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Daily Bread for 9.18.22: ‘Brainfeel’

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with high of 79. Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 6:58 PM for 12h 19m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1942, the Spring Valley Flood afflicts Pierce County:

On the evening of September 17, 1942, after a day of heavy rain, water began rolling through the streets of Spring Valley, in Pierce Co. The village, strung out along the Eau Galle River in a deep valley, had been inundated before, but this was no ordinary flood. By 11:30p.m., water in the streets was 12 to 20 feet deep, flowing at 12 to 15 miles an hour, and laden with logs, lumber, and dislodged buildings.

Throughout the early morning hours of Sept. 18th, village residents became trapped in their homes or were carried downstream as buildings were swept off foundations and floated away. One couple spent the night chest-deep in water in their living room, holding their family dog above the water and fending off floating furniture. The raging torrent uprooted and twisted the tracks of the Northwestern Railroad like wire, and electricity and drinking water were unavailable for several days. Miraculously, there were no deaths or serious injuries.


“Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel”:

“Nobody’s gonna know. They’re gonna know.”

If you’ve been on TikTok in the past year, you’re most likely familiar with these two sentences, first drolly uttered in a post by TikTok creator Chris Gleason in 2020. The post has become a hit and has been viewed more than 14 million times.

But the sound is more famous than the video.

When uploading a video to TikTok, the creator has the option to make that video’s audio a “sound” that other users can easily use in their own videos — lip-syncing to it, adding more noise on top of it or treating it like a soundtrack. Gleason’s sound has been used in at least 336,000 other videos, to humorous, dramatic and sometimes eerie effect.

The journalist Charlotte Shane delves into the world of repurposed sounds, exploring how TikTok and other apps have enabled, as she writes in her recent article for The Times, “cross-user riffing and engagement, like quote-tweeting for audio.” She also considers “what makes a sound compelling beyond musical qualities or linguistic meaning.”

While “brainfeel” may be an apt buzzword for the sensation audio memes elicit, Ms. Shane writes, it is more than a mere trend: We have entered the “era of the audio meme.”


7-Foot Mako Shark Jumps Into Fishing Boat:

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