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"Using recent breakthroughs in photo editing techniques, Eli colorizes, restores, and digitizes photos from queer and trans history. The following images are originally from 1897-1973."
posted by creatrixtiara at 5:30 PM PST - 11 comments

More than 50 years ago, the name “Judy Blume” became an enduring pop culture staple for the bravery it took to write books about puberty and sex in a way that no one else was doing. from Judy Blume Doesn’t Miss Writing. She’s Not Afraid of Dying, Either [Variety] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:28 PM PST - 3 comments

In response to criticisms, Twitter has released the source code for their recommendation algorithm. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:28 PM PST - 27 comments

Sonic the Hedgehog is dead. It's time to solve his murder. [more inside]
posted by fight or flight at 2:09 PM PST - 12 comments

"Yet here I am, at my 75th birthday, still believing with all my heart, soul and mind that the moral arc of the Universe bends towards justice, towards reconciliation with nature, towards kindness with our fellow humans, and yes, towards wisdom." --> [more inside]
posted by Meatbomb at 1:23 PM PST - 11 comments

9-year-old California girl wanted to save her goat from slaughter. Then came the search warrant [The Sacramento Bee]
posted by riruro at 11:42 AM PST - 69 comments

The Town Without Television is an illustrated series (Part 1: Notel, Part 2: Unitel) about the research studying how television affected the culture of a Canadian town that had gone without it. These stories will soon be collected in to a book.
posted by bleary at 11:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility!
posted by aniola at 11:17 AM PST - 24 comments

Dismantling medical fatphobia. An essay by public health scholar Marquisele Mercedes for Pipe Wrench's 2022 special issue on fatphobia. Content warning for medical trauma. An essay on how fatphobia affects patients looking for doctors: "How much can I figure out in advance about this person’s fatphobia? Can I get any clues that they’ll treat my symptoms and problem, or will this be another conversation about my body size that ignores the actual issue? Will they actually touch my body or treat me with disgust?" [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:58 AM PST - 14 comments

My guy on the tooth picks: "I was skiing a zone with a partner when I passed by a snowboarder upsidedown and buried in a tree well. I only caught a glimpse of his board but it was enough to get my attention." [more inside]
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:32 AM PST - 34 comments

The first-ever collective bargaining agreement in minor league baseball history is near, a landmark moment in the sport’s history, and for the players in particular. The deal — which would have sounded outlandish just a year ago, when minor leaguers didn’t have a union — provides substantial raises to players and a slew of other improvements. Evan Drellich at The Athletic has the story. (Archive link.) More than 99% of minor leaguers voted in favor of the agreement. (Twitter). [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:22 AM PST - 16 comments

“Heat Death” might not at first reading strike the reader as science fiction at all. It contains no bug-eyed monsters, interplanetary flights, postapocalyptic worlds, or technological marvels. It focuses not on outer space as much as it does inner space—notably that of a woman—and the geography of the mundane—that of the home and the supermarket—rather than the fantastic or extraordinary.

– A Space of Her Own by Mary E. Papke, is an essay about Pamela Zoline and her 1967 science fiction story The Heat Death of the Universe.
posted by Kattullus at 8:50 AM PST - 8 comments

boygenius (previously), the group composed of singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers (previously), Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker (previously), released their debut album the record today (review, review, interview, interview), accompanied by the film, directed by Kristen Stewart.
posted by box at 8:50 AM PST - 4 comments

E3 isn’t coming back. [The Verge] “The pandemic proved that gaming could survive without E3. The last year E3 took place in person was in 2019; the event was cancelled in 2020, held as a digital show in 2021, and bounced from in person to online-only and finally to fully cancelled last year in 2022. Yet even without E3 as an anchor, developers and publishers have found ways to make a splash that don’t include the investment required for a big booth on the expo show floor. And when the pandemic arrived, the industry already had a playbook to follow — a playbook written by Nintendo. Since 2011, the company has seen enormous success with its Nintendo Direct video presentations, letting anyone in the world watch big game reveals without attending a physical show. Since then, nearly every major gaming company has adopted the format to create newsworthy moments of their own, and they’re pre-recorded ones that can’t break down on stage or might embarrass in front of a live audience. ” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:28 AM PST - 14 comments

How to save America's public transit systems from a doom spiral - "The only realistic way for transit officials to garner public support for the funding they desperately need is to demonstrate an ability to replace car trips, not just serve economically disadvantaged people who lack other means to get around their city. Otherwise, they forfeit the pro-transit arguments that resonate most with the public: curtailing congestion, reducing auto emissions, and boosting economic growth. And to replace cars, transit agencies must offer fast, frequent, and reliable trips. This should be the core mission of any functional public transportation system..." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:49 AM PST - 78 comments

Meet the pebble mound mouse. It creates its own microhabitat by scattering a mound of pebbles around its burrows. The air temperature around the pebbles warms up faster in the morning than the pebbles themselves, causing the formation of small droplets of dew by condensation. The mice carry the pebbles in their mouths to build the mound. The stones can weigh as much as half the mouse's body weight. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:03 PM PST - 18 comments

It may seem strange to apply a theory developed with respect to such significant world events to stickers, a medium primarily concerned with circulating images of lazy cartoon ducks and the like. But that is part of the point. Stickers reveal how the realities of public secrecy in China within the culture of the everyday have crystallized. With stickers, the tactics of visual ambiguity, remixing, humor, affective masking, irony, and ambivalence — once the preserve of artists dealing with significant political events — have become a primary part of mundane visual expression. from Speaking in Stickers by Krish Raghav [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:03 PM PST - 9 comments

Surely this. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:10 PM PST - 621 comments

"There is a world, almost within reach, in which LED lighting could be aesthetically fabulous. But right now, it’s one more thing that overpromises and under-delivers. What we’re starting to glimpse is a new phase in which good light, once easy to achieve and available to everyone, becomes a luxury product or the province of technological obsessives."
posted by PussKillian at 1:58 PM PST - 91 comments

A Few More Last-Minute Baseball Rules Major League Baseball is adding a pitch clock, and if you're a baseball fan, you probably have strong feelings about this rule change. Reading this parody of MLB rule changes was a fun escape from the conversations about how the new MLB rules are ruining / saving the game.
posted by SituationNormal at 1:39 PM PST - 15 comments

Watch - and listen - as museum conservation staff work on or demonstrate objects at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. For example: Conserving a Eurovision dress; Humidifying a ballet tutu; Conserving a PJ Harvey costume; Handling a puppet book; Turning the pages of a medieval choirbook; The handling and care of precious books; Massaging hands with bath rasps from Iran; Preparing a Bollywood poster for stretching; Unlocking a 17th-century strongbox. The full playlist. (MLYT).
posted by misteraitch at 11:11 AM PST - 4 comments

Girl, just eat in front of me A short original song from Singaporean TikToker Syapls on the occasion of the month of Ramadan. Enjoy. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 9:04 AM PST - 24 comments

Why are movies so dark these days? [Polygon] “The truth can’t be boiled down to any one factor. But one key element has largely gone missing from this conversation: filmmaking choices, and the current trends that have directors producing darker imagery. If streaming compression is a necessary evil of modern distribution, and if viewers will choose to watch movies and shows in suboptimal conditions regardless of the filmmaker’s intent, then why are so many directors, DPs, and colorists designing their work in a manner that’s incompatible with how so many people view media nowadays? What benefit are filmmakers getting out of this? The answers are complicated.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:16 AM PST - 88 comments

My Year of Dicks An Oscar-nominated autobiographical cartoon about a woman deciding she's old enough to lose her virginity; less about penises then about high school boys being dicks.
posted by I paid money to offer this... insight? at 11:12 PM PST - 19 comments

Meet the red-tailed phascogale (Phascogale calura), also known as the red-tailed wambenger; red-tailed mousesack; or kenngoor. It is a very small carnivorous marsupial with a big brushy tail/big feathery tail. It is around 10 cm (3.9 inches) long and weighs about 60 grams (2.1 oz). It can leap up to 2 metres (6.5 feet) between tree canopies. It eats insects and spiders and does not usually need to drink water. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:30 PM PST - 16 comments

So, I loved the book very deeply, and the movie was thrilling, but now... Life Of Pi is going to Broadway. (NBCNews, 6m, Al Roker, puppetry) I could see this being a thrilling theater experience. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:43 PM PST - 6 comments

How much money do we think Substack lost last year? by Elizabeth Lopatto [The Verge] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:56 PM PST - 57 comments

No Boyfriends Since Birth: A minicomic about going on a first date as a gay adult, by Richard Mercado [more inside]
posted by simmering octagon at 1:20 PM PST - 8 comments

While Wyrmwood Gaming wants to convince audiences that it’s just a cool bunch of goofballs doing their best, there’s rot at the company extending deep into the heartwood of its structure. TW: sexual assault, sexual harassment
posted by Kitteh at 12:34 PM PST - 21 comments

Piano Day is held on the 88th day of the year (there are 88 keys on a standard piano). The idea came from the German pianist and composer Nils Frahm in 2015 "because it doesn’t hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener." Come celebrate the piano! [more inside]
posted by kristi at 11:43 AM PST - 39 comments

After an unsuccessful board fight and amidst cost-cutting at the House of Mouse, long time Marvel head Ike Perlmutter is out at Disney (ungated).
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:01 AM PST - 30 comments

The portion of artists who failed to follow-up their first hit has been relatively constant in the last two decades — but rose in 2020.
posted by Etrigan at 9:03 AM PST - 21 comments

The trailer for Asteroid City, Wes Anderson's latest film, is finally out. The poster was revealed yesterday and the opening date is set for June 16th (6/21 for wider release). [more inside]
posted by bbrown at 6:54 AM PST - 106 comments

Zelda Producer Plays Tears Of The Kingdom For 10 Mins, And The New Stuff Looks Wild [YouTube][Spoilers ] Zelda fans have been starving for anything they can get, any crumb they can catch, and it seems like Nintendo is finally taking pity, rewarding them with a 10-minute gameplay trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. During the gameplay snippet, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma says through a translator that Tears has changed the world “in many ways,” including pieces of Hyrule that float high in the sky, or “sky islands.” [...] Today’s trailer, which continues to show Link and his verdant world at its best and adds even more gameplay mechanics to the ones previous trailers revealed, is hopefully only the start to Nintendo preparing to open up the flood gates of cold, hard Zelda information. It doesn’t have much time, anyway—the game releases for Switch on May 12. [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 6:49 AM PST - 49 comments

Dyson gripped the top of a stone bollard; Wagner continued to look away. The film caught a stance that suggested majestic indifference to the poorer boys at their side, as though these boys were subjects as well as spectators. The moment passed, the morning moved on. The photographer and the local boys disappeared and the Wagner car at last rolled up. The match began.

—Five boys: the story of a picture by Ian Jack [archive link] is an essay exploring the history of the famous 1937 photograph Toffs and Toughs by Jimmy Sime, and the lives of the five boys in it.
posted by Kattullus at 4:25 AM PST - 26 comments

Brandy Zadrony asks Journalism Twitter, and gets some great story links in reply. [more inside]
posted by wowenthusiast at 8:56 PM PST - 6 comments

Weighty In The Eighties: When Prog Went Pop is an essay by Jim Allen for uDiscover (posted here via yahoo!). It's about that weird period of time when heavy prog artists from a previous decade suddenly started to gain pop music chart recognition. It's a great article, with all the mentioned songs/videos linked below the fold. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:45 PM PST - 83 comments

When thieves retire. What the pirate kingdoms of Madagascar can tell us about the Enlightenment. [more inside]
posted by tavegyl at 8:32 PM PST - 11 comments

After the Afro-Cuban writer H. G. Carrillo died, his husband learned that almost everything the writer had shared about his life was made up—including his Cuban identity. [New Yorker]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:54 PM PST - 21 comments

LAST COMISKEY - Story of the 1990 White Sox and the Final Season (slyt) is a 3-part video series on the last season of old Comiskey Park in 1990. Interviews, photos, videos of players, fans, coaches, sportwriters, and stadium staff, this is a great homage to a beautiful old baseball park for the Chicago White Sox, focusing on the last year in 1990 (before it was torn down) and with a good amount of flashbacks to previous eras. [more inside]
posted by j810c at 6:40 PM PST - 3 comments

Cat-Gpt.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their large language models, or why.
posted by chavenet at 3:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Court Reinstates Adnan Syed’s Murder Conviction in ‘Serial’ Case and Orders New Hearing (NYT gift link) The Appellate Court of Maryland ruled that a lower court had violated the right of the victim’s brother to have been notified of and to attend a hearing. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:30 PM PST - 38 comments

A beautifully illustrated deep dive into the magical, complicated physics of bicycles.
posted by loquacious at 12:43 PM PST - 22 comments

Exactly what it says in the title This YouTube Channel is probably already some of the best of YouTube. But this particular episode may be among the best of the webs.
posted by mumimor at 12:40 PM PST - 8 comments

A series of YouTube videos where regular people are interviewed about their fashion choices. Just regular Parisians & Parisiennes, talking about what they're wearing and why. On the sidewalk. Mostly thrifted. Totally unscripted and awesome. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 12:38 PM PST - 10 comments

Defrag your brain and pipeline the instruction set of your soul with Personal Computer, the most recent heavy-as-balls chiptune metal album from the always-excellent (and MeFi's Own) Master Boot Record. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 10:45 AM PST - 11 comments

As the old Soviet joke goes, how can you tell that someone is an American in Russia? They’re smiling. AI and the American Smile "Why do you smile the way you do? A silly question, of course, since it’s only “natural” to smile the way you do, isn’t it? It’s common sense. How else would someone smile? As a person who was not born in the U.S., who immigrated here from the former Soviet Union, as I did, this question is not so simple..."
posted by gwint at 8:25 AM PST - 67 comments

Parents, be warned! There will be art in this art class! National treasure Alexandra Petri with a disclaimer.
(Washington Post gift link)

"Just wanted to let you know that in this art class, we’re going to be showing the students some art. Will that be okay? You signed up for a classical education, in theory — at least, that word is in the name of our school! — so I had sort of hoped it would be!" [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 7:34 AM PST - 78 comments

Wednesday is a Q&A with Ryan North, webcomic writer. Friday is a Q&A with Drew Curtis, founder and maintainer of Fark. Learn more here.
posted by NotLost at 6:13 AM PST - 9 comments

‘Fallout 4’ has aged beautifully. You should play it again. [Washington Post][Launcher] “In early 2022, I revisited “Fallout 4.” It had been seven years since I played a Fallout game, and I had a hankering for that lone-wanderer roving that the series so gorgeously enables. I am a wasteland weeb. What I discovered was that 2015’s “Fallout 4” might be the best game in the franchise, and even one of the best open-world role-playing games ever made. It is time to give it its flowers. [...] “Fallout 4” is consistently Fallout at its best — a gritty, stylish, post-apocalyptic Americana vision board so rich you can get lost for hours. You’ll melt into the wasteland as you surf curious character arcs and grim quest lines. And what “Fallout 4” nails — perhaps more so than its two predecessors, 2008’s “Fallout 3” and 2010’s “Fallout: New Vegas” — is exploration.”
posted by Fizz at 6:11 AM PST - 61 comments

PBS Space Time is a long-running series of videos about high-level physics, ranging from about five to twenty-five minutes long. It was hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz and is currently hosted by Matt O'Dowd. The videos can be watched both on YouTube and the PBS website. With 300+ videos it's hard to know where to start, but they've sorted them into over thirty playlists, such as Futurism and Space Exploration, Standard Model Lagrangian Playlist and Dark Matter and Dark Energy Explained.
posted by Kattullus at 2:23 AM PST - 13 comments

Cannabis has been legalized in New York State, and legal dispensaries could have opened starting nearly a year ago. Yet there are only five legal dispensaries in the whole state. "Meanwhile, about 1,500 smoke shops are selling cannabis illegally in New York City alone, city officials estimate." "Why Can’t Legal Cannabis Sellers Open Shops?" asks the nonprofit news org THE CITY. (Slow, confusing bureaucracy is the short answer.) More coverage.
posted by brainwane at 4:34 PM PST - 33 comments

... this book is explicitly about being an insufferable, solipsistic teenager: a key part of its effect is that we’re locked inside Charles’s mind, just as Charles is. So it seems perverse to arraign Amis for not spending enough time on the other characters (a bit like complaining that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is overly concerned with Stephen Dedalus). What surprised me, third time through, is how much we actually do find out about Rachel. from Teenage kicks by Claire Lowdon [TLS; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:05 PM PST - 14 comments

Wil Wheaton talks about trauma, trust and the librarian who helped him
posted by jacquilynne at 8:12 AM PST - 56 comments

Dan Olson (aka Folding Ideas) on Decentraland, the Metaverse, and the shitty grift at the center of the (meta)universe. A long, excellent YouTube video that is also something of a spiritual sequel to Olson's Line Goes Up, also featured on the blue. [more inside]
posted by Kybard at 7:20 AM PST - 64 comments

The Texas Observer, a liberal newsmagazine in a state that has grown increasingly hostile to its point of view since its founding in 1954, is closing. The news apparently came as a surprise to Observer staff, but the well-researched story in the Texas Tribune about the closure, like an obituary written before a person's death, suggests that perhaps it shouldn't have.
posted by adamrice at 6:19 AM PST - 21 comments

Slappy the frog lives in a shoe. (Instagram) (multi-link reddit below the fold.) [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 3:51 AM PST - 2 comments

Welcome to Monday, time travelers (wasn't it just Monday a few minutes ago?). For today's free thread, I'd like pass over a bit o' free association I had re the Wee Free Men, and ... the Fremen. And Dune and Discworld more generally. Now, I quickly got in well over my head when contemplating the possibilities of this wyrd alternative universe, but I bet Mefite fans have thoughts. [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:23 AM PST - 68 comments

The oldest DNA ever found reveals a snapshot of a vanished world. DNA frozen for 2 million years paints a picture of an extinct ecosystem. At the icy northern tip of Greenland, far into the Arctic Circle, a deep bed of sediment beneath the mouth of a fjord has lain frozen and undisturbed for 2 million years.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:48 AM PST - 8 comments

We had no idea how this person got his ATV on top of his car, or why...until now. After a number of reddit posts spotting an ATV on a car in Minnesota appeared, another redditor who happened to know the guy inquired and got us the answers we needed in video form.
posted by nTeleKy at 10:14 PM PST - 35 comments

Curious Clocks And Watches Through Time With Oliver Cooke [16m] has everyone's favorite British Museum horologist showing off peculiar clocks and interesting mechanisms from basically the beginning of clock movements. I didn't know this would be so incredibly interesting!
posted by hippybear at 7:46 PM PST - 2 comments

Palestinian writer Mahmoud Habboush on how Medieval Arabic Culinary Literature Offers Lessons for the Present. [New Lines Magazine] Aside from the excitement of knowing what people ate centuries ago, these books are priceless because they reveal the social life of the upper strata of Arab and Muslim medieval societies. Medical treatises, for example, abound, containing information about ingredients — their benefits and side effects — as well as some dishes by name, but rarely do they provide nonmedicinal recipes. Literary sources — also easy to find — shed a little more insight into the cuisine of the past, sometimes delivering the recipe in prose or as a poem, but that is the extent of it. They don’t reveal the full richness of medieval haute cuisine. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:54 PM PST - 12 comments

As a data researcher, I had to get to the bottom of it. What followed was months of categorizing hundreds of action movies, consulting experts in the field of name studies, reviewing academic papers and name databases, and seeking interviews with authors and screenwriters as to the rationale behind their naming decisions. It turned out I had only scratched the surface. from Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John?
posted by chavenet at 1:19 PM PST - 57 comments

10,000 Gecs, by 100 Gecs - 26min (Soundcloud, Youtube) Pitchfork review - it has furthered their interest in thrash guitars, ska revival, and pop-punk that generally sounds quantum-leaped in from a turn-of-the-century Hot Topic. You thought you loved computer glitch but, my friends, have you met slap bass? [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 12:29 PM PST - 29 comments

My first mathematical activity with students. Fresno State professor Howie Hua teaches math to future elementary school teachers. TikTok (How to mentally calculate the decimal representation of elevenths), Twitter (Factoring quadratics), Youtube (Are you using rectangles when multiplying and dividing?)
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:01 AM PST - 7 comments

"The unspoken criterion for this list is that any album that came out when I was in high school will be ranked at least 25 spots higher than it probably deserves." A 100 album-strong list that's really less of a list and more of a long meditation on debuts, albums, and the author's life with music. (But number one is hard to argue with) (not that I don't expect you to try). [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 8:34 AM PST - 127 comments

Ren - Hi Ren [more inside]
posted by fings at 6:58 AM PST - 21 comments

The Wellington Paranormal crew made scooter safety videos in Te Reo Māori.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:43 PM PST - 15 comments

In the Absence of a Trophy, the Photo Is Proof . Kenyan scientist Norbert Odero writes in The Elephant about how voluntarism, coercion and compensation are understood for medical research participants in Africa and the West.
posted by tavegyl at 10:07 PM PST - 6 comments

How Pro Wrestling Explains Today's GOP [more inside]
posted by box at 1:14 PM PST - 52 comments

The stock market downturn wiped away 20% of her nest egg, which is now worth about $240,000. To save on gas, she and Mr. Le Blanc drive to the grocery store only on days when they pick up their mail nearby. “There’s no frivolous driving around,” she said.
posted by craniac at 1:07 PM PST - 110 comments

This is Utah’s new flag — and here’s why more states are mulling redesigns (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 12:55 PM PST - 58 comments

Zakka collector iseebitarou (previously) celebrates 1M subscribers: Sushi Robot.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:55 AM PST - 4 comments

Top 100 3D vehicle renders of 4,280 submissions [more inside]
posted by Gyan at 11:43 AM PST - 5 comments

The age of average by Alex Murrell
posted by chavenet at 11:30 AM PST - 38 comments

Suzanne Heywood tells of how her parents took her and her brother on and endless round the world yacht trip starting in 1976. CW: child abduction.
posted by rongorongo at 6:44 AM PST - 53 comments

Videos showing how all the different fields fit together in the map of mathematics and in the map of physics. Larnell Lewis demonstrates 13 levels of drumming. [Open Culture] Art History Shorts explaining famous works of art, artists, and art movements. [YouTube] [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 1:26 AM PST - 4 comments

Bill Gates and Kevin Scott give us an hour on AI and the rapidly evolving future of computing. Explain it to me like I'm five years old? OK, not five years old maybe, not totally tech blind but I know little of AI. This podcast seemed aimed at people with my level of understanding; it was a good use of my time to spend an hour with these [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 12:00 AM PST - 9 comments

What is the dumbest way a huge turning point in history began? Not a direct Twitter link, just a roundup of things said on Twitter about extremely dumb moments that twisted history. I presume y'all might be able to add your own as well?
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:28 PM PST - 51 comments

Pressures of extreme polygamy may be driving southern elephant seals to early death. Study finds males, who can command a harem of up to 100 females, driven to gain weight as quickly as possible by foraging in areas full of predators.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:40 PM PST - 8 comments

Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced today that company co-founder Gordon Moore has passed away at the age of 94. An era-defining inventor and engineer, his work laid the groundwork for our modern world of computing (and helped create Silicon Valley along the way). [more inside]
posted by redct at 9:27 PM PST - 35 comments

Talib Kweli's podcast People's Party welcomes Jon Stewart for one of those wide-ranging conversations that is full of Stewart insight that we long for more of in our current world. I'm not sure I felt better about the world after this, but I felt like I had some new perspectives.
posted by hippybear at 8:41 PM PST - 1 comment

While the New York Times serves to platform transphobia, the Washington Post alongside health non-profit KFF have compiled an in depth survey of transgender people in the US. (Ungated version.) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:42 PM PST - 12 comments

The Never Ending Property (slYT) [more inside]
posted by box at 1:00 PM PST - 25 comments

Terry Barentsen films bike races, but not for the pro tour. Sometimes he’ll follow a single rider on a ride through their home neighborhoods or follow a chill group ride through NYC or the surrounding countryside - those last two in the company of BikeSnobNYC - but often he shoots alleycat races like Mexico City’s Track Or Die, NYC's Three Blind Mice, SF’s Mission Critical and sprints like Bedford Burning. [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 12:22 PM PST - 17 comments

SpaceX has gotten good at landing its boosters, but it did take a while to get it right.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:11 PM PST - 8 comments

Brandon Sanderson (Reddit, 03/23/2023), "On the Wired Article": "Honestly, I'm a guy who enjoys his job, loves his family, and is a little obsessive about his stories ... I can see how it is difficult to write an article about me." Additional context by Janet Manley (LitHub, 03/24/2023), "Read the meanest literary profile of the year (so far) ... and the subject's response": "Does Kehe insult Sanderson’s writing, or Sanderson, or Sanderson's Mormonism? Yes. All of those things." The Wired article by Jason Kehe (03/23/2023), "Brandon Sanderson Is Your God": "I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He's excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting" (Wayback Machine).
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:55 AM PST - 118 comments

Unfortunately, students interested in film usually acquire their critical frameworks and vocabularies first from popular film reviews, which rely heavily on ideas about artistic achievement and make value judgments without clear criteria. It can be very difficult to break students of the habit of evaluating in these terms and to get them to describe and analyze what they see and hear. It can also be challenging to reconcile aesthetic or technical criteria of judgment with the different registers of social significance that connect films to students’ personal and social lives. These introduce other sets of values and selection criteria into teaching. from What Films Should We Teach?: A Conversation About the Canon [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 10:54 AM PST - 9 comments

What killed Ludwig van Beethoven? Was it Celiac disease? IBD? A neurological issue that also caused deafness? Liver disease? Cirrhosis? [more inside]
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 10:49 AM PST - 8 comments

Alec Karakatsanis' meticulous research on copaganda.
A "Shortage" of Punishment Bureaucrats: When the New York Times Is Like a PR Firm for Police Unions.
Public Relations Spending by Police Part 1 and Part 2: In 2014, Chicago cops had 6 full-time public relations employees. During the coverup of Laquan McDonald's murder, the city increased its police budget to 25 full-time positions. As of 2023, Chicago cops have 48 full-time PR positions.
How the Media Enables Violent Bureaucracy Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:43 AM PST - 24 comments

Gomps, short for "Generic Online MultiPlayer System", is an in-development tool that will add rudimentary multiplayer functionality to any of the thousands of games made in Unity. Here's a short video of the tool working in Firewatch, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Ynglet.
posted by May Kasahara at 10:42 AM PST - 5 comments

Take a typical Alaska cruise and see the damage in its wake. The evidence is clear: the industry needs an overhaul. Article addresses sewage, pollutants, trash, impact on wildlife, impact on port towns and cities. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 10:37 AM PST - 22 comments

An online dance music subgenre quiz.
posted by solarion at 4:27 AM PST - 28 comments

伝統工芸品青山スクエア (Iga-yaki (pottery)) [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 10:16 PM PST - 5 comments

From Matt Baume comes the story of The First Gay TV Movie: The Battle Over "That Certain Summer" [27m], a 1972 made-for-television movie starring Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook as a gay couple struggling with the ramifications of trying to bring Holbrook's son from his marriage into their lives. Developed by the team who had created the recently successful Columbo, it made it onto television just a few years after the Stonewall Revolution.
posted by hippybear at 8:04 PM PST - 18 comments

The pygmy marmoset is the smallest monkey in the world and arguably the cutest. These gummivore rainforest-dwellers are also called pocket monkey, little lion, dwarf monkey, and finger monkey. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 6:57 PM PST - 10 comments

In the wake of Cameron Reed's announcement that she is working on a new book and that Locus-nominated The Fortunate Fall is being republished next year, James Davis Nicoll points us at five other science fiction and fantasy authors whose careers ended too soon, for various reasons. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:00 PM PST - 38 comments

In 2022, the podcast Hot Take—a "holistic, irreverent, honest look at the climate crisis and all the ways media and society are talking—and not talking—about it"— was acquired by Crooked Media, the network founded by the men behind Pod Save America. A year later, the hosts of Hot Take have written separate takes about why the podcast is ending, highlighting mismanagement and malfeasance from the company that acquired them.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 4:12 PM PST - 18 comments

In the 1950s, the Met began acquiring pieces from Robert E. Hecht, an American-born antiquities dealer who spent decades running afoul of authorities and was ultimately tried on charges of antiquities smuggling in Italy. In 1959 and 1961, Italian prosecutors charged Hecht with antiquities smuggling, and in 1973, they issued an arrest warrant for him that was later revoked. But the Met kept buying from him.

–In search of stolen gods at the Met, the latest in a series on looted statues by the Nepali Times, focuses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns “at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes”.
posted by Kattullus at 2:48 PM PST - 12 comments

I. Gods of Prehistoric Britain; II. Paganism in Roman Britain; III. Anglo-Saxon Pagan Gods; IV. Viking Pagan Gods in Britain: the first four of an on-going series of hour-long lectures at Gresham College by cravat-wearing historian Ronald Hutton. (Previously).
posted by misteraitch at 12:29 PM PST - 14 comments

In pursuit of music to study/work/live to, may I present this 1.5 hr spotify playlist of north African music featuring bands such as Bombino, Imarhan, and Ali Farka Toure.
posted by rebent at 11:59 AM PST - 12 comments

Peace activist and educator Kees Boeke (previously) wrote Sociocracy: Democracy as It Might Be, a Quaker-inspired view of what democracy could look like. [more inside]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:37 AM PST - 15 comments

it might've been nice to know this before dying
posted by simmering octagon at 11:37 AM PST - 13 comments

The Chilean Abalone is "International Mollusc of the Year 2023" [see the nominees]
posted by dhruva at 11:07 AM PST - 13 comments

The Music Lab has tests for you to learn how good you are at discerning melodic discrimination and recall, mistuning perception, and beat alignment and more (previously). "This Is What It Sounds Like" offers compare-and-contrast samples to help you reflect on your taste in melody, novelty, realism, timbre, and other elements. Its links lead to further online tests and demonstrations.
posted by brainwane at 9:58 AM PST - 37 comments

Can citizens' assemblies save the planet? The People’s Plan for Nature, launched on Thursday, sets out the UK public’s recommendations for reversing massive declines in Britain’s nature. A hundred people were invited to come together, in a citizens’ assembly, to agree on a plan for how to renew and protect nature. More information at peoplesplanfornature.org [more inside]
posted by N8yskates at 9:04 AM PST - 3 comments

Alexey Titarenko is a Russian photographer with a particular focus on long exposure and city photography, a combination that leads to stunning civic ghostliness as in, among other collections, City of Shadows (1991-1994), or the somewhat more restrained New York (2004-present). See also his photocollage of perestroika-era signs and symbols, Nomenclature of Signs. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 8:26 AM PST - 7 comments

In 1918, there was a lesbian spy network working to "exterminate the manhood of Britain" called The Cult of The Clitoris... Except actually, there wasn't. It was a fake news scandal that somehow won a libel trial. This is the story of the sapphic cult that wasn't.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:15 AM PST - 14 comments

Link is a gay icon, and Zelda fans know it [Polygon] “The Legend of Zelda’s beloved and iconic protagonist, Link, is tagged in more than 17,000 pieces of fanfiction on Archive of Our Own. Among those stories, more than 300 are tagged with “Trans Link,” and nearly 2,000 feature Link in a romantic relationship with Prince Sidon (or Ganondorf, for the enemies-to-lovers fans). AO3 may not be the only metric for how many Zelda fans interpret Link as gay and/or transgender, but it’s one of the biggest. This is no surprise, as fans have been speculating on Link’s gender and sexuality since at least 2009, though realistically he’s been on the minds of queer players since The Legend of Zelda was first released in Japan in 1986.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:42 AM PST - 31 comments

Zellers returns to Canada. (sort of.) Is nostalgia to blame? asks The Walrus, where anyone who follows Brittlestar knows the answer is definitely yes (and be careful, this tune is catchy). (link to YouTube) [more inside]
posted by warriorqueen at 7:29 AM PST - 63 comments

“Among the top complaints was its lack of tongue.” Chinese startup develops kissing machine that “makes sounds and warms up slightly when kissed.” [more inside]
posted by kinnakeet at 2:28 AM PST - 27 comments

Neon is five minutes of mindblowing freestyle skateboarding from Andy Anderson, Isamu Yamamoto, and Kilian Martin. [more inside]
posted by Dysk at 12:50 AM PST - 16 comments

His is a temperamentally conservative vision, in which youth culture—hippies and beatniks, “kids gone feral,” kids who never fought in a war and lack respect for their elders—is an absurd and pathetic sort of menace. Where this could easily become curmudgeonly or censorious in a less imaginative writer, however, Portis always seems bemused; the disappointment is too vast to be taken all that seriously, it is foregone and always cut with an instinctual swerve toward the comic. from Signs and Wonders [Harper's; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:23 AM PST - 1 comment

It started out as Edge's pandemic project. [Rolling Stone] Why not remake some old songs in a new flavor? Larry's on light duty, at best, after back surgery, and it's lockdown anyway so let's just fuck around with a sort of front porch vibe. Two years later, and we have the totally unexpected (even by their label) new U2 project Songs Of Surrender [Wikipedia]. Forty songs spanning their career, organized into four albums. Tracks with major lyric changes marked with •. We begin with The Edge: One, studio version [from Achtung Baby], video, best live recording, most famous cover version [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:43 PM PST - 44 comments

"Even in 1950–53, during the last years of Stalin’s regime, with the high death rates in the labour camps and the [delayed] consequences of wartime malnutrition and injuries, the mortality rate was only nine to ten per 1,000, compared with 14–16 in 1994." Sopo Japaridze's thread on recent research about the 7 million excess deaths in Eastern Europe since the 1990s. [more inside]
posted by kmt at 2:54 PM PST - 22 comments

PSA: This week is the last call for user nominations to the second Steering Committee to help set policy and oversee the site budget for the year ahead. Do you want to help chart a course for this community (or know someone who would make a great pick)? Send in your nominations today! More details from the full MetaTalk post inside. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:05 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Argentine goalkeeper Leandro Requena scored one of the most outrageous goals you are ever likely to see during his Cobresal side’s 3-1 win over Colo-Colo in Chile’s top soccer league.
posted by Etrigan at 12:04 PM PST - 41 comments

You've heard about Cocaine Bear, now get ready for Cocaine Cat. Found after it escaped from a car during a traffic stop in Cincinnati, the serval (which is illegal to own in Ohio), named Amiry, was tested and found to have cocaine in its system. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:45 AM PST - 20 comments

Russia’s war against Ukraine through the prism of the Algerian War and France’s decolonization. Metropolitan France lost [approximately] 75,000 soldiers in Vietnam and 25,000 soldiers in Algeria. The embrace of decolonization was an effort to turn something that was, in quite stark terms, a defeat for the French (and the Dutch, the British, the Belgians) into a good thing, something reassuring.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Superstar celebrity stylist Law Roach unexpectedly announced his retirement via Instagram right after the Oscars, then sat down for a long interview about celebrity styling and the white world of Hollywood gatekeepers. [more inside]
posted by theatro at 9:18 AM PST - 20 comments

“For over a century, movies have been our window into Los Angeles, capturing a mean, superficial, car-infested city. How much if that is actually true, though?”
posted by ob1quixote at 7:18 AM PST - 29 comments

Yes, this is another ChatGTP post, but it's about creating chatbots that parrot Fox news, or perhaps the official propaganda of the Chinese government. The issue is not theoretical, at least two already exist, as reported by the NYT (gift link). [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:58 AM PST - 43 comments

YouTube streamer PointCrow likes to speedrun The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but PointCrow likes to make these speedruns (modded) a bit more interesting: Can I Beat Zelda if Link Grows Every Time I Press A? Zelda, but if I say "bear" then 20 bears spawn. Can I beat Breath of the Wild if I teleport every 5 minutes? Breath of the Wild but the entire world is underwater. Breath of the Wild, but my viewers control THE WORLD. Modding Breath of the Wild so that every enemy is a lynel. Zelda, but if I say "Shrek" then 10 Shreks spawn. Can I beat Zelda if 5 chickens spawn every second? Beating Breath of the Wild without taking ANY damage. Breath of the Wild with One Shield and NOTHING ELSE. Can you beat Breath of the Wild Without Turning Left? Can you beat Breath of the Wild with ONLY BOMBS? Beating Breath of the Wild WITHOUT MY HANDS. Can I beat Breath of the Wild BLINDFOLDED? (Great Plateau).
posted by Fizz at 6:45 AM PST - 11 comments

Abortion pill mifepristone ruling in Texas case could hinge on 1873 Comstock Act - "A federal judge in Texas may try to invoke an obscure 19th-century law called the Comstock Act to roll back mail delivery of the abortion pill mifepristone." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:55 PM PST - 52 comments

A fossilized ankylosaur voice box reveals that these animals may have sported a far more sophisticated vocal range than scientists originally thought. Here is the link to the popular science article. Here is the link to the peer-reviewed journal article, one of the authors is Mark A. Norell from the American Museum of Natural History. (Communications Biology volume 6, article number: 152, 2023)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:29 PM PST - 17 comments

2.5-minute video on YouTube and Reddit, by James Eagle, visualizing what proportion of Web users use particular web browsers (via Unpretty).
posted by brainwane at 6:24 PM PST - 36 comments

It was the 90's. The Australian Prime Minister had begun a program to increase the amount of distinctly Australian media. The Australian Children's Television Foundation embarked on an Australian-French co-production that couldn't possibly work - a show about Elvis without his likeness, his surname or a single Elvis song, costing $11.5 million, and made by people with no experience with production on that scale. The result? RUN THE THEME SONG! This is L'il Elvis Jones and the Truckstoppers, and you can watch the whole thing here (playlist is missing episode 4). (article 1, article 2)
posted by BiggerJ at 5:26 PM PST - 12 comments

In the mid 1970s, there was a crossover between punk rock and porno movies. Maybe it was because we were all fighting the system, or because we were looking for an anarchic and creative outlet for our energy. Or maybe it was just because we were kids with no money and we were acting out… I don’t know, but the reality was that a lot of us would hang out together. from Part 1: Elda Stilletto, Warhol, Glitter Rock, and the Birth of Blondie [NSFW, words & pictures] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 5:22 PM PST - 12 comments

IPCC 2023: All global modelled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C (>50%) with no or limited overshoot, and those that limit warming to 2°C (>67%), involve rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors this decade. If you were born after the 80s, you will experience 1.5°C temperatures.
The Guardian: Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late
The New York Times: Climate Change Is Speeding Toward Catastrophe. The Next Decade Is Crucial, U.N. Panel Says. Wired: Warnings About Humanity’s Future Don’t Get More Dire Than This [more inside]
posted by simmering octagon at 4:27 PM PST - 37 comments

A Martian glacier, rockets, asteroid samples, moons, and more rockets. From the fiery Sun to the search for alien civilizations, here's an update on humanity's exploration of space.

Sol
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured video of an immense solar flare followed by a solar tornado. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 3:14 PM PST - 8 comments

Amazon will be shutting down DPReview, the trusted and comprehensive camera reviews website, as part of the 18,000 job cuts it announced in January, and right on the heels of an announcement of an additional 9000 layoffs. [more inside]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:47 PM PST - 56 comments

Keanu, Lawrence, Carrie-Anne, Hugo, Gloria, Joey Pants and many more team up to bring us Ice Ice Matrix [Auralnauts, 3m43s]. With a guest verse by Wilford Brimley.
posted by hippybear at 1:24 PM PST - 17 comments

It is well known that Elon Musk views public relations as extraneous, and has an adversarial relationship with the press. These two aspects were combined with Twitter's PR email now being set to autorespond with the poop emoji. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:00 AM PST - 80 comments

The Guardian: 'Engineers show 3D printing’s potential by turning cartridges of paste and powder into cheesecake' - “The cheesecake is the best thing we can showcase right now, but the printer can do a whole lot more,” said Jonathan Blutinger, an engineer at Columbia’s Creative Machines Lab in New York. “We can print chicken, beef, vegetables and cheese. Anything that can be turned into a paste, liquid or powder.” Interesting Engineering: “...a 3D-printing device that printed a seven-ingredient dish cooked in situ using a laser. The system constructed cheesecake from edible food inks such as peanut butter, Nutella, and strawberry jam.”
posted by Wordshore at 10:25 AM PST - 40 comments

Big boxes, loads of plastic, the industry is well behind even video games when it comes to sustainability
posted by Etrigan at 7:14 AM PST - 51 comments

On traveling to Morocco with a group-travel company that promised to build “meaningful friendships” among its youngish clientele. Caity Weaver for the NYT / Archive link.
posted by ellieBOA at 6:10 AM PST - 77 comments

Elden Ring Stats Reveal What Bosses Killed Players The Most [Bandai Namco] “Over 20 million people played Elden Ring. Now, a year after FromSoftware’s open-world Soulsborne released, we finally know which part of the game destroyed players the most. It was Malenia of course. Players attempted to fight her 329 million times, [...] Publisher Bandai Namco released that stat along with a bunch of other new ones to highlight the 2022 GOTY’s first anniversary. While the infographics don’t say exactly how many times Malenia killed players, it’s a safe bet that her being the most-attempted boss means she was also responsible for the most failed attempts. [...] The number one cause of death, meanwhile, was enemies and NPCs. That’s how 69 percent of players bit the dust (nice). Player-vs-player kills were only a measly 2 percent. Most summons were for co-op as well.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 4:59 AM PST - 27 comments

Meet the numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus), also called the noombat or walpurti. It is a small (and very cute!) Australian marsupial that eats between 15,000 and 20,000 termites every day. It can stand upright on its hind legs like a meerkat and has a big feathery tail. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:35 PM PST - 17 comments

An aperiodic monotile . [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:08 PM PST - 38 comments

It may well be that literature that depends on the adoption of such a godlike attitude is better laid to rest in our age of Ópera Prima. Our era’s preference for the debut novel is also a preference for the autofictional, for a rejection of universality in favor of particularity, of identity defined as difference. Still, I sometimes long for writing courageous—or hubristic or long-lived—enough to dare to say something about the whole of the human condition: something that is almost certainly wrong, or at least incomplete, but that is nevertheless worth saying. from Subterranean Treasures by Nicolás Medina Mora [The Nation; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 5:13 PM PST - 6 comments

La Véritable Histoire d'Amélie Poulain: Now, just over 20 years since its release, its writer and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet provides an official new director's cut that reveals Amélie's true identity as a KGB agent.
posted by cubby at 3:52 PM PST - 19 comments

Aggressive owl closes campground at Killarney Provincial Park. One man suffers head wounds, another has tuque ripped off and tent attacked.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:19 PM PST - 52 comments

Ever since we first discussed this in 2011, I keep coming back to it regularly. Oração - A Banda Mais Bonita da Cidade is a six minute long tracking shot through a house full of musical people making music in variously combinations before they all join for a joyous conclusion. Syracuse.com provides a bit more background information. I just love it so much
posted by hippybear at 1:18 PM PST - 7 comments

"Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once At Stanford"
posted by Marky at 12:40 PM PST - 193 comments

From Saginaw Township Michigan, Cole Waterman brings you a twisty-turny local news saga featuring a local family, a local exotic pet store, a kinkajou custody dispute, and every possible county, state, and federal agency pertaining to sloth bites. [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 10:16 AM PST - 28 comments

For the first time since 2017 the Barkley Marathons have a finisher. For only the second time in the history of this endurance race which began in 1986, the race has three finishers. Aurélien Sanchez a first-timer from France, John Kelly from the US, and Karel Sabbe a dentist from Belgium all completed the course Thursday night, though none broke the fifty-two hour record set by Brett Maune in 2012. [prev1, prev2, prev3]
posted by jessamyn at 9:49 AM PST - 13 comments

How did the graphics on NES' Punch Out work? It's a little complicated!
posted by cortex at 8:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Rebecca Solnit: How to meet the climate crisis? Redefine 'abundance.' [ungated] - "Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we're well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?"[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:26 AM PST - 40 comments

We’re finally starting to see the truth about the vexing condition. It’s not what we thought. Now, three years later, the research is catching up to the anecdotal reports and the early evidence, and a clearer picture of long COVID has emerged. It turns out that, like COVID-19 itself, a lot of our early guesses about it turned out to be considerably wide of the mark. This time, fortunately, the surprises are mostly on the positive side. [more inside]
posted by holborne at 6:40 AM PST - 126 comments

Hey, I’m Alex Hollender. For the past few years I led the redesign of the Wikipedia desktop interface, which launched this past January. Below are some notes on the project and process.
posted by Etrigan at 5:18 AM PST - 25 comments

Hello fellow travelers, once again it's Monday, when, every week, we gather to throw off our yokes and comment freely. This week, though, I'd like to point out the occasional ambiguities and ambivalences that can accompany such headlong pursuits, with The Frog Prince, a poem by Stevie Smith. [more inside]
posted by taz at 5:14 AM PST - 86 comments

An Australian soldier has been charged with murder over the 2012 shooting of an unarmed man in Afghanistan, in a case that may have precedent for other Western allies. The Office of the Special Investigator has said that ‘40 or 50’ other offences are being investigated. [more inside]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 12:30 AM PST - 9 comments

High rental turnover is bad for schools; bad for health; bad for crime; bad for communities; and bad for the general mental stability of the country. A factual cartoon by Toby Morris about the need for more secure rental tenancies.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:19 PM PST - 58 comments

"A double delight is dichlorodifluoromethane, with its thirteen consonants and ten vowels." Steven Johnson explores two inventions of Thomas Midgley Jr., freon and leaded gas, each lauded at its time, and each subsequently proven to be disasters. (SLNYT) (previously)
posted by doctornemo at 5:16 PM PST - 26 comments

This CT Scan site is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got all this stuff wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by chavenet at 5:07 PM PST - 12 comments

A Sandwich Shop, a Tent City and an American Crisis "He looked out the window toward Madison Street, which had become the center of one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. On this February morning, he could see a half-dozen men pressed around a roaring fire. A young woman was lying in the middle of the street, wrapped beneath a canvas advertising banner. A man was weaving down the sidewalk in the direction of Joe’s restaurant with a saw, muttering to himself and then stopping to urinate a dozen feet from Joe’s outdoor tables. “It’s the usual chaos and suffering,” he told Debbie. “But the restaurant’s still standing.” (archive.org version) [more inside]
posted by gwint at 3:42 PM PST - 32 comments

Manhattan district attorney expected to file criminal charges against ex-president for payment to adult film star in 2016. [Guardian] Donald Trump is bracing for his most legally perilous week since he left the White House, with the Manhattan district attorney likely to bring criminal charges against him over his role in paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels, as he huddled this weekend to strategize his legal and political responses. The former US president has posted in all-caps on his Truth Social platform that he expected to be “ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK” and called for his supporters to engage in protests – an ominous echo of his tweets urging protests in the lead-up to the January 6 US Capitol attack. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:21 PM PST - 142 comments

Video of Pintails, Mallards, Widgeon and Shovelers at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge by Tara Tanaka (suggestion to lower your volume before playing video, the music is appropriately dramatic!).
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:58 AM PST - 4 comments

Oil Frackers Hold a Crucial Piece of the Net Zero Puzzle [ungated] - "Technology used to produce bad old fossil fuels is now being turned to clean renewable purposes. What matters is how companies manage the risks." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:54 AM PST - 21 comments

An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins. Kids and senior citizens alike rally to rescue beloved young seabirds that have lost their bearings.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:08 PM PST - 12 comments

General readers of American poetry probably know Bishop as the author of “One Art.” ... College students will be familiar with other poems and perhaps biographical details, including her increasing importance as a queer poet. Her alcohol use disorder is often there in the shadows, her asthma too. But what about her eczema, the first of three lifelong conditions to develop in childhood and the one that quite literally affected her ability to write? from Elizabeth Bishop’s Eczema by Jonathan Ellis
posted by chavenet at 4:56 PM PST - 3 comments

Tight, tight. A sharp flex, a crack, a sudden a wash of air, then—the scent of a guru upwind! Guru guru guru! Larva831’s eggy thoughts gushed away, its ejected cognitive fluids mixing confusedly with the ejected fluids of its 1000₁₂ hatching sibs. Obsolete embryonic ideas flowed under a dozen dozen dozen cracking shells, swirled through holes in the bottom of the nest, streamed dazzling out into the air above the great tree’s lower branches, hit soil, and dissolved. Larva Pupa Imago by Eric Schwitzgebel is a short story about love, personhood, and transformation. It's also about erotica for uplifted butterflies.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:15 PM PST - 9 comments

Lance Reddick, ‘The Wire’ and ‘John Wick’ Star, Dies at 60 [Variety] Lance Reddick, who appeared in major TV series like “The Wire,” “Fringe” and “Bosch” and films like the “John Wick” franchise, which is set to debut “John Wick: Chapter 4” next week, died of natural causes Friday morning, Variety has confirmed with his reps. He was 60. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:42 PM PST - 99 comments

This technology is good and getting better rapidly as things like GPT4 enter the marketplace and wed sophisticated render engines to AI-generated content. But should we? I honestly don't know how to feel about the ability to create content localized in 120 different languages and body types. Is this a victory for representation? A threat to human labor? What does representation even mean in the workplace when you can customize representation at the individual level? Everywhere I look, I see me! Did we win?
posted by metametamind at 11:19 AM PST - 10 comments

(NYTimes link) Story about seed banks, radical sharing, and endless local varieties. Or just go straight to the seed bank and start planning out your garden. Many of the descriptions of the various seeds are interesting bits of history in and of themselves. Happy gardening!
posted by coffeecat at 10:35 AM PST - 6 comments

University of Chicago researchers working with several artists have created Glaze - a cloaking filter layer that is barely perceptible to humans, but negatively interferes with machine learning models to interfere with their capturing an artist's style. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:28 AM PST - 24 comments

Here are some interesting youtube videos in the 10-20 minute range. Why Clip Art Was Everywhere.... Until It Wasn't. by Linus Boman. How to turn your Neighborhood into a Village by Andrew Millison. How Small and How Big do Houses Get? and How much room do you need to live comfortably? By Stewart Hicks. "Weird Stuff in a Can #147: Tumeric Golden Blend" by Atomic Shrimp
posted by rebent at 7:47 AM PST - 13 comments

Mehdi Hasan addresses how Bush hasn't paid for that atrocity, and how it connects to Trumps victory and Putin's invasion. Hasan says the impetus behind the war was very much GWB, and GWB's is rehabilitated and shouldn't be.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:03 AM PST - 65 comments

anti-racist starter pack: a list each of books, articles, podcasts, interviews/lectures, and documentaries
posted by aniola at 10:58 PM PST - 10 comments

You want squares in triangles? Erich's got 'em! You want triangles in squares? Erich's got 'em! Squares in squares?? Erich's got those, too! How about L's in circles? Triangles in circles? Right triangles in squares? You know Erich's got 'em! Packing! Tiling! Covering! Come on down to Erich's Packing Center for all this and related problems!
posted by Lirp at 10:33 PM PST - 16 comments

The latest from There I Ruined It (SLYT) h/t to Miss Cellania
posted by Gorgik at 9:30 PM PST - 7 comments

50 Genuinely Horrible Albums by Brilliant Artists [Rolling Stone; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 4:52 PM PST - 103 comments

Nirvana's Nevermind but with the Super Mario 64 soundfont
posted by cortex at 4:36 PM PST - 8 comments

1st woman given stem cell transplant to cure HIV is still virus-free 5 years later
posted by tiny frying pan at 3:23 PM PST - 5 comments

The Pogues ‎– Live At The Town And Country Club London (1988) [more inside]
posted by elkevelvet at 11:39 AM PST - 15 comments

Threats to libraries and librarians continue.
posted by hypnogogue at 11:39 AM PST - 32 comments

Cancel culture has its merits, but the left is ready for a better approach [LA Times]. It used to be almost exclusively the political right that complained about the amorphous bogeyman known as “cancel culture.” Recently, at our research center dedicated to diversity and inclusion, we’ve noticed an intriguing shift in the zeitgeist: Complaints have started surfacing on the left. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 10:34 AM PST - 51 comments

Banshees of Inisherin: The Game . Post-Flash Friday Fun.
posted by HeroZero at 10:31 AM PST - 16 comments

Do you want Ai Weiwei to flip the bird at major landmarks, or anywhere else that’s findable on Google Maps? Here is his middle finger extended at the Kremlin. At the Leaning Tower of Pisa. At Mar-a-Lago. At Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. At some guy on the South Pole. At a statue of a moomintroll in Tampere, Finland. Try it yourself and then read about the project here.
posted by Kattullus at 10:16 AM PST - 7 comments

As part of the promotion of their upcoming Lord of the Rings set later this year, Wizards of the Coast has announced that there will be a special rare card - The One Ring, of which only one will be printed. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:50 AM PST - 28 comments

"Bicycles, stop signs, and scofflaw motorists": on research, laws, safety, and norms. By Scott Feeney.
posted by brainwane at 9:41 AM PST - 46 comments

How we are failing older women in Canada [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:24 AM PST - 17 comments

...And monsters sharpen their claws in the void where youth is confused with beauty. Get out your shovel! MeFi favorite Bobby Fingers is at it again, with an incendiary new diorama featuring the (middle-aged) King of Pop on the set of the notorious Pepsi commercial. Special appearances by Matt Parker, Constance Zimmer and David Spiegelhalter, with inspired use of shrooms, horse's caca and an original song about youthful indiscretions. [more inside]
posted by St. Oops at 8:07 AM PST - 15 comments

Experts have been unable to verify the existence of Mr. Electrico, whose 1932 electric chair act supposedly affirmed the young author’s interest in writing
posted by Etrigan at 7:25 AM PST - 19 comments

Believe it or not, the Amish are loving electric bikes. "Electric bicycles have been finding favor in a growing number of communities. From hunters to surfers and even soldiers, e-bikes and their low-cost, far-reaching transportation options have permeated a surprising number of different groups and use cases. The latest community adopting e-bikes en masse may be even more of a surprise: the Amish. Amish communities, more often known for their black buggies pulled by horses, have been increasingly turning to electric bikes as an alternative form of transportation."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:25 AM PST - 22 comments

The Algorithm That Transformed The World - "The Fast Fourier Transform is used everywhere but it has a fascinating origin story that could have ended the nuclear arms race."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:11 PM PST - 11 comments

What's MetaNumbers.com ? MetaNumbers is a free math tool providing information about any positive integer (up to 9223372036854775807), such as its factorized form, its divisors, its classification, or its arithmetic properties (widely used in the field of number theory). Example metanumbers entry: 198606
posted by aniola at 8:49 PM PST - 29 comments

YouTube decided, weirdly, to throw new music at me today. Even weirder is who these new songs are from, all from albums forthcoming this year. Yes has a new song, Cut From The Stars, truly the Ship Of Theseus of rock bands. Also, Extreme seem to be back with a mind-numbing Nuno guitar solo in Rise. And, on the far end of the spectrum, Winger (of all bands) offers up Proud Desperado.
posted by hippybear at 3:14 PM PST - 30 comments

Though the classic Martini recipe is a simple one—only two ingredients in its most austere form—it has inspired more debate than any other over the proper ingredients (gin or vodka?), ratio (wet or dry?) and garnish (olive or a twist?). More than a century’s worth of fine-tuning has resulted in a deep library of both classic and contemporary iterations that run the full gamut of both style and flavor. Here are some of our favorites. from "Planet Martini" [Punch] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:55 PM PST - 89 comments

If the suit still fits… “This year, we’re bringing Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking 1984 Talking Heads concert film STOP MAKING SENSE (newly remastered in 4K!) back to theaters worldwide.”

In honor of the re-release, here's a newly remastered version of my original post from 2011, with updated links and additional info. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 1:02 PM PST - 54 comments

How Mega Man X rewrote the player / character relationship [Eurogamer] “In video games, there is an implicit understanding that you, as the player, and the on-screen protagonist, your digital counterpart, are on the same side. You are unified by a common goal, battling against Bowser as Mario to save the Princess, or working as Master Chief to stop the Covenant in Halo. But occasionally, and perhaps more interestingly, the player and their digital avatar are lumbered with incompatible goals and the relationship is defined by one-sided control, rather than trust and cooperation. An early example - and it may be the greatest example of all - is Mega Man X. [...] Unlike the previous Mega Man series, every enemy X defeats is a life taken. As the player of the game, meanwhile, speeding through levels and eliminating enemies is second nature. Every boss defeated adds to your arsenal of weapons, giving you new tools to explore, uncover secret power-ups, and exploit enemy weaknesses. There's no hesitation to the atrocities committed, in other words. The fast, smooth action is extremely rewarding, and the fun of combat is an exceptional motivator to continue playing. And it's completely antithetical to the being X wants to be.”
posted by Fizz at 12:50 PM PST - 34 comments

The most musical time of the year is nearly upon us. That’s right, it’s almost time for Eurovision! The 2022 version of the Contest was won by Kalush Orchestra for Ukraine with the song “Stefania”. Due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will officially host the 67th edition of the Contest in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Thirty-seven countries will be competing in this years’ Eurovision, participating in two semifinals on May 9th and 11th, with the Grand Final scheduled for May 13. [more inside]
posted by PearlRose at 12:26 PM PST - 26 comments

You can help decode the Herculaneum papyri! A grand prize of 150,000 USD is being offered, with more prizes to be announced. It's on! Hundreds of scrolls that were carbonized and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. have long fascinated scholars. They are uniquely preserved by virtue of being carbonized. But they are also uniquely difficult to access . . . by virtue of being carbonized. Early attempts to unwrap and decode them included rose water baths and tiny weights to unroll and stretch the scrolls. Surely modern science can do better! [more inside]
posted by fruitslinger at 11:33 AM PST - 12 comments

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.
posted by hoodrich at 10:18 AM PST - 78 comments

If you turned on ESPN in November of 2022, you may well have seen something messed up: The Microsoft Excel World Championship [more inside]
posted by firechicago at 9:37 AM PST - 10 comments

Tragically, one of the world’s most valuable sports franchises doesn’t provide complimentary Wi-Fi to its millionaire employees. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:20 AM PST - 32 comments

The year is 1934, and Superman has arrived in Metropolis.
posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 6:01 AM PST - 9 comments

Australia’s extinct giant eagle was big enough to snatch koalas from trees. Dynatoaetus gaffae (Gaff’s powerful eagle) lived during the Pleistocene epoch, perhaps between 700,000 and 50,000 years ago. At twice the size of a wedge-tailed eagle (which it coexisted with) and with a potential wingspan of up to 3m [9.84 feet], this species is the largest known eagle to have lived in Australia, and one of the largest continental raptors in the world. Only two larger eagles ever existed anywhere: Gigantohierax suarezi, which hunted giant rodents in Cuba, and the giant Haasts eagle, Hieraaetus moorei that hunted large moa in New Zealand.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:24 AM PST - 13 comments

Millenials are hitting middle age. In August, The Times asked our 40-ish readers how they felt about their lives, now that they are — chronologically, at least — in midlife. Over 1,300 people responded in less than a week. One of our questions was about whether they had experienced a midlife crisis and how they would define the term. Many people said they felt they couldn’t be having a midlife crisis because there was no bourgeois numbness to rebel against. Rather than longing for adventure and release, they craved a sense of safety and calmness, which they felt they had never known. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 9:25 PM PST - 201 comments

Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine. Functions as a buying guide, an extended joke about SEO, and a tribute to the only line of printers that will keep working indefinitely and leave you alone, from Nilay Patel at The Verge.
posted by silby at 8:37 PM PST - 73 comments

The short-lived TV networks that featured shows like Star Trek Voyager, Moesha, Dilbert, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There's a two part Youtube video detailing the history of the network, the first of which is here.
posted by buffy12 at 4:19 PM PST - 24 comments

No one wanted to read the human stuff anymore, or at least not the kind of thing that had been put on WattPad, AO3, and RoyalRoad by the thousands in the decade that preceded the AI revolution. There were attempts to make those sites human-only, but that was hard, with the models so readily available, and the AI didn’t leave many fingerprints. There had been a relationship between writers and readers, and now the readers had all gone for greener pastures.

Charlotte saw the first ad on RoyalRoad. It said “Eager Readers in Your Area!”
posted by simmering octagon at 4:01 PM PST - 16 comments

Coming from the Louisiana Channel and the Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art (for reasons I can't quickly determine), here is Music Is a Continuum, a half-hour spent with composer Terry Riley at his home in Japan in June 2022. He talks about basically everything, and it's a fascinating glimpse into the world of one of the 20th Century's most important musical influences.
posted by hippybear at 3:09 PM PST - 7 comments

This is a digital edition, free-to-access, of the complete surviving correspondence between T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Emily Hale (1891–1969) – the 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Hale between 1930 and 1957 (deposited at Princeton University Library, they were embargoed until 2020) – together with a number of important additional letters, including letters from Hale to Eliot, located at the Eliot Archive in London. The collection has been edited by John Haffenden (General Editor of The Letters of T. S. Eliot), who provides in addition a detailed chronology of the life and career of Emily Hale, and an Appendix of writings by Hale herself. This website features too a Gallery of photographs, and a fully searchable Index. All of the available documentation relating to the T. S. Eliot–Emily Hale relationship is presented here. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:42 PM PST - 17 comments

Fellow MeFites, a grave injustice to the categorization of sandwiches has been perpetrated by the site Rotating Sandwiches. [more inside]
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:25 PM PST - 106 comments

Horizon Forbidden West: A Year Later [Kotaku] “When series debut Horizon Zero Dawn released, Breath of the Wild came out mere days later. Last year, when Horizon Forbidden West came out, Elden Ring was on its heels days after. Now, it seems, Horizon is overshadowing itself. It’s been just over a year since Forbidden West came out and, aside from the recently released Horizon Call of the Mountain for PlayStation VR 2, the franchise is largely sitting idly. Sure, Horizon Forbidden West’s DLC Burning Shores is set to come out in April. But that’ll be more than a year after the game’s release. [...] We wait as we see Horizon Forbidden West’s Burning Shores DLC on the horizon, excuse the pun. Zero Dawn and Forbidden West’s overshadowings, from Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring respectively, cannot be changed. And the franchise has largely thrived in spite of those ill-timed releases, but now, the series needs to get out of its own way to break through the gaming landscape...”
posted by Fizz at 11:49 AM PST - 34 comments

In a struggling magazine media market, a genre of magazines called special interest publications or bookazines has become a surprising winner.
posted by Etrigan at 7:11 AM PST - 75 comments

Safety on the railway in Latvia is no laughing matter. (It's all great, but the best is at the very end.) This stop-motion animation produced by Animācijas Brigāde features their long-running characters the Rescue Team. Fancy a trip to London or Greece? Or a spot of Latvian history? [more inside]
posted by rory at 5:42 AM PST - 11 comments

I've mentioned it in past posts, but now there's a Youtube list of 633 30 to 60-second episodes of the first SyFy Sci-Fi Channel original series, FTL Newsfeed (IMDB), a commercial-length glimpse into the future, from the past when cable networks could actually be cool in their attempts at branding. It begins with an hour-long video containing the Sci-Fi Channel's pre-launch promo footage, so you'll have to fast forward to get to the first episode. After that each is over quickly, and it's easy to watch several in a row. FTL lasted for over four years, and the entire run does not appear to exist online, but transcripts of all the episodes exist on a pretty extensive fan wiki. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:31 AM PST - 14 comments

How This Guy Makes Hand Puppets That Move Like Real Creatures [WIRED, 9m] is a profile of puppeteer Barnaby Dixon who does really neat, magical things. His YouTube channel is full of delights, including this fairly recent post of puppets sings Sweet Adeline.
posted by hippybear at 1:52 PM PST - 10 comments

OpenAI announce ChatGPT (alt via nitter.net) with ... an unquantifiable amount of more.
posted by k3ninho at 1:16 PM PST - 154 comments

St Vincent and the Roots cover Portishead's classic "Glory Box" (YT link) - all part of a Love Rocks festival last week, apparently. And, of course, the original (HD album version) and from their classic, amazing PNYC with a backing orchestra
posted by foxywombat at 1:14 PM PST - 42 comments

Dick Fosbury, Olympic Gold Medal Winner in 1968, Passed Away at 76 Fosbury was known for inventing the Fosbury Flop: a technique where the athlete goes over the bar facing up and head first. In 1968, he was the only high jumper doing it and cleared 2.24m. By 1972, most of the athletes were using it. In 2014, Fosbury was a guest at The E.G. Conference, where he was interviewed by Peter Sagal about his track and field career and how his technique came to be.
posted by plinth at 12:32 PM PST - 49 comments

"Though it seems improbable, an innovative law in place for three decades has ensured that farms –– some of them having operated for hundreds of years –– continue to thrive in one of the world’s biggest concrete jungles. Now, with a major expiration date attached to the law that protects these farms, Tokyo’s farmers, with the city’s help, are finding ways to keep cultivating their land."
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:21 PM PST - 5 comments

Radio Free Fedi: celebrating sound, agency and avoiding walled gardens | supporting fedi artists
This is small web, consent driven, artist populated, non-commercial mechanism, attribution promoting, community radio for the fediverse. As with everything your mileage may vary but let's try this out and hope we can discover some of the awesome talents that are on the fediverse...radio free fedi is open licensed artists AND copyright using artists who have awesomely granted consent for inclusion in this project. You can too! [more inside]
posted by chococat at 12:11 PM PST - 18 comments

Why video game protagonists have become so chatty [Polygon] “Whatever the reason, as gaming technology has advanced, and gaming itself has been increasingly recognized as an economic force, it seems like more and more protagonists have started to find their voice. They converse with companions who, unlike the blunt urgency of Navi’s “Hey! Listen!” in Ocarina of Time, have themselves become chattier, injected with personality. It’s another matter entirely, however, whether players want to hear what these characters have to say. Perhaps this trend partially exists because games have become so much bigger — bigger worlds with bigger budgets. [...] In this current “you can climb any mountain you see” era of marketing, in which each new release boasts another record broken for the size and scale of its world, games have given more empty space for the player to traverse — and, therefore, more opportunity for silence as the character travels from one quest to the next. And yet recent AAA games seem increasingly anxious of this silence.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:39 AM PST - 54 comments

Command line interface guidelines: a "guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day." Related conversations: "The Poetics of CLI Command Names" (pretty opinionated; previously), "UX patterns for CLI tools" (aiming to cover "how these UX patterns help developers replicate the valuable characteristics of most good GUIs"), "Best practices for inclusive CLIs" (focusing on accessibility), and a Mastodon thread about the benefits of color terminal output. And: some programming languages design their error messages to have better user experience as well. Namely... [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 11:35 AM PST - 31 comments

If you saved $1 a day for a year, do you know how much money you'd have? Roughly $30.000.
posted by signal at 11:19 AM PST - 40 comments

This paper constructs a novel dataset to explore whether Matt Levine’s vacation drives market volatility as suggested by readers and Levine himself. It finds that contrary to expectations, Levine’s vacations have an (almost) statistically significant effect in the opposite direction: decreasing market volatility. This paper provides a series of potential explanations for this observed market reaction. Abstract for: A Matt Levine Effect? [PDF]
posted by chavenet at 8:58 AM PST - 24 comments

Biden Administration Approves Huge Alaska Oil Project Despite pledging no more drilling on federal land, the US president approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow project in Alaska.
posted by lalochezia at 7:59 AM PST - 82 comments

Wineries using bats to keep down pesticides and costs. Researchers say moth-eating bats may be the key to dramatically reducing the use of pesticides in wineries, potentially saving the industry $50 million a year.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:34 AM PST - 15 comments

The rise of EMPRESS - How one woman turned the pirate underworld on its head, waged a solo war against the entire game industry (and won), went mad with power, started a messianic cult based on high school-level philosophy, and faked her own arrest to spite her rivals and haters
posted by buffy12 at 7:26 PM PST - 44 comments

Author Jordan Kurella writes about The Crow: Two movies released when I was eighteen years old. One was The Crow, and the other was Pulp Fiction. One changed my life; the other was by Quentin Tarantino. [more inside]
posted by curious nu at 7:16 PM PST - 32 comments

...writes Matthew Pierce of Evangelical Think Pieces. "Probably the most dangerous thing for Christian men is to see things, because this makes us sin. My youth pastor says men are visual. This means that whenever a man sees a woman, he thinks “that lady has bosoms, I wish I could do a sex right now.” Also, when a man sees something that is not a woman, like a toaster or a blade of grass, he thinks “hey, remember when I saw that lady with bosoms? I wish I could do a sex right now.”" [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 1:09 PM PST - 81 comments

Al Jaffee, Now 102, Is Ready to Be Added to Mount Rushmore An extended version of Mike Sacks’s 2008 interview with the MAD Magazine cartoonist, originally excerpted in And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft (2009). [more inside]
posted by staggernation at 12:46 PM PST - 15 comments

Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content The first time she went viral, she was a toddler. When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].” […] When Claire turns 18 and can move out on her own, she’s considering going no-contact with her parents. Once she doesn’t live with them anymore, she plans to speak out publicly about being the star of a YouTube channel. She’ll even use her real name. Claire wants people to know how her childhood was overshadowed by social media stardom that she didn’t choose. And she wants her parents to know: “nothing they do now is going to take back the years of work I had to put in.” [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 10:56 AM PST - 67 comments

Rest in Print: Remembering Berkeley artist David Lance Goines. [Alta] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:21 AM PST - 21 comments

Sierra Ferrell has been taking her old-timey voice across the country. Down a band member due to Covid in New Jersey. In front of her favorite rowdy singalong crowd in Portland. In her Grand Ole Opry debut.
posted by clawsoon at 5:42 AM PST - 7 comments

As the planet has apparently managed to progress another eleven million+ miles along its celestial transit since last we met, for us that means it's once again Monday and time for another free thread. To celebrate, this week I'd like to bring you back to an era when we didn't rely on AI, replika lovers, or dating site algorithms to find romance. We knew that true love could only be found in one place: Space. [more inside]
posted by taz at 4:15 AM PST - 62 comments

Ballet dancer Marta Cinta González Saldaña, who had Alzheimer's, reacting to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake music. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 12:03 AM PST - 7 comments

Moooove over: How single-celled yeasts are doing the work of 1,500-pound cows "Dozens of companies have sprouted up in recent months to develop milk proteins made by yeasts or fungi. ... The companies’ products are already on store shelves in the form of yogurt, cheese and ice cream, often labeled 'animal-free.' The burgeoning industry, which calls itself 'precision fermentation,' has its own trade organization, and big-name food manufacturers such as Nestlé, Starbucks and General Mills have already signed on as customers." [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:53 PM PST - 51 comments

The thorny devil is older than the Australian deserts. Scientists hope genetics can tell us why. Citizen scientists are being called upon to help unlock the mysteries of the thorny devil and better understand the desert dweller's evolution.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:59 PM PST - 14 comments

A few very different wish-fulfillment pieces of speculative fiction. Stories by lyricwritesprose and by dalekteaservice give us alien points of view on what humans could offer to a troubled universe. And in "Burning Men" by Maria Farrell, certain people start spontaneously combusting. (Author's commentary: it's "about a world where the cost of sexual violence is born by the perpetrators and how that changes everything" as well as "the mood music of brexit and covid.") [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:37 PM PST - 18 comments

From Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz at The Cut, a profile of Replika and the unsettling ways it makes its users feel: “The Man of Your Dreams” [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 12:21 PM PST - 47 comments

McSweeney’s: “Dear Fat-Headed Roald Dahl-Censoring Fuckers, You’re censors. You’re not editors, and you’re not readers. You’re censors. You are exactly what Orwell warned us about. So fuck you.”
posted by beesbees at 4:16 AM PST - 267 comments

“We’ve often had the kind of stress and struggle of, like, is this working?” Rachel Aviv (previously) writes about professor Agnes Callard (previously) and how she integrates philosophy into her marriages.
posted by doctornemo at 6:50 PM PST - 63 comments

Mama's Broke plays a Tiny Desk Concert. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:39 PM PST - 5 comments

Throughout Franzen’s life in public, he has figured himself as embattled, enemy-beset. The metaphors he uses are powerful; most conversations about him enter their universe—accept, even in disagreement, their terms. The oppositional framing of Franzen’s career—the opinions Franzen holds, his means of expressing them, the positions they invite others to take with respect to his work and persona—flatten nuance, entrench stances, limit exchange. They “leave little room for ambiguity or contradiction” and, over time, stand to “incrementally entomb” many conversations about Franzen and—perhaps most of all—the author himself. from Franzen’s Anger by L. Gibson (excerpted from their book Freedom Reread)
posted by chavenet at 4:15 PM PST - 12 comments

yoga dad bod “You look really cute in your yoga outfit,” she said. Cute? Who did she think she was talking to? This kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me—ever. I was wearing red athletic shorts and a yellow hoodie. I am not a fashion expert, but I know enough about fashion to know that my “outfit” was nothing to write home about, unless of course, you happen to be a correspondent for the Unfashionable Male. “My wife picks out my clothes,” I blurted out. “I just grab whatever is clean, and throw it on.”
posted by alexdobrenko at 3:03 PM PST - 38 comments

Kiska, the last captive orca in Canada, died of unknown causes at the Marineland amusement park on Thursday. Kiska, a three year old female orca, was captured in Icelandic waters in 1979 and brought to the Marineland amusement park near Niagara Falls, living nearly all of her 47 years in captivity. From 2011 on, she was the only orca kept in captivity in Canada, and because of this was nicknamed "the loneliest orca in the world." Metafilter previously highlighted the poor living conditions of the animals in Marineland in 2012. [more inside]
posted by fortitude25 at 11:00 AM PST - 24 comments

Someone Created A Ride In Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 That Will Outlast Our Actual Universe [YouTube] “Released in 2002, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 is a popular PC theme park builder that is still actively played and modded by players in 2023. But there are also purists who don’t play the game using fancy mods or open-source ports. And Marcel Vos, a popular RCT2 YouTuber, is one of these players who enjoys experimenting with the original 20-year-old version of the game. A few years back he made a coaster that takes 12 years to complete. But now his newest creation—impressively created without mods—is a working roller coaster that will take over 3 quinvigintillion years in real life to complete. Bring some snacks. [...] If you want to see this bonkers Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 ride yourself, Marcel Vos has graciously released a file you can download and play on your own PC.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 10:53 AM PST - 17 comments

Billboard Magazine posts Madonna's 100 Greatest Songs (Critics' Pics). That's it. That's the post.
posted by hippybear at 10:11 AM PST - 46 comments

What happened with the Buy Nothing app A story of how the originators tried to break away from Facebook, and how BuyNothing grew away from them. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 7:52 AM PST - 28 comments

In 2010, Deaton and Kahneman famously found that income above $75,000 is not associated with higher happiness (previously). In a 2020 study, Matthew Killingsworth got different results (Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year), so Kahneman and Killingsworth engaged in "adversarial collaboration", seeking to resolve their dispute through joint research, with Barbara Mellers as their facilitator. The result was Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. They found that unless you're among the miserable 15%, money does appear to boost happiness... up to earnings of $500,000. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 5:39 AM PST - 60 comments

Soccer loving, Hardcore listening, Dutch actual socialist politician Peter Kwint thinks he knows his way around the most American of music genres. Here are his 500 best songs from a Century of Country and Western for y'all to (dis)agree with.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:21 AM PST - 14 comments

This song by Pakistani-born British actor, writer and comedian Mawaan Rizwan is funny and cutting. "Are You Checking Me Out or Are You Just a Racist?"
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:10 PM PST - 8 comments

Every Sample from Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique"
posted by cortex at 9:41 PM PST - 32 comments

The December 2022 minutes of the Elmwood Public Library Board meeting (IL) are unlike any public library meeting minutes you’ve likely seen. Though public comment was not long, the minutes indicate extreme discontent happening within the walls of the library. And, perhaps, the library’s advertising over 1/5 of their positions as open–all of which are full-time, professional and managerial positions–also sheds light on what appears to be a Board eager to deprofessionalize the facility while implementing an anti-DEI, anti-inclusive culture in order to “align” with the needs of the community.
posted by Etrigan at 7:10 PM PST - 22 comments

Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar, authors who formerly wrote an irregular science fiction book column in the Washington Post, are back with a new column, "If you loved 'Everything Everywhere All at Once,' try these novels," recommending books like Micaiah Johnson’s "The Space Between Worlds," Mefi's own Charles Stross's "The Family Trade," Alix E. Harrow's "The Ten Thousand Doors of January", and many more. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 6:30 PM PST - 23 comments

Schwarzenegger told me he really does want to live forever. Not everyone would, at his age. But not everyone has had his life, either. “If you have the kind of life that I’ve had—that I have—it is so spectacular. I could not ever articulate how spectacular it was.” He was trying to project gratitude, but something else came through—a plaintiveness in that gap between the tenses. from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Act [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 4:08 PM PST - 25 comments

The National Park Service has published four cool crochet patterns! Halibut (Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve) Walleye (Voyageurs National Park) Triops (Wupatki National Monument) Lava Flow Crochet Pillow (El Malpais National Monument)
posted by rockindata at 4:03 PM PST - 7 comments

Updated lyrics for 2023, enjoy! Via McSweeney's Original lyrics from 1980: They let you dream just to watch 'em shatter You're just a step on the boss man's ladder But you've got dreams he'll never take away In the same boat with a lot of your friends Waitin' for the day your ship'll come in And the tide's gonna turn an' it's all gonna roll your way New version on McSweeney's, 43 years later: Zillow lets you dream just to watch them shatter When the housing bubble bursts it won’t even matter ’Cause you got loans they won’t cancel anyway In the same boat with a lot of your friends Waiting for the day you can use that MFA Wish those unpaid internships would’ve had some sway
posted by Word_Salad at 3:46 PM PST - 6 comments

The father of cannabis science, Dr Raphael Mechoulam, dead at 92.
posted by Kitteh at 3:05 PM PST - 5 comments

Silicon Valley Bank was closed today by the state of California and taken over by the FDIC in receivership to secure deposits. This is the largest bank collapse since 2008 and the second-largest failure of a financial institution in US history. This follows 2 days of bank runs related to interest rate exposure and liquidity. [more inside]
posted by JZig at 3:05 PM PST - 172 comments

Just Rolled In is a short-form YouTube show in which mechanics submit clips of customers' unusual cars and complaints. Clips include bizarre manufacturing defects, unhinged homebrew wiring jobs, embarrassing customer misunderstandings of basic car functions, and nightmarishly unsafe vehicles that somehow drove to the shop (and occasionally decline repairs and drive away). Each episode is around 3 minutes of gentle comedy tinged with occasional horror.
posted by saladin at 11:58 AM PST - 38 comments

The BBC's Match of the Day (MOTD) is the longest running football television programme in the world. It is currently hosted by Gary Lineker, former England striker and 1990 World Cup semi-finalist and Golden Boot winner. Lineker, very famously, was never given either a red or yellow card in his professional career. But the BBC have given him one now. [more inside]
posted by plonkee at 11:28 AM PST - 74 comments

Old Glory Bank, the bank for the hard-working Americans who make this country run every day. The bank for people who believe in love of country, respect for the flag, and appreciate the mili Not a McSweeny's piece or an Onion joke, it's a bank in Oklahoma that changed its name and rebranded as, apparently, the Fox News Channel of savings accounts. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 10:19 AM PST - 82 comments

ProPublica and Documented bring us a report about the newly-suspiciously-wealthy architect of the current Supreme Court, Leonard Leo, and his Teneo Network, which seeks to do to US culture what has been done to the court system. Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance” [medium read with clickable video] lays out what might be the most coordinated move toward minority seizure of society we will yet have faced.
posted by hippybear at 9:01 AM PST - 25 comments

To Protect Wildlife from Artificial Light, Look to the Moon: A proposed design for a Danish church looks to automatically adjust the building’s exterior lighting to the abundance of moonlight.
posted by aniola at 8:54 AM PST - 2 comments

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried is a short story by Amy Hempel. It is about friendship and its sad, exhilarating limits. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:51 AM PST - 8 comments

Let's celebrate MAR10 Day with this Kaizo Mario speed-run, courtesy of Awesome Games Done Quick [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 6:11 AM PST - 15 comments

"We could talk about the performance. We could mention the lazy swell of guitar and bass on which Fred Neil's rich, caramel voice drifts for nearly seven minutes. We could mention Neil himself, and how he disappeared from music in the 70s and dedicated the rest of his life to the protection of dolphins." [more inside]
posted by vverse23 at 8:30 PM PST - 8 comments

The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this? [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 6:46 PM PST - 113 comments

David Do, the new head of New York City's Taxi & Limousine Commission, has just become a licensed cabdriver. He aims to drive "100 trips a year as a way of learning firsthand what drivers encounter daily, whether that’s dealing with traffic and customers, or struggling to find designated spots where they can park and take bathroom breaks....Do tried a similar approach at his previous post, where he briefly drove for D.C. Neighborhood Connect, an on-demand shared-ride shuttle." Commissioner Do had to pass TLC's exam (PDF of sample test) to get a license.
posted by brainwane at 5:40 PM PST - 10 comments

The last surviving member of the White Rose resistance movement, which urged Germans to stand up against Nazi tyranny during the second world war, has died, according to the group’s historical foundation. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:31 PM PST - 36 comments

As part of his expansion of operations, Elon Musk is is developing a company town in Texas named Snailbrook. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:02 PM PST - 72 comments

Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country [Mother Jones]
posted by chavenet at 4:00 PM PST - 17 comments

Florence + The Machine cover No Doubt's "Just a Girl".
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:34 PM PST - 15 comments

Weezer's Blue Album but it's me and my friend trying to sing everything from memory
posted by cortex at 10:08 AM PST - 13 comments

“Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?” Topol, the Israeli actor famous for starring as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, has died at 87. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 7:33 AM PST - 75 comments

Tautumeitas is a Latvian folk group, comprised of six women vocalists and instrumentalists. They often bring more modern sensibilities into their music, but have also released straight historically sourced music. Their visual imagery has a lot of references to Latvia's pagan past, pretty clearly here in the music video for Raganu Nakts (Witches' Night, english lyrics). Read a bit more and see their video of Muoseņa, a 2022 track where they collaborated with singer-songwriter Renārs Kaupers. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 11:21 PM PST - 5 comments

Kasey Chambers covers Lose Yourself (h/t to CoverMe)
posted by Gorgik at 9:12 PM PST - 17 comments

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has an extensive set of resources for teaching financial literacy to K-12 students . For the youngest kids, they have a series of books featuring the Money Monsters, where kids can learn about various facets of financial literacy.
posted by rockindata at 7:29 PM PST - 21 comments

Bert I. Gordon (homepage), a.k.a. "Mr B.I.G," prolific filmmaker who made many a Mystery Science Theater 3000 film, has passed away at age 100. Farewell, and thanks for all the flicks! [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 6:29 PM PST - 18 comments

"When Brenda went off script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realize the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place." HUMAN_FALLBACK by Laura Preston, published by n+1 in late 2022 (a shorter version is in The Guardian), details the job Preston did from early 2019 to early 2020, "impersonating a chatbot that’s impersonating a person" for an real estate leasing platform.
posted by brainwane at 5:10 PM PST - 7 comments

When a galley arrives, many blurbers read no more than the publisher’s plot summary which is written by the editor or publicity department or both. It is then quite easy for a blurber to riff off of what they’ve been supplied. Blurbs generally share a common format across all genres of books: Author praise: “A talented writer who…”; “Her intelligence is such that….” One-word gushing: “electrifying”; “gripping.” Two-word slobbering: “wickedly smart”; “hauntingly beautiful.” Dubious equivalences: “as satisfying as it is unsettling”; “as sharply conceived as it is brilliantly written.” from Beware of Book Blurbs by GD Dess [The Millions]
posted by chavenet at 3:58 PM PST - 48 comments

As lions return to hunting fur seals on the Skeleton Coast, a new geofencing project tries to keep people out of the way.
posted by Etrigan at 1:55 PM PST - 9 comments

Finally, A Persona-Type RPG Where You Play As The Golden Girls [Kotaku] In what can only be described as the best example of not letting your memes be dreams, someone is making a free Persona-styled RPG based on The Golden Girls, and it’s set to come out later this year. The Golden Girls Take Manhattan DX, developed by Joey Pagano and Chris Lindgren, is a “fast-paced” turn-based JRPG where you take control of Rose, Dorothy, Sophia, and Blanche as they run down the streets of Miami, battle off hordes of clowns, and Dark Souls-roll through dungeons. Don’t believe me? You can check out the trailer and see it for yourself.
posted by Fizz at 1:31 PM PST - 32 comments

Canada's first Indigenous Governor-General, Mary Simon, shares some of the comments that lead her to turn off comments on her socials.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:19 PM PST - 26 comments

For These Women of Color, Historical Dressing Is a Modern Art Form: "For some, anachronistic attire is a conversation-starter; for others, it’s merely a joyful form of escapism. Either way, it can offer the rest of us a captivating lesson in history, style, and identity. Below, meet seven women and their wardrobes."
posted by jedicus at 11:35 AM PST - 10 comments

"The US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on 6 March that it would retire its flagship JOIDES Resolution drilling vessel rather than extend operations until 2028, as many researchers had hoped." (Alexandra Witze in Nature) [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:01 AM PST - 2 comments

"I don’t use the term “breakthrough” lightly." The latest Ground Truths from Eric Topol discusses a new randomized, placebo-controlled trial of metformin, with a 42% reduction of subsequent Long Covid in participants who received metformin compared to the placebo group. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 10:59 AM PST - 59 comments

"Bloody hell! Jon is in London to talk about populism. Turns out it’s not unique to America! Jon is joined by Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical current affairs publication Private Eye Magazine, to discuss the reign of Rupert Murdoch, the economic consequences of a government run by lunatics, and the explicitly corrupt yet unbeatable right-wing propaganda machine."
posted by Paul Slade at 8:45 AM PST - 18 comments

The 1980 Floor Show was a rock musical featuring David Bowie, held at the Marquee Club in London, on October 18–20, 1973. It was broadcast in the United States by NBC on November 16, 1973, as part of the series The Midnight Special, and presented the last performance of Bowie as his character Ziggy Stardust. Here's eight hours of unedited footage from the show. Includes rehearsals and multiple takes. [more inside]
posted by marxchivist at 7:38 AM PST - 5 comments

The False Promise of ChatGPT (NYTimes OpEd by Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, Jeffrey Watumull) [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 3:57 AM PST - 147 comments

'The Mask by Maya Angelou. [cw: Slavery, racism] sytl
posted by clavdivs at 9:27 PM PST - 2 comments

The band Thumpasaurus makes silly music videos, particularly the maximalist "TALKIN' BOUT" (like a 2020s answer to Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" video) and the Western-inflected "Struttin'" (caution for a bare butt).
posted by brainwane at 4:27 PM PST - 6 comments

The Fugee, the Fugitive and the FBI: How rapper Pras Michél got entangled in one of the century’s great financial scandals, mediated a high-stakes negotiation between global superpowers and was accused of major crimes. [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:52 PM PST - 9 comments

Twenty-one years after his last release of new material, Peter Gabriel has emerged from creative hibernation and has a new album and tour this year! The album, titled "i/o" will have two mixes, Bright Side and Dark Side, and for those spatial-audio-capable, an In Side mix done in Atmos. He's released three tracks so far: Panopticom [Bright, Dark], The Court [Bright, Dark], and Playing For Time [only Dark so far]. In Side mixes are available on Apple and Amazon streaming services. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:40 PM PST - 37 comments

New Order's Blue Monday was released 40 years ago on 7 March 1983. [more inside]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 2:56 PM PST - 71 comments

On a secluded part of the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, MD, is a large stone wall. But it’s not just any stone wall, it is the Wall of Many Stones, a long running stone weathering experiment. Can’t get enough stones? There is a searchable catalog where you can explore the stones from your home state ( and some countries)
posted by rockindata at 12:35 PM PST - 21 comments

On Iraq’s art under two decades of occupation. An often overlooked aspect of this story is how these artists had worked to develop a sense of appreciation among local audiences, who were being introduced to a new definition of art spread by a heterogeneous global modernism, the paradigms of which were distinct from those of preexisting traditions. They also inaugurated educational programs, galleries and art museums, publications, and other modalities of displaying, disseminating, and convening around artistic production. These efforts had a tremendous impact not only in Iraq but throughout the region. One of the catastrophic repercussions of the invasion was that it undermined decades of that labor.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:34 PM PST - 3 comments

Why a Vanderpump Rules breakup is the Red Wedding of reality TV [Polygon] “The people who made these declarations were not talking about a breaking piece of political news. They’re talking about the breakup of Vanderpump Rules stars Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix. I, personally, have been comparing it to Ned Stark’s death plus the Red Wedding plus the JFK assassination, since it is too big, too shocking, too life-altering to be compared to any single event. Vanderpump Rules is a spinoff of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills that set out to follow the lives of Lisa Vanderpump’s employees at her restaurant SUR (Sexy Unique Restaurant). Over the course of the show’s 10 seasons, SUR employees have gained fame and moved on from their jobs waitressing, hosting, and bartending, but not from the show. The magic of Vanderpump has always been that its core cast members were good friends for years before the show began. Their relationships were real, and so was the drama. And the latest Vanderpump scandal is the most shocking one yet.”
posted by Fizz at 12:28 PM PST - 84 comments

From Le Monde in English: An estimated 1.28 million took to the streets across France on Tuesday, March 7, against French President Emmanuel Macron's plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030 while strikes disrupted transport and schools. The figure suggests the demonstrations were some of the biggest in decades, slightly higher than the 1.27 million estimated during a previous round of protests against the reform on January 31 which had seen record numbers since the beginning of the protest movement. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 12:22 PM PST - 28 comments

Snow is a short (7' 46") cinéma pur documentary showing the effects of the 1962-63 freeze on British railways. Its driving soundtrack is a cover of Sandy Nelson's Teen Beat, time-distorted and heavily processed by Daphne Oram. [more inside]
posted by scruss at 10:14 AM PST - 9 comments

Sumplete is a math-logic web browser game where you delete numbers so the rows and columns in the grid correspond to the totals. Sumplete was apparently designed, coded and named by ChatGPT; more in Neowin and Gigazine.
posted by Wordshore at 8:40 AM PST - 33 comments

Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico write Numlock Awards, a Substack newsletter about "the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night". Recently, Hickey wrote about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is building toward a billion-dollar endowment for its museum and other operations, saying the Academy has changed itself "into something more akin to a university from a balance sheet perspective."
posted by Etrigan at 7:17 AM PST - 13 comments

"People think it’s this outlet for revenge [...] In reality, it’s this beautiful, consensual, celebratory dynamic. [...] One thing I do with a lot of my long-term clients is: I push them to get raises, I push them to apply to better jobs. Because the more money they make, the more money they can allocate to me, and the richer I get.” An exploration of financial domination, from findoms, finsubs, and others. (Photos mildly NSFW)
posted by creatrixtiara at 6:12 PM PST - 46 comments

How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled A wild tale of state-corporate collusion in Germany's Fintech industry: The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German élite. But a reporter discovered that behind the façade of innovation were lies and links to Russian intelligence. Come for some standard finance shenanigans, stay for the inappropriate use of state power against journalism. (ungated)
posted by cendawanita at 5:47 PM PST - 24 comments

Drinking will always be a fraught exercise, and I honor anyone who has soberly assessed how best to pursue the good for themselves and their loved ones and decided that it doesn’t include drinking. But for those of us still mixing martinis, the question is not how to drink as much as possible or as little as possible, but as well as possible. May we ask and answer with every glass. from How to Save American Drinking in Five Easy Steps by Clare Coffey
posted by chavenet at 3:38 PM PST - 96 comments

In a video post that veers dangerously close to actual journalism, YouTuber Eddy "Rainforest Cafe" Burback delves into The Deceptive World Of Ghost Kitchens [40m]. Beginning with something that seems like a normal-for-him food stunt, he uncovers a shady world of deceptive practices and safety violations of all sorts. It's good fun and surprisingly informative.
posted by hippybear at 3:19 PM PST - 47 comments

There Is No Saving Cyberpunk 2077 By Luke Plunkett [Kotaku] “We were now free, two years after the game’s nightmarish release, to convince ourselves that this was no longer the same game it had been at launch. Two years of work had righted the ship, given people what they wanted. Cyberpunk 2077 was good now. But was it? I, along with most of you, had played it in 2020 and thought it was terrible. How much could really have changed since then? With a bunch of time to kill on a recent vacation, and to address my own simmering curiosity over the shape the game was in, I spent a few weeks working my way through Cyberpunk 2077, front to back.”
posted by Fizz at 11:56 AM PST - 50 comments

A Woman, an Elephant and an Uncommon Love Story spanning nearly a half century. There are many kinds of love stories. This one involves a woman and an elephant, and the bond between them spanning nearly 50 years. It involves devotion and betrayal. It also raises difficult questions about the relationship between humans and animals, about control and freedom, about what it means to own another living thing. TW some brief descriptions of animal abuse.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:56 AM PST - 4 comments

A major advance in translation technology means that Ukrainians can inform and debunk in real time. The first Google Translate used phrase-based SMT [statistical machine translation] — phrase-based, because it translates one phrase at a time, without considering the context of the phrase.... “Milkport” — from the Turkish süt liman, an idiom akin to “smooth sailing” — became Turkish shorthand for an amalgam of ludicrous machine translation and fake news.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:24 AM PST - 22 comments

Bernadette Mayer's Writing Prompts. Hat tip: Bernadette Mayer will give you ideas. Recommended not just for writers. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:57 AM PST - 5 comments

Actor Jake Phillips does Mark Antony's "Brutus is an honorable man" eulogy from Julius Caesar in a US Southern accent and people from the South comment on what that lends the monologue. And: several Tumblr users collaborate to translate the eulogy: "Friends, mutuals, countrymen, do not scroll past; I come to cancel Caesar, not to stan him..... But Brutus says he was problematic; And Brutus is an honourable man." (via hobo-rg)
posted by brainwane at 8:55 AM PST - 26 comments

...with a 100% chance of murdering the classics. Yo La Tengo will be playing cover song requests live on WFMU from 9 pm to midnight EST on Daniel Blumin's show in exchange for pledges. As in previous years, the show will not be archived by the station. Previously: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:24 AM PST - 42 comments

Bert Huber describes a new law working its way though the EU parliament that may have massive implications for how code is written and regulated. There are potentially great things in the law (no more devices shipped with admin/admin default credentials!) and potentially terrible things in the law (open source maintainers slapped with 15 million euro minimum fines). (via @edwtjo
posted by rockindata at 5:43 AM PST - 32 comments

OMG it's Monday, free thread fam. How did that happen again? Not sure, but today we have another "free thing in your free thing" thread: this rather clever dingbat font featuring glyphs that can be chained together in various ways to create borders, backgrounds, and separators. (cute!) And which also allows a very bad pun in the page title. (priceless!) [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:04 AM PST - 77 comments

A Singaporean man tried to date his female friend. When she refused, he took her to court for $3m. The man is seeking millions in damages from a woman he says caused him trauma by rebuffing his romantic advances and telling him she saw him only as a friend.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:00 PM PST - 36 comments

The robots aren't coming, but the people who can't shut the fuck up about them are already here. Please please please can everyone just take a moment to shut the fuck up about AI? It’s so stupid and it’s barely even started and already everyone can’t stop nutting about how cool it is BUT IT IS NOT COOL. "It's fascinating and it's going to change every single aspect of our lives forever!!!" Do you even hear yourself??? It’s a fucking chatbot just like Alexa, Siri, and the exception that proves the rule, the GOAT itself SmarterChild.
posted by SituationNormal at 5:51 PM PST - 89 comments

One question remains: What happened to the Big Maple Leaf coin?
posted by chavenet at 3:35 PM PST - 14 comments

Would you rather meet Fabio Jackson or spend a week with your celebrity crush? If that doesn't interest you, there are other scenarios.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:03 PM PST - 9 comments

beestung has published some glorious and heart wrenching stories recently. Beautiful Meanings in Beautiful Things by Avery Briar explores variations on intergenerational queer acceptance, both incomplete and unconditional. Goldie Peacock provides glimpses of nonbinary euphoria and stomaches in "2010" and "notes from the past 24 hours in my androgynous apartment" (content warning for drug use). [more inside]
posted by crossswords at 1:41 PM PST - 2 comments

Why are people treating me this way? After 13 years of marriage, I was expecting sympathy, empathy and kindness from this group of married people who no doubt knew, or at least could imagine, how hard this all must have been for me. As the dinner conversation ventured into the ”what’s life like now” part, more of the wives started leaning in my direction, fists tucked under chins as they eagerly awaited the details of first dates and new furniture purchases — the enthusiasm I had for my new beginning.... [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:44 AM PST - 59 comments

Dr. Katie Mack wrote a short article for Science Focus to talk about what's "real" in physics: "..in practice, physics isn’t built around ultimate truth, but rather the constant production and refinement of mathematical approximations. It’s not just because we’ll never have perfect precision in our observations. It’s that, fundamentally, the entire point of physics is to create a model universe in math - a set of equations that remain true when we plug in numbers from observations of physical phenomena."
posted by curious nu at 8:07 AM PST - 31 comments

Sparks have a new single, along with a video filmed in a single take, starring the band and Cate Blanchett.
posted by Hogshead at 7:27 AM PST - 25 comments

The Best of the Worst Cartoons Ever was an episode of the early Cartoon Network show Toon Heads, it is said to have been unaired for posing several Hanna-Barbera productions as bad in some way. It had been preserved by animation historian Jerry Beck (who co-wrote it) and recently uploaded to YouTube by Jerico Dvorak. Here it is, 43 minutes of tremendous cringe. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 5:05 PM PST - 132 comments

Choose Dance Choose dance.
posted by klangklangston at 1:27 PM PST - 10 comments

In Nigeria's election held on February 25, Bola Tinubu has been declared winner but with some delays and discrepancies reported, his two main rivals are disputing the results (NYT | Ungated). The president, and Nigeria, face gowing economic difficulty and unrest. In particular, the Niger Delta with its oil reserves is troubled due to foreign exploitation and local oil theft leading to gang warfare, political corruption, poverty, and environmental devastation.
posted by blue shadows at 12:52 PM PST - 3 comments

The History and Politics of Wuxia by Jeannette Ng [Tor] “These are stories, after all, that are about outlaws and outcasts, existing outside of the conventional hierarchies of power. And they certainly do have plenty to say about these big universal themes of freedom, loyalty and justice. But this is also a genre that has been banned by multiple governments within living memory. Its development continues to happen in the shadows of fickle Chinese censorship and at the heart of it remains a certain defiant cultural and national pride intermingled with nostalgia and diasporic yearning. The vast majority of the most iconic wuxia texts are not written by Chinese authors living comfortably in China, but by a dreaming diaspora amid or in the aftermath of vast political turmoil. Which is all to say that the world of wuxia is fundamentally bound up with those hierarchies of power it seeks to reject. Much like there is more to superheroes than dorky names, love triangles, and broad universal ideals of justice, wuxia is grounded in the specific time and place of its creation.” [Bonus: Wiki, 30 Essential Wuxia Films, An Introduction to Wuxia Novels]
posted by Fizz at 11:18 AM PST - 24 comments

"We believe close partners should be candid with each other when misunderstandings occur. As such, we wish to respond to certain inaccurate statements made today by British officials and media regarding our archaeological activities." From MeFi's own adrianhon, a short science fiction story: "The Taking of Stonehenge".
posted by brainwane at 10:22 AM PST - 14 comments

Meet the (very cute) Mountain Pygmy-possum: Australia’s only hibernating marsupial. Mountain Pygmy-possums often weigh less than a golf ball. They live in the alpine and sub-alpine regions of Victoria and New South Wales, and hibernate underneath the snow. They can hibernate for up to seven months of the year. Here they are waking up from hibernation. They like eating Bogong moths. Mountain Pygmy-possums are also very partial to peanut butter and chocolate: so much so, that wildlife researchers had to deliberately downgrade the tastiness/desirability of the bait that they were using in their research traps as the possums were getting "trap-happy" and they were catching the same individual possum several nights in a row. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:08 AM PST - 11 comments

The Great LA Dumpling Drama - "Last August, moments after news of the Din Tai Fung move broke, the man who runs the Americana at Brand Memes Twitter account was out to breakfast with his mother-in-law when his phone began buzzing." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 35 comments

Ask a Manager has a live one: My dad gave the whole family DNA ancestry kits for the holidays, and it turns out the CEO of the company I work for is my half-brother....About a week after I got my results, an email went out from the head of HR stating that all staff had to take a refresher training on nepotism. The training also included a new clause that said something like “staff are not entitled to privileges personal or professional if familial relation by genes or marriage to executive or management staff is known or unknown or discovered during employment.” [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 10:34 PM PST - 71 comments

Today, we're following up on previous and previouslier stories about the pet dogs left behind after the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. "In the first genetic study of any large mammal in the area around Chernobyl, DNA collected from feral dogs living near the power plant today reveals that they are the descendants of dogs that were either present at the time of the accident or that settled in the area shortly afterwards."
posted by bryon at 5:07 PM PST - 21 comments

Falling Down explores the ways that we imagine cities, Los Angeles in particular. Foster is a character who considers himself displaced, evicted from what he assumed was the promise of Southern California prosperity. And most obviously, he is out of place because he is out of his car. To complete his cinematic arc, he must experience, at three miles per hour, the reality of Los Angeles, a city he has previously known only as an abstraction. from Fatal Flâneur: On Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down” and the Sidewalks of Los Angeles [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:01 PM PST - 22 comments

How Mondragón Became The World's Largest Co-op [The New Yorker, Archive link, medium-longish read] tells the tale of a possibility for an alternative to capitalism -- a worker-owned cooperative that extends far beyond an organic grocery store. This one employs 80,000 people and encompasses a multitude of business and educational opportunities that help continuing to build the community. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:47 PM PST - 15 comments

The 51st Iditarod starts this weekend. With just 33 mushers it has the smallest starting field since the race began in 1973. Reasons for the reduced roster include climate change, impact of the pandemic, inflation, several veteran mushers retiring or taking a break and loss of some sponsors. Despite the travails it promises to be a competitive and challenging race, with just two former champions, 20 other veterans and nine rookies on the trail, this could be the race where the next generation of top mushers begin to emerge and shape the future of the sport. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 2:11 PM PST - 24 comments

David Lindley has passed away. A master of the lap steel and a number of other instruments, he was known for his work with Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne and many other artists. Listen to him playing with his band El Rayo-X and with Wally Ingram. So long, Mr. Dave, and thanks for all the good music.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 2:00 PM PST - 31 comments

The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi collective that has been linked to acts of violence against minorities and LGBTQ communities, glorifying perpetrators as "saints". Antifascist researchers have through their research outed one of the group's founders - Dallas Humber, a California sex toy salesperson long involved in far right online communities. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:37 PM PST - 33 comments

Phylopic is a collection of living beings in profile, Creative Commons licensed!
posted by rockindata at 12:14 PM PST - 5 comments

The long-unavailable "New Asian Cinema" EP (1998) by the Mountain Goats has been made available on their Bandcamp. The band's three Yo-Yo Records EPs from 1998 to 2001 have never been available on major streaming services, and "New Asian Cinema" is the only one up on Bandcamp now. [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 11:35 AM PST - 12 comments

Rolling Stone ranks: The 50 Best Tunes by fictional bands from movies and TV.
posted by bondcliff at 11:10 AM PST - 141 comments

What Worf Really Meant to Star Trek Legend Michael Dorn [Polygon]

““They really didn’t have a bible for Worf at all,” says Dorn of those early episodes. “In fact, one of the first things I did was, I asked the producers, ‘What do you want from this guy? You’ve just handed me a piece of paper that says Worf on it.’” With Roddenberry’s blessing, Dorn set out making the character his own, giving Worf the kind of personal investment and attachment that only an actor can provide. “I decided to make the guy the opposite of everybody else on the show. You know, everyone else, their attitudes were great, and they’re out there in space, relationships are forming. And after every mission they were like, Wasn’t that fantastic? I didn’t say anything to anybody, I just made him this gruff and surly character on the bridge. No smiles, no joking around.””

Dorn has swapped his mek’leth for a kur’leth and glued on his bumpy prosthetic forehead once more to reprise the role of Worf in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, which reunites the Next Gen cast for one last adventure. It’s the chance to give one of sci-fi’s most beloved supporting characters something that’s usually reserved only for Captains and Admirals: a glorious third act.
posted by Fizz at 9:56 AM PST - 44 comments

The Right to Read film shares the stories of people fighting to provide the ability to read for their kids. The entire film is available to watch for free until March 9. The documentary is by Jenny Mackenzie, and executive produced by LeVar Burton. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 9:04 AM PST - 8 comments

Ask A Music Critic: Why Aren’t There More Negative Album Reviews? A viral takedown of the Italian band Måneskin prompted a reader to ask music critic Steven Hyden why there aren’t more negative album reviews. "What’s going on here? ...Don’t tell me that music is better than ever!" Hyden responds with his own theory: no, it’s not really all about access, or fanbases, or poptimism, but rather about "the decline of the general-interest music critic".
posted by bitteschoen at 8:57 AM PST - 42 comments

greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around till the end, if you can. plz enjoy. A ~20k word longform essay by Ella Guro/Liz R on game authorship (and auteurship), the commercialization of the indie game space, power structures, thoughts on what makes a game "experimental", publisher rights vs artist rights, film envy, and tracing the current game landscape back to Californian neoliberalism.
posted by curious nu at 7:49 AM PST - 7 comments

"Why I Am an Anarchist" is a short comic It explains some of the basic concepts of anarchism and why the author is drawn to it as a philosophy. [more inside]
posted by signsofrain at 7:44 AM PST - 19 comments

This selfie above China's balloon was taken over Missouri. Here's how we know that. (SL:npr)
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 5:22 AM PST - 16 comments

Wednesday saw the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. [more inside]
posted by box at 4:38 AM PST - 88 comments

De La Soul is available for streaming everywhere for the first time ever. This is a bittersweet development, as rapper Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, passed away just three weeks ago. Kelvin Mercer and Vincent Mason, the surviving members of the group spoke with Ben Sisario of the New York Times [archive]. Several artists and fans who were influenced by De La Soul reflected on their legacy for the Gothamist.
posted by Kattullus at 3:32 AM PST - 17 comments

UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings. After a college student finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs. His fight to get coverage exposed the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 2:00 AM PST - 35 comments

Meet the Common Brushtail Possum, an Australian tree-climbing marsupial that keeps its young in a pouch until they are too large, at which point they ride on their mother's back. It eats leaves; bark; flowers; fruits; fungi; insects; birds eggs; small to medium birds; and sometimes rats. It likes living in the hollows of old trees; with tree loss, it is now often found in people's roofs or garages or sheds. They sometimes come into people's houses through cat flaps. In urban areas, they will accept fruit from people's hands. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:39 AM PST - 15 comments

On March 2, 2023, Wayne Shorter left us. His influence on the world of music is immeasurable. Take some time to reflect on the abundance of music that he left behind as his legacy: [more inside]
posted by fingers_of_fire at 9:01 PM PST - 37 comments

It became something much bigger. This spoof of an abrasively stupid children’s tv character became the most popular thing on British tv; a dark mirror to Barney the Dinosaur, who was at his apex at the time. ‘Blobby was a reaction to that,’ says Denson, ‘to say, “Well, what would England have, if it was shite?”’ from Mr Blobby Has a Cold [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:55 PM PST - 24 comments

As The Daily Show continues to follow in the Have I Got News For You footsteps and cycle through a new host each week, we find this week has Hasan Minhaj (former correspondent, former name-in-show-title host) sitting down with Generation Alpha and having a bit of a chat. I found it delightful, insightful, and hopeful. Hasan Minhaj Asks Kids What Issues Matter Most to Them [15m30s]
posted by hippybear at 2:37 PM PST - 26 comments

"This is an IBM tape library robot. It’s designed to fetch, load, unload, and return tape media cartridges to the correct bay in large enterprise environments. One fateful ‘workend’, I made one serve drinks. It went back into prod on the Monday…" [A Mastodon thread]
posted by DarlingBri at 2:11 PM PST - 12 comments

Coverage via Erin Reed, aka @ErinInTheMorn, of Kentucky's House passing HB470, "one of the worst anti-trans bills in the country". Gov. Lee in Tennesee has just signed into law a bill that enacts a total ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender children, as well as banning drag shows from public spaces. There are signs of hope as similar bills fail across the country, but legislators are turning their gaze to bills which also prevent adults from seeking gender affirming care.
posted by fight or flight at 1:38 PM PST - 24 comments

And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. …“intelligent” according to what definition? The three-stratum definition? Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences? The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale? Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
posted by rickw at 12:49 PM PST - 39 comments

National Marine Sanctuary Researchers Discover Lost Shipwreck Ironton: "Researchers from NOAA, the state of Michigan, and Ocean Exploration Trust have discovered an intact shipwreck resting hundreds of feet below the surface of Lake Huron. Located within NOAA's Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the shipwreck has been identified as the sailing ship Ironton. Magnificently preserved by the cold freshwater of the Great Lakes for over a century, the 191-foot Ironton rests upright with its three masts still standing." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:04 PM PST - 13 comments

How Drones are helping in the battle against Plant Extinction. "Ben Nyberg stood on a knife-edge ridge along Hawaii’s Nā Pali Coast, his eyes scouring the leafy recesses of the neighboring red-rock ridges. It was quiet, if not for a faint buzzing of a drone flying among flocks of curious white-tailed tropicbirds. Nyberg steered the drone closer toward the opposing ridge, scanning the iPad in his hands, which acted as a viewfinder. Then, he saw it. Wilkesia hobdyi. Its tufted bright green leaves stood out from other plants clinging to the cliff, appearing like something out of a Dr. Seuss book." This is a beautifully illustrated and photographed essay about using drones to find, document and preserve endangered plants. Of note, a robotic arm that delicately cuts samples for study and cultivation. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 10:42 AM PST - 4 comments

95% of the world's bourbon is produced in Kentucky. However, for years residents wondered about the ubiquitous strange dark sooty film that seemed to grow nearly everywhere statewide - was it soot or ash from chimneys? Pollution from another factory? Turns out that it's an infestation of Baudoinia compniacensis, otherwise known as "the whiskey fungus." [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:07 AM PST - 24 comments

Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sparks debate over use of JRPG term [Eurogamer] Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has criticized the term JRPG, sparking debate among players online. In an interview with Skill-Up following previews of the game, Yoshida was asked about how JRPGs have advanced in comparison to action games. According to the interviewer, Yoshida was visibly uncomfortable with the phrase.

"One thing [Yoshida] wants to get across is that when we create games, we don't go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs, we are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by western media rather than users and media in Japan," said localisation director Koji Fox. [...] He said (as translated by Fox): "This is going to depend on who you ask but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term. As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past.

posted by Fizz at 8:10 AM PST - 65 comments

The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic [ungated] - "The Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin would be a century old if it hadn't fallen victim to Nazi ideology." (Magnus Hirschfeld -- and Li Shiu Tong -- previously: 1,2,3,4) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:19 AM PST - 6 comments

"...the combined effects of these tipping elements on global temperatures are likely much smaller than the effects of our emissions choices over the next three centuries. In other words, they make climate impacts worse but don't cause runaway warming. [...] Overall, climate tipping elements are less a looming cliff after which climate change spirals out of control and cannot be stopped, and more like a slope that is hard to climb back up, where the severity of consequences is determined based on how much the future climate warms." Zeke Hausfather has a twitter thread on a new "massive review of climate-tipping elements" of which he is a coauthor: Abstract and paywalled paper here, earlier and unpaywalled version here.
posted by mittens at 4:04 AM PST - 20 comments

Goanna stuck atop radio tower offers poor reception to its rescuers. After ascending 20 metres in a crane bucket to retrieve the unimpressed goanna, a local animal rescuer said it was one of the most unusual, if not highest, call-outs he has responded to.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:19 AM PST - 26 comments

World of Interiors: Touring A 16th-Century Italian Palazzo (SLYT in Italian with subtitles) 92-year old Isabella Ducrot talks about a life with art, furniture and travel.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:10 PM PST - 6 comments

40 minutes of hand-kneaded wood-fired bread baking in rural Kyoto [more inside]
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:05 PM PST - 19 comments

In 1955, David Markson wrote a gushing fan letter to William Gaddis. In 1961, William Gaddis wrote back. [The Paris Review; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:50 PM PST - 6 comments

every american president, but they're all cool and they all sport a mullet [sltwitter]
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:42 PM PST - 63 comments

The paper of record is under fire for its transphobic coverage. How did it get this bad, and who is calling the shots?
posted by DarlingBri at 1:44 PM PST - 64 comments

Eli Lilly is slashing prices of commonly prescribed insulin drugs by 70 percent while capping related out-of-pocket costs at $35 a month Link is to a Washington Post gift article.
posted by PussKillian at 9:08 AM PST - 39 comments

How to design autistic-friendly games [gamesindustry.biz] As the games industry slowly becomes more aware of accessibility needs, efforts to account for neurodiversity have been limited. As part of the GamesIndustry.biz Academy, we previously addressed understanding and supporting neurodiversity, including autism, in the workplace, as well as the fact that accessibility isn't rocket science.

“"There's the kind of desire to throw all the accessibility options in [but] that in itself can be overpowering and not a good thing to do," Alison says. "So you won't find every option that you can think of in our game. The ones that are there are there because they've been thought through specifically [at] every single stage that we [went] through. A huge control centre... That's too much in itself, potentially, for an autistic person. So it's not overwhelming them at any stage, even if that's at the accessibility options stage."”

This article is an attempt at bridging the gap between these two topics, giving pointers about how to account for neurodiversity in-game, and more precisely how to make your game more accessible to players on the autism spectrum.
posted by Fizz at 7:18 AM PST - 11 comments

After 19 seasons is Gray's Anatomy trying a Soft Reboot, or have the writers just run out of ideas? "Since Grey’s Anatomy first premiered in 2005, it has aired 19 seasons, 406 episodes, and birthed 3 spinoffs. Naturally the show has had to adapt as cast members come and go throughout the years. This sometimes makes it hard to recall what exactly went on in season 1. Although who can forget Addison Montgomery (then Shepherd) saying the iconic line, “I’m Addison Shepherd … and you must be the woman who’s been screwing my husband.” - Den of Geek [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 6:20 AM PST - 71 comments

These technologies are not infallible.’ There are ways that we can push back against them. We don’t just have to accept the status quo. Because the Camera Shy Hoodie uses infrared light, the wearer and anyone nearby will not be able to tell that it’s on. “Night vision security cameras are tuned to see infrared light at night,” Pierce told Motherboard. “So that way they can see in the dark. By shooting enough light back at them, it blows out the sensor and causes the cameras’ auto exposure to try to compensate. Losing definition of the view of the scene. And yeah, making everything inside it unrecognizable.” [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 2:19 AM PST - 37 comments

West (through East) to West If you were in the British Armed Forces in the 1980s it was possible to drive from Helmstedt in West Germany to West Berlin passing through East Germany on the way. You simply needed to carry the right paperwork and to follow the rules. A lot of rules. This Royal Military Police film from 1988 talks you through the dos and (multiple) don'ts of making such a trip. SLYT
posted by jontyjago at 12:48 AM PST - 41 comments

Can One City Be a Microcosm of Everything That's Wrong? [ungated] - "In his new book, 'Palo Alto,' Malcolm Harris makes the case that the story of his hometown represents way more than you might expect." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 12:21 AM PST - 28 comments