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Gary Settle has helped dozens of federal prisoners get compassionate release. Will it ever be his turn to go home? An essay by Anna Altman.
posted by Rumple at 11:51 AM PST - 8 comments

@Bioreconstruct is a Twitter account that seems to post almost daily aerial (and ground) photos of Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando Resort, particularly construction projects. It's a tremendous resource for theme park reporters, bloggers and fans, but almost nothing is publicly known about the person behind the account.
posted by Etrigan at 8:33 AM PST - 20 comments

Earlier this week League of Legends players voted “overwhelmingly” to strike [twitter link: @NALCSPA] over plans to make rule changes that would cut the North American Challenger’s League—which only launched last year—from 16 teams to seven. The LCS Players Association, the body representing the region’s professional players, say the plans will see an estimated 70 people—players, coaches, etc—lose their jobs. Riot, meanwhile, say the cuts were necessary to ensure the North American leagues remain “sustainable [and] economically viable”. Tensions escalated a day later when news emerged that pro teams had been actively looking “to field scab players” [twitter link: @NALCSPA], a move that the LCSPA rightly say would “put all players’ futures at risk”, as “crossing the line undermines player negotiating power”. The LCSPA met with Riot earlier today, and not long after, Riot published a long statement on their site addressing the walkout. You don’t have to read far to see that the company has decided to play hardball. [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 6:22 AM PST - 32 comments

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are. - Naomi Klein
posted by signal at 5:08 AM PST - 105 comments

Gender biases in fictional dialogue are well documented in many media. In film, television and books, female characters tend to talk less than male characters, talk to each other less than male characters talk to each other, and have a more limited range of things to say. Identifying these biases is an important step towards addressing them. However, there is a lack of solid data for video games, now one of the major mass media which has the ability to shape conceptions of gender and gender roles. We present the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded corpus of video game dialogue, which makes it possible for the first time to measure and monitor gender representation in video game dialogue. It demonstrates that there is half as much dialogue from female characters as from male characters. Some of this is due to a lack of female characters, but there are also biases in who female characters speak to, and what they say. [Gender bias in video game dialogue] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:11 AM PST - 26 comments

From the Verge -- Lisa's Final Act: how Apple invented its future by burying its past. Text introduction - the video, Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial (30 minutes). The beginning fills in the history of the Lisa and Steve Jobs' involvement with it. The part some of you might be interested in begins with Chapter 5: The Lisa Professional. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:15 AM PST - 20 comments

Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families. Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
posted by Toddles at 7:56 PM PST - 87 comments

" 'I made twenty-five million dollars playing ten birthday parties.' That used to be seen as 'You **** sellout.' Now it’s 'How do I get me some of those?' " How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party
posted by meowzilla at 5:06 PM PST - 70 comments

"Who's Having Sex on the Wienermobile?" (Slate, adapted from the book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs)
posted by box at 3:33 PM PST - 54 comments

"You Coulda Knocked Me Over With A Feather" sung by J. Harrison Ghee. Nominated for 13 Tony Awards, including a Best Leading Actor in a musical award for Ghee (who identifies as non-binary), a delightfully reimagined "Some Like It Hot" debuted on Broadway last November. The soundtrack is fabulous.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:08 PM PST - 6 comments

"Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible. It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller, for fear of making a decision before I was ready, for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community.

Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things that grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. "
posted by simmering octagon at 2:25 PM PST - 11 comments

I walk, I trot, I lope, I gallop! Get to know dj and producer horsegiirL, a rising star amongst "a new wave of electronic artists that prioritize the fun and kitschy, that counters the more serious approach that often permeates the electronic music scene". Or as she says in "My Barn My Rules": Did you know there are more than 350 breeds horses in the world, and I am one of them! [more inside]
posted by wellifyouinsist at 2:16 PM PST - 8 comments

The shingles vaccine was rolled out in Wales in 2013, using an exact birthdate cutoff: people born on or after Sept 2, 1933 were eligible, while those born earlier weren’t. The cutoff created a nifty opportunity to test the hypothesis that herpesviruses, including the VZV that causes chickenpox and shingles, are causal to Alzheimer's dementia. [more inside]
posted by Dashy at 12:55 PM PST - 71 comments

"SO, yesterday my sister and I were talking about this particular tone that a bunch of video games had in the early 90s, and something possessed me to make This" [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 11:38 AM PST - 23 comments

The Language You Cry In traces how a song preserved over generations of women was able to lead a family back to its pre-slavery roots in Sierra Leone. In 1933 a linguist recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song that had been passed on long enough for its meaning and language to have been forgotten. Researchers recognized the language as a dialect spoken only in southern Sierra Leone. It would still take decades of time and the efforts of Amelia's daughter Mary, Baindu Jabati in Sierra Leone, who had preserved a similar song, and the collaboration of multiple scholars for the origins of the song -- a death hymn -- to be fully uncovered. [more inside]
posted by cubby at 10:03 AM PST - 10 comments

Did you know that auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners? That car dealers, along with gas station owners and building contractors make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 millionaires? They're also reliably conservative (they donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1), and despite their recent convention theme, "NADA is all in on EVs,” there is unease in the ranks of the National Automobile Dealers Association. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:02 AM PST - 71 comments

An excerpt from Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood as an article in Vanity Fair about the workplace abuse that went behind the scenes at Lost:

The show was a groundbreaking smash, but behind the scenes it devolved into such toxicity that even co-showrunner Damon Lindelof now says of his leadership: “I failed.”

posted by Pachylad at 7:31 AM PST - 55 comments

Crabby bodies are so evolutionarily favorable, they've evolved at least five different times. So why does this process, known as carcinization, keep happening? (carcinis/zation previously)
posted by Etrigan at 7:19 AM PST - 43 comments

Wrestling turned me cis, then it turned me trans by Abraham Josephine Riesman [Polygon] “Wrestling is built around masculinity, but in its own way it is also transgressive — even queer. Men in wrestling wear bright colors. They intimately touch other men in public. When they’re allied, they speak of each other in the warm terms of life partners; when they’re at odds, they issue ambiguously sexual threats such as “I want your ass.” Most importantly, they show pain. The essential, irreducible element of a wrestling match is the ability to show suffering — the very thing drummed out of every boy by high school, if not earlier. It’s the heart of the art form. No matter how skilled a wrestler is technically, it doesn’t count at all unless they can make the audience believe they’re being hurt. Every wrestler has to spend a significant amount of every match showing nothing but raw, visceral agony. They have to show their secret face, the most vulnerable one of all. Wrestling is an art form, one that turned out to have also planted seeds in my mind about how fun it is to dress up, show tenderness, be vulnerable, and do the things you’re not supposed to.”
posted by Fizz at 6:08 AM PST - 5 comments

Nick Cohen, a former columnist at The Guardian, was accused of sexual misconduct for years, but little happened. An investigation by The Financial Times was spiked, meaning the whole story has only just come out now (NYT, Archive.is). "The British news media is smaller and cozier than its American counterpart, with journalists often coming from the same elite schools. Stringent libel laws present another hurdle. And in a traditional newsroom culture of drinking and gender imbalances, many stories of misconduct go untold, or face a fight."
posted by adrianhon at 3:45 AM PST - 16 comments

The Ukraine war is heading into the summer, most commentators are waiting for the Ukrainian counteroffensive to kick off in earnest. In recent days Russia has been striking Ukraine with drones and missiles harder than in a very long while, and today Moscow was struck by Ukrainian long-range drones. Recent pledges of F-16 training (but no firm deliveries of airframes yet) and actual deliveries of Storm Shadow cruise missiles have somewhat overshadowed the work Ukraine has put in in building brigades with Western equipment. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 2:57 AM PST - 237 comments

The 40 Best Prince Covers Ever from The Best Covers Ever series from the indispensable Cover Me
posted by chavenet at 1:53 AM PST - 33 comments

Meet the mardo, an Australian mammal that can mate for up to nine hours straight and then dies
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:33 PM PST - 18 comments

A chiral aperiodic monotile [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:59 PM PST - 16 comments

Simon Stålenhag, artist, musician, and designer specialising in retro-futuristic digital images, may have a new production coming out... The Electric State. [more inside]
posted by shoesfullofdust at 4:50 PM PST - 8 comments

People Make Games (previously) have just concluded a three-month investigation into the circumstances surrounding the departure of key personnel from Disco Elysium (previously) developer ZA/UM. The result is a two and a half hour long report.
posted by juv3nal at 4:33 PM PST - 22 comments

'Fortress of the Sky' (slyt) A short documentary on the B-17 Bomber. 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner'. 'The life of a ball turret gunner.'
posted by clavdivs at 11:43 AM PST - 44 comments

It is the start of summer, traditionally marked by running, almost balletically, down a steep hill (good 2014 footage) in pursuit of a 7lb (3kg) Double Gloucester cheese wheel. 2023 passed with only an array of broken bones and twisted ankles, and no fatalities or unfortunate decapitations, though (BBC) “...the women's race was won by Delaney Irving who was knocked unconscious [CW: spectacular bounce-and-roll] as she chased the cheese ... another international winner was Ryoya Minami from Japan. Asked why he entered the race, he replied 'because I love cheese'.”
posted by Wordshore at 10:50 AM PST - 50 comments

I hope you all are navigating your cages this week. Happy Monday freethread
posted by Gorgik at 8:18 AM PST - 80 comments

Succession Finale Ends With a Roy Family Bloodbath, and a New CEO [Vanity Fair] [Series/Finale Spoilers] As the smoke clears from Succession’s fourth and final season, here’s who wound up on top.
posted by Fizz at 5:00 AM PST - 41 comments

Search high and low, the charming, funky Austin of "Slacker" is gone. Please don't misunderstand -- Austin today is spectacular, so long as you inked a mortgage before 2020. It is a beautiful city. Austin of "Slacker", I doubt you'd call it a beautiful city. It was charming, and funky, and fun, but not beautiful. I saw "Slacker" while still living in Houston, it was a large part of what it was I knew about Austin before moving here. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 3:52 AM PST - 52 comments

For some, the term is a novelty—a hyperbolic way to express one’s attraction to a pop star or classmate. It accessorizes well with a brooding or chaotic self-image. For others, the implications are more profound. The word itself proves that you’re not alone. It can seem to describe a whole emotional orientation. To some, limerence is romantic; to others, it’s a scourge. For many, it’s both. from Hopeless Romantic, Seeking Treatment
posted by chavenet at 1:10 AM PST - 12 comments

Ikea Teddy Meets Early '00 PC [more inside]
posted by kathrynm at 5:10 PM PST - 3 comments

The Colored Conventions Project. The first Colored Convention was held in 1830 in response to Ohio’s 1829 exclusionary laws and a wave of anti-Black mob violence that had forced two thousand Black residents to flee the state...more than 200 state and national Colored Conventions were held between 1830 and the 1890s. An Introduction to the Colored Conventions Movement. Colored Conventions and the Carceral States. Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s Herstory in the Colored Conventions. To Stay or To Go? The 1854 National Emigration Convention. A rich site with lots of detailed exhibits. [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 4:07 PM PST - 4 comments

Stereogum's interview with Insane Clown Posse, of note is the following paragraph:

And the amount of gay Juggalos out there is really surprising. I think about them doing their research and getting the old records, getting excited about it, and getting their hearts broke or something, you know? I tell my daughter, “For the rest of your life, when your friends ask why your dad said that, say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I’m not now.” There’s no excuse. I was going with the flow, and that’s the very thing we preach against — being a sheep. And that’s what I was doing.

(some details under the cut about this passage in particular) [more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 8:26 AM PST - 66 comments

In a 25 minute very accessible video titled The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth, Veratasium tells us about Micromouse , a yearly competition that has been going since the 1970s, where the object is to get a small robotic mouse to navigate a maze in the shortest possible time.
posted by Harald74 at 1:44 AM PST - 14 comments

Want to own a historic lighthouse? The U.S. government is offering at least 10 lighthouses to the public and government agencies as demand for the once-critical maritime facilities declines due to technology such as GPS. Some of the buildings, which can be centuries old, have colorful histories — and some are even said to have ghosts. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 6:07 PM PST - 50 comments

Some 200 years after textile workers smashed newfangled looms here during the first stirrings of the industrial revolution, other rebels are worried about a newer technology: tap-and-go bank cards and smartphone payment apps ... An unlikely coalition warns that by giving up cash, people could be losing more than they bargained for. from Paper Money Diehards Refuse to Fold [WSJ; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 5:16 PM PST - 112 comments

David Lynch reminisces about composer Angelo Badalementi who died in December 2022 (previously). [more inside]
posted by fairmettle at 2:07 PM PST - 5 comments

When she returned to her podcast after several weeks' absence, Sarah Silverman related the tale of both of her parents passing within a two week span. My Beautiful Parents [37m] is a eulogy and a tale of parents at the end of their lives. Content Warning for all the things: cancer, death, humor about death, photos and videos of sick old people... But what it all adds up to is a remarkable portrait of humanity and parents and children. And I appreciated it, and maybe you'll appreciate it, too.
posted by hippybear at 12:02 PM PST - 11 comments

In a landmark May Day ruling called Lion Elastomers, the National Labor Relations Board restored the rights of union representatives to use heated language, including occasional profanity, during arguments with management. Here's a another link to a Reuters story about the change.
posted by curious nu at 11:38 AM PST - 25 comments

The joy of sulk. "Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear declaration," writes Rebecca Roache at aeon.
posted by misteraitch at 10:48 AM PST - 4 comments

It was early September, late in the bullfighting season of 1977. The Spanish Falangists had lost their grip on power; a governmental ban prohibiting women from fighting bulls on foot had recently been overturned. The profession’s sexist barriers were crumbling, women’s liberation movements were gaining momentum, and a growing number of aspirants like Haskin were flocking to Spain. It was a dangerous dream. from The Bullfighter Draws Her Sword
posted by chavenet at 5:12 PM PST - 6 comments

The Day Before You Came was released in 1982. I Still Have Faith In You was released in 2022. That's a long time for a band to be on hiatus. So what went in in between? ABBA - The Missing 40 Years [1h5m] covers the lives and careers of Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha, and Frida and give a fuller picture of the intervening decades for the biggest band in the world.
posted by hippybear at 12:00 PM PST - 13 comments

Malaysia's Thinaah Muralitharan and Pearly Tan played Rena Miyaura and Ayako Sakuramoto from Japan at the Malaysia Masters badminton tournament earlier this week. One particular rally resulted in much applause from the spectators.
posted by Wordshore at 11:42 AM PST - 36 comments

Slide to Unlock by Craig S. Kaplan is Twister on your mobile device or tablet.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:41 AM PST - 19 comments

Indigitalization [slYT, 1h9m] is a talk by digital artist Jon Corbett (not that one) on the creation of a computing framework that honors and applies Indigenous culture to computing--including a new programming language and hardware using Cree syllabary. [more inside]
posted by Four String Riot at 8:46 AM PST - 5 comments

Black Girl Gamers' Jay-Ann Lopez on the importance of Black representation in fantasy [Eurogamer] “Ahead of the release of Square Enix's Forspoken, there were concerns about representation. Frey, the game's Black female protagonist, was described in a 2021 preview session as having a "hip-hoppy kind of walk", as well as being "an orphan" and "very angry", raising eyebrows at the perpetuation of negative Black stereotypes. Before the game's release earlier this year, paid consultants were asked to play a pre-release build of the game, including a representative from Black Girl Gamers, a 10,000-stong community organization with lived experience of Black cultures and heritage that consults on various elements of the games industry, and whose founder Jay-Ann Lopez I caught up with to find out more.”

“As a trusted voice in gaming, diversity, and inclusivity, we were brought in. We had an opportunity to weigh in on the game - especially given that it is one of the first games to feature a fantasy female protagonist of Black descent. "The importance was key to us and our community and this was communicated during our consultation. Forspoken centres itself on the representation of women of all different experiences, and due to that - the game has unfairly received extreme and unjust criticism about its quality.”

The group's consultation work on games typically includes feedback on character representation, lore, aesthetic authenticity, digital marketing strategies, and how to avoid simply furthering the status quo, where games have centred white male gamers.” [Previously.]
posted by Fizz at 7:05 AM PST - 5 comments

A huge spoiler for the show, written by the winner, is located inside the post, so avoid if you haven't watched it yet. [more inside]
posted by Thella at 2:11 AM PST - 13 comments

Carnival of Fools (SLYT) Louie Zong found a thrift store album of musical clocks, and animated one fool for each little tooty-tooty tune.
posted by moonmilk at 5:26 PM PST - 8 comments

First trailer for Barbie Previous Teaser trailers: Here (1) and here (2)
posted by Pachylad at 5:24 PM PST - 107 comments

The money flows at Binance described by Reuters indicate a lack of internal controls to ensure customer funds were clearly identifiable and segregated from company revenues, three former U.S. regulators said. They said the commingling of these funds put client assets at risk by obscuring their whereabouts. Binance customers shouldn’t “need a forensic accountant to find where their money is,” said John Reed Stark, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Internet Enforcement. Reuters found no evidence that Binance client monies were lost or taken. from Crypto giant Binance commingled customer funds and company revenue, former insiders say
posted by chavenet at 2:39 PM PST - 42 comments

The Athletic ranks the 100 best players in the modern NHL [archive.org]The list is called the NHL 99, though, because -- as they write, "So, spoiler alert, Wayne Gretzky is No. 1 on our list. One could argue Gretzky actually belongs in the Hall of Fame in two categories – as a player and as a builder. Arguably, no single individual did more to grow the NHL game, on and off the ice, than Gretzky." [more inside]
posted by ChrisR at 1:46 PM PST - 33 comments

Naomi Kritzer has a new story out. An app that tells you what to do? Turns creepy, then beneficial/friendly, takes turns that fit with our era. Somewhat reminiscent of Cat Pictures Please. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:38 AM PST - 21 comments

Perhaps you only know Bridget Everett from her HBO series Somebody Somewhere, a quiet meditative piece about small town life. Maybe this is the Bridget you want to have in your head always. If that's the case, be sure NOT to watch her 2015 cabaret special Bridget Everett: Gynecological Wonder [47m], a completely raunchy musical journey that you won't want to share with your parents. Songs about fellatio and on-stage costume changes and so much more!
posted by hippybear at 11:16 AM PST - 13 comments

Seventy years ago today, the USA conducted its only nuclear artillery test. A contemporary propaganda video (ten minutes), which is much more about the cannon than about the Grable warhead. [more inside]
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:35 AM PST - 16 comments

The violence of his era can be found in his serene masterpieces — if you know where to look. (NYT, ungated) [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 8:03 AM PST - 21 comments

The ambient joy of America’s nightly game show is slowly giving way to a Marvel-brained empire. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:52 AM PST - 45 comments

The 100 Hardest Video-Game Levels of All Time [Vulture] “There are so many different ways to create a hard level. This list contains resource-draining RPG grinds, uncompromising tactical grids, mind-melting adventure-game puzzles, and the sort of quicksilver, arcade-y gauntlets that require a speedrunner’s acumen. *(It does not contain, we want to note, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which came out too recently for us to confidently make a determination about whether any of its challenges warrant a spot. We reserve the right to add it at a later date.)” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:41 AM PST - 74 comments

If you’re not using ChatGPT for your writing, you’re probably making a mistake. About 10 minutes into my interview with Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school who has become a prominent evangelist for AI tools, it became clear that he was going to use Bing to interview me. He started by asking the Microsoft search engine, newly infused with a generative AI model from OpenAI, “Can you look at the work of Dylan Matthews of Vox and tell me some common themes, as well as any strengths or weaknesses.” In a couple seconds, Bing had an answer: “Dylan Matthews is one of the senior correspondents at Vox. He covers topics such as effective altruism, philanthropy, global health, and social justice.” (So far, so good.) [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 10:39 PM PST - 163 comments

A ship has become stuck in Egypt's Suez Canal, one of the world's busiest shipping routes.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:24 PM PST - 52 comments

Susan Sarandon is Helene Shaw is Stella Kowalski. Christopher Walken is Harry Nash is Cyrano, and Stanley Kowalski, and Romeo. The Colonel from Boogie Nights is George the Director. The actual director is Jonathan Demme. The program is a 1982 American Playhouse adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's short story, Who Am I This Time?
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:19 PM PST - 12 comments

From David Friedman’s Ironic Sans newsletter, a small collection of URLs you can use to stop getting (a bunch of) junk mail (in the US).
posted by Going To Maine at 4:20 PM PST - 29 comments

The closest and brightest supernova in a decade is ON. In the outer reaches of the Pinwheel Galaxy (Messier 101), 21-million light-years from here (practically next door), a type II supernova has been spotted within the past week. It's viewable here on Earth via backyard-strength telescopes; but, tomorrow (Thursday, May 25, 2023) at 6PM EST (22:00 UTC), virtualtelescope.eu will be zooming in on the classic galaxy via their youtube livestream channel, inviting you to peek into the distant past at this growing dot that's unimaginably large, bright, and far away.
posted by not_on_display at 4:15 PM PST - 34 comments

It’s hard to say goodbye. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that we often get a tremendous hour of television. In honor of ‘Succession’ and ‘Barry’ ending this week, we’re ranking the best series wrap-ups since 2000: The 40 Best TV Finales of the 21st Century, Ranked [The Ringer, as part of "Finale Week"]
posted by chavenet at 2:34 PM PST - 61 comments

The Queen of Rock dies in Switzerland at 83 Another 60's icon passes on. Tina Turner died at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, at 83. Her publicist Bernard Doherty announced the death in a statement but did not provide the cause, although she had suffered a stroke in recent years, according to the NY Times obituary.
posted by lometogo at 12:18 PM PST - 156 comments

Daredevil is Present and the Police Arrive Later - David Brothers dissects Daredevil #304 and takes a look at superheroes, race and policing.
posted by Artw at 11:23 AM PST - 24 comments

The AV Club looks back at 11 years of interconnected DC superhero storytelling: With the series finale of The Flash on May 24, The CW’s ambitious and groundbreaking superhero saga known as The Arrowverse (first unofficially, then semi-officially) comes to an end. If not for the fact that it was focused on television, the Arrowverse would be regarded as one of the only cinematic universes beyond the MCU to actually work—and if you’re basing it on pure hours of content, the Arrowverse is completely unmatched. [more inside]
posted by sardonyx at 11:14 AM PST - 35 comments

Airplane Facts with Max is a social media account starring an aircraft mechanic who gives behind the scenes looks at maintaining aircraft, among several other delightfully nerdy subjects. (TikTok, Instagram)
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:28 AM PST - 5 comments

They've been around for 55 years, had at least 24 members, and surprise! Yes has a new album out, Mirror To The Sky [Discogs]. And... it's unexpectedly good? It isn't the Yes of yesteryear... But it is undeniably from the Yes DNA from many eras, and continues a legacy of musical innovation and Carl Sagan inspired lyrics, forward possibly for years more. CD 1/Vinyl Side 1: Cut From The Stars [5m27s], All Connected [9m], Luminosity [9m] (Please see below the fold for two track recommendations for those wanting a sample) Review from Ultimate Classic Rock [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:26 AM PST - 31 comments

7 news outlets reimagining political journalism in smart ways (WaPo opinion page gift link) [more inside]
posted by box at 7:51 AM PST - 18 comments

Over the weekend a small controversy erupted in board game circles when rumours began circulating that Quackalope, one of the scene’s more popular YouTube review channels, had supposedly ‘blackmailed’ the publisher of a game they had been covering over a series of videos.
posted by Etrigan at 6:25 AM PST - 27 comments

A handy step-by-step guide.
posted by clawsoon at 5:32 AM PST - 93 comments

What watching my daughter play ‘The Legend of Zelda’ taught me by Tom Bissell [The Washington Post] Bissell contemplates how Tears of the Kingdom offers the sort of unstructured play his daughter might not be able to get elsewhere in Hollywood.

“When we found the abandoned mine carts, the question for my daughter became how many she could glue together and still get them moving along the rusted tracks. Between all the Ultrahand R&D, my daughter was also chopping down trees and fusing together the resultant logs to make lean-to structures, just in case she came back to an area later and it was raining and she wanted to “cook something.” (God help us all, you can cook in “Tears of the Kingdom,” too.) At one point, sensing my impatience, my daughter invoked the Wright brothers as her mathematical proof for the necessity of experimentation. What about all the monsters, I asked, the beasts and creatures she was duty-bound as Link to strike down with sword and bow? “Meh,” she said, shrugging. “Pass.””

posted by Fizz at 5:02 AM PST - 51 comments

Earth Will Receive an 'Alien' Transmission From Mars This Week Called A Sign in Space, the scientific art experiment invites the public to help decode the signal, which is meant to emulate a message from extraterrestrials. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:04 PM PST - 25 comments

Who are you, Mel Kaye? [via mefi projects] 40 years (and two days) ago, The Story of Mel was posted to Usenet. This tale of a software engineer, his blackjack program, and the ingenious hack hidden inside it has enshrined "Mel" in the pantheon of Real Programmers. But did Mel really exist? Who was he? [more inside]
posted by mpark at 2:16 PM PST - 49 comments

While a number of audiobooks are narrated by celebrities or by their own authors, the vast majority are read by unknown and unacknowledged literary workers, at once subordinated to the text and responsible for it, unseen but audible. Narrators represent an entirely new role in the literary field, variously performing the functions of author, text, and reader. Like the author, the narrator is the person from whom the text emanates. Given that the material of the audiobook is not the printed page but a recording of a voice, narrators likewise serve as the embodiment of the text itself. And yet, they are also that text’s reader—in many cases, one of its very first readers. from The Work of the Audiobook [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:14 PM PST - 42 comments

Meet The Gathering of Thought Criminals - a gathering of various people who gather to "have discussions they feel they can’t have anywhere else." (SLNew Yorker)
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:55 AM PST - 109 comments

How record producers get paid.
posted by bigbigdog at 9:57 AM PST - 6 comments

My fellow Americans, it's Mailbox Improvement Week, so check to see if your box needs improvements and if you're feeling creative, here's some inspiration!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:54 AM PST - 33 comments

Even if you don't know the name Daniel Lanois, you know his work. He produced The Joshua Tree, So, and Time Out Of Mind, to name just a tiny few from his broad ranging career. If you like hearing all manner of music-making tidbits from one of the best, Rick Beato sat down with Daniel for a three-hour conversation. Everything is discussed from music personalities to recording techniques and equipment to songwriting to simply the joy of finding the vibe. It's an astonishing interview that even at its length feels like it is too short.
posted by hippybear at 8:18 AM PST - 31 comments

How an algorithm solves Wordle Through a modeling method known as Exact Dynamic Programming, the researchers devised an algorithm that solves the game in the optimal manner without fail. In Wordle, players have six tries to guess a five-letter word. After a word is entered, colored tiles reveal whether the letters are in the word and if they are in the correct spot. The model solves the game in just two guesses 4% of the time and in three guesses 57% of the time. It only needs a fifth guess 3% of the time, and it never relies on that sixth and final round. [more inside]
posted by andrewmc at 7:41 AM PST - 63 comments

I’m afraid I have some bad news. After ten years of publishing, The Nib is going to close down this summer. The new issue of our magazine, the Future issue, will be our last. We will continue to publish online every weekday through August and then shut down.
posted by Etrigan at 6:15 AM PST - 31 comments

Well , looks like Tucker Carlson is not running for president (The Hill). The Draft Tucker PAC, launched four days ago, has shut down after a cease-and-desist from Carlson (The Hill). Chairman Chris Ekstrom (Twitter, content warnings) says the PAC will refund the $212 it's raised or donate it to charity.
posted by box at 5:38 AM PST - 23 comments

A Brief history of Concept Albums from Song Cycles to the Modern Day What constituents a concept album? How old is the 'concept' of a Concept Album? Does it differ from a Rock Opera? Are Concept albums still even a thing now that ephemeral streaming services are so popular? What's your favourite Concept Album? [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 5:25 AM PST - 38 comments

Where to Start with Buffy Sainte Marie (And Why You Should) by Andrea Warner "Buffy Sainte-Marie is a living legend and a musical genius. But she’s also “Buffy who?” to a lot of people who have never heard of her before." [more inside]
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 9:36 PM PST - 18 comments

There is something moving about Negovan’s quest to honour McDowell’s performance. There’s not much the recut can do about the script and iffy camerawork, which are all part of the charm. But Negovan has unearthed a much clearer sense of a character arc, from Caligula as wary young man genuflecting to the mad emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, on wonderful form), to a joyful freshly minted tyrant, through to the increasing cruelty and disintegration of his reason as he is driven mad by power. from ‘An irresistible mix of art and genitals’: Caligula finally comes to Cannes [Grauniad] [CW: not really safe for work] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:14 PM PST - 103 comments

In honor of the 100th birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body, the NY Times offers an overview. (Link is to archive.org, NY Times direct link is here.
posted by PussKillian at 11:33 AM PST - 18 comments

Using multiple lines of evidence, the data suggest intermittent but repeated presence of multiple individual birds with field marks and behaviors consistent with those of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. Data indicate repeated reuse of foraging sites and core habitat. Our findings, and the inferences drawn from them, suggest that not all is lost for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and that it is clearly premature for the species to be declared extinct. [more inside]
posted by jquinby at 10:30 AM PST - 25 comments

The chaos of Steve Martin's stand-up comedy in the 70s is legendary, and it's on wonderful display in Steve Martin - Live At The Troubadour 1976 [55m]. Physical, absurdist humor with some banjo tossed in. Filmed for HBO. Content Note: this is from nearly 50 years ago, and contains some objectifying but not completely awful language about women. There is a segment from 36m20s to 37m35s involving him "performing" a Native American song, but it is short and easy to skip.
posted by hippybear at 8:01 AM PST - 40 comments

Just like Joel It's your Monday free thread. Have an excellent week! And more Joel
posted by Gorgik at 6:22 AM PST - 91 comments

One Year As One Of The Top Competitive Duolingo Players On Earth ... And if you are thinking: "competitive Duolingo?" Yes, competitive Duolingo. They added leagues at some point.
posted by Etrigan at 6:10 AM PST - 58 comments

"On March 3, a largely unknown creator named Steve ‘Veddge’ Nelson shared an unassuming-sounding mod on the Doomworld forums. He claims this is an enhanced version of a 15-year-old "my own house but full of demons" map file (who hasn’t tried to make one of those?) left behind by a recently deceased friend. Tragic, but curious." [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 6:00 PM PST - 30 comments

"A road diverges in the yellow flats along the outer rim of Joshua Tree National Park. The two lanes in the middle of the desert peel off Interstate 10 ..." "A few foremen live on the premises full time to keep watch over Eagle Mountain. Verdant palm trees poke out from the street they live on, while the rest of town remains preserved by dust. One night in the stillness, a foreman heard trespassers in the dark. The sound of a shotgun blast into the sky scared them off."
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 4:51 PM PST - 33 comments

Autofiction has often been derided as both overly concerned with a writer’s individual experience—“navel-gazing”—and inconsiderate to those other than the writer whose lives it depicts. But these criticisms betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what draws writers and readers alike to autofiction. The best—most redemptive—autofiction since Proust included more than 400 characters in his rhizomatic lifework has concerned itself with the ways in which individual lives and identities are connected to the lives and identities of others, and sought to represent this interconnectedness to readers who also sense the terror of being “walled-up” inside their own consciousness. from The Autofiction Writer and the Torturer by Marcus Hijkoop
posted by chavenet at 12:39 PM PST - 20 comments

Fastest-rising baby names in the US, 2012-2022 (chart from Axios, data from SSA) Biggest gain: Everleigh. Biggest drop: Alexa
posted by box at 9:39 AM PST - 127 comments

There is a kind of person who finds the idea of seeking out “the best” incredibly enticing, on an almost spiritual level. The kind of person who genuinely enjoys perusing articles like “the nine best hair dryers of 2023,” who is overcome with clammy dread at the idea of drinking in a bar with only a four-star rating on Google, who, in order to plan a weekend getaway, requires a prolonged and extensive operation that involves several spreadsheets. You know the type. Maybe you even are the type. [single link, NYT: possibly paywalled]
posted by niicholas at 8:27 AM PST - 86 comments

Lotfi Lamaali is a longboard dancer. But what is longboard dancing? A sort of hybrid of freestyle trick skateboarding and dance, on bigger, looser, more flexible longboards. Just as much focus on using smooth dance steps and twirls to move around the board as on moving the board itsel. The end result when done well is mindblowing. [SLYT]
posted by Dysk at 9:44 PM PST - 14 comments

In 1982, the first version of The Us Festival [Wikipedia] happened, attracting a then-ridiculous-sounding 400,000 people in attendance across a three-day weekend. One of the acts on the first day, New Wave Day, was The B-52s. Thanks to the miraculous infusion of cash and technology from Steve Wozniak, who organized the festival we have The B-52s At The Us Festival [1h], the entire set, with pretty good video quality and great sound!
posted by hippybear at 8:10 PM PST - 38 comments

Generate a secure password from the lyrics of America’s greatest singer-songwriter
posted by Going To Maine at 5:27 PM PST - 14 comments

The celebrated author of Money and London Fields, whose works defined the 80s and 90s literary scene, died of oesophageal cancer on Friday at his home in Florida.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:06 PM PST - 55 comments

Some of that hate has to do with aesthetics—either you’re down with DMB’s amalgamation of soul-stirring Joshua Tree anthem rock and smooth jazz and bluegrass-fiddle hoedown and hacky-sack funk or you aren’t ... Most of the time, though, if someone tells you they don’t like Dave Matthews, they’re really voicing a deep tribal aversion to the type of person they picture when they picture a Dave Matthews fan—spiritually incurious trustafarians, pumpkin-spice basics, fleece-vest IPA bros, or whichever straw-man stereotype offends their imagination most. from The Dave Matthews Guide to Living and Dying [GQ; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 11:29 AM PST - 119 comments

Jim Brown, all-time NFL great and social activist, dead at 87 "Jim Brown was virtually unstoppable in every arena... Whether on the field, as a Hollywood film hero or civil rights advocate, Brown was a force."
posted by kathrynm at 10:18 AM PST - 27 comments

Jourdon Anderson, a formerly enslaved person, responds to a request from his former master to return to work for him.
posted by adept256 at 9:04 AM PST - 17 comments

The world's most famous shipwreck has been revealed as never seen before. [BBC] The first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, which lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic, has been created using deep-sea mapping. It provides a unique 3D view of the entire ship, enabling it to be seen as if the water has been drained away. The hope is that this will shed new light on exactly what happened to the liner, which sank in 1912. The visualization was pieced together from a staggering 700,000 images collected by remote controlled submersibles. Over the course of 200 hours, a crew of engineers directed the robotic explorers to scan the length and breadth of the colossal ship as it rested at a crushing depth 3,800m below the ocean surface. Scan images and footage are from @AtlanticProds and Magellan.
posted by Fizz at 8:21 AM PST - 18 comments

BBC: “...where local people have asked it to, it tries to launch an After School Satan Club, focused on community service, science, crafts and critical thinking. Opponents say it's frightening children, but TST says its content is demon-free. They have a kids' song - My Pal Satan - with a bopping animated goat, and the lines: 'Satan's not an evil guy, he wants you to learn and question why. He wants you to have fun and be yourself - and by the way there is no hell.'” Courthouse News: “Good-natured Satanists defy expectations in Boston.” Axois: “These aren't your grandfather's satanists.” WBUR: “The group says it chose Boston because of an ongoing lawsuit against the city.” Reuters photoset.
posted by Wordshore at 3:31 AM PST - 31 comments

Today, "drop bears" are just an urban myth made up by Australians to tease overseas tourists. But 15 million years ago, there really were carnivorous tree climbing koala-like marsupials that weighed up to 70 kilograms (154 pounds).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:44 AM PST - 21 comments

Study Offers New Twist in How the First Humans Evolved [ungated] - "By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent. The findings were published on Wednesday in Nature." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 14 comments

The 2020 documentary The Ventures: Stars On Guitars [1h30m] tells the story of the most famous instrumental rock and roll band in the world. Having released hundreds of albums across over six decades, this garage band from Tacoma became a global influence on rock and guitar playing whose influence goes beyond measure. If you think you aren't interested in or have no connection to this, you're probably mistaken.
posted by hippybear at 8:03 PM PST - 6 comments

"Superstar" Billy Graham, a one-time WWWF Champion and the man who essentially invented the professional wrestler of the 1980s a decade earlier, has passed away at the age of 79. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:23 PM PST - 9 comments

Orcas have attacked and sunk a third boat off the Iberian coast of Europe, and experts now believe the behavior is being copied by the rest of the population. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 4:44 PM PST - 64 comments

School bus gets stuck
posted by pipeski at 3:32 PM PST - 27 comments

Xtra Magazine profile of electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos by Kristen S. Hé [more inside]
posted by mpark at 2:45 PM PST - 20 comments

The always wonderful Simone Giertz accidentally panders directly to me personally by choosing to make a robot out of stained glass.
posted by cortex at 11:35 AM PST - 33 comments

See your identity pieced together from stolen data [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:25 AM PST - 45 comments

Good news in big cat news. First cheetah cubs born in India since extinction 70 years ago. Tigers that scored higher on words such as confident, competitive, and ambitious fell under what the researchers labeled as the “majesty” mindset. With her third litter (three cubs!), Florence the lioness has now given birth to approximately one third of Senegal’s Niokolo Koba National Park 's lion population. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:43 AM PST - 4 comments

In a landmark 7-2 decision that many artists forewarned could have significant implications for fair use doctrine, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Andy Warhol Foundation failed to honor photographer Lynn Goldsmith's copyright when Warhol, in the 1980s, used her portrait of Prince to create a work of art. Justice Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion with Justice Kagan penning a fiery dissent in which she alleged Sotomayor had, "adopted a 'posture of indifference' and left 'in shambles' part of a fair-use test used in copyright cases." Some point to the ruling's possible consequences for generative AI artwork while art museums have expressed concerns of their own. [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 10:26 AM PST - 26 comments

Mortal Kombat 1 [Official Announcement Trailer][YouTube] [Content Warning: extreme gore, violence, blood, etc.] “The next Mortal Kombat game — titled Mortal Kombat 1, an entry that will bring the series into the past — is (officially) coming this year. Warner Bros. Games and longtime series developer NetherRealm Studios announced the next Mortal Kombat game on Thursday with a reveal trailer, confirming that the fighting game will be released on Sept. 19 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The first trailer for Mortal Kombat 1 confirms the return of some familiar faces: Shang Tsung, Liu Kang, Raiden, Scorpion, Kitana, Mileena, and Sub-Zero. But they look quite different from the kombatants that players may know for the past 30 years, as Mortal Kombat 1 is set deep in MK’s history.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 7:22 AM PST - 48 comments

"The melding of your thoughts with Twitter scrolling causes you to imagine a flow of Tweets overlayed over physical reality. You will read an opinion in 280 characters or less written by someone you do not know and you will compute this as something that someone out there believes. As you later walk through your grocery store buying bread, you’ll imagine the strangers you see are directly reflective of the Twitter threads you’ve been reading. Although one of these worlds is human, and one of them is a fragmented for-profit manipulation, we melt them together as equally reflective of reality, and in doing so we adapt to both equally." Those aren't "Tweets", Those Are Your Thoughts
posted by simmering octagon at 7:06 AM PST - 27 comments

What do we have to show for a century of psychiatric research? In a review of recent books by Anne Harrington and Andrew Scull, the historian of medicine Marco Ramos follows the changing fashions in twentieth and twenty-first century psychiatry--from eugenics to brain dissection to lobotomies to psychoanalysis to DSM to Big Pharma to psychedelics--and offers an unsparing assessment of the field's ethical record, scientific discoveries, and public health achievements.
posted by sy at 4:34 AM PST - 25 comments

M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity [2018, 1h20m] is the story of world famous Dutch graphic artist M.C Escher (1898-1972). Equal parts history, psychology, and psychedelia, Robin Lutz’s entertaining, eye-opening portrait gives us the man through his own words and images: diary musings, excerpts from lectures, correspondence and more are voiced by British actor Stephen Fry, while Escher’s woodcuts, lithographs, and other print works appear in both original and playfully altered form. RogerEbert.com review from Matt Zoller Seitz. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:45 PM PST - 18 comments

"Governments from across the world made grand promises... at the biodiversity conference in Montreal to save nature by protecting 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. But back home many are presiding over the destruction of some of the most ancient and precious protected areas on Earth — sacred groves and places that have long been preserved by religious fervor and strict taboos that are often far more effective than game wardens or environmental statutes." [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 2:54 PM PST - 16 comments

It doesn’t take much theorizing to notice that this banal cosmopolitan approach to the world isn’t a form of rebellion or a noble counter to the prevailing capitalistic, nationalistic business as usual. It’s very much aligned with the dominant system. The expat who moves to Portugal because they’ve been priced out of their American housing market uses the same logic of a multinational corporation transferring their operations to Bangladesh. They’re both trying to get more bang for their buck. And neither tries to argue they owe something to their new locale. Their money should be enough. from Americans Abroad by Jessa Crispin
posted by chavenet at 11:14 AM PST - 101 comments

Cash-free payment systems link up across Southeast Asia 'Adoption of QR payments is one thing, but being able to pay across country borders is another. While a Chinese tourist might be able to use an Alipay QR code at an accepting merchant in Japan or the U.S., the Southeast Asian network is a direct agreement between central bank systems.' We're talking about embedded links that takes you to direct bank transfers from one person's bank account to another, not a third-party solution or clearinghouse. What is QR code payments? (Wiki)
posted by cendawanita at 10:19 AM PST - 18 comments

What did British Latin sound like?
Linguist Danny Bate attempts to reconstruct a little of how Latin was spoken in Roman Britain.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:40 AM PST - 16 comments

"One of the most terrifying things that ever happened to me is that Keith Moon decided he liked me." (slyt via boing boing) Joe Walsh on the stories that inspired the lyrics to Life's Been Good. [more inside]
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 8:57 AM PST - 11 comments

After getting picked up by Netflix after being a casualty of the Disney-Fox merger and the ill-fated Chapek regime, the Nimona movie now has a teaser trailer and a release date - June 30th.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:40 AM PST - 27 comments

The Mysterious Origins of New England Steak Tips [more inside]
posted by backseatpilot at 7:22 AM PST - 37 comments

Killers of the Flower Moon directed by Martin Scorsese [Official Teaser Trailer ] [YouTube] Based on David Grann’s broadly lauded best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon is set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror. Directed by Martin Scorsese and Screenplay by Eric Roth and Scorsese, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion.
posted by Fizz at 6:32 AM PST - 55 comments

I think the best most human thing in the world is strangers doing a silly thing together A short Tumblr post by calamitys-child lists a few examples, such as "very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler's questions like we were on Letterman".
posted by brainwane at 6:25 AM PST - 15 comments

Taco Bell has filed a petition to cancel two much smaller rivals' trademarks for "Taco Tuesday", a move that would let its 15,000 US locations use the phrase.
posted by Etrigan at 5:21 AM PST - 49 comments

Montana completely bans TikTok. This follows bans on government-, state-, and university-owned devices around the country. [more inside]
posted by box at 5:02 AM PST - 46 comments

Greenwich Village: Music that Defined A Generation [1h32m] is a 2012 documentary that looks at the part of the 60s folk and subsequent rock revolution that wasn't based in California. Guthrie, Seeger, Dylan, Baez.. and that's just the beginning. A really great look at a fascinating era of music that shaped what we all listen to now.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM PST - 8 comments

Technologists warn about the dangers of the so-called singularity. But can anything actually be done to prevent it? [New Yorker]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:54 PM PST - 176 comments

I’m on record as opposing the pitch timer, and I opposed it on aesthetic, even theological, grounds... I’ll just have to come right out with it. I was wrong.

posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:38 PM PST - 41 comments

English Historical Fiction Authors is a group blog that has been going since 2011, where researchers and novelists post about British history. There are posts about wool and war, Schools of Gardening for Ladies, beds and bugs, aspirin, theatrical censorship, magazines, tours of Ruthin and Snowdon, slipcoat cheese and posset, subversive fairy tales, and The Learned Pig. [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 4:14 PM PST - 3 comments

Lily Meyer's treatise on translation, human communication, and Jim Jarmusch's 'Ghost Dog'
posted by signsofrain at 12:50 PM PST - 27 comments

If the metatribe reflects anything about our wider cultural moment, it is our shared disillusionment with the broader liberal optimism the rationalists have come to embody. The promise proffered by so much of Silicon Valley — that we can hack our way to Enlightenment, transcending our humanity along the way — no longer seems plausible amid the broad ennui and general pessimism that has settled into our culture over the last decade. from Rational Magic by Tara Isabella Burton
posted by chavenet at 11:10 AM PST - 43 comments

Time mirrors: "Light can reflect off mirrors, and sounds off surfaces. However, scientists have long theorized about time reflections, where a signal passing through a time “interface” would act like it was traveling backward in time. Now a new study for the first time demonstrates time reflections with light waves. "
posted by dhruva at 10:11 AM PST - 27 comments

The Beyond Growth 2023 conference held at the European Parliament was organized by around 20 MEPs from 5 parties. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 7:04 AM PST - 13 comments

Isabella Rosner: I've come across A LOT of good 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names over the past 3.5 years, as I've worked on my thesis. Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found. (SLTwitter)
posted by verstegan at 5:57 AM PST - 94 comments

Early Computer Art in the 50s & 60s
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 1:52 AM PST - 19 comments

Truant the border collies zooms into first place in the 20" class and also becomes the champion at the 2023 WKC Masters Agility show. (SLYT)
posted by Harald74 at 9:42 PM PST - 38 comments

Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its problems can be fixed. Doom loop (noun) — A scenario in which one negative development causes another negative development, which then makes the first problem worse. A vicious cycle.: This is how San Francisco could die: [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 7:58 PM PST - 103 comments

Vice Media files for bankruptcy as ad business suffers:

Vice Media Group, popular for websites such as Vice and Motherboard, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday to engineer its sale to a group of lenders, capping years of financial difficulties and top-executive departures.

The bankruptcy filing is a fallout of a challenging period for many technology and media companies that have been cutting costs to survive a weak advertising market amid slowing economic growth.

Vice said the lender consortium that includes Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital will provide about $225 million in credit bid for almost all of its assets and also assume significant liabilities at closing.

posted by Pachylad at 7:38 PM PST - 24 comments

The Last Recording Artist, by Jaime Brooks, is a fantastic essay about the birth of radio, Hatsune Miku, Drake, the relationship between artists and commercial product, and—as Brooks themself puts it—"ghostwriters, virtual pop stars, and the world to come."
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:50 PM PST - 10 comments

Let 3’s decades-long expertise in creating challenging art makes ŠČ the hardest-working single letter in Eurovision history. Initially, Let 3 were satirising communist prudishness and conformity in the last years of Yugoslavia. Images of their early performances show themes which are Let 3 trademarks to this day: huge moustaches, military headwear, and frequent male nudity. Youtuber Eurovision Histories walks us through the meaning of the song Mama Šč! (read the comments for more insights!)
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:44 PM PST - 7 comments

“Removing the surroundings with black [backdrop] helps your brain to actually fill in the gaps and build this kind of 3D representation"
posted by folklore724 at 5:31 PM PST - 12 comments

Cinnamoroll is currently in the lead in the 38th annual Sanrio Character Ranking, and was the reigning champion for the past three years. Will Cinnamoroll hold onto this position, or will current second place-holder Pompompurin take the crown? Perhaps there will be a dark horse victory from Gudetama or Aggretsuko? Voting is open until May 26, 5PM (Japan Standard Time). [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 5:06 PM PST - 31 comments

Rotaries, traffic circles, roundabouts... Do you ever just want to rant about roundabouts? Well, you don't have to! Lewis Black, as a professional ranter, has been reading audience-written rants at the end of his shows for years! He is here for you, for all of us really, with The Rant Is Due, Best Of Roundabouts. [18m30s]
posted by hippybear at 3:11 PM PST - 70 comments

An Elderly Shaggy Talks About Mystery Inc Content warning: more moving than you might be expecting it to be. From the brilliant Michael Fry.
posted by tomcooke at 2:17 PM PST - 22 comments

Star Wars Characters as Baroque Portraits. [SLYT] [AI] What it says on the tin. 3 minutes long with optional music. Images generated by Midjourney..
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:16 PM PST - 14 comments

Although it’s estimated that 750 women—likely more—fought as soldiers in the United States Civil War, the United States Army once declared that not a single woman ever fought. We know little from the women-soldiers themselves; many, like the men, could not read or write. Scholars rely heavily on obituaries and letters to piece together the stories of how they lived. [more inside]
posted by J. Tiberius at 11:44 AM PST - 19 comments

50 years after release, Disney’s Robin Hood is still a life-changing furry phenomenon [Polygon] “Part of the unique qualities that made Robin Hood a furry media mainstay comes down to the fact that the title character — a dashing, jovial hero who robs from the rich and gives to the poor — is a fox. [...] From the outside, the film is a laid-back adventure known as much for reusing visuals from earlier Disney movies as for its powerful connection to unlocking personal identities in one subset of fandom. For those of us who aren’t part of the furry community, it may be surprising to realize just how much of an impact Robin Hood has had.”
posted by Fizz at 11:20 AM PST - 53 comments

The MTV Basement Tapes (YT playlist, promo, full episodes (Frank Zappa, Rick Nielsen)) A showcase of videos by (generally) unknown and (usually) unsigned artists and groups, The MTV Basement Tapes (not to be confused with these Basement Tapes) ran from 1983-86.
posted by box at 10:46 AM PST - 17 comments

A lawsuit could change how the Forest Service fights fires.
posted by Etrigan at 9:21 AM PST - 17 comments

The plot of Mr. President is deceptively simple, with most of the action taking place over a single week. When a half-crazed beggar accidentally kills a particularly brutal colonel in a fit of rage, the president decides to pin the blame on a general and his lawyer, whose political loyalty he has begun to doubt. This sets in motion a series of interlinked schemes and machinations that result in the imprisonment, torture, death, bondage, or general ruination of assorted government higher-ups, who suspect what is coming, and ordinary citizens, who do not. from The Inventor of Magical Realism by Larry Rohter [NYRB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 9:12 AM PST - 5 comments

A Minnesota man invented a motorcycle that runs on beer. It can run on other liquids as well, but as the inventor says, why not beer? Just load up the keg... (YT link)
posted by PussKillian at 7:00 AM PST - 26 comments

The origin of the iconic Whaleback ship design on the Great Lakes and it’s demise. The whaleback ship and barge design was iconic to the Great Lakes in the Gilded Age and for strange reasons, Puget Sound in Washington state.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:33 AM PST - 6 comments

YouTube videos can be really well produced, with a lot of shots and custom video footage and various tricks and things to make the entire product more thrilling to view. But what exactly does making one of these things actually entail? Well, YouTuber Caddicarus created The Exhausting World of Making a Caddicarus Video [1h2m] in which he uses all these great techniques to make a video about creating all these great techniques. I've spent enough time watching videos and wondering "could I do that?" that this was a really great all-in-one roll-up of what this one creator does for his videos.
posted by hippybear at 2:50 PM PST - 11 comments

Will Russia carry through on its threats against Finland for joining NATO? Teri Schultz reports how Helsinki is bolstering the border in case Moscow's war plans veer west. In Imatra, the city nearest to where the fence project is kicking off, Mayor Matias Hilden says no one is enthusiastic about the project, but they're resigned to it. "It's a little bit sad that we need it," he told DW in an interview in Imatra City Hall.
posted by folklore724 at 12:41 PM PST - 25 comments

Stay hydrated a little differently, courtesy of watertok.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:51 AM PST - 67 comments

It’s hard to know why he didn’t flee earlier. He had told a colleague that he was scared of flying over oceans. But another fear may have been stronger: Running would destroy the fantasy that had turned him from local screwup into local hotshot. Just three days before the raids, he was wearing black sequins and partying with Pitbull at the DC Solar holiday party, as if being Jeff “Mother Fuckin’ ” Carpoff for one more night trumped the grubby unknowns of a lifetime on the run. from The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 7:45 AM PST - 35 comments

A Greenlandic MP has refused to speak Danish during a debate in the Danish parliament in Copenhagen and instead spoke in her native Inuit language, frustrating uncomprehending lawmakers and highlighting strained relations between Denmark and Greenland.
posted by Etrigan at 7:37 AM PST - 32 comments

Happy freethread Monday! It's gonna be sunny here in Seattle, which means more time on the bike saddle for me. I hope you all have a great week!
posted by Gorgik at 6:34 AM PST - 77 comments

A speech by and an interview with Representative Rashida Tlaib, remembering the Nakba/The Palestinian Catastrophe. (mp3; Angela Davis's message begins at 14:25, Tlaib's speech starts at 22:22 and interview at 33:33)
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM PST - 11 comments

Platypuses return to Sydney's Royal National Park after they disappeared from the park's waterways about 50 years ago. The iconic Australian animal is believed to have disappeared from the national park after a major chemical spill on the Princes Highway in the 1970s, but numbers may already have been in decline. A joint project by the University of New South Wales, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and the World Wildlife Fund has reintroduced five females to the Hacking River, with a group of males to follow next week.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:22 PM PST - 13 comments

“We are not sorry that we are carers. But we are very tired of being poor carers.” Anti-racist advocate for women's rights Selma James and others launched the Wages for Housework campaign over 50 years ago, in 1972. Online archives of Wages for Housework at Global Womens Strike. A "militant mama" who felt pushed out of political organizing on discovering James' work. Title taken from this 1977 issue of Safire, the inaugural newsletter of the US-based Black Women for Wages for Housework (founded in 1976). [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:01 PM PST - 5 comments

In the Washington Post, End of a love affair: AM radio is being removed from many cars. (archive link.) This is new cars; they aren't actually coming to take your old one.) Conservative outrage with BMW, VW, & Ford's announcement; people bemoan the loss of access to local radio but nobody's recalling how Clear Channel stole that, years ago. [more inside]
posted by Rash at 4:11 PM PST - 120 comments

The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story. Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee (editor and podcast host of the ruminative Emergence Magazine) and Adam Loften created the Emmy nominated video Earthrise in 2018.

I wondered what role this image could offer us 50 years later as we face intense political, social and ecological upheaval. Could it become a symbol of remembrance that unites us?

[more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:10 AM PST - 10 comments

In How To Find Things Online, v buckenham looks at the web as an unwilling data source for Large Language Models (among other omnivorous machine learning projects), and how the changing incentives for both people making content and corporations hosting/controlling that content may undercut the assumption that useful information will continue to find its way into those hungry artificial hippos. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 9:09 AM PST - 31 comments

But how does the human brain know where to leave them and when it’s worth recording in painstaking detail? How does it know what to forget? The fact is, as far as your brain is concerned, almost nothing is worth keeping. The first thing we do with most of the information we take in about the world is to forget it. from Faulty Memory Is a Feature, Not a Bug [Nautilus; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 7:38 AM PST - 22 comments

A new Engineer's Guide to Cats, on the subject of Cat Future Technology, with bonus reenactment of Star Wars with cats. A lot of other feline-focused film frivolity can be found on klusmanp's Youtube Page. (Engineer's Guide to Cats previously, again, also.)
posted by JHarris at 6:51 AM PST - 5 comments

Some yet-to-be-revealed celebrity is releasing a book in July that the publisher is promising will be a blockbuster. But Variety can report for certain that this mystery author is not, as rumored, Taylor Swift.
posted by Etrigan at 9:02 PM PST - 15 comments

PetaPixel makes a pretty strong case that yes, a photograph can change the world. In less time than it's going to take me to write this sentence I have thought of at least ten remarkaly powerful images. I think that the earth shot from space, that magical image of this magnificent, beautiful blue ball -- we're so lucky. Stop, for just a second, humor me here, look at our beautiful home -- we're so lucky. But I know there are ugly things also, that someone caught on film -- cough if up, move us, either to tears or to joy, or, best, tears *of* joy. Can a photograph change the world? (Show your work.)
posted by dancestoblue at 8:51 PM PST - 12 comments

New demon catshark species discovered off coast of Western Australia. The senior curator of the CSIRO's Australian National Fish Collection, Will White, said the creature's distinctive white iris was a rare feature for deepwater sharks. "Normally, they're always very dark — either dark green or just black eyes," he said. "It has been found only in one other deepwater shark species — a member of a closely related species from New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea." Dr White said the characteristic could help to establish links between similar species. The shark, which lives hundreds of metres below the ocean's surface, is seldom seen.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:49 PM PST - 12 comments

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom changes the conversation By Mike Mahardy [Polygon] “If, as with music, movies, TV, or books, we can look at Tears of the Kingdom as a dialogue between creator and audience, then Nintendo has effectively changed the conversation. Historically, when Zelda players asked Nintendo, “Can I do this?” the answer was usually “no” or “not yet.” Breath of the Wild often answered in the affirmative, but Tears of the Kingdom takes that response one step further: When pressed as to whether something is possible in this enormous, absurd, mysterious world, Nintendo doesn’t just try to say “yes.” It strains to say “yes, but also...””
posted by Fizz at 7:15 PM PST - 192 comments

This is handy if you live in New York City, and a useful example for folks in other areas with lots of different zones, districts, etc.: "The NYC Boundaries Map is a tool for viewing and querying overlapping administrative boundaries in NYC." Give it an address and (example) it'll tell you which districts it's in for 12+ different slices, e.g., police precinct, school district, Community District (which Community Board covers it), legislative districts for city and state representatives, ZIP codes, etc. Source code and a longer prose explanation available on GitHub.
posted by brainwane at 6:24 PM PST - 4 comments

Chapter 1: The Myth of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic (in full). And a delightful interview with Virginia Sole-Smith on her new book Fat Talk. Chapter 5 excerpt (on the diet culture of doctors) in TIME, and Chapter 9 excerpt (on fathers) in The Atlantic.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:01 PM PST - 63 comments

The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe by Dan O’Sullivan is the story of Ken Eto, who grew up the son of a fanatical Christian convert in California, was sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and after getting involved in illegal gambling, rose through the ranks of the Chicago mob. And then his story really started.
posted by Kattullus at 1:52 PM PST - 14 comments

Nataki Garrett to Leave Oregon Shakes Amid Emergency Fund Drive Like many theaters, the legendary Oregon Shakespeare Festival has suffered due to the pandemic, and the periodic fires going on in the region. But even with that, they are out of money and the local population has been resistant to having an African-American director, Nataki Garrett. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:10 AM PST - 122 comments

Enlinko and Unrelated Words are solo games of semantic connections between random words. The TikTok #gotitchallenge, demoed on YouTube by Hank & John Green, is a similar 2-player game. "What is My Thought Like?" was an eloquent multiplayer game of connections between random words, once common (1786, 1789, 1790, 1806, 1831, 1849, 1855, 1858, 1863, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1904, 1913, 1917, 1922), mentioned in 1750, and essentially the same as "Le Jeu de la pensée" in 1701. But Semantle and Pimantle (previously) are semantic connection games too, according to a FAQ resembling "French Toast" and the 20 Questions variant "Plenty Questions" (co-invented by MeFi's own moonmilk and re-invented on TikTok as "Guess the Word"). 20 Questions appears in English in 1796 and 1799, maybe inspired by "Les Douze Questions" (1788).
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:02 AM PST - 9 comments

At category 4 or 5, Cyclone Mocha is set to strike an area of land filled with refugee camps on the Myanmar coast of the Bay of Bengal. The camps are near the ocean and low in elevation. The last similar storm in strength and location (Nargis, 2008) killed over 100,000. In contrast to some sorts of natural disasters, hurricanes come with warning. The Red Crescent relief fund.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:28 AM PST - 3 comments

Pask Makes A Mid-Century Table: a chill and genial Aussie woodworker narrates his way start to finish through a very pretty one-off dining table project that I absolutely did not start watching just because of the tiling table top pattern. Includes a brief cameo by a placid, sleepy surprise python, because Australia.
posted by cortex at 8:27 AM PST - 24 comments

The strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine, hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe ... Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and time. from The Ether Dreams of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Mike Jay
posted by chavenet at 7:36 AM PST - 3 comments

Energy Saving Road Lighting in Norway. When traffic approaches, Norway’s auto-dimming roads get brighter. New LED lights dim to 20 percent when no cars are in the area. When a car drives by, the lights turn to 100 per cent. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:16 PM PST - 24 comments

[NYT gift link] “In the United States, [the name] Kyle has never been exceedingly popular… Nevertheless, as some Kyles will tell you, Kyle is not just a name. It’s a lifestyle.” KyleFair comes to Kyle, Texas next weekend. [more inside]
posted by bendy at 5:04 PM PST - 35 comments

Changes at the CW television network mean original progamming is being scrapped. Instead, the network is turning to importing content from Canada, Australia and the U.K., as well as more reality TV.
posted by sardonyx at 2:26 PM PST - 61 comments

Growing up, I thought being named after Connie Chung made me unique... (SLNYT)
posted by praemunire at 10:08 AM PST - 30 comments

If you're in the mood to feel old, try this story about Pokémon cards appearing on Antiques Roadshow.
posted by Etrigan at 8:15 AM PST - 28 comments

Culturally, an ambivalent relationship with the ambivalent slime persists. On the one hand, we view it as abject and rank—a sign of decay, death, rot, the feminine; indeed, Sartre famously despised it—but on the other, we find it exciting and amusing. from Creatures That Don’t Conform by Lucy Jones [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:03 AM PST - 20 comments

The livestream of the moose migration in a particular part of Sweden is over for this year, although a 3-hour highlights program is available for viewing worldwide. But there is time to listen to the fourth annual live broadcast of birdsong on Sveriges Radio P1 channel (Swedish) TODAY. The broadcast from six different Swedish locations begins at 00:02 Swedish time on Saturday morning, May 13, and ends at 07:55 am. For those in the US, the broadcast begins today, Friday May 12, at 3:02 pm Pacific and 6:02 pm Eastern. This link will let you chose and listen to P1. Warning: There will be Swedish commentary for much of the program, but I hear that there will be birdsong only between 4 am to 5 am Swedish time (7pm Pacific/10 pm Eastern). Enjoy!
posted by Bella Donna at 2:54 AM PST - 12 comments

After promising in her Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame speech that she'd now have to make a rock and roll album.... Dolly Parton has come through, in ways only Dolly Parton could! Rockstar, coming out in November, has the most ridiculous cast of rock musicians you can imagine. But not only that! This sister isn't holding back because this rock album is THIRTY TRACKS LONG! Anyway, here's the lead-off single, World On Fire.
posted by hippybear at 7:42 PM PST - 89 comments

World Wildlife Fund tracks wildlife recovery from Black Summer bushfires with AI, machine learning. Wildlife experts are surprised to see animal populations recovering across eastern Australia following the devastating 2019–2020 Black Summer bushfires. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:34 PM PST - 3 comments

Street chess player explains the rules of chess to someone who might just have played before. [more inside]
posted by Sebmojo at 5:14 PM PST - 36 comments

CW: Police violence in beginning of video
münecat on a Metafilter perennial favorite topic: Sovereign Citizens: Pseudolaw & Disorder (yes this is nearly 2 hours of video essay goodness)
posted by Rhomboid at 12:38 PM PST - 56 comments

Moderator Mayhem is a game about moderating a fictional social network. It's hard! And that's the whole point. It was co-written by Techdirt and Engine as a way to help inform emergent conversations about content moderation.
posted by bwerdmuller at 9:59 AM PST - 24 comments

goblin.tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:29 AM PST - 59 comments

MLB’s plan to integrate Negro League numbers and statistical legacies with its own remains years from completion. More than two years after its announcement, MLB is still in the initial phase of the project: data acquisition. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 8:12 AM PST - 14 comments

Alasdair Gray, who passed away in 2019, was and is one of Scotland's most prolific authors. Yet in spite of his lifetime of work, none of his novels have ever been adapted into a feature film until now. The teaser for "Poor Things", directed by Yorgo Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, has dropped.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:01 AM PST - 20 comments

When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating. from Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
posted by chavenet at 6:49 AM PST - 26 comments

Beweging Is Leven is an eldercare initiative by Azmi Alubeid & Joël Kruisselbrink and it's the most charming, clever, and funny use of every-day objects and whatever is around. Seriously, the videos are just the best. By far the most content seems to be in Instagram so these are Instagram links I'm afraid! But so worth it. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 5:32 AM PST - 6 comments

Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist Didier Queloz explores the astronomy behind Hovoyerse (developer of Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd et al)'s new interstellar turn-based RPG Honkai Star Rail.
posted by creatrixtiara at 11:03 PM PST - 20 comments

V & E Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection Pictures from the 2016 grand opening. "We are actively acquiring instruments for the collection...contact Vince directly." [more inside]
posted by amtho at 8:36 PM PST - 12 comments

"I am love’s infidel; the Muslims’ creed is no use to me.
My veins are taut like wire; I’ve no need of the Hindus’ holy belt.
So go away from my sick bed you foolish physician:
For the lovesick, the only cure is a glimpse of the beloved.

"That is why fundamentalists, whether the Pakistani Taliban, the Saudi government or ISIS, have destroyed so many Sufi shrines and places of pilgrimage. The poetry sung at those places celebrates and advances an Islam that rejects political power, an Islam incompatible with the ambitions of religious fundamentalism." [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 8:15 PM PST - 9 comments

Son House -- Full Live Performance (November 15, 1969) [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 2:22 PM PST - 12 comments

When I first spoke with wadud over Zoom, she told me she started diversifying Allah’s pronouns after teaching an undergraduate religious studies course at Virginia Commonwealth University in the late 1990s. wadud asked her students to explore the lyrics of Joan Osborne’s song, “What if God Was One of Us.” While discussing pronouns for God, the men in the class told her that they could relate to God when God was referred to as “He,” but not when God was referred to as “She.” In that moment, wadud decided to start using female pronouns for Allah, who, according to traditional Muslim teachings, transcends gender, yet has historically been described with male pronouns.

Hafsa Lodi: The Muslim Women Using Feminine Pronouns for Allah.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:04 PM PST - 18 comments

Trigun Fan Account's Tweet Turns Queer Sci-Fi Novel Into An Amazon Bestseller. An enthusiastic tweet on Sunday from the account of one bigolas dickolas woIfwood now has the 2019 scifi novella This Is How You Lose The Time War sitting at #7 on Amazon's bestseller list. Co-author Amal El-Mohtar reacts and is interviewed. Co-author Max Gladstone says it feels like coming full circle. Bookriot: "There is something so delightful about this whole experience."
posted by mediareport at 1:34 PM PST - 87 comments

Crushed - Imagine Dragons released a music video filmed on the front lines of Ukraine. It follows Sasha, a young boy who endured months of shelling in his town.
posted by Captain_Science at 11:49 AM PST - 6 comments

According to her Instagram. Heather Brooke Hamilton aka Heather B. Armstrong aka dooce aka love of my life. July 19, 1975 - May 9, 2023. "It takes an ocean not to break." Hold your loved ones close and love everyone else.
posted by Bluecoat93 at 9:51 AM PST - 156 comments

Why Portuguese Food is Hiding Everywhere "Cultures and cuisines inspire each other all around the world, especially in the last few decades. But Portugal seems to be a special case. It's a not a cuisine that's in the spotlight a lot, yet a lot of very different countries around the world have a dish that has some sort of Portuguese influence. Today, I skim through some of the biggest examples of Portuguese food hiding in other cuisines and briefly look into the different historical reasons to how it happened."
posted by dhruva at 9:31 AM PST - 34 comments

“I AM A SURGEON!!” [Twitter] If you’ve been on social media over the past few days, you’ve probably seen an incandescent doctor (played by Freddie Highmore) yelling that he is a surgeon while an impassive Dr. Jackson Han (played by Daniel Dae Hyun Kim) watches from his desk. It’s a fascinating few seconds of television, especially when it’s been divorced of all context, then remixed, amplified, and snipped into smaller memes. Where did this even come from? The Good Doctor is a show originally adapted from the South Korean drama Good Doctor, and it aired in the United States on ABC for six seasons. [...] The clip of this scene, which has now circulated across numerous social media platforms, seems to have first been interpreted ironically on TikTok. Users initially posted it in full in late April; then it proliferated in a series of increasingly absurd edits, before making its way onto Twitter. People aren’t sharing this clip because they’re amazed by Highmore’s intense performance or the quality of the script.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 8:54 AM PST - 44 comments

Hundreds of endangered seahorses released into the wild off New South Wales coast. White's seahorse used to be a common sight in the waters off Sydney and Newcastle, but numbers have declined dramatically over the past 20 years. Scientists hope that might be starting to change.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:13 AM PST - 8 comments

A major Paramount division announced Tuesday it will shutter MTV News and slash its US workforce by 25%, bringing to an end the iconic music video network’s news division that once covered a range of issues from pop culture to politics and became a household name for Generation X and Millennial adolescents. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:55 AM PST - 58 comments

Nothing survives transcription, nothing doesn’t survive transcription: a talk (or the text thereof, and, yes yes, you're very clever, now shut up and read it) about the fundamental inability of transcription to capture that which it is transcribing, by Mefi's Own Allison Parrish.
posted by cortex at 7:44 AM PST - 7 comments

Congressman George Santos (R-NY), who repeatedly lied about his qualifications during the election, has been charged in Federal court in a 13-count indictment: seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. Santos was arrested Wednesday morning and will be arraigned Wednesday afternoon before U.S. Magistrate Judge Arlene R. Lindsay at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, New York. The charges stem from a grand jury investigation, and allege that Santos embezzled political contributions, fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits, and lied in his disclosures to the House of Representatives. [more inside]
posted by Gelatin at 7:42 AM PST - 90 comments

If there is one thing that I want you to take away from this article, it’s that venture capital firms and other heavily invested players in the crypto space should not be trusted to give us the facts on the industry they desperately need to promote. They will produce superficially objective-looking reports full of numbers and charts, but a critical reading shows just how blatantly they are manipulating numbers to arrive at the conclusions that fit their narratives. from Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto report: Narrative over numbers by Molly White
posted by chavenet at 4:49 AM PST - 28 comments

"Here Comes the Sun" is now the first song by the Fab Four to hit a billion streams on Spotify. It has been the most popular song by the band since their streaming debut on their platform since 2015.
posted by Pachylad at 12:24 AM PST - 38 comments

SLYT What it says on the tin.
posted by mikeand1 at 8:17 PM PST - 8 comments

Listen to the sound of Wikipedia's recent changes feed. (English, French, Sanskrit selected - you can choose your own filters). [more inside]
posted by mephisjo at 8:06 PM PST - 5 comments

Vacation Baby [1h2m] is Hari Kondabolu's most recent hour of stand up comedy, from earlier this year. It's about having a new baby during a pandemic. being Asian in America, and a lot of other stuff.
posted by hippybear at 7:38 PM PST - 7 comments

Remember this? The five year mission to seek out new lyrics and new dramatizations is finally over and KHAN!!! The Musical is now playing in New York!
posted by steveminutillo at 7:26 PM PST - 13 comments

Will it Tofu? is a short YouTube Playlist asking the hard-hitting question everyone needs answered. [more inside]
posted by ArgentCorvid at 6:08 PM PST - 13 comments

The Oppenheimer trailer is here. The film is directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy as the title and historical character. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 1:59 PM PST - 101 comments

Trust in Media 2023: What news outlets do Americans trust most for information? A YouGov survey about 56 media outlets, of which Politico's Jack Shafer is not a big fan.
posted by box at 1:49 PM PST - 44 comments

NY jury finds TFG liable for sexual assault, defamation in E. Jean Carroll trial. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:37 PM PST - 211 comments

Technology Connections' new video is about Sony Betacam.
posted by Pendragon at 12:16 PM PST - 23 comments

Profile of Kimberly Mata-Rubio, the mother of Uvalde victim Lexi Rubio's mother: “Is this never going to come to an end?”
South Dallas-raised Karen Attiah on witnessing in real time the variety of social deaths that don’t get captured in victim counts or statistics, in the aftermath of the Allen TX mall shooting.
For months, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action (including families from Uvalde) have descended on the Texas State Capitol, demanding lawmakers take action on a bill to #RaiseTheAge for gun purchases. The bill advanced out of committee yesterday, finally, but still may stall before being brought to the full chamber. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:36 AM PST - 37 comments

Because your body is complex and redundant, training and nutrition can be simple. Short and sweet article about why you can relax about your exercise routine by Greg Nuckols at Stronger by Science. previously, previously.
posted by bq at 8:46 AM PST - 33 comments

Thoughts from the ghostwriter of Prince Harry's memoir "Spare."
posted by PussKillian at 8:02 AM PST - 37 comments

Pour one out for the ol' Metaverse. [more inside]
posted by pepcorn at 6:59 AM PST - 163 comments

The Canadian city of Brossard, located right across the St. Lawrence River from Montréal, has installed a new traffic light in a school zone that only turns green for safe drivers. The light’s Québécois manufacturers call it the “feu de ralentissement éducatif” (educational traffic-calming light), or FRED. The light is red by default, but turns green when an attached speed camera detects an approaching motor vehicle that’s driving under the speed limit.
posted by Etrigan at 5:10 AM PST - 63 comments

Relive the Story of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [Story Recap Trailer][YouTube][Spoilers] “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is only a week [2 days, 16 hours, 12 min.] away from release, and many Nintendo Switch owners may be saying to themselves, “Oh, yeah, what exactly happened in Breath of the Wild?” After all, it’s been more than six years since Breath of the Wild landed on Switch (and Wii U), and a refresher may be in order. [...] To get players back up to speed for Link’s next adventure, Nintendo has condensed the story of Breath of the Wild into a six-minute video. It explains why Link was taking a 100-year nap, reminds you of Zelda’s very important role in containing the evil of Calamity Ganon, and touches on where Link and Zelda wound up at the end of the game. A good portion of Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild story recap video is about the century before the events of the game itself, and it’s pretty high-level stuff. The video doesn’t touch on many of the side characters or supplementary stories of Breath of the Wild, but it’s a solid primer for players jumping into Tears of the Kingdom.” [The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Trailers: #1 #2 #3]
posted by Fizz at 4:47 AM PST - 64 comments

This is as much a problem of genre as a problem of ideology — or, more precisely, it is a problem of temporality: how we think about time. The « it’s not too late » of Earth for All misses what « we are fucked » demonstrates: a genuine grasp of tragedy. from Tragedy & farce in climate commentary by Ingo Venzke [European Review of Books; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 4:44 AM PST - 15 comments

A new documentary on the founder of the Rolling Stones will be on BBC Two next week, May 15 from 9 to 10:30PM. Interview with film-maker Nick Broomfield in The Guardian, the ​inside story of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. "He epitomized the dazzling 60s and then was gone." But what about the kid who swiped his electric dulcimer, 1n 1966? There's [more inside]
posted by Rash at 9:34 PM PST - 8 comments

Questions on Virginia Police Computer Fraud Unanswered Questions into a Virginia State Police Investigation on computer fraud in small town south central Virginia are left unanswered as Special Prosecutor Michael Newman, an insider with Pittsylvania County Virginia is appointed to investigate his own. Small town good ole boyism is commonly assumed as computer forensic evidence is ignored in favor of local district attorney opinion on computer hacking techniques routinely used by police officers. In this case, there is no warrant for the computer breach and forensic evidence is discarded even with the state police.
posted by screenname00 at 9:09 PM PST - 13 comments

Pod Save The UK is an American-style political chat and humor show that just launched. Hosted by comedian Nish Kumar and journalist Coco Khan, their premiere episode Is the UK Ready to Ditch the Monarchy? [1h2m] brings in Amelia Hadfield from Surry University and Labour MP Clive Lewis to discuss the role of the monarchy in the UK in the 21st Century and how, if at all possible, they might get rid of the crown. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:44 PM PST - 24 comments

French scientists study the important issues and have discovered the best way to call a strange cat to you. (SLGizmodo) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:25 PM PST - 56 comments

Sopranos But It's Also Full House (slYT)
posted by box at 11:32 AM PST - 11 comments

In what other setting would we be angry at a person we almost just killed?
posted by gauche at 7:43 AM PST - 116 comments

Happy Monday, MeFites. I wish you all to have a great week, and a great free thread!
posted by Gorgik at 6:16 AM PST - 70 comments

In the end, the art in Day Jobs is not demystified by its source material as much as the day jobs are remystified by artistic success. The only way for this effect not to have occurred might have been to show unfinished, unrealized, or nonexistent art: what artists couldn’t quite bring to completion, or couldn’t even start, because they were too busy with, or tired from, their jobs. But no one wants to see that, no matter how much more representative it might be. from The Art of Work by Megan Marz
posted by chavenet at 4:05 AM PST - 12 comments

Scraps of ancient DNA coaxed out of a deer tooth pendant show it likely hung around the neck of a woman or girl around 20,000 years ago. We don't know what she looked like, but she was related to a population of humans further east of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, in which the pendant was unearthed. (Nature article.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:40 PM PST - 14 comments

Question Mark, Ohio is a new immersive internet mystery from Joe Meno and Dan Sinker that attempts to recapture the wonder of the early internet; follow along on Instagram as Violet Bookman investigates the case. More about the project here and here.
posted by carrienation at 2:34 PM PST - 13 comments

I don't know who exactly is going to watch all three hours of this, aside from me. Duran Duran: Only Five To Blame is a pop culture time capsule of a single band's career. A non-narrative documentary told entirely through popular media appearances, this is the chronicle of a band in their infancy, through into meteoric fame, across breakups and reformations, and finally into the literal present, ending on New Years Eve 2023. It's an astonishing chronological collage demonstrating the enduring capacity of a collection of art school lads from Birmingham and the power of massive egos to keep rock alive in the 2020s. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:16 PM PST - 26 comments

Matt Daniels for the Pudding used Open Syllabus to explore what books from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are being assigned in college-level classes. It’s a fascinating look at a new “turn-of-the-century literary canon” pulling out the top ten titles for each decade, both fiction and nonfiction.

How does a book become a present-day classic, enthusiastically assigned by educators? Among the things I considered were: was it heavily awarded? Did it have an outsized impact on culture? Does it pertain to a topic that the next generation should know?

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 8:42 AM PST - 41 comments

After years working in China’s finance industry, Helen Wang was feeling on the edge of burnout. She was fed up with working grueling hours, then being expected to be on call during her precious time off. The 28-year-old wanted to find a new path: one where she could “lie flat” for a while.Then, a friend gave her a left-field suggestion: move to Sweden. On Chinese social media, Scandinavia is often portrayed as a socialist utopia — a place where women’s rights are respected, parents of young children receive lavish support, and the working culture is relatively relaxed. What better place to start over? [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 8:32 AM PST - 42 comments

'They just need a safe place to be.' How public transit became the last safety net in America (slVice)
posted by box at 7:33 AM PST - 13 comments

Nüshu: China’s secret female-only language "Throughout history, women in rural Hunan Province used a coded script to express their most intimate thoughts to one another. Today, this once-“dead” language is making a comeback." [See also: Tan Dun's symphony Nu Shu: the Secret Songs of Women]
posted by dhruva at 7:14 AM PST - 6 comments

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak owns a Tesla. “And boy, if you want a study of AI gone wrong and taking a lot of claims and trying to kill you every chance it can, get a Tesla,” Wozniak told CNN earlier this week.
posted by dancestoblue at 3:58 AM PST - 179 comments

In other words, this isn’t the most obvious foursome to occupy a painted, nostalgic eternity together. But now, ironically, thanks to these ubiquitous paintings, Monroe, Dean, Presley, and Bogart seem forever inseparable. So who decided on this grouping, and why? The answer is comically, unnecessarily complex. from The Hopper-Consani Connection [The Believer; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:45 AM PST - 15 comments

Golden orb spider captured eating microbat in Far North Queensland. Megan Wright has a healthy respect for the spiders that live around her home north of Cairns, but admits being very excited — and horrified when she noticed a big golden orb spider eating a bat caught in its web.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:27 PM PST - 23 comments

In 1999, the band American Football released their eponymous debut album (which would later come to be known as LP1 after they also named their next two albums American Football). Its cover was a picture of a nondescript white house at 704 W. High Street in Urbana, Illinois, which has since become an emo pilgrimage site. And now, the band and their label own the American Football House.
posted by Etrigan at 10:03 PM PST - 13 comments

After a seven-year hiatus, Chris Onstad is writing Achewood again. Achewood—once Time Magazine's top graphic novel of 2007, despite being a webcomic—has also revamped its web site for the first time in approximately twenty years, to include convenient chronological links to its many character blogs (example). (While the webcomic portion of Achewood is its heart and soul, the bulk of its writing consists of stories which take place across and between eleven different blogs; until now, there has been no convenient way to follow the blogs in lockstep with the comics, or even combine the blogs and tie their various arcs together.) [more inside]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 4:50 PM PST - 43 comments

YouTuber @TheManInMeOfficial has created a series of videos summarizing "Iconic Albums" released each month during different decades. I don't know what the criteria are, but I have to say, the selections are indeed iconic. Each video runs 11m. Most Iconic Album Released Every Month Of The '60s. The 70s. The 80s. The 90s.
posted by hippybear at 2:07 PM PST - 31 comments

Documentary Family Photography is a recent movement in family photography that eschews the posed portrait in favor of capturing moments of real life in passing. As images we make of ourselves become more and more polished, people are wanting to recreate some of the "spontaneous and unexpected" moments of the analog-camera era in photo sessions where "shit gets real" and "perfect is boring." The Documentary Family Photographers association has educational resources and a directory; the Family Photojournalistic Association does similarly; the Documentary Family Awards gives prizes.
posted by Miko at 9:30 AM PST - 30 comments

Christopher Cantwell talks about a meeting with a trans fan, and how his conversation with her opened up and changed his views of his own work:

In January 2020, I went to Long Beach Comic-Con, did a panel, sold some Doctor Doom issues and copies of my books She Could Fly and Everything. Sitting at the small table, a young woman approached me.

She had come all the way down to Long Beach and bought a pass to the Con just to find me and tell me how much Halt and Catch Fire had meant to her, particularly in some more difficult times for her recently, especially when she was transitioning.

(This FPP title is a reference to the infamous soundbite from a recent Rowling interview re: - what else? - her transphobia and how it affects her Harry Potter brand, that the HBO boss tried to downplay the Discourse as "That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into." ⁠Cantwell's thread quote tweets a Variety tweet about the fallout) (Full thread in extended description below) [more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 7:40 AM PST - 10 comments

Why There's No Room for Suburbs in Open-World Games [Waypoint] [Games by Vice] “The other day I was replaying The Crew 2, driving from Texas to San Francisco in my silver 1955 Mercedes-Benz SLR. After passing through the epic canyons and peaks, I finally arrived at the glistening Pacific. Looking at my GPS, now barely 3 miles away from downtown San Francisco, I was shocked to still be seeing dense redwood forests and not, say, suburban Millbrae. Then in a flash, I was finally amidst skyscrapers. But when I looked in my rearview, there were the redwoods I barely left behind. Booting up GTA V, GTA San Andreas, Saints Row, and Watch Dogs 2, I noticed a similar pattern. We are transported to major cities and vast countrysides, but nothing that really speaks to the in between — to the suburbs. Where is New York’s mighty Westchester County, once ground zero for COVID in those early days? What about Chicago’s burbs where Ferris Bueller went ham?”
posted by Fizz at 5:19 AM PST - 56 comments

When you sign up for digital service, sometimes they make it difficult to unsubscribe. by Caroline Sinders
posted by chavenet at 2:25 AM PST - 28 comments

Sailing boat rescued by the Götheborg. Imagine losing your rudder out at sea and sending out a distress call. And then the largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship in the world comes to your rescue. Or in the words of the sailors on the sailing boat: "This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?"
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:59 PM PST - 15 comments

The real reason for the Supreme Court's corruption crisis - "Roberts's 2011 report and the Court's more recent statement on ethics portray the Supreme Court as a unique institution that cannot be constrained by the same ethical rules that apply to less powerful judges, especially when it comes to recusals." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:11 PM PST - 57 comments

The downfall of Brydge: iPad keyboard company folds, leaving staff unpaid and customer orders unfulfilled Chance Miller over at 9to5Mac with a well reported and sourced account of the extremely sudden demise of popular iPad (and more recently, Surface) accessory maker Brydge. [more inside]
posted by General Malaise at 2:59 PM PST - 15 comments

A List of Things People Blamed on Flappers (SL Mastodon)
posted by RobotHero at 2:48 PM PST - 28 comments

Jon Lovett interviews Chasten Buttigieg about his new book I Have Something To Tell You [23m] but more about what growing up gay in the US has been like and what living as a [peculiarly high profile] gay man in the US today is like. It's one of the better, deeper interviews about how growing up queer can be damaging and the choices it leads one to make. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:56 PM PST - 2 comments

Why are TVs so cheap now? Still too expensive? How about a completely free, ad-supported TV?
posted by meowzilla at 12:39 PM PST - 65 comments

Amazing bird singing. Wait for it ....
posted by dancestoblue at 11:53 AM PST - 9 comments

My grandmother doesn’t talk about the bomb. [NYTimes]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:26 AM PST - 6 comments

Lost Ones: Decades later, Ben Ratliff, former pop music critic at The New York Times, can recall the details of a song he heard once, but that it is impossible for you to listen to. I’m sorry to report that it cannot be streamed. It cannot be purchased on a compact disc or a cassette, used or new. There’s no rare vinyl pressing listed on Discogs. Ratliff’s bit of recollected music criticism, shared over email, is a kind of ghost story.
posted by ellieBOA at 9:28 AM PST - 52 comments

Ted Chiang writes on the probable implications of corporate A.I. adoption “ If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? ”
posted by Silvery Fish at 7:59 AM PST - 72 comments

Capitalism in Chaos explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important for German and subsequently French plans of economic and geopolitical expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [more inside]
posted by kmt at 5:47 AM PST - 6 comments

"The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered." from Information Overload by Claire Bishop [ArtForum; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:23 AM PST - 10 comments

Billboard's list of the 50 Greatest Minivan Rock Songs

Think about popular music around the turn of the millennium, and what comes to mind? Maybe it’s the teen-pop that dominated TRL, or the rap-rock and nu-metal that rose up seemingly in response to it. Maybe it’s the crossover hip-hop and R&B jams that made household names out of Timbaland and The Neptunes, or the four-quadrant country that propelled Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks to diamond-level sales. Maybe it’s Eminem. Maybe it’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

What probably doesn’t come immediately to mind, however, is the music that served as the glue for top 40 radio during this period: accessible, catchy, cleanly produced rock music built on sonic foundations of processed guitars and/or driving piano. This was the dependable, generation-spanning pop-rock that filled in the gaps between some of the meteoric musical moments and careers shooting off around it. We call it Minivan Rock.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 1:42 AM PST - 87 comments

Inspired by Pepperoni Hug Spot, AI Lost Media gives you: Pizza Nuggets (cw: pizza)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:59 PM PST - 16 comments

Palaeontologists uncover mystery of marsupial lion bones in Wellington Caves excavation. Weighing up to 164 kilograms, the marsupial lion was the largest mammal predator ever found in Australia and preyed on other megafauna such as the diprotodons between 2 million and 46,000 years ago.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:46 PM PST - 7 comments

Small Wonders Magazine [via mefi projects] is a new online speculative fiction and poetry magazine. Their inaugural issue contains fiction by Saswati Chatterjee, Premee Mohamed, Wendy Nikel, Charles Payseur, Moses Ose Utomi, and John Wiswell, and poetry by Beth Cato, Mary Soon Lee, and Ali Trotta.
posted by joannemerriam at 3:45 PM PST - 3 comments

Despite the countless series I've seen her in, or the variety of profiles I've read about her across the decades, I've never really felt like I had any peg on Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a person. But she sat down for a 2-hour conversation with Pete Holmes for his podcast You Made It Weird, and across the first half-hour you can watch Pete peel away her defenses and by the end a more fully rounded portrait of her emerged. I really enjoyed this, much more than I expected going in.
posted by hippybear at 12:50 PM PST - 16 comments

Xbox Is Running Out Of Time To Get It Right by Ethan Gach [Kotaku] “But if Hi-Fi Rush showed the promise of Game Pass, where more focused and stylized games can find an audience without sanding themselves down into dust to appeal to a mass market, Redfall has done just the opposite. Arkane’s vampire shooter feels incomplete and plays like mush, a far cry from the striking, precisely drawn contours of immersive sims like Prey and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. [...] For years now, Xbox fans and players have been waiting for Microsoft to begin delivering a steady stream of hit exclusives that can rise to the level of those found on PlayStation and Switch, and it simply hasn’t. The results of an acquisition spree of new studios that began in 2018 are mixed at best, with each bright spot—Psychonauts 2, Pentiment—overshadowed by delays, missteps, and radio silence around major projects teased years ago in a premature effort to drum up hype for the Xbox Series X/S.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:42 AM PST - 56 comments

Enriquie Tarrio and three other members of the terrorist Proud Boys were convicted today of seditious conspiracy in Washington, D.C. for their role in the January 6th insurrection. (SL Associated Press)
posted by Ipsifendus at 9:25 AM PST - 74 comments

Wow.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:31 AM PST - 57 comments

Last month, an Asheville, North Carolina, judge convicted two journalists of trespassing for doing nothing more than recording police conducting a homeless encampment sweep at a public park on Dec. 25, 2021. The journalists, Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit, are entitled under North Carolina law to a second trial, this time with a jury. “This prosecution is both unconstitutional and pointless. The First Amendment prohibits using trespassing laws as a pretext to retaliate against journalists for doing their jobs. And nobody in Asheville stands to benefit from government resources being wasted to criminalize journalism,” said FPF Advocacy Director Seth Stern. [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 8:07 AM PST - 12 comments

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. From Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector.
posted by Harald74 at 3:38 AM PST - 90 comments

Republican States Are Racing Toward Authoritarianism [ungated] - "Regardless of how Abbott proceeds, the governor's urge to pardon a killer for no discernible reason other than that the killer belongs to Team Red and the victim is claimed by Team Blue tells us how deep into the authoritarian jungle the Republican Party has penetrated." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 3:21 AM PST - 72 comments

40 Years of KOYAANISQATSI [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:20 AM PST - 40 comments

Someone sent Slate's 'How to Do It' column a barely disguised Star Trek: DS9 plot synopsis:

The Wife I’m a Surrogate for Wants Me to Spend More Time With Her Husband. That’s a Very Bad Idea.

I’m a 21-year-old woman, and I’m seven months pregnant at the time of writing this. My boyfriend is on deployment, and while he was away, I decided to surrogate for a couple that lives in the area. The money is better than anything I could make otherwise, and part of the contract I signed meant that I moved in with “Miles” and his wife, rent-free and for much nicer accommodations than I could find on the market.

The couple I’m carrying for is super sweet and some of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, which is starting to turn into a problem. I’m sure it’s just a combination of pregnancy hormones, my boyfriend being away, and having a little too much free time, but I’ve found myself fantasizing about Miles. It doesn’t help that his wife, “Keiko,” keeps pushing us to spend more time together when she’s not hanging out with me. Nothing overtly sexual has happened, but sometimes he does this thing where he rubs my ankles (the swelling’s bad), and it just feels so unbelievably good. In my more rational moments, I can tell that this is very definitely a Bad Idea. But I’m living in his house, and he’s really quite good-looking for a guy in his 40s. And a few times I’ve “let my hands slip” to rub at his shoulders or chest. He always gently asks me to stop after a moment, but I know I’m on the verge of losing control here. How do I stop thinking about this guy?

posted by Pachylad at 12:04 AM PST - 38 comments

Rare albino echidna rescued from road. Locals have been asked to look but not touch following the discovery of an albino echidna — dubbed "Raffie" — in central-western New South Wales.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:35 PM PST - 6 comments

The 2023 inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame have been announced. [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 3:20 PM PST - 50 comments

The first music video from The Hives' first new album in more than a decade riffs on the first two Evil Dead films and is highly recommended for fans of garage/punk rock, horror iconography, and general awesomeness. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:11 PM PST - 9 comments

The Problem With Parking
posted by backseatpilot at 11:06 AM PST - 47 comments

Dune 2 [Trailer][YouTube] The saga continues as award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embarks on “Dune: Part Two,” the next chapter of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel Dune.
posted by Fizz at 9:24 AM PST - 119 comments

NPR ranks 40 Songs From 40 Years Of 'Weird Al' Yankovic [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 9:01 AM PST - 76 comments

The Stopgap is a new website edited by Danny M. Lavery and Jo Livingstone. The two editors were interviewed by Laura Hazard Owen about their idea for the site and it’s future.
posted by Kattullus at 6:44 AM PST - 24 comments

How a Flint pediatrician hopes to improve health and dismantle poverty [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:02 AM PST - 7 comments

If you've been to Budapest in the last twenty years you certainly encountered the famous "ruin-pubs". Now you can watch a five-part documentary about their history with English subtitles. New episodes are posted on every (Central European) Tuesday. First episode, Second episode. Narrated by Bori Péterfy.
posted by kmt at 5:12 AM PST - 8 comments

This Is The Way - Dance Mix "Auralnauts are Craven Moorhaus and Zak Koonce. We do a lot of things here...We write music." - Auralnauts Youtube Page. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 2:22 AM PST - 11 comments

EYECANDY is a labor of love for the people. It’s something to enjoy and learn from. It’s not something you should gatekeep— It was made to blow the gates open. It’s forever WIP. It’s never 100% accurate. It’s a little messy. It’s for you.
posted by chavenet at 1:23 AM PST - 13 comments

Female Fire Lookouts Have Been Saving the Wilderness for Over a Century. Spotting smoke from towers on high peaks could have been deemed "man's work", but a few pioneers paved the way for generations of women to do the job.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:21 PM PST - 5 comments

In the cases of Rep. Mauree Turner, Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, and Rep. Zooey Zephyr, state Republicans are weaponizing decorum rules and legislative discipline to silence Democrats. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 5:24 PM PST - 62 comments

Released just a couple of hours ago, Lewis Black brings us his very recently completed comedy hour, Tragically, I Need You [1h3m]. CW: This deals very directly with the unfolding, trajectory, and personal harms of the COVID pandemic. It is also full of anger and ranting about these things, per Lewis Black's oeuvre, so maybe cathartic.
posted by hippybear at 3:35 PM PST - 10 comments

Folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot dies at 84. Gordon Lightfoot, the folk singer-songwriter known for “If You Could Read My Mind” and “Sundown” and for songs that told tales of Canadian identity, died Monday, Lightfoot recorded 20 studio albums and penned hundreds of songs, including “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” In the 1970s, Lightfoot garnered five Grammy nominations, three platinum records and nine gold records for albums and singles. He performed in well over 1,500 concerts and recorded 500 songs.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:39 AM PST - 126 comments

"Homes or Cash Cows," Shelterforce's on-going series, includes Hands Off the Houses: Can We Stop Speculative Land Grabs?: "According to a report by Americans for Financial Reform, 1.6 million housing units in the U.S. are now owned by private equity, including over 1 million apartment units, 275,000 manufactured home lots, and over 239,000 single-family rental homes." Most recent article is on how NYC's land speculators use LLCs to evade legal responsibility while sitting on vacant property.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:38 AM PST - 40 comments

Sci-Fi Short Film "Camouflage" | DUST
posted by Meatbomb at 10:52 AM PST - 2 comments

Meanwhile, on Normal Island, Charles the third is getting crowned this Sunday. The coronation for the billionaire King-to-be is funded by commoners. As popularity for the monarchy falls and protests are planned, various petitions have been rejected, and the mass swearing of an oath of allegiance has been raised. The Proclaimers have been dropped from the official soundtrack, though many more Scots have their own jovial song. And another Scot, Frankie Boyle, has [very NSFW] examined the monarchy over the ages. Americans don't care and their presidents are traditionally no-shows. [post title]
posted by Wordshore at 10:04 AM PST - 177 comments

150 African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize at Landmark Nairobi Meeting:

More than 150 workers whose labor underpins the AI systems of Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT gathered in Nairobi on Monday and pledged to establish the first African Content Moderators Union, in a move that could have significant consequences for the businesses of some of the world’s biggest tech companies.

The current and former workers, all employed by third party outsourcing companies, have provided content moderation services for AI tools used by Meta, Bytedance, and OpenAI—the respective owners of Facebook, TikTok and the breakout AI chatbot ChatGPT. Despite the mental toll of the work, which has left many content moderators suffering from PTSD, their jobs are some of the lowest-paid in the global tech industry, with some workers earning as little as $1.50 per hour.

posted by Pachylad at 9:14 AM PST - 10 comments

News of the strike, which takes effect in a few hours, came late Monday after the guild’s negotiations with the AMPTP failed to reach an agreement on a new film and scripted TV contract. It’s the WGA’s first strike since the 100-day walkout of 2007-08.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:25 AM PST - 86 comments

The biggest concern is whether there will be enough elevator music for the entire ride.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 6:33 AM PST - 49 comments

In 1986, Barbara Lowe Vollick won five games of ‘Jeopardy!’ in a row. Her episodes were then taken out of circulation. What followed was a nearly 40-year hunt for the missing tapes—and a quest to find out what really happened between the show and its most enigmatic champion.
posted by Etrigan at 5:53 AM PST - 56 comments

Anime Confronts a New Apocalypse by Matt Alt [The New Yorker] Back in the day, manga was hopeful and positive. Now? Lots of the biggest players are dark and cynical. Alt's piece examines how and why recent times have changed their outlook.

““We’re off to outer space, we’re leaving mother Earth, to save the human race,” the opening lines of the theme song to “Yamato” and “Star Blazers” went, but modern audiences seem more interested in escapes into inner space and saving themselves. Part of this is simply due to changing tastes and styles, inevitable in any youth-oriented medium, and part to how even the most radical subcultures inevitably get co-opted—witness how hip-hop and punk, so edgy and threatening in the eighties, morphed into mainstream pop. Days after Matsumoto’s death, a column about the artist expressed concern about how “cold and cynical many recent anime seem to be.” But is this a criticism of the current crop of animators and fans—or a reflection of Japanese society itself?”

posted by Fizz at 4:55 AM PST - 32 comments

So what color is the sea? Silver-pewter at dawn; gray, gray-blue, green-blue, or blue depending on the particular day; yellow or red at sunset; silver-black at dusk; black at night. In other words, no color at all, but rather a phenomenon of reflected light. The phrase “winelike,” then, had little to do with color but must have evoked some attribute of dark wine that would resonate with an audience familiar with the sea—with the póntos, the high sea, that perilous path to distant shores—such as the glint of surface light on impenetrable darkness, like wine in a terracotta vessel. from A Winelike Sea by Caroline Alexander [Lapham's; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:05 AM PST - 40 comments

Primary Wave treats their catalogs the way powerful record labels treat their star artists—except all of the publishing company’s talent is either dead, a legend, or both.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:26 PM PST - 4 comments

How to get more women on bikes? Better biking infrastructure, designed by women. Men outnumber women by two-to-one on bikes in Australia. It’s time more women were involved in planning new bike paths and protected lanes to feel safer on the road.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:48 PM PST - 41 comments

"Maybe we are now reaching a point where the language of psychology is starting to be appropriate to understand the behaviour of these neural networks." - llya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of Open AI. [more inside]
posted by EarnestDeer at 6:21 PM PST - 129 comments

He Bombed the Nazis. 75 Years Later, the Nightmares Began Trauma works in mysterious ways: "Like most of his generation, John Wenzel returned from World War II with no interest in sharing memories. Just shy of his 100th birthday, he found he could no longer ignore the past."
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:25 PM PST - 8 comments

“I do more $1 million a year in sales,” Rose said, “so someone here likes me.” Believe it or not, we have some folks who sit in the parking lot working up the courage to come in. They’re embarrassed, or ashamed, I guess. A lot of people come in and do a lap, but then they go right to what they’re looking for, as if they didn’t want us to know that’s what they came here to get. That’s fine. We’re not judging. But if you do this every time you come in, who are you kidding? There’s a lot of shame in this community when it comes to sex. Some of that is small towns. Some of that is religion. But a lot of it comes from the fact that we just don’t do sex education in this state. That’s a problem because sex is part of life, and so many people here don’t feel like they have a place to go with questions about their bodies and what gives them pleasure.
posted by alexdobrenko at 3:44 PM PST - 14 comments

Neil Diamond had just released a new album in the second half of 1993 when he appeared on the Phil Donahue Show [46m]. I feel like this is peak early Nineties daytime television.
posted by hippybear at 3:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Discovered in the deep: the superbuilder sea anemones that make verandas
posted by brundlefly at 1:13 PM PST - 8 comments

Golden Klimt In 2015, on the occasion of the 23rd edition of the Life Ball in Vienna, photographer Inge Prader took incredible shots in tribute to the Golden Cycle of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt using fashion models.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:45 AM PST - 6 comments

"Do y’all think tipping culture has gotten out of control?" Inside our evolving tipping dilemma. [LA Times]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:45 AM PST - 166 comments

Look for the union label. Online exhibit Union-Made: Fashioning America in the Twentieth Century features the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Today’s successor unions to these historical labor organizations are UNITE-HERE and Workers United. Vintage shoppers often look for the union labels in clothing as a clue to the age of the item: "The AFL and the CIO merged in 1955, therefore any ILGWU labels with AFL-CIO (look closely, as it is often very small) on them are post-1955." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:37 AM PST - 10 comments

Free thread! (I was planning on being more creative and going to metatalk and trying to set up a schedule, but I'm a little hungover and the morning is getting away from me. So here we are)
posted by Gorgik at 8:10 AM PST - 99 comments

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) have announced the creation of the Infinity Award, with its inaugural presentation honoring the works and career of Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) at the 58th Annual Nebula Awards Ceremony on May 14. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:50 AM PST - 27 comments