Known for his painstakingly intricate mixed-media sculptures, Canadian artist Chris Millar continues to test the bounds of scale and detail. Two recent works epitomize his ongoing explorations: “A Prize Every Time” and “Loom Beneath the Loam,” the latter of which contains eight tiny paintings, two relief sculptures, and numerous sculptural elements attached to a brass frame. Cartoonish pendants, vignettes with faces, branch-like tendrils and more lend the piece an enigmatic contraption-like quality, as if the pull of a hidden lever will send the entire thing into motion.

In a departure from his multimedia pieces, “A Prize Every Time” is a meticulously rendered acrylic painting containing some 90 portraits of notable figures from Alberta who populate a map of the province, where the artist originally hails from. It has the look of a tourism map merged with a look-and-find book.

“To an American audience, a lot of the Alberta-centric easter eggs will go over their heads, but even if they don’t know about Alberta’s history or geography, it’s a pretty fun painting to look at!” Millar says. You may recognize a few famous individuals, such as Michael J. Fox and Joni Mitchell, both of whom were born there.

See more on Millar’s Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Visual Cacophony of People, Places, and Things Fill Chris Millar’s Mixed-Media Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

Die gore wolf in Epe heeft de hond van de schaapsherder al opgevreten (daar lopen nu twee kuddebeschermingshonden bij dus nu durft die miet niet meer) en nu is hij toe aan het toetje. PANNEKOEKEN. Nu zit er in de bossen bij Epe een uitstekend pannekoekenrestaurant en kennelijk zijn daar mensen die wolven pannekoekjes voeren. En zo gaat die wolf mensen associëren met vreten en is het geen wolf meer, maar gewoon een valse teirnghond die alleen maar meer vreten komt halen bij de mensen. De gemeente heeft bordjes opgehangen dat het beest niet gevoerd mag worden, ook geen pannekoeken. Maurice la Haye van de Zoogdiervereniging: "Als er signalen zijn dat een wolf gevoerd is, schiet het dier dan dood." Het is niet bekend of de wolf een voorkeur heeft voor stroop, poedersuiker, kaas+spek of alleen kaas.

It’s won all the awards and now it’s going out in a blaze of comedy. Everything that could possibly go wrong for the restaurant does … but who cares when the fusion of tragedy and laughter is this good?

It may not be a gastronomic reference many midwestern gourmands would appreciate, but the last episode of the last season of The Bear was Marmite TV. Set in the back yard of the titular Chicago restaurant – transformed over the course of the show from a sandwich shop to a fine dining establishment by its talented and troubled head chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) – the season four finale consisted of the cast shouting over each other about their respective grudges, oscillating between rage and misty-eyed sentimentality. A naturalistic exchange of complex emotional truths? A rare opportunity to flesh out TV characters’ psyches away from the demands of an actual narrative? Maybe. Or a plotless, unpleasantly cacophonous half-hour designed to entertain no one besides those unhealthily invested in the inner lives of Carmy, his protege Syd (Ayo Edebiri) and their ragtag bunch of fictional colleagues? Yeah, I didn’t love it.

Whatever your perspective, it’s hard to deny that The Bear is one of the shows that best encapsulates what was so great and not-so-great about peak streamer-era TV. The brainchild of writer-director Christopher Storer, the series always prioritised thematic richness and indie movie melancholy over focus-grouped crowd-pleasing or hoary screenwriting convention. As a result, it walked the line between uncompromising integrity and tedious self-indulgence – something only possible during a period, now passed, when platforms considered pouring money into auteurish shows a price worth paying for cultural clout.

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From Cameron’s Brexit exit to Starmer’s Burnham bow-out, half a dozen PMs have gone. So who’s the best of the bunch?

The UK has had six prime ministers in the last 10 years – with a seventh likely to be in place by as early as mid-July.

John Crace ranks those who have been booted out of Downing Street between 2016 and 2026.

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Decision allows Trump administration to block migrants from entering US soil and the right to claim asylum

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The supreme court has given the Trump administration a green light to turn back asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system.

The Trump administration has sought for years to block migrants from setting foot on US soil, where federal law guarantees them the right to claim asylum and protection from persecution. The ruling will allow that practice to resume, concluding a battle that has spanned three administrations.

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The move comes after Russia’s Consulate General in the Romanian city of Constanta was closed last month following a drone crash in the country.

“There was a proposal in Alaska, but there was no agreement. If there had been an agreement, we would have had an end of the war,” Rubio said.

The World Cup as I see it: not the matches, but everything surrounding them. The trumpet that blooms into flowers. The cleats that wait. The flag with a dove. The musical note made of two soccer balls. The trophy. The hand. The kick. A personal series of vector and 3D illustrations celebrating soccer as a global celebration, the small symbols, the bright colors, the joy that brings the whole world together every four years. Created with Adobe Illustrator. Vector illustrations with texture and 3D objects. A vibrant color palette designed for celebration.illustration, football illustration, soccer illustration, world cup, sports illustration, vector illustration, 3d illustration, character illustration, editorial illustration, digital illustration, colorful illustration, adobe illustrator, illustrator, graphic design, illustration series

A few different names will appear on the timesheets during first practice at the Austrian Grand Prix.

AI agents now write code and run tasks at machine speed, and sometimes those same agents delete the wrong thing. AI-enabled attackers can also use AI to find zero-day vulnerabilities more easily. Most recovery systems still run at human speed, which widens the gap between how fast data can be lost and how fast it can be restored. Eon was built to close that gap. In our latest Hot Seat, Tim Phillips talks to Gonen Stein, president and co-founder of Eon, about what recovery should look like in the agentic AI era. Stein and his co-founders previously built CloudEndure, a cloud migration and disaster recovery outfit that AWS acquired. They found that backup had never been redesigned for cloud-native infrastructure: the old model assumed static servers and scheduled maintenance windows, while cloud environments change constantly. There's also a gap between the C-suite's faith in recovery and today's reality. Eon's research found that 98 percent of executives were confident in recovery, while most had suffered three or more failures last year. As Stein puts it, a completed backup is not the same as a tested restore. Configurations drift, new services appear, and backup policies fall behind, so the plan looks fine until you need it. The risk is not hypothetical. In April, an AI agent tasked with resolving a credential mismatch in PocketOS's staging environment deleted the production database and took the attached backups with it. The event took nine seconds. The agent used valid credentials and a legitimate API, so no alert fired. Eon's answer is to hold backups in immutable, logically air-gapped vaults with separate credentials, so that when something goes wrong the restore can target a single table or record rather than rebuild the whole environment. Watch the Hot Seat to hear Stein on AI-augmented attacks, the case for isolated recovery, and the checks to run first. You will learn about: Why confidence outruns evidence: a green tick on a backup dashboard does not confirm that a full recovery has been tested, and most organizations cannot pass that test. AI on both sides: coding agents ship faster than humans can review their work, while AI-augmented attackers shrink the window between finding a vulnerability and exploiting it. Recovery outside the blast radius: backups that share credentials or storage with production are vulnerable to the same attacks and faults, which is why air-gapped vaults matter. Granular restore: why you should be able to recover a specific table or record at a precise timestamp, rather than rehydrating an entire environment. If you are responsible for cloud data, backup policy, or recovery planning, watch this one. Sponsored by Eon.io + Inc.

The online Apple Store went offline Thursday morning, but instead of such a move marking the launch of upgraded products, it came back online with nothing new to offer but higher prices. The budget-priced MacBook Neo wasn’t even spared from the spike, with its entry-level price climbing from $599 to $699. Along with the Neo, entry-level MacBook Air prices rose by $200 and base MacBook Pro machines increased by $300, putting the lowest-spec machines in the lines at $1,299 and $1,999, respectively. iPads also went up in price, with the base-model iPad Air (11” w/128GB of storage) jumping from $599 to $749 and the basic iPad Pro (11”, 256GB of storage) now priced at $1,199 up from $999. iPhones were spared from the price increase, for now at least, but that may not last either if the current trend in hardware pricing is any indicator. As we’ve been covering of late, and pretty much everyone is well aware, memory prices are skyrocketing thanks to the AI and datacenter boom, leading to shortages, longer lead times, and the need to increase prices on everything that contains even the barest minimum of anything that looks slightly like RAM. With entry-level MacBooks now starting at a minimum of 16 GB of sweet, sweet integrated memory, it’s no wonder the prices are increasing alongside everything else. Terminal Apple CEO Tim Cook even warned that price hikes were coming in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week, telling the publication that increases were “unavoidable.” “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” Cook told the WSJ in an interview. Cook didn’t give any details on the what or when of Apple price increases, but there’s no reason to guess any longer. Microsoft has been affected by memory crunches too, and quietly rolled out a 12" Surface Pro and 13" Surface Laptop with a paltry 8 GB of memory this week. Given they have half of the minimum RAM spec needed to run Copilot+, the two machines are devoid of the AI marketing suffusing everything else that Microsoft now sells. As for when iPhone price increases may rear their heads, that’s still unclear, but don’t expect it to take too much longer. Micron, one of Apple’s RAM suppliers, said in its Q3 earnings call that it had signed agreements with 16 of its commercial customers to lock in historically high memory prices through 2030 on the back of continued uncertainty. “Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve,” Micron CEO, president, and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra said during this week’s earnings call. “Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand.” In other words, if that iPhone is looking long in the teeth, it might be time to upgrade before those prices, too, begin to climb. We reached out to Apple for comment, but didn’t hear back. ®

De verwoestende aardbevingen in Venezuela maken opnieuw zichtbaar in welke spagaat het land zich bevindt. Noodhulp komt voor een groot deel van landen die vooral toegang willen tot de grondstoffen die Venezuela rijk is. „De vraag is welke tegenprestaties daar tegenover staan.”

In Kansas City wordt in de nacht van donderdag op vrijdag (Nederlandse tijd) onweer voorspeld. In de Centraal-Amerikaanse stad speelt het Nederlands elftal om 01.00 uur tegen…

Het nieuwe, bloedstollende boek van Thomas Harding deed me weer eens beseffen hoe moeilijk het voor een historicus is om de waarheid te achterhalen

Nederland heeft zich, ook al moet de wedstrijd tegen Tunesië nog beginnen, vrijwel zeker geplaatst voor de knock-outfase, de volgende ronde na de groepsfase.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het Rode Kruis en Klimaatverbond Nederland roepen eigenaren en beheerders van koele, openbare gebouwen op om de deuren te openen voor mensen zonder verkoelingsopties. Het KNMI heeft voor vrijdag in grote delen van het land code rood afgegeven vanwege de hitte.

Het Rode Kruis en Klimaatverbond Nederland denken bijvoorbeeld aan kerken, moskeeën, bibliotheken, buurthuizen en gemeentehuizen die hun deuren (langer) kunnen openstellen.

"Extreme hitte is meer dan ongemak: het vormt een serieus risico voor de gezondheid. Voor mensen in slecht geïsoleerde woningen en voor dak- en thuisloze mensen is verkoeling vaak niet vanzelfsprekend. Ook ouderen, zwangere vrouwen, baby's en mensen met een fysieke of mentale kwetsbaarheid lopen extra risico", schetsen de organisaties. Een koele ruimte kan voor mensen het verschil maken, zeggen ze.

Het KNMI heeft voor vrijdag code rood afgegeven voor meerdere provincies, waaronder Zuid-Holland. Dat betekent onder meer dat mensen wordt geadviseerd alleen naar buiten te gaan als dat nodig is en vooral uit de zon te blijven. Nooit eerder werd in Nederland code rood afgegeven vanwege extreme hitte.

sapphire_rouge has added a photo to the pool:

​Het gezichtje op het matrixbord in de dorpskern ziet er verdrietig uit. Zijn perfect cirkelvormige rond is sipjes naar beneden gekruld. Wat scheelt eraan, gezichtje? "Je rijdt 55 km/h uur waar 50 is toegestaan," zegt het gezichtje. "En mijn vrouw is bij me weggegaan."

We laten het gaspedaal een beetje los. "Ze was het enige wat ik had in dit leven. Ik weet niet precies wat de zin van het leven is, dat moeten filosofen maar uitmaken, maar om dag in dag uit vanaf een paal automobilisten eraan te herinneren dat ze zich aan de maximumsnelheid bibeko moeten houden zal het toch niet zijn." Het lijkt alsof alsof hij uit zijn LED-ogen een traanje wegpinkt, maar het kan ook gewoon condens zijn." Je rijdt trouwens 53 km/h, dat is nog steeds te snel." We laten het gaspedaal helemaal los.

"Mijn vrouw vind dat ik niet goed over mijn gevoelens kan praten. Dat ik alleen maar kan praten over auto's. Ze heeft op zich geen ongelijk. Maar wat kan ik zeggen, ik heb mezelf ook niet gemaakt." Dan schieten plotseling zijn mondhoeken omhoog terwijl zijn kleur verandert naar een vrolijk groen. "49 km/h. Dankuwel!", zegt het gezichtje. "Misschien ga ik dat leuke groene poppetje van het voetgangersverkeerslicht eens op date vragen"

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