorate Police,” it read. So he did.

But it doesn’t matter where you’re from or who you are. If you’re British, the Empire has affected your life. Even if you’re significantly younger than me, like my children are, your framework of reference will be influenced by Empire. Theirs is because mine is, and mine is because my parents’ is, and theirs is because of where they went and what they did.

Which brings me to the picture I bought and don’t know what to do with. …

The life sabbatical: is doing absolutely nothing the secret of happiness?

Few of us have the money to take a long pause from work or caring responsibilities. But, as I found, even a day can make a difference.


You might imagine that escaping from your everyday life would involve relocating to a Hebridean croft or attending a series of rejuvenating retreats. But, according to Emma Gannon’s new book project, A Year of Nothing, it could be as simple as staying at home. “I did nothing,” writes Gannon. “I stopped replying to emails. I used my savings. I slept. I borrowed a friend’s dog. I ate bananas in bed. I bought miniature plants. I read magazines. I lay down. I did nothing. It felt totally alien to me.”

For Gannon, the sabbatical was enforced after she experienced burnout, caused by chronic exhaustion from occupational stress. “All the while, I was keeping diaries,” she says. “Writing down the ‘nothingness’ of my days. I journalled all the things I noticed, the stuff I usually ignored, the people I met, the kindness of strangers, the magical coincidences – the smallest, tiniest uplifting glimmers.”

Am I alone in feeling a surge of envy reading Gannon’s litany of aimlessness? It’s not even as if I’m in need of a break. Recently I went on a relaxing holiday to Málaga. I admired the Pompidou Centre, stared out to sea at the distant blur of Morocco and guzzled bitter-orange-filled dark chocolate from the supermarket. In other words, bliss. On my return after two weeks, I plunged back into my working life recharged and raring to go. But, inexplicably, days later, I found myself intensely craving more time off, and experiencing a low-level discontentment that only intensified in the following days.

Was I having some kind of existential breakdown? I turned to the psychologist Suzy Reading, author of Rest to Reset: The Busy Person’s Guide to Pausing With Purpose (you’re welcome), for advice. She suggested that, like many people, I probably struggle to identify what kind of rest I need. “For people who do a lot of socialising and interacting with other people for their work, they might find that what they actually need to replenish is silence and solitude.” …

4 Reasons People Got Wrongfully Shipped Off to Asylums


Konstantin Päts was the president of Estonia when the Soviets invaded in 1940. For a while, he remained in office as their puppet, but they grew tired of him and forced him out. They put him under house arrest, then moved him to a prison, then put him in a series of Russian psychiatric hospitals. He ultimately died in one of these.

While he was in the asylum, Päts protested his confinement, saying he was president of Estonia. “You are insane,” said the doctors. “You are insane because you say you’re the president of Estonia. After all, if you were the president of Estonia, you wouldn’t be in an insane asylum.”

Beware the men in white coats. When they toss you in a padded room, you may never get out. Historically, people have been locked away for such invalid reasons as…

4. Speaking Ukrainian

We were talking a few seconds ago about Soviet Russia, but this next story isn’t about Russians locking away Ukrainians. This story (and all the next ones we’ll be talking about today) happened in the United States. And this Ukrainian speaker was committed, not thanks to discrimination but because of a misunderstanding.

Katerina Yasinschuk arrived in the U.S. as a teen during World War I. She spoke only Ukrainian, and this wasn’t a problem initially. She fell in love with a man (who we assume understood Ukrainian). Then she left him in 1921, and police in Philadelphia found her outside looking lost. When they questioned her, she appeared to reply with gibberish. She was “babbling,” they concluded, a sign of madness.

Pictured: The Tower of Babble, a famous lunatic asylum.

They dropped her off at the Philadelphia State Hospital. She failed to prove her sanity at a psychiatric evaluation because she was unable to answer in English, or in any other language the doctors understood. They committed her, and during the six years that followed, she continued to speak Ukrainian, in the hopes that someone would understand her. No one did, so she gave up and remained silent — for the next 40 years. …

Why Can’t Robots Click The “I’m Not a Robot” Box On Websites?

Clicking a tiny box tells Google all they need to know about your humanity.


If you’ve browsed the internet for any amount of time, you will likely come across a reCAPTCHA box. These boxes appear when you first enter certain websites and ask you to check a box to prove that you are not a robot. The box is labeled “I’m not a robot,” and everyone clicks without a second thought because they aren’t robots. Sometimes, clicking the box forces you to do a series of visual puzzles that ask you things like clicking on all of the images with a motorcycle in them or clicking on all of the pictures with streetlights in them. These basic tests lead people to believe that robots cannot do them. But that isn’t the case.

Online robots, or just “bots,” as they are often called, are highly advanced. They have been trained to do everything from playing Runescape to running entire X (formerly Twitter) account farms. So they can clearly click on a box or an image featuring a stop sign. The trick is that these tests aren’t determining whether or not you can click these things but how you click them.

The way that reCAPTCHA boxes determine whether you are human or not is how slow and inefficient you are compared to a machine.

What Is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is a company owned by Google that runs all of the little boxes that appear on your screen when you are browsing the internet. The boxes feature a logo with an arrow going in a circle on the right and features the word reCAPTCHA on it. This is an advanced program that Google offers to website hosts that helps keep unwanted traffic off of their sites. …

まるさん17才の誕生日記念動画です。This is a video commemorating Maru’s 17th birthday.

THE LAST TAB . . .

A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR BATHROOM CHOCOLATE LOVERS: Riding My Bike Down the Hershey Highway
A tale of obesity, exercise, laxatives, and a mother’s love.


Beware of bathroom chocolates. They might actually cause severe trauma.


I WAS A FAT CHILD. A VERY FAT CHILD.

I was not “chunky.” I was not “big-boned.”

I was fat.

My jeans came from the Sears “Husky” department. My after-school snack was a roast beef sandwich.

Yes, my “snack” was beef and bread.

A friend came over after school one day and said, “What the Hell are you eating?”

I said, casually holding my sandwich, “A snack.”

He said, “A cookie is a snack. That’s not a snack.”

He was right. So I had a cookie after I ate my sandwich.

My doting and loving mom would never turn down my requests. Her only son, I was sure to get whatever I wanted, whether it was good for me or not. She came from a family of 13 children, and in hindsight she probably had a difficult time cooking for just one kid.

I didn’t mind. Food was my friend.

Or so I thought.

The worst part of being fat was dealing with the nicknames. My name is Rodney. I had a small group of good friends — maybe four or five close friends.

They called me “Round-ney.”

These were my good friends.

On a related note: I’m not a very good judge of character.


OH LADIEEEES. This is an accurate depiction of my physical state at the age of eight.

One of my friends had a sister named Sheila. Sheila would often go bike riding and asked me to come with her one day.

I was excited about this, as normally girls didn’t say much to me aside from, “Ugh.”

I found myself in the bathroom, ready to head out on our bike ride. Looking for a hairbrush, I searched through the bathroom cabinets.

There, in one drawer, was a small box of chocolates. …

Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.

Ed., etc. I didn’t have time to do this today.

ONE MORE THING:

ONE MORE ONE MORE THING: Such Sad! Kabosu, Dog Who Inspired Doge Meme, Dies at 18
The beloved canine was honored with her very own bronze sculpture in Japan last year.


Atsuko Sato with Japanese shiba inu dog Kabosu at the Sakura Furusato riverside park, where a commemorative bronze statue was erected last year.


Proud Millennials mourn today, as the world faces the devastating loss of the zeitgeist of the internet. Or zeitdoge, if you will. Kabosu, the Japanese shiba inu who inspired many a meme — and her very own commemorative bronze statue in Japan — crossed the rainbow bridge today on May 24. 2024.

All dogs go to heaven, but this doge will probably end up in a special VIP subHeaven, as her likeness captured the soul of burgeoning internet culture. Kabo-chan, as she was known to her owner, Atsuko Sato, succumbed at the age of approximately 18 after a protracted struggle with canine leukemia and liver disease.

Kabosu was memorialized in her hometown of Sakura with a statue in her iconic pose in situ on a statuary couch at the Sakura Furusato riverside park, unveiled on November 2, 2023 — the pup’s 18th birthday. The sculptural group also includes renderings of Sato’s three cats, also reportedly a reference to the importance of felines in our modern meme ecosystem. (It’s clear who the star is, though.) It was crowdfunded by Own the Doge, an organization committed to doing good works in her name. “May her legacy of joy and perseverance live on forever through our global community,” a representative for Own the Doge told Hyperallergic. “Legends never die.

One can only assume that pilgrimages to this holy site are already being planned, from basements around the world.

…

Assimilation Complete