MetaFilter

Mastodon isn't just a replacement for Twitter Users flocking to the platform will need to shift their expectations for social media and become engaged democratic citizens in the life of their networks. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 9:34 PM PST - 100 comments

Oath Keepers Elmer Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs found guilty of seditious conspiracy , Brandi Buchman, Daily Kos, Nov 29 2022: ...Though defendants Caldwell, Watkins, and Harrelson were spared the seditious conspiracy charge by the jury, their failure to escape the obstruction of an official proceeding charge is significant. This charge, like the seditious conspiracy charge, carries a maximum 20-year sentence in prison ... Rhodes faces a max sentence of up to 60 years in prison ... Meggs up to 86 years ... Watkins up to 56 years ... Caldwell up to 40 years ... Harrelson up to 46 years... Sentencing guidelines are only recommendations and the defendants could receive shorter terms... [Previously on MeFi.]
posted by cenoxo at 7:31 PM PST - 17 comments

The Haçienda - The Club that Shook Britain is an hour-long 2022 BBC documentary about Manchester becoming the center of the universe in the late 80s, with The Hacienda, a club founded by New Order and Factory Records that changed the the culture of the UK and far beyond.
posted by hippybear at 6:31 PM PST - 6 comments

Cocaine Bear (SLYT) is freebased on true events and stars Ray Liotta and Keri Russell, reuniting her with her co-star from The Americans, Margo Martindale.
posted by emelenjr at 5:55 PM PST - 37 comments

The singer, songwriter, and keyboardist was 79.
posted by humbug at 2:45 PM PST - 73 comments

Play-Doh in Panama and Monopoly in Malawi: the most popular toys in the world.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:07 AM PST - 17 comments

How Social Media Ensures That No One Hears Amber Heard. [archive]
posted by team lowkey at 10:05 AM PST - 65 comments

The Super Mario Bros. Movie | Official Trailer [YouTube] A plumber named Mario travels through an underground labyrinth with his brother, Luigi, trying to save a captured princess. Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (collaborators on Teen Titans Go!, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies) from a screenplay by Matthew Fogel (The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, Minions: The Rise of Gru), the film stars Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong, Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek and Sebastian Maniscalco as Spike.
posted by Fizz at 9:06 AM PST - 82 comments

In the endless struggle for engagement, gross recipes have become more powerful than appetizing ones.
posted by Etrigan at 7:57 AM PST - 42 comments

The first pattern that most people learn in Conway's Game of Life is the diagonally-moving glider. Over the decades, Life enthusiasts have found that many other patterns can be constructed from gliders, by positioning enough of them to hit each other in the right way - sometimes thousands of them. Just a couple of weeks ago, it was finally demonstrated that you can construct all these other patterns from just 15 gliders... you just might need to start them really far apart. So far, in fact, that the distances between them are measured in millions of binary digits: enough to encode a two-stage constructor, the design itself, and a cleanup mechanism. Math blogger biggiemac42 explains how it was done: at the end of the post is a video of it in action.
posted by automatronic at 7:41 AM PST - 20 comments

To commemorate the first day of sleet where I live here's Jonathan Richman to remind you of all the summer days gone by. [more inside]
posted by Lawn Beaver at 6:31 AM PST - 13 comments

Why Fascism's Returning to the World - "It was the great John Maynard Keynes who pieced it together best. Fascism, he discovered, was the result of sudden, sharp plunges into poverty, especially unexpected ones, ones where people's expectations of upward mobility collided with the grim reality of downward mobility."[1,2,3] (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:22 AM PST - 37 comments

Recently, the National Constitution Center assembled three teams of legal scholars to draw up their ideal constitutional revisions. After the libertarian, conservative and progressive groups released their proposals, organizers noticed several areas of possible agreement and invited them to reconvene, this time not divided in teams. They compromised on five amendments: eliminating the natural born citizen requirement for President, allowing a legislative veto, strengthening Presidential appointment power and applying term limits to the Supreme Court and lastly making future amendments easier. (video) So is it possible that change could come to this founding document or will discussion remain trapped in the ivory tower? [more inside]
posted by Octaviuz at 7:36 PM PST - 49 comments

As Twitter continues its daily descent, Post has popped as, hopefully, a hate-free replacement. Still in beta and you have to wait a few days after registering to get an account, but it certainly looks promising.
posted by dobbs at 5:41 PM PST - 190 comments

Plenty of movies rate a 0% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, but much rarer is the 0% audience score. Here is a list of 30 movies with a zero percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Inspired by this post on Fanfare.
posted by Literaryhero at 4:56 PM PST - 41 comments

You enter a bright new digital world, exited to explore and hyped just to enjoy the vibe. Ten months later you're yelling at someone for standing in fire. What changed? [84 min.]
posted by ob1quixote at 4:10 PM PST - 12 comments

Nicolas Cage and John Carpenter are cinema’s most studious eccentrics. From Documentjournal.
posted by mephron at 2:50 PM PST - 4 comments

If you're under 45, you can get vaccinated against HPV. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 2:30 PM PST - 42 comments

Cohost.org is a new, in-development blogging platform that pledges: no ads, no tracking, your home feed is a chronological timeline of posts by the people you follow, with "clear and effective moderation done by humans." It's open to signups and it's built by a not-for-profit worker-owned software company. It's currently not that easy to browse unless you're logged in; here are some sample tags: food, autism, long post. Previously.
posted by brainwane at 1:57 PM PST - 27 comments

"How much would you pay to save your cat's life?" On cats and kidney transplants (warning: extensive talk about pets dying)
posted by box at 1:36 PM PST - 17 comments

As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way. Consign that app to oblivion.
posted by mecran01 at 12:18 PM PST - 62 comments

“Once the river broke the record, your mindset is, ‘It’s not going to get any higher.’” A riveting account of the horrifying 2021 "atmospheric river" storm and flooding in British Columbia that resulted in an estimated $13 billion in damages. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:40 AM PST - 20 comments

It is not feasible to buy a good quality cashmere sweater for $50. (SL Twitter thread from Derek Guy, menswear writer.) (Previously)
posted by toastyk at 9:00 AM PST - 36 comments

Ketchup Is the Absolute Worst Condiment. When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct. Heinz Is Not America’s Best Ketchup. Oxford Scientists Crack Case of Why Ketchup Splatters From Near-empty Bottle. The Surprising Asianness of Ketchup. Climate Change Is Coming For Your Ketchup. A Skeptic Tries: Ketchup. Ketchup: Fridge or Cupboard? The Debate Is Settled. So, Can Dogs Eat Ketchup? We Have The Answer. Don't Even Think About Putting Ketchup On A Hot Dog. Queen Elizabeth Is Releasing Her Own Royal Condiments.
posted by Fizz at 6:02 AM PST - 169 comments

For six years in a row, Billie Eilish has sat down with interviewers from Vanity Fair on the same calendar day in October to answer questions about her career, her life, and her state of mind, reflecting on an eventful 12 months of pop stardom and media scrutiny. (single link YouTube)
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:14 PM PST - 14 comments

Nazi messages infiltrating the US. Authoritarian powers on the rise. The involvement of Congress members with this fascist movement. Ripped from the headlines -- of 1940. Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra (show page link) is an 8-part podcast that talks about the efforts of the Nazis to gain influence and even win power in the United States during WWII (before US involvement), and the fights to bring those involved to justice. This Apple Podcasts page lets you play each episode, while the show page has background links and more.
posted by hippybear at 4:40 PM PST - 11 comments

An Oral History Of The Time Six Doctors Swallowed Lego Heads To See How Long They’d Take To Poo
posted by backseatpilot at 1:47 PM PST - 50 comments

Who killed Bruce Lee? The hyponatraemia hypothesis [link to Clinical Kidney Journal article, should be non-paywalled] [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:33 PM PST - 11 comments

South Florida woman "might not have bothered buying the Shells & Cheese product 'had she known the truth.'" Kraft Heinz being sued [WaPo link] in a class action lawsuit because it takes more time to open up their container, add water, and stir than the packaging alleges. [more inside]
posted by hydra77 at 11:30 AM PST - 121 comments

Researchers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford have found the Old English female name Eadburg repeatedly scored on the surface of an 8th century Latin copy of the Acts of the Apostles. The markings include multiple complete and shortened versions of Eadburg, drawings, and an English transcription of the text. They were discovered by Jessica Hodgkinson , a PhD student at the University of Leicester, while researching her thesis on women and early medieval manuscripts. Much more information about the manuscript here and about the technology here.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 9:48 AM PST - 19 comments

Opening the door to an industrial refrigerator that has been affixed to a Cubist sculpture of Fozzie Bear Caity Weaver visits what might be the most silent, anechoic human-built space on Earth. (gift link) [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 9:11 AM PST - 26 comments

How do you make lace? Very very slowly, according to Broiderie Stitch, a two-person lace-making business in Gartner, Massachusetts. Lace was small, portable, and very, very expensive - a favorite for smugglers and an easy way to transport a large store of wealth. The lace middlemen profited the most off of this lucrative trade, but even a lowly lacemaker with just a few patterns would make more with lace than she could working as a laborer. Still, it wasn’t the best of jobs - four girls (or sometimes sixteen) would be clustered around the light of a single candle in the winter with their pillows and bobbins. Open fires would dirty the work, so small personal heaters filled with live coals might be placed under their skirts (a fire hazard, to be sure) or the lacemakers might work over a barn so the heat of the animals kept them from freezing. Summertime was much nicer, when so much sunlight made lacemaking easier on the eyes. Many old lacemaking songs are about finishing one’s work before the candles were lit, since weak candlelight made things so much harder. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 6:40 AM PST - 33 comments

Reiner Knizia is like royalty in the board game community. With more than 700 published games, spanning a 25-year career, he is one of, if not the most prolific board game designer in the world.
posted by Etrigan at 6:13 AM PST - 27 comments

A Timeline Of Adaptive Technology In Digital Experiences [Able Gamers]

“Despite its stunning popularity today, video games weren’t always so mainstream. In fact, at its outset in the 70s, the video gaming industry was a small niche market trying to grow its customer base and introduce the world to its technology and stories. As a result, a small-yet-devoted community began to emerge, and people with disabilities saw the immediate value of what the video gaming community could offer them. As such, video game developers and companies began to focus on accessibility in their software and cultivating adaptive technology solutions to promote their companies and games in the press. AbleGamers has spent the last sixteen years creating change via direct advocacy and action in the industry, fighting to remove the barriers to gaming that people with disabilities experience. Today, the major wins for accessibility that we’ve witnessed over the past decade prove that the industry is undergoing a transformation that welcomes people with disabilities to the community.”

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:18 AM PST - 7 comments

On the first day of christmas, my true love gave to me this thread and an advent of robots, all for free. [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:48 AM PST - 68 comments

Some gems of the Old Web (note, posts do not link to video):
June 1994: And, if you take a grape, cut it in half but leave the sides attached by a piece of skin, and then microwave it. Sparks!
August 1994: If you leave a pop-tart in a toaster too long, the results are... incendiary.
And from 1998: Marshmallow Peep research [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:40 PM PST - 25 comments

Bach: 15 Two-Part Inventions, BWV 772-786 ....is a Youtube playlist that presents the score of each Invention as the piano music plays. Additionally, each link contains two further links. One shows in color a musical analysis of the Invention, and another has fingering for the piano student.
posted by storybored at 9:37 PM PST - 4 comments

Lester's Tune-a-Day Lester Bailey plays and repairs melodeons. In 2013 he finished his project of recording and posting a tune every day for a year - but then he kept going (at a lower frequency) and is still going today.
posted by moonmilk at 7:40 PM PST - 1 comment

Wings of Hope [more inside]
posted by bendy at 6:40 PM PST - 2 comments

Lumiere films from the very early days of film, subjected to various ML refinements and coupled with foley sounds, and you've got some amazingly modern looking movies from 125 years ago! 21 old films from 1895 to 1902 colorized and upscaled in 60 fps, with sound runs 22 minutes, with the first 4m33s describing the upscaling process.
posted by hippybear at 12:52 PM PST - 23 comments

Stacy's dad By Sub-Radio. More about the cover and the band at Mel Magazine [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 11:59 PM PST - 27 comments

@SCOTTeHENSLEY: "We developed a new multivalent mRNA vaccine against all known influenza virus subtypes. Our study describing the vaccine was just published..." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 28 comments

How Bootsy Collins Impostors Pulled Off the Ultimate Music Biz Scam (David Browne, Rolling Stone)
posted by Gerald Bostock at 4:46 PM PST - 12 comments

The soft drink Fanta was invented by Coca-Cola, an American company, inside of Nazi Germany during World War II. Developed at the height of the Third Reich, the new soda ensured the brand’s continued popularity. Fanta became a point of nationalistic pride and was consumed by the German public, from the Fraus cooking at home to the highest officials of the Nazi party. How Fanta Was Created for Nazi Germany [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:21 PM PST - 70 comments

How Moondog Captured the Sounds of New York

Synchronizing his work to traffic and footsteps, the musician and composer translated the clamor of street life into song.

The weird and true story of Moondog

Moondog -- Do Your Own Thing

The Genius of Moondog, New York’s Homeless Composer

Random Moondoggery and details within regarding the life of someone Mefi's Own nickyskye knew well and counted as a close friend... [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 2:26 PM PST - 34 comments

An obscure ages-old internet photo sparks an investigation that leads to a giddy, joyful conclusion. Nick Robinson takes us on a journey as we learn that "MICHAELSOFT BINBOWS' isn't what you think it is. [35m] Features use of Google Earth VR which is the only thing that's made me want VR so far.
posted by hippybear at 12:22 PM PST - 12 comments

Every day, tens of thousands of people line up outside the Temple of Time where the Great Clock resides, waiting their turn to enter and bow before it. “They stand quietly, but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured. They must watch the precise passage of minutes and decades. They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.” from Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. "The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us." Joe Zadeh writes a compelling essay in Noema magazine about the origin and meaning of globally standardized clock time.
posted by ReginaHart at 9:42 AM PST - 20 comments

In honor of Charles Schulz's 100th birthday, dozens of syndicated cartoonists worked Peanuts references into their strips today.
posted by COD at 8:28 AM PST - 36 comments

A family moves their inn from the Earth to outer space in a failed 1979 TV pilot. Obviously inspired by a certain scene Star Wars, "Starstruck," on YouTube (27 minutes), starring Beeson Carroll, Lynne Lipton and Roy Brocksmith, may remind you of a certain holiday special from the year before. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 8:12 AM PST - 33 comments

"The songs and stories on "Free To Be" showed kids that they could question the world they lived in, that parents are just people and that emotions are real. And what's on TV might not be." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 7:21 AM PST - 53 comments

"If you look up quark masses online, you’ll find that the mass of an up quark is around 2 MeV while a down quark is close to 5 MeV. But those same sources will tell you the mass of a proton is a whopping 938 MeV. Our sums are off by about 99 per cent." Dr. Katie Mack explores the weird nature of protons in a short article.
posted by curious nu at 6:34 AM PST - 28 comments

Using the Midjourney AI, graphic designer Johnny Darrell has come up with some mind-bending imaginings [Facebook link] of a "Tron" directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:15 AM PST - 27 comments

The overworked project manager on the redesign of the Imperial Lambda-class shuttle gets surprisingly competent feedback from an unknown official on Coruscant. She promptly decides that anyone bored enough to do a technical review of their own free will should be found proper employment for their own good. (AO3, Beth Winter, Star Wars, Gen) - because project management in any galaxy goes darkside.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:18 AM PST - 14 comments

Overly Sarcastic Productions is a YouTube channel where the two creators/owners - going by the colorful monikers of Red and Blue - provide overviews and analysis of pop culture, myths, legends, literature, tropes, and other such topics. With the 10 year anniversary of the first video on the channel nearing, Red and Blue recount lessons learned from a decade of creating content.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:01 AM PST - 2 comments

A Plethora of Unaired Pilots Warning: time destroyer. One YouTube user has posted over 50 unaired TV pilots. [more inside]
posted by amtho at 8:33 PM PST - 33 comments

Bobby Fingers has uploaded another diorama build video showcasing an incident between Steven Seagal and Gene LeBell. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 6:17 PM PST - 21 comments

"It's not hyperbolic to say that this is the most significant worker revolt we've seen in China for many years" says Chris Cash, Director of the China Research Group in a four minute interview with Times Radio that includes graphic footage from an unverified video. [more inside]
posted by Thella at 5:25 PM PST - 44 comments

The BIGGEST Art Collab On YouTube IS BACK! [S2 E1] In early 2021, graphic artist and YouTuber Ten Hundred painted a character in the middle of a large wooden panel, then sent it to another YouTuber to paint another small section, who then sent it to another, until it was done. The first panel traveled over 30,000 miles before it arrived back at Ten Hundred's studio to be auctioned for charity. For season 2, he started two different panels and sent them off. For one of them, each artist has to choose another YouTuber with fewer subscribers. Season 2 is still in progress. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 4:28 PM PST - 2 comments

(Explained Using John Wick)
posted by chavenet at 3:07 PM PST - 14 comments

Coins that are the only evidence of the historicity of the otherwise unrecorded Roman so-called emperor Sponsian have been found to be authentic 3rd century issues. The history of these coins is sketchy and there are some stylistic anomalies that have cast doubt on their authenticity since they first emerged in 1713. Plus, they portray an alleged emperor that appears nowhere else on the historical or archaeological record.
posted by Etrigan at 1:52 PM PST - 27 comments

As far back as Gemini 6, NASA has used music to wake astronauts - and robots - to start their day. From Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra to Puccini and Rachmaninov, from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Weird Al Yankovic, from the Ramones to the Everly Brothers to ABBA, NASA crews have woken up to meaningful and whimsical music. Archivist Colin Fries compiled a chronology of Wakeup Calls for NASA (89-page PDF). Previously. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 12:40 PM PST - 7 comments

Instead of Black Friday, try Buy Nothing Day! [more inside]
posted by aniola at 12:35 PM PST - 44 comments

Your tastebuds don’t deceive you: Brussels sprouts actually taste better than they used to.
posted by meowzilla at 11:31 AM PST - 57 comments

‘Nepo Babies’ of Famous Parents Say They Did It Their Way. No One Is Buying It.
posted by girlmightlive at 9:23 AM PST - 91 comments

The 50 greatest HBO shows ever – ranked [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 8:15 AM PST - 51 comments

Prune Juice and vodka! What could go wrong?? Bon Appétit magazine known for it's exquisite taste and innovations in cuisine has a few recipes they'd like you to try.... [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 7:49 AM PST - 21 comments

Women, Life, Freedom is the cry heard across Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini 70 days ago. UN launches human rights investigation after Iranian regime murders over 300 protesters. [more inside]
posted by adept256 at 2:38 AM PST - 17 comments

The 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs of All Time according to Rolling Stone
posted by The Gooch at 8:31 PM PST - 128 comments

And here is Bo Diddley & Chuck Berry -- Bo's Beat from Chuck Berry & Bo Diddley -- Two Great Guitars

Only Solitaire blog gives it a bit of side eye

More of an historical curiosity here than an actual good album — but a terrific historical curiosity all the same. ...the album is never remembered as a particular highlight for any of those guys; however, in some ways it is a rather unique artifact of the era. Even if you find it horrible, you won't ever forget how you found it horrible, that is for sure.

All the same here are the two men in concert all of 45 years later:

Chuck Berry & Bo Diddley Together LIVE (2009)

And down the tesseracted rabbit hole we go... [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 8:10 PM PST - 9 comments

Short little essays about little-known facets of American restaurant history. Including such gems as: The Public Natatorium, Milwaukee's only dolphin-equipped restaurant (how could it fail?) And... [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 6:00 PM PST - 9 comments

Smokey Bear is supposed to communicate an important message about wildfire safety. But viewers were talking about his balloon at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for a totally different reason this year: his looming, brawny, unsettling hotness.
posted by chavenet at 2:04 PM PST - 52 comments

From IEEE Spectrum comes These Haptic Microfingers Tickle Pill Bugs’ Toes subheadlined Balloon actuators and liquid metal sensors enable tactile human-insect interactions in which is described microfingers with tactile fingertip feedback so one could feel things at insect scale. This feels really important, even if right now it's just tickling bug toes.
posted by hippybear at 1:40 PM PST - 4 comments

1957 Voyage of The Mayflower II.
posted by clavdivs at 11:56 AM PST - 5 comments

These men are geniuses! Their shit tastes like candy! Adam Conover (recently previously on Metafilter) continues to press his case for treating billionaires with the respect they deserve (YouTube, 19m30s)
posted by flabdablet at 5:37 AM PST - 20 comments

American Movie: Thanksgiving Edition [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 5:08 AM PST - 15 comments

It's a directory of blogs. Avoid your family today like it's 2006. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!
posted by COD at 5:05 AM PST - 29 comments

Meet the hounds trained to track down rhino poachers in Kruger Park. Rhino poachers entering Kruger National Park are increasingly being run down by packs of unleashed hunting hounds in full cry, followed by a chopper tracking their hi-tech GPS collars. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 4:06 AM PST - 17 comments

ESA has announced their Astronaut Class of 2022. Comprising 17 astronauts from 12 countries, of which almost 50% are women, the cohort includes 5 career astronauts, 11 reserve astronauts, and 'parastronaut' John McFall, the world's first disabled astronaut. Although not guaranteed to go into orbit, the former British Paralympian will be part of a feasibility project to see what the requirements would be for that to be possible. [more inside]
posted by atlantica at 3:45 AM PST - 4 comments

LEA is EthiCo's own Learning-Enabled Algorithm: an anticipatory artificial intelligence program built with next-generation machine learning. That's just our fancy way of saying that she's designed entirely around you! She can automate your daily purchases, manage your hectic schedule, and even suggest the perfect time for you to sit back and chill out!

The LEA Project: An interactive, musical horror-comedy from composer, writer, and sound designer Eric Matthew Richardson.
posted by creatrixtiara at 1:21 AM PST - 2 comments

The greatest Texas songwriter you’ve never heard of is a 72-year-old grandmother from Lubbock. This is her story. What do you do when you find yourself in the midst of middle age, you can’t stay in a relationship to save your life, and your friends keep trying to get you to check into a mental hospital? If you’re Jo Carol Pierce, you go instead to a zen monastery in New Mexico and begin writing emotional, hilarious songs about sex, suicide, and the blessed Virgin Mary. From there, you move to Austin and craft the songs into a piece of musical theater called Bad Girls Upset by the Truth, recruiting other misfits to play with you. Then—again, if you’re Jo Carol Pierce—you watch as the play becomes a big hit and you, at age 51, transform into something of a rock star. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 1:10 AM PST - 8 comments

Trendwatch is an ongoing series of short unsettling videos examining such current trends as New Time, modes and operation of the A-CS unit, and nausea in the workplace. (No jumpscares. Loud high-pitched beeping at times.)
posted by solarion at 9:01 PM PST - 7 comments

This Library Attracts The Public By Dressing Up One Librarian’s Cat As Literary And Movie Icons Notable photos: Queen Elizabeth II, Mary Queen of Scots, Cat With A Pearl Earring, Phantom mask, Iron Throne, Teddy Roosevelt, Gritty, members of Clone Club.... [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:20 PM PST - 19 comments

Around 20 professional singers and composers attempt to sing a very badly transcribed version of "Let It Snow" as written. (SL Twitter.)
posted by eotvos at 2:26 PM PST - 21 comments

A 10-minute miscommunication on Slack between journalists at the Associated Press resulted in an erroneous report last week that appeared momentarily to bring tensions between NATO and Russia to their highest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis ... Last Tuesday, AP posted a news alert saying that a “senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people,” and noting that leaders in Poland were “holding an emergency meeting due to a ‘crisis situation’” ... The report, which would have represented a Russian missile striking a member of NATO, immediately sparked fear of a dramatic escalation of tensions between the US and Russia. from AP fired a reporter after a dangerous blunder. Slack messages reveal a chaotic process.
posted by chavenet at 12:43 PM PST - 37 comments

Two pro wrestlers developed ‘The Progressive Liberal’ to be the bad guy at matches. Then the atmosphere turned far darker (previously on MeFi)
posted by Etrigan at 11:52 AM PST - 21 comments

Prepared by Statistics Canada, Canada at a Glance presents current statistics on Canadian society. Subjects covered in Canada at a Glance include population, education, health, and others to provide a statistical portrait of Canada. [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 10:34 AM PST - 23 comments

"Since 1970, Indigenous people & their allies have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native people do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims & other European settlers. Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands and the erasure of Native cultures. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Indigenous ancestors and Native resilience. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection, as well as a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience worldwide." [more inside]
posted by aniola at 10:31 AM PST - 6 comments

The 9 best Thanksgiving songs I definitely didn't just make up by Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post, with composer Jack Mitchell. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 9:45 AM PST - 9 comments

Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, love(d) them or hate(d) them, the clothes are fabulous! A Game of Clothes is a tumblr blog that deliciously, obsessively, meticulously records the real life styles the vast cast of characters would wear, and where they would wear them, and why, and who they are, and where they are from. Pretty much all the W questions, but most particularly, what would [ASoIaF Person] wear, or maybe who would wear [Famous Designer]? Basically a "Westeros Wear Daily." [more inside]
posted by taz at 8:27 AM PST - 6 comments

100 Notable Books of 2022 (NYT gift link) [more inside]
posted by box at 8:05 AM PST - 12 comments

Being a "Foreigner" English Girl Born in Japan An interview as part of a series created by Max D. Capo [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 8:04 AM PST - 12 comments

The family behind the wonderful recipe blog The Woks of Life is profiled in Bon Appetit by journalist and author Kat Chow. [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 6:10 PM PST - 13 comments

In the early 15th century, Edward, 2nd Duke of York, wrote a list of 1,126 names he considered to be suitable for dogs. Link to the paper "The Names of All Manner of Hounds: A Unique Inventory in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript" by David Scott-Macnab. Via Twitter user @WeirdMedieval.
posted by pipeski at 3:09 PM PST - 36 comments

I need to tell you something. Something very important. Geraldine DeRuiter, James Beard Award Winner, (previously, previously, previously) takes on the Pumpkin Lobby (Big Pumpkin?) and their push for all food pumpkin. [more inside]
posted by carrioncomfort at 12:53 PM PST - 121 comments

San Francisco cartoonist Paul Madonna was driving his regular commute in a smart car through McLaren Park, when he was struck head-on by a Mercedes Benz going the wrong way at approximately 50-60 mph. [more inside]
posted by ishmael at 12:50 PM PST - 23 comments

In 2017, as #MeToo raged, the fact that you couldn’t say “Men Are Scum” on Facebook went viral.
In 2018, Monika Bickert and her team sat in the “Oh, Semantics” meeting room (a coincience, surely) to re-evaluate this policy.
Simon Van Zuylen-Wood got to sit in and wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair in 2019: “‘Men Are Scum’: Inside Facebook’s War On Hate Speech”
(Hat tip to the most recent episode of Evelyn Douek’s Moderated Content Podcast, featuring Alex Stamos.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:38 PM PST - 12 comments

NationStates is a free multiplayer political simulation game founded by author Max Barry back in 2002. Previously. Previouslier. Ten days ago, the game turned 20 years old! [more inside]
posted by gakiko at 12:17 PM PST - 19 comments

Dreading a holiday dinner with more conservative relatives? Are you unwilling to just smile and pass the gravy as your right wing relative spouts some nonsense from the culture wars? A Redditor has created some handy cheat sheets / study guides for liberal Americans who feel argumentative.
posted by interogative mood at 11:24 AM PST - 39 comments

Not just Americans - worldwide votes will be counted. Following some jury shenanigans in the 2022 contest, jury involvement has been reduced and other voting changes mean that... "Those watching in the rest of the world will be able to vote via a secure online platform using a credit card from their country, and their votes, once added together, will be converted into points that will have the same weight as one participating country in both of the Semi-Finals and the Grand Final." Initial reaction is mixed. Eurovision 2022 was won by Ukraine; the 2023 finals will be hosted by Liverpool in England.
posted by Wordshore at 10:36 AM PST - 28 comments

Marine, aka moonovermarine, is a French embroidery artist much of whose work adapts imagery from games, movies, and other cultural wells. Their current project: a series of scenes from the monochrome ZX Spectrum game "Sentinel".
posted by cortex at 7:51 AM PST - 11 comments

The Crockpot arrived amid a slew of innovations, from the microwave oven to the breadmaker, that promised to save women from the drudgery of cooking for their families. But unlike its technological contemporaries, the slow cooker didn’t speed up a working woman’s cooking, it slowed it down. The crucial part was being absent for almost the entire cooking process: A woman could actually leave the house and enter the workplace, without neglecting her wifely duties. [more inside]
posted by warriorqueen at 7:50 AM PST - 81 comments

In the wake of a coach being ejected from the Olympics in Tokyo for punching a horse, UIPM (the governing body of modern pentathlon) has voted to replace show jumping with a Sasuke-style obstacle course (a.k.a. American Ninja Warrior) following the 2024 Games in Paris. The change does not come without controversy, as several national governing bodies accuse the UIPM of violating its own rules regarding changes to the sport. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:48 AM PST - 32 comments

"Although 5 decades of research have yielded many failures, [cancer] vaccines are now positioned for success" While there are currently only a few vaccines being used to treat cancer (as opposed to preventing it), "knowledge gained from [COVID-19] trials and versatile therapeutic potential of the mRNA can be applied for the development of vaccine for the infectious diseases and cancer." There are many cancer vaccines currently in clinical trials (find one) and receiving research grants. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 7:16 AM PST - 11 comments

Redditor lg_cuber (also going by Grazzy on YouTube) has been recreating the entirety of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild map in Minecraft, along with the help of a few Minecraft community friends. This is a work in progress. It is glorious to behold. [YouTube] [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
posted by Fizz at 4:07 AM PST - 13 comments

It’s one thing to find Barth’s fiction masturbatory—that’s a matter of taste—but it’s another to hold it morally responsible for the cultural degradation we associate with fast food, commercialism, and televisual self-consciousness run amok (an especial bête noire for Wallace). Such menaces, it seems fair to point out, more likely result from political and technological circumstances coextensive with postmodernity as a historical epoch rather than from the stylistic choices of any individual author, or group of authors. from Life in the Fap Lane
posted by chavenet at 12:35 AM PST - 24 comments

Natural Habitat Shorts is an animated web series featuring anthropomorphized animals going about their daily lives. Created by Brennan Brinkley, Nicole Low, and Tyler Kula, the shorts imagine animals participating in mundane activities - shopping, working, commuting - with humorous results. The videos, each of which are less than a minute long, gained popularity on TikTok last year. New shorts are posted every few weeks.
posted by Aster at 9:46 PM PST - 17 comments

Instead of turning to influencers, (sponsored) top-ten lists, or Amazon “sales,” the Metafilter community has collaborated to create gift suggestions by and for real people, who want to have real connections, and make a real difference in the world. Read below the fold for the gift guides, or check out the tag #MeFiGiftGuide2022.  [more inside]
posted by rebent at 9:02 PM PST - 8 comments

Michael Sheen wants to know where you buy your socks. Michael Sheen explains what a social enterprise is. Social enterprises are real businesses but at least 50% of their profits are reinvested to benefit the community.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:47 PM PST - 6 comments

He introduces me to the dogs as he harnesses them one by one: “... This is Aske ‘Qulikiqtaaq’ Walker, after baseball player Alan Walker. This is Tuugaaq, meaning narwhal tusk. This is Asgard, big guy named after the Norse god. ... This is Carlos, named after a cab driver in Mexico. And this is Grillis, named after British Adventurer Bear Grylls—I used to have a dog called ‘Bear’ but a bear came into town and ate that dog. Happily, someone in town shot that bear and gave me the meat to feed the other dogs. Seems only fair. This is Bear’s replacement in the team.”

Devon Manik says, I usually hunt with the dogs. It’s really a great job. I feed a lot of people.”
posted by Rumple at 5:59 PM PST - 4 comments

In a major shakeup at the House of Mouse, Disney CEO Bob Chapek is out, with former CEO Bob Iger returning as a "caretaker" CEO to right the corporate ship. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:50 PM PST - 65 comments

The SCTV Guide To Showbiz [1h58m] is a fan-created 2021 documentary that covers the entire history of SCTV, from before it happened until after it ended. Witness a bunch of beloved comedians when they were puppies! Marvel at their chutzpah! Delight in whatever it is they do! Note: This is not a clip show of favorites. It's a history of SCTV told by SCTV with SCTV lore included. Enjoy!
posted by hippybear at 2:05 PM PST - 12 comments

From Maya.land (previously): a "drafty as hell lol" post on public utilities, tourism, personal experience of infrastructure, technical agency, and the romantic and the invisible.
posted by brainwane at 12:40 PM PST - 8 comments

Jim Harris Was Paralyzed. Then He Ate Magic Mushrooms. After becoming paralyzed from the chest down, the mountain athlete found an unlikely ally in recovery: psychedelics.
posted by theora55 at 9:31 AM PST - 23 comments

Christmas is right around the corner, and maybe you need to do some shopping? Here's some vintage toy commercials. The 1950's had a tight toy game, but maybe you're more nostalgiac for the 80's or 90's?
posted by valkane at 9:06 AM PST - 21 comments

This great post reminded me of a buoy that's been bobbing around - gulper eel, ribbon eel, electric eel - there are so many eels on the Inky Depths posting list, so LET'S TALK ABOUT EELS TOGETHER, it's about time, am I right?! (okay, Inky Depths #4 was about the Slender Snipe Eel. But there is so. much. more. to. talk. about.) Well I'll be hornswaggled, let's dive in! (more inside) [more inside]
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:00 AM PST - 16 comments

A HD fan video for audiotrack 12 from the Random 35 Tracks Tape from the mid-90s (historical detail). The same choir-like vocal can be briefly heard on Aquarius (version 3). Previously on Stable Diffusion; alternative fan video. Texts used in generation below the fold... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 8:20 AM PST - 8 comments

In this DefunctTV special, Kevin investigates the origin of the four-note theme that has been used on Disney Channel for the past two decades. [92 min.]
posted by ob1quixote at 7:33 AM PST - 15 comments

How is this thread loading? a) Down, b) Side, c) Free, d) Off [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:31 AM PST - 123 comments

Need some new budgeting ideas? Enjoy something tactile? Try cash stuffing! [more inside]
posted by creatrixtiara at 8:32 PM PST - 38 comments

As Twitter is in its death throes, Tumblr is thriving (for certain definitions of thriving) and doing a deep dive into Goncharov (1973), dir. Martin Scorsese. In fact, tumblr is talking about it so much that Goncharov is today's top trending tag there. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 7:11 PM PST - 45 comments

Blood quantum requirements first imposed on Native Americans as part of the push for assimilation continue to threaten the future of many tribes:

Tailyr Irvine interviewed Indigenous residents in Missoula and on her Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. They share their deep personal, social and political concerns about the blood quantum system, which can impact Native Americans’ most personal decisions—including with whom they have children. Through seven intimate stories, Irvine shows how blood quantum requirements are increasingly putting pressures on Native Americans’ lives.

[more inside]
posted by adamsc at 7:03 PM PST - 11 comments

Kiwix is a utility that allows you to download entire websites including wikipedia, Khan Academy..... [more inside]
posted by storybored at 5:59 PM PST - 24 comments

A favourite amongst many Canadians since 1924, Red River Cereal was a victim of pandemic cuts by the owner of the brand since 1995, the American company Smuckers. Thanks to the new owner, Arva Flour mill near London Ontario Red River cereal is back! Arva Flour Mill is also the oldest commercial water-powered mill in North America, the oldest food-processing company in Canada, and the 6th-oldest continuously-operating company in Canada at over 200 years old. [more inside]
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:16 PM PST - 25 comments

R.I.P. an American science fiction writer. Winner of Hugo and Nebula awards, Bear wrote more than fifty books. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 5:09 PM PST - 78 comments

The Mysteries of Encyclopedia Brown: The Books, The Lawsuits, The HBO Show?! [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:01 PM PST - 13 comments

The Barnacle Goose Experiment is an abiogensis (wikipedia yeah I didn't know either) body horror idle clicker by Everest Rose Pipkin where you play as a researcher in a biodome tasked with generating a world out of their own body. There is sound so you may want to mute the browser tab.
posted by juv3nal at 4:19 PM PST - 28 comments

The Pangeos terrayacht (Robb Report, designers) is a proposed 1800-foot vessel that could house 60,000 people. [more inside]
posted by box at 3:07 PM PST - 71 comments

"Library school" is a nebulous way of describing about library and information science education. While early library schools in the US and UK were primarily vocational training for people to work in school or public libraries, iSchools cover a range of knowledge worker jobs in a variety of places. There are many places you can work with that degree. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 10:00 AM PST - 67 comments

Unlike the TikTok algorithm, which is creepily accurate, Facebook is an erratic pu-pu platter of things I never knew I wanted to see. For years, I have been unwittingly feeding it conflicting information about who I am. As a journalist, I have used Facebook casually for reporting purposes, joining divergent communities dedicated to everything from women in business to Airbnb hosts and polyamorists. After finding subjects for stories, I never bothered to leave these groups, and like creeping ivy, their posts began to overtake my feed, to delightful results.
posted by mecran01 at 9:36 AM PST - 49 comments

How what you eat affects climate change. One serve of beef = 330 grams of carbon dioxide. One serve of chicken = 52 grams of carbon dioxide. One serve of fish = 40 grams of carbon dioxide. One serve of vegetables = 14 grams of carbon dioxide. One serve of lentils = 2 grams of carbon dioxide. Livestock = 14% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world (transportation) which is also 14%.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:06 AM PST - 88 comments

For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:33 AM PST - 26 comments

Bent by Nature, a podcast from LA's KCRW about the legendary DJ Deirdre O'Donoghue and her influential radio show SNAP, has made available live music archives from the show, with dozens of in-studio live music performances from the 80s and early 90s from the likes of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, R.E.M., Tom Waits, and Robyn Hitchcock, as well as interviews. Don't know where to get started? Here's a guide. If you still can't decide what to listen to, you're in luck--there's a 24-hour streaming channel featuring a shuffling playlist of SNAP episodes restored from Deirdre's original board tapes.
posted by carrienation at 3:56 PM PST - 11 comments

As I delete these emails, I often wonder: Who are all these people who want to talk to a reporter, any reporter, so badly that they will pay a publicist to email every journalist they can think of—including me, a guy who doesn’t write about pool safety or divorce or witches at all? Who actually opens these emails, let alone responds to them? Do they ever work? And what would happen if I tried? from My PR Day of Yes [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:41 PM PST - 11 comments

Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU (Substack) "This is one of the nicest and best-resourced ICUs in the country. So, my assumption has been that the faults of this ICU unit are likely shared by all ICUs, while the virtues probably are not." [more inside]
posted by meowzilla at 2:51 PM PST - 54 comments

The best reading skill no one ever taught you. Care of Elizabeth Filips, who clearly knows a thing or two about how to live a chaotically organized life.
posted by philip-random at 9:31 AM PST - 49 comments

The world’s largest dam removal will touch many lives in the Klamath River Basin
posted by Etrigan at 9:03 AM PST - 22 comments

A short video about the nutrients in dairy milk; almond milk; soy milk; and oat milk that also looks at the water use to make each one and the carbon footprint to make each one.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:57 AM PST - 44 comments

"How The Forest Dies: The Amazon is going dry. In one parched corner, a desperate wait for water is only just beginning." A sobering portrait of the human cost of deforestation of the Amazon, from the Washington Post. [more inside]
posted by mittens at 7:10 AM PST - 20 comments

"There's no way anyone could get away with such an obvious lie, it would be too easy to check. But it turns out if something is easy to check, NO ONE ACTUALLY DOES." [1h 57m] Hbomberguy spends half an hour finding the true origins of the Roblox "Oof" sound effect that plays when you die, then gets sucked into the outrageous (yet utterly banal) world of egotistical lies of veritable videogame industry icon, Tommy Tallarico.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:45 AM PST - 25 comments

Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud — Dan Primack & Sareen Habeshian, AXIOS, 11/18/2022. Elizabeth Holmes on Friday was sentenced by a California judge to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing company, Theranos. Per yahoo!finance, Holmes was also fined a $400 million special assessment and must surrender to custody on April 27, 2023. She's expected to appeal. (Most recently and previously on MetaFilter, see also Wikipedia.)
posted by cenoxo at 4:22 PM PST - 99 comments

Put in a text prompt and generate your own Pokémon character. What it says on the turtwig.
posted by swift at 4:03 PM PST - 19 comments

Flogging his new album on the Tonight Show, Bruce Springsteen settles a nearly 50-year-old argument.
posted by chavenet at 3:38 PM PST - 36 comments

Bobby Broccoli brings you the tale of the the man who tried to fake an element (a 1 hour and 19 minutes long YouTube essay).
posted by Pendragon at 3:20 PM PST - 8 comments

David Amram is an American composer, arranger, and conductor of orchestral, chamber, and choral works, many with jazz flavorings. He plays piano, French horn, Spanish guitar, and pennywhistle, and sings. He has worked with Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Aaron Copland, Pete Seeger, Willie Nelson, Charles Mingus, Bob Dylan, Thelonious Monk, Patti Smith, and many others. Yesterday he turned 92 years old. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 2:51 PM PST - 6 comments

Cult movie director Albert Pyun carved a reputation for himself as a B-level action/sci-fi director who brought memorable visuals and endless imagination to films that were usually filmed on very limited budgets. Sadly, Pyun was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis several years ago… and is now in hospice. His wife Cynthia Curnan took to Facebook to ask fans to send in personal messages so she can read them to him in his final days. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:40 PM PST - 19 comments

How Newspapers Helped Crowdsource a Scientific Discovery in 1833 - In November 1833, the Leonid meteor shower was so unusually bright and intense that professor Denison Olmsted wrote to the local newspaper and asked readers to send in their observations. Other newspapers syndicated his letter, and he got responses from across the country. (Oh also, today's the peak of this year's Leonid shower.) [more inside]
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:30 PM PST - 5 comments

Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who famously spent eighteen years living in Charles de Gaulle airport before leaving in 2006, died of a heart attack last Saturday... at Charles de Gaulle airport. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:57 PM PST - 7 comments

The dark and mysterious origins of Denmark's psychiatric brain collection [more inside]
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:24 PM PST - 10 comments

Featuring a striking art style inspired by illuminated manuscripts and early modern woodcuts, Obsidian's narrative RPG Pentiment debuted this week to near-universal acclaim. Reviewers praised its art style, story, and the sheer audacity of releasing such a game. Director Josh Sawyer sat down with Wired to discuss the game's influences (Umberto Eco, Darklands), why it wouldn't have gotten made without Microsoft's Game Pass, and the meaning of history. [more inside]
posted by uncleozzy at 11:15 AM PST - 24 comments

For the first time since 1991, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted to introduce four new prefixes to the International System of Units (SI) with immediate effect. [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:32 AM PST - 23 comments

"This paper explores the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on cooperative organizations. In particular, we examine how technology addresses and creates challenges within cooperative organizations...." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 10:30 AM PST - 3 comments

App Tracking Protection is now open for all Android users. It’s a beta feature in DuckDuckGo for Android that helps block 3rd-party trackers in your apps, even when you’re not using them. You can see what personal data trackers are typically trying to collect before we block them (like your precise location, age, and a digital fingerprint of your phone). We’ve also improved performance, reduced app exclusions, and made our blocklist publicly available. Start blocking 3rd-party trackers in your Android apps today: update to the latest version of the DuckDuckGo Android app, open Settings and select “App Tracking Protection” and follow the onscreen instructions. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 8:50 AM PST - 12 comments

Whether you’re a Swiftie superfan, NFL diehard or just enjoy the occasional Broadway musical, virtually everyone agrees that our ticket-buying experience is beyond broken. Trying to see your favorite artist often requires participating in a process that begins with hitting the refresh button hundreds of times over the course of a few minutes and hoping to hit the equivalent of a lottery until finally allowed into a transaction. The lucky ones earn the privilege of being held over a barrel by companies that can charge them whatever and however it would like. The vast majority aren’t so lucky, and must take their efforts to the secondary resale market, where they can expect considerable if not exponential markups on the face value of a ticket. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:35 AM PST - 54 comments

The Qatar World Cup Explained is a five part series by Tifo Football exploring the geopolitics around how Qatar has ended up hosting the World Cup.
posted by juv3nal at 4:00 AM PST - 34 comments

Twitter export: "Do you want to export your Twitter followers, follows or other Tweet data? With our Twitter Export tool you can quickly export followers, following list, retweets or likes of a tweet for free and download it to Excel in CSV format." Via babelfish at Ask Metafilter. Seems timely. [more inside]
posted by nthdegx at 3:18 AM PST - 563 comments

Lyre's Dictionary generates new English words based on existing roots and patterns. I found it through its Mastodon bot but it also has a Twitter bot (for now) and an RSS feed.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:28 PM PST - 10 comments

Fenced In: How the Global Rise of Border Walls Is Stifling Wildlife
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:42 PM PST - 5 comments

An Introduction to the Principles of 3D Food Printing
posted by aniola at 6:19 PM PST - 15 comments

The recently-released Atari 50 100+ game collection/90's-CD-ROM-style multimedia thingy from retro championers Digital Eclipse has been out for about a week, receiving not a single review below 8/10, making things look good for possible DLC. But why wait for more? There's already two entire podcasts aiming to cover every single Atari 2600 game made within the console's lifespan: 2600 Game By Game and Atari Bytes (the latter including bespoke game-related short stories). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 3:53 PM PST - 22 comments

The prescience of Steinberg’s famous cover of a New Yorker’s skewed vision of the world is not merely the outsize importance he grants to New York City, but also the schematic way he depicts other countries. For all the ironic self-awareness this cover suggests about the New York–centrism of the magazine’s readership, it is, in fact, emblematic of the fiction section’s myopia. from The View From The Fiction of the “New Yorker”
posted by chavenet at 3:36 PM PST - 12 comments

The Mary Wallopers are the best new(ish) band I've run across in ages, and if you like the wildest and rudest kind of Irish folk music, there's a good chance you'll love them too. Here's a video of each of the album's 11 songs to help you decide: Eileen Og, Love Will Never Conquer Me, Cod Liver Oil & The Orange Juice, John O'Halloran, The Hackler, The Night The Gards Raided Oweny's, Building Up And Tearing England Down, Lots of Little Soldiers, Frost Is All Over,, The Butcher Boy, All For Me Grog. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 1:04 PM PST - 9 comments

Inside the 'secular pronatalist' eugenics movement (Julia Black @ Business Insider, archive.org version) Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 10:36 AM PST - 193 comments

Gaslighting is a term that comes up a lot on MeFi, especially on the Green. Dr. Robin Stern, co-founder and associate director for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, has a podcast called The Gaslight Effect that explores the concept, how it shows up in different situations, and how people can reclaim reality.
posted by brookeb at 10:21 AM PST - 27 comments

Via Messy Nessy Chic, a look at the forgotten sport of barrel-jumping.
posted by Ipsifendus at 8:36 AM PST - 8 comments

Three years after that album and that Glastonbury performance, Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr. – the man you know as Stormzy – is back, and a changed man [GQ] [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:33 AM PST - 7 comments

STUDIO4℃ is making an English subtitled version of Princess Arete available for free on YouTube until Dec. 2nd 2022. Animation Obsessive has a consideration of the film along with a history of its making. [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:40 PM PST - 7 comments

Marc Rebillet - Your New Morning Alarm (full version) (slyt, I guess, if we still bother to say that anymore.)
posted by kaibutsu at 7:58 PM PST - 24 comments

Material culture (previously) surrounds us, both the old stuff and the new stuff [archive.org link]. Sometimes this stuff reveals surprising new facts, as with the recent translation of writing on a hand-shaped bronze ornament uncovered in 2021 that pushes the timeline for the existence of writing in Basque by hundreds of years. Other times, it's just a thing for kids to play with, or maybe adults, or definitely adults[NSFW], but sometimes play carries meaning. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:45 PM PST - 2 comments

The Week 3 Fundraising Update is live on MetaTalk. We’ve blown past our Survive target thanks to you, and are well on our way to being able to 🌱Revive🌱 Metafilter! [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 2:52 PM PST - 7 comments

This assumption is the core of post-cyberpunk’s body politic. We are subtly conditioned to believe that the optimal way to fix the world is to fix the system — luring us into a state of realism where we must work with those who rule over us, as opposed to implementing the radical solutions that have in the past led to the kind of change the world is in desperate need of right now. from The Rise and Fall of Cyberpunk
posted by chavenet at 2:46 PM PST - 71 comments

From 2017, The Daily Show's Roy Wood Jr brings us an hour of comedy: Father Figure [1h]. Pointed observations about race that I appreciated while I laughed out loud in a room by myself. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:57 AM PST - 9 comments

Julia Zarankin, author of the 2020 memoir Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder (book excerpt) wrote a heartfelt "Good riddance, Canada Fitness Test." Relatedly, the memoir includes a chapter on how the desire to carry a spotting scope and accoutrements motivated a weight-lifting regimen, belatedly, after years of marriage to an amateur powerlifter. Interview with Zarankin. Recorded book talk. Life aspiration? "To sport the hairdo of a cedar waxwing, acquire the wardrobe of a northern flicker and develop the confidence of a Ross's goose." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:04 AM PST - 26 comments

The seventh edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is out this month. [more inside]
posted by box at 9:22 AM PST - 26 comments

What is it like to be 41 and meet the thing that will likely kill you sometime before you turn 45? A reflection on saying goodbye to it all. [more inside]
posted by ewok_academy at 9:03 AM PST - 29 comments

Nearly a decade later a deadly house fire near Milwaukee gets a feature article with the depth and history of something you would see in The New Yorker on oranges. Why?

Because with this renter and landlord the outcomes of this deadly house fire demonstrate the two justice systems in the US. The landlord is Todd Brunner, a slum lord with a lengthy history of code violations and fires at his property. It's is not shocking that the the deadly fire at the property that a bank had recently foreclosed on results in no fines, nothing. It is still astonishing that the renter, a mum who loses 3 of her children in the fire, ends up serving back to back child neglect sentences. [more inside]
posted by zenon at 8:17 AM PST - 36 comments

The Official Apple Rankings with accompanying scores and reviews. 100% accurate. Sample: "The Cameo Apple tastes like a juicy dog fart wrapped in used Whole Foods napkins." How apples are ranked. [more inside]
posted by swift at 5:21 AM PST - 92 comments

Is tonight the night that NASA launches its SLA rocket? Yes it is! [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 11:30 PM PST - 58 comments

[NSFW] "...[L]ife to me was very dangerous and people were not to be trusted; truth to power is very important. My films are still playing to people, because people haven't changed – as a matter of fact, they've gotten worse." BBC Culture looks back with Ralph Bakshi and others at "Fritz the Cat at 50: The X-rated cartoon that shocked the US". Here's the full movie on the Internet Archive. | Wikipedia — Fritz the Cat & Ralph Bakshi |
posted by not_on_display at 7:55 PM PST - 19 comments

HEP2go is a site that helps physical therapists and other rehabilitation professionals create home exercise programs for patients and clients, and helps patients by providing clear instructions and examples for each exercise. The inventory of exercises is divided up by anatomical category and exercises are annotated with text descriptions, photo illustrations, and -- in many cases -- short demonstration videos. (Click the "play" icon in the lower left corner of the photo to get a Vimeo inset to pop up and play.)
posted by brainwane at 5:52 PM PST - 16 comments

Meta has released Galactica, a large language model trained on scientific literature. Some early results: Zero point energy and the theoretical design of an ion cannon: early results; Multiphasic Deflector Shields vs. Proton Torpedoes: A Comparison. And it has side hobbies! Like taking hallucinogens and writing WWII naval yarns.
posted by sixswitch at 5:07 PM PST - 49 comments

“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry said. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.” from DEA’s most corrupt agent: Parties, sex amid ‘unwinnable war’ [AP]
posted by chavenet at 2:04 PM PST - 17 comments

Imagine the turmoil if a newly elected president of the United States announced that the U.S. government would no longer honor any outstanding Treasury bills because most of them were issued under his profligate predecessor. That’s essentially what Kim Jin-tae, the governor of South Korea’s Gangwon province, did. In doing so, Kim sparked a nationwide credit crisis that is spreading internationally, in the most farcical and unnecessary economic self-destruction this side of Liz Truss. Enhancing the absurdity is the origin of the crisis: Legoland Korea, a theme park based on the familiar brick toys. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 1:26 PM PST - 20 comments

Many places claim to be the Center of the Universe, places like Tulsa, Seattle and Wallace, Idaho. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 10:06 AM PST - 38 comments

Someone Named Gumball Uploaded All 285 Issues Of Nintendo Power To Archive.org “All 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines. A couple of remaining issues were sourced via Reddit by Gumball. Scanned in full color, the collection is a wonderful way to browse through gaming and media history.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 9:37 AM PST - 26 comments

From the creator of Best of Nextdoor comes Best of Dying Twitter, a chronicle of the bird site's current Elon Era. While Best of Dying Twitter retweets some informative threads (Threadreader links here and here), most of the account is devoted to the lulz. [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 9:19 AM PST - 92 comments

Statewide police conduct standards will soon be enforceable almost two years after law passed “ From 1999 to Feb. 2021, just 81 law enforcement officers lost their ability to work in Virginia because of unacceptable conduct on the job. Since then, numbers have surged. Between March 2021 and Aug. 5 of this year, 103 Virginia police officers have been decertified” .

the first time a police chief has ever been decertified in Virginia

increased potential crimes involving computer trespass, to include making an unauthorized copy of data.

[more inside]
posted by screenname00 at 6:22 PM PST - 16 comments

Migratory Patterns of The Modern American Skyscraper, a short story by Derrick Boden in Clarkesworld. [more inside]
posted by signal at 5:42 PM PST - 14 comments

An excerpt from Robert Shetterly's Portraits of Earth Justice Robert Shetterly began painting the Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits over twenty years ago as an act of defiance and love; defiance against the culture of lies promoting the war against Iraq, and love for the people who throughout our history have had the courage to tell truth to unjust power while demanding that our ideals be mirrored in our actions. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 5:38 PM PST - 7 comments

On 15 November 2022, the world’s population is projected to reach 8 billion people, a milestone in human development.
posted by adept256 at 4:55 PM PST - 113 comments

In a new experiment, six goldfish learned to drive a tank of water on wheels around a room. This feat of steering suggests that fishes’ navigational abilities hold up even on land. Illustrated by cartoonist JoAnna Wendel as part of the Wild Things series for Science News Explores.
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:18 PM PST - 21 comments

'Mystery of BBC radio's first broadcasts revealed 100 years on' [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 3:05 PM PST - 3 comments

FTX's Unbalanced Balance Sheet. FTX is the latest crypto-star to disappear into a black hole. Matt Levine dissects the startling balance sheet of the company. It's a tragedy to the people who got burned, but to bystanders it is comedy gold. To wit:....(archive version) [more inside]
posted by storybored at 12:49 PM PST - 174 comments

Montgomery Burns or Elon Musk?
posted by clawsoon at 10:23 AM PST - 53 comments

10 Ways To Stay Connected to Your Disabled / Chronically Ill Friends This Thanksgiving [text based article at autostraddle]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:45 AM PST - 8 comments

Postpartum confinement is the general term for remaining in bed or in seclusion for a period of time after childbirth. Many cultures have some form of this practice including China where it's called "Sitting the Month" and Latin American cultures of spending the first 40 days after childbirth in "quarantine" or la cuarentena. However, the practice of prepartum confinement, often simply called bed rest, is still used for certain pregnancy complications but used to be a more normalized part of European pregnancies for certain classes. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 9:04 AM PST - 12 comments

Despite their extreme lifestyles, avians can live remarkably long lives for animals their size.
posted by Etrigan at 7:39 AM PST - 13 comments

Is Link wearing pajamas in A Link to the Past? An investigation [Polygon]

“Link’s green tunic is an iconic game costume that stands the test of time. But when I first booted up The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on Game Boy Advance at a young age, I was fully convinced that Link spent the entirety of the game running around in his pajamas. In the game’s still-incredible opening segment, Link wakes up after receiving a telepathic plea for help from Princess Zelda. Soon after, Link ignores his uncle’s instructions to go back to sleep, doesn’t bother to change, and — once he sees that his uncle has been killed — barrels into a dungeon crawl through Hyrule Castle to save Princess Zelda. Does Link really save both the Light and Dark worlds in little more than a Hylian nightie? Is he an elite-trained child warrior wearing combat fatigues to bed? And did his uncle manage to pass on his mustache-growing skills before he died?”

posted by Fizz at 4:59 AM PST - 31 comments

Well, excellent friends, it's Monday, again, and this thread must be traveling on, now, 'cause there's too many places it's got to see... [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:12 AM PST - 102 comments

The U.S. city of the future - "What does the city of the future look like in the USA? Let's take a trip to Any City, USA of the mid 21st century. With a look at the existing situation, current trends, and recent government policy, let's take a look at where we'll work, how we'll get around, and where and who we'll live with in the coming decades." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:11 AM PST - 15 comments

Kherson celebrates liberation after 8 months of Russian occupation (Kyiv Independent photos). Buildings mostly stand, but infrastructure is largely severed. Zelenskyy says Russia has committed war crimes there, as in other occupied regions. 179 settlements on the west bank of the Dnipro River have been liberated. Russians continue defensive operations on the east bank. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 7:12 PM PST - 253 comments

It's a hostile world, but you're determined not just to survive, but thrive. Come meet The Weird and Wonderful Fans STILL Playing Fallout 76 [43m], an MMO game panned on its release but years later is home to Elizabethan actors, any number of outlaws, and even a cannibal cult (in a world where death is irrelevant). Even in the irradiated wastes, community will be found.
posted by hippybear at 6:03 PM PST - 10 comments

"one time in college a professor spent 90 minutes talking about an example scenario that involved beef and i thought nothing of it until several weeks later when i found out that my classmate had made a minute long compilation of all 125 times he said "beef" in one lecture"
posted by brundlefly at 4:44 PM PST - 69 comments

During quarantine, many of us watched a lot of movies, and perhaps yearned for a time when one could browse the shelves of the local video store looking for inspiration. For Jeff Kuykendall, writer and cult / horror movie aficionado, the solution was simple: build a video store in his basement. Midnight Video: the Private Video Store I Built in Quarantined Cabin Fever. [more inside]
posted by Ishbadiddle at 4:38 PM PST - 9 comments

As a reminder, the Metafilter Fundraiser Auction 2022 is nearing its end. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 3:58 PM PST - 8 comments

The bulk of rejected energy is an unavoidable byproduct of combustion and heat engines. We can, however, avoid wasting energy when heating/cooling houses and apartments. Learn about thermal bypass, thermal bridges, wind washing, heat pumps vs furnaces, air leakage, the stack effect and building envelopes. Weatherproofing? Deal with air leakage, make sure that insulation is installed properly and seal your attic. *(Data on energy flows from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, including one for 2021). [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:12 PM PST - 22 comments

All 240 Artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Ranked From Best to Worst by Bill Wyman (the journalist, not the bassist in the Rolling Stones) in Vulture, takes a long, hard look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees and ranks them. Originally written in 2018, it's been updated to include this year's RRHoF class. [more inside]
posted by tommasz at 7:40 AM PST - 101 comments

Emilie (seven) plays "Moon River" on piano for Sharky the dog
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 5:14 AM PST - 24 comments

"When @paulpowlesland told me in 2017 that he was going to up-anchor, squat a fucked post-industrial river in East London & try to precipitate its ecological recovery, I thought he was as crackers as his psychedelic cat leggings." — Jon Moses on Twitter. Full article: London's forgotten river and the barrister who saved it. via @ambrosen
posted by taz at 2:58 AM PST - 13 comments

The Mountain Dogs follows two beloved golden retrievers, Sampson and Baylor, as they climb to the summit of the Pinnacle Trail in Stowe, Vermont each day without their owners.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:24 AM PST - 26 comments

Keith Levene has died of liver cancer at the age of 65 His stint with The Clash was brief. He had a much larger impact on punk and post-punk as one of the original members of Public Image Ltd. His bright, echoing, shimmering guitar, at times lush, at times harsh, influenced generations of bands to come.
posted by Ayn Marx at 5:11 PM PST - 21 comments

'Ellen Needs Insurance' is the real story of an actor in her quest to get coverage Ellen is a Screen Actors Guild member who's $800 or so short in acting earnings this year to get insurance. When she can't get enough gigs, well....create your own! Which is to say, make a film about trying to get insurance and hire others in the same situation. Fundraising efforts can be found here.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:23 PM PST - 3 comments

Almost 50 years ago Dallas—and the country—was gripped by the tragic story of John McClamrock, a high school football player paralyzed during a violent tackle. But after the newspapers moved on, another story was quietly unfolding, one of courage, perseverance, and a mother’s fierce love. [more inside]
posted by charmedimsure at 2:03 PM PST - 11 comments

What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning? There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets. This works because his followers are similarly poisoned and can relate so well. Cached version
posted by signal at 1:20 PM PST - 65 comments

In a very rare interview, Elton John spends 25 minutes talking to Joni Mitchell about how she is today, her Newport Folk Festival performance, and many songs and what they bring to mind for her. It's a lovely interview, and Joni seems to be doing really great!
posted by hippybear at 1:12 PM PST - 12 comments

Judy Tenuta was the first comic to win "Best Female Comedian" at the American Comedy Awards. Her albums Attention Butt-Pirates and Lesbetarians! and In Goddess We Trust received Grammy nominations. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 11:39 AM PST - 35 comments

John Gomperts returned ancient objects worth up to £80,000 he had inherited from his grandmother, including artifacts from Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Pakistan.
posted by Etrigan at 10:28 AM PST - 12 comments

B. Dylan Hollis is a content producer who makes recipes from vintage cookbooks with a comedic flair. Some recipes go well. Others...don't. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:41 AM PST - 27 comments

F.D Signifier [previously 1, 2] is back with another Black Media Breakdown video essay: You're Wrong About Black Panther (2018) [1:20:57 YouTube video, auto-transcript only] [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 9:12 AM PST - 8 comments

"These are the hugs I miss" by Linda McIver: "One person can give many different hugs, but hugs between the same two people tend to develop a distinctive character over time."
posted by brainwane at 7:24 AM PST - 9 comments

Risk Calculators Launched to Help Americans Plan for Climate Change. (Bloomberg) "American communities facing a warmer future, with more intense floods, storms and wildfires, on Monday got two new digital tools that will aid officials in calibrating infrastructure and strategies to adapt." [more inside]
posted by mittens at 6:50 AM PST - 7 comments

The Long and Winding Road to Eukaryotic Cells - "Despite recent advances in the study of eukaryogenesis, much remains unresolved about the origin and evolution of the most complex domain of life." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 7 comments

The Simplest Math Problem No One Can Solve - Collatz Conjecture
posted by Bottlecap at 10:13 PM PST - 33 comments

If you like waving bubble wands and/or putting bubble wands in front of a fan or even popping bubbles then this bubble simulator may please you.
posted by swift at 6:39 PM PST - 21 comments

A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization
posted by sammyo at 5:25 PM PST - 4 comments

In winter, the Kalahari Basin in northern Botswana is a dusty, windswept wasteland of scrubby flora, with precious little rain. But not for long. As captured by a somber and wondrous segment from the original BBC Planet Earth, summer showers from the Angolan highlands soon feed a meandering river that splays out across the wilderness, flooding a vast inland delta that transforms hundreds of miles of arid desert into a verdant everglade teeming with life: the Okavango. This seasonal miracle, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Africa's Seven Natural Wonders, attracts all manner of megafauna that have adapted to its myriad creeks and lagoons, from migratory birds and amphibians to all five Big Game species (making it a boon for ecosafaris). And though it is (like most things) under threat from exploitation and climate change, conservationists worldwide are working tirelessly to defend it. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:43 PM PST - 4 comments

After months of discussions and public meetings, Toledo City Council passed a medical relief debt proposal by a vote of 7-5, approving $800,000 to purchase the medical debt of an estimated 41,000 Toledoans. As part of a collboration with the non-profit RIP Medical Debt, the city's plan will create up to $240 million in debt relief for its citizens. Toledo is the first city to approve a community-scale medical debt relief. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:55 AM PST - 40 comments

I guess the government found a utility for blockchains: Investigating fraud via blockchain. The DOJ and IRS have announced the seizure of 51,351 BTC stolen from the original Silk Road. In 2012 James Zhong devised a scheme to steal BTC from the Silk Road (previously: 1, 2, 3, 4). He was successful... [more inside]
posted by shenkerism at 10:50 AM PST - 51 comments

Gallagher has passed. Comedian Gallagher, who tormented audiences with smashed fruit through many years, has passed. After making a solid career working his same act over and over again, then becoming a mean, right wing crank, he has died. "And there was much rejoicing".
posted by Windopaene at 10:22 AM PST - 77 comments

This monday a multi-unit strike comprised of 48,000 student employees (TA's, student researchers, and post-docs) will be held across all UC campuses. The average TA salary in the UC system is $24,000. The students are bargaining for Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA), the ability to add dependents to their university healthcare, job stability, and parity for international students, among other demands. University administration referred to these demands in a letter to their staff as part of the unions "social justice agenda". [more inside]
posted by dreyfusfinucane at 10:21 AM PST - 54 comments

Comic book illustrator Kevin O'Neill, best known for his work on Marshal Law, 2000 AD, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has passed away of cancer at 69. [more inside]
posted by whir at 9:29 AM PST - 27 comments

Uber and DiDi spent billions in Latin America. Now homegrown contenders are flourishing in the places they ignored.
posted by Etrigan at 8:53 AM PST - 2 comments

Kevin Conroy, known for his iconic performance as the Caped Crusader over a range of media starting with Batman: The Animated Series, has passed away at the age of 66.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:41 AM PST - 62 comments

Cipe Pineles changed magazines forever. Her illustrated recipes tell a personal tale. A pioneering magazine art director illustrated recipes that became a book after her death, in part through the work of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat illustrator Wendy MacNaughton. MacNaughton had never heard of Pineles when she came across her forgotten sketchbook [more inside]
posted by fruitslinger at 8:22 AM PST - 3 comments

TrustCor Systems is a root certificate authority trusted by all major browsers, app stores, and email clients, but Prof Joel Reardon of AppCensus discovered irregularities with TrustCor and found that TrustCor has "identical slate of officers, agents and partners as a spyware maker" subsidiary of the surveillance company Packet Forensics, including Raymond Saulino. As late as 2010, Raymond Saulino and Packet Forensics sold tools that carry out man-in-the-middle attacks using forged certificates. Ryan Dickson of Google's Root Program identified additional irregularities [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 3:48 AM PST - 22 comments

Samuel Katz, 1927-2022, was the US virologist who was part of the research team that created the measles vaccine. Before its invention, measles killed 2.6 million people a year - by 2020, that number was just over 60,000. Coverage of the vaccine fell by 4% during the pandemic, but a new initiative from the Global Vaccines Alliance is now underway to reach 85 million children before the end of next year. [NYT / Archive/ via]
posted by ellieBOA at 1:05 AM PST - 27 comments

A CSS puzzle box from Blackle Mori (previously) [more inside]
posted by solarion at 8:25 PM PST - 16 comments

But buyers beware: Nepenthes [carnivorous plant] collecting—as I eventually learned almost too well—is next-level stuff. There’s a lot more to these plants than fertilizer and YouTube how-tos. They’re botanical prima donnas, liable to walk out on life without notice if their specific needs aren’t met. And your new hobby will shove you into a strange world. There’s something dark in the pits of those pitchers, and it’s not the rotting bugs. If you fall in, you may land in an acidic soup of crime, addiction, and existential angst. Mat Orchard thought he could handle Nepenthes. They nearly ate him alive.
posted by sciatrix at 3:03 PM PST - 20 comments

This is the story of what happened when a container full of precisely 4,756,940 pieces of Lego washed off the cargo ship Tokio Express during a storm off Land’s End in February 1997. "Even harder to find are examples of the 4,200 black Lego octopuses that had also been on board – they are almost impossible to spot when caught up in seaweed. As Tracey reminisces in the book, she found her first octopus back in 1997, not long after the cargo first went missing, but did not discover another one for a further 18 years." [more inside]
posted by MarianHalcombe at 3:03 PM PST - 10 comments

You could win a bar bet with this one: Friz Quadrata has appeared in more episodes of Law and Order than any actor...because Friz Quadrata is the show's title font across all its incarnations. On the big screen, some directors use the same typeface for titles across multiple films: John Carpenter and Albertus, Ingmar Berman and Florida (free knockoff here!), Stanley Kubrick and Futura, and (sorry) Woody Allen and Windsor. [more inside]
posted by Ishbadiddle at 2:23 PM PST - 19 comments

Nothing frustrates Roberta quite so much as being told she can’t do something, and nobody draws her ire quite like programmers, who she says would often go over her head to complain to her husband. In 1997, she told the Philadelphia Inquirer she found “a lot of arrogance” among the young, male programmers at her company. (This also describes the person she married.) “They like to think, ‘We know something you don’t.’ I remind them that I'm the designer. I know what I'm doing,” she said. from Why Roberta Williams Came Out of Retirement to Remake a Beloved Text Adventure [Vice]
posted by chavenet at 1:47 PM PST - 10 comments

Alex Jones ordered to pay nearly half a billion dollars to Sandy Hook families in additional damages (CNN). "This depravity, and cruel, persistent course of conduct by the defendants establishes the highest degree of reprehensibility and blameworthiness," said Judge Barbara Bellis in her decision. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 12:39 PM PST - 73 comments

The English Civil War in the style of Westside Story [Youtube, Horrible Histories]. And the post-Civil-War restoration of Charles II as a rap song. [Youtube, Horrible Histories]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:28 AM PST - 6 comments

In 1923 a primatologist named John Bauman conducted the first quantitative test comparing human and chimpanzee strength. His conclusion, that pound-for-pound chimpanzees were "more than three" times stronger than humans, gave rise to almost 100 years of conventional wisdom about chimpanzees' near mythical strength. This wisdom prevailed until 2017, when a team of scientists conducted the most rigorous study to date of chimpanzee strength, and concluded they averaged only 1.5x stronger than humans. That said, if the muscles on this hairless alpha male are anything to go by, some individual chimps are probably far stronger
posted by BadgerDoctor at 11:09 AM PST - 21 comments

Drawing the Times is a platform for graphic journalists and cartoonists, publishing special issues on climate change, "meat-free cities" and refugees. Tânia Alexandra Cardoso's ongoing series on Amsterdam (Chapter 1, Chapter 2) during the pandemic explores how an "emptied" city is full of decades of decisions on urban redevelopment.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:35 AM PST - 2 comments

One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened?
posted by Etrigan at 8:28 AM PST - 72 comments

These octopuses need their space! Gloomy octopuses are one of the few animals that throw projectiles at each other. They like to lead solitary lives but because ideal den grounds may be few and far between, sometimes they are forced to live near each other. Irritable gloomy octopuses throw things at each other when annoyed. Who doesn't want space sometimes? The NYTimes article is under paywall. If you are over the free article limit, please go to the PLOS abstract here.
posted by ichimunki at 8:03 AM PST - 14 comments

Early botanical gardens were often created for the purpose of growing plants for medicine with the oldest one dating back to the 1500s in Padua Italy. Ethnobotany continues to be a rich field for study with many medical and pharmacy schools also maintaining their own "drug gardens." [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 7:35 AM PST - 7 comments

During a concert at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, AZ in September 2022, the guitarist Julian Lage got to play a short improvisation and Charlie Christian's Seven Come Eleven on Christian's own 1940 Gibson ES-250, showing Lage's typical joy at playing, seeing what sounds he can coax out of this legendary instrument. [more inside]
posted by Grangousier at 6:49 AM PST - 6 comments

A friend sent me link to this vid and I just keep going back to it. My hope is that it'll catch you, too. This young man (more and more men are young to me as the years stack, I'm guessing Jon to be in his early 40s) this young man often sends me good links. He's from West Virginia, I've told him for years that he's got dirt on him, in a good way, maybe it's more that the dirt is in him; West Virginia seems to get inside the people, I think mostly in a good way. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 12:54 AM PST - 6 comments

A legend in the sport of basketball, Michael Jordan found himself in a much different position as the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats in 2011 - but as the Secret Base team recounts in their latest Jon Bois documentary, even while hating losing, he found enjoyment in the struggle.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:19 AM PST - 9 comments

One of the guess-that-song daily web games, Heardle Decades, has added Christmas Heardle -- listen to a few seconds at a time, type the name of the song or artist to search among dozens of Christmas songs, and try to guess the song within the first 12 seconds of the tune.
posted by brainwane at 5:41 PM PST - 5 comments

Help Alex Norris, creator of webcomic.name, pay their legal expenses. More information on the lawsuit can be found at this post on /r/comics.
posted by snortasprocket at 4:39 PM PST - 14 comments

The morning Super Deluxe shut down, filmmaker Allen Cordell finished his next video for them, a sequel to the previous one he'd made for them. Recently, I'm guessing an obstructive Turner Broadcasting higher-up recently experienced Occurences or something, because the video has finally been uploaded to Allen's Vimeo channel. No description can prepare you for a little gameshow called... WHOSE LEG IS THIS.
posted by BiggerJ at 4:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Tom Brady lost big on FTX. The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan lost big on FTX. Everybody who owns cryptocurrency lost big on FTX. FTX is the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, and it may be insolvent. The founder of FTX lost big on FTX, losing an estimate 94% of his wealth in a single day.
posted by clawsoon at 2:44 PM PST - 171 comments

When You Just Ain’t Got it All Together Dewayne Noel from Dry Creek Wrangler School shares some wisdom for the young folks (and not so young folks) who watch his channel. (SLYT, 16 minutes)
posted by swift at 2:38 PM PST - 2 comments

That night, I felt community so strongly , from the folks who came to the venue hours earlier to help move tables and hang fairy lights, to the people who’d travelled from neighbouring towns to be there, to the pal who made sure there were virgin mojitos on offer after I’d spoken to her weeks before about how I’ve been struggling with alcohol again. I felt part of something bigger which made me reflect on what that actually means. People often talk about rest and joy being found in ‘community’, but what is it and how do we find it as adults? [more inside]
posted by MarianHalcombe at 1:09 PM PST - 1 comment

📢📢📢Now, we ask you to help REVIVE Metafilter 📢📢📢 As of today’s fundraising update, we’re only $500 a month away from our Survive target!* The community is coming together to keep the lights on at our shared online home. But we need to go further to safeguard Metafilter’s future. It’s time to 🌱Revive Metafilter.🌱 [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 11:09 AM PST - 24 comments

Planet: Critical by Rachel Donald interviews diverse exports on topics related to climate change, the environment, human society, and economics (see her archives tab). [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 9:29 AM PST - 8 comments

Dr Pepper Enthusiast John Green Taste Tests Dr Pepper and Its Misbegotten Pretenders [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 4:15 PM PST - 77 comments

Commencing with an unusual total lunar eclipse, Election Day 2022 is upon us at last. Pundits and prognosticators predict that the Republicans will reclaim at least one house of US's bicameral federal legislature and at the state level many legislatures and governorships are up for grabs as well. Less scrutinized, but perhaps every bit as important, many states will elect officials who will be responsible for the security and integrity of elections going into the 2024 presidential election cycle. There's a lot at stake. [more inside]
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:15 AM PST - 724 comments

Peptoc Hotline features pre-recorded life advice and encouraging messages from the students at West Side Elementary, a K-6th public school in rural Healdsburg, California. Call 707-873-7862 (707-8PEPTOC). [more inside]
posted by dorey_oh at 9:43 AM PST - 15 comments

Mastodon's popularity is soaring, and it's all due to the chaotic actions of one man. As people explore what else is on offer for social media, Mastodon has emerged as a viable open-source alternative, with no ads. Reuters has an explainer, as does CNN, New York Times, and the Guardian. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 6:12 AM PST - 409 comments

Was stitched up by a postie, that's not glamorous. Song about Dick Turpin. [Youtube]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:30 AM PST - 6 comments

150 years ago, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president - "Letter to the New York Herald, April 2, 1871 - I claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised woman of the country and announce myself as a candidate for the presidency."[1,2,3] (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:07 PM PST - 2 comments

Examples of Medical Device Misconnections (FDA) Patients may require dozens of different devices at once. [...] Because these connectors are easy to use and may be compatible with different medical devices, users can mistakenly connect unrelated systems to one another.
posted by meowzilla at 9:08 PM PST - 29 comments

As part of Metafilter fundraising, our auction opened last night. See Metatalk to learn more or discuss.
posted by NotLost at 6:35 PM PST - 2 comments

Folks, US "democracy" has become such a clown show that English and Australian tourists are booking specialized election experience tours & disrupting canvasses.
posted by gottabefunky at 4:10 PM PST - 39 comments

Japan: the early 1980s. You have a small, urban, low fuel car containing a foldable motocycle which you are trying to market to younger demographics. Who do you hire to promote the car but ... a ska band from England called Madness, famous for their 'nutty train'. And thus a series of adverts for the Honda City came to be, and the tune became the song “In The City”. Though never released as a UK single, the track became the b-side to Cardiac Arrest and has since been performed live; the song Driving In My Car also appeared in the ads. The fuller and stranger story of the Honda City car from Honda's own website, Marco On The Bass and Autoweek. Bonus: Madness allegedly derived their 'nutty train' from this Dave Allen sketch.
posted by Wordshore at 2:03 PM PST - 16 comments

Virgin Atlantic has seen a 100 per cent rise in crew applications following its decision to launch gender-free uniform options, the airline’s CEO has said.
posted by folklore724 at 1:00 PM PST - 46 comments

You learn a lot by watching world leaders at the supermarket. Boris Yeltsin's visit to a Texas supermarket in 1989, seeing the plentiful food and the plethora of snacks, was claimed to have shattered his vision of Communism. George Bush was supposedly amazed at seeing a supermarket scanner at a grocer's convention in Orlando but this reaction was found to have been wildly overstated. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 8:15 AM PST - 105 comments

Poet, programmer and professor Allison Parrish writes: "Over the summer I dug in deep with Game Boy modding and made this: the Game Boy Pocket SP. [...] In this post, I’m going to talk about why and how I made the Pocket SP, and how you can make your own."
posted by mhoye at 7:28 AM PST - 6 comments

Shyam Saran Negi, Independent India’s first voter, passed away in Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur on Saturday. He was 105. Negi died of natural causes and will be cremated with full state honours, officials in Kinnaur said.
posted by Etrigan at 4:58 AM PST - 6 comments

Here’s one way to start this story: Who is the uncredited man at the end of Rosemary’s baby?
Here’s another way:
On a spring night in Madrid in 2003, the Spanish photographer Paco Gómez got a call from his brother-in-law. He had seen a messy pile of discarded photos on Calle Pez, a street in the gentrifying neighborhood of Malasaña, close to where Gómez lived. His brother-in-law thought it was the kind of thing that would interest him. He was right: Gómez put on his shoes and hustled out the door of his apartment. … The photos contained something much stranger than mere unknown lives for Gómez to imagine his way into. In one, a man in ratty underwear stood in a bare room in a posture of crucifixion. In another, a statuesque teenage boy posed like a magazine heartthrob. In still another a woman with a lustrous ponytail stood before a Dalí-esque canvas of angels and demons. … Though he didn’t yet know it, Paco Goméz had just met the Modlins.
posted by vacapinta at 3:42 AM PST - 8 comments

What will never let you down or desert you? a) This car, b) This album, c) This thread, d) This Mason, e) This Mason [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:15 AM PST - 81 comments

I Knew You Were Muggle (Taylor Swift Parody) | Young Jeffrey's Song of the Week [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 7:37 PM PST - 2 comments

'Ties'. A short animation by Dina Velikovskaya.
posted by clavdivs at 6:09 PM PST - 9 comments

In the ongoing tradition of satirical Honest Government Ads by The Juice Media, this one about a new gas project that, if approved, would be be very bad for climate change. Honest Government Ad: Visit Western Australia.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:24 PM PST - 17 comments

Want to hate Tetris, or for Tetris to hate you? The answer may be Hatetris (which you can play here), an adversarial Tetris game (by MeFi's Own qntm) that tries to serve you the worst possible pieces you could ever not hope for. Here's a detailed writeup of understanding and breaking the high score record by David & Filipe, who just shattered their previous record with 148 whole points.
posted by cortex at 1:45 PM PST - 22 comments

Limb lengthening used to be surgery primarily performed on little people (great first-person account here, shorter news article) or people with limb length discrepancies (YT channel, podcast). However in the last 15 years, more of the people who are getting the procedure done are getting it for cosmetic reasons, often "men with confidence issues." Surgery (and aftercare) is painful, time-consuming, and expensive yet it became much more popular during the early pandemic when lengthy recovery time would be less apparent. [previously. CW most of these links involve surgery talk and/or photographs]
posted by jessamyn at 12:27 PM PST - 41 comments

These next two weeks, we are collecting questions on ask.metafilter.com to help find fantastic holiday gifts that show love for friend, family, nature, and our global community. These questions, tagged with #MeFiGiftGuide2022, will be collected into an FPP on Nov 24, the night before Black Friday, to spread our community’s love and wisdom across the universe (or at least to the hearts of our future MeFi members). [more inside]
posted by rebent at 10:44 AM PST - 6 comments

Craig Conley of oneletterwords.com (previously) has over 4,000 vintage headlines for you to peruse, including: [more inside]
posted by wesleyac at 10:25 AM PST - 12 comments

City Climate Corner podcast (with transcripts!) explores how small and mid-sized cities/jurisdictions are tackling climate change and its impacts, such as extreme heat. Episodes (mapped geographically) include Contra Costa, Rotterdam, Flagstaff, Laramie, Fort Collins, Quinault Nation, Columbia (MO), Anchorage (and a special episode on Alaskan youth) and more.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:43 AM PST - 3 comments

Mimi Parker of Low has died. The vocalist and drummer died from ovarian cancer last night; her husband and bandmate Alan Sparhawk released a statement today: "Friends, it’s hard to put the universe into language and into a short message, but{...} She passed away last night, surrounded by family and love, including yours. Keep her name close and sacred. Share this moment with someone who needs you. Love is indeed the most important thing." [more inside]
posted by carrienation at 9:24 AM PST - 75 comments

The 2021 Rugby League World Cup is currently underway in England, for the first time it's not just one competition but four: Men's, Physical Disability, Wheelchair and Women's competitions. The basics of Rugby League are that the attacking team has six tackles to take forward the ball and score a try (4pts) by touching down the ball across the opposition line. A try further entitles a kick at goal, with success rewarded with 2 more points. More rules here. [more inside]
posted by biffa at 5:20 AM PST - 7 comments

Keen for some inspiration for next year's Halloween costume? Consider Red, a 2017 short film by artist Del Kathryn Barton with Cate Blanchett as a redback spider who orgasms then eats her mate. Of the aggressive score by Tom Schutzinger, Barton says, "it really comes at you and slaps you around, and the film really needs that.” Yes, yes it does. [more inside]
posted by Thella at 8:29 PM PST - 9 comments

"I already had a recurring payment to metafilter, so when I saw the casual banner note about fundraising, I initially ignored it. As others have suggested, making the situation more obvious/dire might attract more attention. I've since sent a one-time payment and upped my monthly payment. I'm not saying this to brag, but to stress that it nearly didn't happen due to me initially not realizing the severity of the problem." Anyway I figured that's fixable, so now you know! [more inside]
posted by aniola at 7:49 PM PST - 74 comments

Patrick Haggerty, trailblazing gay country singer, 1944-2022. If you're a longtime MeFite or a longtime public radio listener, you might know Patrick Haggerty from his StoryCorps story about a conversation he had with his dad as a teenager in the 1950s, where his father told him, "don't sneak." [previously, and previouslier.] But Haggerty - in addition to being an organizer, an activist, and a Marxist, who was kicked out of the Peace Corps for being gay - was also widely acclaimed as the first out gay country star as the leader of the band Lavender Country, who as early as 1973 were releasing songs like "Come Out Singing" and "Back in the Closet Again." [more inside]
posted by Jeanne at 6:09 PM PST - 15 comments

The Hearthstone Access Project, posted previously, is winding down after a little over a year. [more inside]
posted by Alensin at 5:44 PM PST - 5 comments

In 2011, Joe Staton and Mike Curtis breathed new life into Dick Tracy. In 2008, dril tweeted the word 'no'. In 2009, he helped breathe life into Weird Twitter. And now, the creator of Daily/Hourly Pornhubbed Heathcliff (content warning: random Pornhub comments) has created Dril Tracy, the Twitter bot that replaces sufficiently long text in Staton/Curtis-era-and-onward Dick Tracy comics with random dril tweets. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 4:16 PM PST - 4 comments

"When I started this, I thought this video was going to be like a chill travelog, that was like 30 minutes long, and, uh, it didn't turn out to be that." Jenny Nicholson does a fascinating four hours (almost) on the history and status (as of 2021) of Evermore, a Theme Park/Live Action Role Play experience. [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 3:01 PM PST - 38 comments

October 2022 in humanity's exploration of space. Let's start from the sun. The European Space Agency (ESA) Solar Orbiter zoomed very close to our star and captured great images of its corona. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 1:56 PM PST - 7 comments

If Books Could Kill is a podcast where Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri discuss and critique books that capture the public imagination. The first episode is about the infamous shitshow Freakonomics, and other staples of airport bookstores will follow in subsequent weeks. It is currently only on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but the plan is that it will be available everywhere.
posted by Kattullus at 9:18 AM PST - 45 comments

From the edited discussion (video) on The Geopolitics of Stuff in the inaugural issue of The Polycrisis: The last two years has demonstrated the power of feedback effects—how crises and policy responses magnify each other. Uneven international access to finance for energy worsens climate vulnerability, causing countries to then pay a higher price for debt.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:43 AM PST - 16 comments

[Quick link to the music video] Years before the Macarena enraptured the planet for a short while, we witnessed another dance phenomenon that had swept Earth (including Japan) – Lambada. There was no way to escape it from 1989 to 1990. [more inside]
posted by Roverlaw at 9:46 PM PST - 20 comments

USENIX is ending the Large Installation System Administration Conference after 35 years. "LISA made LISA obsolete (That's a compliment!)" by Thomas A. Limoncelli takes us back to 1987, when "System administration is important" and "Open systems like TCP/IP and POSIX (Unix) are the future" were radical ideas, and shares LISA history (including: "LISA was LGBT-friendly when other conferences most certainly were not."). [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 3:21 PM PST - 14 comments

From '50s pulp fiction P&P to bodice-ripper Northanger Abbey, it's the worst Jane Austen covers ever. (SL Twitter thread, with some additional egregious examples in the comments.)
posted by Kat Allison at 2:55 PM PST - 20 comments

The Philosophy of Modern Song is a new book by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan. [more inside]
posted by OHenryPacey at 1:05 PM PST - 34 comments

Koch snowflake a little too symmetrical for you? Consider the Kochawave Curve [pdf] (arxiv.org page), a variant that leans hard to the side and has a number of interesting properties and tilings of its own.
posted by cortex at 12:44 PM PST - 8 comments

What is a Groomer? is a documentary by little hoot and Caelan Conrad on moral panics, LGBTQ+ stigma, and stochastic terrorism.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 10:42 AM PST - 16 comments

Using freehand machine embroidery, Peter Frederiksen recreates scenes - and sometimes even short animated clips - from classic cartoons, and sometimes makes more abstract sketches. His web site is a bit neglected and the freshest images are on his instagram page. [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 9:42 AM PST - 8 comments

Every week brings word of another company bringing gamification to the workplace, whether it’s Amazon workers in India competing to deliver packages in order to score “runs” in a thirty-day, cricket-themed Delivery Premier League for rewards like smartphones and motorbikes, or United Airlines’ short-lived experiment to help staff “build excitement and a sense of accomplishment” by swapping their bonus with a lottery — available only for those with perfect attendance records, of course. In You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All, MetaFilter's own Adrian Hon examines how "points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life as tools for profit and coercion." [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 5:50 AM PST - 87 comments

To highlight the scale of the [missing white woman syndrome] problem, [Columbia Journalism Review] has developed a tool to test your own newsworthiness. By entering basic demographic data (none of which is saved by CJR) at areyoupressworthy.com, you can calculate your own worth, according to the American press.
posted by Etrigan at 3:56 AM PST - 55 comments

Bringing Humans into the water cycle [via mefi projects, where you can learn more about the project]
posted by aniola at 7:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Did the Oscar-Winning Director Asghar Farhadi Steal Ideas?
posted by Rich Text at 3:09 PM PST - 19 comments

"I spent the last couple weeks finally tackling a project I've put off for years: finishing a stained glass menorah project my grandfather started decades ago and left incomplete when he died." -- by Metafilter's own Josh Millard. (Related Twitter thread) [via mefi projects]
posted by bondcliff at 1:21 PM PST - 33 comments

Producer Rick Rubin and former Beatle Paul McCartney listen to isolated tracks for a classic recording. (SLYT)
posted by emelenjr at 12:48 PM PST - 28 comments

In Norse mythology, the earthly realm of Midgard and the divine plane of Asgard are connected by a shimmering rainbow bridge -- the magnificent Bifröst. Though scholars debate whether the legend of this lustrous path was inspired by the famed aurora borealis or the star-studded arc of the Milky Way, there is perhaps another possible candidate: nacreous clouds [timelapse]. Also known as polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), these breathtaking formations can be seen (quite rarely) in the high polar latitudes in wintertime at dusk, when a mass of super-cooled water ice forms so high up in the stratosphere that it reflects light from a sun that's well below the horizon at ground level. The result: diaphonous pearl-white sheets and iridescent streaks that light up the bleak twilight landscape with an otherworldly glow. (It's not all sunshine and stratospheric rainbows, though -- when mixed with nitric or sulfuric acid, these 10-15 mile-high clouds can contribute to ozone depletion over the polar caps [video].) Not a fan of winter weather? You may chance to see their more temperate cousin, the spectral and blue-tinged noctilucent cloud, which sometimes forms in summertime months north of 50° latitude (and north of 50 miles straight up). Or if you live near a space coast, you might see one of a menagerie of "twilight phenomenon" -- artificial light-clouds formed by multi-stage rocket plumes backlit by the sun -- including the spectacular space jellyfish. Just make sure to keep your eyes on the road... [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:13 PM PST - 13 comments

A squid biologist takes to the streets — and Skype — to share scientific knowledge. Squid biologist Sarah Mcanulty (@sarahmackattack) runs the Squid Facts hotline and recently hosted #Squidtember (with lots of delightful illustrations by Natalie Metzger aka The Fuzzy Slug.) Want a squid fact? Text "OH YEAH!" to 1-833-SCI-TEXT
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:07 PM PST - 8 comments

George Booth, New Yorker Cartoonist of Sublime Zaniness, Dies at 96 [ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:58 AM PST - 41 comments

Maya.land is one of those idiosyncratic personal websites with, for example, a page about heraldry and the Internet. ("Heraldry scales nicely down to avatars.") Maya most recently posted about choosing a new font. "...a lot of what we think we’re perceiving in an artwork or Thing is the part that can be flawlessly reproduced, but the way our minds grab onto it is all about its aura – the origin, the context, the situatedness that a mechanical reproduction wouldn’t duplicate."
posted by brainwane at 8:29 AM PST - 5 comments

Describes ending contact with people who want contact, but use contact for emotional abuse. Various phases, pleading, threat, etc.-- and the infuriating third parties who insist that your should maintain contact or forgive. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:43 AM PST - 24 comments

The Ontario government is preparing to use the notwithstanding clause - "a magical section of the Canadian constitution that allows provincial governments to simply ignore... the fundamental freedoms and legal rights of Canadian citizens" - to force the lowest paid education workers who have fallen furthest behind inflation to stay on the job. The union has vowed to strike anyway, starting Friday, despite the threat of daily fines of $4,000 for each worker and $500,000 for the union. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 6:39 AM PST - 92 comments

In the early years of the 20th century, pioneering inventors began the quest to fulfill humankind's greatest transport dream: motorized roller skates. Some used a V-twin engine, 2-stroke lawnmower engine, drills, jetpack or segway but could the future be an electric moonwalk?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:13 AM PST - 30 comments

The 3D Pollen Project have scanned and modeled about twenty types of pollen grain for those with access to a printer. [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:43 PM PST - 5 comments

Jessica Mitrani’s stylish short tells the true story of the sedentary Catalan Countess of Guell, Palomba Matas Mujika de Pumeral y Santiago, who at the age of eighteen famously reclined on a chaise lounge refusing to ever stand again. Narrated by Rossy de Palma, the Spanish star of "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" — who is known for her own dark and unorthodox beauty — the film recounts what would happen if the countess kept to her word, and is soundtracked by a sleek cover of The Velvet Underground’s “I’ll be Your Mirror”.”
posted by Roverlaw at 8:15 PM PST - 4 comments

A photoessay by Carol Guzy. Affectionately known as babushkas, these elderly women sheltered in place through the early days of the war in Ukraine.Nadia Panasivna Yerukhymovych, 89, sings a moving folk song called Mother's Braid CW: possibly disturbing imagery; dead animal
posted by adept256 at 5:30 PM PST - 7 comments

Gathering Together For The Magic of Magic: The Gathering
posted by Etrigan at 4:50 PM PST - 27 comments

BBC News: “...they saw a Fiat Panda which had been converted from petrol to electricity. They imported a similar car into Norway and used the first modern-day EV on the country's roads to launch a campaign of civil disobedience, making a point about how it needed to embrace an alternative to polluting fossil fuel vehicles. They racked up fines as they drove the car through toll booths, parked illegally and refused to pay vehicle taxes, arguing that this new form of sustainable transport should be free of these levies in order to make it more attractive.” More in [Goodwood] [Which Car]
posted by Wordshore at 3:49 PM PST - 12 comments

The divorce of Melania Trump's former social secretary and the heir to Bunny Mellon's fortune is a classic example of why you should follow your lawyer's advice. Thomas Lloyd and Rickie Niceta married in 2006. He cheated on her in 2014 and after they reconciled, he voluntarily and against the advice of his lawyer signed a post-nuptial agreement to get her to stay in the marriage. The cost: he would give Rickie $7 million if he cheated again. He cheated again and now a court in Maryland says he needs to cough up the money.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 3:47 PM PST - 36 comments

Physical education is a part of public education in the US. APE (Adapted PE) is mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Here are some tips for being inclusive of students with autism in physical education and some more scientifically-backed suggestions (pdf). [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 2:26 PM PST - 11 comments

It’s Metafilter’s annual fundraiser! Contributions from the community keep the lights on, and we’ve been asking you to help fund Metafilter. Here’s an update on MeTa about our first week of fundraising. [more inside]
posted by tavegyl at 12:35 PM PST - 19 comments

Comiclopedia, once the brainchild of the late Sir Cornelius Kousemaker, the owner of the oldest comics shop in Europe still in business. Did you know there are now 14,000 comics artists counted there by country? From Algeria to Yemen -- will wonders never cease? It's no wonder Kees Kousemaker got himself knighted. [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 12:19 PM PST - 7 comments

Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:24 AM PST - 153 comments

From the site: "an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon."
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:02 AM PST - 41 comments

For too long, the running community has pretended as though it were possible to keep politics out of running. As if, somehow, running is the great equalizer where people can come together and compete on an equal playing field, transcending all markers of identity. The truth is, when I go for a run as a Black woman, that in and of itself is a political act and one that puts me at risk—fearing for my life. As long as we live in a world steeped in white supremacy—and we do—being a Black woman will never be separate from my identity as a runner. From a conversation with Alison Désir (Instagram link), author of the new book Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport that Wasn’t Built For Us, in today's Culture Study newsletter by Anne Helen Petersen. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 6:22 AM PST - 9 comments

A vial of human serum, an ice box and an illegal flight: how an Australian doctor saved millions of babies' lives. John Gorman is probably the most famous Australian you've never heard of. His groundbreaking medical research to treat a blood disease has saved millions of babies' lives around the world and it wouldn't have happened if not for an ice box, an illegal flight and his sister-in-law.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:22 AM PST - 8 comments

... 2hrs of the forest of the giants, the tallest flowering plant in the world, a eucalypt that can reach 90m in height. And beneath its arbour is an incredible array of wildlife, including an incredible chorus of birds. Ann Jones (previously) recorded this near Marysville in Victoria. It was a cold, misty morning on Taungurong Country and among the first sounds that can be heard in this recording is a male lyrebird practising some of his repertoire – both mimicry and his own sounds. [more inside]
posted by Thella at 3:44 AM PST - 9 comments

Happy 17th birthday to Kabosu, the origin of the doge meme.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:45 PM PST - 9 comments

Takeoff, one-third of the hyped and influential rap trio Migos, died in Houston last night. He was 28. [more inside]
posted by kfholy at 7:56 PM PST - 38 comments

While this would have been more fitting on October 31 than November 1, here's the Scooby-Doo Project for your spooky, found-footage entertainment.
posted by sardonyx at 6:17 PM PST - 12 comments

Julie Powell is dead. Her manic and maniacal cooking of the entire oeuvre of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol I was at one time the best of the web. While Julia Child herself did not approve of the tone or struggle of the project, foodies, weirdos, and weird foodies flocked to read Julie's updates. [SLNYT] [more inside]
posted by wnissen at 5:42 PM PST - 39 comments

Rabbit Test is a short story by Samantha Mills, published online by Uncanny. Content Note: Sexual Assault, abuse, traumatic miscarriage, psych ward treatment, and suicide.
posted by Zonker at 3:11 PM PST - 7 comments

A photo essay. A photographer spent years documenting the cultural, ecological and potential human health impacts in communities downstream of Alberta’s oilsands. Photo warnings: terminal illness, dying, funerals and animal death (hunting and aftermath).

A United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances wrote “Indigenous Peoples appear to be disproportionately located in close proximity to actual and potential sources of toxic exposure.”
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:17 PM PST - 10 comments

As the industry consolidates, it runs the risk of putting profits ahead of kids—and setting back the movement for universal childcare. (archive.ph link)
posted by Etrigan at 2:06 PM PST - 16 comments

Black, White, and Grey All Over: Where Binary Teaching Fails Underground Comix - The newly relaunched Gutter Review (previously Neotext Review) takes a look at teaching underground comics, generational changes in reading, Robert Crumb and the place of offense in literature. Previous Robert Crumb. Previously.
posted by Artw at 12:04 PM PST - 39 comments

"I don't think that would solve anything - running away... [y]ou can't run away, man. WE have got to do something."

D. H. Peligro the drummer for the Dead Kennedys since 1981, died on Friday October 28th at the age of 63. Peligro also briefly worked with many punk bands and also the Red Hot Chili Peppers as well as fronting his own band, Peligro. Flea from the RHCP called him "the truest rocker" He was outspoken about his experiences of racism as a Black drummer in a punk band. DK has put up a brief announcement on Facebook and Jello Biafra posted his own remembrance on the Alternative Tentacles website.
posted by jessamyn at 11:20 AM PST - 34 comments

When you get tired of debating U2's catalog in Bondcliff's post, Rolling Stone has all of Taylor Swift's songs ranked for your consideration.
posted by COD at 10:53 AM PST - 51 comments

If there's one thing everybody loves, it's U2! And if there's one thing nobody ever argues about, it's a list of things. So with that in mind, let's all talk about Vulture's ranking of All 234 U2 Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best! [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 10:07 AM PST - 116 comments

Dilip Mahalanabis, who came up with “the most important medical discovery of the 20th century,’’ died last month. Dr Dilip Mahalanabis was one of the main movers behind Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT, sometimes known as ORS), which can cut deaths from dehydration, especially due to diarrhea, from 30% to around 3%. Doctors had been treating dehydration with IV rehydration for decades, but that is expensive, and requires trained staff. Starting with refugee camps in Bangladesh in 1971, Dr. Mahalanabis realised that the same mixture of boiled water, sugar and salts could be given orally. It could be done quickly and cheaply, and most importantly, it didn't need a doctor. People could learn how to make the mixture, and share the recipe with neighbours. [more inside]
posted by YoungStencil at 8:24 AM PST - 56 comments

If limbo is all we know, perhaps we take some comfort in the banality of its ubiquity.
posted by chavenet at 8:01 AM PST - 19 comments

[Trigger warning: child abuse, domestic violence and systemic failures to protect kids.] In the state of colorado, court appointed investigators act as “parental responsibility evaluator” in custody cases, making recommendations to judges for the custody of children, some of whom have been abused by their parents. There is little to no oversight over these investigators, not all of whom believe most abuse victims. E.g.: “The #MeToo movement informs us that, you know, about 90% of all allegations are true, or something around there,” he said. “In my forensic work, that’s completely flipped on its head: About 90% of the allegations I hear are false.” Kilmer emphasized the estimates are based on his “own experience,” not scientific research. [more inside]
posted by lab.beetle at 7:33 AM PST - 23 comments

This is the most beautiful and memorable pieces of writing I've come across in a long time. Excerpt from Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine by Patricia Grayhall
posted by night_train at 6:08 AM PST - 5 comments