NEW RESOURCES

Nintendo Wire: Online exhibition lets you explore the world of Pokémon Trading Card Game illustrations. “The Pokémon Trading Card Game has been going strong for well over 20 years now and it’s showing no signs of stopping. The illustrations on each card play a large part in the game’s lasting appeal – whether you collect old favorites or seek out Full Art cards, there’s plenty to appreciate. Now a new website has opened up in partnership with Anique that lets you interactively explore the world of Pokémon Trading Card Game illustrations.”

Digital Library of Georgia: Family Papers Documenting The Lives Of Enslaved People In Liberty County, Georgia, Dating Back To The 1700s, Are Now Available Online.. “In partnership with the Midway Museum, the Digital Library of Georgia has just made the Julia R. King Collection available online…. The collection includes essential documents related to slavery, including estate appraisals and inventories that include the first names of enslaved African Americans. It will be of particular interest to those doing family research on people enslaved in Liberty County, Georgia.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Engadget: Google is testing a way to start streaming games from search results. “One thing that will help bolster adoption of cloud gaming is by making it as easy as possible to fire up a game. To that end, Google is testing a way to start playing something with a single click from search results, even if it’s not on the company’s own Stadia platform.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Verge: How Nokia ringtones became the first viral earworms. “Today, Fusoxide is behind the popular @ringtonebangers Twitter account. With others, like @OldPhonePreserv, he helps to maintain Andre Louis’ phonetones directory — a repository of phone software, sound banks, ringtones, and audio ephemera from a bygone era.”

Ars Technica: Excel esports on ESPN show world the pain of format errors. “The Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) hosts regular international competitions, both invitational and open to anyone, in which Excel pros strive to solve as many questions as possible from a complex task. You can download all three of the tasks used in last weekend’s battle for free. ESPN showed a 30-minute edited version of the full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle between previous champions.”

CNET: A Healthy Relationship With Social Media Is Hard to Define for Gen Z. “Plenty of young people, equipped with ample knowledge of how to quash social media use, and an awareness of the pitfalls of constantly being online, continue to sink huge amounts of time into the platforms. That dynamic underscores a more connected reality for members of Gen Z, roughly those born between 1997 and 2012, who rely more on social media than older generations for friendship, knowledge or a sense of community that they lack in physical spaces.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Scam loan apps extorting Mexicans thrive in Google Play Store. “[Pedro] Figueroa is one of more than 2,230 people who fell prey to fraudulent loan apps in Mexico between June 2021 and January 2022, according to data compiled by the Citizen Council for Justice and Security, an advocacy group based in Mexico City. The Thomson Reuters Foundation found 29 loan apps with millions of downloads in the Google Play Store that have been reported to the authorities for extortion, fraud, violation of Mexican privacy law, and abusive financial practices.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Penn State: Lessons on nutrition easy to digest in virtual reality spaces. “Virtual reality (VR) may provide nutrition teachers and dietitians with an entirely new way to serve real lessons on healthy eating, according to a team of Penn State researchers. In a study, students learned about nutrition both through an interactive VR lesson, as well as during a more traditional lecture that was hosted in a VR environment. The research also showed that nutrition educators might not even need all the bells and whistles of VR interactivity for those lessons to be effective.”

EurekAlert: Social media helps scientists monitor rarely sighted whales. “Social media posts helped scientists to monitor one of New Zealand’s rarest whale species, the infrequently sighted southern right whale, or tohorā.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

WIRED: The Creators of ‘King’s Quest’ Are Back With a New Game. “Ken and Roberta Williams are the cofounders of Sierra Online, the company behind such classic computer games as King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Quest for Glory. Their latest project, Colossal Cave: Reimagined by Roberta Williams, is a remake of the genre-defining Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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