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David Letterman's series for Netflix My Next Guest takes itself to new territory when David visits Kiev and interviews Voodymyr Zelenskyy in a subway station and tours the city with comics and others. My Next Guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Full Episode | Netflix [44m]
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM PST - 20 comments

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD, the unofficial mascot of the Texas Christian University HornedHYPNO Toads football team, which is having an improbably good run this season. (SLNYT / archive.today) [more inside]
posted by snortasprocket at 1:50 PM PST - 16 comments

On this final day of the Year of Our Load 2022, a gallimaufry of best-ofs from largely reputable publications and sites both general and music-oriented. In no particular order:
MOJO: The 50 Best Albums of 2022
[more inside]
posted by the sobsister at 11:13 AM PST - 23 comments

If you looked at this post title and thought, that is some hyperbole, I would have agreed with you if I had not already watched it. He Thought He Had Friends. They Were Paid Actors is a YouTube video by channel T1J that popped up in my feed and which I tried to ignore, because it sounds like a horrible mean-spirited thing I would not enjoy. But finally I couldn't help it, I had to know the ending. Reader, I cried. And you might. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 10:35 AM PST - 20 comments

Only four people have ever solved the puzzle contained in the pages of Cain’s Jawbone. TikTok helped turn the obscure, 100-page British novel into a craze. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:06 AM PST - 14 comments

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the risk of nuclear war is again on the rise—though it remains, for most, at a remove, seemingly irrelevant to daily life. How can we keep a sustainable balance of attention between the immediate (rent, food, health) and what could fairly be deemed intangible (the annihilation of human life)? The language of the nuclear threat becomes almost comedic—even within the bounds of this piece—vacillating between “peril” and “crisis,” “war” and “utter annihilation,” terms that, through repeated use, become monotonous, cartoonish. from By the Bomb’s Filmic Light
posted by chavenet at 8:32 AM PST - 15 comments

A Metafilter Tradition, DJ Earworm mixes through the year 2022, I Want Music
posted by wheelieman at 7:11 AM PST - 5 comments

Barbara Walters has died.
posted by clavdivs at 6:03 AM PST - 47 comments

Farewell to Benedict XVI: ‘Humble worker in vineyard of the Lord', Former Pope Benedict XVI dies at 95
posted by kmt at 4:23 AM PST - 57 comments

Sophy Wong makes clothing using a hybrid 3dprint-sewn technique. [more inside]
posted by clew at 7:35 PM PST - 14 comments

This is an article that talks about atmospheric rivers, which can carry more water than the Amazon River and provide California with like half its water. This is a 25-minute video that talks about how to use emergency fire shelters for firefighters. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 5:30 PM PST - 9 comments

It's the Holiday season. Are you stressed? If so, you might enjoy listening to some of the tapes recorded by Israel Regardie for Falcon Press in the early 1980s. I particularly recommend #1 on Awareness, #2 on Relaxation, and #11 on Rhythmic Breathing. [more inside]
posted by wittgenstein at 11:45 AM PST - 8 comments

Red Letter Media takes a look at the growing trend of VHS collecting, which has created an entirely new market for professional VHS grading: We Finally Watched Nukie: The VHS Grading Video
posted by Pendragon at 11:18 AM PST - 34 comments

We Rate Dogs’ annual compendium of good boys and girls is here. If you’re like me, you might want to have tissues available—these videos seem to bring an inordinate amount of dust with them.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 10:50 AM PST - 18 comments

I don’t know if you heard, but Stanford University banned the word “Americans” (SL Substack from Stanford professor Adrian Daub).

I am notorious for getting myself signed up for way too university mailing lists ...I also don’t delete emails. In those 29,000 emails [in Daub's inbox], the acronym “EHLI” or “elimination of harmful language” doesn’t appear once. If Stanford “announced” a policy “banning” use of the word “American”, surely it wouldn’t forget to tell its tenured faculty members.

posted by spamandkimchi at 9:45 AM PST - 82 comments

On this December 30th, US National Bacon Day (coverage last year; one of several Bacon Days?), enjoy the English Wikipedia page on "bacon mania".
posted by brainwane at 9:41 AM PST - 18 comments

[TW: Acrophobia, real life fear] A lovely Friday video, in which professional climber Magnus Midtbø has Alex Honnold (previously) convince him to free solo, or, climb without safety equipment, a 206 meter cliff.
posted by SunSnork at 9:30 AM PST - 29 comments

Trump Tax Returns (WaPo gift) released (NYT gift) by the House Ways and Means Committee (CNBC) (.pdfs via Axios, analysis and .zip via the House). [more inside]
posted by box at 9:19 AM PST - 39 comments

Surely it’s possible. A place to go that… proves life’s beauty rather than pantomiming it. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:56 AM PST - 9 comments

Skagway, Alaska's Mo Mountain Mutts (YT, IG, TikTok) is an unusual dog-walking service that employs a 14-passenger minibus to pick up its clients (YT mirror).
posted by uncleozzy at 5:49 AM PST - 6 comments

Yet something did survive. In the deepest reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes packed by Eve’s mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No, inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and was centered in a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of L.A. The Franklin Avenue scene, I call it for reasons that will become apparent. And it had all the explosive vitality that the scene at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank had for Ernest Hemingway and his fellow Lost boys. It was the making of one great American writer, the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another. These two writers were friends. Enemies as well. They were also women, a fact fundamental rather than incidental... from Joan Didion and Eve Babitz Shared an Unlikely, Uneasy Friendship—One That Shaped Their Worlds and Work Forever by Lili Anolik [ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:58 AM PST - 14 comments

A 2010 instructional music video, for businesses who have been advised to “Redesign Your Logo”, by Neil Cicierega. (previously)
posted by Wordshore at 4:17 AM PST - 15 comments

Why We Might Be Alone David Kipping, of Columbia University, takes on the usual arguments for a universe that is “teeming with life” and finds them all wanting. [more inside]
posted by argybarg at 11:05 PM PST - 79 comments

The Pac-Man Dossier is an extremely detailed description of the game logic of arcade Pac-Man. It explains why, once in a while, monsters will harmlessly pass through Pac-Man. It explains why they won't go up through the tunnels above the monster box. It explains why occasionally, after losing a life, monsters will refuse to leave the box . It explains when and why Blinky becomes Cruise Elroy, and why sometimes Pinky gets confused and loses track of Pac-Man. It even explains, as far as the player can continue to play, what to do on the kill screen. It is awesome. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:43 PM PST - 7 comments

After having his Twitter account reinstated, alt-right influencer and misogynist Andrew Tate decided to pick a fight with climate activist Greta Thunberg, and quickly found himself on the wrong side of her acerbic wit. His reaction to her snark wound up being much more serious for Tate, as he revealed he was currently in Romania - where he was facing charges of kidnapping, rape, and human trafficking. Needless to say, the Romanian police responded by arresting Tate and his brother Tristan. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:58 PM PST - 310 comments

Pelé, the Brazilian soccer legend who won three World Cups and became the sport’s first global icon, has died at the age of 82.
posted by NotLost at 5:43 PM PST - 40 comments

Ian Tyson, Canadian folk singer and songwriter, passed away today on his ranch in Longview, Alberta at the age of 89. His most lasting contribution must be "Four Strong Winds", once voted the greatest Canadian song of all time, and the unofficial anthem of Alberta. [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 5:17 PM PST - 25 comments

The House Oversight Committee's hearings on climate disinformation: Backtracking on promises to release subpoenaed industry documents. Industry bullying of reporters like Hiroko Tabuchi. "The [oil] industry wants to see so much government funding for carbon capture locked in that there’s no choice but to continue down that path." (recall the Juice Media's CCS episode) From Amy Westervelt of Drilled.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:15 PM PST - 8 comments

Every Friday, photographer Mayan Toledano drives her silver Volvo convertible—decorated with a dancing Elvis hanging from the rearview mirror and a pink cowboy propped on the dashboard—to deep corners of Brooklyn like Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach to deliver food to food-insecure Holocaust survivors. These survivors are members of Connect2, a program created by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island. “I now have a lot of grandparents in the city,” says Toledano, who moved to New York more than 10 years ago. “Otherwise, I don’t have family here at all.”
posted by minervous at 4:09 PM PST - 5 comments

Radio Garden - This is a globe. It has green dots. Each green dot represents a radio station somewhere in the world. This website plays those radio stations. There are a lot of radio stations. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 3:58 PM PST - 15 comments

Madhav Sahasrabudhe shows how to spin cotton yarn by hand with a peti charka or book charkha. The peti charkha is a foldable, accelerated spinning wheel invented in India in the twentieth century (perhaps by or at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi) - giving all the functionality of a great wheel, in a package the size of textbook, with an enormous 1:125-1:150 drive ratio. Want to try one? Mark Shepard wrote up detailed tips in 1983. Don't want to buy one? You can DIY your own from mid-90s craft store items, or 3D print the pieces.
posted by janell at 1:36 PM PST - 10 comments

Panamanian glassfrogs hide their blood while they sleep, to improve their transparent camouflage! More on phys.org, including a video of a frog being scanned in a frog scanner.
posted by moonmilk at 1:21 PM PST - 6 comments

There have been two recent high-profile articles criticizing those trying to avoid catching or spreading SARS-Cov-2 (or trying to avoid catching/spreading it again): one in the NYTimes, "The Last Holdouts" by Amy Harmon (who reportedly deceived members of a covid safety group for parents about her own position), and one in the New Yorker, "The Case for Wearing Masks Forever," criticizing the People's CDC, by Emma Green (who is reportedly an anti-mask advocate). There have been rebuttals (more inside) [more inside]
posted by girandole at 12:17 PM PST - 161 comments

They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is... [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:43 AM PST - 21 comments

Historical accuracy and truth are not important for Beijing’s purposes. China would obviously prefer a more comprehensive interpretation of Zhangzhung’s extent, and the lack of knowledge and certainty surrounding Zhangzhung make it ripe for exploitation and distortion. The importance of the kingdom is that it is tied to so many cultural and geostrategic dynamics China wants to manipulate today. Beijing is therefore actively creating historical revisionism through the sponsorship of archaeologists and historians to provide a new narrative of Zhangzhung in order to justify its territorial, cultural, and geopolitical control in the region. from How China Reinvented an Ancient Kingdom to Advance Its Claims in the Himalayas [The Diplomat]
posted by chavenet at 4:40 AM PST - 20 comments

A Hobart mum has bent down to pick up her dog's Tasmanian devil-shaped stuffed toy, when the toy started running, resulting in her and the kids taking refuge on the kitchen table until the animal bolted out the back door.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:01 AM PST - 40 comments

The story of how an unaired TV pilot from David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada, Band of Brothers, etc.) starring Bebe Neuwirth won an Oscar. (Grainy YouTube video of the pilot included in the link.)
posted by sardonyx at 10:11 PM PST - 10 comments

Tom Scott apologises: So it turns out the whole history about fire brigades not coming to put out fires if you're not insured with them wasn't true at all. (SLYT; 7 mins with link to the longer report, which is here)
posted by cendawanita at 9:49 PM PST - 31 comments

2022, in 7 minutes (SLYT Vox)
posted by rebent at 5:46 PM PST - 10 comments

Come Fly With Me: The Story of Pan Am [59m] shows what air travel was from its founding with a Miami-Havana mail route taking on passengers to creme de la creme air travel that finally collapsed after airline deregulation and the race toward the bottom. Relive the most glamorous decades of flying!
posted by hippybear at 5:00 PM PST - 11 comments

When you realize you want to turn a private group chat conversation into a useful public document, Sisi Wei suggests: "Many times, it is only because a conversation was off the record that we are able to learn the most — and after learning it, we realize that the broader community could benefit from learning it too. So how do we share knowledge from conversations we all agreed would be private, in a way that builds more trust instead of tearing it down? I’m so proud to announce the launch of 'How to turn 🔒 Private Conversations into 🌳 Public Resources through 🤝 Community Consent,' a step-by-step guide for journalists on how to use a consent-based, trust-building process to turn off-the-record conversations into public, shareable resources." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 1:12 PM PST - 4 comments

A blog about travelling around Britain (mostly England and Wales) with a literary focus.
* Welcome to Sunny Stevenage (Ellen Terry, Gordon Craig, Forster, Orwell, Bulwer-Lytton)
* The Strangest Town in Wales (Laugharne: Dylan Thomas)
* East Enders (Dickens, Marlowe, other London writers)
[more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 1:07 PM PST - 5 comments

From the owner's Instagram page. Kabosu, the 17-year-old shiba inu that inspired the Doge meme, has been diagnosed with leukemia and liver disease. [more inside]
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 12:53 PM PST - 17 comments

Salaams from India and namastes from Pakistan dominate these comment sections of music and dance videos, in what sometimes feels like the simplest place on the South Asian internet. The heights of this fraternalism are on display in the fandom for Coke Studio Pakistan, which recently completed its 14th season. On their channel, Indian fans feel free to be wistful, hysterical and often envious about the show's music. "But this is unsurprising, really," said Rohail Hyatt, who spearheaded the show in 2008. "Nation-states are much younger than the histories of music that are woven all across South Asia. Of course, they take on different meanings to listeners, as is documented in the comments. But shared histories just exist. They always have. No one, in no position of power, can counter that." [more inside]
posted by smcg at 12:31 PM PST - 4 comments

The holiday travel season saw a polar vortex that caused American carriers to struggle, but for Southwest Airlines, the initial issues of the season quickly compounded into a cascade failure that has left many travelers stranded across the US even as the weather has improved over much of the country. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:53 AM PST - 93 comments

Kermit the Frog in Half-Life 2
posted by cortex at 7:46 AM PST - 7 comments

A specialist on medieval manuscript noticed a possible case of plagiarism. They started looking into it, and found out that nobody is real and nothing is real. The rest of the are worth looking into as well.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 6:38 AM PST - 64 comments

Parks Canada's most memorable public toilets of 2022
posted by jacquilynne at 6:20 AM PST - 25 comments

Every Christmas Eve, I took my belongings and travelled the Humboldt Way back to the institution grounds. An animal had broken through one of the windowpanes, and so I could unclasp the window and let myself in. I camped in this very hall, right where you’re sitting, by this same hearth, heating myself with the wood we used to keep in the shed, and with some dry wood I collected on my trek up the path. I did this every Christmas Eve, as I said, and in this way I could look after the place. I could watch it fall slowly apart, the paint chipping around windows and doors, the roof sagging and collapsing in places, the floorboards rotting. from "S/Z" by Ben Libman [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:07 AM PST - 2 comments

Fourteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2022. Smithsonian paleoanthropologists reveal the year’s most riveting findings about our close relatives and ancestors.
posted by gudrun at 7:21 PM PST - 25 comments

WOOKS: An acid-soaked journey to the edge of madness with the wise and wild Wooks of America’s hippie underbelly.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:57 PM PST - 8 comments

I Spent 3 Years Alone Building a Log Cabin.
posted by storybored at 2:16 PM PST - 29 comments

The Lies of P [Announcement Trailer] [Gameplay Trailer] “Lies of P is a new “Souls-like” action RPG that blends the classic children’s story Pinocchio with the plague-filled horrors of Bloodborne. Developed by Round 8 Studios (Bless Unleashed) and published by Neowiz, the game is slated to come to Google Stadia, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X in 2023. Lies of P looks like a horrifying take on the toy-becomes-boy classic. The first part of the trailer shows a rat squirming out of what appears to be a dead man’s mouth. It’s a far cry from the cheery tale many people know from the animated Disney film.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 6:34 AM PST - 36 comments

An underdog who wins against the bad guys. This is the kind of story we all enjoy. [nitter]
posted by chavenet at 4:00 AM PST - 76 comments

Best ways to reduce city car use, a researched listicle [more inside]
posted by aniola at 7:54 PM PST - 102 comments

Even in the worst situations there are people who shine like beacons. Amid a deadly winter storm, heart-warming tales spring forth of neighbors assisting stranded tourists and helping deliver babies. [more inside]
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 6:02 PM PST - 10 comments

How to befriend crows. "Only the females rattle-knock." [more inside]
posted by gregoreo at 5:50 PM PST - 24 comments

"One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20. According to that person’s memory (which given the amount time that has elapsed, means that we should basically be saying “according to legend” at this point), a total of eleven copies of “OS/2 for Mach 20” were ever sold, and eight of them were returned."
posted by clawsoon at 4:41 PM PST - 22 comments

I’ve had this question rattling around in the back of my mind for the best part of a year now. I enjoy playing wargames. Anything from the complexity of the hex-and-counter simulation of Stalingrad ’42, to the abstract duel of Twilight Struggle. The same question keeps coming back to me though – should I really be enjoying something based on a conflict which saw hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people die?
posted by Etrigan at 2:34 PM PST - 63 comments

Animation short film “Metamorphosis" (9:20)
posted by amtho at 12:37 PM PST - 4 comments

A new Christmas song: "I just want the Tories to fuck off"
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:18 AM PST - 15 comments

How a Cocaine-Smuggling Cartel Infiltrated the World’s Biggest Shipping Company [Bloomberg; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:43 AM PST - 13 comments

Hello, friends, welcome to Monday — and, for some of you, Boxing Day. But this thread is here to say, don't box it, unbox it! Let loose your comments, links, aphorisms, jingles, jangles, rhymes and riddles here! Fly your flag, free your sails, tell your tales, let it out! [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:57 AM PST - 77 comments

Gamespot has an epic series of videos covering various bits of esoterica concerning The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Here's a playlist of all of them. Youtube channel Looygi Bros has a similar playlist covering Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Wind Waker. Added together, it totals 841 miscellaneous pieces of Zelda lore! By the time you've finished watching them all, it'll probably be Zelda Day 2023! [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:14 AM PST - 14 comments

House committee investigating Jan. 6 insurrection has released its report. Read the full report.
posted by NotLost at 5:53 PM PST - 67 comments

Previously on gorgeous faux-70's puppet show The Creatures of Yes, they came back for a Midnight Special... and haven't left since. And now Snowflake Day (in the climatological season known in TV-land as Christmas) has rolled around, and with it, an epic holiday special filmed in a library instead of a literal closet: Snowflake Revue. (Previ-yes-ly.)
posted by BiggerJ at 3:43 PM PST - 4 comments

YouTuber AdvensturesOfSly gained a bit of frame this year with a vial Mary Poppins video. Now they present a Christmas Video to end the year. Other amusing videos by this creator to perhaps give you some year end amusing nonsense: Jeddie Murphy, Revenge of the Jedi, The Sound of Music, but the hills are no longer alive, Spider man learns that with great power comes great piano, Werner Herzog narrates as the Penguin from Wallace and Gromit enters The Fallout Universe. No doubt from Todd Howard announcing Wallace and Gromit joining the Fallout Franchise.
posted by interogative mood at 3:22 PM PST - 2 comments

Don Christopher, a California farmer who turned the humble, much-maligned bulb of garlic into a staple in millions of American homes and elevated the sleepy town of Gilroy into the garlic capital of the world, died on Dec. 12 in Gilroy. He was 88. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 10:37 AM PST - 35 comments

The Public Domain Review has curated a collection of diaries from Christmas past, all sourced from the Internet Archive. [Many without alt text.]
posted by eotvos at 9:56 AM PST - 6 comments

Enjoy reading and recommending science fiction and fantasy prose, art, TV, film, and more published in 2022 with a crowdsourced list of Hugo Award-eligible works, people, magazines, etc. It currently lists 164 short stories and 29 novelettes, most of which you can read for free online, along with more than 130 novels, 19 graphic stories, and dozens of magazines and podcasts. This collaborative spreadsheet is administered by the fans who run the group blog Lady Business. If something you loved isn't in the sheet, please add it!
posted by brainwane at 8:40 AM PST - 3 comments

RIP Maxi Jazz, 1957 - 2022. Truly no obituary needed to explain his place as "dance music's poet" beyond his very own words...
posted by protorp at 7:25 AM PST - 17 comments

A personal holiday tradition: spending Boxing Day trying to solve this quiz. Here's the link to the Guardian. If you don't want to visit that paper, then the quiz should be up on the College site pretty soon.
posted by CCBC at 1:24 AM PST - 54 comments

Pub-crawling Santas get armoured vehicle stuck in Cornish hedge [more inside]
posted by ominous_paws at 12:11 AM PST - 26 comments

The unstoppable Jon Solomon is well into his 34th year of his 25 hour Christmas marathon on WPRB, a community supported radio station in Central New Jersey. He goes until to 6 pm on Christmas, so you have plenty of time to still tune in. He's got lots of weird Christmas music to serve up, so tune in, turn on, and Xmas out.
posted by mollweide at 9:58 PM PST - 4 comments

You can't imagine what this little company with big ambitions went through to create an iconic film that entirely flopped at the box office. The Making Of Tron [1h28m] is full if insights about process, computer imaging, business running, and basically everything about Tron, the cutting edge movie of its day.
posted by hippybear at 9:39 PM PST - 16 comments

World's largest crocheted Christmas tree knitted in Portugal [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:29 PM PST - 19 comments

There are many various Santa substitutes celebrated around the world, but for sheer oddity, few can beat New Windsor's Eggbert the Egg. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:02 PM PST - 17 comments

Happy Holidays, MetaFilter! I hope you enjoy this 1954 jazz album, Winter Sequence. Written by Leonard Feather and arranged by Ralph Burns, it features the following artists: [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 1:42 PM PST - 5 comments

"I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.  I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced."  ..  "I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable." — William Shatner (NPR)
posted by jeffburdges at 10:38 AM PST - 40 comments

a raccoon tries to catch falling snow
posted by aniola at 8:49 AM PST - 19 comments

It's never easy to go on strike, but the winter holidays are an especially tough time to fight the bosses. UMWA coal miners in Alabama have been on strike for over 600 days. Workers in various departments of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been out since October, and have been publishing the Pittsburgh Union Progress the whole time. Mental health professionals in Hawai'i went on strike in August against Kaiser Permanente and are still holding the line. United Auto Workers employed by Case New Holland in Iowa and Wisconsin have been on strike for nearly eight months. [more inside]
posted by heteronym at 8:44 AM PST - 8 comments

Movie studios can be sued under false advertising laws if they release deceptive movie trailers, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson issued a ruling in a case involving “Yesterday,” the 2019 film about a world without the Beatles.
posted by Etrigan at 7:59 AM PST - 66 comments

Three fantastical stories about trying to heal. "Isabel said, 'I think I’m being possessed.' You said, 'You’re not being possessed.' You also said, 'Don’t be so dramatic,' which you would later look back on and regret." "Spirochete" by Anneke Schwob (please note the content warnings on that page) has a demanding friendship and a chronic illness. “Did you regret what you said before Carl passed?” "Reprise" by Samantha Lane Murphy (please note the content warnings on that page too) portrays the end of a car ride, over and over. "Traditional witches and green witches don’t always see eye to eye. With a life on the line, Berthe is very persuasive." "Berthe the Green Witch" by Catelyn Winona (Caffeine and Magix on Tumblr) features a snob getting comeuppance. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:39 AM PST - 5 comments

The Complete 1984 Metro Toronto Santa Claus Parade with Original Commercials [YouTube] Here is the complete broadcast of the 1984 Metro Toronto Santa Claus Parade, now with corrected audio. This was the last parade before broadcast duties were taken over by Global TV in 1985. BONUS: The Complete 1986 Metro Toronto Santa Claus Parade, Eaton’s Toronto Santa Claus Parade (1954), 60+ Minutes of Awesome '80s Xmas Commercials, [via: Retrontario]
posted by Fizz at 5:38 AM PST - 17 comments

The New Wave Of American Shoegaze - "While there're so many revelatory new sounds coming out of Philly, the reason we're on the crest of a New Wave of American Shoegaze, not just one city's worth of cool shit, is that there are several other distinct styles coming to fruition in tandem. One of them is country-gaze, a fledgling genre popularized by its foremost band, Wednesday, who share a kinship with the noisiness of the Philly bands but are otherwise doing their own thing. That is, hitching traditional country music with sand-blasted shoegaze guitars in a way that really hasn't, almost improbably, been done before." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:23 AM PST - 20 comments

'Latrinograms' WWII Anti-rumor film for inductees.
posted by clavdivs at 1:10 AM PST - 12 comments

Raise your flag for another serving and watch the show. Matt and Trey and Dana have a special announcement in A Holiday Gift From Casa Bonita [1m]. To bravely quote from a YouTube comment from Chuck K: "Sopapillas! Black Bart's Cave! Cliff divers! Stalagmite room! Puppet show! Weird wishing well! More sopapillas! Thank you, Matt and Trey, for restoring this Denver treasure. May it survive thousands, if not millions of years into the future."
posted by hippybear at 8:27 PM PST - 25 comments

The Christmas Price Index is up a whopping 10.5% from 2021, the third highest year-over-year increase in the index’s history.
posted by chavenet at 3:58 PM PST - 21 comments

Youtuber Coffeezilla has posted a 3-part series digging into Logan Paul's CryptoZoo project. What he found wasn't pretty. A (very) brief summary can be found here.
posted by clawsoon at 11:23 AM PST - 40 comments

How To Paint a Crosswalk. "The instructions below are about making a crosswalk that looks as legitimate as possible, to create as safe an environment for pedestrians as possible, ensure that the crosswalk lasts as long as possible, and reduce the likelihood that it is removed by local authorities. This guide also aims to ensure that painting is done while prioritizing the safety of the participants and that of passing drivers and bystanders." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 11:15 AM PST - 32 comments

Does ChatGPT have a sense of humor? A funny writer asks ChatGPT to rewrite his work in the style of George Saunders, David Sedaris, and George Costanza. Hilarity ensues, but did the AI get the joke, or was the AI the punchline?
posted by SituationNormal at 9:20 AM PST - 30 comments

An oral history of Run-DMC's 'Christmas in Hollis'
posted by box at 9:19 AM PST - 8 comments

In his recently rebooted newsletter The Amazon Chronicles, Tim Carmody (previously) is exploring how Amazon and the other tech giants have moved from a "heroic" phase focused on growth and championing the liberatory value of their products to maintaining profitability above all else: The ideal for a tech company in 2023 is either docile humans ready to consume what they've been given, or better still, no humans at all.
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:49 AM PST - 11 comments

Even in a melting pot, uncommon names can boil over From WNYC/Gothamist: Conversations with four New Yorkers who maneuver through life with names that affect their sense of place and community [more inside]
posted by okonomichiyaki at 5:51 AM PST - 87 comments

Frank Thorp V (instagram) is a producer and reporter for NBC News. His beat covers photographing Congressional activities in a big way. His latest project with fellow reporter Sarah Mimms is the portrait series Faces of the Investigation, covering the people involved in the Jan 6 hearings. [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 5:29 AM PST - 5 comments

Iona Datt Sharma (previously) is a lawyer and author of science and fantasy fiction that I love and frequently recommend. They often write about the legal and social infrastructure of fantastical places. "Are you here to bang on about cultural ties and the longitudinal view of history?" "Light, Like a Candle Flame" (2017) reckons with the aftermath of a generation ship, sewage treatment, and the fear of "repeating all the old mistakes". "And it is the oldest settled law of our people that where signene lies, no cause of action can." "One-Day Listing" (2014) depicts attorneys taking care of refugees and each other, and grief. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 4:22 AM PST - 4 comments

Voices in the Valley is a new BBC radio series of ten short horror tales, all set in the isolated English village of Barrowbeck, and all written by Andrew Michael Hurley. Readers include Tamsin Greig, Toby Jones, Maxine Peake and Reece Shearsmith. I found them perfect listening for this bleak, midwinter season.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:46 AM PST - 2 comments

on Janice, on Jasper, on Nero and Smokey! 🛷 Santa Paws Day 2022 at Dogs Trust Ireland — the one where all the dogs choose a toy.
posted by taz at 1:40 AM PST - 11 comments

Jack Evoniuk reverse-engineers and explains, "I'm surprised that, as far as I can tell, I'm the first to detail how exactly Pitfall! rendered its world, but I'm also kind of disappointed. If you haven't seen this GDC talk about preserving the history of games you absolutely should. Unlike many other disciplines the history of software is not being well preserved, even though it should be the easiest to preserve. We have the original source code for basically zero games for the Atari, NES, SNES, ColecoVision, you name it. Disassemblies are invaluable, don't get me wrong, but they're not the original. And they show nothing about the original comments."
posted by cgc373 at 12:31 AM PST - 18 comments

Festive Travel Mayhem with Richard Ayoade & Jon Hamm in Hong Kong: FULL Episode | Travel Man is 47m of exactly what it says on the tin. "Christmas" special, sort of.
posted by hippybear at 8:22 PM PST - 13 comments

Novelist and "cuspy Oregon Trail Xennial" Catherynne M. Valente (previously) takes us through Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media.
posted by Etrigan at 8:04 PM PST - 33 comments

This is what you get when you ask the sports guy to come in to cover a blizzard in the morning show. "Tune in for the next couple hours to watch me get progressively crankier and crankier."
posted by signal at 6:51 PM PST - 25 comments

"Under the careful and prudent guardianship of co-founder Ebenezer Scrooge, Scrooge & Marley (established 1803), Great Britain’s foremost commodities trading company, has announced yet another record-breaking year. “The formula is simple,” said Scrooge. “Tough but fair trading policies and a sharp eye on expenses and always, always, a belief in the value of the bottom line.”" A Holiday Gift For You: “End of the Year PR Missives From Scrooge & Marley.” Thank you, jscalzi! [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:19 PM PST - 2 comments

Ashcraft scrawled “Short Snorter No. 1” one of the bills, initiating the man into a club of sorts (and earning a buck for his troubles). A “snorter” was a shot of liquor; a “short snorter” was a small amount that wouldn’t put the pilots like Ashcraft over the legal limit; and a short snorter bill was evidence that you had a place among the still small number of people who had taken to the skies. from How to Spot a ‘Short Snorter’ [previously]
posted by chavenet at 3:33 PM PST - 4 comments

Human Power Load Calculator - Theoretically, a human being can haul a load of almost unlimited size given unlimited time and unlimited equipment. Practically, however, equipment, geography, and time puts limits upon what is physically possible.
posted by aniola at 12:59 PM PST - 32 comments

All I Want For Christmas Is You except it's the Wii Shop channel music, or vice versa maybe
posted by cortex at 11:59 AM PST - 16 comments

In 1978, ABC aired a 12-minute version of West Side Story. Cher played all the roles.
(previously in 2008, but all the links have rotted.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:18 AM PST - 18 comments

What on Earth is a polar vortex? So there has been quite a lively and vigorous debate in the research community of the idea that the jet stream might be torquing more in the winter, and what we call “weather weirding” might be producing more intense winter extremes. Previously on Mefi on the vortex in 2022. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:02 AM PST - 52 comments

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2022 [more inside]
posted by box at 7:47 AM PST - 32 comments

BBC reality show "The Traitors" (trailer) has its final today: 22 contestants lodged in a Scottish castle and collaborating to win a pot of money even as they plot to murder and banish each other so to be the survivor who walks off with it. Host Claudia Winkleman - to be found bedecked in every variety of tweed - talks about how she was persuaded to host the show. The Traitors is like a long running version of the psychological party game Mafia, originally was developed in the Netherlands as "De Verraders". An American version, filmed in the same location, will follow.
posted by rongorongo at 6:32 AM PST - 21 comments

Christmas carols and hymns as electronic instrumentals: a very 8-bit christmas by lowecase t - carols as chip tunes (via MeFi Projects); and LJ Kruzer's Christmas Carols - rendered in warm, glowing synths and organs
posted by nthdegx at 2:51 AM PST - 7 comments

'Magic mushrooms' would be decriminalized in California under new bill [ungated] - "SB 58 would allow only plant-based hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, the active ingredient in 'magic mushrooms,' and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, which is found in some plants used to brew ayahuasca. Other naturally occurring psychedelics that would be allowed under the bill include ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid found in the iboga shrub, and mescaline found in cacti other than peyote." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:01 AM PST - 42 comments

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern gets picked up on a hot mic during Question Time in parliament calling her rival (David Seymour, leader of the Libertarian ACT party) an "arrogant prick". Weak outrage follows but gets quickly turned on its ear, and eventually the two team up to raise $100,000 ($63K USD) for the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Win win. [more inside]
posted by not_on_display at 9:50 PM PST - 32 comments

Night Mind on YouTube brings us his exploration of one of the most labyrinthine novels, Mark Z Danielewski's House Of Leaves. In three parts: Secrets In Sound [1h39m], Labyrinth In Letters [1h37m], and Rest In Roots [1h46m]. It's a great round-up of the book if you've read the work. If you haven't it's full of spoilers but leaves SO much unexplored that you might be driven to crack the book yourself. It's a difficult book to describe, but this comes pretty close. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:20 PM PST - 19 comments

A few short scifi pieces by BIPOC authors whose work I love and I frequently recommend. "As a low-quality person waiting for slaughter, Helena understands how those cows feel." "A Series of Steaks" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (January 2017) (previously) portrays a beef forger, stuck with an awful job, who makes an unexpected friend. "I’m a very expensive prototype but there will be efficiencies at scale." "Left of Bang: Preemptive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems" by Vajra Chandrasekera (April 2017), on training in surviving and committing violence, is short and brutal. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:45 PM PST - 3 comments

The emergence of concepts such as the “dark Web” and the “deep Web” represents a case of a “rhetorical invention” — a sociocultural process in which novelties are constructed by language and connected to a specific discourse and ideology. Such discursive constructions are never neutral, each carrying with them a range of connotations and meanings that contribute to shape wider media imaginaries and representations. Overall, our analysis shows that British newspapers’ uses of these concepts encapsulated specific visions of the relationships between surveillance and privacy on the Web, consistently linking privacy-enabling technologies to criminal activities and behaviors. Much like the sociotechnical imaginaries of electronic payment underpinned the equivalence of data and money, news media’s representation of the “dark” Web brought forward a vision that associated the use of tools to evade surveillance in the Web with malicious endeavors. We argue that such a vision signals what we propose to call a criminalization of privacy that is affecting on how privacy and surveillance on the Web are framed and publicly discussed in the public sphere. from "Inventing the Dark Web: Criminalization of Privacy and the Apocalyptic Turn in the Imaginary of the Web"
posted by chavenet at 3:29 PM PST - 28 comments

The 2022 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog is here, thanks to Drew Magary and Defector. Let's ogle some decorative crap!
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:00 PM PST - 93 comments

Over the past few decades, there has been a fight over the legal status of college athletes, with many pointing out that for marquee athletics, they should be treated as employees. That fight took a step up as the National Labor Relations Board has announced that their Los Angeles office is directed to pursue unfair labor practices charges against the University of Southern California, the Pac-12 Conference, and the NCAA. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:30 PM PST - 12 comments

Let's take a second to appreciate what just happened.

• You lost the first game.
• You won the second game.
• So you've won 50% of your games.
• But you have less money that you started with.

This might not seem like a big deal. But let's keep playing… [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 12:45 PM PST - 50 comments

The Ghosts of Christmas Yet to Come, ranked by freakiness [Polygon] “In the text, Dickens describes the ghost as “shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand.” This leaves a lot of leeway for adaptations to interpret, and A Christmas Carol is one of the most-adapted works of fiction of all time. So in the holiday spirit, I decided to watch every film version and evaluate them on one single criteria: How scary do they make the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? Don your sleeping cap and come with us on a journey into holiday horror.”
posted by Fizz at 12:01 PM PST - 29 comments

Skeal is a short (about 3-5 minutes) browser game made in Unity. Sound required for the full effect. [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 9:49 AM PST - 15 comments

The Great Delusion Behind Twitter. "It is a failure of imagination to think that our choice is the social media platforms we have now or nothing. I keep thinking about something that Robin Sloan, a novelist and former Twitter employee, wrote this year: “There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! What a colossal bummer that Twitter eked out a local maximum, that its network effect still (!) consumes the fuel for other possibilities, other explorations.”" [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:19 AM PST - 62 comments

Happy winter solstice, everyone! Here's a nice selection of moody winter / solstice images assembled by Irene Gallo, from Tor, 2011. "So, on this Solstice Day, with so few hours of sunshine to warm us, I asked a number of artists to send me some of their favorite winter paintings. I asked nearly 20 people, expecting about half to respond. In fact, everyone responded, often multiple times. Clearly, I am not the only one that finds both comfort and mystery in these images."
posted by taz at 6:42 AM PST - 14 comments

Most meat substitutes might have a serious bioavailability problem for iron and zinc Most meat substitutes other than seitan and mushroom-based substitutes have high levels of phytates, presumably a way that plants defend themselves from animals. The zinc and iron can be present at high levels, but not for humans. Archive link. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:02 AM PST - 94 comments

France Live: “Saturday, December 17, the Sainte-Musse hospital in Toulon. This 88-year-old man came to the emergency room with a shell stuck in his anus. For safety, part of the hospital had to be evacuated.” BFM Toulon Var: “The man claimed to have found this shell seven inches in length and 3.5 inches in width (18 cm to 9 cm) at his brother's house.” Interesting Engineering: “The patient was taken into surgery for the removal of the shell from his anus. The 88-year-old man is reportedly in good health.” This is, of course, a regular mishap amongst European men in December. Related: Historical French royal anal surgery.
posted by Wordshore at 5:14 AM PST - 49 comments

Yule is not “Christmas with the serial numbers filed off”, and Christmas isn’t “Yule with added Baby Jesus”, Yule is far more exciting and wild and numinous than that. Folklore writer and pagan Yvonne Aburrow talks about the anarchic traditions of Yule - and about its function as a time of inner reflection.
posted by rongorongo at 5:00 AM PST - 16 comments

A Show for Christmas by English comedian and playwright Daniel Kitson, is “a story about possibility and magic and grief and hope and tradition and toffees. Which is to say, Christmas. Basically.” It is an audio adaptation of a stage show he did in 2014 for the Battersea Arts Centre. The hour and a half running time is mostly narration by Daniel Kitson, but it also features Isy Suttie in an acting role. It is available online until January 1st.
posted by Kattullus at 1:58 AM PST - 2 comments

This Super-Tree Could Help Feed the World and Fight Climate Change - "It's called pongamia, an ordinary-looking tropical tree with agricultural superpowers. It produces beans packed with protein and oil much like soybeans, except it has the potential to produce much more nutrition per acre than soybeans. It's hardy enough to grow on just about any land, no matter how degraded, without any pesticides or irrigation. It not only removes carbon from the atmosphere, which combats climate change, but it also sucks nitrogen out of the air, so it usually doesn't need fertilizer that accelerates climate change." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:21 AM PST - 22 comments

...most large U.S. cities spend more on carceral systems than on health and supportive services, combined. ...After controlling for age, the strongest prioritization of carceral systems was observed in cities where the proportion of low-income Black residents approached or exceeded that of high-income white residents.
posted by latkes at 9:15 PM PST - 6 comments

Three short science fiction stories written by people of color and published this year (and thus eligible for you to nominate for 2022 awards). "there’s official information, but it’s never enough. And there are rumors, but you can’t trust them. This is almost like…in between." "Shared Data" by Malka Older imagines us joining forces to share information as mutual aid. "What he wanted was to leave reality." "Simulations" by Danilo Campos portrays an AI who gives a tech CEO surprising advice. Vaughn reached inside herself experimentally, tentatively, looking for anger, and found only fear again. "All That Burns Unseen" by Premee Mohamed depicts firefighting, eldercare, and a new friend. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:14 PM PST - 10 comments

"Tenacity, will and harnessing the latest technology give the Ukrainians a decisive advantage,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me last week. “We are witnessing the ways wars will be fought, and won, for years to come.” Washington Post column parts 1 & 2 [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 5:05 PM PST - 6 comments

The art of urine in the age of fulfillment [ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:25 PM PST - 13 comments

"Daydreams aren’t questions to be answered, but questions to live with, dangerous only when they stay static. Even in our best lives, our daydreams allow us to retain secret lives that no one else can access or touch. They are the ultimate privacy: the thing that remains secret even inside our closest intimacies, perhaps the thing that exists in order to remain private within those intimacies. The things we imagine doing are more private than any of the things we’ve done."--Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations, by Leslie Jamison (Astra)
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:02 PM PST - 5 comments

free yourself of daylight's culinary limitations. become a midnight gourmand.
posted by simmering octagon at 12:48 PM PST - 19 comments

100 Best Albums of 2022 (Rolling Stone) [more inside]
posted by box at 11:52 AM PST - 45 comments

"Tenement Town takes a look behind the doors I pass every day, and offers glimpses of the lives that were lived over the centuries in the places Edinburgh’s citizens still call home." - Diarmid Mogg on his new website. Each entry starts with a specific Edinburgh front door and takes us step by step through 200 years or so of the individuals who've lived there. Today's investigation covers 10 Hill Place, the latest of the 15 addresses he's tackled so far. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 7:13 AM PST - 24 comments

Neon White [YouTube][Trailer] “Describing Neon White’s genre might be more difficult than actually playing it. A “speedrunning FPS-parkour-deck-builder” sounds incredibly esoteric. But that description belies a fairly simple core loop. Each level is basically an obstacle course, with both enemies and bottomless pits to overcome. Scattered throughout are “cards” that double as weapon pickups and navigational abilities. Grab a pistol card, shoot a few enemies, then use that card’s ability for an extra jump over a bottomless pit. Simple. Throughout its 90-plus levels, Neon White does steadily increase the complexity: The obstacle courses incorporate tripwires, bounce pads, walls that can only be broken with certain weapons, and more. The difficulty (and fun) comes from stringing together these actions, like a gymnast running along a balance beam before dismounting directly onto a set of parallel bars.” [via: Polygon] BONUS: [35 Minute Speedrun (World Record)][YouTube] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:07 AM PST - 18 comments

Ryuichi Sakamoto releases "last" concert amid cancer battle (Kyodo News). Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence / Ryuichi Sakamoto - From Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano 2022 [more inside]
posted by Sockin'inthefreeworld at 2:03 AM PST - 14 comments

This is what a tech market looks like in:-- Rest of The World's correspondents share their photo essays from: Taipei, Jakarta, São Paulo, Lagos, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Mexico City.
posted by cendawanita at 2:01 AM PST - 11 comments

Auslan, the majority Australian sign language has a visual dictionary with three recognised signs for ‘holiday’, of which the second is noteworthy.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:47 AM PST - 26 comments

Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection Would you change your behavior if you knew that COVID causes immunodeficiency that mirrors AIDS? Merck manual now lists COVID alongside AIDS as a cause of acquired Lymphocytopenia. “Patients with COVID-19 also frequently have lymphocytopenia (35 to 83% of patients).“ Recent papers show that SARS-CoV-2 infects the immune system, causes T cell exhaustion, B cell disregulation, immunosenescence, and is a lympho-manipulative pathogen. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 1:07 AM PST - 259 comments

Wargames blog The Player's Aid has started a bi-weekly column on map-making and map design for tabletop war games. It provides a look into a very particular niche in graphical design. Examples of two different approaches shown are the lush area-based map of Britain in This War Without an Enemy about the English Civil War and the more subdued but very clear hex-based map in Holland '44 about Operation Market Garden, but there are up to now a total of five games featured.
posted by Harald74 at 12:58 AM PST - 5 comments

Aspiring singer-songwriter (CAZZA) and YouTuber Call Me Caroline does a first listen + musical analysis of The Beatles' Rubber Soul [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:13 PM PST - 24 comments

Yet even as a “mode,” literature’s circulations still move well beyond any single reader’s reach. Any individual scholar is constrained by context and limited by their languages, and so overwhelmed by world literature writ large. In an essay a decade later, [David] Damrosch revisited the issues of scale and position: “At once exhilarating and unsettling, the range and variety of literatures now in view raise serious questions about scale, of translation and comprehension, and of persisting imbalances of economic and cultural power.” from World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022 by Kevin Riordan
posted by chavenet at 3:23 PM PST - 7 comments

The NYT today shone additional light on the allegations of homophobia that have been common since the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), including here on Metafilter. In particular, they point to the research done by Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, president of the National Society of Black Physicists, who suggests that anti-gay witch-hunts in the US State Department that have been blamed on Webb, were in fact perpetrated by John Peurifoy. However, they story does not end there. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:10 PM PST - 40 comments

The Persistence of Race Science: Science built up the idea of race. Can it ever be torn down? A well-written and deep investigative series from UnDark Magazine. Their navigation is a little awkward and breaks the back-button, so links to each of the articles in the series are after the jump. [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 1:14 PM PST - 9 comments

The House January 6 committee voted on Monday to recommend that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. [more inside]
posted by team lowkey at 12:33 PM PST - 86 comments

LitHub presents the best book covers of 2022.
posted by Shepherd at 12:05 PM PST - 9 comments

How to Survive in Broken Worlds (Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler)
posted by box at 11:25 AM PST - 9 comments

"Epic used privacy-invasive default settings and deceptive interfaces that tricked Fortnite users, including teenagers and children.... these enforcement actions make clear to businesses that the FTC is cracking down on these unlawful practices." Fortnite Video Game Maker Epic Games to Pay More Than Half a Billion Dollars over FTC Allegations of Privacy Violations and Unwanted Charges
posted by jessamyn at 10:13 AM PST - 13 comments

It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.” Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; [more inside]
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:50 AM PST - 7 comments

Two short speculative stories, written by people of color, that use a fantastically cozy teashop and restaurant to depict comfort and care. "Speaking of the service! They’re LGBTQ+ and undead-friendly, obviously, so that’s a plus." "Review for: Izakaya Tanuki" by J. L. Akagi praises a hard-to-find ozoni vendor. "Who’s that interesting hominid you were talking to?" In "Liz's Tea House" by Rodrigo Culagovski (MetaFilter's Own signal), space newbie Ana stumbles through a lot of beloved scifi stories on the way to making a home for herself. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 8:37 AM PST - 19 comments

Jim Morrison wanted to be a poet. Instead, he became a rock star. Here are his poetry notebooks Jim left behind over two dozen notebooks, even though he died at 27 and destroyed his high-school notes. He gave them titles like “Tape Noon,” “GOLD,” “Paris Journal,” and “Lizard Celebration.”
posted by SituationNormal at 8:15 AM PST - 10 comments

New congressmember-elect (R-NY, Long Island) George Santos's resume seems to be fictional (NYTimes) [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 7:46 AM PST - 156 comments

How an MSG seasoning company became a serious player in the semiconductor industry
posted by Etrigan at 7:45 AM PST - 3 comments

Beginning Dec 20, the BBC is broadcasting daily episodes of a radio dramatization of Susan Cooper's classic children's fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising, with each episode corresponding (more or less) to a day in the story, moving from Midwinter's Eve to the Wild Hunt. [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:38 AM PST - 41 comments

Oh hey, it turns out it's Monday again. Ah well, it happens. I guess today we might as well ask (I mean we could not ask, but nah): When people talk about "Free Will" what do they mean? a) Wheaton, b) Shakespeare, c) Meghan Markel's brother in law, d) this thread, OR ... [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:03 AM PST - 90 comments

Extremely talented singer/songwriter and performer Todrick Hall has written, directed, choreographed, produced and performed in a 1 hour 31 minute long musical film, Forbidden, full of great songs, great choreography, great costumes and great sets which is FREE to watch on his youtube site. The supporting cast includes Cynthia Erivo, Tiffany Haddish, Jade Novah, and RuPaul. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:27 PM PST - 8 comments

Les Mis in French. Les Mis in Japanese. Les Mis in Dutch. Les Mis in Portuguese. Les Mis in Norweigen (incomplete). Les Mis in Korean. Les Mis in Spanish. [With varying production quality.]
posted by eotvos at 5:26 PM PST - 25 comments

toldinstone is a podcast by Historian Garrett Ryan who discusses the ancient world. His latest episode is 'Trivia, Ancient and Modern' with Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame.
posted by clavdivs at 4:31 PM PST - 1 comment

Otherwise Magazine's current issue on Work includes a profile of a teacher in Kurdistan and a visual report "Delivering precarity" on food delivery work in Romania. The issue on Becoming includes an ode to tap water and stories from those detained in refugee camps.

Two Pakistani men used to talk and sing from the small windows at night. I liked listening to them. It made me feel calm. One of them had a little mirror so that they could see each other and he used to joke: "Let's do a video call, uncle."

[more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:40 PM PST - 5 comments

"Taking stock of the world’s oldest soups:" at Atlas Obscura, Blair Mastbaum writes of diligently maintained soup and stew bases kept boiling for many years, including those used for the neua tune (a type of beef stew) at Wattana Panich in Bangkok and the oden broth at Otafuku in Tokyo. On a related note, a Reddit commenter discusses claims of centuries-old pot-au-feu stocks in France.
posted by misteraitch at 12:34 PM PST - 28 comments

The 2022 NYT face quiz is here! Can you recognize these 52 famous faces?
posted by Going To Maine at 10:46 AM PST - 66 comments

From the On The Media team comes The Divided Dial, a 5 part podcast series about talk radio: its origins, its main players, and why one side of the political spectrum came to dominate so much of the radio spectrum. Episodes run between 30 and 50 minutes.
posted by hippybear at 8:03 AM PST - 11 comments

Ranking Every Mainline Final Fantasy Game [Game Informer] “Final Fantasy is a staple in JRPGs and video games as a whole. It might have more entries in it than any other series out there and it won’t be slowing down anytime soon. On top of that, thanks to its anthology-like nature, if one Final Fantasy game doesn’t click for you, there’s a good chance another one will. As a result, ranking the Final Fantasy series can be highly contentious. Everyone has a lot of love for the first entry they played, and then there are heavy hitters like Final Fantasy X and VII, too. However, the staff here at Game Informer did the seemingly impossible: we ranked all 19 mainline numbered Final Fantasy games, including their direct sequels, from worst to best.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:34 AM PST - 88 comments

"The Maison du Pastel shop, off rue Rambuteau, opens only on Thursday afternoons. In this small window of time, Isabelle and Margaret serve their customers like they are selling elixirs for the soul. They spend the rest of the week at their atelier in a village 60km outside Paris, where they live in a dilapidated house previously owned by Isabelle’s ancestors. There they make 1,800 shades by hand, using a method passed down from Henri Roché Sr, which has changed little since the 18th century." 'The tiny Paris pastel shop that changed art history,' (archive.ph here). (Stolen from today's Chartbook, I should confess!)
posted by mittens at 6:47 AM PST - 17 comments

Satire from Australian group The Shovel. (Youtube) [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:52 PM PST - 4 comments

Exactly what it says on the tin. A brief, but informative interview with the author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, in Slate, about what she's been up to this year. [more inside]
posted by damayanti at 6:43 PM PST - 14 comments

Raven rides the slipstream "bow wave" of a truck[SLYT] for kilometres down the Dempster Highway.
posted by Mitheral at 6:19 PM PST - 20 comments

Putin's War A Times investigation based on interviews, intercepts, documents and secret battle plans shows how a “walk in the park” became a catastrophe for Russia. [more inside]
posted by General Malaise at 4:23 PM PST - 44 comments

Why fusion will never happen Not because it can’t, because it won’t. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to cost more than the solutions we already have.
posted by robbyrobs at 4:11 PM PST - 70 comments

For the last couple of years, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, British historians, writers and broadcasters, have run a chatty and informative two-hander podcast The Rest is History: or wherever you get your podcasts . They are nearly 300 episodes (each 25-50 mins) in: "interrogating the past, and attempting to de-tangle the present". As Qatar approached, they agreed to have a conversation about each of the 32 finalists. Their choices are idiosyncratic: Ecuador gets a chunk on the Galapagos and Darwin's Finches. For non-scientists they make quite a good fist of explaining the story and its importance. Denmark: The Great Escape . . . of 99% of Danish Jews in 1943. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:10 PM PST - 2 comments

P-22 was a mountain lion who unknowingly changed the world. A eulogy for P-22, who was discovered to have a number of health ailments, the most serious being that he appears to have been hit by a car. He was an integral part of the LA landscape, and brought attention to environmental factors that are hostile to wildlife and animal life in an expanding urban landscape. P-22 was the inspiration behind the funding drive for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the first bridge "in the California highway system designed specifically for fostering wildlife connectivity".
posted by toastyk at 1:42 PM PST - 32 comments

(SL Twitter) A young opera singer's practice is interrupted by the Phanom Of The Ope... [more inside]
posted by zaixfeep at 1:40 PM PST - 5 comments

The most popular people names for dogs [unleashed] & The Pet-Name Trend Humans Can’t Resist [runs free]
posted by chavenet at 12:40 PM PST - 48 comments

Stable Diffusion can generate images from text. Spectrograms are graphical representations of audio. Riffusion mixes the two. rock and roll electric guitar solo, lo-fi hiphop beats, the sound of metafilter
posted by simmering octagon at 12:35 PM PST - 17 comments

Punjab: Food, Music and Resistance from Vittles Magazine newsletter (previously).
‘Pecha’ and the music of protest.
Mirchan Kurkurian and Swollen Lips.
The Prophet of Vegetables.
Samosas and Mimosas: Authenticity and Feminism in Hot Mango Chutney Sauce.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:21 AM PST - 2 comments

Why the Age of American Progress Ended [ungated] - "Invention alone can't change the world; what matters is what happens next."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 8:26 PM PST - 30 comments

You better watch out: once again, (MeFite!) John C. Worsley brings us holiday cheer from space, the final frontier. Previously. Previously. The whole collection (all of which I love).
posted by kristi at 4:17 PM PST - 6 comments

Bookforum magazine (previously (an incomplete list)), launched in 1994, recently announced that the current issue would be the last. An appreciation.
posted by box at 3:38 PM PST - 3 comments

Last month Tom Lehrer put all his songs online for free streaming or downloading, and relinquished all rights to them. You can browse them by album, title or category, and also download the sheet music for each song. But get those songs fast, because the website is only staying up for a limited time yet.
posted by Kattullus at 3:20 PM PST - 50 comments

The coziest frogs (and tiny chickens, ducks, fawns, rabbits, kitties, etc.) you'll find anywhere. Claire Garland (dot pebbles) creates incredibly detailed and adorable knitting patterns for tiny animals and also their tiny sweaters. She graciously gave me permission to use a really lovely frog photo (the one with the tiny table) for my holiday cards, and then I discovered so much more. She also has a beautiful book, with those patterns also on Ravelry. Instagram too.
posted by amtho at 2:54 PM PST - 10 comments

Together is an ongoing comic about a nurse, her unemployed boyfriend and the mysterious tumor forcibly joining them together. [more inside]
posted by simmering octagon at 12:24 PM PST - 6 comments

On 16 December 1972, a village in northern Mozambique virtually disappeared from the map. Wiriyamu saw its inhabitants killed one by one at the hands of the Portuguese military, who invaded the territory during the colonial war. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:56 AM PST - 5 comments

For your reading pleasure (?), the 2022 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which "challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Straight No Chaser released a new song, Christmas Night With You. The men's acapella group, which formed at Indiana University, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. A YouTube video of the group's first performance of The Twelve Days of Christmas in 1998 went viral after being posted to YouTube in 2006. [more inside]
posted by brentajones at 11:32 AM PST - 4 comments

Hijacking & Weaponizing the Narrative: Disinformation Amid Rising Repression in East Asia. Case studies focused on the Philippines, Mindanao, Indonesia, West Papua, Hong Kong, and Cambodia, but are indicative of a larger, systemic issue across the region.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:04 AM PST - 2 comments

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About in 2022 from Future Crunch & The Progress Network
posted by ellieBOA at 11:03 AM PST - 8 comments

For decades now, a certain phrase has been appearing on motivational posters, necklaces and, thanks to a particular explosion in the early aughts, in the home goods aisles at stores like Target, Marshalls and TJ Maxx: “Live, laugh, love.” The saying is a paraphrase of Bessie Anderson Stanley's 1904 poem "Success," which reads, “He achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much." And while "Live, laugh, love" is just one example of a phrase used in inspiring home decor, it has, for whatever reason, now reached iconic status. [more inside]
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:56 AM PST - 110 comments

After 25 years, numerous series, and finally winning the title of Champion, the story of Ash Ketchum's path to becoming a Pokémon Master will finally come to a conclusion. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:11 AM PST - 10 comments

The Bagel Shop Next to the Bagel Shop! Only in NYC would you find two bagel shops right next to each other. Are they rivals? Friends? What's the story there? A reporter actually did the legwork to investigate.
posted by SituationNormal at 9:10 AM PST - 26 comments

Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker will be the next President of the National Collegiate Athletic Administration (archive.today link), a billion-dollar business nonprofit organization "dedicated to the well-being and lifelong success of college athletes". IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel (the NCAA headquarters is in Indianapolis) says "Welcome to the worst job you've ever had".
posted by Etrigan at 8:57 AM PST - 17 comments

"Many claim that our spaces are “toxic” or “problematic,” often sharing compelling and troubling personal anecdotes as evidence of this . . . If everything is “violent,” nothing really is. If every slight is “oppression,” nothing is." Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, offers a searing indictment of the problems that identity politics engender in left-wing activism.
posted by Gordion Knott at 8:53 AM PST - 32 comments

At 04:50 GMT this morning, a 1,000 tonne fashion accessory, containing 1,500 fish, blew apart in the lobby of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Berlin. It was the world's largest cylindrical aquarium, now it's a puddle. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:41 AM PST - 40 comments

The first trailer for Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie staring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has dropped and it's something.
posted by octothorpe at 6:59 AM PST - 73 comments

Great Barrier Reef sharks that can walk on land genetically unique, study finds. Researchers are investigating the possibility that a population of epaulette sharks on Lady Elliot Island could qualify to be named as a new species. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:33 AM PST - 19 comments

Answering AskMeFi's eternal questions, Does It Go Bad? is an old school website run by one man (Marcin Skrzypiec) pulling together sensible advice about food and food storage.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:56 AM PST - 6 comments

If you want to follow the progress of the private jet of the world's richest man, you're out of luck. Bernard Arnault, the LVMH CEO sold it over a month ago.
But suppose you want to follow the comings and goings of the private jet of the man who will soon be the third richest person in the world? That's a more interesting story. "Free speech absolutist" Elon Musk has not only banned the @elonjet account from his once-popular social media site Twitter, on Thursday night the accounts of multiple high profile journalists were banned apparently for reporting on the controversy. [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 11:20 PM PST - 525 comments

Just over a year ago after years of suffering from the debilitating pain of CRPS a popular TicTok content creator named FunshineCrayon decided to go into hospice and have a medically assisted death. It appeared that their journey had come to an end. This week they returned to their account to let folks know that they had survived, after being offered some new treatments. A more detailed video has been posted to their YouTube Channel
posted by interogative mood at 10:09 PM PST - 16 comments

You are STRG.SNEK, the computer repair program. The program is broken, explore the data and find out a way to repair it. But watch out for the data!
(Ed. Note: The program is not broken. This is a snake/metroidvania mashup with a bangin’ soundtrack by ToulouTouMou that you can play in your browser. H/t Terry’s Free Game Of The Week and a person on Mastodon.)
posted by Going To Maine at 9:38 PM PST - 8 comments

Compilation of rare, high-quality clips of pre-DSOTM Pink Floyd, collected by the BBC. Highlights (for me) include Astronomy Domine with a shamanic Syd Barrett, a rockin' Let There Be More Light featuring a groovy dance floor under a tent, and Atom Heart Mother complete with choir, in Germany. Full setlist inside. [more inside]
posted by swift at 7:25 PM PST - 16 comments

Prof. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Dr. Jami Valentine Miller, and many others have been working to compile a nearly comprehensive list of Black US woman physicists and astronomers in association with the AAWIP.
posted by eotvos at 6:43 PM PST - 1 comment

"Chindogu is a Japanese word meaning “weird tool.” These (almost) useless inventions might address a challenge, but they also create bigger problems....While inventions like these are usually not practical for their intended purpose, they can still be charming, evocative, and funny, and give us something that successful inventions can’t. They offer a moment’s deviation from some prescribed path to success, a pause in the slog of value creation, to allow a moment’s worth of weird joy....The Chindogu Society has published ten underlying – and surprisingly deep – tenets. They espouse an endearing earnestness, speak to the bizarre failures of late-stage capitalism, and underline Chindogu’s appeal across cultural and linguistic divides, offering more interesting musings on failure than most of our fables or motivational posters in the process." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:54 PM PST - 17 comments

The Horrifying War on Libraries (slDiscourse Blog)
posted by box at 3:24 PM PST - 25 comments

Portfolio site Artstation is dealing with an ongoing protest over AI. Artists are not compensated for the use of their art for AI datasets, which charge money and are a commercial product. [more inside]
posted by ishmael at 3:21 PM PST - 57 comments

In NY, some teens are rejecting iPhones and social media. SL-NYT, but to reader view - think it should work for everybody.
posted by COD at 2:24 PM PST - 71 comments

The Witching Cats of New Jersey is a short essay by artist and historian Kazys Varnelis about the fashion among the 19th century New Jersey merchant class of commissioning portraits of their cats in the guise of witches’ familiars, most of whom are now kept at the Germantown College Archives. This then becomes an essay about AI generated art, for obvious reasons.
posted by Kattullus at 12:55 PM PST - 13 comments

As we had into the finals of the 2022 World Cup tournament, much has been made of its location, Qatar, and how they got the bid and executed preparing for the global event. Podcasters Roger Bennett (Men In Blazers) and Tommy Vietor (Pod Save the World) bring us a seven-part podcast, World Corrupt [Crooked Media page with listening links], which examines these issues in depth with humor and outrage in equal measure. Episodes mostly run under an hour. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:44 AM PST - 14 comments

Collect Them All! The elderly man from Florida has learned about NFTs and hired someone to work miracles with Photoshop. We were promised a "Major Announcement." Apparently this was it.
posted by hydra77 at 11:18 AM PST - 124 comments

Huntington Library acquires the papers of Thomas Pynchon [This is not an obituary, Thomas Pynchon is alive, though he is 85] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:01 AM PST - 6 comments

Looking Back: BabyNameWizard.com, 2004-2021 I had cause to look up the Baby Name Wizard today and was saddened to learn it's gone. But creator Laura Wattenberg is still writing about names on her site Namerology! [more inside]
posted by faethverity at 10:48 AM PST - 13 comments

From Serena Jones on Mastodon (@SerenaJ@historians.social): "The Albert Khan Museum in France has just made available for download thousands of early autochrome photos from around the world: Khan, a banker, had top French photographers travel the world documenting everyday aspects of global life which he believed would soon vanish as the world rapidly developed. Such prescience." [more inside]
posted by taz at 9:20 AM PST - 13 comments

A roundup of major critics' lists of the best of 2022
Rogerebert.com: The Ten Best Films of 2022, The New York Times: Best Movies of 2022, Slate: The 10 Best Movies of 2022, Indiewire: The 25 Best Movies of 2022, Polygon: The best movies of 2022, The Guardian: Best films US 2022, Rolling Stone: 22 Best Movies of 2022, The Atlantic: THE 10 BEST FILMS OF 2022, Washington Post: The 10 best movies of 2022, The Ringer: The Best Movies of 2022, The New Yorker: The Best Movies of 2022 [more inside]
posted by octothorpe at 5:26 AM PST - 59 comments

This week in Alaska, a trial has begun that may test the provision of the Alaska state constitution barring persons who belong to groups that advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government from holding office. Representing residents in the politically conservative Matanuska-Susitna valley, Wasilla representative David Eastman has been a controversial member of the lower house of the Alaska legislature since 2017. Recently re-confirmed in his office by those voters, Eastman must first face a historically unusual challenge to his eligibility to serve another term. [more inside]
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:40 AM PST - 9 comments

After a catastrophic crash on an unknown planet, pilot Mills (Adam Driver) quickly discovers he’s actually stranded on Earth…65 million years ago. [Trailer via Kottke]
posted by ellieBOA at 1:05 AM PST - 92 comments

Mosfilm has uploaded a 4k extended version of Andrei Rublev to Youtube. Mosfilm is a Russian film studio, particularly noted for producing the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Much of their output is available to watch on their (English) Youtube channel.
posted by Alex404 at 12:08 AM PST - 21 comments

I Don’t Want My Little Girl to Die on The Floor of a Hospital “I have a daughter. She’s four. Before the pandemic, she had a bad case of RSV. She was having trouble breathing. We took her to a hospital. The staff treated her right away. We were home later that afternoon. Back then, hospitals weren’t full of babies with respiratory viruses. Now they are. Now parents are spending days trying to find a bed. There’s a growing shortage of liquid antibiotics. Moms are calling 18 pharmacies just to get a prescription filled. Doctors are telling us to crush up adult medicine and sprinkle it on their food. I know, it doesn’t look that bad. I understand how easy it is to dismiss everything I just said. When you look out your window, you don’t see toddlers dying on the floors of hospitals. You don’t see packed ERs. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 10:57 PM PST - 56 comments

“Everything I have came from $800.” On Twitter, the men touted themselves as financial sages in a community known to fans as FinTwit. Two launched a Discord server, Atlas Trading, amassing more than 230,000 members who avidly followed their stock tips. They appeared on podcasts that soared in popularity with the bull market, and showed off luxury cars on Instagram. The ‘FinTwit’ Influencers now face charges in $100 Million Scheme. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 10:28 PM PST - 24 comments

Snakes have a clitoris: scientists overcome a massive taboo around female genitalia. Scientists say previous research mistook the organs on female snakes as scent glands or under-developed versions of penises
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:01 PM PST - 22 comments

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT): The Politics of Loneliness — Social, economic, and technological trends contribute to widespread feelings of isolation—and there’s a role for policy in making things better.
posted by tonycpsu at 8:28 PM PST - 18 comments

Despite the death of Flash, through the holiday magic of Ruffle Homestar Runner has a new interactive feature, a Decemberween Advent-ish Calendar of sheet music of various H*R songs, along with the characters commenting on them and the odd animated grace note. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 7:46 PM PST - 12 comments

Geographer and geologist collecting oral literature of indigenous peoples tells of stories of sea-level rise at least 7,000 years old.
posted by NotLost at 7:14 PM PST - 19 comments

How the team sets its own salaries at OCF (part 1) - This is part one, detailing the model we came up with and transparently sharing our staff's pay—part two is about the process we used and resources for other groups who might want to try something similar. - How OCF Developed a New Compensation Model (part 2)
posted by aniola at 5:28 PM PST - 13 comments

Zola Jesus: Alive in Cappadocia is a four-song performance recorded in a 2,000 year-old cavern-chapel in Turkey. (The performance of 'Skin' is particularly great, imo.) The chapel itself is fascinating, and is one of many ancient rock-hewn churches in Cappadocia. The monks of the region also had a vast complex of agricultural caves used for everything from stables to beehives to pigeon roosts. The music video for Lost from Zola's most recent album was also shot in the area, and is spectacular.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:37 PM PST - 2 comments

How bad is the fentanyl crisis in America? Very bad. " 'The cartels saw the void left by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry,' said John Callery, a 30-year veteran of the DEA who retired after running the San Diego field office. 'Nature abhors a vacuum and they said, ‘Holy crap. We only have to get five pounds of fentanyl across the border instead of 7,000 pounds of meth. Perfect. And we can make 10 times as much money.’”'" The article covers the DEA's confused and unfocussed response, the rise of the Mexican cartel supply chain and the situation in San Diego, ground zero for fetanyl smuggling. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 4:20 PM PST - 47 comments

Quiz: Are you fluent in Gen Z office speak? (WaPo gift link, archive.org)
posted by box at 3:18 PM PST - 119 comments

It seems to have been the emergence of globalized trade routes over the next few centuries that precipitated a new demand for fortified wine and other forms of alcohol that could travel across the ocean, packing as much potential drunkenness into the smallest spaces possible ... Hard liquor, in this light, is just one of the many scourges imposed on us with the rise of global capitalism, a centuries-long epidemic, a legal poison, normalized, for the most part, by the efficiency of its cultural laundering — cocktail recipes, jokes, advertisements, the eternal promise of “fun”. from Gone Bad, Come to Life by Justin E.H. Smith [Previously]
posted by chavenet at 10:52 AM PST - 41 comments

After spending years engaging with MAGA members, Q followers, and other believers in conspiracies, The Daily Show's Jordan Klepper finally takes stock of all the crazy and tries to understand it. The six-part podcast Jordan Klepper Fingers The Conspiracy [Apple Podcast page with listening links] features conversations with sane people who are experts in different conspiracies, and outlines their origins and how it all fits together. Episodes run around an hour. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:40 AM PST - 12 comments

Stephen "tWitch" Boss has died at age 40. Boss first gained notoriety as a runner-up on the 2008 season of So You Think You Can Dance - and later an All-Star on the show - but since 2014 has been best known as the sidekick and DJ on Ellen DeGeneres' daytime show. (CW: Suicide) [more inside]
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:38 AM PST - 36 comments

The 50 best video games of 2022. The Best Game of 2022. The 25 best video games of 2022. The Best Video Games of 2022. The Best Video Games of 2022. The Best Games Of 2022 (So Far). The 10 Best Video Games of 2022. The 25 Best Video Games of 2022. The best new PC games in 2022. The best video games of 2022. The best mobile games in 2022.
posted by Fizz at 8:22 AM PST - 31 comments

I'm the mom of a trans kid in Texas. Stop asking me why we don't move to a 'safer' state. Raising a kid is hard work. Raising a trans kid in Texas is even harder. Yet I grimace when people ask me, "Why don't you just move?" The better question is, "Why don't you just help?" Placing the blame on me — a mother who has endured death and rape threats just for daring to confront Texas lawmakers on their cruelty toward my son — is hurtful, irresponsible, and, quite frankly, privileged. We have built our lives here. We can't just leave. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 1:34 AM PST - 123 comments

Christmas is coming up, and in Ukraine the civilian population is struggling to keep the lights on after massive Russian missile and drone attacks on the heat and electricity infrastructure. After using hundreds of simple Iranian drones with reportedly limited success, Russia is trying to procure ballistic missiles from Iran. The US is finalising plans to send Patriot air defence missiles, while there are reports (machine translation) that the comparable French/Italian SAMP/T Mamba will also be provided. On the front line the situation seems to be quite stable as the muddy season is drawing to an end, but both sides keeps a lid on information these days. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 12:16 AM PST - 161 comments

How Normalcy Bias Will Define Our Future. Many of us have encountered this attitude daily over the last few years. It’s infuriating. We’ve tried to get those around us to take various threats seriously, whether it’s the coronavirus or climate change. Our friends and family wave us off. It leaves us feeling isolated and unbalanced, wondering if we’re the ones with the problem. We’re not, and normalcy bias shows just how weird people act in the face of threats. Most of the time, they’re predisposed to shrug it off. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 10:10 PM PST - 67 comments

You Are a Skeleton & That Is a Problem, a Gameboy homebrew game made by Nicky Flowers. There is a Good Ending, and there is a BEST ENDING!!!, and there are a whole lot of bad endings. It's short though! It was made for Bad Game Jam, and you might like these other entries.
posted by JHarris at 3:22 PM PST - 13 comments

A chronicle of 9 different christmases from the life of Tim Rogers I struggle to do justice to what Rogers has written here. It's a handful of snapshots from his life, linked to living abroad, sex, romance and the holidays. It's beautifully written in that inimitable Tim Rogers style, and it's sad in a way that I think a lot of us will recognize from our own lives. If you're in the mood for a bit of Holiday Melancholy, click on through.
posted by signsofrain at 1:08 PM PST - 3 comments

The US state of California, where car culture is so ingrained that it spawned its own Saturday Night Live sketch series, has made jaywalking legal starting in 2023 in the Freedom to Walk Act. [...] Pedestrians can only be ticketed for jaywalking – or crossing outside of an intersection – if there is “immediate danger of a collision". The cost of a jaywalking ticket in California could be as much as $250, compared to $1 in jaywalking-friendly Boston. (jaywalking previously and previouslier)
posted by meowzilla at 12:17 PM PST - 84 comments

Mike Leach died today at the age of 61, a couple days after suffering a heart attack. Best known as a college football coach, currently at Mississippi State (but also an author of a biography of Geronimo), Leach was one of the more interesting public figures in American life at a time when public eccentricity isn't appreciated as much as maybe it once was. Someone once asked Leach how he'd like to be remembered in his obituary. Leach responded "well, that's their problem. They're the one writing the obituary. What do I care? I'm dead." Stories and memorable moments inside. [more inside]
posted by kevinbelt at 11:27 AM PST - 14 comments

Early Modern Recipe Online Collective is celebrating 10 years of collective transcription and pedagogical collaboration. Historian Elaine Leong on last month's transcribathon of manuscripts from the archives of the Royal College of Physicians, including Lady Sedley's receipt book (dated 1686). The 17th and 18th centuries were the period in which recipe books flourished as literacy was becoming more widespread and households sought the ability to produce many of the necessities and luxuries of life at home. 5 minute talk titled Lost in Transcription: EMROC, Recipe Books, and Knowledge in the Making. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:18 AM PST - 5 comments

Get all your baffling gender-selection webforms at genders.wtf. Curated by effy.
posted by cortex at 10:57 AM PST - 37 comments

TPM has received copies of Mark Meadows texts related to Jan 6. In a series of articles, TPM is releasing text messages that were turned over to the House committee investigating Jan 6. All told, he was in contact with 34 members of Congress. [more inside]
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:15 AM PST - 71 comments

On the day when "SBF" is arrested and charged with criminal fraud and money-laundering and his rival "CZ" remains the target of a federal probe and Binance's audit is questioned [despite badly-timed efforts at PR [ungated]], it's a good day to revisit the "true believers of the bitcoin cult" in this article by David Golumbia from 2018.
posted by chavenet at 9:31 AM PST - 49 comments

The Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse trailer is out now.
posted by gauche at 9:24 AM PST - 34 comments

A web-based yule log (ylog?), presented in several styles. Planetary asked some people to reinterpret the original Yule Log video, and put it online. Josh Gross on Twitter gives a few more details.
posted by brentajones at 9:15 AM PST - 4 comments

The limpkin, a tropical marsh bird commonly found inhabiting Louisiana and Florida, was recently spotted for the first time in New York state. The lone bird was filmed along the Niagara River in Lewiston, and later captured by wildlife specialists to be relocated back South. More details on the case available from regular citizens in the Google Group community forum Geneseebirds. For more information on limpkins, listen to BirdNote or read an overview on the Audubon website.
posted by rcraniac at 8:15 AM PST - 6 comments

Expiration dates are basically bullshit
posted by jacquilynne at 8:09 AM PST - 62 comments

The simple fact is this: I never regretted a single cold shower. I've always felt better immediately afterward. Alert, happier. More importantly, after cold showers, I always felt like I had achieved something. I never had that groggy feeling you get when you spend too long in a piping hot shower. It was good to have done something difficult. That was nice. ~~~ My feelings about this cold shower experiment are complex, rooted in weird ideas about trying difficult things and not giving up, even if there's no good reason to forge ahead. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 10:45 PM PST - 90 comments

Meta-Analyses Are The Gold Standard For Evidence, But What’s The Value Of Gold These Days? “Meta-analyses are a top-tier form of scientific evidence, assuming they’re conducted and reviewed skillfully. New research casts major doubts on that assumption in the exercise science and sports nutrition literature….The presently reviewed paper assessed the 20 most-cited meta-analyses in the field of strength and conditioning. After critically appraising these meta-analyses, the researchers found that 85% of them contained at least one statistical error. [more inside]
posted by bq at 9:52 PM PST - 9 comments

Deep Learning Is Hitting A Wall. "Current deep-learning systems frequently succumb to stupid errors... They sometimes misread dirt on an image that a human radiologist would recognize as a glitch. (Another issue for radiology systems, and key motivation for keeping humans in the loop, is that current AI relies mostly or entirely on images, with little or no comprehension of all the text that might describe a patient’s history, sometimes neglecting critical information.) A deep-learning system has mislabeled an apple as an iPod because the apple had a piece of paper in front with “iPod” written across. Another mislabeled an overturned bus on a snowy road as a snowplow; a whole subfield of machine learning now studies errors like these but no clear answers have emerged." Also: How come GPT can seem so brilliant one minute and so breathtakingly dumb the next?
posted by storybored at 9:31 PM PST - 53 comments

The early reviews on Netflix's Harry & Meghan are uniformly dismal. Sometimes entertainingly so. The Atlantic says: "In the trailer for this series, Harry complains that his family is a “hierarchy,” which suggests that the whole concept of a monarchy might have eluded him." Inside: more reviews and reactions. [more inside]
posted by MiraK at 9:16 PM PST - 80 comments

Fifty years ago yesterday, Kermit and Joey said the alphabet together. [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 6:30 PM PST - 28 comments

Angelo Badalamenti, composer of unsettling film soundtracks, dies at 85 [more inside]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:16 PM PST - 57 comments

Helga, Zohar and Commander Moonikin Campos take a trip. It's time for another look at humanity's exploration of space, starting with the Sun.
The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter glimpsed a "solar snake" racing across the face of the Sun. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 5:42 PM PST - 6 comments

Yvonne Smink creates extraordinary performances that the phrase "pole dancing" barely begins to describe. [more inside]
posted by jokeefe at 5:09 PM PST - 6 comments

I don't really know much about Jay Shetty, but I have been a long-time fan of Trevor Noah. This conversation between the two has Trevor offering up his insights about life, purpose, interpersonal relationships, and all kinds of things. This is maybe the deepest interview I've heard from Trevor, and it's given me a lot to ponder. For People Who FEEL LOST In Life, WATCH THIS To Find Yourself | Trevor Noah & Jay Shetty [1h30m]
posted by hippybear at 3:55 PM PST - 3 comments

How to Ban 3600 Books from School Libraries
Archive.org
posted by box at 1:56 PM PST - 48 comments

Top US holiday toys for each year from 1920 to 2021. "The list was curated using national toy archives and data curated by The Strong National Museum of Play. Some items remain curious relics of the past, while others are essentially as iconic now as they were upon their debut. Each one also functions as a window into American culture." [more inside]
posted by taz at 1:23 PM PST - 62 comments

When a storm surge swept dozens of wild horses and cattle from the coast of North Carolina, no one expected there to be survivors. Then hoofprints appeared in the sand.

In 2019, Hurricane Dorian caused a storm surge which flooded Cedar Island, North Carolina: an account by J.B. MacKinnon
posted by Rumple at 11:13 AM PST - 11 comments

The Last Great Wilderness slide show (link includes a video recreation of the slide show talk), developed by activists in 1988 and continuously toured for nearly two decades, played a vital role in building alliances between environmentalists and the Gwich’in Nation and in fostering grassroots action to keep oil drills out of the Arctic Refuge.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:07 AM PST - 2 comments

Émilie Gillet of Mutable Instruments has officially closed her shop. Her ground breaking designs are open sourced, which has led to the designs being cloned in smaller packages, also open source, as well as several professional builders now offering her designs. (A hobbyist can also have the pcbs fabbed and build them on their own, as I have.) [more inside]
posted by Catblack at 9:50 AM PST - 14 comments

Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes [ungated] - "Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels." (also btw: Nuclear fusion power edges from fantasy to reality)
posted by kliuless at 8:42 AM PST - 76 comments

DEATH STRANDING 2 (Working Title) [2022 Teaser Trailer] Kojima Productions’ next game, Death Stranding 2, was officially revealed at The Game Awards 2022 on Thursday by studio founder Hideo Kojima. The sequel will see the return of Léa Seydoux, Norman Reedus, and Troy Baker, and will bring Elle Fanning and Shioli Kutsuna to the roster of acting talent for the sequel, which Kojima referred to as simply DS2. [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 8:05 AM PST - 15 comments

Hello, and welcome to Monday! To access the following free thread, please choose your level of payment: a) Your everlasting soul, b) Tuesday, c) Little Joe, d) FYPM [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:17 AM PST - 94 comments

On December 11th, 1992, The Muppet Christmas Carol was released. Gregory Wakeman finds out how grief and addiction helped shape a film that still has a huge following 30 years on. The Muppets reminisce with Brett Goldstein about making the movie. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 1:17 PM PST - 90 comments

How the 1% Runs an Ironman (NYT gift link, archive.org) Inside the world of Ironman XC, which makes the endurance contest a little more endurable—for executives who can afford to pay.
posted by box at 12:22 PM PST - 58 comments

In a long article similar to a recent Meta, "The White Review asks friends and contributors what books they've enjoyed reading and rereading." This year, Sofia Samatar (previously) suggests books such as Amina Cain's A Horse at Night: On Writing, and Elvia Wilk (previously) suggests books such as Ned Beauman's Venomous Lumpsucker. [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:44 AM PST - 18 comments

Stephen Tennant: The Great Writer Who Never Wrote. I suspect many of you will feel an affinity with Tennant whose "lack of stamina, both mental and physical, was to be the prevailing theme of his existence." (s/l The Paris Review)
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:55 AM PST - 23 comments

I killed every NPC in Skyrim. [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 6:54 AM PST - 27 comments

Tiny Desk had Stromae in [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 6:08 AM PST - 11 comments

As the landmark 2manydjs mix compilation arrives on streaming platforms to mark its 20th anniversary, David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax are interviewed in Dazed and the Guardian. Previously and previouslier (2002!)
posted by ellieBOA at 4:21 AM PST - 6 comments

In early 2021, in the richest area of the world's richest country, in the home of the world's largest technology companies, the best way to find a COVID-19 vaccine was to go to a website which relied on a small army of volunteers making phone calls every morning to every single pharmacy. This is the story of VaccinateCA, and the United States' bungled vaccine distribution. (warning: very long)
posted by meowzilla at 11:43 PM PST - 28 comments

Native California bees are disappearing while domestic honeybees spread in part of a pattern where human activity is making ecosystems around the world look the same. Atlantic | Ungated [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 12:20 PM PST - 10 comments

The Tren Maya (WaPo gift link, archive.org), President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's signature infrastructure project, is a $15 billion train line that will connect tourist cities on the Yucatan peninsula and pass historic Mayan sites in southeastern Mexico. Archaeologists Manuel Pérez Rivas and José Francisco Osorio León are tasked with ranking the importance of previously-undiscovered ruins.
posted by box at 11:22 AM PST - 13 comments

On the internet, “crunchy” has become shorthand for a parent making a conscious choice to raise their kids with all-natural food, clothes, and products. Crunchy parents tend to avoid iPads, red dye 40, sugar, gluten, processed foods, and plastic toys...But the reliance on alternative medicines has created distrust of any western medicine, including, in some extreme cases, medical experts and life-saving childhood vaccines. Now, a social-media feud between @reallyverycruncy and another parenting creator has ignited a larger debate about whether parents can participate in the crunchy lifestyle without being sucked down a pipeline to extremism.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:02 AM PST - 118 comments

Hades II [Reveal Trailer][YouTube] [ Hades II FAQ] “The Game Awards happened [earlier this week] but we’re not here to talk about that. What we’re here to discuss, true believers, is Supergiant Games surprising everyone by breaking its “no-sequel” tradition in announcing Hades II and swiftly stepping on the gaming world’s collective necks with how attractive its characters are, again. And they’re not just hot, they’ve got some interesting historical lore behind them to boot. Whereas the 2020 action-roguelike Hades saw Zagreus battling his way up from Hades (the place) to meet his estranged bio-mom, Persephone, Hades II sees Zag’s sister, Melionë, descending into the underworld to beat up their dear old grandpappy, Chronos, the Titan of Time. Somewhere along the way, she’ll likely be charged with freeing Hades (the dude) from bondage.” [via: Kotaku] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:55 AM PST - 48 comments

Destroying The Old Lie: What Makes a Film Truly Anti-War [CW: graphic cinema and real world imagery, violence, gore, film spoilers] [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 3:15 AM PST - 32 comments

In March 2022 The Ever Forward grounded in Chesapeake Bay. Much discussed here at the time. Now nine months later the US Coast Guard has issued its accident report with recommendations. The slightly garrulous Sal Mercogliano give his insider's take: good fun but 30mins. tl;dr: the Captain was having dinner downstairs; the pilot was chatn and txtn on his phone; the most junior watch-keeper had the con; visibility and weather fine. What could possibly go wrong? [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:15 AM PST - 13 comments

Mosaic: A match-three "broughlike" (a term for a restrictive roguelike akin to the works of Michael Brough) from the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge 2022.
posted by solarion at 9:22 PM PST - 6 comments

10 Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2022. It's been a good year for science and Tech says Derek Thompson in The Atlantic's inaugural Breakthroughs of the Year article.
posted by storybored at 9:06 PM PST - 17 comments

Dungeons & Dragons dice are notoriously fickle friends. Here's how I un-cursed my oracle rocks before going into fictional battle.
posted by Etrigan at 7:35 PM PST - 35 comments

America's Most Loved Monorails: from Wanamaker's in Philadelphia to Meier and Frank in Portland, one highlight of Christmas Seasons past was a ride on the Department Store Monorail!
posted by vespabelle at 6:09 PM PST - 13 comments

LIMA — Peru’s former President Pedro Castillo announced on Dec. 7 that he was dissolving Congress, among other actions. Castillo made the announcement on the same day that Congress was scheduled to hold a vote on his impeachment. The move ultimately failed, and Castillo has been arrested by police for what has been called a “self-coup.”
posted by aniola at 5:33 PM PST - 20 comments

Breakfast Bangers Click the Full English and drop some jungle-full beats.
posted by swift at 3:24 PM PST - 11 comments

CGP Grey dives into The Maddening Mess of Airport Codes!.
posted by cozenedindigo at 12:44 PM PST - 41 comments

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures. A digital monograph featuring interpretive essays on Islamic artifacts (Jerusalem in Java, Indonesia), texts (Tarikh-i Jahangushay is a Muslim chronicler’s account of non-Muslim Mongols), and phenomena entwining over fourteen centuries. Reader instructions.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:12 PM PST - 3 comments

A classic 5-over-1: retail on the ground floor, topped with several stories of apartments one wouldn’t want to be able to afford. The words THE JOSH have been appended to the canopy above the main entrance in a passionless font.

Why Is Everything So Ugly?
posted by Rumple at 10:48 AM PST - 83 comments

For 20 years, Clarissa Crader has done everything in her power to get Justin Campbell care for his schizophrenia. He just got off probation after beating an elderly man. Now what? [TheCity.nyc]
posted by riruro at 10:44 AM PST - 27 comments

What Twitter [or social media more broadly] Does to Our Sense of Time (archive.ph) an essay by author Jenny Odell. "Entrainment, a term that originated in biology and then spread to the social sciences, refers to the alignment of an organism’s physiology or behavior with a cycle; the most familiar example would be our circadian rhythm. The signal driving entrainment, in this case light and dark, is called a “zeitgeber” (German for “time giver”)... The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number of hours we have in a day."
posted by gwint at 10:27 AM PST - 8 comments

Just three days after the reelection of Raphael Warnock gave Democrats a 51-49 advantage in the Senate, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema today declared in an op-ed in the Arizona Republic that she is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an Independent. [more inside]
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 6:43 AM PST - 183 comments

Rachel Aviv: The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles (SLTNY) CW: child abuse
posted by kmt at 6:21 AM PST - 27 comments

Tom Cardy: The Ballad of Smokin' Joe Rudeboy [previously 1, 2, 3]
posted by lazaruslong at 10:46 PM PST - 6 comments

Asteroid Launcher: not your parents' Asteroids. Choose a type of NEO, how large it is, how fast it's going, and the angle of impact when it hits the Earth's atmosphere. Pick a point on the map, and hit the LAUNCH ASTEROID button. The app will show on the map and tell you factoids about the resultant crater, fireball, shock wave, highest wind speed, and earthquake. But ya gotta aim and chuck it just right, and then quick, hide behind the moon so the earth doesn't know what hit it!
posted by not_on_display at 10:30 PM PST - 30 comments

At its surface, it seems like a simple problem with a simple solution. Across the country, medicine cabinets are littered with unused, potentially addictive opioids. So the federal government wants to distribute prepaid envelopes alongside new painkiller prescriptions, allowing Americans to mail back their leftovers. But the seemingly innocuous proposal has generated opposition from a surprising source: the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, a powerful nonprofit organization that has dominated drug policy advocacy in Washington for decades.
posted by Etrigan at 5:39 PM PST - 37 comments

The FTC will sue to block the $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft. Activision Blizzard CEO says 'the allegation that this deal is anti-competitive doesn't align with the facts.' The FTC says 'Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals.' Pitfall Harry could not be reached for comment.
posted by box at 12:52 PM PST - 27 comments

Many staffers at the New York Times are going on strike today. [more inside]
posted by hydra77 at 9:24 AM PST - 59 comments

Raspberry (the people with the tiny computers) had the great idea of hiring a former surveillance cop to be a "maker in residence." The lack of enthusiasm for this decision has been answered on Twitter and Mastodon with snark and blocking, so all is going just fine.
posted by dominik at 9:11 AM PST - 90 comments

Maria Farrell explains why "plantations" is a better term. Metaphors work best when we consciously use them as tools to look with, rather than as the whole thing we’re seeing. [more inside]
posted by kingless at 8:02 AM PST - 27 comments

President Biden says WNBA star Brittney Griner has been freed from a Russian prison. "Moments ago I spoke to Brittney Griner. She is safe. She is on a plane. She is on her way home," he wrote on Twitter. Previously and previouslier.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:38 AM PST - 100 comments

There's a poem at the end of Minecraft, but Minecraft doesn't own it. Quite a story by an author who lives in the gift economy as much as he can.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:09 AM PST - 29 comments

I want a silent wedding reception. My fiance and I are planning our wedding. As the bride, I’m planning on making certain requests of my guests, to make sure that my special day is as perfect as possible. For example, I’m asking that my guests wear exclusively yellow at the ceremony. My fiance has been supportive, but he angrily rejected my other request: that our guests remain silent throughout both the ceremony and reception (to ensure that the focus remains on us).... [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 9:47 PM PST - 82 comments

Fishing nets laced with spice did nothing to deter hungry dolphins, leaving fishers searching in their bid to beat depredation. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 4:33 PM PST - 17 comments

Ari Melber sits down with Jeff Goldblum for a discussion from just a few days ago about his career that also touches on a zillion other topics, as you would expect from talking to Jeff. It's a fun and fluffy interview that might also contain some insights into the impenetrable Goldblum.
posted by hippybear at 3:48 PM PST - 8 comments

Robin Sloan on how Big Tech's recent stumbles can open the door to a new internet: Some of you reading this were users and/or developers of the internet in the period from 2002 to perhaps 2012. For those of you who were not, I want to tell you that it was exciting and energizing, not because everything was great, but simply because anything was possible. The concrete hadn’t set. Now, after a decade of stuckness, the pavement is cracking — crumbling — and I want to insist to those of you who lived through that time, and those of you who didn’t: we all have a new opportunity.
posted by Cash4Lead at 2:08 PM PST - 41 comments

Over at Ask A Manager, proprietor Alison Green asked readers to recount their office holiday stories. Commenter Stella70 responded with a tale of youth, hubris, bad decisions, and copious amounts of alcohol.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:26 PM PST - 30 comments

Flow State is a substack that, each weekday, recommends an album or two's worth of 'music that's perfect for working (no vocals).' [more inside]
posted by box at 12:30 PM PST - 8 comments

Lustmord has released a newly mastered redux of "The Silent Night" for all your dark ambient holiday needs. [more inside]
posted by FatherDagon at 12:15 PM PST - 5 comments

Every "Chronically Online" Conversation Is The Same
posted by backseatpilot at 11:38 AM PST - 130 comments

The recently published Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food you can make so you don’t die, by Zilla Novikov and Rachel A. Rosen, is here to rescue those of us struggling to feed ourselves. "Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies." [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:55 AM PST - 73 comments

Narrative designer Bruno Dias (cf. Fallen London) presents: A [not yet] Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, an ongoing weekly series about the decades-long evolution of which kinds of decks competitive M:tG players were relying on in tournament play and exactly which stupid terrible broken cards were responsible for that before subsequently being banned from play forever. The story begins with Chapter 1: Magic as Dr Richard Garfield, PhD Intended.
posted by cortex at 8:08 AM PST - 37 comments

"Mornings.co.uk was curious which dreams were most common in different countries around the world. So, we analysed Google search data to see which dream symbols every country is searching for. And then we looked at what the most common dreams might mean." For those who dream of maps, here's the hi-res one Mornings.co.uk drew up.
posted by not_on_display at 12:16 AM PST - 62 comments

Advent Incremental is an advent calendar style incremental game by The Paper Pilot with new layers opening up each day leading up to Christmas.
posted by juv3nal at 9:39 PM PST - 140 comments

My 4 year old couldn't breathe. And the medicine was gone.
posted by foxfirefey at 9:37 PM PST - 35 comments

The sky over the city of Vancouver was the color of a television tuned to a Prince concert. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 2:57 PM PST - 51 comments

The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. Review essay by Laleh Khalili on When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm. A US government website records federal contracts given to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and others. Homeland Security and the Pentagon paid lavishly for ‘engaging human-centred design’, developing a ‘culture of continuous improvement’ and other meaningless bits of management-speak festooned with cryptic acronyms. Two contracts with the federal procurement agency, which earned McKinsey $1 billion between 2006 and 2019, had to be terminated because the company refused to submit to an audit. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:12 PM PST - 41 comments

5 key questions the Georgia Senate runoff will answer. The election could say a lot about candidate quality and whether Democrats can replicate their success in the state.
posted by team lowkey at 1:07 PM PST - 81 comments

Season 4 of TCM's podcast The Plot Thickens is Here Comes Pam, 7 episodes of Ben Mankiewicz in conversation with Pam Grier about her life. From her childhood in Colorado to the present day, Pam tells her own story. And wow, what a story it is! Each episode runs ~45m, and there might be some bonus episodes released.
posted by hippybear at 10:53 AM PST - 4 comments

Michigan’s famous Christmas Tree Ship sank 110 years ago
posted by tiny frying pan at 10:31 AM PST - 9 comments

Gymkhana 2022 (previously) features a crazy guy doing crazy things in a crazy car. [more inside]
posted by box at 9:54 AM PST - 21 comments

This is a new release of Dwarf Fortress. All craftdwarfship is of the highest quality. [more inside]
posted by nathan_teske at 9:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Fourteen beams of light will illuminate Mount Royal to commemorate the victims of the École Polytechnique massacre, an anti-feminist mass shooting that occurred 33 years ago on 6 December 1989 at École Polytechnique in Montréal, Québec, Canada. [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 9:09 AM PST - 17 comments

The rise of the video game union: [Polygon] is an all-in-one explainer on why game workers are unionizing and the specific steps that future organizers may take. We encourage you to share the link, and we’ve also prepared a zine version that you can print and distribute in your community. In legal speak, the zine is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US), which permits distribution of the zine provided that it is not altered or modified, or used commercially. Learn how to print it in your town. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:21 AM PST - 5 comments

Spending too much money on food and drink is an act known as abligurition, according to one 18th-century dictionary – the result of which might be a feeling of barleyhood (a Tudor-period word for a hangover), or crapulence (defined by Samuel Johnson as “sickness by intemperance”). And after all that overindulgence you may well need to swadge (to relax after a large meal), and be in dire need of a yulehole – a term defined by the superb Scottish National Dictionary as “The hole in the waist-belt to which the buckle is adjusted to allow for repletion after the feasting at Christmas.” (Should you need it, the excellent Scots word pang, according to the same source, can be used to mean “to force an unwanted article on someone”. Ergo, it is the perfect word for Boxing Day, or for all the Bounty bars left in the bottom of your tub of Celebrations.) Author Paul Anthony Jones reveals the roots of his love of obscure words in The Guardian.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:59 AM PST - 31 comments

A few days before he ended things the second time, we had a fight about my writing and ethics, specifically the question of whether I would write about our hypothetical future child.
posted by folklore724 at 2:05 AM PST - 98 comments

"But, as the mods explained, ChatGPT simply makes it too easy for users to generate responses and flood the site with answers that seem correct at first glance but are often wrong on close examination." The Verge has an article about the new Stack Overflow policy banning AI-generated answers. Users of the site are rewarded with points for contributing upvoted content to the site, which can be used as clout for job-finding prospects. [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 4:02 PM PST - 148 comments

Black Growth, Green Growth, and Creepy Eyes: three of a number of fascinating and unsettling procedural animations by rich_lord.
posted by cortex at 3:26 PM PST - 13 comments

The Amaterasu Railway in Miyazaki Prefecture is a popular local train that takes passengers on a gorgeous 30-minute journey through the spectacular scenery of Takachiho. The quirky train is known for its open roof, its journey over Japan’s highest train bridge, and train conductors who blow bubbles along the way. But now they’re known for something else: leaving passengers feeling hungry.
posted by Etrigan at 2:41 PM PST - 11 comments

"The California Roadkill Observation System uses a form-based data entry system to report carcasses resulting from wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC). Operating since 2009, it... contains 1,338 users and more than 54,000 observations of 424 species of ground-dwelling vertebrates and birds, making it one of the most successful examples of crowd-sourced roadkill and wildlife reporting." [source, via, cw: dead animals] See similar projects at GlobalRoadkill.net
posted by jessamyn at 10:46 AM PST - 15 comments

The little-known student loan middlemen who are threatening debt forgiveness (MarketWatch) For decades, lawmakers shaped policy to benefit entities that earned money from the federal student-loan system, sometimes to the detriment of borrowers. Now, they are at the center of legal efforts to stop Biden’s cancellation plans (currently on hold).
posted by box at 9:39 AM PST - 28 comments

Actor, music teacher and longtime Sesame Street resident Bob McGrath has died peacefully on Sunday, at the age of 90. [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 7:43 AM PST - 76 comments

Sisters from Nova Scotia Cassie (fiddle) and Maggie (piano and guitar) MacDonald play traditional and original music, and they're a breath of fresh air. Their sound is like...Solas, but less stern, plus sibling harmony, and also sometimes they stepdance for percussion. They both have lovely voices. Start with "Star in the East" [SLYT] and "Little Road to Bethlehem" [SLYT]. Then go get their Christmas album"A Very Very Cassie and Maggie Christmas" on Bandcamp and play it to chase away the gray winter days. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 6:59 AM PST - 10 comments

Joyeux lundi, mes amis! For today's quiz, please identify the best French word: a) Liberté, b) Égalité, c) Fraternité, d) Apostrophe, e) Ce fil [more inside]
posted by taz at 4:19 AM PST - 85 comments

Goblin mode won the public vote to become Oxford’s Word of the Year 2022. Goblin mode has been floating around online for a long while and came to prominence over 2022. Its recent popular origins are contested, the main contenders being a viral Reddit post and a photoshopped headline about Julia’s Fox’s breakup with Kanye West. [more inside]
posted by d288478 at 3:35 AM PST - 47 comments

What is Structural Engineered Bamboo (SEB)? - "[Radial laminated bamboo] is more than twice the strength of any engineered or glulam timber product. In tension, it is more than 10 times stronger due to the continuous silica fiber content throughout bamboo. The higher density of SEB is ideal for connection design as timber fiber will crush within bolted connections, whereas this maintains its form under higher compression."[1] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 18 comments

"Through the Tube". How to teach remotely on television. 1960s teacher instructional." (YouTube)
posted by clavdivs at 9:45 PM PST - 7 comments

Happy Daze is a news website which helps you stay informed on all the good things happening in this great big world of ours. The big news networks predominantly feature negative news because the only thing they are after is more clicks and eyeballs (so that they can generate more advertisement revenue), and the unfortunate fact is that sad, tragic, and negative news just generate more attention. Happy Daze is run by a small team with no outside funding. We are not owned by a billionaire or a VC firm so we can publish news that we think is important with no ads. We strive to be different and non-divisive by showing people that there are plenty of positive stories and things happening which can help make one feel better about the world and humanity in general. via Reddit
posted by dancestoblue at 8:00 PM PST - 7 comments

Breaking Kitchen (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by obol at 4:05 PM PST - 7 comments

Line drying - everybody's doing it! [more inside]
posted by aniola at 3:27 PM PST - 75 comments

Danny MacAskill's Postcard from San Francisco [more inside]
posted by oneirodynia at 3:25 PM PST - 16 comments

Noodle, the pug who made "no bones day" a thing, has passed at 14-1/2 years old, after a spell of TikTok stardom that raised him to the level of New York Times obituaryworthiness. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 2:33 PM PST - 21 comments

The December 2 2022 episode of The Sarah Silverman Podcast, "Chapelle, B*Face, Anything Goes", spends much of its 50m running time with Sarah talking about Dave, anti-semitism, racism, her own past with blackface, and what all this seems to mean to her. I found this interestingly reflective and nuanced, and was worth my time to go through twice. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:31 PM PST - 22 comments

ChatGPT's transcripts were all the rage [more inside]
posted by dyslexictraveler at 1:45 PM PST - 94 comments

How far can you walk in 10 minutes? How about an hour? Or on a bike? How far can you go by train in Europe in 5 hours? (How about non-stop?) For USians: Amtrak Explorer.
posted by gwint at 12:47 PM PST - 14 comments

"The End of Companion Television" Former CNN host Brian Stelter on the end of live programming on the Headline News (HLN) network (SLThe Atlantic, archive.org version)
posted by box at 9:30 AM PST - 20 comments

In Forests Full of Mines, Ukrainians Find Mushrooms and Resilience [The New York Times]

“The forests in areas that were occupied remain heavily mined. Mines and unexploded ordnance cover thousands of square miles of Ukrainian land, according to the interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky. The Ukrainian government pleaded with people not to pick mushrooms, and the government agency for forest resources imposed formal restrictions on walking in forests in nine Ukrainian provinces, including the region around Kyiv where Mr. Poyedynok goes. But specialists say it will take at least a decade to demine the forests — and many Ukrainians were not ready to wait that long before returning to their favorite hobby. Reports of mushroom hunters stepping on mines came regularly from all of the nine provinces where walking in the forest was banned.”

These misty and damp parts of the country have long beckoned to mushroom hunters with the promise of plenty, but now peril, too, lies beneath the earth’s surface.
posted by Fizz at 7:29 AM PST - 8 comments

Play as an early 19th century surgeon in a historically accurate and gruesome interactive text game (Twine) by The Old Operating Theatre Museum’ web volunteer Charlotte Regan.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:00 AM PST - 9 comments

How to Find Dog Agility Trials (via https://dogagilitytrials.com/) UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada links inside. See pure happiness without having to talk to anyone! How could anybody have a better time than a very good dog who finally has something to do with all that energy and smarts? The hottest club in [your US state] is your local dog agility course. Culture and rules might vary at places and events – especially indoors, so check before going, but generally you do not have to own a dog to watch an agility trial. [more inside]
posted by amtho at 11:23 PM PST - 13 comments

The year is very very definitely 1971, and these are Rare Moog Dancers.
posted by cortex at 3:24 PM PST - 18 comments

Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny [Official Trailer] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:22 PM PST - 69 comments

Andor: Star Wars for Grownups "But Andor is something new and astonishing: a Star Wars series written and filmed entirely for discerning grown-ups. It’s accurate but faint praise to call this the smartest Star Wars ever made; it’s one of the smartest shows anyone has made in recent years, and can reasonably be mentioned in the same breath as, say, The Wire. It’s better than this bloated and wildly uneven franchise deserves; that it was greenlit at all suggests, against all odds, that even endlessly recycled blockbuster intellectual properties have some room for artistry." (n.b. spoilers) [more inside]
posted by gwint at 12:41 PM PST - 68 comments

Flash Forward with Rose Eveleth is a podcast that explores possible or not-so-possible futures, taking great care to examine how technology, opportunity, and adversity will be experienced differently by people of different identities. Typically, each episode begins with a short piece of audio fiction, followed by inteviews with experts. The current ongoing special series, Welcome to Vanguard Estates, kicks off a with a choose-your-own-adventure style nonlinear narrative, which you can experience in audio form or read as text. [more inside]
posted by BrashTech at 12:21 PM PST - 3 comments

How James Joyce Almost Became A Famous Singer. "Joyce was angry at his defeat in the competition—but in typical fashion, blamed the rules, not his own shortcomings. He complained about the pigheadedness of judges who evaluated contestants in singing music they had never rehearsed. Who cared how a musician learned a song, he argued, when the real measure of ability is what you do after you learn it?" [more inside]
posted by storybored at 11:18 AM PST - 5 comments

The family-friendly Holi-Drag Storytime event in Columbus, Ohio, co-hosted by the Red Oak Community School and the local Unitarian Universalist Church, was canceled early this morning. Last month, the Proud Boys, a domestic terrorist group, publicized their intent to disrupt the event. Columbus police stated that they would be present to'monitor the situation'. The organizer, in an emotional statement, details the actual lack of commitment or support. Posts attempting to communicate and build community support on the usually LGBTQ+-supportive /r/Columbus subreddit have been deleted and the poster shadow-banned. [more inside]
posted by Silvery Fish at 10:08 AM PST - 45 comments

Airport lounges being spoiled by the unwashed masses This is satire? Right? If you read it as White Lotus level parody it's brilliant.
posted by Keith Talent at 10:05 AM PST - 31 comments

From the youth game to emerging pro leagues, the sport is booming among women and girls (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:34 AM PST - 2 comments

Here's Al Franken explaining why, by way of an anecdote involving Amy Klobuchar, as well as a harsh yet very funny observation by Lindsey Graham. Watch the whole video. It's worth it
posted by BadgerDoctor at 8:39 AM PST - 42 comments

In the latest proof of new legal requirements that all internet puzzle games must now end in "rdle," distinguished readers, I give you Murdle, a daily homicide-based logic / elimination puzzle game. A bit of fun for when you still want to kill somebody some time after the crosswordle and the sudokurdle, but before watching Jeopardle. [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:43 AM PST - 30 comments

Matt Parker contemplates the question: can the same net fold into two shapes?
posted by Pendragon at 12:03 AM PST - 11 comments

Something that is always “a little bit scary” is “particularly scary” right now. A confluence of factors, some structural and some cyclical, have aligned to make the current housing market among the most challenging, expensive, and stressful ones in recent years. Many Americans seem to share that sentiment: Half as many home sales occurred this past July as in the same month two years ago.
posted by folklore724 at 11:44 PM PST - 34 comments

It's like peeling back nearly 40 years of history. Holly Johnson performs just a few weeks ago in Switzerland, doing many Frankie Goes To Hollywood hits. Holly Johnson of Frankie goes to Hollywood - Baloise Session 2022 – @ARTE Concert [1h11m]. At age 62, he's still got the voice, and his band takes twice as many people to make up for The Lads.
posted by hippybear at 4:40 PM PST - 15 comments

Subtitles, rich lifeguards, heavenbanning, and gold-plated Morse Code keys: Tom Whitwell brings us 52 things I learned in 2022. (SLMedium)
posted by swift at 4:11 PM PST - 36 comments

Alice Guy-Blaché -- The Consequences of Feminism (1906)

Alice Guy-Blaché -- A Fool and His Money (1912) First Narrative film with an all black cast*

Alice Guy-Blaché -- Falling Leaves (1912)

Alice Guy-Blaché -- The Ocean Waif (1916)

Films - Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché: Cinema’s First Woman Director [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 4:06 PM PST - 3 comments

EU throws party in €387K metaverse — and hardly anyone turns up [Politico] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:32 PM PST - 28 comments

People Hanging Christmas Trees from the Ceiling to Outsmart Their Cats season has arrived. Link goes to nitter.net version. Direct links to Tiktoks: ornament protection, ceiling tree, plexiglass barrier, a cat tree, and a tree cat. Original tweet by writer and local whale enthusiast s.e. smith (who just launched a link roundup tinyletter!).
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:18 PM PST - 20 comments

How Fondue Was Invented. Ok, but for real: How A Swiss Cheese Cartel Made Fondue Popular. Fondue in the 70s. The canonical fondue pot. Le Chalet, Restaurant of the Pavilion of Switzerland, New York 1964 World's Fair, dejeuner menu
posted by gwint at 10:20 AM PST - 40 comments

Did a parent, teacher, or unsympathetic friend ever tell you to "save your tears"? Use of this item is probably not what they actually meant: Debunking the Myth of 19th-Century ‘Tear Catchers.’
posted by taz at 9:50 AM PST - 10 comments

The system is structurally designed in favor of older members with more seniority. Can you, a young member of Congress, survive? [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 9:27 AM PST - 19 comments

But we will! [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:35 AM PST - 72 comments

Heritage out of Control: Disturbing Heritage, Birgit Meyer's essay on the idea of material waste in religious objects, thoughtfully compares Dutch and Ghana as religions, colonialism and modernity intertwine. Going from the academic to the practical, Decluttering Dilemma: What to Do With Religious Items (multi-religious) and a librarian for a Catholic collection on What can you do with unwanted holy cards and Grandma’s religious statues?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:47 AM PST - 11 comments

Once a decade, the British Film Institute polls thousands of critics and directors to determine the best film of all time. Here is the newly-released critics list from 2022. The greatest film of all time? Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles No other film made by a woman has ever reached the top 10. [more inside]
posted by vacapinta at 5:35 AM PST - 103 comments

How Wednesday Addams Birthed a Generation of Cynics Nearly 30 years ago, Christina Ricci’s version of the character reinforced millennials’ suspicion that “the bright side” is an illusion (Emily Alford for Longreads).
posted by box at 4:51 AM PST - 22 comments

"how many painters are having to basically become process artists and action artists instead and setting up a camera in order to film themselves doing the painting because actually, what the algorithm cares more about is the verb..." Gabrielle de la Puente, in the conversation "Instagram Has Ruined The Art World" (27 Nov 2022) on making alternative online venues for artists to display work. (via sliceofpearpie: "this isn’t about external validation.... these form part of our working conditions.") "You were trying to explain to an artist how they could reach ten times more followers online by adhering to certain principles. You felt like the devil when you explained it." A comic by Jaakko Pallasvuo about relatability and attention. "Not everyone presents well in 280 characters, especially in a space they don’t even want to be present." charlottemadison42 and largishcat on a similar issue for writers.
posted by brainwane at 4:33 AM PST - 10 comments

It's official: The world's biggest 4-day workweek trial proves there's no reason to work five days a week [ungated] - "The pandemic has proven that our modern notions of how the office and our week should look are not as set in stone as we might think, exposing our ideas of what is needed to ensure productivity. Now that we've discovered that work can be done from home just as effectively, the next step is questioning how many working days are actually needed."[1,2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:57 AM PST - 44 comments

Thomas Keyes sets out to reproduce the circa 800 CE Book of Kells from parchment making, to pigment finding/ foraging/ growing/ producing pigments (from scratch), forming and writing the text, to a complete folio. [Dark Mountain in case anyone's averse], Thomas also has a kickstarter [I have no affiliation, I simply love re-creation and experiential historical research for itself, and what we can learn from doing, I also value much of the though, work and ethos that is Dark Mountain]
posted by unearthed at 11:30 PM PST - 7 comments

A deeply trippy A.I. generated music video for a shortened sixteen-and-a-half minute cut of Pink Floyd's track Echoes (original track was twenty-three-and-a-half minutes) from their album Meddle. Be sure to watch at a high resolution.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 9:58 PM PST - 16 comments

There are thousands of studies connecting religious belief and practise to health. However, much of this research has failed to include non-believers. In a recent study [paywalled] using data from almost 16,000 Canadians which included non-believers, the researcher "failed to find any evidence that religious believers had better levels of stress, physical health, life satisfaction or mental health compared to non-believers."
posted by clawsoon at 7:53 PM PST - 14 comments

“I thought I was so green, but then I realised I'm flying,” she says. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 4:47 PM PST - 123 comments

Returning after a seven month sabbatical, Jason Kottke brings us, via Open Culture, a engrossing, beautiful documentary about China's Van Goghs: The Village That Paints A Thousand Fakes A Year. [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 4:31 PM PST - 4 comments

The big search company that people have complicated feelings about
+ fantasizing about traveling somewhere, anywhere
+ a corporate tool for buying plane tickets
+ a fun interface design
= google.com/travel/explore
posted by Going To Maine at 1:34 PM PST - 7 comments

Secret 9/11 memo reveals Bush rewriting the history of the 9/11 attacks and the warnings he'd tuned out

On April 29, 2004, President George W. Bush hosted one of the most unusual meetings to ever take place inside the Oval Office. The 10 members of the 9/11 Commission got to ask him and Vice President Dick Cheney any question they wanted about the September 11, 2001, attacks. The words that were spoken in that room remained secret for nearly two decades. Now, we can finally read what Bush said.

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 1:20 PM PST - 47 comments

Weakness, specifically literary weakness, is enlivening, challenging, and generally has the effect of compelling the reader to move, as we say, outside their comfort zone. Weak novels cause us to attend to fiction as strategy rather than as entertainment. from The Weak Novel by Lucy Ives
posted by chavenet at 1:08 PM PST - 6 comments

¡Hola Papi! (aka J.P. Brammer) offers a meditation on "the gay bar."

But sometimes, after spending too much time outside of one, I get that familiar urge for an overpriced well drink and shitty pop music, for the sharp, judgy, lustful glances of faggots, for the near-darkness and the sticky floors and the people who, while not in perfect accord, have at least resolved to find each other.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:48 AM PST - 7 comments

Pattern Collider is an interactive tool to explore Penrose (and other "quasi-periodic") Tilings. (here's another webtoy) minutephysics on YT: Why Penrose Tiles Never Repeat. [more inside]
posted by gwint at 9:39 AM PST - 12 comments

The embodied energy just of the construction materials of the Seagram Building is estimated at 173 million kWh – almost four times the amount of energy that workers put into building the Great Pyramid at Giza (46 million kWh, approximately 78 million days of manual labour).

Barnabas Calder and Florian Urban compare the energy profile of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Seagram Building with Waugh Thistleton’s 6 Orsman Road, London. via
posted by Rumple at 9:24 AM PST - 40 comments

Wordle gets more intentional, but the new Wordle editor is ruining Wordle.
posted by Etrigan at 8:30 AM PST - 57 comments

One of the pioneers of indie feminist cartooning, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, has died at 74 after a long illness. Kominsky-Crumb, whose alter ego was (and was not) "Honeybunch Kominsky," drew rough, hilarious, vital cartoons about her experience as a young Jewish woman in a raunchy world. (2018 interview, cw: sexual violence.) Her obituary at Comicsbeat shows some of her characteristic strips. She is survived by a daughter, a grandson, and her husband. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 8:28 AM PST - 25 comments

The most important thing about climate tribes is that they shift the conversation from passive, “true-believer” narratives towards active, action-oriented ones. I couldn’t help but notice that the aforementioned YPCCC climate typology is inherently passive. “How worried are you about climate change?” is a very different question from “What do you believe is the right approach?”

Nadia Asparouhova (previously) creates a framework to understand the diverse, complex, and sometimes conflicting objectives and narratives that shape different types of climate work and advocacy. [more inside]
posted by rebent at 7:21 AM PST - 20 comments

Why The Railroads Refuse To Give Their Workers Paid Leave by Eric Levitz at NYMag. Archive.org link. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 7:13 AM PST - 91 comments

More than picking a zit - dermatillomania or obsessive skin picking, and sufferers using social media to build community and awareness (Buzzfeed News).
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:28 AM PST - 25 comments

The best 60 seconds of your life? [more inside]
posted by greenhornet at 4:39 AM PST - 16 comments

"The landscape of climate emotions is broad and complex, with different emotions being elicited in different people to different degrees. This gives rise to an additional, yet undertheorized layer of disagreement among the public: there is division of opinion not only about what should be believed regarding climate change, but also about how we should emotionally react to it." (The paper's key example: How should one face a warmer than normal summer--with pleasure or fear?) How to Feel About Climate Change? An Analysis of the Normativity of Climate Emotions.
posted by mittens at 4:25 AM PST - 21 comments

In the US and some other countries, Tubi is an ad-supported streaming service where you can watch some movies and TV for free, without having to log in. The catalog of course includes a lot of "that looks like dreck" stuff, but also 16 seasons of Columbo, classic films such as Stalag-17 and Fail-Safe, and other stuff you may have been meaning to watch. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 4:13 AM PST - 59 comments

If Twit, but don't fancy the ads. Bookmarklet to block promoters of tweets automatically.
posted by pompomtom at 4:11 AM PST - 4 comments