508: PG-rated Rick and Morty, Midjourney without Discord, and a transgender pop star
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If you enjoy Rick and Morty’s meta modern narratives but can’t stand the violence, I enjoyed Fionna and Cake, a new show set in the children’s Adventure Time universe but aimed at young adults. It’s just as thoughtful and mind bendy but PG rated.
Technology
SportsIcon is a personalized AI gym coach on Whatsapp
Untools is a simple list of mental models and how to apply them
Ideogram is Midjourney without the annoying Discord interface
Learney plots education resources on a map for easy progression in a topic
Ideologies
This Israeli tour guide’s passionate yet factful defense of Israel taught me many new things, such as the Arab expulsion of Jews around the same time as the Nakba, that Romans renamed Judea to Palestina to disassociate it from Jews, andthat Jews accepted the proposed 1947 division but Arabs declined it and started a war.
I’m not sure I buy his take that Islam is inherently violent and inferior, though his data points are well chosen. And my cursory web research disproves his assertion that the US gives more aid to Palestine than to Israel, to the tune of billions vs millions.
Wendover’s exploration of the Gaza incursion is as top notch as the rest of his content, and impressively worded to be non political. It’s impressive Hamas was able to pull that off against the imposing IDF defenses.
Memes
Did you know the pop superstar Kim Petras is transgender? She is one of the youngest people ever to transition, before puberty, after petitioning local doctors.
You may know her as the female voice in Sam Smith’s Unholy, but it turns out the rest of her ouvre is even more catchy and preposterously sexualized. Take the lyrics of Coconuts, for example. “You can put them in your mouth / right now right now”.
I can’t get her songs out of my head. 😅