A grab back of links today.
I don't really have words for this one, just go ahead and take a look yourself. Orion flies far beyond the Moon, returns an instantly iconic photo
A very different scale of 'wonder of nature'. I love how, to the eye, they seem like a great, shifting single organism. Sunset murmuration in Nottinghamshire caught on camera
More science news. The last paragraph here is, uh, certainly something that felt like a weird twist in the tale, but is apparently not that unexpected. Researchers discover two new minerals on meteorite grounded in Somalia
More space. The Verge links to a TikTok by Lizzie Philip going over the (wonderful, amazing, ridiculous) plan to retrieve samples from Mars. A simple plan.
I'll quote from this one in more detail. It harks back to Birdwatch. Manifesting History
Musk’s narrative follows a similar path because up until alarmingly recently…it worked. As I’ve related above, Musk has been an irascible shithead for many years, but his overwhelming clout with the media meant that he could, effectively push through any idea his little mind desired. A flamethrower? Sure. $420 Tequila? Of course. Landing humans on Mars? He said 2022, but everybody was fine with saying “within five years” or “2029.”
Musk has gotten away with a mixture of half-truths and outright lies enough times that he believed that he had the popularity to do anything, another condition afflicted upon those with billions of dollars. When he bought Twitter, I truly think that he believed everybody would be behind him, because up until that point most of the media had been. Kara Swisher gave an interview in May about how smart Elon was. Jessica Lessin of The Information described the acquisition as “like watching a business school case study on how to make money on the internet.” Hell, he was able to con banks and investors into raising $13 billion for him. Musk still had the ability to manipulate the media - and still does, in the sense that he can still get a bunch of stories about literally anything he does - but couldn’t change the reality that he did not have a plan for the website that he tied his entire financial future to.
That’s why he seems so utterly pathetic. Musk may have had no plan, but he also appears to have never considered the eventuality that most people would dislike his choices. For someone supposedly tuned into “the future,” he continually fails to adapt to his changing circumstances, picking and losing fights and taking that as proof that his cause is just rather than his ideas being bad. And now his closest allies are wobbling sycophants like David Sacks, who accidentally ended up on the right side of the antitrust debate in an attempt to kiss up to his boss.
Yeah.
And finally, your one-stop-shop for Twitter nonsense: https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/