PicoBlog

“Happy Jesus Year!” was the well-wish-du jour around my birthday this January 28th. Texts, calls, in-person exchanges with friends, it was a constant chorus. I had never heard the phrase before, which refers to a person’s thirty-third year of life. The year of his life where Jesus (at least the one of Christian theology) was flogged and crucified under Pontius Pilate, entombed after his death, and rose from the dead three days later.

For someone who grew up reading a mid-sized North Carolina daily newspaper, The New York Times seemed like the biggest of leagues beyond the most unreachable of fences. As a teenager, by that point enamored with the idea of being a journalist, it was a splurge to occasionally spend a couple of dollars on the Sunday Times at the convenience store, an edition that weighed more than the pot roast my mother was making for supper.

Breaking Bad’s pilot aired on AMC on January 21, 2008, a Monday. A.V. Club editor  Keith Phipps was taking pitches for shows that the new TV Club section should cover in the new year. TV Club started in the fall of 2007, just before a writers’ strike paralyzed television production, and the section had had to establish itself on reality recaps and classic rewatches. But scripted shows were coming back—for instance, my husband Noel Murray was about to start covering LOST with the season 4 premiere—and the TV Club crew was looking to expand.

Who the hell is Freydís Moon? Freydís Moon (they/él/ella) is a bestselling, award-winning author, diviner, and creator with an affinity for quirky, speculative storytelling. A lover of culture, mysticism, history, and language, they constantly find themself lost in a book, trying their hand at a new recipe, or planning a trip to a faraway place. -Goodreads.com as of 4/21/2024 Just a few days ago, Freydís Moon was a Latinx nonbinary author in the indie book scene who focused on queer eroticism spun with what was thought to be serious and emotional inspection of the author’s diaspora Latin American heritage.

“Every day it’s watching you.” —Shinji Sato On December 28, 1998, fans packed the 1,200-person capacity Akasaka Blitz club in Minato, Tokyo to witness what was meant to be Fishmans’ final show with their bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara. Singer Shinji Sato, drummer Kin-Ichi Motegi, and guitarist Kensuke Ojima formed the dub-rock band while at university in Minato in 1987. Kashiwabara joined in 1988. After playing bass with the band for 10 years, Kashiwabara decided to leave for what he called family matters.

Google has way too much code in their codebase… and they chose to put it all in one repository. Anyone Google employee has access to all of Google code from Pixel, to Youtube, to Google Cloud. Google made it work because working with a single repository is simpler. It’s simpler dealing with less dependency management, and having a single source of truth. Lets take it back to 2015 and talk about how Google stored 2 billion lines of code in 9 million source files.

As many of you may have read recently, Google’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini, has provided some problematic responses to user queries. In particular, the AI’s ability to render historically accurate and reality-based images in response to prompts has come in for criticism. As the New York Post wrote: “Though the Gemini chatbot remains up and running, Google paused its image AI feature last week after it generated female NHL players, African American Vikings and Founding Fathers, as well as an Asian woman dressed in 1943 military garb when asked for an image of a Nazi-era German soldier.

Kareem’s Daily Quote: Coach Gregg Popovich tells us something important about living with disappointment. Arrest of armed Jan. 6 rioter does new harm to GOP talking points: Republicans tried to spin the insurrection as a spontaneous act of patriotism. Think again. Katie Britt defends sex trafficking story she falsely links to Biden presidency: With trembling voice, she deliberately lied about women so she could falsely blame Biden. Fake news. Jordan Peterson Whines Over ‘Woke’ Report on Drop in Traffic Deaths: Peterson complains about a city that has zero traffic fatalities.

Today, all four episodes of our new series Thank You Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story are available to watch on Hulu. We are so excited about this series, which has been almost three years in the making. Measured another way, however, this show is really the product of over 40 years of creativity, showmanship, and hard work on the part of the band. What you’ll find in this series is the story of a band that rose together, that fell apart, and is still making hits to this day.