January 21
Henry Moore
Gone With the Wind?
Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act... the U.S. wind industry, especially manufacturing, has been enjoying a renaissance. ... That growth is now in question, as just this week, [Donald] Trump stated that he plans to ensure "no windmills" are built during his term in office. [more inside]
“Nice hole Tim”
It's 2026 and you wonder what your friends are up to [SLMastodon thread]. In which Dan Fixes Coin-Ops on Mastodon gives us a taste of would could still become true if we only could make it so in one, long, delicious fever-dream of a toot-thread. (Dan, previously.)
Mothership RPG
Around the world in 180 beans or less
Beans, beans, the musical fruit been found in ancient Egyptian tombs and are mentioned in the Illiad. They were cultivated in Peru as early as the second millennium B.C.E. (Warning: Raw beans of the Phaseolus genus have a toxin (phytohaemagglutinin) that requires cooking at high temperatures to neutralize). [more inside]
Aboriginal stories advance scientific understanding
Aboriginal stories advance scientific understanding of environmental events.
Uncle Ken's ancestors told stories of the land trembling and the ocean moving. Researchers believe this information is crucial for advancing scientific understanding of major events and changes to Australia's environment over time.
The Milestone Society
... was formed in 2004 "to identify, record, research, conserve and interpret for public benefit the milestones and other waymarkers of the British Isles". They have a history of milestones on their site, and link to a more detailed one. Last year members found a stolen milestone listed for auction in Welshpool, and got it restored to its site in Derbyshire. [more inside]
Was this useful for me? For you? For anyone? Probably not.
Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games. This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme: The Most Mario Colors
Space is the Place
Everyone Who Has Ever Been to Space, Charted, a set of visualizations by Clara Moskowitz, senior editor at Scientific American, along with graphics intern Zane Wolf. Related: How many people are in space right now?
Sometimes you have to play with your food...
Theo Rooden is an artist who does a lot of work with optical illusions and geometric patterns in weaving. Usually fabric. Sometimes Pringles.
Brrrrr.
I'll tell you about turtlenecks. In honor of the Polar Vortex currently hitting much of the US, "Derek Guy", menswear writer (Die, Workwear!, Put This On) and social media raconteur, gave us a short but comprehensive BlueSky thread on the history of the turtleneck sweater and how to wear it in contemporary life.
Siberia was a bar...
Full time waitress, half-assed artist Cynthia Georgianne writes about her experience meeting a sometime-writer and chef at Siberia Bar in the 1990s. Known primarily for its original location in the 50th Street 1 and 9 subway station in Manhattan, it was about as dive as dive can be. According to legend, owner Tracy Westmoreland dragged a non-functional toilet all the way to Japan for a board meeting after a long-running dispute with Mitsubishi, owners of the developer Rockefeller Group. He eventually moved the bar to a new location in the 40s and the bar closed shop only a few years later. [more inside]
The Food Ranger
Trevor James, a.k.a. The Food Ranger, has had many Asian culinary adventures, but perhaps none as adventuresome as the DEATH LEVEL SPICY HOT POT CHALLENGE!!!.
Brief encounter
You meet all kinds of interesting people on the train. Frederick Joseph, a Black writer born and raised in the USA, writes unforgettably of his post-2024-election trip across country on the Amtrak Zephyr. [more inside]
Some clichés are like planets, their gravitational pull too strong
For all that creative labor across the past century, the English-speaking world has been largely resigned to the idea of middle age as a dreadful, isolating crisis. This is likely due in part to the midlife crisis’s amazing elasticity – the way it stretches to accommodate shifting cultural contexts and the rise of whole new artistic forms. Few other topics seem to lend themselves so generously to esoteric offerings and crowd-pleasing genre fare, to the page and the screen. from How midlife became a crisis [The Conversation; ungated]
January 20
Joe helped to make legal history
By sharing his family's stories and personal experience, Joe helped to make legal history. Due to financial and time constraints, native title bodies often struggle to file compensation claims before elders with vital knowledge die, but a new Australian Federal Court decision allows their testimonies to be collected and preserved for future claims.
Guitar Rig Diagrams
Bohemia is the material substrate through which genius emerges
These social mechanics—wherein creative rivalries oscillate between friendly and zero-sum—are universal, and I know them well. I only learned about them in practice when I encountered the Dimes Square scene during the pandemic. The pandemic created just enough squalor and gloom, and lowered rents just enough, for just long enough, for that latest bohemia to emerge. The downtown of the 2020s is centered on readings, screenings, and plays; but the sense of proximity, constant myth-making, and artistic competition that I experienced, and still experience, would have been familiar to the downtown bohemian of 1961. from The Death and Life of Bohemia by Michael Gasda [First Things; ungated] [more inside]
Happy Inauguration Day, DOGE!
A coalition representing veterans, public health professionals, teachers and other groups filed a suit today against DOGE, citing the the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), and asking a court to block DOGE's activities until it complies with law.
The 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act says that committees of outside government advisers must be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented,” and that they must make their records available to the public — yet Musk and Ramaswamy's DOGE does neither. [more inside]
"How would you even use this code?"
"Autonomy" is a short scifi/horror story by Meg Elison, published January 2025 in Clarkesworld, that partially takes place in an autonomous vehicle. Elison notes, "Here is my story of bloody revenge, a theme I can't get enough of these days." Content note for sexual assault and gore.
Fix Your Hearts or Die!
FANFARE THIS WEEK... A special event thread for live commenting on the US inauguration. New movies: apocalypse musical The End; a queer examination of Kevin Smith's 90s romcom in Chasing Chasing Amy; Barry Keoghan and Nykiya Adams in the social realist drama Bird; and a woman becomes romantically entangled with her stepson in French drama Last Summer. In TV, Severance is back, Silo season two is wrapping up, and Stephanie Hsu's ex-lovers are dropping dead, in order in Laid. Also inside: FF's complete David Lynch wrap-up... [more inside]
Keep your mind set on freedom and your eyes on the prize
Crys Matthews calls herself the poster child for intersectionality. Her new album released last week,Reclamation (Youtube, Apple,Spotify, Autographed CD, reviews 1 ,2,3,4,5) "is both sonically and ideologically the fullest representation of who I am as an artist and as a human, she says. A preacher's kid, a Black woman, a Butch lesbian, and a proud Southerner who sings social justice music right alongside 'traditional' Country and Americana music, Matthews is reclaiming not just of the space Black artists have been denied in Country and Americana music, not just of the space LGBTQ people have been denied in communities of faith, not just of the autonomy women have been denied over their own bodies, she is reclaiming the South that raised her." And today, because it s a terrible day for so many, she released her latest song, Sleeves Up, written November 6th, 2024. There is so much [more inside]
Leonard Peltier granted clemency
Joe Biden has granted clemency to Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, in one of his last actions as president. Clemency isn't a pardon--the conviction stands--but the 80-year-old Peltier will be released from prison.
Everyone thank Trump for kicking the can another 90 days down the road
Matt Stoller Explains the TikTok Dispute from a Legal Perspective That said, despite the 270 deadline, in the law, there’s also a 90 day extension the President is able to offer if he thinks that there is a path to divesting the app... Basically, TikTok said it is subject to a law banning the app, and praised Donald Trump for somehow thwarting that law. In truth, Trump just said he’d offer the 90 day extension that’s in the law itself.
Trump, for his part of this ordeal, said he will use an executive order to give TikTok that reprieve, and focus on cutting a deal to keep the app functional. “The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.” He also said he wants the “United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up.” [more inside]
Salutations de Floride
EPIC, the musical
EPIC: The Musical is a musical adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey created by Jorge Rivera-Herrans Per Athena Scalzi, I found out about EPIC, an online musical that's beautifully mind-blowing. [more inside]
Do Not Obey In Advance
1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom. - Historian Timothy Snyder from On Tyranny with 20 rules for resisting tyranny
My Unsung Hero
My Unsung Hero is an ongoing NPR series where people tell brief stories of the (mostly) strangers they met who changed, and sometimes saved, their lives. [more inside]
The "Megalopolis" of Tabletop Role-Playing Games
‘Ultimately, Invisible Sun is an amazing roleplaying game. Its production design is breathtaking, and many aspects of its gameplay are brilliant and revolutionary. ... All roleplaying games are escapism; it is a testament to Invisible Sun’s creative ingenuity that it both foregrounds its own escapist nature and simultaneously provokes meaningful questions about what a better world might look like — because ultimately, we can’t just leave Shadow behind; our world desperately needs a rescue mission, not just an escape hatch." - David M. Higgins, Los Angeles Review of Books [more inside]
No Chains Can Bind The MeFite! Your Weekly Thread, Freed
What have you broken free from? Have you shed an extra obligation or an anxiety that's stalked you for years? Are you finally putting on the weight you want and having to let go of too-tiny clothing? Have you freed a link? Have you freed yourself from Free Willy? Have you freed yourself from "Free Bird?" If free is not free, is it still free, and for whom? This is your weekly MetaFilter free thread, so how do you do, fellow kids?
Goal: for every Kimberley child to speak their grandparents' language
New project aims for every Kimberley (Australia) child to speak their grandparents' language. Maureen Deegan's mum had to relearn her own language, Jaru, which she had not been allowed to speak. Now Maureen is helping others to keep their languages alive.
Nah, let's just skip the ceremony today
It's Inauguration Day in the United States, so let's take a look back with various AP reporters. But if this American tradition doesn't interest you this particular year, here's a few other things you can do today: [more inside]
Fuckin' idealized form of magnetism, how does it work?
Under cool conditions, the up-down arrows nudge each other into alignment — all up, say — while the freewheeling arrows point in random directions. As the temperature rises, one would expect the thermal energy to start flipping all the arrows violently, washing out any alignment. But it doesn’t. The free arrows pinwheel around more, stabilizing the magnetic order in the up-down arrows. And this arrangement survives even as the temperature climbs higher for all eternity. The magnetic order never melts away. from Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case [Quanta]
January 19
Chic Live At Budokan 1996
Only the last iteration of Chic, the greatest rock, soul and funk band ever in its final performance live at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in 1996. The band died the next day with Bernard Edwards, who was suffering from pneumonia. [more inside]
The Rolex manufacturing facilities
"By the time I received the invitation from Rolex Geneva to visit its four facilities, I had been to just about every other factory one could imagine – ranging from those who are simply packaging up pre-made movements and strapping them into off the shelf cases and dials, to those who are still doing everything by hand (but only producing a few watches per year). What I saw within the halls of Rolex wasn't like either; it was like seeing something brand new being made, something that went beyond a watch. The scale of everything, the detail, the people and perfection, is I think unique in watchmaking, if not all consumer products."
Sacred artefacts returned
These sacred artefacts were thought lost forever, but one phone call changed everything.
When a German researcher arrived in Yuendumu (Australia) in 1972, the Indigenous community gave him rare access to their customs and culture. Half a century later, an emotional reunion has seen some sacred artefacts he was given returned.
Pause here for reflection.
From: 'Make it New', The Ezra Pound Society Magazine',
"Gordon Sellar started writing his blog on The Cantos in February 2012. He remembered having read a few in a postgraduate seminar: being a writer himself, with sci-fi and occult leanings, he intended to make Pound the protagonist of a novel. Blogging The Cantos, one at a time, a canto a week, had to be his research and preparation....But as events unfolded in unforeseeable ways, Sellar abandoned the blog after having reached canto 57 in May 2014."
"'Blogging The Cantos" [more inside]
comfort food for the discomfited
A partial catalogue of Star Trek stories about wrongful convictions. A BlueSky thread from Amanda Knox.
Hail to the Meme
Trump has just delivered a masterclass in the ability of a president to turn power into wealth. [Axios; ungated]
"Pop! Pop pop! Pop! Pop into Pop Up Video!"
Between 1996 and 2002, VH1 had a show called Pop Up Video which paired music videos with trivia and jokes that "popped up" on screen, mostly without controversy. Most of it is unavailable today, but the Internet Archive has a number of episodes taped off televion. Here is a list: [more inside]
Caution: Nerds
Journalist Robert Evans, best known for his sharp, sardonic perspective in everything from Cracked to Bellingcat to Behind the Bastards, live-skeeted his experience of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the annual showcase of the latest tech coming your way (whether you like it or not). Lowlights of the bacchanalia can be found in a series of increasingly pointed episodes of Better Offline (hosted by fellow Silicon Valley curmudgeon Ed Zitron). But it wasn't all bad -- true to the show's mission to be "an oasis within a tech industry gone wrong", Robert and friends made a discovery: after days of grifters and con men at CES we stumbled upon the booth for VLC. they were all dressed as wizards and told us, "we have nothing to sell, we just decided to show up". i told them I'd been using their software to pirate media for 15 years and they said "keep doing that". And reader, there are pictures. [more inside]
John Coltrane's "Interstellar Space"
"As one of Coltrane's final recordings this duet session with Ali is one of his most essential and unique. … Coltrane had engaged in earlier duets with Elvin Jones… but in Ali he found a drummer even more willing to abandon terrestrial rhythmic boundaries and set course for uncharted space. Across these duets the saxophonist is at his most visceral exuding an overpowering confidence tempered at times with sacrosanct tenderness. Ali's interlocking pan-rhythmic patterns envelop and embrace while fervently pushing the music forward." - Derek Taylor [more inside]
Help, my luggage is running away!
Wheeled luggage has become the one true luggage and makes traveling so much easier, but when and where did they come from? And how did sexism affect their acceptance? [more inside]
Give me the king in his countinghouse
With Amis came a new kind of literary voice, and a public whose taste for it was rapidly inspired. This voice spoke of damage (“Damage is waiting. Soon, damage is going to stop waiting – any day now”), fear (“One of these days I’m going to walk right up to fear”), booze, junk food, pornography, bodily functions (“As I emerged from some X-certificate work in the equatorial bathroom”), dental mayhem (“various pains have taken up residence in various parts of my face”), and an intense alertness to the passage of time (“I’ve got to grow up. It’s time”). from Martin Amis and the Changing of the Guard [Salamagundi]
January 18
food, truly
"TrueFood is a user-friendly interface designed to unveil the degree of processing of food products, powered by GroceryDB, a comprehensive database. GroceryDB is part of a research project [Prevalence of Processed Food in Grocery Stores, Nature Food, 2024 (note:PDF)], that provides the data and methodologies necessary to quantify food processing and analyze ingredient structures within the U.S. food supply. By integrating large-scale data on food composition with machine learning, TrueFood offers valuable insights into the current state of food processing in the U.S. grocery landscape, highlighting distributions of food processing scores and the variability in product offerings across different grocery stores." [more inside]
So many of our crimes came back to our womanhood being the first offence
"Some argue EUPD [emotionally unstable personality disorder] is a misogynistic diagnosis that mostly serves to dismiss women in distress. The disorder itself has been in psychiatric practice only since 1980 when it appeared in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III. The criteria are decidedly questionable: impulsivity, unstable relationships, unstable sense of self, fear of abandonment, anger, feelings of emptiness. These describe trauma responses and neurodiversity, and can easily be crafted into very feminine shapes: I’ve had friends clinically admonished for dyeing their hair different colours, as a sign of impulsivity and an unstable sense of self. But if that’s the case, why do cosmetics shops sell so much brightly coloured hair dye? I was never formally assessed, but I was later told my history of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse played a part in my diagnosis, and it’s not just the abuse, it’s how you deal with it – it must be processed with elegance and good grace. If you go off the rails, do drugs, drink, screw around, then the criteria are met, the diagnosis is made, rinse and repeat." [more inside]
LEGO D-Day
Bloodletting treatment for PFAS contamination
Jersey discovered PFAS aka “forever chemicals” in groundwater in the mid-1990s, which originated from firefighting foams, which 3M sold knowing their toxicity. Island officials never informed many resedents, signed a remarkably poor deal with 3M in 2005, and only completely stopped using contaminated water in 2022. Islanders should take a new bloodletting treatment to reduce dangerous blood levels of PFAS. [more inside]
“In the 1950s, you had this mid-century hubris - tech could conquer all"
“In the 1950s, you had this mid-century hubris—technology could conquer all”
“The history of the West is one of struggle of mankind against nature,” says Sarah Keyes, a historian at the University of Nevada, Reno. “In the post-World War II world, [that] these elite folks can still be trapped for days in the mountains is terrifying—and a continuation of a cultural legacy.” from When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days [Smithsonian]
When advertisements go wrong
Pakistan International Airlines recently issued an Eiffel Tower advert marking the return of flights to Paris. Unfortunately, the advertisement made a lot of people think of the 2001 September 11 attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda.