News

Mouse Brains in Shocking Clarity

Lemme tell ya, we can really REALLY look at mouse brains now. Also, stop shooting people, video game accessibility is neat, Twitter does not care about trans people, Amazon is butthurt and more.

Endeavorance

Apr 19, 2023 — 4 min read

What a good brain picture we have here

LETS START OFF WITH COOL SCIENCE SHIT, YEAH? OKAY.

A team of researchers who have been tirelessly working for years have produced the highest resolution scan of a brain (specifically, a mouse brain) ever. Like way way way way way way higher resolution than we currently do with existing MRI tech.

Details of the scan get down to the level of microns, literally 64 MILLION times smaller than the detail level of a typical MRI.

Here's a very great quote from the lead author of the paper, G. Allan Johnson, Ph.D.:

It is something that is truly enabling. We can start looking at neurodegenerative diseases in an entirely different way

Medical science is fucking cool. That is all.

What a bad… shooting random people… we have here

Two back-to-back and nearly identical stories of shootings happened over the past couple of days. Not the "mass" variety of shootings, mind you. Just the normal kind. But don't worry, there have been several mass shootings since my last newsletter, too.

First, a 16 year old boy named Ralph Paul Yarl was shot by a homeowner after the boy accidentally went to the wrong house when he went to pick up his younger siblings. He knocked on the door, the homeowner opened the door, yelled at him and immediately shot him in the head, then shot him again after he had fallen to the ground.

Miraculously, Ralph got up and went to multiple houses seeking help before eventually finding someone and collapsing on the ground. He survived the encounter with severe injuries and is now recovering at home. By all accounts, he is a bright and inspiring young student.

Shortly after that incident, a 20 year old woman named Kaylin Gillis was murdered by a 65 year old man after Gillis and her friends drove onto his driveway momentarily while they were lost on a drive. The man who killed her shot at the car twice without warning as the car was exiting the property.

There's not a lot to be lighthearted about here but if you have one takeaway from this, please don't let it be that you should be scared of your neighbor. That is what leads to behavior like this. Aggressive individualism and the assumption that everyone is out to get you is how we end up with lives being cut down for a completely harmless mistake.

Accessibility is pretty cool yeah?

How about something completely different?

The Horizon game series is a pretty dope concept: play as a woman in a post-apocalyptic earth where humanity has gone back to a simple tribal life as the world is now overrun by robot dinosaurs. Like. Yo.

The second installment in the series, "Horizon Forbidden West," is getting an expansion soon which will include an interesting accessibility feature: anti-thalassphobia.

Horizon includes a decent bit of swimming and exploration, and it seems the expansion will have even more. But some folks who may want to enjoy the game may also have a significant phobia of crushing depths and the horrors of the deep. So developer Guerrilla Games is adding an accessibility feature which will reduce the anxiety around being underwater, opening up the "infinite air" option and reducing the visual effects that add to the claustrophobia.

Accessibility in video games is a hot topic these days, with some developers putting in a ton of options into their games, while others may staunchly refuse to "compromise their gameplay." There are also some really confusing gray areas, such as the Dark Souls series, in which the gameplay is much more intrinsically tied to "being difficult" for reasons that wouldn't make much sense to add accessibility options to. Of course, arguments can be made for a ton of different ways to make the game more accessible, but the discussion continues around what is accessibility versus "compromising artistic vision" and that uh… gets messy real fast.

Twitter will not protect trans people

…likely because Elon Musk is still fucking salty that his ex-wife was dating a trans woman.

Twitter has quietly removed wording from its Hateful Content Policy which explicitly laid out restrictions of deadnaming and intentionally misgendering trans people. This move mirrors Musk's not-so-quiet general transphobia and the ongoing spike in hateful content on the platform.

Presumably, this change makes it a lot easier for the site to harbor its target content now, which is people tripping over themselves to post the absolute dumbest shit you've ever seen. Of course with a paid blue check mark.

Analyst says Amazon Prime memberships are flatlining, Amazon screeches otherwise

An analyst published findings that Amazon Prime memberships aren't quite rising anymore and may be reaching a plateau and pushing up against a sort of "saturated market" barrier. Like, getting to the point of new subscriptions being impractical.

While it would be good to see that such a massive company's subscription service is hitting a plateau, it basically just means that Amazon has been successful at their absolute domination effort.

However, since the beast will always crave more with the endless pit of hunger in its stomach, an Amazon spokesperson has come out swinging being like "NO! WE ARE STILL GROWING! ANY STATEMENT TO THE CONTRARY IS UNACCEPTABLE"

So who knows for realsies, but it turns out that Amazon gets real mad if you even sorta suggest that their business isn't doing as much business as it seems.