Fango mourns the passing of Kōji Suzuki, who became a household name in horror as the author of the RING trilogy, comprised of the novels RING, SPIRAL, and LOOP, which have been adapted into iconic films, manga, television series, and video games. We send our condolences to his friends, family, and fans.
Just heard that Tony Stella passed. We are such huge fans of his work. He did our favorite SEND HELP poster. I was trying to get in touch because he did other pieces for the film that we didn't use but they're so great I want them framed anyway. RIP. Such a talent. @studiotstella
I think about the Cheers guy now and then. Who is he? Why so smug? What was his life like? I know he could have never imagined his mug would eventually be seen by millions repeatedly on a contraption that beamed images and sounds through the air into people’s homes.
Orcas have brain structures you don't have.
Neurobiologist Lori Marino's MRI work on killer whales identified a fourth cortical segment called the paralimbic lobe. It sits next to the limbic system and handles emotion and social awareness. It doesn't exist in humans or in any land mammal. In orcas, it's so elaborated it erupts into the cortex.
Their cortical limbic lobe, the region handling self-awareness and social processing, is exceptionally developed. Their brain weighs roughly 12 pounds, four times the mass of yours. They have spindle cells, the same neurons that let humans reason about other minds.
When an orca surfaces and locks eyes with you, it's running a social assessment with neural hardware specialized for exactly that. It knows you're a separate being. It knows you're watching it back. It's evaluating you.
Here's what should recontextualize the clip. In all of recorded history, wild orcas have killed zero humans. Zero documented fatalities. One surfer was bitten off California in 1972, and the orca released him the moment it realized he wasn't a sea lion. A 12-year-old was bumped in Alaska in 2005. The orca approached, touched him, turned back.
Orcas hunt great white sharks. They coordinate wave attacks that sweep seals off ice floes. They take down moose swimming between islands. They have every capability to kill you. They have never chosen to.
Marino's explanation: the orca neocortex is developed enough to instantly distinguish a human from prey. Other researchers point to orca culture, the traditions passed through pods across generations, in which humans simply aren't food.
That look is recognition and restraint. From a mind built for social cognition at a scale your brain can't reach.
sports in the streaming era are so cool. is it easier to find? no. is the broadcast weirdly dark and gray? yes. is the connection more reliable? definitely not. it must be cheaper then? also no
Your body replaces 98% of its atoms every year. Within five years, every single one is swapped out. The you from 2021 is physically gone. Not "mostly gone." Gone. The atoms that used to be your face are now part of the air, the ocean, somebody else's lunch.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory proved this in 1953. Your skin right now is about a month old. Your liver, six weeks. Your stomach lining regrows every five days. Your skeleton is completely different from ten years ago. A few atoms do stick around for life, buried in some brain cells, in parts of your heart, and in your tooth enamel. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden tracked them using leftover radiation from 1950s nuclear bomb tests. The oldest surviving piece of "you" lives in your brain, your heart, and your teeth.
Your brain is also erasing you. On purpose. A neuroscientist named Ron Davis at Scripps Research found that the brain has cells that release dopamine, the same chemical you feel after a good meal or a win, and use it to dissolve memories. When his team shut these cells off in test animals, they remembered twice as much. The chemical behind your best feelings is the same one shredding your past, and it never stops running.
Ebbinghaus proved this back in 1885. You lose about half of everything you learn within one hour. A 2020 study from Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute had people live through a real experience and then checked how much they kept. At best, about a quarter. 75% of the details of your own life are being actively wiped by the organ that is supposed to be keeping track of it all.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Squeeze all of it into one calendar year, with the Big Bang on January 1st, and humans show up at 11:52 PM on New Year's Eve. Your whole life, every birthday and breakup and boring Tuesday, lasts 0.17 seconds on that calendar. Not even long enough to blink.
Stars will keep burning for about a hundred trillion more years, then the fuel runs out and the lights go off everywhere. The last things left will be black holes, places where gravity is so strong not even light can escape. Even those slowly leak away over a number of years so large you would need a hundred zeros to write it. After the last one is gone, nothing is left. No light, no warmth, nothing bumping into anything else, ever again. The universe reaches total stillness and stays there. Forever.
Brian Cox once described the window where life can even exist as one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent of the universe's total run time. You are in that window right now. Built from borrowed atoms, running on a brain shredding its own records, here for a fifth of a second on a cosmic calendar that ends in permanent silence. Anyway, hope your Tuesday is going alright.