Featured Links - December 11, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Cement graffiti

• The Stormy Age of SFF Magazines by Neil Clarke. "When people proclaim that we’re experi­encing a ‘‘Golden Age’’ for short fiction, I tend to look at them sideways. While we’ve seen an explosion of new markets over the last two decades, it’s never been a particularly healthy time for the overwhelming majority of them. For print editions, increasing postal and printing costs are eating away at profits. Those publishing online struggle face steeper challenges and often have unpaid or steeply underpaid staff."
• Behind the Scenes of the Most Spectacular Show on TV (gift link) "Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment." I hardly ever watch football (and if I do I prefer the Canadian variety), but I still found this article fascinating. 
• Google Rolls Out New Accessibility Features to Make Daily Tasks Easier. "New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily."
• Here's a primer on the far-out sounds of free jazz. Some way out there music as an antidote to the onslaught of syrupy Christmas music I'm being bombarded with everywhere I go right now. 
• The High Life and Shocking Death of Beatles Sidekick Mal Evans. "New bio 'Living The Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans' tells one of the the strangest stories in all of Beatles lore." I have been watching Get Back and wondering what happened to him after the Beatles.
• There’s a crisis in the Yukon River. "Flowing from British Columbia through Alaska to the Bering Sea, the nearly 2,000-mile-long Yukon River used to teem with Chinook and chum salmon, sustaining a culture of harvesting fish to feed both Alaskans as well as sled dog teams vital for transportation during the winter. Now those salmon runs have turned into to a trickle, as climate change and other factors weigh against the fish. The result is a drastic cut to local food supplies in a region where store-bought food, shipped in from thousands of miles away, is expensive."
• Opinion: This is a pandemic of attrition. "It’s time for our society to admit that we’ve made a mistake and change course. The COVID-is-mild experiment, despite the wishing and the hoping, has been a tragic failure. We aren’t just accepting ongoing hospitalizations and deaths to protect the economy, but also ignoring the social and economic costs of continuing high levels of acute infections. Worse still are more cases of Long COVID, a condition that takes many people entirely out of the workforce. And with every wave, the staffing attrition worsens."
• Electric vehicles are better than gas-powered cars in winter—here’s why. "All cars lose range when the temperature drops below freezing, not just EVs."