The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

When the British government announced last week that it was transferring sovereignty of an island in the Indian Ocean to the country of Mauritius, Gareth immediately realized its online implications: the end of the .io domain suffix. In this piece, he explores how geopolitical changes can unexpectedly disrupt the digital world. His exploration of historical precedents—such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia—offers valuable context for tech founders, users, and observers. Read this for a look at the unexpected intersection of international relations and internet infrastructure.

Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world | Aeon Videos

This excerpt from the documentary The Long Journey (1964) follows two English teenage girls as they wander, smoke cigarettes and provide stream-of-consciousness insights into their inner lives and the world around them. In a voice-over, one of the girls, seemingly a quasi-runaway, discusses her desire to live a free, non-conforming life far from the routines of school and church, before meeting a friend and commenting on the drab hues and peculiar beauty of the industrialised countryside. In every instance, the two seem to be seeking to understand their place in the world and what it means to live a free, authentic life. Pivoting between a melancholic view of their surroundings and carpe diem sentiments, they offer contradictions in earnest as, like young people coming of age in any generation, they navigate their own conflicting impulses and grapple with the question of how best to exist in the world.

My Friend Can Be a Bit Much, but He’s a Good Guy If You Give Him a Chance – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

If you find yourself outside alone with him and a Cutco knife, just give me a holler, and I’ll come out to diffuse the tension. He might try to steal your liver. I know I said he already had the transplant, but I get the feeling one liver isn’t enough for this guy.

An Enormous Photo of the Moon Zooms in on the Cratered Lunar Topography in Incredible Detail — Colossal

Following four days of continuous observation, Darya Kawa Mirza captured the moon and its rugged surface in exceptional detail.

The self-taught Kurdish astrophotographer amassed 81,000 images, which he stitched into a 708-gigabyte composite revealing the intricacies of the lunar topography in stunningly high resolution. Each frame zooms in on both individual craters and bruise-colored spots—a combination of asteroid and comet strikes and deposits left by volcanic eruptions—allowing for an up-close study of the orb illuminating our night skies.

This New Red Dead Redemption 2 Mod Turns Every NPC Permanently Drunk!

If you’ve been keeping an eye on RDR2 mods, you know there’s already been some wild stuff, from souped-up visuals to mods that turn the game into a laid-back job sim. But Blurbs’ creatio takes the cake for weirdness. He’s managed to make every single NPC in the game permanently drunk, even during those big, dramatic cutscenes.

So, instead of heartfelt moments, you get Arthur Morgan standing there like, “What in tarnation is happening?” as everyone around him wobbles, trips, and face-plants into the dirt.

Regeneration is a better ideal for health than restoration | Aeon Essays

Despite more than 3,000 years of fashioning prostheses to replace missing parts, today around 20 per cent of people outfitted with a limb prosthesis end up abandoning their device, often because it doesn’t feel or work ‘right’. There has been a great deal of research in improving functionality of prosthetic devices, less in improving comfort, and far less in understanding psychosocial factors that contribute to device abandonment. From our new perspective of health as an outcome of adaptive regeneration, we can begin to ask questions about the goals we want to achieve: do prosthetic devices need to mimic the form of the lost structure? If functionality is the primary concern of most prosthesis wearers, are there other ways to achieve functionality? And are prostheses always the best solution?

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing – Syllabus

This syllabus explores the concept of fake objects, defined as material replicas of originals that are absent, fictional, immaterial, or otherwise unobtainable. Fake objects are created to satisfy the desire for things that never were. Their worth is not necessarily tied to the rarity of the original or the fidelity of reproduction. Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing. We’ll first look at what fake isn’t, then investigate examples of fake objects used to celebrate, mourn, and preserve moments in time.

The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics | Aeon Essays

It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.

In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.

Your Name in Landsat 🛰️

Type in your name to see it spelled out in Landsat imagery of Earth!