Maple_syrup_fella

In November 1984, 17-year-old Lisa McVey was riding her bike home after a double shift at a donut shop in Tampa, Florida. Out of nowhere, a man dragged her off the bike and forced her into his car. He blindfolded Lisa, pressed a gun to her head and drove to his apartment. For the next 26 hours, he raped and tortured her. The girl believed she was going to die. But she was determined that if she did, police would catch the man who killed her. So she paid attention to everything. She peeked under her blindfold whenever she could, counted the steps up to his apartment and pressed her fingerprints onto every surface she could reach in his bathroom. She also kept him talking and promised to be his girlfriend. She even made up a story that her father was seriously ill and depended on her. Slowly, it worked. After 26 hours, he drove her back toward her grandmother's house and apologized. Then he told her “Tell your father he's the reason why I didn't kill you." Every detail she had memorized, from his car to his apartment to the ATM he had stopped at, led police straight to him. His name was Bobby Joe Long. That year, he killed at least 10 women in the Tampa area. He was arrested on November 16, 1984, and later sentenced to death. Years later, Lisa joined the same sheriff's office that caught him and became a deputy who helps survivors of sexual violence. In 2019, when Long was executed, she sat in the front row.

In 2019, a homeless woman in Anchorage, Alaska, stole a cellphone from a man's truck. When she looked through it, she found something horrifying. The phone was full of photos and videos of a woman being tortured and strangled to death. The phone's owner, Brian Steven Smith, had filmed himself beating and murdering 30-year-old Kathleen Jo Henry in a hotel room. At one point, he could be heard saying “In my movies, everybody always dies." The woman copied the files onto a memory card and took it to police. During questioning, Smith confessed to shooting another woman before abandoning her remains. In July 2024, he was sentenced to 226 years in prison.

Ever notice that in Dune humans fly spaceships between planets but don't use a single computer? That's not a plot hole. It's completely on purpose. The movies barely explain why, but once you know, almost everything else in Dune starts to make sense. About 10,000 years before Paul Atreides, humans did exactly what we're doing right now. They built thinking machines to make life easier. They let the machines do their work and make their decisions, hoping it would set them free. Instead, the people who controlled those machines gained the power to enslave everyone else. Humanity eventually fought back in a holy war called the Butlerian Jihad, and won. The thinking machines were destroyed. To make sure it would never happen again, they made one rule sacred: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." But getting rid of computers created a problem: who would do their work? The answer was humans. Mentats are trained from childhood to think like computers. Navigators use the spice to glimpse the future and steer ships safely through space. The Bene Gesserit spend generations pushing the human mind and body to their limits. Every superpower in Dune exists for one reason: there are no computers. That's my favorite thing about Dune. It's also the most terrifying. Dune isn't a future without AI. It's the future after AI. Frank Herbert wrote that in 1965.

Rest in peace, Professor 🪦 Doomsday is going to hit so much harder now.

In the final years of his life, Ernest Hemingway tried to convince friends and family that the FBI was following him, but they just told him he was paranoid. In late 1960, he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he received electroshock therapy. Even there, he refused to speak freely, convinced someone was listening. In July 1961, Hemingway died by suicide at his home in Idaho. Years after he died, the FBI released files showing that they had been monitoring him for the last 20 years of his life.