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Facebook’s Monopoly Is Imploding Before Our Eyes. Competition, miscalculations, and regulatory scrutiny have all but killed the advertising giant's dreams of diversifying its business and rolling up the digital world into its platform.
posted by team lowkey at 10:09 PM PST - 124 comments

From Super Eyepatch Wolf, who brought us What The Internet Did To Undertale (previously), comes What The Internet Did To Garfield [1h20m]. You can decide -- do you remain innocent, or do you watch a movie length video essay that will utterly change, destroy, and rebuild how you view this most basic of comic strips?
posted by hippybear at 8:41 PM PST - 28 comments

Ross Chastain (driving the red and black car) picks up five places to qualify for the winner take all NASCAR 2022 Cup Series championship in the Phoenix on Nov. 6 with the most Hollywood move I've seen in five decades of watching stock car racing. SLYT to compilation of dozens of views. Some NSFW language. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 8:20 PM PST - 52 comments

Pick your nose. Don't pick your nose. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 7:22 PM PST - 28 comments

Want to know more about Halloween Customs, Games Connected with Halloween? Or maybe you’d prefer Strange Happenings on Halloween Night or a Ghost Story? [more inside]
posted by scorbet at 1:58 PM PST - 5 comments

Less than 12 hours after Taylor Swift’s 10th album, Midnights, dropped on Oct. 21, a 25-year-old New Zealander posted a video on Twitter in which he recorded himself correctly guessing, one by one, upon first listen, every song on the album produced by Jack Antonoff. “I’m able to instantly detect if Jack Antonoff worked on a song due to a visceral hatred of his production style,” Caleb Gamman captioned his clip, which currently has over 84,000 likes. (archive.ph link)
posted by Etrigan at 12:53 PM PST - 61 comments

In advance of the 2022 US midterms, Apollo Academic Surveys is reporting an expert survey on threats to American democracy. At a time of potential risks to American democratic norms and institutions, we report the results of a survey of 682 experts in political science. The expert email list was constructed from the faculty list of U.S. institutions represented in the online program of the 2016 American Political Science Association conference. [more inside]
posted by bluesky43 at 9:05 AM PST - 32 comments

Language justice is a practice based on the concept that everyone has the basic human right to speak in the language(s) in which we feel most comfortable at a given time, where no one language is dominant in a space or discussion. Decentering English is liberation-based in principle but difficult in practice. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 8:24 AM PST - 30 comments

Lego Mindstorms will be discontinued at the end of 2022. RIP. [more inside]
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:19 AM PST - 35 comments

What we have here is what we call a non-repeating phantasm, or a class-5 free roaming thread, real nasty one too. [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:58 AM PST - 170 comments

Lula defeats Bolsonaro to again become Brazil’s president. "Twenty years after first winning the Brazilian presidency, the leftist defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro Sunday in an extremely tight election that marks an about-face for the country after four years of far-right politics." Background on Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva: 'Our phoenix': Lula's ups and downs in Brazil defy belief; background on the election: All you need to know about most divisive vote in Brazil’s history.
posted by taz at 12:57 AM PST - 39 comments

1 Billion is Tiny in an Alternate Universe: Introduction to p-adic Numbers - "The p-adic numbers are bizarre alternative number systems that are extremely useful in number theory. They arise by changing our notion of what it means for a number to be large. As a real number, 1 billion is huge. But as a 10-adic number, it is tiny!" (previously ;)
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM PST - 11 comments

Paul Weller and Suggs got together with some horns and made a song. But there's another video! During which Suggs rolls around on the ground and Weller chews gum while singing. [more inside]
posted by goofyfoot at 11:29 PM PST - 5 comments

In December of 2021, professionals in the print and design industries were disappointed to learn that because of a breakdown in licensing talks, Adobe would remove Pantone Color Libraries from future versions of its Creative Cloud products. The reality turned out to be more disappointingly late-stage-capitalist-rent-seeking, when Adobe decided that any Photoshop file with a Pantone color would be replaced by black squares when the PSD file was loaded, unless the user pays an additional $21 per month. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:55 PM PST - 46 comments

Once again (previously,) the Spanish band Broken Peach has released a Halloween Video in their classic style. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:34 PM PST - 6 comments

Four Poems by Dennis Brutus. 'Cold' (YT), 'Train Journey', 'I must conjure from my past', ' Still the Sirens' [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 7:30 PM PST - 1 comment

Attila Kobori & Leo Lorenzo compete at the Bavarian Open 2022, dancing to Janele Monae's Make Me Feel. [dance is ~2m30, there's info about the Open afteward, 3m21s total] Honestly, this happened in Munich just a few weeks ago and I find it thrilling to watch.
posted by hippybear at 5:57 PM PST - 8 comments

Fern Brady comedy special (SLYT, 56:01m, subtitles/captioning).
posted by curious nu at 5:42 PM PST - 15 comments

Get Blogging! [via mefi projects]
posted by aniola at 3:52 PM PST - 40 comments

Wanna watch some birds and snakes and insects and whatnot with no commentary? Wildlife video diary.
posted by clawsoon at 2:12 PM PST - 3 comments

My First Fright The first scary movie I saw wasn't really scary, but the circumstances surrounding it made it so. What are your first unlikely scary movies?
posted by hairless ape at 12:52 PM PST - 54 comments

Friday Night Forking [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 12:11 PM PST - 2 comments

On October 30, 2002, a cancer-stricken Warren Zevon returned to the ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ stage for one last performance. Twenty years later, Letterman and more remember the gravitas and emotion of that stunning night. (archive.ph link)
posted by Etrigan at 12:04 PM PST - 20 comments

Get your code personally reviewed by Elon Musk! On paper! This service is sure to massively disrupt software development, bro. Multiple pricing tiers appropriate to whatever level you're on. Meet Elon Musk personally, and get your code shot into space! But the video explains it better than I could.
posted by Naberius at 9:34 AM PST - 42 comments

Wikipedia is notoriously complicated when discussing math-related topics but sometimes the concepts themselves are actually not that difficult when described in plain language. Let's talk about fractals, specifically the Cantor Set, the Sierpinski carpet, and the Menger sponge. Here's how they relate to one another, mathematically. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 9:31 AM PST - 28 comments

What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture (Derek Thompson for The Atlantic)
posted by box at 8:50 AM PST - 40 comments

The Last Stop and the Book of Revelation by Nicolette Polek [The Paris Review]
posted by chavenet at 6:17 AM PST - 2 comments

"I’m always looking for tangible examples of how our towns and cities go through long slow cycles. Our places as well as our institutions have a lifespan." Johnny Sanphillippo at Granola Shotgun (previously) writes about the death of an elderly neighbor, sorting through her belongings, San Francisco infrastructure that's well-maintained or not, and related topics, illustrating his post with many photos (heads-up in case you're on a low-bandwidth connection). In case you enjoy his work, check out the Granola Shotgun archives, including 2014-2020 material on his old WordPress site.
posted by brainwane at 5:43 AM PST - 13 comments

Duty to Warn, an association of mental health professionals that speaks out about Trumpism, has released an eleven-minute preview version of their soon-to-be released documentary #UNTRUTH, a follow-up to their 2020 documentary Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump.
posted by orange swan at 6:48 PM PST - 32 comments

Welcome to The Backyard Squirrelympics 3.0 -- The Summer Games [23m], in which teams of squirrels compete with each other for the Walnut Cup! Created by Mark Rober, previously, previouslier.
posted by hippybear at 4:24 PM PST - 11 comments

On the anniversary of Stevie Wonder's landmark 1972 album Talking Book, musicians who made it and artists who cherish it share their stories. An interactive oral history. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 1:27 PM PST - 14 comments

Frontline Comics Project, a project of the Graphic Medicine International Collective.
posted by latkes at 1:09 PM PST - 3 comments

Ninety percent of US households consume peanut butter and the National Peanut board estimates that 60% of Americans prefer smooth peanut butter. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 11:49 AM PST - 168 comments

Selma Blair is my hero. That might sound trite or cliched, but it's hard to find the words to express just how much her run on Dancing With the Stars after a 2018 Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis meant to me. I too have a chronic illness (fibromyalgia). As anyone with a chronic illness will tell you, it can be difficult not to feel defined by your limitations, partly because our ableist society is designed to remind you of them at every turn — I've had my fibromyalgia diagnosis for 11 years and too often my way of dealing with it is to ignore it, trying to pretend it doesn't exist. But with her appearance on Dancing With the Stars, Blair proved that no matter the circumstances, it's your courage and your spirit that define you. (archive.ph link)
posted by Etrigan at 8:53 AM PST - 7 comments

'Handmade in Japan' Episode 1: Samurai Sword. Episode 2: The Kimono. Episode 3: Mingei Pottery.
posted by clavdivs at 10:12 PM PST - 8 comments

Strikes: an ancient, time-tested tradition.
posted by aniola at 6:31 PM PST - 13 comments

The Seattle Humane Society offers a YouTube playlist of Halloween purrodies of beloved horror movies starring adoptable kittens. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 5:23 PM PST - 5 comments

Hanneli Pick-Goslar (1928-2022) was a friend and classmate of Anne Frank and survivor of the Holocaust including the Lost Train. She settled in Israel where she worked as a pediatric nurse in Jerusalem. She and her husband had three children, 11 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren. She dedicated her life to fighting antisemitism and telling story of her life, and Anne's. Their friendship became the subject of the movie My Best Friend Anne Frank.
posted by jessamyn at 4:01 PM PST - 27 comments

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 2:32 PM PST - 54 comments

Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic , with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming. ... Now, with the world already 1.2 degrees hotter, scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. ... Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years. [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:35 AM PST - 61 comments

Ahead of Halloween, Vulture asked Foley artists to answer the question [Marilee] Yorston commonly fields: What is the hardest sound you’ve ever had to perform in a horror project? The answers ranged from the yowls of a disembodied spirit to the exact gushing of a head exploded from the inside by a discharged fire extinguisher. (archive.ph link)
posted by Etrigan at 8:12 AM PST - 26 comments

The World Cup is the world’s most-watched sports event, with the last one held in Russia in 2018 attracting 3.6 billion television and online viewers. The next World Cup begins in Qatar on 20 November. As noted by Sky News: Qatar won the bid for the 2022 Men's World Cup over the USA by 14 votes to eight. But given the country's strict Islamic laws, its questionable human rights record, and searing temperatures, there were immediate corruption concerns over the decision. Soon after, FIFA commissioned its own investigation into Qatar's methods, which found "no evidence of any improper activity by the bid team". [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 7:56 AM PST - 39 comments

An Economic History of the ('Long') Twentieth Century - "Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall."[1,2,3] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:42 AM PST - 13 comments

Youtube creator GiantGrantGames gives the details of how Youtube assigns the ads on a video, why there are so many ads there now and only more coming in the future, and what you can do about it (hint: uBlock Origin), in a video titled YouTube Ads Are Getting Insane And I Hate It. It also reminds us that, in 2023, you won't be able to block ads in Chrome anymore. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 4:11 AM PST - 76 comments

Architect Michael Wyetzner breaks down the details of five creepy buildings from scary movies for Architectural Digest.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:41 PM PST - 10 comments

Building on the international success of AAAH!BA [previously], competition now arises from a new band, Bee Dee Gee's Hee Bee Gee Bees, who bring us Stayin' Alive (performed by a vampire) and Tragedy (performed by a werewolf).
posted by kaibutsu at 6:13 PM PST - 8 comments

Hot Ones with Cate Blanchett. As charming as one could imagine. As interesting and engaging as one could hope. Too much editorializing? Or just cold hard facts? You decide. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 4:13 PM PST - 43 comments

Where have all the checks gone? I'll tell you! There's this secret feature credit unions and banks in the US have, hidden behind the obscure nomenclature of "online bill pay." Your financial institution of choice will cut a physical check and put it in an envelope and address the envelope and put a stamp on it and drop it in the mail and typically they don't even charge you for the check, the envelope, the ink, their time, or the stamp! The postal carriers carry on carrying, and then someone else receives the check in the mail!
posted by aniola at 12:09 PM PST - 135 comments

@elonmusk says he has "bought Twitter" in a message to advertisers and that he hopes the site doesn't "become a free-for-all-hellscape". However, according to the Guardian, "despite his use of the past tense, he did not legally own Twitter at the time of the post" although "the final paperwork is expected to be completed on Friday afternoon". It's also not certain if a specific former President's banned account will be allowed to return to the site, an event the WSJ calls "a red-line for some brands".
posted by autopilot at 9:19 AM PST - 1538 comments

Meg Elison asks, Has there ever been a richer time to be fat? We live in a time when there is mainstream discourse about body neutrality and fat acceptance. On the other hand, R. K. Duncan says, This is going to be a Jeremiad, not a hopeful essay. ... If you are fat, stay if you need righteous anger, but please don’t make yourself read this if you need something soft right now. This essay is for thin SFF fans and creators.
posted by Etrigan at 8:08 AM PST - 28 comments

Nate Hagens' interviews experts who bring a "systems perspective" on energy, ecology, climate change, the environment, and related aspects of economics, technology, human behavior, and geopolitics, but these animations give the overall theme. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 8:08 AM PST - 13 comments

The UN has released the 2022 Emissions Gap Report. The report finds that only an urgent system-wide transformation can deliver the enormous cuts needed to limit greenhouse gas emissions by 2030: 45 per cent compared with projections based on policies currently in place to get on track to 1.5°C and 30 per cent for 2°C. This report provides an in-depth exploration of how to deliver this transformation, looking at the required actions in the electricity supply, industry, transport and buildings sectors, and the food and financial systems.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 8:00 AM PST - 22 comments

Are octopuses floods, or are they reservoirs? Are they two-thirds water, like us, or do they explode the body–environment boundary? To be in the (even virtual) presence of an octopus is closely akin to an acid trip, I feel: a hot flood, a visitation of humility, of xenohospitable love, divine trust, comradely fearlessness. [more inside]
posted by jshttnbm at 7:24 AM PST - 17 comments

It’s a funny thing: ever since my mother died, now almost three years ago, I have been fixated on other women who were, like her, impossible, hilarious, horny, suicidal, bookish, and intermittently threatened with psychiatric confinement. First, it was the feminist revolutionary Shulamith Firestone; now, it is Marilyn.

–Some Like It Hot, Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society by Sophie Lewis, an essay which considers Marilyn Monroe, feminism, her mother, BimboTok, misogyny and a lot else. [Internet Archive link]
posted by Kattullus at 5:22 AM PST - 7 comments

The White House logo currently has a bat flying around in anticipation of Halloween. What delightful and unexpected little nods to Halloween have you noticed - on the web or off? [more inside]
posted by kristi at 11:07 PM PST - 22 comments

'Halloween' Main theme by banjo guy ollie
posted by clavdivs at 8:02 PM PST - 4 comments

K-Pop in the time of Covid , an appreciation zine by comics artist Maia Kobabe (author of Gender Queer). E also drew every outfit e wore to K-pop shows.
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:10 PM PST - 2 comments

Crypto winter had just started when software engineer Molly White launched her blog, Web3 is going just great. She’s now one of the most influential blockchain skeptics. Wherein Molly White explains, among other things, that, no, she does not think it's all a scam. But: “It felt like suddenly people were marketing crypto to the average person,” she told Protocol. “People were getting sucked into these schemes that they really did not know much about or understand properly.”
posted by Ayn Marx at 3:09 PM PST - 31 comments

“I don’t rail against PC culture and all that because I think when somebody is accused of being politically correct, that usually just means they’re being sensitive to other people’s feelings.” -- ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic: The Great American Novelty
posted by bondcliff at 2:24 PM PST - 43 comments

Blaseball, the Absurdist Horror Fantasy Sport That Won a Cult Fanbase, Is Back After a Year-Long Siesta (IGN) Most critically, Blaseball remains at the mercy of its fans. The year-long siesta has enabled The Game Band to play out what Clark calls the “possibility space” much further in advance than before. The team is moving away from the grand, overarching storylines that characterized the first two eras in favor of more of a “monster of the week” format that allows fans to dip in and out without reading pages of wiki articles about what happened months ago. But the stories told week to week will remain in the hands of the sim and the fans. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 10:39 AM PST - 11 comments

The mission of BigPumpkins.com is to provide an interactive web site to the giant pumpkin growing community! We would also like to promote the exciting sport/hobby of giant pumpkin and giant squash growing by helping new comers get started.
Want to see some World Records?!
Giant Pumpkin: 2702.9 Cutrupi Giant Squash: 2164 Skinner Watermelon: 350.5 Kent Master Gardener: Tobeck 2021
Field Pumpkin: 211 MacKinnon Tomato: 10.8 Sutherland Long Gourd: 173.75 Eaton Bushel Gourd: 470.5 Connolly
posted by Going To Maine at 10:27 AM PST - 15 comments

A lot of artists know the feeling; we’re belatedly learning how factory workers felt half a century ago, watching themselves be replaced by robots. Tim Kreider's review of the the last stop-motion film: Mad God by Phil Tippett, over thirty years in the making, and an exploration of what it means to be obsolete. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 10:14 AM PST - 30 comments

'Where did the Tweeters Go?' (Reuters) These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document.
posted by box at 5:25 AM PST - 118 comments

The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - "Where it came from, what it all means, and why it still matters." (archive; also btw What Is Code?[*] by Paul Ford, earlier)
posted by kliuless at 1:01 AM PST - 93 comments

FRONTLINE - Putin's Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes

CW: War crimes documented via incredibly detailed FRONTLINE footage of interviews of survivors, captured Russian footage, Ukrainian footage and detailed analysis by Ukrainian war crimes investigators. It is harrowing to view but well worth watching. [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 12:49 AM PST - 15 comments

Welcome to World of WearableArt — World of WearableArt (WOW) is a unique combination of the world’s leading wearable art competition and a spectacular stage show held in Wellington, New Zealand. WOW attracts cutting-edge talent from across the globe, from garment designers to the show’s dancers, aerialists, musicians, and performers. The creative team spends around 18 months bringing together each bespoke WOW Awards Season. The world of WearableArt Awards Show is New Zealand’s most significant theatrical production. It is a not-to-be-missed event for around 60,000 people and a coveted competition for international designers working at the cutting edge of fashion, art, design, and costume alongside students and first-time entrants.
posted by Roverlaw at 9:32 PM PST - 8 comments

“the California dream is still alive and well,” the state’s 40th governor said in a Zoom interview a month before his probable reelection. The truth is that California outperforms the US and the rest of world across many industries. That’s especially relevant with renewable energy, the fastest-growing business in California and Germany. The market capitalization of California companies in this business increased 731% the past three years, or 1.74 times more than their German counterparts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
posted by folklore724 at 9:30 PM PST - 29 comments

RIP to a brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a historian’s memory. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:42 PM PST - 38 comments

Understood from the perspective of China, Hong Kong has not just seen the tactics of co-option and threat, developed for a gentler takeover, turned to the service of a far more draconian one. It has also seen the perfection of methods of co-opting businesses and academics, infiltrating institutions like universities and funding pro-party propaganda on social media which can be used farther afield.
posted by blue shadows at 6:38 PM PST - 9 comments

stridulating mammal of the day (15 second imgur video) [more inside]
posted by aniola at 6:14 PM PST - 21 comments

Intriguing behind-the-scene look at a film sequence from Athena, directed by by Romain Gavras. The film has earned kudos for its cinematography and long sequences with minimal cuts. Another scene. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive at 3:20 PM PST - 9 comments

In a surprise move, it was revealed today that filmmaker James Gunn and producer Peter Safran have been tapped to lead DC’s film, TV and animation division. This comes shortly after corporate rival Marvel released the trailer for Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 3:00 PM PST - 34 comments

Dave Karpf takes a critical look back fifteen years later on the classic Kevin Kelly essay Thousand True Fans, on what it got right and the various things it got wrong or never grappled with to begin with.
posted by cortex at 1:51 PM PST - 61 comments

"The London restaurant menu at the time of writing includes a slimy little asterisk; ‘Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species – please ask your server for an alternative’: sashimi with a sauce of cognitive dissonance...(f)or many diners at Nobu, though, the asterisk is presumably not so much a deterrent as a victory flag: it’s their scarcity that makes eating them so visceral a thrill." [more inside]
posted by mreleganza at 1:46 PM PST - 23 comments

On October 18, Republican Rep. Mike Johnson introduced the "Stop the Sexualization of Children Act", apparently designed to "protect" children from "sexually explicit material". In practice, it is a federal anti-LGBTQ bill which threatens to defund any federally funded institution which provides LGBTQ-supportive material to children under 10. It defines "sexually-oriented material" as images, descriptions, and simulations of sexual acts, genitalia, or "any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects." This includes "any exposure to transgenderism", which may cover the very existence of trans people in those spaces.
posted by fight or flight at 1:46 PM PST - 25 comments

"Debbie fought the contractions at first, hoping to reach Europe and a hospital, but it soon became clear that her baby would touch down before the plane did." -- What happens to babies born on planes? [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 1:39 PM PST - 17 comments

When the MMO Glitch died in 2012, it released its code and its many assets into the public domain, and since then, several groups have tried to resurrect this charming game. Children of Ur and Eleven ended up combining forces and then stalled out; the last announcement from either of them was in 2019. Odd Giants, however, is up and running today for you to play for free in alpha. [more inside]
posted by fiercecupcake at 12:55 PM PST - 18 comments

Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, sees rest as a revolutionary way to push back on America’s obsession with productivity at all costs. (gift link) [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 12:13 PM PST - 11 comments

NY Times: Climate Activists Throw Mashed Potatoes on Monet Painting “After throwing mashed potatoes at a painting by Claude Monet, on exhibit in Potsdam, Germany, the climate protesters each glued a hand to the wall“ [more inside]
posted by beesbees at 10:44 AM PST - 148 comments

Fiona Apple Claims Maryland Officials Blocked Access for Court Watchers Over Pretrial Detention Suit: The singer-songwriter, who's been observing court proceedings for a couple of years, was one of several people to file an affidavit in support of plaintiffs suing over allegedly unlawful system
posted by Etrigan at 8:35 AM PST - 12 comments

Metafilter depends almost entirely on user contributions. The community needs your help to stay up and running and to improve in the future. Contributions, especially recurring contributions, are what pay for servers, moderators and technical support. Please contribute through the Metafilter funding page! [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 8:33 AM PST - 29 comments

How the Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan Endure By a river in the hills near the Russian border, a 300-year-old community of multilingual Jews keeps 'Europe's last shtetl' alive [more inside]
posted by NoMich at 6:34 AM PST - 14 comments

Since it is the season, at least in the USA, why not take an hour to see how politics are done in Louisiana? Or at least, was done up to 1991. [more inside]
posted by BWA at 5:07 AM PST - 7 comments

Crisp Sandwich Day on St Crispin's Day [via mefi projects] . Also Buttystock - related crisp sandwich photo project promoted by aniola three years ago. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:49 PM PST - 20 comments

“At a 2.3% [economic] growth rate, [earth's surface] would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.” — Tom Murphy (Do The Math), “Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist” / “Limits to economic growth” [PDF] [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 7:05 PM PST - 59 comments

The new DLC for the old Homestar Runner Halloween toon Homestarloween Party is finally out!
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:02 PM PST - 7 comments

If Updike sums up the American tradition that celebrates the US post and the principle of union, Pynchon and Ellison draw on another tradition, just as deeply rooted, that fears and distrusts the post, seeing it as an engine of conformity, a tyrannous system that infiltrates private life and suborns citizens as its empty vehicles. from These Swift Couriers: Postal Democracy and American Literature [LARB, June 2021]
posted by chavenet at 2:47 PM PST - 7 comments

The Guardian ranks Steely Dan's top 20 songs. [more inside]
posted by emelenjr at 1:42 PM PST - 57 comments

At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers. We wanted to understand how residents use and monitor these cameras, but more importantly, we wanted to know their impact on low-wage delivery workers who are routinely observed and recorded over the course of their daily work. How does this form of surveillance change labor conditions?
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:19 PM PST - 54 comments

Let's take a drive in the country

Slow Roads is a casual, procedurally-generated driving game which lets you disconnect from life for a while and run endlessly toward the distant horizon. Set the scenery to suit your mood, throw on some music, and
just drive.

From the developer.
posted by device55 at 8:55 AM PST - 43 comments

A lovely three part Twitter comic about pigeons and the people who love them, by Jenny Jinya: part 1, part 2, part 3. (Jenny Jinya previously.)
posted by MartinWisse at 7:16 AM PST - 4 comments

Butterfly wings pattern and junk dna “Reed’s lab has uncovered key color pattern genes: one (WntA) that controls stripes and another (Optix) that controls color and iridescence in butterfly wings.“
posted by Yellow at 6:15 AM PST - 4 comments

Is Taylor Swift doing a better job at building a metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg right now?
posted by signal at 4:13 AM PST - 31 comments

Who said "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." a) Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa; b) Bobby McGee; c) Nikos Kazantzakis; d) This Thread [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:01 AM PST - 77 comments

H.R. Giger's biomechanical landscapes are a disturbing fusion of decaying flesh, bone and machinery. Slideshow. Animation. Inspired by his work, SCORN challenges you to explore and survive within these nightmarish visions. RPS. Full walkthrough. (CW: horror).
posted by adept256 at 2:02 AM PST - 27 comments

Most American high school students fear it. Keegan Gregory lived it. Last November, he found himself face-to-face with a school shooter. This is the story of what happened next. [Sports Illustrated]
posted by riruro at 8:05 PM PST - 35 comments

Olaplex went from small batches sold from a garage to a $14 billion dollar brand in seven years. Then TikTok turned on them. [alt link]
posted by folklore724 at 7:53 PM PST - 13 comments

Just a bit of silliness from over a decade ago; appropriate for the season. Fellow MeFite (and my partner) Kitteh and I were singing this to each other today and I was surprised it had never been shared here: from back when the Internet was fun, a goofy Hallowe'en treat. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 2:56 PM PST - 7 comments

Animator Mike Salcedo had created a project to animate the alphabet one letter a day in February - a project that got a bit out of hand. But it seemed like it was incomplete - until now.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:54 PM PST - 3 comments

Not Just a Big Fish, but Perhaps the Biggest Bony Fish Ever [NYT; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:11 PM PST - 24 comments

Part I of my graphic memoir [via mefi projects]
posted by rogerroger at 11:28 AM PST - 15 comments

Before 1976, mangoes were commercially neglected because of its erratic fruiting habit. Am still looking for confirmation that half of the mango supply [in the Philippines] comes from backyard growers, defined as those who own five to 20 fruit-bearing trees.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:47 AM PST - 20 comments

Peter Schjeldahl, the revered art critic for the New Yorker, has died
posted by falsedmitri at 8:43 AM PST - 9 comments

The Creatures of Yes (previ-yes-ly, previ-yes-lier), the strange and supremely endearing puppet show made using 70's technology, just keeps returning - this time with The Midnight Special.
posted by BiggerJ at 7:04 PM PST - 7 comments

Come and find me / at the Goth Beach
posted by cortex at 10:02 AM PST - 30 comments

"Bodega cats are royalty in New York City," but it's not always an easy life (YT 4:47). Flatbush Cats is a nonprofit that gives non-judgmental help where people care for neighborhood cats but cannot afford to have them treated. Chill music and explanatory videos help them raise money for their own spay-neuter clinic. They patiently foster spicy kittens, tough old boys, and girls in trouble, along with helping cats who got themselves stuck. [cw: animal injuries]
posted by Countess Elena at 7:18 AM PST - 24 comments

Kyiv: Special Edition, Ukraine - Somewhere Street

I was lauding NHK's Somewhere Street in adept256's Let's go for a walk in the city when I came upon this in my search. It shows the sights, views and landmarks along conversations and interactions with people met in the streets of Kyiv in 2019.
posted by y2karl at 5:15 AM PST - 3 comments

In which Craig Mod reflects on on eighteen months of electric bike ownership. Author, essayist and walking man Craig Mod (previously, previously) reflects on the magic and the charm of electric bicycles. "Into the shadow mountains we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present, always ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An owl hoots. The smile has never left my face."
posted by lewiseason at 5:03 AM PST - 89 comments

Meet Storm the baby platypus. [Youtube]. Twin baby boy platypuses. [Youtube] George the platypus is released back into the wild. [Youtube] A very plump wild platypus [short video on Twitter]. Rescued baby platypus is doing really really well after significant initial medical challenges. [Youtube]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:59 AM PST - 3 comments

OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!! EVERY YEAR WE GET TOGETHER AND MAKE SALMON FOR TOAST, EVERY YEAR WE GET A CROCKETY BLOAT, EVERY YEAR WE GET DRUNK ON THE DOCKS, AND EVERY YEAR WE HAVE SEX WITH OUR CAPS LOCKS!!!! [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 4:02 AM PST - 95 comments

The Commodordion.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:23 PM PST - 11 comments

4k POV walks , no commentary. Tokyo. London. New York. Paris. Sydney. Mumbai. Hong Kong. Bangkok. Rome. Vienna. Seoul. Buenos Aires. Santiago. Montreal. Cairo. Marrakech. Nairobi.
posted by adept256 at 9:14 PM PST - 23 comments

The first vitrification melter at Hanford, Washington state, USA, has turned on. It also ran into some trouble and has to cool down and be debugged before getting up to working heat. [more inside]
posted by clew at 7:56 PM PST - 25 comments

In Michigan: A Primer, Travelogue. by David Erik Nelson [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 5:59 PM PST - 25 comments

Where do banks site their branches, and why? Or: how does deposit insurance work? Or: what does it mean for a transaction to be "final"? Patrick McKenzie discusses these topics and more in his newsletter "Bits about Money: About the modern financial infrastructure that the world sits atop of." He focuses on the US, international networks, and Japan.
posted by brainwane at 2:00 PM PST - 21 comments

Variety: Jury sides with Kevin Spacey in Anthony Rapp's lawsuit for 'sexual battery' when he was 14 - Spacey's team argues the allegations are driven by career jealousy plus other factual inconsistencies; jury agrees. In any case: Even though Spacey scored a victory against Rapp, he still faces legal challenges. He has been ordered to pay MRC, the producer of “House of Cards,” $31 million in damages after the political thriller had its episode-order cut in the wake of abuse allegations against the star. Spacey also faces charges in the U.K. for sexually assaulting three men when he was living in London as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater. He has pled not guilty.
posted by cendawanita at 11:02 AM PST - 32 comments

A scholar goes back to his hometown in Nigeria to study the informal transportation network that deeply affected his youth.
posted by Etrigan at 10:59 AM PST - 6 comments

The Firebird by Stravinsky, arranged for piano by Agousti, performed by Piedmontesi. Watch the score unroll, as the music crashes and thunders through the Danse Infernale, calms you through the Berceuse and lands you perfectly on a revelatory Finale.
posted by storybored at 9:08 AM PST - 8 comments

Guardian emus ferocious with locusts and foxes, but make great pets. They may have a toenail like a can-opener that can kill foxes, but these pet emus also love a cuddle and a selfie. [Text-based news article with photographs and optional youtube video that does not autoplay.]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:30 AM PST - 24 comments

From Olivia Wilde’s extramarital vinaigrette to Drew Barrymore’s torn-up pizza: the world of celebrity salads [Grauniad] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:47 AM PST - 20 comments

But the school bell has a different, more complicated history than the "factory model" story. From Audrey Watters (whose work, including at Hack Education, is pure awesomeness): "Listen up. The school bell is not a technology adopted to train students to become factory workers, ok? Or alternately, keep it up, and I'll just keep writing these essays about the history of school technologies and screaming into the void." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:02 PM PST - 42 comments

Forensic Bitemark Analysis Not Supported by Sufficient Data, NIST Draft Review Finds. "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has reviewed the scientific foundations of bitemark analysis, a forensic technique in which marks on the skin of a biting victim are compared with the teeth of a suspected biter."
posted by readinghippo at 9:31 AM PST - 38 comments

Single link (warning: long video with transcript): Corporate Influence on Inflation [more inside]
posted by doggod at 7:23 AM PST - 25 comments

"These images, supplied to us by the MYA Network... show what tissue in the first nine weeks of pregnancy actually looks like."
posted by clawsoon at 6:39 AM PST - 31 comments

What it says on the tin.
posted by humbug at 6:16 AM PST - 357 comments

The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater. Brian Feldman published an investigation into the origins of a classic viral video, identifying the kid knocked down by an errant full-court shot and talking to him years later. But then he kept digging—and ultimately revealed that memories, even when they're broadcast on national TV, can be faulty. [more inside]
posted by thecaddy at 7:53 PM PST - 13 comments

In the spirit of the listicles from last month, Rolling Stone has given us one more to complain about. The 50 (absolutely NOT) best concept records of all time. (I can prove it! So can you!) Go! [more inside]
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 7:32 PM PST - 96 comments

Katricia Dotson’s remains were studied, disputed, displayed and litigated. Lost in the controversy was the life of an American girl and her family. CN: state murder of children and others, subsequent shocking violations of human decency [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 6:33 PM PST - 7 comments

For people who want cute emu content without the racism or the cavalier approach to disease, I recommend this twitter account. More links to specific emu posts inside. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:07 PM PST - 14 comments

Kowloon, a "technicolor Polynesian paradise" in Saugus, Massachusetts, is a legendary 50,000-square-foot restaurant serving 20,000 people each week. The Wong family worked hard to please their customers and expand their business, continually reinventing the menu and the venue. They also helped hundreds of Chinese immigrants (and Chinese-diaspora, for example, Chinese-Venezuelans) find work and become integrated into American society. This is the story of Kowloon, and the story of Chinese food in America.
posted by rednikki at 5:45 PM PST - 10 comments

In the newest Fumble Dimension, Jon and Kofie try for better hockey through goonery, and instead take down the house of cards that is NHL '22. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:03 PM PST - 17 comments

The biotic pump theory proposes that evaporation or transpiration causes clouds formation that reduces atmospheric pressure, and then draws additional moist air into the regions with high evapotranspiration, i.e. forests draw moist air inland, while deserts lose moisture to seas. Although unproven, rainfall patterns fit the theory. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 3:55 PM PST - 11 comments

Cute 15 second twitter video on the experience of learning new things [more inside]
posted by aniola at 3:34 PM PST - 10 comments

Content warning: painful procedures, reference to sexual assault in the following New York Times Magazine feature by Rachel E. Gross (archived version). After hearing about her injury, she said, one urologist compared her to a rape victim and said she must be having a trauma reaction to her biopsy. Next, according to her medical charts, a women’s health specialist diagnosed her with “perimenopause” and prescribed testosterone cream. Another gynecologist recommended an “O shot,” or vaginal rejuvenation procedure. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 12:45 PM PST - 16 comments

It almost makes me freak out now, just thinking about how many near misses this thing probably had. Watercolors, Elvis and ohana: an oral history of Lilo & Stitch.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:32 PM PST - 26 comments

NASA has shared a new image, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope [previously] of the iconic Pillars Of Creation first captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
posted by mhoye at 12:13 PM PST - 33 comments

Juggling ROBOT or NOT??? [via the Ironic Sans substack, which also mentions Dipert, Moschen, Kennedy and more]
posted by chavenet at 7:35 AM PST - 7 comments

Fat people (or larger bodied as it says in the article) can have the same eating patterns and health problems as very thin people. The article is about the idea of that "atypical anorexia"-- severely restricted eating without much weight loss-- isn't significantly different from anorexia with severe weight loss, but it's very difficult for fat people to get treatment. Even professionals who do treatment have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that there are fat people who need help with eating more. archive link
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:51 AM PST - 28 comments

TikTok’s Favorite Emu Is Sick With Bird Flu And Experts Were Alarmed At How The Owner Handled The Outbreak Zoonotic outbreak. Bird deaths. Little quarantine. Much cuddling. Still Tik-Tokking. (Previously, where the final comment links to a thread about Taylor Blake and how white (and non-black) lesbians appropriates black lesbian terminology)
posted by cendawanita at 10:57 PM PST - 75 comments

For one trio of brothers raised in Oxnard, there was no use in asking for permission to make their comics. They didn't need it. With all the trademarks of an '80s punk mentality, Mario, Jaime and Gilbert began sharing their work on their own... Fans quickly followed, and their fervor remained steady, as did the brothers' creative output. "Love & Rockets," the brothers' ongoing series — now helmed by Gilbert and Jaime — is celebrating its 40th anniversary. And in celebration an hourlong documentary [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 7:14 PM PST - 11 comments

Hair-straightening chemical products linked to increased uterine cancer risk in new study. Ongoing research previously suggested that hair straightening chemicals are associated with an increased risk of certain hormone-related cancers, including breast and ovarian cancers, and now, a new study links use of hair straightening products with an increased risk of uterine cancer. Black women may be more affected due to higher use of the products, the researchers noted.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:23 PM PST - 9 comments

An echidna is unexpectedly found at an inner city train station. A wedge-tailed eagle hitches a boat ride to shore after being fished out of the ocean. An endangered bird travels hundreds of kilometres looking for love, and ends up falling for his own reflection.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:17 PM PST - 7 comments

The folks at WordTips have dissected our foul mouthed tweeting to figure out what swear word is most popular in each state. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:44 PM PST - 53 comments

"A while ago I made an addon for myself. It was essentially a tab FIFO [First In, First Out]. It would only allow 10 tabs to be open at a time. If an 11th tab was created, the least recently activated tab would be closed." Throttle Tabs is a Firefox browser extension (an add-on) by Eitan Isaacson to help manage open tabs. "I decided to add an 'overflow' feature which is essentially tab purgatory. Instead of having the addon auto-close the tab, it hides it. .... The overflow can be capped too so it can permanently discard old tabs after a given limit." Source code.
posted by brainwane at 1:35 PM PST - 38 comments

I HEAR THE BLUES A-KILLIN' (or: Frasier Meets Columbo), a 16-page comic by Joe Chouinard.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:23 PM PST - 18 comments

Galen Weston Jr has got your back during these financial tough times by price freezing the popular No Name brand products his stores carry. Galen Weston Jr, a true man of the people with his many many vacation homes and inherited wealth, wants you to know that he feels your pain in trying to feed your families. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 10:25 AM PST - 29 comments

The US spends more on health care administration than comparable nations. One estimate, based on 2021 data from the OECD, finds that the US spends $1,055 per capita on health care administrative costs—by far the highest amount on a list of twelve OECD nations plus the US. The next highest is Germany at $306 per capita.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:51 AM PST - 41 comments

Air Canada's newest safety video is heralded as showcasing Canada's natural beauty, creatively fulfilling the need to share flight safety information without ever showing the inside of an aircraft, and following in the footsteps of other airlines' novel approaches to security briefings. [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 8:50 AM PST - 26 comments

The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene (NYT gift link, archive.org) What the rise of the far-right Congresswoman means for the House, the GOP, and the nation. Adapted from Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost its Mind, out today.
posted by box at 5:00 AM PST - 67 comments

Free peer-to-peer file transfers in your browser [more inside]
posted by aniola at 12:38 AM PST - 20 comments

Jim Keller on AI Generated Software - "It won't be that long until you start looking at all the software that has ten years of legacy in it and go 'Why would I want old software? Why wouldn't I want software that was generated this week?'. And there are a whole bunch of really interesting changes that come with that."[0,1] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:21 AM PST - 76 comments

Too often, argues Duguma, tree planting is “greenwashing” aimed at grabbing headlines and promoting an image of governments or corporations as environmentally friendly. Tiina Vahanen, deputy director of forestry at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, noted recently that many projects end up being little more than “promotional events, with no follow-up action.Why ambitious tree planting and carbon offset projects are failing.
posted by blue shadows at 6:21 PM PST - 11 comments

On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation at 5:01 PM PST - 56 comments

Actress Patti LuPone, 50-year veteran of Broadway, has apparently just ragequit theater. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:04 AM PST - 80 comments

"It was possible for someone to spend their late teen years attacking slave catchers as part of an abolitionist vigilance committee, hit their 20s ambushing proto-confederates in Kansas alongside revolutionaries who fought on the barricades in 1848, fight in the war itself, battle the klan in guerrilla actions after and still be spry enough to end up in the middle of the 1877 Great Upheaval and the conflicts following that. They would have spent very little — maybe none — of those years in uniform." "Living in the prologue: lessons from America's long civil war" by journalist and anarchist David Forbes (notes on her sources) narrates the life of Abraham Galloway to discuss the US's "long civil war — and the thousand forms of resistance within it". [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 10:27 AM PST - 8 comments

A TikTok by Alex Falcone
posted by chavenet at 7:52 AM PST - 25 comments

FYMA: A Lesser Key to the Appropriation of Jewish Magic and Mysticism (PDF/text zine; name-your-price download) is an essay by Ezra Rose (a nonbinary queer artist, educator, Jewish mystic and recovering “Western esoteric” occultist) looking at the provenance of Jewish/Hebrew elements in the western occult and esoteric movements, and how many of those are the legacies of appropriation during periods of intense antisemitic persecution. The essay covers the (more Christian than Jewish) idea of Solomonic demonology, the path from Jewish Kabbalah to Christian Cabala and the Qabala of the hermetic underground, attempts to ahistorically equate Kabbalistic elements with Tarot and exoticised oriental mysticism, and the use of Hebrew inscriptions in scary/evil occult symbolism in fiction, and how this is rooted in the genocidal antisemitism of medieval Europe, which, in the wake of Qanon-adjacent conspiracy theories and rehashings of ancient antisemitic tropes, is far from consigned to history. [more inside]
posted by acb at 5:23 AM PST - 33 comments

This thread ain't getting no younger ... [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:24 AM PST - 106 comments

Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770% - YouTube. A month of Python runtime down to 500 milliseconds. And it's Wordle! Which isn't as new as you think. It's a Matt Parker thing.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:00 AM PST - 29 comments

A radical housing program in the San Francisco Bay is recognizing how women who killed their abusers deserve dignity—and a second chance.
posted by Etrigan at 7:55 PM PST - 2 comments

The St. Paul Police Department held an award ceremony this week to honor Alex Mingus, a Minnesota resident who performed “an act of gallantry and valor” in response to a shooting. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:23 PM PST - 19 comments

Although my own favorite is Procession by Nightwish, there are many list articles chronicling ecology and climate songs, with some examples by LouderThanWar, Eva Amsen (Forbes), Ijeoma Nwatu (Nature Conservancy), Sarah Gibbens (National Geographic), Joe McCarthy (Global citizen), Jayson Greene (Pitchfork), and Alexis Petridis (Guardian). [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 4:24 PM PST - 33 comments

How ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think Doctors have suspected for a while that ultra processed foods are bad for us, and in 2014, the Brazilian government took the radical step of advising Brazilians against eating them. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 2:26 PM PST - 75 comments

A profile of Kari Lake (WaPo gift link), who might be the next governor of Arizona
posted by box at 5:26 AM PST - 46 comments

How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors
posted by chavenet at 5:13 AM PST - 14 comments

(SLBloomberg) I went out for a walk this morning and noticed I still don't need my winter jacket. When I was a kid mid October in the UK was, to use a local expression, 'brassic'. It is a balmy 14c today and the longer it stays warm, the greater the chance of success for Ukraine in their (and our) war. This post is a response to this post from two weeks ago. One commenter said of the war in Ukraine, "this is a no holds barred energy war". For this reason I believe balance is essential and that is what I am attempting to provide here.
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 4:27 AM PST - 22 comments

Don't worry, most of these 'Sexy' Halloween Costumes can't actually hurt you.. probably From TheMarySue.com: ".. this list I have compiled for you has tossed all actual elements of sex appeal, taste, and logic out of the window. Get ready for the worst “sexy” costumes of the year." [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:27 AM PST - 99 comments

An Evidence-Based Guide to Progressive Social Change (pdf) - The guide covers the most effective actions you can take as part of an activist campaign, within your organization, and in your everyday life in order to build a better world for us all to live in. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 12:18 AM PST - 23 comments

How happy have the world's English-language retweets been? How about tweets in other languages? Tweets sorted by US state or city? What happiness-path do famous books take? [more inside]
posted by clew at 8:58 PM PST - 10 comments

Puddles Pity Party - War Pigs (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:24 PM PST - 20 comments

DALLE-2 is now open to all. 50 credits free per month. 15 free subsequently.
posted by storybored at 5:39 PM PST - 53 comments

The Washington Post just dropped a story [gift link] on the behind-the-scenes infighting inside Truth Social and it's SPAC. Will Wilkerson has come forward with documentation on how Trump tried to pressure the group into giving equity to Melania, and how Don Jr. and Eric tried to muscle in as well. Digital World Acquisition Corp, the SPAC that will supposedly fund Truth Social has not been doing well financially, and Truth Social is far below its desired subscriber count.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:59 PM PST - 34 comments

At just after 11 a.m. on Friday, two members of Just Stop Oil, a group that seeks to stop oil and gas extraction in Britain, entered room 43 of the National Gallery in London opened two tins of Heinz cream of tomato soup, and threw them at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” one of the treasures of the museum’s collection. It is one of six surviving images of sunflowers that van Gogh made in 1888 and 1889.
posted by folklore724 at 12:59 PM PST - 287 comments

Sure, $381 for a three small jars seems like a lot but does your peanut butter come with an MSDS? I thought so. NIST is the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and they offer a vast array of standard substances for your reference use. Their reference peanut butter includes a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and full datasheet but that's just the beginning. (A Twitter thread).
posted by tommasz at 8:21 AM PST - 36 comments

Making the radical case for Sinéad O'Connor: She was right all along [ungated] - "Using extensive archival video — including footage from a wedding at which a teenage O'Connor sang 'Evergreen' — brief, stylized re-creations and interviews with O'Connor's friends, collaborators and contemporaries, 'Nothing Compares' traces O'Connor's meteoric rise from troubled teenager to Rolling Stone cover girl, and her even more precipitous fall from grace... Ferguson said that many of the screenings get rowdy and emotional. Young people come up to her 'with their eyes flashing, just incensed and inspired' by O'Connor's ordeal." Interview with Kathryn Ferguson on Nothing Compares (trailer; Rememberings previously).
posted by kliuless at 7:21 AM PST - 69 comments

Based on court records, there had been a suspicion that Chaucer had raped Cecily Chaumpaigne in 1380. Newly discovered documents provide a completely new interpretation. Chaucer the Rapist? (New York Times) (no paywall archive) A Special edition of the Chaucer Review includes responses by feminist academics about what this changes... and doesn't change.
posted by thandal at 5:20 AM PST - 14 comments

Why Bad Catholics Make Great Art by Nick Ripatrazone
posted by chavenet at 5:10 AM PST - 3 comments

Robbie was one of the funniest people I’ve met and used to keep us laughing constantly Everybody knows him as Hagrid in the Harry Potter series. And we all love him, I mean some of you cranky bastrards are all "I hated him, he's the worst!" but you know that's a lie. He was beautiful and carried his pain with him as he tried to save his friends, small and large, the creatures around him. He was a police psychiatrist (well, maybe a psychologist) In the drama Cracker, that in some ways was a continuation of Hagrid, only this time he was trying to save people while punishing himself for not being better at it by drinking, smoking and gambling himself nearly to death. [more inside]
posted by evilDoug at 11:21 PM PST - 50 comments

How Quincy M.E. Changed Medical History For decades, Americans suffering from ‘orphan diseases’ struggled to get their voice heard. Then Pete and Jack Klugman used TV to make the world listen. - Medium article by John Bull, ht to altamira16 who recommended it to me.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:19 PM PST - 27 comments

Three Films By King Norodom Sihanouk. 'The Little Prince'/ព្រះប្រជាកុមារ (1967) 'Apsara'/ អប្សរា (1966) 'The Lake of Happiness' 'The Nine Lives of Norodom Sihanouk' [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 7:03 PM PST - 6 comments

Harpist Emily Hopkins (previously on the blue) experiments with wah-wah pedals. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:57 PM PST - 12 comments

Another Gallery of Rotating Food GIFs has 420 mesmerizing images of spinning food. Though it is undoubtedly the finest of the Internet Archive’s six galleries devoted to spinning food items, the others are worth perusing too. [via Depths of the Internet Archive]
posted by Kattullus at 2:23 PM PST - 13 comments

"The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive." [more inside]
posted by kristi at 12:17 PM PST - 15 comments

Recently, Caitlin Doughty and her team at the YouTube channel Ask A Mortician published a long-form documentary about the disastrous sinking of the SS Eastland, one of the worst passenger shipping accidents in U.S. history. After being viewed several hundred thousand times, YouTube determined that the video violated its community guidelines. The explanation for the decision seems at odds with the video's actual content, but appeals have been met with automated responses or silence. [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 10:21 AM PST - 30 comments

Studio Ibbini is an award-winning collaboration between Julia Ibbini and Stéphane Noyer creating works that intersect contemporary art, design and engineering. Julia is a visual artist and designer, with a background in graphics and collage. Stéphane is a computer scientist and maker, with an interest in computational geometry. [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 6:56 AM PST - 6 comments

Supermarket Chain Kroger merges with Albertsons in a $25 Billion Deal (NYT gift link) [more inside]
posted by box at 5:47 AM PST - 106 comments

Mize hurt you one at a time, pulling tools from a briefcase, cold and businesslike. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:37 AM PST - 7 comments

One of the most important women in Apple’s history never worked for Apple - "Margot Comstock took her winnings from a TV game show and bought a computer. It led to a magazine, which turned into a major hub for the nascent community of developers and fans of one of the most important computers in history."
posted by kliuless at 1:11 AM PST - 14 comments

Need I say more?
posted by domdib at 12:35 AM PST - 9 comments

Adam Conover, famous for ruining everything [previously], takes to youtube for his first (presumably there will be more) longform rant about everyone's new favorite billionaire Yvon Chouinard (recently on the blue) and explaining Why There's No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire [more inside]
posted by revmitcz at 6:22 PM PST - 87 comments

Earlier this week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to demonstrate that avatars would no longer be mere floating torsos, but would soon have legs. It was a very weird video existing in a very weird space. Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?
posted by AlSweigart at 5:45 PM PST - 86 comments

The latest report from the congressional committee investigating the insurrection on Jan 6 has advised that they will subpoena former President Donald J. Trump for questioning and any relevant documentation related to that day. After the resolution was passed on a voice vote, a roll call vote was requested. The resolution passed unanimously. Video for the entire most recent hearing is here.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 5:00 PM PST - 84 comments

A Spoken History Of The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe started in a small New York City living room in 1973 and has since then nurtured countless artists, such as poet Pedro Pietri (“Puerto Rican Obituary”). Today, the Cafe continues to hold space in Losaida (Lower East Side's Puerto Rican & Hispanic community as renamed by artist Bimbo Rivas) and online. Aja Monet, who was the youngest poet to win the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe Grandslam Championship, speaks about the importance of the space in an interview just last month.
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:29 PM PST - 5 comments

Tours of Amazon Fulfilment centers are live in 8 countries. You just have to answer a few questions: How much do you know about Amazon? How do you feel about ordering from Amazon? How do you feel about Amazon as an Employer? [more inside]
posted by wowenthusiast at 11:42 AM PST - 26 comments

Whisper, from OpenAI, is an open source tool you can run on your own computer that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English." Instructions on how to download, install, and run it. (I have successfully used Whisper and the results were very good. However, it is not fast enough to run during recording of an interview and give you live captions/transcripts; it runs after the fact, on already-recorded audio.) [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 10:58 AM PST - 60 comments

Russia's Crimea disconnect A brief account of Crimea's complicated history with both Russia and Ukraine by historian Timothy Snyder.
posted by klangklangston at 10:52 AM PST - 23 comments

A spooky season video inspired by a German fairy tale with voices by Cillian Murphy and Bernice Stegers. Warning for the death of a child (this is an old school fairy tale). SLVimeo, just over 4 minutes.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:21 AM PST - 5 comments

I made $200,000 last year ghostwriting tweets for superstar VCs. It takes me 5 hours a week. Here's how I found my clients and built a booming side hustle from scratch. [Business Insider; archive]
posted by chavenet at 4:32 AM PST - 30 comments

As winter is approaching in Ukraine, the Kerch bridge has been heavily damaged, the day after Putin's 70th birthday. The very next day daily bombardments of Kyiv and other population centers had a massive increase in intensity, but this had probably been planned for a week already and mostly intended for the domestic audience. In a public debate where Western concerns dominate, the Ukrainian minister of defence Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk lays out the Ukrainian perspective on their path to victory. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:06 PM PST - 377 comments

Calculating when eclipses will happen using "the sort of mathematics that you learn in grade school and an understanding of what we in music would call harmony" along with a vertical stick, a place to sit, and a reasonable timepiece. If you prefer text, NASA explains the Saros in Solar Eclipse Periodicity.
posted by clawsoon at 12:43 PM PST - 15 comments

Nature Red in Tooth And Claw and Don't Give a.... What's a fair fight? The internet's favorite tough critter - the Honey Badger faces off against 3 Leopards - a mom and 2 juveniles. Who wins?
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:51 AM PST - 24 comments

Kauers and Moosbauer pen a short, understatedly snarky response to the recently heavily hyped Nature cover article describing the DeepMind team's AlphaTensor project. [more inside]
posted by 3j0hn at 10:50 AM PST - 14 comments

Whenever a thought enters your mind, you will briefly observe it, place it upon a leaf, and watch as it floats down the stream. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 7:24 AM PST - 4 comments

We have imagined time, at least in Western countries, as subservient to commerce, and attempted to export or forcibly impose that understanding worldwide. And just as there’s nothing “natural” about eating with, say, a fork, there’s nothing natural about the way we’ve organized time. It is ideological, which is to say, it is also political — and a means of imposing a particular type of order on others. For her Culture Study newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen writes on The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture and those who suffer under this approach to time, including folks who have disabilities, those with ADHD, and many more. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 4:55 AM PST - 89 comments

Someone is pretending to be me. [via.]
posted by chavenet at 4:29 AM PST - 25 comments

Steve Keen just won the Friede Gard Prize for Sustainable Economics (and has choice words for that other thing). Keen's talks about economists' denial and minimization of climate change are colorful (37 min) concise (15 min) and sometimes technical (30 min). [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 4:13 AM PST - 14 comments

2022 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition — Explore a tiny alien universe unseen by the naked eye, with photo galleries going back to 1975.
posted by cenoxo at 2:10 AM PST - 8 comments

As winter is approaching in Ukraine, the Kerch bridge has been heavily damaged, the day after Putin's 70th birthday. The very next day daily bombardments of Kyiv and other population centers had a massive increase in intensity, but this had probably been planned for a week already and mostly intended for the domestic audience. In a public debate where Western concerns dominate, the Ukrainian minister of defence Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk lays out the Ukrainian perspective on their path to victory. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 2:02 AM PST - 132 comments

Dame Angela Lansbury Passes Away at 96 [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 1:17 PM PST - 120 comments

L.A. City Council's true colors were put on blast this weekend. This weekend, audio of a year-old conversation between three City Council members and the (now former) President of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor leaked, leading to a major shakeup in the City due to the conversation's overt racism and cynical political horse-trading. [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 11:26 AM PST - 55 comments

Bordalo II Combines Salvaged Neon Tubes, Industrial Materials, and Other Waste into Lively Trash Animals in a New Retrospective. A seven-meter-tall squirrel made of railway dividers, decommissioned industrial hoses, and shopping carts in disrepair opens a massive retrospective from Portuguese artist Bordalo II (pronounced Bordalo Segundo). [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 6:08 AM PST - 10 comments

“As a teenage boy, I felt sad about lots of things,” McCloud told me. “Life seemed to be sad. And by George, Rod McKuen was sad too, and we could be sad together.” Rod McKuen sold millions of poetry books in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on late-night TV. He released dozens of albums, wrote songs for Sinatra, and was nominated for two Oscars. He was a flashpoint in the battle between highbrow and lowbrow, with devotees revering his plain-spoken honesty and Dick Cavett mockingly calling him “the most understood poet in America.” Every year on his birthday, he sold out Carnegie Hall. But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape. - By Dan Kois, Slate Magazine
posted by MrVisible at 5:18 AM PST - 74 comments

The startup, called GloriFi, initially aimed to launch with bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages and insurance, while touting what it called pro-America values such as capitalism, family, law enforcement and the freedom to “celebrate your love of God and country" ... But before GloriFi’s vision of a conservative banking network could be tested in the marketplace, management missteps and tensions with its investors stalled the company’s rollout.” How a New Anti-Woke Bank Stumbled [WSJ, ungated]
posted by chavenet at 4:16 AM PST - 49 comments

Content warning: neo-Nazis, antisemitism (but I repeat myself), Tucker Carlson, food craziness, conspiracy theories, toxic masculinity, etc. abound in The Emerging Raw Food Movement and the 'Great Reset', a longish read written by Joshua Molloy and Dr. Eviane Leidig for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology. Perhaps inevitably (remember the wellness-to-white-supremacy pipeline?), "food has become an increasingly visible topic across far-right digital subcultures as well as the broader right-wing online ecosystem." [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 2:45 AM PST - 87 comments

Mexican Week on the Great British Bake Off. "let’s give them some credit for trying to pronounce things like guacamole or pico de gallo; it’s not their fault that the Anglo world decided to base pronunciation on Common Law."
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:50 PM PST - 118 comments

In the United States and elsewhere, land is being converted to offer free fruits and vegetables, "no questions asked" (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 11:31 AM PST - 66 comments

Ten years ago this day, Mr. Autumn Man strode forth from the pages of The Onion. Earlier this year, Erik Adams reflected on his biggest claim to fame: being the face of Mr. Autumn Man.
posted by Hypatia at 9:54 AM PST - 14 comments

"Article 7 of the Treaty of New Echota is crystal clear—Cherokee Nation 'shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.' For nearly two centuries, Congress has failed to honor this promise." But that may change, as the Cherokee Nation is once again calling upon Congress to seat their delegate, Kim Teehee.
posted by jedicus at 7:35 AM PST - 40 comments

The seditious conspiracy trial of nine Oath Keepers (WaPo archive.today) over their actions during the January 6, 2020 assault on the U.S. Capitol began last Monday, October 3, 2022 in Washington, DC and resumes today. Here’s a list of ongoing CNN coverage including their summary Takeaways from week 1, Holmes Lybrand & Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN, Oct 7 2022. The trial may take four to six weeks. More about the Oath Keepers militia at Wikipedia.
posted by cenoxo at 4:57 AM PST - 45 comments

Question: what is neat cool groovy and free? [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:14 AM PST - 105 comments

(Cue Chumbawamba on the soundtrack) It is the late 1640s. The king of England is about to be killed and a protestant capitalist Commonwealth under Cromwell is in formation. IN another decade, the powerful and propertied will turn over the country to the royals again. But there are other revolutions afoot that seek to turn the world upside down. The tradition of the left is older than we often remember... [more inside]
posted by SandCounty at 9:33 PM PST - 30 comments

The Top movies by Andrzej Wajda. Released in France and Poland (1983), Wajda' Film 'Danton', based on a play by Stanisława Przybyszewska was not with without controversy. 'Danton' (yt) [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 6:11 PM PST - 10 comments

«Link to audio» As a joke, Jessica Williamson posts a fake “CAT FOUND” poster with pictures of a possum instead of a cat. To her surprise, she gets hundreds of phone calls that ultimately shift her view on humanity. (8 minutes) [more inside]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:47 PM PST - 52 comments

A house with a whole lot of colorful cat infrastructure. Memphis/pomo. [more inside]
posted by clew at 12:46 PM PST - 23 comments

Philosopher of Science and co-developer of Actor Network Theory Bruno Latour has died at the age of 75.
posted by St. Oops at 10:58 AM PST - 22 comments

This teacher keeps an empty chair in his N.J. classroom. Here’s why other schools are doing the same.
posted by May Kasahara at 8:35 AM PST - 32 comments

everything you see in this video other than a balloon is 100% real. no VFX. we shutdown 9 blocks of downtown NOTE: very dizzying [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 8:46 PM PST - 23 comments

Frogs with very unusual calls: These seven links (more inside) lead to short 30-second tracks of frog calls that you can play (at the bottom of each page), as well as photos of the frogs and a short description of their lifestyles. Motorbike Frog = these sound so much like motorbikes that in the past, some people have called the police to report motorbikes hooning around at 3am/4am only to have it turn out to be frogs. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:19 PM PST - 16 comments

Not rehired at New York University. NYU decided not to hire adjunct professor Dr. Maitland Jones Jr. to teach another organic chemistry class after students circulated a petition against his teaching (unpaywalled link). Jones, lead author of a popular orgo textbook, tried to file a grievance, but was blocked. Some students charged Jones with being unnecessarily negative in grading and commentary, while he argued that students have been poorly prepared for the class. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 2:02 PM PST - 128 comments

How Literal Fuck Hats Saved the Peregrine Falcon
posted by oulipian at 1:43 PM PST - 43 comments

Previously on MetaFilter in 2020, Mark Chrisler of The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong podcast spent five episodes to solve the origin of the "Foolkiller", an unexplained sunken submarine found in the Chicago River in 1915. More than two years later, in episode 7, he discovers he was all wrong. (episode 6 is mostly a summary of episodes 1-5)
posted by ShooBoo at 9:13 PM PST - 10 comments

Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams… But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.
posted by mhoye at 8:36 PM PST - 37 comments

"The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine," Marin told a reporter on Friday. "That's the way out of the conflict."
posted by folklore724 at 1:46 PM PST - 56 comments

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has determined one of their Vermeers was not actually a Vermeer. (WaPo gift link) [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 11:24 AM PST - 37 comments

An Coimisiun Le Rinci Gaelacha (CLRG) is dealing with its largest ever alleged cheating scandal, which has seen some of the most successful and well regarded Irish dance teachers and schools accused of fixing competitions for their own students. (post title courtesy of Prof. Kieran Healy)
posted by Etrigan at 11:16 AM PST - 24 comments

The US midterm elections will be held in 31 days, on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. While US democracy is still in danger, there has been some good news. For example, recently a Montana trial court struck down three voter suppression laws for violating the Montana Constitution. That is a huge win for voters, according to Democracy Docket. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:41 AM PST - 42 comments

"... Societies that practices it (Christian Nationalism) are some of the most evil places on earth," and America is at the precipice. MTG and her ilk have openly admitted that they want the US turned into a "Christian Nation". They wanted to turn us into Russia under Putin, Brazil under Bolsonaro, our democracy into theocracy. Check out the trailer for "American Theocracy"... documenting the rise of Christian Nationalism.
posted by kschang at 9:40 AM PST - 38 comments

This is beautiful. This is an ad asking Australian people to Vote Yes to support a Voice to Parliament, so that Australia's First Nations people can have a say on matters that affect them. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:40 AM PST - 9 comments

The Burnout Crisis in Pink-Collar Work (The Atlantic): On the urgency of resolving the job crisis in nursing, teaching, and child care. "You are starting to see cities and states get really aggressive with this stuff. [...] It’s just a matter of when you can get the stars to align in Congress. I do sometimes wonder whether we’ll need another catastrophe before they’ll do it." [more inside]
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 8:21 AM PST - 42 comments

History of the Supreme Court supporting mass incarceration There are specific Supreme Court rulings which have made mass incarceration feasible. The essay especially focuses on the importance of jury trials for limiting imprisonment. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:58 AM PST - 8 comments

Man in Cave - Internet Historian [YT] A man (Floyd Collins) gets stuck in a cave. Events spiral out of control quickly. [more inside]
posted by Trifling at 6:10 AM PST - 16 comments

Small chinese restaurant in Japan, Small Udon restaurant in Japan and there's a whole channel of these wholesome, calming and hunger-inducing videos. Minimal dialogue, lots of technique and a peek into the everyday life of Japan. (Similar previously: Walking through Tokyo in 4k
posted by kmt at 4:32 AM PST - 12 comments

Violent Night [YT] If we're all in the mood for more genre mashups, here's a trailer to an upcoming Christmas movie starring David Harbour and John Leguizamo.
posted by cendawanita at 3:17 AM PST - 17 comments

Philosophers should stop wasting time on old philosophers. "In this paper, I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful. The epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are largely frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy. My claim is that we can learn surprisingly little about philosophical problems by studying the works of the ‘great’ historical philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, or Wittgenstein. Examples for philosophical problems are: what is knowledge and how do we acquire it? What constitutes a just society? How does the human mind work? What are natural laws? Where does linguistic meaning come from? Becoming acquainted with the history of philosophy contributes very little to improving our understanding of those problems and their potential solutions, so we would be better off doing much less of it." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 10:41 PM PST - 65 comments

The suspect was armed with a gun and a knife and most child victims were stabbed.

“We think of mass shootings as something from far away, like in the United States,” said Lieutenant Colonel Kritsanapong. [SLNYT, archive] [more inside]
posted by bendy at 6:15 PM PST - 23 comments

Shotgun Wedding [SLYT; movie trailer, Amazon blue, totes worth it]
posted by chavenet at 2:43 PM PST - 47 comments

In the oil crisis of the '70s, "hardhead" former English teacher Ned Ackerman decided that the future of cargo transport was in its past: under sail. In 1976 he began building the schooner John F. Leavitt, the first cargo vessel built without an engine since 1938. The Leavitt foundered on its very first voyage, to Haiti - a dramatic failure chronicled in the documentary film Coaster (check out the poster). Since then, people continue to try to make the dream work: some efforts have gone by the wayside, like the Vermont Sail Freight Project of 2013-14 and the Salish Sea Trading Cooperative of 2010-15; meanwhile, a new generation even more motivated to engineer climate solutions is giving it a go: the Schooner Appollonia; SailCargo Inc., Timbercoast, and Grain de Sel. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 2:07 PM PST - 46 comments

"[I]nstead of supporting the media in Ukraine, the government is trying to tighten state control over journalists. Parliament has already voted in the first reading of the draft law “On the Media,” which subjects all Ukrainian media to one state regulator. This did not happen in the times of Kuchma or Yanukovych, when we had a dictatorship and authoritarian rule ... [T]oday Ukrainian society has just as easily accepted the biggest rollback of democracy in Ukraine, which the ruling parties justify with the war. All of this can end very badly for Ukrainian society, especially if the war drags on for years. Ukrainians will simply get used to living with an authoritarian style of governing society. "

• interview with Serhiy Guz, a journalist and trade union activist from Ukraine. More on anti-labor legislation in Ukraine.

posted by derrinyet at 1:42 PM PST - 20 comments

TW: photos of botfly larvae. [more inside]
posted by Drosera at 1:29 PM PST - 19 comments

"This piece continues a theme I’m fascinated by, which is the internal conflict within the Republican Party over corporate power. In this case, it’s about a lawsuit by Wall Street and Big Tech to have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is trying to stop banks from discriminating against customers, declared unconstitutional. But if Wall Street is successful, they will be empowering banks to deny banking services to conservatives. And therein lies the possible tension." Who Loves Woke Wall Street? By Matt Stoller [more inside]
posted by rebent at 12:25 PM PST - 19 comments

Today, President Biden announced a sea change in federal marijuana policy, including a blanket pardon of all federal simple possession charges (and calling on governors to do the same), as well as beginning the process to reschedule marijuana.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:17 PM PST - 75 comments

By the time I arrived at Brooklyn’s Park Slope farmers’ market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. (SL The Atlantic - archived)
posted by ShooBoo at 11:19 AM PST - 31 comments

The incomparable Korean artist Kim Jung Gi has passed away from a heart attack at age 47.
posted by MetaFilter World Peace at 10:19 AM PST - 11 comments

Tired of image-sharing sites that don't aggressively compress every uploaded photo down to a 1K jpeg? Great news: now there's Kilogram, the lowest-quality photo sharing site on the internet.
posted by cortex at 8:53 AM PST - 23 comments

Thousands of Years Before Humans Raised Chickens, They Tried to Domesticate the World's Deadliest Bird. While one should certainly be wary around a cassowary and its dagger-like claws today, a study found that humans may have raised the territorial, aggressive birds 18,000 years ago in New Guinea, making them the earliest bird reared by our ancient ancestors. [Smithsonian Magazine]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:00 AM PST - 26 comments

We removed search engines from our results to discount “middle-man visits” and removed Facebook and YouTube as they would otherwise dominate the results. So we have identified and mapped the most visited website in every country around the world, and also the top news, banking, fashion, and food website in each region. [via]
posted by ellieBOA at 6:08 AM PST - 36 comments

The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature to Annie Ernaux. You can read recent article about her in The New Yorker, London Review of Books and The Guardian.
posted by Kattullus at 4:08 AM PST - 18 comments

Dr. Michèle Hayeur Smith, an anthropological archaeologist at Brown University, has analyzed cloth from Viking and medieval archaeological sites to show that women were responsible for the manufacture of a vitally important resource: a legally standardized cloth used as currency. A 2020 virtual lecture by Dr. Hayeur Smith, referenced in the Scientific American article, goes into more detail.
posted by jedicus at 2:06 PM PST - 23 comments

What Compels Us to Watch Scary Stuff? An interview with the hosts of the horror movie recap podcast Too Scary; Didn’t Watch
Henley: "My original 'Too Scary; Didn’t Watch' experience was actually when I was really little. I got my babysitter to tell me the full recap of the Freddy Krueger movies, because I’m pretty sure I saw The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror special where they mentioned Freddy and I was like, I need to know the details. After that moment, I was so scared, so deeply, deeply, deeply disturbed and unable to sleep."
Sammy: "And that’s something we’ve realized—sometimes it’s worse to just have a scary movie described to you because your brain might create the scariest version of whatever the story is. But sometimes, like with Nightmare on Elm Street, there’s actually a lot of humour..."
Henley: "We just did a bonus episode where Sammy showed me clips from certain horror movies and she included one of Freddy running, and it’s just the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life."
Sammy: "Freddy’s a fun villain! He has fun with it, man. He’s having a good time." [Jessica Beebe, In The Mood] [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:14 PM PST - 55 comments

Every job can be a climate job. Asking your employer for any type of change—from new coffee makers to comprehensive action on climate—can be intimidating, especially when the request targets something core and systemic to the business, and may not be supported by leadership. But there are tangible, collaborative ways to harness your employee influence and spark climate action at any company (Drawdown Labs report link).
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:15 AM PST - 15 comments

Maria Ylagan Orosa, the inventor of banana ketchup, gets an obituary via the NYTimes Overlooked series. Original paywalled NY Times link [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 9:07 AM PST - 7 comments

Board games are the throwback we want to carry forward, but The future of tabletop games is digital. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:51 AM PST - 46 comments

Velma Is Officially a Lesbian in New ‘Scooby-Doo’ Film, Years After James Gunn and More Tried to Make Her Explicitly Gay [Variety] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:29 AM PST - 131 comments

NPR is not our friend. Let’s take a closer look at why this is. “… like much other media, NPR has become a partisan news service with a sterile, professional tone that belies an underlying allegiance to a very narrow range of political viewpoints that are largely inoffensive to those in power. Today, NPR is a product stuffed with advertisements. It receives relatively little in government funding and is mostly paid for by corporations and a small percentage of its listeners who come from a very specific demographic: white, well-educated liberals.“
posted by mph at 12:07 AM PST - 130 comments

Sequel to Frasier series has been green lit. Streaming service going ahead with 10 episodes, with Kelsey Grammer reprising his role as Frasier Crane, but other original cast members remain unconfirmed. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 8:55 PM PST - 62 comments

Yom Kippur 2022: A Disabled Zoom Choir “Surely this is the fast that I desire: to not ignore your own flesh and blood.” Has ASL interpretation. Jewish Covid Resilience Network
posted by Bottlecap at 8:52 PM PST - 3 comments

Tiny Desk (Home) Concert: Trueno A four song set (with bonus freestyle) from Buenos Aires hip hop artist Trueno for NPR's Tiny Desk series.
posted by capricorn at 6:06 PM PST - 2 comments

This installation enables a live plant to control a machete.
posted by dhruva at 4:05 PM PST - 52 comments

The Store is Closed is a forthcoming survival horror game set in SCP-3008, an endless furniture store that is definitely not IKEA. Here's the trailer. [more inside]
posted by escape from the potato planet at 3:21 PM PST - 12 comments

After saying he would, then he wouldn't, Elon Musk has announced that he will go through with his purchase of Twitter at $54.20/share. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:05 PM PST - 198 comments

The High Cost of Living Your Life Online
posted by backseatpilot at 11:11 AM PST - 61 comments

The Coal Miner's Daughter, singer/songwriter Loretta Lynn has died at age 90. [more inside]
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 8:30 AM PST - 77 comments

Simone Leigh is an extraordinary visual artist. She is representing the United States at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia this year. Presented in the United States Pavilion, Simone Leigh: Sovereignty is commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Video Walkthrough. [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 7:28 AM PST - 2 comments

Two fishermen cheated in a tournament, got in over their heads, are now up a creek without a paddle
posted by Etrigan at 6:24 PM PST - 103 comments

Go ahead, Taste the Biscuit, then dig in and discover the background behind this quirky fun by Toasters'N'Moose.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:10 PM PST - 11 comments

Anthony Novak made a parody facebook page of the City of Parma’s police department.
The cops arrested him, charged him with a felony, and lost. Novak sued the cops for ignoring that his site was a parody. He lost his case. He appealed to the sixth circuit and lost again.. Now, it’s on the docket for this Supreme Court term.
Most importantly (to me), The Onion has filed an amicus brief in support of Novak that jokes around but makes a serious argument.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:51 PM PST - 62 comments

Introducing the Airport Book Harm Index
Type/Intensity of harm: When the book does harm, how bad is it? Who is harmed? And how are they harmed?
Influence/Scope: How many people read this book or were directly exposed to its contents? How influential was the book on society? Did it spawn other books in its harmful image?
Persistence: How long was the book able to do its harm?
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:33 AM PST - 46 comments

In a big roll-up of culture-junkie style websites, Fandom has acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News and Comic Vine in a deal worth an amount "in the mid-eight figures". Fandom already acquired Screen Junkies, Curse Media and Fanatical in the past few years. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:55 AM PST - 23 comments

Activists Flood Election Offices With Challenge , New York Times, 9/28/2022 [alternate archive.today link] — Activists driven by false theories about election fraud are working to toss out tens of thousands of voter registrations and ballots in battleground states, part of a loosely coordinated campaign that is sowing distrust and threatening further turmoil as election officials prepare for the November midterms. [This is happening from Maine to Missouri to Montana across the USA: check with your local election office.]
posted by cenoxo at 8:21 AM PST - 23 comments

Deaf Korean members of the LGBT community are working to change Korean Sign Language. From official signs for "lesbian" and "gay" which evoke sexual acts rather than identities, to the lack of distinction in the vocabulary between HIV and AIDS, to established-but-unofficial negative facial expressions associated with queer vocabulary, KSL has some aspects which are being called out as problematic, and a network of activists has been working since 2019 to build and propose alternative vocabulary. Found via Language Log.
posted by jackbishop at 8:01 AM PST - 6 comments

They found Drago, they found Desperado... now giggly Australian journalism degree dropouts cum urban legend sleuths Cameron James and Alexei Toliopoulos are... Finding Yeezus
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 6:24 AM PST - 14 comments

Who Will Win the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature? is Alex Shepard's annual guess [archive] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:57 AM PST - 33 comments

If this thread were an Agent, it would be: a) Free, b) Provocateur, c) 99, d) Secret? [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:36 AM PST - 87 comments

Things that no longer comfort me Finding comfort in the wrong things kept me complacent. Perhaps it’s the same for you. This is a list of things that no longer comfort me, and why. [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 1:26 AM PST - 86 comments

The first commercially-available CD (Billy Joel's 52nd Street) was released forty years ago yesterday. Steve Knopper at Billboard relates "How the ‘Shiny, Tiny’ Discs Took Over" [archive.org link]. Daryl Worthington at The Quietus explores "the unique experimental potential of the format". At DW, Silke Wünsch ponders the medium's rise & fall. And Adam Aziz at grammy.com asks "Can CDs Make A Comeback?". [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 1:01 PM PST - 127 comments

Yes, my fellow bear lovers, it's that wonderful time of year! Welcome to Fat Bear Week 2022, organised by the ever educational team at Katmai National Park. [more inside]
posted by fight or flight at 10:07 AM PST - 17 comments

New research shows that many cancers play host to their own unique microbiomes of fungi, which may affect our chances of surviving them.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:56 AM PST - 44 comments

"It was Halloween night and Parliament Funkadelic was about to tear the roof off the Houston Summit, ready to bless the crowd with their cosmic brew of interplanetary funk." Enjoy the concert and spend 1h22m blowing the cobwebs out of your mind, this fine fall Sunday. [more inside]
posted by wellifyouinsist at 9:24 AM PST - 13 comments

The trip to Rose Cottage is Cal Flyn's account of a trip to Swona, a remote Scottish island that was abandoned in 1974. A herd of cattle has been running wild there for decades. [more inside]
posted by rory at 6:53 AM PST - 7 comments

Business booms for Melbourne's last typewriter repairman, Tom Koska [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 4:08 AM PST - 2 comments

How to Hide a Plague: How Elite Capture and Individualism Made Covid Normal How large right wing business interests co-opted science to hamstring public health response and pull the classic capitalism move of individualizing risks, while convincing the public it was their idea. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 1:13 AM PST - 44 comments

In a first, a London coroner's inquiry has ruled that social media platforms such as Instagram held material blame for the death of 14 year old Molly Russell, who committed suicide in 2017 after falling into a social media negative feedback loop that pushed self-harm media to her. (CW: suicide, self-harm) [alt link] [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:42 PM PST - 24 comments

News outlets around the world have reported the death of Antonio Inoki. A student of Japanese professional wrestling legends Rikidōzan and Karl Gotch, Inoki's life would encompass professional wrestling, the genesis of mixed martial arts, and international politics. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 4:45 PM PST - 13 comments

The 2022 Yuletide fanfic exchange starts soon, and fans are recommending their fandoms for you to check out. Yuletide celebrates fandoms that have relatively little fanfic on the major fanfic platforms. This fandom promo post has tons of comments recommending songs, video games, films, books, ads, poems, visual novels, and other work, old and new, along with content notes and "where to find it" advice. "Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them."
posted by brainwane at 4:14 PM PST - 10 comments

Workers are being lured back into offices this fall with promises of community, fun, and superb perks. But unless you’re working at Google these perks are often far from glamorous. A mailroom punching bag. Tuna cans with no can opener. A folded-up exercise machine. What's the most useless "perk" at your office?
posted by folklore724 at 2:07 PM PST - 115 comments

3Blue1Brown - YouTube did it again, a summer contest for new and facinating maths videos. This time with special focus on collaboration and even web page (non-video) creative math content. The results are out! Have you seen more math videos in your feed recently? (SoME2 results) - YouTube (necessary links are in the YouTube description)
posted by zengargoyle at 1:01 PM PST - 7 comments

Filmmaker Ben Crew has created a fan edit of Tim Burton's Batman as a silent movie. (archive.org link) [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 5:43 AM PST - 16 comments