PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Father Pete leads the masses at Notre Dame

    Thirty seconds into the video, the camera shows Father Pete — to call him anything else is to barely know him — striding into the Basilica. He’s as identifiable by his buzz cut and black-rimmed glasses as he is by his perpetual smile. Sunlight follows him through the doors.

    That’s when the student section loses its collective mind, cheering as if running back Jeremiyah Love just went for another 98-yard touchdown.

    Excellent story about a University of Notre Dame priest and the community he supports.

  • Teens start banned book club

    After books were banned, what better way for teenagers to rebel than to start a banned book club?

    “It was really difficult for our first year,” Gooblar-Perovic added. “We couldn’t be like an official club with our school, because it would be, legally, iffy.”

    The group persisted. After the part of the law that affects school libraries was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, the Banned Book Club gained official recognition from the school. Now, as enforcement of the book restrictions remains frozen under a second temporary injunction, the club has 15 to 25 regular members and meets weekly to discuss books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, The Color Purple, The Handmaid’s Tale and Fahrenheit 451 — some of the same titles that had been previously removed from the Iowa City Community School District’s libraries. According to Iowa City West High’s library catalog, the books have since been reshelved.

  • The rise of chatfishing

    ChatGPT and its contemporaries are becoming dating tools, or at worse, crutches to mask social conversational deficiencies, aka chatfishing.

    Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

    Which is why the man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. “I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she says. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me. That’s when I suspected he’d been using AI.”

  • Mexico City’s zombie walk

    Every year, Mexico City hosts a zombie walk. Quite festive with a lot of different interpretations.

  • Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states

    Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states.

    Utopias — the white whale of the brewer’s lineup — is back for 2025 and it’s stronger than ever. Released every other year, the 2025 Utopias clocks in with a jaw-dropping 30% ABV, higher than most liqueurs and as much as some rums. Despite that high number, it’s still a beer. And that’s where the sales issues come in.

  • Settlers of Catan movie

    Netflix purchased screen rights to Settlers of Catan. Hmmmm.

    Netflix has won the rights to the Asmodee board game and plans an array of projects — scripted and unscripted, live-action and animated. The streamer describes the TV and film projects as set in “a place where settlers must navigate bountiful and varied landscapes, shifting alliances and limited resources, while robbers roam the land.”

    There better be scene of somebody hoarding all the sheep or someone in dire need of a brick.

  • Sea otters stealing surfboards

    A very real alliteration: sea otters stealing surfboards.

    On Wednesday, Isabella Orduna was catching some waves at Steamer Lane, a popular surf spot off Santa Cruz, Calif., when she felt a small nip on her foot.

    Startled, Ms. Orduna, a 21-year-old college student, rolled into the water. The moment she surfaced, she saw a “big, fuzzy, chunky bear of an otter” sitting on her board, she said. “I was like, wow, what do I do now?”

    The hijacking of Ms. Orduna’s surfboard was the first of two such incidents reported this week at Steamer Lane. On Thursday, another surfer had their board commandeered by a sea otter.

  • AI is gonna drink your milkshake

    Not only are AI data centers hungry for electricity, they are thirsty for water. So much that towns and cities are experiencing water shortages.

    Nearly 60 percent of the 1,244 largest data centers in the world were outside the United States as of the end of June, according to an analysis by Synergy Research Group, which studies the industry. More are coming, with at least 575 data center projects in development globally from companies including Tencent, Meta and Alibaba.

    As data centers rise, the sites — which need vast amounts of power for computing and water to cool the computers — have contributed to or exacerbated disruptions not only in Mexico, but in more than a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times examination.

  • Tactical frivolity

    The current administration deemed protesters violent and menacing. You know what isn’t? A person in an inflatable chicken costume, a protest tactic called tactical frivolity.

    This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants. In contravention of the Trump administration’s claims that the protesters were all Hamas agents or antifa interns, the protest in Chicago was wholesome, nonaggressive and almost shockingly middle-of-the-road. It’s hard to call an inflatable chicken dangerous.

  • Sleep is a spectrum

    We’ve known that sleep has cycles, but more research is showing that how we sleep is more nuanced and may exist as a spectrum.

    It’s still largely mysterious how the brain manages to move between these states safely and efficiently. But studies targeting transitions both into and out of sleep are starting to unravel the neurobiological underpinnings of these in-between states, yielding an understanding that could explain how sleep disorders, such as insomnia or sleep paralysis, can result when things go awry.

    Sleep has been traditionally thought of as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, Lewis said. You’re either awake or asleep. But the new findings are showing that it’s “much more of a spectrum than it is a category.”