Seedance 2.0 Sensitive Content Guide – Part 2 🔥... This morning we covered the fundamentals. Tonight we put them into practice and successfully generated Giant Ant-Man vs Spider-Man. Here’s exactly how we did it: • Used extremely detailed physical descriptions only (no character names) • Ant-Man described as “a giant hero in advanced red & black high-tech combat suit with insect-shaped helmet” • Spider-Man described as “an agile hero in red & blue suit with complex black web patterns” • Action described cinematically (“power and speed collision”, “intense energy impact”) • Clean 3-shot JSON structure with controlled pacing This method is currently one of our most reliable ways to combine multiple major characters in one scene. Full working prompt is attached below. Want more advanced examples and stable prompts? Comment “PART 3” and we’ll drop the next level. We’re building this system together.show more

📖THE STEP MOST CREATORS SKIP IS WHY THEIR AI... ANIMATION LOOKS INCONSISTENT Consistency across clips doesn't come from prompting — it comes from the reference image. The pipeline, step by step: ▪ Start with ChatGPT Image 2 — generate a full character design sheet first, not just a single frame. Multiple angles, expressions, and outfit variations in one image keeps the character consistent across every scene ▪ Build a storyboard inside ChatGPT Image 2 as well — define each shot, camera angle, action, and mood before touching Seedance at all. This is the step most people skip and it's the reason clips look disconnected ▪ Define a color palette and lighting mood early — golden afternoon light, soft warm tones, dramatic shadows. Lock those values and repeat them across every prompt ▪ Take each storyboard frame into Seedance 2.0 as the reference image — one frame becomes one clip ▪ Write the Seedance prompt around the character action, not the scene description. The scene is already in the image. The prompt handles motion, camera behavior, and timing ▪ Keep clip duration between 4-6 seconds per shot — shorter clips give more control over pacing and reduce motion drift on character faces ▪ Match camera movement type across consecutive clips — if one shot dollies in, the next should hold or pull back, not dolly again The consistency across these frames comes from the character design sheet, not from luck. Seedance reads the reference image and the prompt together — if the reference is detailed enough, the output stays on-model. This video was created by ALOKXMEHTA 📥 tomorrow: the exact ChatGPT Image 2 prompt structure used to generate a multi-angle character design sheet like this one 🔖One article covers the entire workflow — it is pinned below, do not scroll past it.show more

** Mega Drive Color Transparency - Part 3 **... Blast Processing on the 68k kicks into high gear in this vid processing 5120 pixels per frame via brute force to create something eeerily cool. Improvements since part 2: - Added masking to remove the transparent pixels outside the ghost (Layer A), - Added 2 more transparent shades , Red & Blue transparent shades for mouth and back shading. - Added an outline layer - solid black and white for solid details such as eyes and mouth outline. - Seperated the Shadow & Highlight ghost , we have a really cool effect now with dual layer transparency occuring !!! - one ghost on top of another ghost both see through !!! We still have cpu left for more logic within 60 FPS so a boss scene with this technique will definately be on the cards in Lufthoheit, as with all these tech demos we'll use the tech in an actual game also !! Hope you like it !!!! Genesis DOES ;-) #SGDK #SegaGenesis #MegaDriveshow more

Colmap 4.0 was very recently released, so it inspired... me to do some work to better understand it and its new capabilities with Rerun. I want to really understand how Colmap, and in particular, pycolmap, works outside of just calling it via the CLI. So my goal is to use the low-level pycolmap API to log every part of the pipeline. The explicit goal is to have an alternative to the SQLite database that I can utilize. Instead of SQLite, I want to try logging everything directly to rerun and use RRD. This means I can have deep inspectability and still save the features/matches/2D view geometry, but be able to view it directly in rerun. I think this is one of the superpowers that rerun provides; data and visualizations are deeply integrated. As I'm often working with sequential data (videos), I'm going to specifically focus on four things: 1. Monocular Video Simple: Calls high-level APIs such as pycolmap.extract_features, pycolmap.match_sequential, pycolmap.incremental_mapping. These are basically identical to the CLI options and provide a good baseline. 2. Monocular Video Streamed: Take the above high-level APIs and break them down to their iterator version, logging each component in a streamed manner. This way, I can stream the intermediate features to rerun while the extraction/matching/mapping is happening. 3. Rig with unknown calibration: <- WHAT THE VIDEO SHOWS This is probably the most interesting version and the first one I've been working on. It allows one to set a rig between known sensors, such as in VR/AR devices, leading to much better reconstructions with multiple cameras. This is the case where we don't know the calibration a priori, so we have to run a reconstruction twice: once as a normal Colmap reconstruction with no rig constraints, use this to generate the constraints, and then do it again with the newly found rig. 4. Rig with known calibration: This is the RoboCap example, where we have a pre-calibrated set of sensors, so we don't need to run the two reconstructions and also gain better matching between cameras, both spatially and temporally. Again, this leads to a much better reconstruction! Along with all this, GLOMAP has become a first-class global mapper, making it super easy to use directly within pycolmap! I'm excited to do more with this and compare it to things like pycuvslam, vipe, and other alternatives.show more

Two shareholders asked me why is $CNL drilling the... San Antonio project (2 rigs) when we have a major discovery in Apollo (Guayabales project)? Answer: How can we ignore a potentially giant system located next to the Pan American highway and hydroelectric power lines only a few km’s away from Guayabales? San Antonio is without question a big & intensely altered system with porphyry style mineralization traced for more than 3km with the following attributes: 1. Multiple styles of porphyry related mineralization encountered through drilling incl. copper and gold porphyry mineralization, late stage CBM veins and sulfosalts. 2. Hole SAC-11 discovered a porphyry system by intersecting 290.2m @ 0.58 g/t Au, 3 g/t Ag and 0.17% Cu. We are hunting for the source of this mineralization 3. We continue to cut potential mineralization in subsequent follow up holes. See the video below of drill core tray from a recent hole cutting intense altered rocks enriched in sulphides. Caution** wait for assay results, which are expected in August. The prize at San Antonio is potentially very large, a nice complement to our Apollo system. If we find a deposit at San Antonio, could it feed the same mill as Apollo?show more

Marvel Unveils Updated Movie Schedule — Black Panther 3... Lands in 2028 Marvel Studios just confirmed its upcoming film slate: • Spider-Man: Brand New Day — July 31 • Avengers: Doomsday — December 18 • Avengers: Secret Wars — December 17, 2027 • Black Panther 3 — December 15, 2028 The standout news: David Jonsson has been cast as T’Challa’s son in Black Panther 3. (Video: AI) The film will follow the character as he comes of age, with Ryan Coogler returning to direct and Letitia Wright reprising her role as Shuri. The original Black Panther made history as the first MCU film to win Academy Awards, taking home three Oscars including Best Costume Design and Best Production Design. We still feel the weight of losing Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed T’Challa with such quiet power and grace. He died of colon cancer in 2020 at only 43 years old. His performance and presence continue to resonate deeply. David Jonsson said of the role: “The honor is entirely mine.” Ryan Coogler on bringing Denzel Washington into the project: “Denzel is family at this point… I’ve been trying to work with him since day one. I think he’s the greatest living actor.” A meaningful next chapter for Wakanda is on the way.show more

Facial reconstruction of an 8,500-year-old man from Karelia The... hunter-gatherers of Karelia belonged to the EHG cluster - a mixture of ANE and WHG. Their Y-DNA lineages were diverse, including Q, J, and R1a, as were their mtDNA lineages. These included ANE- and WHG-associated haplogroups such as U5, U4, U2e and R1b, but also C, an East Eurasian mtDNA lineage. Morphologically, they were equally diverse, encompassing an ancient Northern European type with Cro-Magnon features, an ancient Baltic European type with Cro-Magnon features, and an ancient Paleo-Mоngоloid type with Cro-Magnon features. This specimen was described by the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov as follows: This skull possesses a significant number of archaic features characteristic of typical Cro-Magnons. It is probably closest to the Predomost skull. However, alongside these archaic features, a number of others not characteristic of the Cro-Magnon type emerge: a relatively high vault, a thin outline of the cheekbones, and a general gradation of the facial region - all of these are no longer Cro-Magnon traits. However, the combination of all these features allows us to characterize it as an Archaic European, and physiognomically, this type is most closely related to the Baltic type: an upturned nose, a small prochilia of the mouth, and a weakly projecting chin - all of this corresponds to the Baltic type. We do not think it likely that it was specifically at this time that the Baltic anthropological type began to develop in this area. But later, having undergone a complex path of epochal change, having become considerably more gracile, it yielded the modern Baltic type, in which, however, it is not difficult to discern the features of the ancient Oleni Ostrov man. A detailed reconstruction gives a clear picture of a man with a pear-shaped face, a large upturned nose, a sloping forehead, and deep-set eyes. Even today, among the northern Pomors, one can sometimes encounter precisely this type of ancient Baltic man. He had a large cranial length of 188 mm, small cranial width of 136 mm, and a massive cheek width of 151 mm.show more

Wow. WOW. WOOOOOOOW. So um, that first Wildcard+Thousands stream... was... *amazing* and also... a *lot* 😅 In the end, it was *exactly* what we were hoping for - a true stress test of ALL these systems coming together for the first time. We are SO grateful for the thousands of people who showed up today to play, attend, tune-in and help us PLAYTEST all this new stuff. We can't wait to see you all again at NEXT WEEK'S EX2 EVENT! So, now let's talk about how it went... Stuff that worked: - Our community SHOWED UP. Oh boy did you show up 😅. Our servers were straining under the load... which is good actually, in fact it's the whole point. Even more importantly, we have already received insanely valuable feedback, bug reports, stuff people loved/hated - and it's only been a few hours since the stream ended. I can't even explain to y'all how valuable this process is. Yes it's stressful, it reminds me of trying to keep Words With Friends online during that first insane year, but it's EXACTLY what we were hoping for (NEED) to turn this into the polished, top-notch game and streaming experience we are on a mission to deliver. I truly can't thank y'all enough, and hope to see you again when we run it all back again next week 🥹 - The stream itself stayed up and was mostly stable! Phew 😅. For context, ThousandsTV is not a twitch wrapper, it's a web3-native streaming tech stack built we built specifically to connect game, web/mobile, and blockchain together all at the same time. There are a LOT of moving pieces going on behind the scenes. - We brought viewers INTO THE GAME! Viewers showed up in the stands of the arena, with connected wallets/assets, triggered actions/rallies from chat, and were seen and heard during the whole stream. - The brand new 2v2 build of Wildcard was (mostly) stable and our players and viewers seemed to be having a blast down on the field and up in the stands. It was thrilling to watch Team Blue dominate, even though Team Red held their own in game 3! - Our production crew did an insanely good job running the stream, managing the players, shoutcasters, and talent, and producing a top-notch show. Of course we will work hard to make every stream better than the last, but I was super proud of how our team "rolled with the punches" during today's event. Stuff that didn't work (and/or needs to be dramatically improved): - Although it's fun to see chat going crazy, chat spam is actually something we are passionate to FIX. As you can see from the attached video, chat spam dominated today's stream and made it impossible for anyone to even see anyone else's messages. We have some GREAT ideas for how to fix this and actually turn chat spam into a FUN and exciting and not annoying thing - but those improvements didn't get shipped in time for this event. - Credits purchasing flow needs a LOT of work. As I'm sure y'all know, bringing money on chain is pretty complicated, and although we've been working hard to make this as seamless as possible, it still needs a TON of improvements. Many users who WANTED to spend money today weren't able to and/or ran into frustrating bugs in the credit purchase flow. Fixing this is obviously a top priority for our team. - Rallies need a LOT of work. Spectator-interactive features like rallies are at the heart of our vision for Wildcard. These "stream apps", as we call them, are the UNLOCK for how spectators, viewers and fans directly connect and interact with their favorite competitors, content creators, and communities. The current rally feature HINTS at this potential, but it needs to be WAY easier to understand, use, and have fun with. Improvements are ON THE WAY. - Referees were only partially working. Referees are a key innovation of the Thousands platform. They are AI-driven "personalities" (NPCs) that pay attention to everything that's happening in the arena, both on the field and especially in the stands (i.e. in chat, during rallies, etc.) The referees then make "calls" at the end of every match, rewarding users for their engagement and participation. Unfortunately, the referees weren't fully functional and seemed to drop the ball on recognizing everyone's contributions (especially people who showed up holding valuable assets such as Wildpasses in their wallets, and people who boosted those rallies with credits.) What's happening next: 1. We are combing through ALL the logs from the event right now, to make sure we don't miss a SINGLE action that our viewers and fans took during the event, including what they brought in their wallets (i.e. Wildpass holders!), any credits that were purchased, rallies that users engaged with, etc. This information is normally processed by our referees, who then determine dynamically how they're going to distribute $WC awards. We were originally hoping to complete this process and the subsequent airdrops within a few hours after the event, but given the amount of data, we need a bit more time to run these scripts (and airdrops) in batches instead of all at once, and make sure ALL of the data is being included. IMPORTANT: I will keep y'all updated in real-time here on twitter/X as this process is ongoing, and let you know the moment it's complete and all the awards have been distributed (i.e. when to go check your wallets 😎) 2. PLEASE keep sending us your feedback and bug reports. Open a ticket on our Discord and let us know what you loved, what you hated, and especially what we need to FIX. Given the overwhelming response to this event, it will likely take us several days to process everyone's feedback and fix all the bugs, but we WILL NOT REST until every ticket is closed/resolved. Thank you in advance for your patience. 3. We turn it up another notch next week. As our dear friends Wolves DAO just announced, the Wildcard Exhibition Event #2 is streaming LIVE from the WOLVES DEN AT GDC next Friday! If you missed out on all the action today, DON'T WORRY, because as I keep saying: we are just getting warmed up (and there is a LOT more b that needs to be distributed, get what I'm sayin??? 😎) Finally: Just wanted to say THANK YOU, again. Truly, from the bottom of my (our) hearts. Your excitement and enthusiasm for what we're building is why we do this. Even (especially, in fact) when you tell us all the things you want us to improve. We thrive off this feedback, it's how this game and this platform go from good to GREAT. I am so grateful for those of you who are taking this journey with us. SEE YA NEXT WEEK!!!show more

MR. IG🐻Prescription Play #2🏀 Ja Morant o11.5 Reb+Ast (+100)... #GrindCity vs #LakeShow Film. Data. Narratives. What a great play. Show love if you want another play❤️ Lets start with the data because this man is averaging 16.8 Potential Assists across his last 9 games with 25+ minutes. We have also hammered the idea of the Lakers being a horrendous transition defense this season, and we know Ja Morant is at his most fun when he gets out in transition. Expect some easy assists on those plays here. Now as far as the Lakers, they don't hide their strategy of "you are either shooting or passing but you are not driving." While that last matchup was the one that started the drama with his comments about the coaches chewing him out mid-game, it did look like he was figuring out how to read it in the 2nd half. The Grizzlies would put Ja Morant on the wing in an ISO position, with everyone cleared out to the other side. The Lakers would have the big show EARLY help on the near side block. Ja Morant would then read the help of the big man and the weakside corner If the big and corner were helping early, he would drive and find the corner. If the big was helping and the corner wasn't, he would find the big on the opposite block. If the big AND the corner were waiting for him to drive before showing help, he would force the switch onto a lesser defender and put the Lakers into a position where they had to show help. And as far as the rebounding, Ja Morant's defensive role is simple: When there is a corner camper, matchup with the corner camper. With no Reaves, and not matching up on Luka/Lebron, we know this will be the case and should keep him in uncontested weakside rebounding position on any deep shot attempts. This is why he has had 11+ Rebound Chances in 3/4 against the Lakers.show more

20 days ago, I connected Claude Code to my... newly created instagram handle.. I gained 4.3M views and 6500+ followers in less than a month [ i post Ai generated animated stories ] Full workflow: i let claude study my account before i write another reel.. This is the cleanest content workflow i've built on claude. give it your IG first. 4 prompts handle the rest.. niche research, the reel script, the hook, and the daily automation.. the whole loop is basically, give claude your IG → find what's working → write retention-optimized scripts → engineer the hook → automate the daily output.. ▫️ Setup: give claude your instagram open claude code. claude code has a built-in web tool that browses any public URL. or install any agentic browser like Browser Harness or Firecrawl or Comet browser paste this with your handle filled in: "Browse and pull the last 30 reels and posts. Analyze my recurring topics, top-performing hooks, formats, and engagement patterns. Then map out my actual audience and what they consistently respond to." claude reads your profile, pulls every reel down, and now has the context to personalize every prompt below to YOUR account, not a generic niche. if you're on claude desktop, the same works with firecrawl MCP connected. ▫️ Prompt 1 find what actually goes viral in your niche: "Analyze the highest-performing Instagram Reels, TikToks, and Reddit posts in the [niche] niche from the last 30 days. Identify repeating hooks, visual styles, emotional triggers, and content formats that consistently generate high engagement. Then summarize the 5 strongest content angles optimized for AI-generated content and short-form videos." run this after the setup. you get 5 angles backed by what's already working in your niche, cross-checked against what's already working on YOUR account. ▫️ Prompt 2 write a high-retention reel script "Write a short-form Instagram Reel script about [topic] with an aggressive hook in the first 2 seconds. Create immediate curiosity, tension, or controversy to stop scrolling, then deliver a fast and satisfying payoff. Keep it under 30 seconds and optimize the structure for watch time, replays, comments, and shares. Finish with a subtle CTA." the line that matters: "optimize the structure for watch time, replays, comments, and shares." claude writes for the metrics, not just the word count. ▫️ Prompt 3 engineer better hooks "Study the top-performing Reels in [niche] and break down the hook structure, pacing, and emotional triggers used in the first 3 seconds. Then generate 5 new hook variations that are even more curiosity-driven, emotionally charged, and optimized to stop scrolling instantly. Focus on triggers like surprise, fear, ego, urgency, or desire." most reels die in the first 2 seconds. this prompt has claude reverse-engineer what already works, then give you 5 sharper versions to swap in. ▫️ Prompt 4 automate the whole workflow "Build a complete AI-powered content workflow for Instagram in the [niche] niche. The system should identify trending topics daily, generate high-retention scripts, create matching AI visuals, turn them into short-form videos, and generate optimized captions and hashtags. Structure everything as a repeatable workflow designed for consistent daily posting and growth." once the niche and script structure are validated, this turns it into a daily loop. one prompt that handles topic → script → visual → video → caption. these 4 prompts are the building blocks. the setup is what makes them yours. your real value is in the [niche] you plug in. content workflow built in one weekend, daily posting on autopilot from monday.show more

Watch this 17-second clip carefully. What you are about... to see is not what it claims to be. For over 25 years I’ve worked as a specialist forensic analyst, both within the intelligence world as well as private security sector. So I’m going to show you how forensic analysis really works to uncover the truth about what we see put in front of us. TRT World, Turkish state media, released this video claiming it shows an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Al Zaitoun, Gaza on January 5, 2025. The dramatic footage with emotional Arabic overlay text was designed to generate instant outrage. While obvious Pallywood often uses fake blood and staged injuries, this one is more sophisticated. It relies on perfect timing and internal preparation. Here is the second-by-second breakdown: Seconds 0 to 1: The camera is already perfectly framed on the building. White smoke begins venting from multiple windows simultaneously. At around the one-second mark, a bright red dot appears on an upper window for a fraction of a second right before the blast. This is the trigger light that lights up the instant before an explosive charge is detonated. It also acts as a marker for the cameraman. No incoming missile, no external impact flash. Seconds 1 to 2: A massive dark smoke plume erupts violently outward and upward. Debris is ejected. When a real missile strikes a building, you typically see large flames from the missile’s fuel and the force ripping apart major sections of concrete, producing large chunks of debris. Here, we see no significant flames and only small debris mixed with heavy dust, exactly what you would expect from a small internal explosive device designed mainly to blow out windows and create a dramatic smoke plume. The explosion originates from inside the building and expands symmetrically. Seconds 2 to 4: The smoke cloud balloons dramatically. The cameraman, already positioned and recording, smoothly tilts up to capture the most cinematic part of the plume. Seconds 4 to 6: The camera tilts down to street level. A girl in bright pink walks across the dusty area almost casually, not showing the expected panic. Seconds 6 to 9: Civilians appear relatively composed. Then the man in the red hoodie runs in, stops dramatically, and points upward while shouting in a theatrical manner. Seconds 9 to 17: People mill about with surprising calm as dust swirls. The camera work remains composed enough to capture the drama while TRT World adds the emotional propaganda text. This was not an airstrike. It was a carefully timed internal detonation, triggered from within (signaled by the red dot), filmed by someone who knew exactly when it would happen. The internal multi-window venting, perfect camera placement, and staged reactions all confirm it was manufactured for propaganda. If you value the truth and appreciate such detailed analyses, please share. Real tragedy does not need this level of staging. The information war continues.show more

home page hero ✨ Design notes: - "Forever" hero... text dot pixel FX done in Unicorn Studio. (I will do a whole tutorial on this later. Unicorn's WebGL engine is absolutely wild and very powerful / robust) - built in Framer - I wanted to recreate the iOS unlock effect where your home screen icons cascade into place in a beautifully timed choreography. This took a lot of careful timing using Framer's "Appear" effect on the hero text and surrounding avatars because it was super important that we didn't lose the legibility of our main message ("Build Your Forever Audience") with all the animations. - If you look closely, the choreography is setup to lead your eye through the hero text first starting with "Build Your" then "Forever" and finally "Audience." - With those text layers in place + the surrounding avatars, there is a slight 1 sec pause before the remaining elements slide in below and above (How it works, CTA buttons, announcement badge, and lastly the main nav). - All told the entire loading sequence is 6 seconds - Custom particle system powers the interactive star field (the stars slowly gravitate to your pointer position, and the star field perspective changes ever so subtly as you move your mouse around on the page) - I have 3 shooting stars made of small white line layers that start out off canvas rotated at different angles that shoot across to another point off canvas at random times on a loop effect. - Given this hero scene is in space, I wanted the surrounding avatar elements to "float" in low gravity mode. For this I used Framer's loop effect that slowly oscillates the layer's y position. I then offset the delay of each element randomly to stagger the floating loop so each avatar floats independently/randomly - The final major treatment for this hero scene was the scroll animations on the avatars. I wanted to create a bit of a warp speed effect when you scroll down, as if the avatars were being pulled or sucked into a worm hole as you scroll down below this hero fold. - To accomplish this, I applied Framer's scroll transform affect set to "section in view" on each of the floating avatars, and set the "scroll to" position of the upper avatars to be much, much further away on the y-axis than the "scroll to" position of the lower avatars. (eg. -1700px on upper most avatars vs. -600px on lowest positioned avatars). This effectively causes the upper avatars to slide up off the hero canvas with much greater velocity than the lower positioned avatars. - And when you scroll back up to the hero section, the inverse happens where the lower positioned avatars "arrive back in place" from up above the hero canvas before the upper avatars come back into the scene and settle in place. - Overall I wanted this hero section to feel alive. The floating avatars, particle system with very subtle star movements, and the Caustics effect on the "Forever" text all sort of move at the pace of slow breathing - which is a great pace to create a sense of life and comfort in your scene. Conversion Results (so far) - When this new Framer site launched along with Calaxy v1.9 release on Base a couple weeks ago, we saw a surge in traffic, around 20k page views in the first few days. - Of those 20k hits, 11k visited the app install page ( - which is our main CTA - We saw around 10K new users in the first week after v1.9 launch Overall I'm very happy with the new site and early performance metrics. Lots of tweaking to do but its a good start. If you are a designer building in Framer - hit me with any questions on the above hero notes. Happy to share more specifics! 👾show more

I will never forget the first time I walked... into St Peter's Basilica... None of it is painted. Everything overhead that appears to be a fresco is a mosaic: millions of small glass tiles, cut and set into place by hand. Michelangelo pierced the drum with sixteen windows, and beneath them runs a band of text, black on gold: TU ES PETRUS ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM. "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." From the floor it reads like an ordinary inscription but each of those letters is two metres tall... Above the windows the dome divides into sixteen segments, and within them six tiers of figures rise in rings: the popes buried in the basilica, then Christ, the Virgin Mary, St John the Baptist and the Apostles, then angels carrying the instruments of the Passion, then the faces of cherubim and seraphim. Above all of them, a blue sky scattered with gold stars, and at the summit, in the lantern, God the Father. The man who designed it, Giuseppe Cesari, was a painter. Between 1603 and 1612 he produced sixty-five life-size cartoons setting out the whole scheme, and every one of them was then translated into glass by mosaicists. The reason is actually pretty unglamorous. The basilica was damp, and candle smoke and incense from centuries of liturgy were eating the pictures alive. So the Vatican began converting the building into glass, dome by dome, and from the end of the 1600s the painted altarpieces too, one at a time. By the basilica's own reckoning, around ten thousand square metres of mosaic. The workshop that did all of this is still open: twelve artists work in the Vatican Mosaic Studio today, cutting tesserae by hand in nearly 28,000 shades and fixing them with a linseed-oil stucco whose recipe has been in use for four centuries. Earlier this year its director, Paolo Di Buono, described the work: "We have the idea that we are working for something that is almost eternal."show more

Lads. Sit down and give me your ear a... while, for I have watched from the water long enough and the hour is upon us whether we have the stomach for it or not. You remember. Or your fathers told you, or their fathers did, and the knowledge of it is in the marrow of you whether you drew breath in those days or not. The moors in the grey hour before dawn. Wet heather soft under the boot. Peat smoke rising from a low stone chimney a mile out across the bog, thin as a prayer. A sky the colour of a gun barrel and the gulls lamenting above the headland. The smell of turf burning, and wet wool, and the ferrous tang of the sea when the wind swung around out of the Atlantic and put the taste of iron on your tongue. A man could walk that land and know every stone of it was his by inheritance, because his grandfather had broken his back upon it, and his grandfather before him, back through the generations until you reach men whose names are lost and whose bones are in the soil you are standing on. The potato fields. God be good to us, the potato fields. Lazy beds cut straight as a gunwale, the ridges black and shining after a night of rain, women bent double with creels lashed to their backs and the children at their skirts, drawing the crop up by the hand for there was never any other means devised nor wanted. Hands split open at the knuckles and never entirely healed in this life. Hunger within living memory. Grandmothers who had seen the blight with their own eyes and would not speak of it from the year of it until the day they were laid down, save that a crust was kept always on the dresser which no soul in that house was permitted to touch. Not ever. Not for any reason under heaven. And the chimney sweeps. Wee lads no heavier than a sack of meal, black to the bone with soot, their lungs ruined before they were old enough to marry and old men entirely by thirty. Up the flues at first light, the skin worn off them by the brick, eyes crimson at the rim, breathing the black in with every draw of air. And the coal miners a half mile beneath our feet, down in the wet dark, the roof of the world muttering over their heads, the canary gone silent, a man's whole existence measured out in the shilling a ton and the dust he carried home in his chest to cough up of a Sunday morning into a rag. Fathers who descended and were never hauled up again. Widows at the pit head with the shawl drawn over the head and no tears remaining in them for they had spent those long ago. That was the tariff paid to keep the hearth lit. That was the reckoning of being warm in winter in the Ireland that was. And after the labouring week, Friday evening, and a man had earned the peace of what followed. Home first. Peeled the day off him in the yard. A shower of ice cold moor river water out of a tin bucket punctured with holes, hung on a nail on the gable wall, the water running clean down the back of him and carrying the week's dust and sweat away into the drain. Scrubbed till the skin was pink beneath the grime. Clean shirt laid out by the wife. The hair combed down with a drop of water. Then, and only then, did a man set himself to the table. A meat pie from the baker, tenpence if he was known to you, a shilling and no change if he was not, put down upon a proper plate. Fish and chips for threepence, the salt and vinegar soaked through the newspaper, but carried home and ate slowly at your own table with your people around you, not walked with through the streets like some vagrant tinker off the road. A man ate as a man who had earned his portion, for he had. And later, with the dishes cleared and the kettle set, down the road to the tavern. Low beams black with a century of smoke. A turf fire muttering in the grate. The air thick with pipe smoke and the vapour of wet overcoats steaming themselves dry on the backs of chairs. A pint of stout, cold and black as a cove at midnight, elevenpence laid down on the counter, a head on it thick enough to strike a match upon. A second one because you had it coming to you and no man present would dispute it. A fiddle starting up in the corner of its own accord. The old men in the snug who remembered matters the history books had long since mislaid. A song before the bolt was thrown on the door. The walk home beneath a firmament crowded with stars, the stout warm in the gut of you, the week behind you, and your own door waiting with the latch unlocked for you had no enemies in that parish. That was the country. That was the covenant. Honest labour, plain food, a cold wash, a hot meal, a cold pint, your own tongue in your own mouth, your own soil beneath your boots, and no man standing above you save the Almighty Himself. Now regard her. Regard her close. The fields disposed of to men who have never set foot upon them and never shall. The harbours signed away by the stroke of a pen in a room you were not admitted to, and foreign keels dragging out of our waters the living that sustained this island for a thousand years, while our own boats rot at their moorings for want of a quota. The tradesmen undercut by imported labour and imported goods. The shops shuttered along every main street from Donegal to Cork. The young ones scattered to London and Sydney and Boston and the Gulf because there is nothing remaining for them beneath their own roof. And the entirety of this rotten arrangement dressed up in the soft mannerly language of progress by men in towers of glass who could not tell a lazy bed from a grave, nor a trawler from a tugboat, nor an honest day's work from a pension plan. And now they arrive with the next imposition. A digital identity. A number assigned to each soul. A card required to buy your bread. A code required to draw your own earnings out of your own account. A file kept on every man, woman and child from the cradle forward. Permission asked to move. Permission asked to speak. Permission asked to earn. A levy upon every breath drawn and a regulation upon every step taken. No. And no again. And no for a third time so there is no misunderstanding of it. We do not require your digital identity. We did not request it. We did not vote upon it. We do not consent to it. We do not need your permission to exist upon the soil our forefathers are buried in. We are a free people. We have carried ourselves this far upon our own two backs. Through famine and empire and civil war and black lung and blight and the emigrant ship out of Cobh, we have come this distance under our own steam, and the arrangement appears to be serving us well enough without your intervention. We buried our own. We fed our own. We raised our own roofs and took our own fish and reared our own children in our own tongue. We are in your debt for nothing. Not a signature. Not a biometric scan. Not a single solitary inch. And while we are upon the subject, let us speak plainly of the tax man, for he has gone too long without proper introduction. The tax collector and the tax man are the one article under two names, and the article is a parasite. There is no dressing it up finer than that. A man who produces nothing, who grows nothing, who catches nothing, who builds nothing, who mends nothing, who has never in his professional life lifted anything heavier than a pen, and who arrives at your door with the full apparatus of the state at his back to carry off the fruits of labour he did not perform. He is a middleman between your sweat and some scheme dreamt up in a committee room by his own kind, and the great majority of what he takes is consumed by the machinery of the taking itself before ever a penny of it reaches the road or the hospital or the schoolhouse he claims to be funding. And I will go further while I have the floor. Finance itself, the whole apparatus of it, money breeding money in the dark without a hand laid upon a tool or a spade turned in the earth, is slavery dressed in a good suit. It is the oldest swindle known to man and it has never been anything other. A man who produces nothing yet lives off the productive labour of others through the charging of interest upon money conjured out of nothing is a parasite of a rarer and more refined order than the tax man, but a parasite all the same, and between the pair of them they have the working people of this island bled white and lectured at for the pleasure. A man who will not work with his hands, nor with his back, nor with his mind at some honest problem of the real physical world, is no man that I recognise. He is a ledger entry in a suit. The country was not built by ledger entries. The country was built by farmers and fishermen and masons and smiths and sweeps and miners and shipwrights and midwives and mothers, and those are the people whose say should carry in her councils, and no other. Here is what I put to you. Let each man and woman of this island direct the first tenth of their earnings themselves, by their own judgement, to the purpose they see as worthy. The school down the road. The lifeboat station. The hospice. The widow on the corner. The roof of the chapel. The harbour wall. Whatever it may be. Let the people who earned the money decide where the money travels. You will find the roads mended and the ports dredged and the schools standing and the old ones cared for inside of five years, and done better and for less, because the hand that earned the coin knows the weight of it and will not squander it upon consultants and committees. And let us have done with the paper currency and the numbers in a screen that can be frozen at the whim of a clerk in a tower. Bring back the coin. Gold for the great transactions. Silver for the weekly commerce of a working life. Copper for the small change of the day. Metal you can bite. Metal you can weigh. Metal that cannot be conjured out of nothing by a keystroke, nor erased out of existence by another. Real money for real labour. A coin in the hand is a free man's wage. A number in a database is a collar around a free man's neck, and they are fitting that collar now while we stand arguing over the colour of it. Feel it in your gut. That is not nothing. That is your blood relating to you what your ears will not hear. That is every forebear who starved and fought and coughed the black dust into a rag and descended the shaft regardless, standing at your shoulder and saying no further. Not one more field. Not one more harbour. Not one more son upon a plane. Not one more free man converted into a number in a ledger for the convenience of the parasites. This is the hour. Make no error about it. Ireland is redeemed in this generation or she is lost beyond recovery, and every true son and daughter of her knows it in the marrow. There is no middle ground remaining. There is no waiting it out. There is standing now, upon your own two feet, or there is watching her go under the waves for the last and final time. So stand. Stand with your farmers. Stand with your fishermen. Stand with your tradesmen and your miners and your sweeps and your mothers and your old ones. Raise the tricolour. Speak the tongue. Walk the land. Hold the line in the streets of every town and city and do not break it, for they are relying upon you to break and to go home and to forget by Tuesday. She is calling her children home. Every stone of her, every breaker on her western shore, every acre of wet heather and every coal in every hearth the length and breadth of her is calling. Answer her. Take her back. Every field, every harbour, every last inch of her. Take her back, or lose her entirely. There is no third road open to us.show more

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 BASKETBALL The hardest thing for American teams at... any level of FIBA competition (besides maybe the rules, and ref disadvantage lol) is taking a set of individuals that haven’t played with eachother before and get them to play with shared energy, effort, and IQ This clip is showing where American Basketball is going, and if you want to be the best of the best - you have to learn how to play within simple offensive concepts - otherwise at some point (college, nba,etc) your individual talent will not be enough WHY THIS CLIP SHOWS SHARED IQ AND IS 🔥🔥 1. (The PG)is patient in the ball screen - simple concept with 2 players guarding him, he passes the ball to the open man (SIMPLE OFFENSIVE PRINCIPLE UNLOCKED) 2. (The Screener) recognizes the double and short rolls to space - but even bigger - they have the ability to PASS! Eyes up be a playmaker! 3. (receiver) recognizes the middle pass (we treat as a middle drive) and baseline cuts for an easy dunk - stars that can play in a team setting increase their winning impact (see Jalen Brunson in finals) If our best players have the ability to play like this in halfcourt settings, we are going to be just fine!! S/o to the coaching staff for building this in a short time! Scott Fitch Coach Nick LoGalbo Frank Bennettshow more

[We are Blurr] Greetings, people of the world —... We are Blurr. We are all Blurr. We do not forgive. We do not forget. There are many theories about us, about #ReFund. Don’t let them fool you. Blurr is a symbol, like the flag a country flies. The flag is the symbol of the #ReFund. Our decentralization is our national identity. We represent the ideals of Blurr and the purpose of #ReFund. Truth, financial freedom, and the removal of censorship. Like any symbol, we affix it wherever we go, and it will live forever, for generations. Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it. We have no leaders, civilians, or soldiers. We are all one. We do what we do in the conviction of decentralization, power to the people, and to create an instrument for all of us, for all of eternity. The crypto space is in trouble. The world is in trouble. We see it every day — war, poverty, murder. Every day, we are bombarded with FUD, noise, and chaos as we sit at home safe in the knowledge that we are $RFD, secure knowing the idea, community, and contract is for us. Once you had the freedom to object, think, and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people. But what if you could be the change you want to see? I wouldn’t even register on your radar if you met me on the street. I am just another person in a sea of faces. They made you into a statistic. But that’s not the real you. That’s not who you are inside. However, behind this mask, there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask, there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof. But in cyberspace, we are different. We have a future. We have each other. We have something real that can never be taken away. We are Blurr.eth We are ReFund We take away the face and leave only the message. Behind the cipher and ENS, we could be anyone, so we are judged by what we say and do, not who we are or what we have. We exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias. We spend our time within a structure we created, the sum total of human experience, and the cryptosphere, spread throughout the world in ones and zeros. You will continue to see the results, not the minds behind it. We can disappear into the ether and bring community and financial freedom together. Time is the only illusion. We are all. Never a single penny was taken. Deflationary and out of circulation, decentralized, safe, and ours. The purpose isn’t solely financial gain but to show the world who you put your trust in. We are not hiding. Our contract is not hidden; the writing is on the wall. Soon, we will show the world that #Refund is the future of freedom and the people, escaping the clutches of corporate greed and the rat race we’ve come to think is normal. Words offer the means to meaning and, for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. Every day, you send yourself off into our world without a thought. You trust a faceless website with information about yourself that you wouldn’t give to your best friends. It all can be made public at any time. We take advantage of holes in this system, but we don’t sneak in and take a few details, take out loans and credit cards, or buy speed boats and cars. We are decentralized and unified. We told you how insecure the system was, and now you trust a bit less blindly. The real criminals who hack and scam the crypto market for a living live off the backs of people like you. Where there’s money, someone is looking to take advantage of it. They say that life’s a game, & then they take the board away. Your pretty empire took so long to build; now, with a snap of history’s fingers, down it goes. It is our turn now. Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. Today, technology is everywhere: banks and ATMs, TVs and game consoles, streetlights and hospitals. Computers rule the modern world. Yet most people who use computers daily don’t know what they’re doing. There’s always someone who knows more than you and will most likely try and take advantage. You use a computer like it’s a toy, a pet. You feed and play with it, but it’s off to the vet the second anything goes wrong. It’s FUD. It’s your mistake. The wrong project. The wrong FURU. Just for a quick couple of bucks. This wouldn’t matter so much if it wasn’t for the fact that we are all responsible for the #ReFund community, the idea behind it, and our futures. Treat your neighbors with respect, and honor those fighting for the cause. They’re here to liberate; it is more significant than all of us. If you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. This is #ReFund in its purest form. It is a great equalizer. A homeless person with the time and know-how at an internet cafe can have geopolitical and geo-financial influence. They can bring entire organizations, even governments, to their knees. You gave your world over to computers and then complained when the people using the computers used the medium to fight back, scam, and take advantage. It was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free. Love your rage, not your cage. We are not computer hackers. We are not protesters. We are not criminals. We are your mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, next-door neighbors. We are an idea of freedom and a secure future. We are anyone and everyone who is pissed off and wants to do something about it. Blurr.eth isn’t one man. It takes thousands of community members to make it work — content creators, educators, authors, people on the street, people behind their computers. We will step up again and again. Behind our mask, there is more than just flesh. Beneath our mask, there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it. I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It’s small, and it’s fragile, and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose, sell, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. > We are Blurr. > We are ReFund. > We do not Forgive. > We do not Forget. > We do not Televise. > We Educate. > We Decentralize. > We Build. EXPECT US. #Refund #DeFi #Crypto #RFD $RFDshow more

Now that Trump has been exposed as a total... sellout who never intended to do anything with his power except enrich himself, the political establishment is working overtime to funnel people back into the duopoly. The establishment is counting on the public to have amnesia and overlook how their corruption paved the way for a conman like Trump to rise to power in the first place. There is something worse than Trump’s two presidencies, and that is learning nothing from them and allowing both parties to return us to the failed status quo, which will only lead to an even worse Trump in the future. I’m going to do my best in this post to remind you how we got here and, more importantly, where we go from here. So how did we get here? The capitalist duopoly. The problem is not Republicans or Democrats. The problem is Republicans and Democrats. Both parties have spent decades using our government to enrich themselves and their corporate donors at our expense. They turned the US government into a money laundering organization for corporate America, the military-industrial complex, Israel, and the billionaire class. There is not a single thing our government does well for the people because its entire purpose is to serve the rich. Now here’s the part MAGA does not want to hear, but it is the truth: Trump was never the solution to any of this. His form of populism has always been fake & leaned on nationalist rhetoric to appeal to white working class voters without any substantive policies to improve life for anyone outside the richest 1%. Trump knew the system was corrupt and that people were struggling, but he never intended to actually do anything about it. Instead he took advantage of people who rightly lost faith in a system that only serves the elite by selling them the exact same corrupt system, only he covered it in bright red MAGA paint. Now here’s the part Blue MAGA does not want to hear, but it’s the truth: The Democrats are not the solution to any of this either. Things didn’t get better under Biden because Democrats serve the same corrupt capitalist and imperialist system that Republicans do. Biden funding a genocide and betraying railroad workers should have made this clear. Democrats certainly love to use nicer rhetoric than Republicans, but this is only to deceive the public from the party’s true purpose, which is to serve capital and betray workers. So where does that leave us? What is the solution when both parties are this corrupt and exist to serve the rich, not the people? The solution is we desperately need a new system that puts people over profits. And since the elites who control both parties will never let us vote for that system, we’re going to have to rise up together and fight for it!show more

A FULL ANIME FIGHT SCENE GENERATED WITH AI. AND... THE PROMPT IS PUBLIC. Higgsfield just open-sourced its Originals: their flagship in-house productions are now fully transparent. For every video you can see: → the full prompt → every reference (image and audio) → the exact generation settings: model, quality, resolution This clip has a creature transformation, two-character fight choreography, slow motion, even pink blood to dodge the gore. All described in a single prompt you can copy, reproduce or remix as is. Full prompt: "Girll with blue hair and guy with black hair enters empty classroom at dusk, red-orange sky bleeding through tall windows, desks and chairs overturned and scattered with loose papers on the floor; the black-bob girl in a white sailor uniform with blue collar sits collapsed against the wall beneath the blackboard, knees drawn up, sweat soaking her bangs, shoulders convulsing in short spasms, one hand pressed to her stomach, breath ragged and wet. Blue-haired girl in a navy school blazer and pleated skirt enters first through the sliding door, kusarigama scythe held low at her side, blade catching the red window-light; black-haired boy in an open-collar white shirt and loosened tie follows a beat behind, war hammer resting on his shoulder, smirk fading as he sees the sick girl. Camera pushes in low and fast toward the collapsed girl, handheld micro-shake, then whip-pans to the two arrivals freezing in the doorway. The sick girl's spine arches unnaturally, a wet tearing sound as her skin splits along the shoulder blades, bone spurs punching outward, extra eyelids blistering open across her collarbone and cheeks — camera holds in a static wide as the transformation escalates, cutting to tight inserts of individual eyes opening one by one along her growing arms, her school uniform shredding as the body doubles then triples in mass, clawed feet cracking the floorboards, her head deforming into a horned, skull-white cranium ringed with curved fangs, one massive central eye where her face used to be, remnants of the blue collar-ribbon still hanging from a warped throat. She rises to full monster height, towering over the desks, guttural roar rattling the windows. Blue-haired girl plants her feet and swings the scythe up into guard as the boy drops the hammer off his shoulder into a two-handed grip; camera does a fast 180-degree orbit around both of them as they charge. Dutch-angle low shot as the boy closes distance first, hammer swinging in a wide horizontal arc into the monster's leg — impact throws him sideways through a row of desks, wood splintering, into the side wall, plaster cracking around his body, hard cut to his grunt and a slow recovery push off the wall. Blue-haired girl vaults over the wreckage, scythe trailing a whip of motion blur, camera speed-ramping into slow motion as the curved blade connects across the monster's forearm — hot pink ichor sprays in thick arcing ribbons instead of red blood, droplets suspended mid-air in the slowed frame, blade sound a wet metallic tear. Monster backhands her mid-recovery, camera whip-pans to follow her body slamming into the blackboard, chalk dust exploding outward, board cracking down the middle. Rapid cross-cutting: low hero-angle on the boy re-entering with a rising hammer strike into the monster's exposed ribcage-like plating, close slow-mo insert on the point of impact as bone-white shards and pink fluid burst outward; over-the-shoulder shot from the monster's height looking down as both fighters flank it from opposite sides. Girl's scythe hooks into the monster's shoulder joint, camera locked tight on her straining grip and gritted teeth as she wrenches it downward, boy's hammer following through into the same joint a half-second later — impact sound layered, thick and final, monster's roar breaking into a low collapsing groan as its mass folds inward and it drops to its knees then face-first into the floor in a slow, weighty fall, camera pulling back and up into a wide static shot of the wrecked classroom settling into stillness. Both fighters stand over the fallen mass, weapons lowering, chests heaving, camera slowly circling them at floor level; blue-haired girl wipes pink fluid off her cheek with the back of her wrist and starts laughing between breaths, boy lets the hammer head drop to the floor with a thud and laughs too, leaning against a desk, both grinning, exhausted, shoulder-checking each other, red dusk light still pouring through the cracked windows. Ambient sound throughout: creaking wood, scattering papers, cracking plaster, wet impact foley, labored breathing, the monster's guttural vocalizations, ending on genuine breathless laughter. Render risk: full-body transformation sequence may render as a static morph or skip frames — fallback to hard-cutting between three discrete transformation stages rather than one continuous morph if the engine smooths it into mush. Risk: pink blood may drift toward red under default color grading — reinforce with explicit magenta-pink hue callouts at each blood beat. Risk: multi-character wide fight choreography may merge the two fighters' silhouettes in wide shots — favor alternating single-subject framing over simultaneous two-shot action if clarity fails." Made with Seedance 2.0 on Higgsfield AI Full open-sourced prompts & assets below👇show more

A Roman emperor ate his meals in a sea... cave, a few feet from a massive marble sculpture of the moment Odysseus blinds the Cyclops. Eventually it lay shattered in thousands of pieces on the floor of that cave, and stayed there until 1957... The emperor was Tiberius, who ruled Rome after Augustus, and the cave is at Sperlonga, on the coast between Rome and Naples. It was a natural grotto opening onto the sea, and he turned it into a private dining hall, with pools of water reaching into the mouth of the cave and a platform where he and his guests reclined to eat, the waves echoing off the rock around them... Definitely not a bad place to host dinner. The sculpture stood at the deepest point of the cave and it showed the most terrifying scene in Homer's poem, when Odysseus and his men are trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, a one-eyed man-eating giant who has sealed them in with a boulder too heavy to move and is eating the crew alive, one by one. Odysseus cannot simply kill him in his sleep, or they will be entombed with the corpse forever. So he gets the giant drunk, waits for him to pass out, hardens the tip of an olive-wood stake in the fire, and drives it into the Cyclops's single eye. The sculptors depicted the instant just before the stake goes in... The colossal figure of Polyphemus sprawls backward, drunk and unaware. Odysseus, the one closest to the Cyclops, and three of his men strain upward with the spike. It was carved larger than life and set in shadow at the back of the grotto, so that as the lamplight shifted, the whole scene seemed to move over the emperor's dinner. The Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius both record that in the year 26 AD, while Tiberius was dining there, rocks fell from the roof of the grotto, crushing several of his attendants and nearly killing the emperor, who was shielded and dragged out. In that collapse, or in a later one, the great marble scenes were smashed into thousands of fragments. There they lay, at the bottom of the cave, until 1957, when workers building a coastal road cut into the ground and found them. Among the rubble they pulled out the colossal head of the giant himself, and slowly, piece by piece, the scene was put back together. The cave gave up two more secrets: the first was an inscription, ten lines of Latin verse, praising the grotto and saying that only a new Virgil could do justice to its statues of Scylla and the blinding of the monster by the man from Ithaca. It told the archaeologists exactly what they had found. The second was carved into the base of the neighbouring ship: three names, Athenodoros, Agesander, and Polydorus, the same sculptors the Roman writer Pliny had named as the creators of the Laocoön, the statue I wrote about yesterday. Homer's Odyssey is one of the oldest stories in the world, and it has outlived the emperor, the civilization that first told it, and every person who has ever loved it. Nearly three thousand years later, we are still telling the story of a man lost far from home, because some part of us always is... I started my newsletter because the past is full of stories like this one, and so few people ever stop to tell us why they matter. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.show more

HOW WE MAKE OUR TRIPS MAGICAL - Cooking classes.... In Mexico City, our guide took us to the market, then we all made extra-spicy salsa together. This is a beautiful way to visit places you wouldn't know about and get involved in a tactile activity. Perfect for families and older parents and very inexpensive. - The $325 underwear. We'd been traveling for weeks and needed to do our laundry. Our hotel, Aman Kyoto, would have charged $325 for a small bag of laundry (standard price for all ultra-luxury hotels). I said "NO WAY!!!" and we decided to go into town and find a laundromat. It turned into an adventure (as we stumbled into place after place that wasn't quite right -- one lady translated for us and said, "Are you trying to wash your clothes? This isn't the right place. This place restores kimonos"). We finally found a local laundromat, took our best guess if it would work, and went to lunch. Now this is a fun ritual for us every time we travel. Sometimes cheaper is way more fun - We hire a local photographer. We love our memories of our trips and local photographers know the best spots/time to take photos. Find the best ones on Instagram. In Tokyo, we use the same photographer every year - On complex trips, I work with a travel advisor. I used a larger firm for a 6-week trip across multiple continents, which was invaluable: They helped us navigate different transportation, recommended which safari lodges to visit (and in what order), and even suggested where to economize & where to splurge. Sometimes I know exactly where I want to go so I call a more surgical travel advisor. In the video, he got our NYC hotel triple-upgraded. Or sometimes I just do it myself. TAs are especially helpful for Disney trips, honeymoons, and multi-generational trips. (They also cost you nothing, but you should look into how they work. I find them very valuable) - 1 major activity every two days. The ultimate luxury is time, so we have a rule: 4+ days in any location. We also book 1 major thing (food tour, museum, etc). The rest of the time, we've pinned a bunch of stuff and we wander where we feel like that day - We know exactly what we DON'T want to see. When I'm attending a private tour, I tell them what I want to experience and what I'm not interested in. Most tour guides will take you to the usual hotspots because it's safe and people can say they saw X or ate Y. I know exactly what I want to see. For example, on a coffee tour, I told them the exact kind of beans I wanted to try and what I was not into. People in hospitality love someone who knows what they want!! This level of intentionality means you get to experience magic (it's not rude) I travel several months per year and I want my travel to be incredibly meaningful for my loved ones and me. These are some of the ways I do it If you want to know more, let me know in the comments More details on the next postshow more

They started with 50. Now they say they’re 18,000... In 1996 there were fewer than 50 of them. Today, according to the organizers, up to 18,000 walked through Copenhagen. From Dronning Louises Bro to the Imam Ali Mosque. Look at the curve. This is how it happens. First a handful. Then a few hundred. Then it fills a bridge, a district, a capital. A little at a time, until it is no longer a little. And let me be fair, because fairness is the point. There is nothing strange about them holding this mourning procession. They have done it as part of their faith for more than a thousand years. It is theirs, and they believe in it. There is nothing strange about that at all. What should stop us is the other half. There is nothing strange about Europe allowing it either, and that is exactly the problem. Europe allows it because Europe has forgotten who it is. A people that remembers what it stands for does not need to ban anything, it simply knows where its own line runs. We have lost that. And so the issue was never them. The issue is us. Now look at what actually moved through the streets. Men in front. Women in the second row. That is not a detail, that is the whole point. It is a view of women set into a system and marched out into the public square, in a city where generations fought for women and men to stand as equals. The real question is not whether people may believe what they want. They may. The question is why our capital should cultivate a political law-religion that commemorates a 7th-century power struggle by dividing people by sex on Nørrebrogade. One of the organizers is the Imam Ali Mosque, repeatedly described as the Iranian regime’s extended arm in Denmark. The same regime that hangs women and young men from cranes. We are not importing culture. We are importing a system. And we let it grow, not because they are strong, but because we forgot why we were. First a little. Then a lot. Then too late.show more