james choice

a maltese nobleman whose father wanted him to become a lawyer, so naturally he moved to constantinople and spent the next forty years painting street vendors, coffeehouses, markets, costumes, and everyday ottoman life instead.

before photography made cities endlessly reproducible, preziosi was basically producing hand painted snapshots of istanbul for european travelers. his studio in pera became so well known that even the future king edward vii stopped by and bought his watercolors.

he also worked as a dragoman for foreign embassies and became so associated with the city that ottoman art writers later treated him almost as one of their own painters.

a foreigner who came to paint istanbul and ended up becoming part of its visual memory.

keith sapsford was a 14-year-old australian boy whose tragic curiosity led to one of the most haunting accidental deaths in aviation history. in 1970, driven by an adventurous spirit and a longing to see the world, he snuck into the wheel well of a japan airlines plane at sydney airport. as the aircraft ascended, the compartment door opened mid-flight, and he fell to his death from 200 feet.

a world where facts still exist, but they have lost their monopoly on reality.

people do not necessarily believe what is true. they believe what feels true, what fits their identity, what confirms what they already think, or what gets repeated often enough to become familiar.

that is what makes post truth so dangerous.

the lie does not have to defeat the truth.

it just has to make the truth feel optional.

years have passed and i still haven’t forgotten this movie.

some films you simply watch. others stay in your head like a scent.

this one stayed with me less as images and more as a smell.

i’m reading ron chernow’s biography titan: the life of john d. rockefeller, sr.

rockefeller was about as capitalist, conservative, and monopolistic as it gets. at one point he was hated across america and became almost a symbol of the ugliest side of capitalism.

and yet, at the same time, he had been giving money away since he was basically a teenager. throughout his life he helped countless people and institutions, donated heavily to medicine and public health, and funded schools, foundations, and projects that ended up having a real impact on society.

when it came to standard oil and money, though, he was ruthless.

he bribed people, made secret deals, crushed competitors, manipulated transportation rates, and used every advantage he could get. but strangely enough, even during the gilded age, he never really embraced the kind of absurd luxury you would expect from someone that rich. by billionaire standards, his personal life was relatively restrained.

i’m not here to praise rich people, but compared with people like elon musk and jeff bezos today, rockefeller almost comes across as mild.

what makes it even stranger is that despite all the philanthropy he did because of his own beliefs and religious convictions, he never really managed to win over the public, and all his wealth still could not stop standard oil from being broken up.

today’s billionaires seem to operate in a completely different environment.

they can cut public programs, influence politics, involve themselves in other countries’ affairs, launch cars into space, try to shut down parts of cities for private events, and generally behave in ways that would have looked outrageous even by gilded age standards.

and somehow, millions of people still cheer them on.

that might be the strangest part.

an ottoman born tobacco entrepreneur from manisa, turkey who became a new york millionaire and left behind a hospital in the city where he was born.

born musa eskenazi in 1855 to a sephardic jewish family, he left manisa as a teenager, learned the tobacco trade in alexandria, then moved to the united states and built schinasi brothers with his brother solomon.

their business imported turkish tobacco and became hugely successful. at one point, around 200 jews from manisa reportedly worked in their new york operation. in 1906, sultan abdülhamid ii awarded schinasi the fourth class order of the medjidie.

he later lived in a marble mansion on riverside drive designed by william tuthill, the architect of carnegie hall. image

but the most interesting part of his story came after his death in 1928.

schinasi left $1 million to establish a hospital in manisa. only $200,000 was meant for construction and equipment. the remaining $800,000 was preserved as an endowment to help keep the hospital running.

his widow helped carry out the plan, and the hospital opened in 1933.

the internet is genuinely dying.

the reason, as discussed here, is primarily the search engines. people have stopped producing because they can no longer get their pages noticed.
social media platforms are no different. when you search on youtube, it shows 5-10 relevant results and then completely unrelated stuff. same on x. many platforms work the same way.

this is why a lot of people who actually produce quality content eventually give up. they can't get to where they want to go. there are tons of youtube channels where they've stopped making videos.

this is exactly the kind of example i was talking about, the internet dying directly, separate from bots and so on.

ai is just the icing on the cake. ais come with biases on every topic. so you can never search for the opposite side of an issue.

for example, i search "y is actually harmless" on yandex. the ai immediately says "y is actually beneficial. no." did i fucking ask you, i say, but it just keeps arguing with me.

the search results are no different. i just want to hear the opposing view on that subject. the results insistently come back saying it's beneficial, and it never lets me search clearly. all search engines are the same. the youtube search section is the same.

and then these sons of bitches set traps just to get us to accidentally click on ads.
for example, when you're scrolling reels on instagram, everything's working fine, but the moment an ad pops up, suddenly it stops scrolling. makes you click by accident.
like, my eyes automatically filter out ads. so these sons of bitches make ads on x look like regular people's tweets. or they change ad formats to throw off your visual habits.
figured i'd vent while i was at it.

“i realized that the entire journey had been from myself to myself.”

let's start with the anatomy of it.

where are the feet? at the very bottom of the body, right? because they touch the ground, they have often been culturally associated with dirt, inferiority, and low status. that symbolism has always made its way into language, literature, proverbs, and everyday expressions.

now think about what a foot fetishist typically does. they show affection toward the feet using their lips, tongue, and hands.

the lips and tongue belong to the face, one of the highest and most symbolically honored parts of the body. the hands, meanwhile, are associated with cleanliness, eating, creating, working, and almost everything we actively do in the world.

so what does it mean when someone uses what we consider their most elevated and capable body parts to show intense attention and affection toward another person's lowest body part?

the answer seems fairly simple. it can represent an unusually strong sense of admiration, devotion, and belonging.

history gives us an interesting parallel. in the past, someone granted an audience with a king, sultan, queen, or other ruler might bow down and kiss their feet or the hem of their clothing as a gesture of respect and loyalty.

in that sense, foot fetishism can be understood as a particular form of attraction in which one person symbolically places the other above themselves and takes pleasure in openly expressing that admiration. it can also allow affection and desire to be expressed in a way that is less centered on the body's more obvious sexual areas and more focused on reverence, intimacy, and attention.

so why does it seem to be more common among men?

one possible reason is that women's feet are much more heavily aestheticized in fashion and popular culture. they are often smaller and more delicate in appearance, and there is an entire visual culture built around pedicures, nail polish, anklets, toe rings, decorative socks, stilettos, heels, sandals, and countless other ways of drawing attention to them.

deleted all of his photos on instagram. right now, only the real madrid reels seem to be gone too, and he even removed his profile picture.

something serious must have happened during today’s negotiations. it honestly looks like real madrid might be preparing to move him on.

a really good film. i enjoyed it quite a bit. there are a few scenes that are genuinely unsettling, but they fit the story and never felt out of place.

i'm not sure if this was the filmmakers' intention, but it left me thinking about something i haven't really seen other people mention. it wasn't the romance, the obsession, or any of the obvious themes that stuck with me. instead, it sparked a completely different set of thoughts that lingered long after the credits rolled.

puzzles and sudoku. sudoku especially draws you in like crazy, from beginner all the way to expert level. once you learn the techniques, you feel even more enlightened.

there's a serious tonal difference between the first film in the series and the sequels that came after. the first film is almost a character study, while the sequels move forward in a much more spectacle-driven way.

but that innocence, that honesty at rocky's core never gets lost. in my opinion this consistency is exactly what's kept the series standing for so long. no matter how famous the character gets, at his core he stays the same neighborhood guy, and the audience feels that. so rocky is proof of what a well-written character is capable of.

good books don't give a person answers, they just clean the mirror a little more. this book is such a mirror that at first you see yourself all cool and impressive. as the pages go on, it unscrews the bolts of your ego and tosses them out one by one. then, in the mirror, you see that strange being standing behind you, the one that's made the decisions in your place your whole life, held all the strings, and played you like a puppet on its finger. amazon link

as those in the know know, pokemon is another game that came out of japan and ended up influencing the whole world. the mechanic at the heart of pokemon is actually the same as rock, paper, scissors.

rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper wraps rock. the beauty of the system is that no option is absolutely superior. pokemon took exactly this idea and spread it across dozens of types. fire burns grass, water puts out fire, electricity zaps water, and ground completely nullifies electricity. then, once types like ghost, dark, fairy, and dragon enter the mix, you end up with a balance system that takes years to memorize.

that's why pok3mon was never just a "let me grind the strongest pokemon" game. the right matchup is often more decisive than level or stats. anyone who saw for the first time that an electric attack has no effect on a ground-type pokemon learned it the hard way.

maybe this is one of the reasons the series has lasted so long. it doesn't keep making the player ask "which is the strongest?" instead, it gets them thinking "which is the right choice against the one in front of me?"

and when you take the balance that rock, paper, scissors builds with three options and adapt it to hundreds of pokemon and dozens of types, you end up with gameplay that stays fresh even after thirty years.