gnsk has added a photo to the pool:
banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:
The famous red torii gate (Heiwa-no-Torii) of Hakone Shrine in the waters of Lake Ashi.
In this picture, I exposed for the sky to avoid blowing out the bright parts of the clouds and preserving a lot of the details.
WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - Het Amerikaanse leger heeft een reeks "krachtige" luchtaanvallen op Iran uitgevoerd, meldt het Amerikaanse centrale commando CENTCOM op X.
De aanvallen waren een reactie op wat volgens het commando Iraanse aanvallen waren op drie commerciële schepen die door de Straat van Hormuz voeren. "De door Iran getoonde agressie was ongerechtvaardigd, gevaarlijk en een duidelijke schending van het staakt-het-vuren", aldus CENTCOM.
Iraanse staatsmedia melden dat er diverse explosies te horen waren in en rondom de Zuid-Iraanse kustplaats Sirik, die aan de Straat van Hormuz ligt.
Iran houdt de Amerikaanse regering verantwoordelijk voor de gevolgen van de "schending van het memorandum van Islamabad" over het beëindigen van de oorlog, laat het Iraanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken weten via staatsmedia.
Joy Machine and Vertical Gallery are excited to share their first collaborative exhibition, Wanderland by Collin van der Sluijs. This marks the artist’s sixth solo exhibition in Chicago and more than a decade in partnership with Vertical Gallery. It’s his first presentation at Joy Machine.
Wanderland comprises a new body of work developed during a two-year period. Spanning enormous mixed-media paintings, intimate drawings, and skate decks bearing the artist’s signature birds, the exhibition reflects both the momentous and mundane, particularly loss, grief, and the therapeutic powers of nature.
A portmanteau of wander and wonderland, the title evokes van der Sluijs’ continued devotion to imagining a vast, dreamlike ecosystem. For the past decade, he’s produced various bodies of work as a sort of world-building exercise, intuitively selecting a blend of oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, and more to render dynamic still lifes and portraits of figures subsumed by chaos. Wanderland continues in this vein, once again presenting hazy bouquets that allude to the artist’s Dutch heritage and a melange of symbols and markings referencing his background in street art. “Collin works in such a wide range of styles—like a modern twist on classical painting, with graffiti and illustration mixed in,” Patrick Hull, Vertical’s owner and curator, shares.
Each collection emerges through a lengthy process of trial and error, and often, van der Sluijs will work on a piece for years, even turning it around to face the wall periodically to provide a brief respite while in his studio. “I really need to make big mistakes and fight my way out of it,” he adds. In this way, cultivating wonder and an unceasing desire to explore his inner emotional and external landscapes is an essential part of the process. Wanderland is about “a walk to the visual world that you create around yourself, like wandering around. But it’s also like diving into the unknown.”
Following a collection of darker pieces made in the early years of the pandemic, Wanderland emerges with more levity and hope, albeit not without difficulty and grief. While working toward the exhibition, the artist broke his ankle, rendering it impossible for him to stand while painting larger canvases hanging on the wall. Instead, he had to sit, stretching himself across the horizontal surfaces and contending with a novel, challenging mode of making.
And despite his physical limitations, van der Sluijs also spent more time venturing outdoors during the last two years. Making small works on paper amid natural settings was a sort of balm in processing the recent death of a friend. “All those personal stories, they make the context of a show,” he adds.
To celebrate more than a decade of collaborations, Vertical Gallery published a book commemorating the occasions, titled Wanderland: 1991-2026. Its pages juxtapose the artist’s exploits as a painter, muralist, and graffiti writer with the more personal moments that define his roles as husband, son, father, and friend.
Wanderland runs from July 10 to August 22. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. on July 10. The artist will be present.
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 Collin van der Sluijs’ ‘Wanderland’ Imagines a Vast Ecosystem Encompass the Momentous and Mundane appeared first on Colossal.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Chinese startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, according to three people familiar with the matter, a push that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei chips, which it has depended on to train and run its globally popular models. The chip is designed for inference -- the stage of AI computing in which a trained model generates responses for users -- rather than for training new models, the sources said. If successful, DeepSeek's expansion into semiconductor development would mark a major strategic shift for a company widely hailed in China as the country's AI champion, potentially adding to challenges faced by Chinese tech giant Huawei.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other major banks have reportedly explored acquiring Fiserv's debit-card networks, STAR and Accel, in a move that could help them bypass federal caps on debit-card transaction fees. A law limits the fees big banks can charge merchants, but only if the transactions are routed through an outside network. There are no caps on these interchange fees over a bank-owned network, however. The Wall Street Journal reports: When Capital One Financial bought Discover Financial in a $50.6 billion deal, it got a network that cut out the need for a middleman in card transactions and allowed it to deal more directly with merchants. Now, big banks are looking on with envy because owning a network can mean exemption from a federal law that caps debit-card fees. Those fees collectively amount to billions of dollars each year across the industry, but banks have long complained the government-defined cap limits their ability to offer customers debit-card rewards and other services. Some have been exploring a small deal that could upend the rules, though they are worried about political backlash if they try.
Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial Services Group have in recent months held preliminary and tentative discussions about a deal to acquire a network owned by the financial-technology company Fiserv, according to people familiar with the matter. There is no certainty a deal will happen. Several of the banks that looked at the Fiserv network have already decided it would be unlikely for them to move forward, some of the people said. Some have privately expressed concern that such a deal could prompt backlash from lawmakers, regulators and merchants, the people added.
Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial Services Group have in recent months held preliminary and tentative discussions about a deal to acquire a network owned by the financial-technology company Fiserv, according to people familiar with the matter. There is no certainty a deal will happen. Several of the banks that looked at the Fiserv network have already decided it would be unlikely for them to move forward, some of the people said. Some have privately expressed concern that such a deal could prompt backlash from lawmakers, regulators and merchants, the people added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”
BertvB posted a photo:
An action shot of a Eurasian Jay (Garrulus glandarius) perched alertly at the water's edge, while a second jay lands directly behind it with wings fully spread. Captured from a photo hide in Utrecht during late spring.
This reboot of a 2000 film, based on a script by the great Ingmar Bergman, features some extremely odd camera work and a very strangely written female lead. But it’s frequently bewitching
The film Faithless, a cruel adultery fable directed by Liv Ullmann from a screenplay by the great Ingmar Bergman, was something of a throwback even when it came out in 2000: that sort of sensual dissection of arty middle-class mores was no longer common cinematic currency. Arthouse indulgence hadn’t died out altogether and it still hasn’t today, but, for generations of viewers in 2026 weaned on premium streaming, the lofty waft of the new Faithless TV reboot, adapted from the Bergman scripts by Sara Johnsen and directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), might seem alien.
We’re smoking on planes and wearing corduroy suits in deep maroon: yes, it’s 1977 and, in Stockholm, actor Marianne (Frida Gustavsson) and her pianist husband Markus (August Wittgenstein) are visited by Markus’s oldest friend David (Gustav Lindh), a wannabe film auteur who’s returned from London bruised by his divorce. Episode two introduces a second timeline, in the present, where lauded director David (Jesper Christensen) and veteran performer Marianne (Lena Endre, who was the younger Marianne in the Ullman movie) meet again and reflect on the damage caused by their affair.
Faithless aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now
Continue reading...Hossam Hassan’s side beaten after being 2-0 up late on
‘They want Messi to stay in the tournament’
Egypt’s manager, Hossam Hassan, has vowed not to watch another minute of the World Cup after feeling his side “suffered an injustice” against Argentina as Lionel Messi inspired a miraculous comeback from two goals down.
Egypt took an early lead through Yasser Ibrahim and thought they had doubled their advantage early in the second half, only for Mostafa Ziko’s goal to be disallowed for a foul by Marwan Attia in the buildup. Ziko made it 2-0 soon after before Cristian Romero pulled one back for Argentina and Messi equalised, in the process scoring his eighth goal of the tournament and 21st in the World Cup.
Continue reading...The suspension of the USA striker’s red card after Trump’s intervention has shown what Gianni Infantino’s organisation is trying to turn the sport into: scripted entertainment
Frites 4 Cheats 1. Tintin 4 Tonto 1. Some good news here, perhaps. It seems Gianni Infantino was right after all. Football has united the world. Mainly football has united the world in gleeful satisfaction at the USA exiting its own World Cup tournament as soon as possible following the great and glorious Donald Trump Mr-Fix-It intervention.
This was the tone of the immediate global reaction to the USA’s invertebrate defeat in Seattle on Monday night, soundly beaten by a righteous and highly motivated Belgium: land of beer, waffles and sporting vigilante justice. Ghent 4 Bent 1. Antwerp 4 A twerp 1. Mayonnaise 4 May-have-interfered-in-due-process 1. I can go on. How long have you got?
Continue reading...
Your Windows is watching you. The US Justice Department's complaint against Peter Stokes for alleged involvement in the Scattered Spider hacking group offers a reminder that it's difficult to hide online activity from Microsoft's operating system (or any other). Scattered Spider, according to US authorities, targeted numerous companies in the US by compromising employee accounts in order to access more than 100 corporate networks and exfiltrate or encrypt data that would be ransomed for payment. The group is said to have obtained over $100 million in ransom payments. The complaint, arrest, and extradition of Stokes relied in part on a Microsoft Windows Global Device Identifier (GDID), among other telemetry records, to link online activity to the suspect. "According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios," explained FBI special agent Ali Sadiq in an affidavit accompanying the DOJ's criminal complaint. The court filing also notes that Microsoft made criminal referrals to the DOJ implicating Stokes. It points to an October 2024 referral that cites online service telemetry that company security researchers believe linked Stokes to other hacking group members. Social media posts relevant to Scattered Spider, supposedly sent and received by Stokes, look unlikely to help his defense. The affidavit says that members of Scattered Spider used a web tunneling tool called ngrok to avoid network barriers and maintain access to compromised servers, as well as a VPN service called Tzulo. Investigators obtained IP address records from ngrok and the VPN provider and then obtained records from Microsoft that matched the time when that ngrok account had been set up on a Windows machine through a specific GDID. "According to Microsoft records, on or about May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC – when, according to ngrok records, the ngrok account was created – the device with the GDID accessed, among other ngrok pages, 'https://dashboard.ngrok.com/signup,' the ngrok page to set up an ngrok account," the affidavit explains. Microsoft's GDID records also showed that the Windows device with that GDID accessed Tzulo servers assigned to the IP address identified by ngrok. And the GDID was subsequently linked to an IP address in Estonia where Stokes resided. The Windows GDID, or at least the infrastructure for it, is said to date back to the release of Windows 10 in 2015. The GDID itself doesn't show up much in online documentation until 2021 or thereabouts. According to a developer writeup posted to GitHub, wlidsvc (Microsoft Account service) provisions the device with login.live.com and gets back a device PUID. The identifier is then stored in the registry. The Connected Devices Platform (cdp.dll / CDPSvc) reads it and registers it into the Device Directory Service (DDS) graph. And after that, Delivery Optimization reports it as the documented UCDOStatus.GlobalDeviceId. Apple maintains similar identifiers, including a hardware UUID and a DSID (Destination Signaling Identifier) [PDF] tied to iCloud, among others. Linux also supports a machine-id. And when presented with a lawful demand for information, most service providers will cooperate and provide whatever information they store. ®
