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Space juggling "The first rule of Space Juggling is that thrown balls move in straight lines." Interview with Adam Dipert
posted by dhruva at 7:49 PM PST - 16 comments

Pitchfork reviews Peppa Pig's Peppa's Adventures: The Album
posted by box at 2:16 PM PST - 14 comments

Barrett Moore had ordered 2 million N95 masks, held enough freeze-dried food to feed families hiding from global Armageddon for decades, owned a small arsenal of guns, and fortified a pole barn in which to wait out the collapse of civilization. But he had something no one else could buy: knowledge that the end was coming and that the supply chains would snap; the best hope your family had was holing up in his northern Michigan compound while things fell apart.
posted by darkstar at 12:38 PM PST - 194 comments

Stephen Sondheim's 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle [Wikipedia] was a genuine flop. It's rarely produced, and the original production was never filmed. But in 1995, a concert version was mounted at Carnegie Hall as an AIDS fundraiser, starring Bernadette Peters, Madeline Kahn, and Scott Bakula. Presented in glorious single-camera VHSovision, that performance is on YouTube. [2h9m] Here is a half-hour lecture on the background of the show. [Vimeo] Here is the Broadway libretto [PDF] if you want to follow along. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:16 AM PST - 14 comments

Jookin' Buckin' Choppin' Footworkin' Boogie Jiggin' Swag and Krumping are just some of the dances you can watch and enjoy in this twitter thread.
posted by vespabelle at 8:49 AM PST - 3 comments

A two part series from Criminal, the podcast. Hear directly from these real life victims of a robbery/kidnapping/rape/extortion scheme and how the Vallejo police turned on them in a surreally horrifying twist. [more inside]
posted by amanda at 8:05 AM PST - 19 comments

It’s quite astonishing to learn that Pac-Man was allotted 14-pages in a porn mag whose format was dedicated to nudity, dirty jokes and cigarette ads. Even more surprising is no one complained that he was. Writer, historical researcher and self-confessed vidiot Cat DeSpira unpacks an odd feature from the April 1982 issue of Oui Magazine in this blog post for her site Retro Bitch. [CW boobs and butts] [more inside]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 8:03 AM PST - 23 comments

jan Misali, amateur linguist, asks a seemingly simple question: how many of the Mario games are "Super Mario" (or 'mainline') Mario games? It turns out to be surprisingly complex, because of the dozens of Mario games released over the years, there's only universal consensus on three. [more inside]
posted by Merus at 5:47 AM PST - 24 comments

These norms in the literacy of English speakers today are so well entrenched that simple adjustments are very jarring. If ai trai tu repreezent mai akshuel pronownseeayshun in raiteeng, yu kan reed it, but its difikelt and disterbeeng tu du soh. It just looks wrong, and that feeling of wrongness interrupts the flow of reading.

–Typos, tricks and misprints is an essay by linguist Arika Okrent about why English spelling is so damn weird.
posted by Kattullus at 1:49 AM PST - 58 comments

"Many of you are wondering, how did we get from Zero Covid and being the envy of the world to being an experiment in what happens when the Delta variant rips through an unvaccinated population?" The Australien Government has a helpful Honest Government Ad breaking down exactly how the massive outbreak in Sydney that is working hard to become a national franchise came about. If you'd like an on-the-ground explanation straight from the states' mouths, Meanwhile in Australia parts 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and 27 will catch you up on the past eventful month.
posted by rednikki at 4:35 PM PST - 29 comments

A few weeks ago, the FDA approved a costly Alzheimer's drug developed by Biogen, but for what benefit?
1. There is not strong evidence that Amyloid beta plaques causes Alzheimer’s disease, even if aducanumab showed a reduction in those plaques.
2. Aducanumab did not show any real-life outcomes like improvement in cognitive outcomes or reduction in mortality.
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:49 PM PST - 42 comments

The 2005 video for Björk's Triumph of a Heart (alternative) follows a familiar three-act story: relationship difficulties lead to one partner storming off for an evening of wild fun while the other (played here by Nietzsche) ponders at home; thoughts and regrets on both sides; and a return and reconciliation. However, a brief scene around 3:55 became something else... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 2:25 PM PST - 20 comments

"Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent." A Twitter thread (also a post on Medium) by Amanda Knox (previously), in response to Matt Damon’s new film Stillwater, "hamfistedly inspired" by her story.
posted by bitteschoen at 5:38 AM PST - 71 comments

"I asked for a world class team of contact tracers." In which Australians The Chaser make lemonade from pandemic lemons.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:49 AM PST - 41 comments

Internal CDC document urges new messaging, warns delta infections likely more severe (WaPo) The delta variant of the coronavirus appears to cause more severe illness than earlier variants and spreads as easily as chickenpox, according to an internal federal health document that argues officials must “acknowledge the war has changed.” [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:05 PM PST - 343 comments

The flow of sheep from above. More aerial photography from Lior Patel.
posted by clawsoon at 8:36 PM PST - 15 comments

Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage How did an iconic celebration of harmony descend into mayhem? Woodstock 99, the first film in Bill Simmons' Music Box HBO series, examines how the festival collapsed under the weight of its own misguided ambition. [more inside]
posted by dmh at 1:11 PM PST - 36 comments

Dusty Hill, bassist for and long-time member of ZZ Top, has passed away at the age of 72. [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 8:16 AM PST - 96 comments

Man v food: is lab-grown meat really going to solve our nasty agriculture problem? If cellular agriculture is going to improve on the industrial system it is displacing, it needs to grow without passing the cost on to workers, consumers and the environment (The Guardian, long read)
posted by bitteschoen at 5:01 AM PST - 38 comments

Ron Popeil, inventor and king of TV pitchmen, dies at 86 [AP] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:28 AM PST - 51 comments

The Last Dirty Picture Show: a love letter to the Tiki Adult Theater
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:13 AM PST - 14 comments

A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime. Millions around the world know “Patria y Vida” — “Fatherland and Life” — the scintillating music video that inverted the Cuban Communist Party’s slogan — “Fatherland or Death” — and became the anthem of protests in Cuba on July 11. Less familiar is “Oe’ Policia Pinga” — roughly, “F--- the Police” — by the rappers Marichal and Daryelo Sánchez. [more inside]
posted by leslietron at 6:27 PM PST - 41 comments

A bipartisan $550 billion infrastructure spending deal passed a test vote in the US Senate, with support from 17 Republican senators. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 5:10 PM PST - 83 comments

Introducing Name Drop: A Daily Trivia Game from the New Yorker [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:05 PM PST - 17 comments

The Gawker name was toxic, but also weirdly revered; an intractable combination. It could not be brought back because it could never be what it once was, and also because what it once was was sued out of existence by a professional wrestler. After a hiatus of five relatively uneventful years, Gawker is back.
posted by gottabefunky at 4:00 PM PST - 47 comments

How much carbon could soil actually sequester? Despite rising enthusiasm for carbon farming in Europe and the U.S., some soil scientists are less optimistic about the climate impacts of soil carbon sequestration. Projects such as the Harnessing Plants Initiative and the Marin Carbon Project have multiple worthy goals but may be overstating the actual carbon sequestration benefits. “I have The Nature and Properties of Soils in front of me — the standard textbook... The theory of soil organic carbon accumulation that’s in that textbook has been proven mostly false … and we’re still teaching it.” [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:56 PM PST - 13 comments

Tom Scott tried to film an Icelandic volcano and it was a complete disaster (Fagradalsfjall eruption previously). Tom Scott is no stranger to Iceland, having made a number of YouTube videos there, including when he went to check whether the northernmost part of Iceland was still above water, why you can't swim between two continents, and that submerging yourself in power plant wastewater is sometimes a good idea.
posted by Kattullus at 1:51 PM PST - 10 comments

Historian and podcaster Patrick Wyman (previously) considers the legacy of Christopher Columbus: "Rather than casting Columbus as either the hero or the villain in an epic story about the emergence of a recognizably modern world, we should understand him as a replacement-level historical figure: not among the elite, a Clayton Kershaw or prime Carmelo Anthony; not in the mid-to-upper tier of his profession, like Nelson Cruz, Joe Flacco, or CJ McCollum. He was a notable step below that."
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:18 PM PST - 24 comments

As someone who has followed this case for over a year, there is a lot in this article that had not been previously reported. Mainly the depth of racist vitriol García Peña faced in the years leading up to her tenure denial.
posted by coffeecat at 12:11 PM PST - 34 comments

From Morocco with love... Hassan Wargui takes the Moroccan banjo-playing tradition to new places. '"I love the banjo, it’s my first instrument," says Wargui. His music is actually part of a hidden tradition of banjo music in the area that dates back to the 1970s: he learned to play by imitating groups like Archach and Izenzaren, who hold a legendary status in the Sous. "No one taught me, I learnt myself."' [more inside]
posted by Sheydem-tants at 6:24 AM PST - 9 comments

Primož Roglič, Slovenian cyclist who "used to be nobody", dropped out of this year's Tour de France after being injured in a crash. After his compatriot and rival Tadej Pogačar won the bronze medal in Men's Road Race in Tokyo, and Roglič was left far behind, fans and even Roglič himself (link in Slovenian) were doubting whether he was ready for the Men's Individual Time Trial. But he did well anyway.
posted by gakiko at 3:48 AM PST - 10 comments

"The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based conclusions about the disorder" is a scientific review of studies about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, published in the September 2021 issue of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. (DOI link, full PDF, 30 pages, open access article licensed as CC-BY.) "Our aim is to provide current and accurate information about ADHD supported by a substantial and rigorous body of evidence." Findings start: "The syndrome we now call ADHD has been described in the medical literature since 1775." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 3:33 AM PST - 56 comments

How America's Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai'i by Lisa Hix in Collector's Weekly [2017]
posted by chavenet at 3:22 AM PST - 9 comments

I fucking hated it.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:29 PM PST - 151 comments

Bit-field patterns created from applying simple formulas (small subset of work available in unrolled thread)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:26 PM PST - 43 comments

A24, who brought us the American-Swedish folk romp Midsommar (product), as well as Hereditary and The Lighthouse, have a new movie out: Lamb. It's set in Iceland, seems to be about sheep and lambing, and the trailer features a Beach Boys song.
posted by Wordshore at 3:18 PM PST - 33 comments

In America, losing a job means making a hundred phone calls to a state unemployment-insurance system. Getting hit by a car means becoming your own hospital-billing expert. Having a disability means launching into a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce–type legal battle. Needing help to feed a toddler means filling out a novel-length application for aid. ...at some point, I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the “time tax”—a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them.
posted by latkes at 2:39 PM PST - 74 comments

At a time when so many Millennials like her have become less interested in marriage and children and are also delaying having children for their careers, she [Tyra Reeder] is a new kind of female fertility archetype: nurturing and distant at the same time. Portrait of a Professional Baby Maker [more inside]
posted by Laura in Canada at 12:41 PM PST - 25 comments

The time a "stiff" caught fire.
posted by blue shadows at 12:39 PM PST - 34 comments

For decades, poppers have been the go-to sex drug for gay men. But where do they come from?
posted by death valley compound at 11:46 AM PST - 40 comments

His leadership ushered in alternative conceptions of gender, race, and political power that would, eventually, shake the world.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:22 AM PST - 17 comments

What I Want to Bring to Light on the Jan. 6 Committee (Adam Kinzinger, R-IL, NYT) [more inside]
posted by box at 7:10 AM PST - 79 comments

Something peachy this way comes: Dope Lemon's 2019 Give Me Honey is a nice vibe and odd, initially tense, but ultimately feelgood video, apparently an homage to The Knife's mesmerizing, lo-fi Pass This On, 2003. (Wikipedia: Dope Lemon, AKA Australian folk singer-songwriter Angus Stone; Swedish electronic music brother-sister duo The Knife. Stone has also performed in a sibling duo as Angus & Julia Stone) [more inside]
posted by taz at 6:07 AM PST - 4 comments

How TV Went From David Brent to Ted Lasso (NYT – non-paywalled link) – Two decades ago, TV’s most distinctive stories were defined by a tone of ironic detachment. Today, they’re more often sincere and direct. How did we get here?
posted by bitteschoen at 1:17 AM PST - 104 comments

From ports to rail yards, global supply lines struggle amid virus outbreaks in the developing world Some back-to-school products could be hard to find for American consumers in the coming weeks.
posted by NotLost at 9:30 PM PST - 36 comments

A daytime TV talkshow host interviews successful business entrepreneur, a cancerous tumor. [SL: 8 minute video; includes brief but cavalier references to suicide and unhoused people.] [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 5:11 PM PST - 7 comments

Olympic Gymnast Oksana Chusovitina has retired. This was her final vault.
posted by storybored at 4:27 PM PST - 13 comments

A collaboration between Ralph Ginzburg (editor) and Herb Lubalin (art director), Avant Garde is partly remembered for its radical politics and embrace of erotic content ... But probably the greatest legacy of the magazine is the logo Lubalin designed, which gave birth to the Avant Garde typeface that still lives today. A Complete Digitization of the 1960s Magazine Avant Garde: From John Lennon’s Erotic Lithographs to Marilyn Monroe’s Last Photos [Open Culture; some NSFW images]
posted by chavenet at 2:41 PM PST - 5 comments

Jofra Bosschat described his works as "Surrealism based on studies of psychology, religion, the Bible, astrology, antiquity, magic, witchcraft, mythology and occultism."
He is perhaps best known for his Zodiac Series which has an accompanying contemplative blog from symbolreader.
However his other work initially inspired by Salvador Dalí is equally if not more fantastical. ( Art. Some images NSFW. Some repeats)
posted by adamvasco at 12:37 PM PST - 4 comments

The Biodiversity Crisis is as serious a threat to the survival of humanity as the climate crisis, but it gets less publicity these days. Maybe there is some hope? [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 11:58 AM PST - 11 comments

Can I interest you in a wordless 14-minute timelapse video of making a fancy surfboard?
posted by cortex at 10:41 AM PST - 9 comments

... the question isn’t whether the world will decarbonize, but how it will decarbonize - and co-ops are ideal vehicles for pursuing a democratic path to decarbonization. Top-down, technocratic approaches that rely heavily on market logic, such as those pursued by Investor Owned Utilities, tend to favor the rich. Co-ops offer an egalitarian alternative.
posted by mhoye at 10:40 AM PST - 3 comments

[CW: outdoor "Ooo-la-la!"] The campaign to "turn the Hiawatha Golf Course into a public cruising ground and food forest" has a twitter account and online manifesto. The first run of 3,000 stickers is sold out (proceeds); the origin of the yard sign photographs; the signs are starting to be noticed.
posted by Wordshore at 9:26 AM PST - 24 comments

David Cain of Raptitude (previously, previously, previously) has blogged for over a decade about his efforts at improving his life, including several structured experiments around "A place for everything, and everything in its place", meditation, exercise, and more. This year, Cain received an ADHD diagnosis and wrote: "One of the bigger bombshells was realizing that this mystery issue is the whole reason this blog exists. Raptitude has been my response to living with ADHD and not knowing it." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 3:57 AM PST - 72 comments

Lindsay Ellis goes on The Financial Diet to talk about the financial aftermath of being canceled “There were so many people who were waiting for the excuse to topple me.” [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:14 PM PST - 115 comments

Stephen Sondheim's least-performed (and perhaps most ambitious) musical Pacific Overtures [Wikipedia] premiered on Broadway in 1976 and ran for 109 performance and won two of the two Tony awards it was nominated for. The original production and cast was filmed and shown on Japanese television. It is also on YouTube [2h20m]
posted by hippybear at 7:13 PM PST - 17 comments

The KIMONO Project of Imagine One World for the Olympics.
"The project consists of 213 handmade kimonos, inspired by each country’s culture, history and scenery. Each kimono is created by a different artist or studio using traditional handweaving and dyeing techniques." [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:33 PM PST - 30 comments

#WomenMakeSF is a project by Dr. Amy C. Chambers, where she intends to watch and review every feature film, short film and TV show created or co-created by a woman. She introduced the project in the blogpost Women Make Science Fiction: Gender is not a genre. There's also a podcast, cohosted by Dr. Lyle Skains, with eight episodes so far, which are most often discussions between Drs. Chambers and Skains about a small set of movies and a related topic. They have had two guests, Katie Heffner in a conversation about women in SF fandoms, and Cheryl Morgan, discussing trans representation across different forms of science fiction.
posted by Kattullus at 1:43 PM PST - 7 comments

Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, hero of Portugal’s return to democracy, has died. [FT obit: archive version]
posted by chavenet at 1:16 PM PST - 7 comments

096
posted by y2karl at 11:34 AM PST - 10 comments

In today's confusing news, Philip Morris wants cigarettes banned.
posted by Slinga at 9:13 AM PST - 49 comments

The Climber - Adam Ondra. The Hurdler - Dalilah Muhammad. The Swimmer - Simone Manuel. The Gymnast - Sunisa Lee. Four visual decompositions of what these amazing Olympic athletes can do.
posted by storybored at 6:15 PM PST - 6 comments

AMA on Reddit by a thief pouter breeder. National Geographic article on thief pouters. (archive copy) [more inside]
posted by xdvesper at 6:03 PM PST - 4 comments

After I heard about him, what really piqued my interest was when I saw that Orville Peck (Who Is Orville Peck? Toronto Star, Apr 2019) had done a cover of Bronski Beat's gay anguish anthem Smalltown Boy. The next video I watched was the myth-deconstructing No Glory In The West. And after that was a surprising cover of Bobbie Gentry's Fancy. I mean, who is this guy? {Orville Peck is (Essentially) Telling You the Truth, Billboard, Dec 2020) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:45 PM PST - 19 comments

A retrofit of the sidewalk railings on the Golden Gate Bridge last year has caused the bridge to "hum" when wind conditions are just right (much to the annoyance of neighbors). Musician Nate Mercereau has responded to the complaints by creating several duets with the bridge. He explains his process in a Facebook post.
posted by agatha_magatha at 8:58 AM PST - 19 comments

The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism. A newish wave of sophisticated, adult board games have made exploitation part of their game mechanics. A reckoning is coming. "Puerto Rico is the only game I ever turned down even a single trial play of, because of a literal curl of my lip in distaste as I was being taught the game."
posted by Major Clanger at 3:37 AM PST - 121 comments

What Birmingham Roller Pigeons Offer the Men of South Central [more inside]
posted by scruss at 12:55 AM PST - 7 comments

The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? A long-form essay from the San Francisco Chronicle. [more inside]
posted by subversiveasset at 7:35 PM PST - 29 comments

Don't trust Bigipedia (previously)? Want something more trustworthy and less physically possible? Look no further than The Museum of Everything, the eighteen-episode comedy audio sketch series with a dash of magical realism - so don't sweat the impossibility of a provincial museum just off the M3 that's curated by Tom Waits and contains literally everything (except maybe Badgerland (animated episode 3)). Well, not until you get to the... GIFT SHOP. (aaahhh...)
posted by BiggerJ at 6:09 PM PST - 3 comments

Jerusalem Demsas on progressive obstructionism which prevents Democratic-run states like California from building infrastructure and housing, making them outrageously expensive. "I thought that I was going to ride the Purple Line [a project that's been delayed for 20 years] when I was in high school. And that never happened. And people are really mad. So you have a situation here, where a very few people have managed to proffer up a bunch of facially neutral, race neutral, class neutral, explanations for why it’s a bad idea to build a public works project. And at the end of the day, the people who have suffered the most are domestic workers who are taking multiple bus lines, or having to figure out other ways to get to work every single day. And they’re bearing the cost of all of that." [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 5:23 PM PST - 21 comments

After Hand Tool Rescue restored a "grip anything" fractal vise, everybody got into it. Nebraska-based artist Steve Lindsay has been working on a modern metal one for six years. You can put a downpayment on one for yourself, but he doesn't know how much it'll cost when it's done.
posted by clawsoon at 4:44 PM PST - 27 comments

Did You See What the Liberian Olympic Team is Wearing? [SLNTY] "Mr. Clemens is a Liberian American designer who founded his own company in 2004 with the motto, “Not for you, for everyone.” He was creating deconstructed unisex basics aimed at subcultures long rejected or neglected by the establishment fashion world long before diversity was an imperative and gender fluidity a movement, and has always been more interested in building a modern community than catering to the status quo. [more inside]
posted by duien at 2:56 PM PST - 12 comments

Joan Macdonald has not always looked like a bodybuilder. At 71, she weighed 90kg (14st 4lb), and had rising blood pressure and kidney troubles. She was also on medication for cholesterol and acid reflux, and her doctor wanted to double the dose. Her daughter, Michelle, expressed Macdonald’s dilemma bluntly. “You’re going to end up like your mother did in a nursing home!” she told Macdonald. “And people are going to have to look after you. Do you want that?” “Of course I didn’t want it,” Macdonald says now. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.” A Guardian short profile of a woman who started lifting weights at 71. (Content warning: seems not great about health at any size.)
posted by Bella Donna at 1:49 PM PST - 19 comments

Desert Center, CA is that line on I-10 signs that you never exited to see. From the highway, it's abandoned buildings and oddly-arranged palm trees. There's a lot more to its history and the founder was quite a character.
posted by bbrown at 1:47 PM PST - 7 comments

Tom Jackson’s Postcard From the Past Twitter feed features old British postcards with captions taken from the messages written on the back. A lot of the cards are very funny but I’m not laughing at anyone but myself. It’s our own lives that are written on these cards … It strikes me that the past is funny and odd and serious and heart-breaking and packed full of people who feel a lot like us. Jackson also hosts Podcast From the Past, “the weekly podcast where we discover the memories, mysteries and stories held by postcards that for some reason we never threw away. Each time, host Tom Jackson – the creator of the Postcard From The Past twitter feed and book – welcomes two guests to the studio to share their cards and tell their stories.”
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Looking at soil life on its own terms: adding tiny structures to soil to capture processes that rely on the physics of small. Great stuff for seeing something that surrounds us but is impossible to see unaided. There's a lot of soil research that has started with taking samples of the top 15cm and shaking it up in water, which is the only way to reliably grow *some* things, but we know kills others. How to see how others really live?
posted by clew at 10:58 AM PST - 11 comments

And in this round of the Professional Sports Teams With Racist Names Choose New Names Draft, for the 2022 season and onward, the Cleveland baseball team selects "The Guardians." Atlanta, you are on the clock.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:23 AM PST - 97 comments

Silly book cover spoofs.
posted by chavenet at 7:58 AM PST - 11 comments

"You saw that headline and thought: “This can’t possibly be real.” Alas, it is very much a real thing that’s really happening in America in 2021. The asteroid cannot come swiftly enough."
posted by Slinga at 7:44 AM PST - 28 comments

Emulation is a fascinating area of software engineering... Whilst the rest of world moves onto cloud first, massively distributed architectures, emulation is still stuck firmly in the 20th century writing single threaded C++ of all things. This project was born out of a desire to bring the best of modern design back to the the future of ancient computing history. [more inside]
posted by antiwiggle at 6:39 AM PST - 25 comments

"The FTC’s endorsement of the rules is not a surprise outcome; the issue of Right to Repair has been a remarkably bipartisan one, and the FTC itself issued a lengthy report in May that blasted manufacturers for restricting repairs. But the 5 to 0 vote signals the commission’s commitment to enforce both federal antitrust laws and a key law around consumer warranties - the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act - when it comes to personal device repairs."
posted by mhoye at 6:35 AM PST - 34 comments

Did you realize you could have a whammy bar for your Clavinet? After stumbling across Lachy Doley's cover of Voodo Child on such a contraption, I found a little bit of information about it (more music links on that page) and Doley's own look inside his instrument.
posted by Harald74 at 3:59 AM PST - 21 comments

“A lot of people don’t like Gordon, who is haughty and rude, but I feel an affinity with this train because the contempt in which he holds all the other trains on the Island of Sodor comes very close to matching my own.” An overview of the characters featured on the Thomas and Friends Storytime podcast. (SLGuardian)
posted by kyleg at 9:05 PM PST - 41 comments

Cockatoos in Australia Are Teaching Each Other How to Loot Trash Cans [Science^alert] "Before 2018, the results show these bin-opening skills of cockatoos were confined to just three suburbs of Sydney, each separated by quite a lot of distance. Yet after 2019, the technique had rippled out to 41 surrounding neighborhoods as well." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:00 PM PST - 33 comments

Ryan adopts street cat Choonsik. Korean mega-messaging app KakaoTalk's most popular character is a lion who looks like a bear because he has no mane (he's a bit insecure about his short tail as well). Who are the Kakao Friends? [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:24 PM PST - 5 comments

Cybathlon is an international multi-sport competition that pairs disabled athletes with teams of scientists, engineers and researchers, inspired by the long-term goal of making everyday life more accessible for disabled people. [more inside]
posted by Erinaceus europaeus at 1:24 AM PST - 6 comments

Nick Rhodes & Wendy Bevan Release Second Album Of Four-Part Series [Top40-Charts.com] Astronomia is a 52-song, 4-volume project being released as 4 albums. Astronomia II: The Rise Of Lyra [YT Audio playlist] came out on June 20, 2021. It can be heard (or purchased) on these online services. (Previously: Astronomia I) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:13 PM PST - 4 comments

Through long talks with Jason about the meaning of life, the nature of God, and how to make people happy, he’d come to see money as plain bad. How could it not be? It enabled organizations and “people who rely on the belief in evil” to do bad things. Armies, borders, possession, ownership—all bad. And not only did money enable what he deemed insane behaviour on a grand scale, the dependence on it, the fear of losing it, the focus on acquiring it wrecked people’s lives and drove them to be dishonest with themselves and others..."And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
posted by Grandysaur at 6:11 PM PST - 203 comments

Previously: how the USSR repurposed high resolution film salvaged from American spy balloons to use on their Lunik 3 moon probe. But then: One day in late 1959 or 1960 ... a crack team of four CIA agents worked through the night in stocking feet taking apart a kidnapped Soviet Lunik spacecraft without removing it from its crate. They photographed every part and documented every construction element, then perfectly reassembled the whole thing without leaving a trace. [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 1:26 PM PST - 27 comments

NYT and Archive.org link (missing the pictures)
posted by praemunire at 12:43 PM PST - 10 comments

Bo Burnham started out as a geeky kid writing parody songs in his room, but the success of his work on YouTube soon launched him into a career in comedy, where he quickly won the respect of comics thrice his age. Three innovative specials and one acclaimed coming-of-age film later, Bo seemed to disappear from the scene for years... only to return in spring 2021 with INSIDE [trailer], a striking one-man/one-room pandemic comedy masterpiece, inventively cinematic in style, which devolves from clever social media parody to incisive sociopolitical critique to dystopian internet horror to a heartbreaking elegy for a dying world as it parallels his own emotional breakdown. Two months later, with six Emmy nominations and a nationwide theatrical release this weekend, there's plenty of Content to chew on -- a full track breakdown, lyrics, commentary, analysis, and beyond. Want it? Good. There's [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:17 PM PST - 56 comments

From when Mary Carillo had to fill in some dead air for NBC while nothing was happening at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, a badminton rant.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:40 AM PST - 33 comments

KMA’s radio housewives "filled the rural [Iowa] airwaves from the 1920s to the 1980s, with recipes, gardening advice, and friendship...They were the early mom influencers. They created a sacred space, a gentle gathering of women’s voices, which had no place in major media outlets. Here, they could be themselves: just women talking to lonely women over the airwaves." Lyz Lenz's Men Yell at Me newsletter considers wives, whiteness, and the construction of midwestern identity: When Women Filled the Air. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 11:14 AM PST - 7 comments

The Boulevard Park Trio: One and Done This obscure Sacramento band's only record embodies the timeless beauty of bored, talented youth entertaining themselves in a hot, flat city in the 1990s. Well researched and detailed newsletter post about the punk scene in Sacramento in the 90's.
posted by josher71 at 9:54 AM PST - 10 comments

Pornhub has just launched a museum guide for classical nudes [TimeOut] but then the Louvre Calls in Lawyers Over Pornhub’s Hardcore Re-Enactments [Daily Beast] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:00 AM PST - 36 comments

Catholic official resigns (Axios) after publication identifies him using legally obtained (and purchased) "anonymized" location data that links him to Grindr and gay bars. The New York Times did a big feature on the risks of this data in 2019 posted here previously. [more inside]
posted by ecreeves at 7:07 AM PST - 71 comments

Chappell and Rispoli, writing for Neimanlab, argue that we should defund the [journalism] crime beat. (With some secondary links to questionable sources and or paywalled stuff.)
posted by eotvos at 5:44 AM PST - 16 comments

Channel 4’s trailer for the 2020 Paralympics sends chills. Previously.
posted by Erinaceus europaeus at 11:57 PM PST - 25 comments

'Is her husband one of us or of those places?' Of those places. 'Kdto!' They had suspected as much. The messenger gave them the address and left. Family began to look for people who knew people in Britain. Calls were made; letters were written: We have our person in this place; can you check on her and give us advice? In the end, family decided to bring Aunty Flower back home: 'Let her be mad here with us.' [more inside]
posted by smcg at 12:48 PM PST - 9 comments

How Singapore built one of the world's largest floating solar farms.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 10:29 AM PST - 20 comments

Next March, the Baltimore Museum of Art is opening an exhibition curated entirely by 17 members of the museum's security team. “Our security officers spend more time in our galleries and living among our collection than any other staff within the institution,” said Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “It is their perspectives, their insights, and their relationships with the art and daily interactions with our visitors that will set the stage for Guarding the Art to be an exceptional experience.” [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 10:27 AM PST - 32 comments

"We know as much about teaching and learning as we do about public health. The difference is most of us don't know how much we know. By the time you finish high school you know what vitamins are, what germs are, and where babies come from. You probably don't know similar basic facts about how people learn and how best to teach them." - Greg Wilson, author of Teaching Tech Together (among other things, and in the blue previously) takes 40 minutes to sum up what everyone in technology should know about teaching and learning.
posted by mhoye at 10:14 AM PST - 17 comments

From the superb California Sun daily newsletter: "At the start of 2020, the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America had roughly 1,700 members. There are now 5,500. The growing ranks have been fueled by a new wave of Hollywood leftists seeking transformational change, including high-profile members such as 'The Big Short' director Adam McKay and Rob Delaney of 'Catastrophe.' Hollywood Reporter interviewed dozens of showbiz workers for a piece titled 'Hollywood’s Socialism Boom.'"
posted by PhineasGage at 10:03 AM PST - 4 comments

At last, I asked: Why send it to me? “It’s like when you feed a stray cat and it leaves you a dead bird on your porch,” Prickett replied. “I sent it to you as a gift. I mailed Foodies to writers I admire and a few musicians. One film director, I think. A handful of lit professors and Weird Al Yankovic. If you got one, it’s because I liked something you wrote. It could be anything from a critical tome to a tweet. In your case, I liked a short story of yours,” he said. “And sorry, but I’m going to have to keep sending yours to your mom. It isn’t a perfect system but it’s the one we have.” On the Trail of a Mysterious, Pseudonymous Author by Adam Dalva [The New Yorker; archive] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:22 AM PST - 10 comments

Learning to Love GMOs. "...many environmental groups have...quietly walked back their opposition as evidence has mounted that existing G.M.O.s are both safe to eat and not inherently bad for the environment. The introduction of Bt corn, which contains a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally insect-resistant bacterium that organic farmers routinely spray on crops, dropped the crop’s insecticide use by 35 percent. A pest-resistant Bt eggplant has become similarly popular in Bangladesh, where farmers have also embraced flood-tolerant “scuba rice,” a variety engineered to survive being submerged for up to 14 days rather than just three. Each year, Bangladesh and India lose roughly four million tons of rice to flooding — enough to feed 30 million people — and waste a corresponding volume of pesticides and herbicides, which then enter the groundwater." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 7:13 AM PST - 51 comments

This ode to the husk (Twitter thread) will take you back to a simpler time. The 90s - when young and old alike venerated the husk.
posted by signsofrain at 10:12 PM PST - 120 comments

GM Will Suck Lithium From the Salton Sea to Make Batteries [Autoweek] "Controlled Thermal Resources will pump hot, salty water from deep below the Salton Sea and extract the lithium from it, along with clean thermo energy at the same time. Cleaner water goes back into the Salton Sea and the ground beneath it. It’s a win-win." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:52 PM PST - 34 comments

While other billionaires seek to leave the mess they made back on Earth by riding on space fantasies, Jean-Louis Brenninkmeijer escapes in miniature: a $24-million miniature Canada in HO scale.
posted by jjray at 8:01 PM PST - 39 comments

Why we're blind to the color blue. I'm always in the market for surprising facts. One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye. It's hard to believe since it appears that we see blue clearly, but it's astonishing when shown an example.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:34 PM PST - 64 comments

Is your team working within a Scrum framework? Is it not working for you? Do you feel micromanaged, overworked, overwhelmed with meaningless meetings? Your team might be using Scream. The Scream Guide explains all. [more inside]
posted by cosmic owl at 1:26 PM PST - 87 comments

"Need a fun way to learn about computational text analysis for digital humanities?" Well, "we should tell you about The Data-Sitters Club, how it works, and who we are. It all started one day when Quinn Dombrowski was on vacation in Las Vegas and started getting nostalgic about Ann M. Martin’s iconic series about girlhood in the upper-middle-class American suburbs of the 1990s." Start with "Quinn's Great Idea" to read a series of colloquial narratives chronicling research using the Baby-Sitters Club corpus. For example: Curious about what we can learn from the series's formulaic "Chapter 2" duplications?
posted by brainwane at 11:28 AM PST - 10 comments

Lost Tables and its companion site Lost Dishes chronicle the history and recipes of influential and iconic former restaurants in the St. Louis, Missouri area, complete with oral histories, photographs, and menus.
posted by jedicus at 11:02 AM PST - 18 comments

Reality TV Has Remade Our Politics. But Just for One Party. (slPolitico)
posted by box at 6:55 AM PST - 47 comments

Is Netflix's distribution model changing the content of what we watch? (Peter Labuza, LA Times; archive link). Labuza writes that "giants such as Netflix are positioned to control which films get made and how, without necessarily following the preferences of consumers." [more inside]
posted by kingoftonga86 at 6:21 AM PST - 38 comments

The Subversive Joy of Lil Nas X’s Gay Pop Stardom NYT Magazine cover story (long read) by Jazmine Hughes. "A peek into a hot boy summer filled with new highs, disappointment and growth." Archive link.
posted by hippybear at 9:51 PM PST - 14 comments

Nobody Wants To Be a Serf Anymore [more inside]
posted by queen anne's remorse at 2:37 PM PST - 115 comments

Spyware sold to authoritarian regimes used to target activists, politicians and journalists, data suggests. Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak. The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:30 PM PST - 59 comments

“Imagine a world in which nature is intertwined with the industrial: giant lotus flowers replace concrete skyscrapers; an urban forest forms a city constantly in shift through a tree’s life cycle. This is the imaginarium of Belgian architect Luc Schuiten. To discover his work is to fall under the spell of a colourful cosmos, where architectural blueprints are swapped for visionary storyboards that invite the viewer to dive into his utopian dreamscape.”
posted by ob1quixote at 8:38 AM PST - 7 comments

Want to make greeting cards and signs from your very own computer like you would have in 1986? theprintshop.club emulates an Apple II running Broderbund's original release of The Print Shop in your browser, and when it prints out, generates a PDF you can then send to your printer!
posted by JHarris at 2:46 AM PST - 43 comments

Here is the story:

Even though the Japanese have eaten raw fish for centuries, the famously orange salmon was not a common sight in this dish until very recently. The Japanese simply did not consider their Pacific salmon clean enough to eat raw.

But is it true? The Great Salmon Sushi Conspiracy [SLYouTube, 15:36, has a commercial you can skip past pretty easily] [more inside]
posted by CCBC at 12:37 AM PST - 41 comments

"17 people sent me this and all 17 of them were right to do so." [Twitter link with embedded video] Full project information here. Assembly video (for those who choose to go so far).
posted by hippybear at 8:50 PM PST - 50 comments

In the late 90's and 2000, YTV aired Freaky Stories, an animated series using a diverse variety of art styles to depict 140 urban legends across its 35 episodes. Not all countries to which the show was exported got to see the host segments, live-action puppet sequences which starred a bug and a maggot living in a greasy-spoon diner. Much of the show was lost until the entire run was rediscovered in 2020. Note: contains - hoo boy - death, gross-out humor, insects, spiders... everything they could get away with in a kid's show, basically. And remember: just because they never happened doesn't mean they ain't true! [MLYT]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:34 PM PST - 9 comments

Paste Magazine attempts to list The 50 Best Dystopian Movies of All Time, including some unusual candidates.
posted by eotvos at 3:09 PM PST - 130 comments

RIP Wolfgang Weingart, a designer's designer [more inside]
posted by xtian at 10:28 AM PST - 7 comments

"So the written forms of Greek geometric propositions were not so much something one would learn and copy slavishly as prompts that said: here is something interesting; try it yourself. The Elements was not a dead repository of facts but a support for learning and practice, an invitation to perform for oneself, in the same way that rhetoric textbooks aimed to prepare students for rhetorical performance."
posted by escabeche at 10:13 AM PST - 9 comments

The 1984 single from Tangerine Dream, set to a night time video of the automated Tokyo Yurikamome line from Shimbashi to Odaiba (alternative video, shortened side-view video). The track appeared in the film Risky Business, as well as The Squid and the Whale, Mr Robot, and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Different train video, train composite video.
posted by Wordshore at 4:54 AM PST - 11 comments

Valve has announced the Steam Deck, a handheld PC that will not only be able to play games from Steam, but also anything a computer can normally do. It is due out in December of this year and the base model will sell for $399. Here's a hands on preview from IGN.
posted by FJT at 9:48 PM PST - 66 comments

Ride With Juno As It Flies Past the Solar System’s Biggest Moon and Jupiter [JPL/NASA article, embedded video] "Using the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager, the mission team has put together this animation to provide a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby." Juno Flies Past the Moon Ganymede and Jupiter, With Music by Vangelis [4m, direct link to video on YouTube]
posted by hippybear at 8:44 PM PST - 26 comments

Why Name Signs Matter in ASL Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, five women joined forces with a mission: assigning Vice President-elect Kamala Harris a name sign, the equivalent of a person’s name in American Sign Language. Ms. Gooden, one of the five women who came together for Ms. Harris’s name, said that as the conversation around a possible name sign for the vice president started taking shape on social media, non-Black and non-Indian deaf individuals — mostly men — were leading the dialogue. For the women involved, it was key that Black and Indian deaf women were part of the process, given Ms. Harris’s background. (NYTimes article available from Internet Archive) [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 7:23 PM PST - 14 comments

Rapper/beatboxer Biz Markie (née Marcel Theo Hall) passed today. He was 57. [more inside]
posted by kfholy at 6:49 PM PST - 61 comments

A Quiz
posted by gusottertrout at 1:29 PM PST - 51 comments

The Weird History of Hillbilly TV. "There is the South. But there is also“the South” — the version of our region conjured by television executives. Today, Gabe Bullard takes a hard look at the weird history of hillbilly TV, from Andy Griffith to “Duck Dynasty.”" From The bitter southerner. [more inside]
posted by soundguy99 at 1:09 PM PST - 28 comments

Yes, all mountains are old, but the Appalachian mountains are incomprehensibly old. Have you ever wondered why we don’t find fossils in the Appalachian mountains? The truth is, we do, they’re just not the kind of fossils you might think of—there are no mammals, no dinosaurs, no reptiles. There’s something else entirely. (Single link twitter thread) (threadreader)
posted by Karmakaze at 11:34 AM PST - 86 comments

Why America embraced Whitney Houston, and how it destroyed her. What happens when you stop being America's sweetheart? And who does your voice belong to? Constance Grady for Vox's The Purity Chronicles. [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 10:34 AM PST - 13 comments

In the early 1900s, a strange and wonderful planning fad caught on. It can still help us think about building livable places.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 9:45 AM PST - 15 comments

The truth behind the Amazon mystery seeds “ If someone had wanted to invent a surreal provocation designed to unnerve Americans in the summer of 2020, it’s difficult to conceive of a better one than a deluge of unsolicited Chinese seeds.”
posted by dhruva at 9:05 AM PST - 68 comments

Kamil had received a phone call; by the end of it, he looked ashen. He left the office in an agitated state and headed downstairs. His colleagues ..saw three men load Kamil into a car and drive off...Two days later, three police officers drove Kamil home..They emerged with Kamil and his laptop, and drove off. Munire returned home to find their apartment turned upside down... Kamil’s books and papers lay scattered everywhere. China has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs, along with thousands of individuals from other Muslim minority groups, and undertaken a campaign of forced sterilization against Uyghur women. The U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands have officially recognized the crisis as a genocide.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:06 AM PST - 34 comments

After 2 years and 9 months, Eric Kleptone's tetraptych is finally available in full. Clocking in at 8 hours, 18 minutes the combined OV ER LO AD is a mashup magnum opus that will be difficult to beat. [more inside]
posted by Molesome at 4:09 AM PST - 23 comments

The person who paid $28 million to join Jeff Bezos on a trip to space is unable to do so because they are busy, the private rocket company has announced.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:41 PM PST - 128 comments

[?]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:20 PM PST - 34 comments

Digital preservationist David Rosenthal suggests that the U.S. government has been slacking in its response to ransomware and should take more active measures. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 10:36 AM PST - 48 comments

Long read from Heated: After 18 years of life in the world’s fifth most climate-vulnerable nation, Baig sees her family’s predicament for what it is: not just tragedy, but profound injustice. Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, and yet has been forced to bear the brunt of the world’s carbon crisis. “I’m angry about it. I’m sad about it. I don’t know how people have the audacity to prioritize money over humanity,” she said. And she can’t help but wonder if this would have happened if America—which has put more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation—had felt these impacts first. The battle for a livable future is a battle against fossil fuels, writes Emily Atkin, and right now, it's all hands on deck. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:19 AM PST - 32 comments

The condition — officially called "cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome" but now known to health care workers as "scromiting," — has popped up with increasing frequency at hospitals in Colorado
posted by sammyo at 9:09 AM PST - 90 comments

“Neuroprosthesis” Restores Words to Man with Paralysis [UCSF article] tells of using computer-brain interface to think words for communication by people with speech loss. 21st Century medical breakthrough doesn't feel like an overstatement.
posted by hippybear at 9:00 PM PST - 17 comments

With Myst, the most enduring product of the great 90's multimedia kick, having recently been re-re-re-remade, why not go in the other direction and play the officially tolerated Apple II demake (demaker's Twitter)? You'll need this in-browser emulator. This is Myst so of course there's tips and notes below the fold. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 8:04 PM PST - 11 comments

‘Welcome 2 America’: The Oral History of Prince’s Lost Album [Rolling Stone; archive]
posted by chavenet at 3:11 PM PST - 21 comments

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Melismata at 2:10 PM PST - 110 comments

He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong. (Wired)
posted by backseatpilot at 12:44 PM PST - 29 comments

Women’s gymnastics was created to be a feminine sport, and the femininity that it promoted was the white, Eurocentric kind. As the sport progressed from its very white, very dancey origins and increased in acrobatic complexity, the WTC and FIG held fast to a certain set of self-consciously feminine artistic ideals that were seen as being at odds with the more athletic components of gymnastics.

Dvora Meyers writes about why Simone Biles seems to be constantly low scored and how that fits in with the history of Women's gymnastics and its scoring system.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:17 PM PST - 25 comments

Deadpool and Korg (Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame) do a reaction video for the trailer for a movie called Free Guy, starring a couple of guys named Ryan Reynolds and Taika Waititi. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:54 AM PST - 26 comments

Who Owns Mike Disfarmer's Photographs? Strangers made his small-town portraits famous in the art world. Decades later, his heirs want control of the estate. (SLNew Yorker)
posted by box at 10:17 AM PST - 21 comments

Guardian: “The most surprisingly contentious subject? Toilet roll orientation.” Daily Mirror: “Perhaps you've ended a relationship or even disinherited a family member based on their toilet roll orientation.” The related Wikipedia page, the cat complication, Christmas ruined and some science. What to do if faced with this problem? Toilet paper facts e.g. “Seven percent of Americans steal rolls of toilet paper in hotels or motels.” MetaDebate: clockwise or counter-clockwise? MetaNostalgia: Izal and Bronco: shiny side on cheeks or away from cheeks?
posted by Wordshore at 5:18 AM PST - 129 comments

The dominant age cohorts today are people who came of age after the Soviet collapse. Their experience of “the Revolution” is one of interminable shortages and unfulfilled promises for reform. Fidel and Raúl Castro, whose prestige as regime founders bolstered popular support among older Cubans, are gone, replaced by a new generation of leaders who have to prove their right to rule by performance. They have to deliver the goods, literally, and so far, they have not been able to do it. [The Nation] [more inside]
posted by riruro at 8:15 PM PST - 49 comments

The Art of the Romanian Haystack
posted by bq at 6:31 PM PST - 15 comments

It’s Summer 2021, and here’s another roundup of weird audio dramas! There is some good stuff coming out of Toronto these days, notably Hi Nay and Parkdale Haunt. They may help you spend time while isolating, doing chores, or waiting for some quarantine or other to lift. As usual, this will focus on paranormal ongoing stories as opposed to Science Fiction or Fantasy dramas or anthologies of short stories, with or without framing elements, for the most part. Feel free to disagree with the decisions. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:06 PM PST - 12 comments

In a 2005 experiment, psychologist Petter Johansson and his colleagues presented each subject with two photographs of women’s faces and asked which they found more attractive. In each case the experimenter then presented the “chosen” photograph and asked the subject to explain their choice. But in fact, using sleight of hand, the experimenter had exchanged the photos and was presenting the one that the subject hadn’t picked. from Futility Closet
posted by chavenet at 11:59 AM PST - 57 comments

Let's assume you'd like to get better at a skill. What role does learning tacit knowledge play in growing your expertise? "Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’. A series of blog posts by Cedric Chin summarizes education research and "explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition" - including a summary of an approach for eliciting tacit knowledge from experts. Some really interesting anecdotes here about Toyota, judo, bike-riding, recognizing tennis serves, and more.
posted by brainwane at 11:23 AM PST - 32 comments

Why would declining to prosecute people for low-level crimes also reduce other types of crimes? The study, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the key is keeping folks out of the criminal justice system. Doing so reduced the odds by 58 percent that these folks would engage with that system in the future. ... I decided to call up the three authors of this study to see what they felt were the implications of their research on this policy. It turns out they were as pleasantly surprised by the results as I was. David Byrne writes about US counties and cities that have stopped automatically prosecuting minor nonviolent crimes and seen overall crime go down.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:08 AM PST - 28 comments

What happens when people constantly upgrade love? NY Times author Kelly Sundberg is tired of "flipping men": bonding with men who then immediately dump her and commit to others. This seems especially cruel for those who have been with someone during a sickness, unemployment, or during a rough time. The shopping/upgrading mentality might have some roots in capitalism: everything is a market, why not love? Modern dating and relationship games seem to beat the hope out of decent people.
posted by Freecola at 9:11 AM PST - 66 comments

You may already have seen reports about ticketless fans breaking into Wembley Stadium for the Euro 2020 final last Sunday – what was initially claimed to be "a small number of people" later turned out to be a "large number" causing "absolute bedlam" – but you will find a lot more disturbing details in this in-depth report by Sports publication The Athletic (non-paywalled version at archive.is). [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 7:15 AM PST - 97 comments

Listen. Matthew Inman has something to say about wombats and their weaponized hamslammers. (SL The Oatmeal) [more inside]
posted by Thella at 12:49 AM PST - 36 comments

The short-lived 1982 TV series Police Squad!, which parodied M Squad and other cop shows and was eventually reborn as the Naked Gun movies, isn’t officially available for streaming anywhere. It is on this one dude’s YouTube page, though!
A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise) 🚨 Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment) 🚨 The Butler Did It (A Bird In the Hand) 🚨 Revenge And Remorse (The Guilty Alibi) 🚨 Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood) 🚨 Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh)
Dated in spots, but blessedly free of wife murderers.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:18 PM PST - 107 comments

The Epically Terrible Star Wars Holiday Special: An Oral History via LitHub
posted by chavenet at 9:46 AM PST - 83 comments

Edwin Edwards, the charismatic, famously corrupt four-term governor of Louisiana -- the man who soundly defeated David Duke, Grand Wizard of the KKK* -- has passed away at the age of 93. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 9:37 AM PST - 24 comments

The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine? Walker explained that, for most people, the “quarter life” of caffeine is usually about 12 hours, meaning that 25% of the caffeine in a cup of coffee consumed at noon is still circulating in your brain when you go to bed at midnight. That could well be enough to completely wreck your deep sleep. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 7:45 PM PST - 231 comments

Is it possible to complete Super Mario 64 blindfolded? Not only is it possible, it's a speedrun category, as recently demonstrated by Bubzia at SGDQ 2021.
posted by JHarris at 5:52 PM PST - 17 comments

Apple Bottoms was a fashion brand for callipygian women's jeans launched by the rapper Nelly in 2003. The brand proved to be popular with hip hop artists, who name dropped the brand in songs such as MC Jin, 36-24-36, Twista, Overnight Celebrity, and Flo Rida's Low. The brand stopped advertising in 2010, but Flo Rida's 2007 hit Low has unexpectedly proved to be the most influential in raising the profile of the jeans outside the hip hop community, after YouTuber JoedEcher posted a 25-second video of Apple Bottom Jeans by Louis Armstrong. Since then, covers of Flo Rida's Low (retitled "Apple Bottom Jeans") done in the style of different rock groups have become a new meme, as Nelly teases reviving his jeans once again. [more inside]
posted by jonp72 at 2:01 PM PST - 34 comments

Paul F. Tompkins says: This is the place to let me know if any other food-shaped vehicles that you know of
posted by cortex at 1:55 PM PST - 18 comments

In addition to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list/data visualization (previously), there's the "world heritage post" Tumblr account which reblogs "the most iconic tumblr posts, new and old." Not yet (as far as I know) affiliated with UNESCO. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 1:14 PM PST - 22 comments

The obesity epidemic is deeply weird. For example: lab animals are getting fatter, even if they're eating the same diet that animals were fed decades ago. People living at higher altitudes are significantly less prone to becoming overweight than people who reside at lower elevations. [more inside]
posted by alex1965 at 10:01 AM PST - 153 comments

Deer Queer Dancer [15m24s] follows two queer couples as they compete in the World Latin Dance Cup. Queer Joy and Dance Joy Unite! [Possibly region blocked, sorry] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:14 AM PST - 2 comments

The Michigan Republican Who Decided to Tell the Truth. A profile of Ed McBroom, a Michigan state senator who led an eight-month investigation into the legitimacy of the 2020 election in Michigan, concluding that the allegations of fraud were nonsense. "Soon after the report was released, Trump issued a thundering statement calling McBroom’s investigation 'a cover up, and a method of getting out of a Forensic Audit for the examination of the Presidential contest.' The former president then published the office phone numbers for McBroom and Michigan’s GOP Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, urging his followers to 'call those two Senators now and get them to do the right thing, or vote them the hell out of office!'" [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 8:06 PM PST - 41 comments

Back in 2019, Molly Conger woke up early to provide a detailed twitter thread on the history of monuments in Charlottesville. It provides a fascinating bit of context as the Confederate statues of Lee and Jackson are finally removed from the city's public spaces. [more inside]
posted by mark k at 7:29 PM PST - 11 comments

The numnum cat just wanted some milk. The Kiffness, however, thought better of it. And then people joined in. [more inside]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 5:02 PM PST - 18 comments

Everybody knows that improving the 2016 Super Mario Bros. non-tool-assisted speedrun record was physically impossible. What this documentary breakdown of SMB speedrun progress since then presupposes is: maybe it wasn't? [more inside]
posted by cortex at 11:27 AM PST - 11 comments

While not as chonky as certain brown bears, hummingbirds have their own summer of gorging... on nectar 🌺 & insects 🕷️ in order to double their weight as they prepare for their fall migration (and feed their young in sometimes precarious nests). Males head south as early as mid-July, with females leaving next, and finally the young who migrate for the first time all alone. The Rufous may migrate as far as from Alaska to Mexico. Citizen science site Journey North has this year's migration news, as well as a time-stamped map of sightings.* [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:14 AM PST - 15 comments

After consuming magic mushrooms in Basel, Switzerland, I ran into Albert Hofmann, the chemist who catalyzed the psychedelic era. ... In his writings, Hofmann occasionally divulged misgivings about having brought LSD and psilocybin into the world. In a letter in 1961, he compared his discoveries to nuclear fission; just as fission threatens our fundamental physical integrity, he said, so do psychedelics “attack the spiritual center of the personality, the self.” Psychedelics, Hofmann fretted, might “represent a forbidden transgression of limits.” [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 11:14 PM PST - 28 comments

In under thirty minutes, Scream It Off Screen (previously with website and YouTube channel links _{website features an image of the event's host in a milk bath - should have mentioned that last time, honestly}) will stream their next short film contest of chaos, with the audience voting on whether each of fifteen completely randomly selected short films plays to completion, and which of those that fully played wins the Big Nasty Prize of $101.01. But this time, click 'more inside' for a full list of past winners (and second, third and notable next places where listed on the website and Facebook page), with links to watch them wherever possible - all no more than fifteen minutes long. (Warning: films may include blood, violence, non-sexual nudity and who knows what else.) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:11 PM PST - 6 comments

To celebrate his 65th Birthday, actor Tom Hanks took a 60-minute turn on the Internet wheels of steel at lovely little oldies/classic rock web radio station Boss Radio 66 (“That Ichiban Sound!”).
posted by Going To Maine at 4:36 PM PST - 7 comments

A piece in Cambridge University's American Political Science Review, Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support is unpacked on Twitter (or ThreadReaderApp) from the version framed in the language of the science journal: there are swathes of the population who aren't loyal to a party but are loyal to White Christian America, who flocked to 'Make America Great Again'. As a friend, how do we talk about "white Christian supremacy versus a fully multi-racial democracy" that would throw away democracy itself? From the tweets: "It draws our attention away from the faction and forces us to 'both-sides' democracy v. anti-democracy." "As long as they can hide behind party labels they are protected by 'bipartisanship' and the both-sides implications of 'polarization' research. It's time to bring this faction out of the protection of party labels and the veil of political civility, and into the discussion."
posted by k3ninho at 3:23 PM PST - 26 comments

Adam Smith to Richard Spencer: Why Libertarians turn to the Alt-Right [SLMedium, 2018] To understand why libertarians are so susceptible to white supremacist ideas, we have to look at the history of it, specifically within the United States. The fact is that libertarianism has always been a refuge of racism and implicit support for authoritarianism, despite direct contradiction to their supposed ideology.
posted by heatherlogan at 1:43 PM PST - 63 comments

A clever Starbucks partner has used white-out to creatively edit and add realism to a corporate message to staff.
posted by adept256 at 12:15 PM PST - 68 comments

The Final Projects from a map-making course at the New School. Also worth a look, map critiques.
posted by storybored at 8:52 AM PST - 8 comments

Zaila Avant-garde is the first African American winner of the Scripps Spelling Bee. She won it after correctly spelling the word "murraya" correctly. She is also the first champion from Louisiana. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 8:51 AM PST - 29 comments

Great Works by Oscar Mardell consists of thirteen poems [four of them here], each about a different freezing works in Aotearoa New Zealand. Satirising the colonial-pastoral mythologies through which the local landscape has often been interpreted, the collection gives due attention to an industry which, in spite of its centrality to the nation’s economic history, has remained conspicuously absent from its art and literature. [CW: slaughterhouses]
posted by chavenet at 8:47 AM PST - 6 comments

Sex educator Justine Ang Fong has been hounded out of her position [NYT] at Dalton, a Manhattan private school, by corporate shill, Richard Berman. [Alternate link]
posted by jacquilynne at 6:52 AM PST - 23 comments

Sometimes, the key to a successful storage medium is its flatness...
posted by butterstick at 5:56 AM PST - 13 comments

Mary Weinrib, born Manya Rubenstein in 1925, survived a forced labour camp in Starachowice, then Auschwitz, and then Bergen-Belsen. She passed away on July 2, 2021. She tells her story in this oral history interview available via the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her son, Geddy Lee of Rush, tells his parents' Holocaust survival story in this 2019 radio interview.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:50 PM PST - 23 comments

Bloom County update: Opus is thrilled that masking has ended, but walks right into something. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:15 PM PST - 77 comments

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Cecil B. DeMille really chews up his own scenery in this archival film via Periscope Video.
posted by loquacious at 8:37 PM PST - 15 comments

City Creatures. A blog from the Center for Humans and Nature about the other species who live among us, to name just a few: mallard ducks, spiders, crabs, waxwings, rats, and the aforementioned turkeys. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:38 PM PST - 17 comments

Financially Hobbled for Life (Free link to WSJ article.) Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans. [more inside]
posted by mono blanco at 5:38 PM PST - 123 comments

The bears are back at Brooks Falls! Just in time to get ready for the big salmon buffet coming over the next several weeks, the brown bears have returned to Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park. [more inside]
posted by azpenguin at 12:29 PM PST - 19 comments

"Finally made myself a little personal portfolio/speaker website, with a nostalgic twist... Which Internet era are you nostalgic for?" Moriel Schottlender's new website is available in several flavors: 1989, plus 1992, 1997, 2000, 2012, today, and future. Check out the future-style credits in particular. (Disclaimer: I know Moriel and worked with her years ago.)
posted by brainwane at 12:22 PM PST - 20 comments

"Why a Mentally Ill Millennial from Missouri is Running for US Senate," Ron Deets in his own words as to why he's running for senate. More Ron Deets on Twitter.
posted by geoff. at 11:23 AM PST - 22 comments

“I wanted to tell my story,” she says, “because I had been written about. Paul had written about the marriage, in separate books. And Louis has written about his parents. As a woman, as someone who isn’t a famous person, I just thought, I want to have my say. I thought, this picture of me as a character in someone else’s books, that’s not me.” Anne Theroux interviewed in the Guardian about her new memoir, The Year of the End
posted by chavenet at 7:36 AM PST - 15 comments

Kristen Roupenian’s viral story draws specific details from my own life. I’ve spent the years since it published wondering: How did she know? Previously, previously, and the original, viral story.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:36 AM PST - 167 comments

Caitlin Reilly's latest short skit is a satirical take of how women are portrayed in scifi movies as one-dimensional workaholics who can't have a personality outside of being a scientist, or her scientist dad's daughter. [more inside]
posted by antihistameme at 5:29 AM PST - 21 comments

Robert Downey Senior, actor, filmmaker, and father of Robert Downey Jr., has died. He was 85. [Variety/Deadline/The Guardian] [more inside]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 4:50 AM PST - 13 comments

Ah, Scotland, so much sightseeing, so much work for tour guides... Would you like a tour of a Scottish distillery? Or perhaps you prefer the thrills of a Scottish stone circle tour? Or maybe an Edinburgh ghost tour? Or perhaps you’d like to visit the Scottish Parliament? An ancient castle? A museum? And how about Loch Ness? [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 3:33 AM PST - 16 comments

Sitting president Jovenel Moise was killed in his home and his wife critically injured. Reports say that a group of heavily armed English and Spanish speaking men posed as DEA agents and entered their private residence. Police claim four assailants have been killed in a shootout. Previously and previously.
posted by molecicco at 11:31 PM PST - 30 comments

Autostraddle's team ponders the existential abyss of IKEA's Pride-themed couches. "terrifying bisexual couch aside, I appreciate that the lesbian one looks inspired by flamingos and urine."
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:24 PM PST - 44 comments

Eric Adams is the Democratic candidate for the mayor of NYC, defeating Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley. In Machine Man, David Schleicher describes Adams's theory of politics as based on coalition-building, rather than ideology or personality. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 5:07 PM PST - 29 comments

Molly Ostertag presents an in-depth and compelling argument that the hobbits' relationship was a romantic one, presented as explicitly as Tolkien felt he could:

It was a conscious choice on the part of “Frodo” and “Sam” to include the many moments when they express love for each other, and it reads much in the same way people from the past delicately referred to their same-sex relationships: wanting to acknowledge their truth while obeying the conventions of the time.

posted by serathen at 1:26 PM PST - 91 comments

Mary Simon has been appointed as the first Indigenous person to serve as Canada's Governor-General. Exquisitely qualified in all but one key respect, she is said to have been on the shortlist the last several times a GG was needed, but has now finally been chosen at a time when Crown-Indigenous relations are particularly fraught.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:45 AM PST - 23 comments

This was the pact I made with my now and future self: to become the most successful writer that it was possible to be. We were supposed to claw to the top together, legends in the making who would interview each other for Vanity Fair. Why, then, were they giving up? An essay on the writing life and dreams of youth. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 9:00 AM PST - 29 comments

Ashenden, or The British Agent is a Somerset Maugham novel published in 1928, loosely based on his experiences during World War I. In 1991 the BBC created an adaptation of four of the stories. [more inside]
posted by wittgenstein at 8:55 AM PST - 14 comments

54 pounds of pure unadulterated kinetic energy, Hank is lucky enough to be fostered by someone (or someone who knows someone) who put together a very appealing website about this very energetic dog with NO BALLS. [more inside]
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 8:52 AM PST - 20 comments

"I hate Original Diana immediately, or at least I want to hate her." "The Failed Dianas" is a short, emotional science fiction story by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld, February 2021) in which our Asian-American protagonist struggles with whether it is possible to make her parents happy. It was P H Lee's favorite story of the month.
posted by brainwane at 8:45 AM PST - 6 comments

Jamie Loftus (noted podcaster on Metafilter) is doing a summer podcast deep dive of the comic Cathy and its social context. [more inside]
posted by thoughtful_ravioli at 6:35 AM PST - 28 comments

Bookforum asks "what forms of art, activism, and literature can speak authentically today?" [more inside]
posted by simmering octagon at 6:16 AM PST - 4 comments

Dingoes are considered a non-native wild dog in Western Australia. A giant fence through the country has been designed to prevent dingoes from entering the state. However, studies have shown that they are effective at controlling the feral foxes and cats that are destroying native wildlife. Now pastoralists who have seen massive benefits from allowing dingoes to return to their ranches are campaigning for a broader restoration program.
posted by rednikki at 1:10 AM PST - 21 comments

Four kestrels were born on an upper level of the Jornal de Notícias [article in Portuguese] building in Porto last week. They were born on a bed of shattered safety glass, but appear comfortable. You can watch them here. [Time is US west coast +8 hours, or GMT +1] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:59 AM PST - 13 comments

Got some pesky free time you want to destroy? Here's three gorgeously overdesigned freeware Windows games from the 00's with an absolutely preposterous number of levels between them: Dr. Lunatic: Supreme With Cheese, the ridiculously large top-down action game with optional vastly largerer fandom-made expansion pack (lotsa info after the jump, including more free games from the dev). Enigma, the also obscenely big Oxyd-inspired marble-rolling top-down action-puzzle game. And the non-mind-bogglingly-huge but still beautifully overdesigned (in its earlier incarnations) Little Square Things - in completely different '19, '08 (also bundled together on Steam) and '01 (browser-based) flavors - a Sokoban-descended puzzle game where there's many kinds of boxes... and you control most of them! [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:42 PM PST - 7 comments

Peeta Peppa and Tony Roni, hosts of the Eats-A-Pizza Show, visit The Sawmill in Seaside Heights, New Jersey to review their famous monster slice. [SLYT]
posted by ob1quixote at 6:33 PM PST - 15 comments

Language Keepers. Episode One introduces listeners to the language revitalization efforts of the Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni and Kawaiisu Indigenous communities in California.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:05 PM PST - 2 comments

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining the faculty of Howard University, creating a center for Journalism and Democracy. Hannah-Jones' has a sharp and clear statement on her new job and her mistreatment by the University of North Carolina. [more inside]
posted by Nelson at 11:32 AM PST - 48 comments

From Laura Paddison in Reasons to be Cheerful: When Karen McGlathery used to swim in the coastal bays off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the water would quickly turn cloudy and brown as sediment swirled around her. Now, 25 years later, for as far as she can swim the water remains clear. ... McGlathery, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, is part of a team running the largest seagrass restoration project in the world in these coastal bays — and one of the most successful. The two-decade-long project is a “blueprint for restoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems,” according to a 2020 research paper, and proof that marine habitats can be brought back to life in a way that’s self-sustaining.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:37 AM PST - 14 comments

Robert Wright, Ode to a world-saving idea: attribution error. "If I had to pick only one scientific finding about how the human mind works and promulgate it in hopes of saving the world, I’d probably go with attribution error."
posted by russilwvong at 9:19 AM PST - 16 comments

Richard Donner, prolific director of Superman, the Lethal Weapon series, and The Goonies (and many, many more) has passed away at the age of 91.
posted by zardoz at 4:35 AM PST - 53 comments

This wasn’t about, say, calling escargot “liberty snails” or a croque monsieur an “Uncle Sam-wich,” although surely someone has thought of that. It was about taking a beloved, ubiquitous staple and putting a nationalist mark on it—not the same culinary colonialism and appropriation of, say, calling chana masala “The Stew” or roti “balloon bread,” or the long-term transition of diners into a symbol of conservative small towns, but an intentional, blatant provocation intended to needle political opponents while saying, “this is ours, actually.”

A history of “Freedom Fries”, the hyperbolic W-era nationalistic rebranding of French fries in the wake of France opposing the Iraq war as a moment in the ongoing American culture war, and a beating of the bounds between the in-group and out-group of “Real America”.
posted by acb at 2:15 AM PST - 105 comments

"When so much of life is mediated through WeChat, stickers become a necessary mask. A way to be visible without committing. Communication without actually communicating." Chaoyang Trap (previously, cofounded by MeFi's Own beijingbrown) delves into "laziness-as-resistance" in China (discussed in a recent New York Times article), the process of making and selling these images, how they differ from reaction GIFs, copyright, woodblock prints, fandom, and more. Related: the poem "This Language That We Share" by Judith Kingston. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 9:00 PM PST - 5 comments

I’m tired of hearing from white men in Hollywood that he wasn’t really a martial artist and just did it for the movies.
posted by Francies at 7:38 PM PST - 65 comments

The story behind the seed genebank, or “doomsday vault,” and how it thrives despite war and displacement.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:35 PM PST - 3 comments

“Somebody That I Used To Know”: A 10th Anniversary Oral History
posted by chavenet at 4:20 PM PST - 47 comments

Stars and Stripes takes an unusual look at the withdrawl from Bagram Airfield. As America pulls out of Afghanistan, their influence is visible not only in the war-torn country and a complicated legacy from nearly two decades of occupation, but also in a number of low-level Pokemon guarding gyms at on-base locations.
posted by jackbishop at 9:25 AM PST - 50 comments

If you're looking for bands, you may be looking for UK's the Go! Team. The 'post-genre' band plays feel-good party music; their latest single (slyt).
posted by kfholy at 7:05 AM PST - 18 comments

Leaving a man isn't easy. This is a collection of letters written to Sugar, who writes back with unrivalled compassion and affirms that our cultural understanding of women’s autonomy isn’t totally in sync with the logistics of 21st century partnership.
posted by antihistameme at 6:48 AM PST - 26 comments

The same word can mean different things in different cultures, "Thongs" in Australian English and British English for example. However seldom has such a difference in meaning had such a dramatic effect as in the launch of Nonce Finance's partnership with a crypto company. For the non-British,"nonce" is a colloquial term used for child sex abusers. This is a useful reminder that you should always check before using a word which may have multiple meanings. Fortunately, cryptocurrency and NFTs are classically famed for only being used for good things and not being at all associated with grift, money laundering and paying for illegal services...
posted by fallingbadgers at 6:14 AM PST - 40 comments

The internet's latest obsession. Can You Figure It Out? KnowYourMeme helps out.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:36 AM PST - 63 comments

The Brooklyn Museum has returned 1305 looted artifacts to Costa Rica, following the 2011 return of approximately 983 pieces. The Museum is returning approximately one third of the 16,000 looted artifacts transferred to the Museum by Minor Keith, an early 20th century railway and plantation owner who co-founded the United Fruit Company.
posted by jedicus at 4:29 PM PST - 16 comments

“You Can’t Actually Blow Up the White House”: An Oral History of ‘Independence Day’ [2021] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:13 PM PST - 31 comments

Idaho Transfer is a 1973 science fiction time travel movie produced and directed by Peter Fonda. [more inside]
posted by wittgenstein at 11:47 AM PST - 22 comments

Musical force of nature Tom Cardy has a helpful suggestion for finding that thing you can't find. [Note: a bit sweary.]
posted by cortex at 11:13 AM PST - 14 comments

It's difficult to describe Bigipedia. Unleashed on the unsuspecting world back in 2009, the two series (eight episodes total) ARE The Internet. You can look up Teddy Bear's Picnic, discover BigiKids, or participate in BigiStreetWatch. You can't escape The Internet! Find links to all 8 half-hour episodes (mp3 format) here! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:02 AM PST - 1 comment

A map of tree cover in any city in the United States is too often a map of race and income. This is unacceptable. Trees are critical infrastructure that every person in every neighborhood deserves. Trees can help address damaging environmental inequities like air pollution. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 9:28 AM PST - 39 comments

Best described on Youtube as a 'generational talent (slyt),' singer-songwriter-sax player Jorja Chalmers has a new album out of covers, some sax related. Jorja has played with Bryan Ferry and others.
posted by kfholy at 6:13 AM PST - 2 comments

Men I Trust are a Canadian dream-pop band with infectious basslines, oblique lyrics, and a sound drenched in swimmy reverb and sunny nostalgia.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:32 AM PST - 6 comments

Matthias Kramm, a demo coder, shows us his setup: a Commodore 64, a monitor, and a 1541 disk drive, all connected together. He show us he's loaded a small program into the drive's memory. Then, he disconnects the computer from the monitor and the drive, severs and strips the drive's cable still plugged into the drive, connects them directly to the monitor with a resistor spliced in, opens and closes the drive's door, and the show begins. The fact that the demo has music without speakers isn't close to the most impressive part of it. There's an overview on his site, which has links to more details.
posted by JHarris at 2:15 AM PST - 49 comments

"The Nonsense Laboratory uses machine learning to let you poke at, mangle, and play with the spelling of words." And: "The tools in the Nonsense Laboratory let you manipulate these letters and mouth movements to make strange and new words... a bit like playing a musical instrument or modeling clay." Five toys: the Mixer ("Mix together existing words to make new meanings"), Mouthfeel Tuner ("Change how text feels in your mouth"), Respeller ("Spell the sound of a text with different letters"), Sequencer ("Invent new words by sequencing mouth movements"), and Explorer ("Investigate an endless field of nonsense"). Led by MeFi's own aparrish.
posted by brainwane at 4:57 PM PST - 7 comments

The 30 Best Action Movies of the 1990s, Ranked
posted by chavenet at 4:01 PM PST - 73 comments

Building new market housing downtown to catch high-income renters - yuppie fishtanks - as a way to keep them from pushing renters out of older working-class residential neighborhoods. As a TikTok video. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 2:37 PM PST - 45 comments

The Myth of the Millennial Aesthetic
posted by backseatpilot at 1:03 PM PST - 31 comments

I said goodbye today to River, who most of you know as Fallout 4’s Dogmeat. Heartbroken doesn't cover it, but I won’t eulogize her here. For twitter, I thought it'd be appropriate to look back at her impact on that game. (plus, writing about game dev hurts less than grieving) [Twitter link] - Game Developer @JoelBurgess explains how knowing a dog changed a video game. Threadreader link.
posted by hippybear at 10:24 AM PST - 21 comments

The fighting on Blocher's Knoll, Barlow's position, is brutal & fierce. 19-year old Bayard Wilkeson, commanding Battery G, 4th US Artillery, is unhorsed by a rebel shell, his leg horrifically mangled. Still directing the fire of his guns, he amputates his own leg with a penknife

One detail that stood out for me from Angry Staff Officer's currently still ongoing retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg
posted by MartinWisse at 10:01 AM PST - 11 comments

We were not superior, we were simply luckier. We were less depressed because we’d had better luck. The machinery of society had operated to our benefit, and we’d been able to do more interesting things. But a lot of us enjoyed feeling contempt for Trump’s followers, just as they enjoyed feeling contempt for us.
posted by latkes at 9:01 AM PST - 77 comments

Texas’s Best Young Accordionists Carry on a Conjunto Legacy. Conjunto is a working-class Texas Mexican music, blending traditional Mexican folk music with the polkas, waltzes, and accordions of the Germans who settled in Texas and northern Mexico in the mid-1800's. At TexasMonthly.com, Roberto José Andrade Franco writes about how the 2020 and 2021 class of young accordion players are coping with the interruption of their lives and aspirations, and how they are carrying on both personal and cultural legacies. (The article has several links to music, interviews, and further reading.)
posted by soundguy99 at 6:22 AM PST - 22 comments

Dark Academia and internet Aesthetics generally have taken over the internet, yet we haven't fully stopped to consider the consequences of this phenomenon. [Youtube]
posted by antihistameme at 10:25 PM PST - 67 comments

Have the audio drama FPPs caused you to ask “but what about weird fiction anthologies? Why do you hate anthologies so much?” Despite 200 episodes of the Magnus Archives , which is, if we are honest, an anthology show with a very robust frame, here is a selection of weird fiction anthology podcasts to while away your hours while waiting for that vaccination. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:30 PM PST - 12 comments

Sarah Miller writes on climate change, two years after her essay "Heaven or High Water" about selling real estate in Miami:

What then? What would happen then? Would people be “more aware” about climate change? It’s 109 degrees in Portland right now. It’s been over 130 degrees in Baghdad several times. What kind of awareness quotient are we looking for? What more about climate change does anyone need to know? What else is there to say?

Previously.
posted by foxfirefey at 11:54 AM PST - 124 comments

Boy Scouts reach $850 million settlement with tens of thousands of sexual abuse victims [NBC, content warning, child sexual abuse] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:06 AM PST - 28 comments

Witches On Tinder
posted by Going To Maine at 10:37 AM PST - 15 comments

Between June 28 and July 10, Deadline for Democracy is encouraging US voters to help get the For the People Act passed by putting pressure on politicians. "Together, we can ensure Americans can safely and freely cast our ballots so that every voice is heard and our elections reflect the will of the people. But every day, we get closer to a very real deadline to take action to pass the For the People Act." Over 80 organizations launched Deadline For Democracy, "a cross-movement mobilization plan for the July Recess to demand lawmakers act urgently to defend democracy and pass the For the People Act by August." The need to protect voting rights became all the greater with yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that Arizona's restrictive state voting law is A-OK.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:08 AM PST - 27 comments

Joseph Reagle briefly makes three recommendations for writers of academic books "wishing to reach a wider audience and transcend common academic conventions and weaknesses": "balancing metadiscourse, pruning names, and sharpening theses".
posted by brainwane at 7:32 AM PST - 38 comments

I Learned How to Cope with Agoraphobia. The Pandemic Eroded It All – Talia Lavin (previously) writes for Vice about having to "face the crippling fears I avoided for more than a year" as the country reopens for “Hot Vax Summer”
posted by bitteschoen at 6:15 AM PST - 9 comments

July 1st, 2021 marks a sea change in college athletics, as the NCAA functionally removes their regulations on the exploitation of name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights, allowing players to finally make money on their own image without risking their eligibility. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:05 PM PST - 9 comments

A month ago (previously), Youtuber Veritasium sailed Blackbird (previouslier) directly downwind faster than the wind. Afterwards, a physics professor bet him $10,000 that it didn't happen. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye weighed in. Veritasium asked Xyla Foxlin to design and build a working model to win the bet. Foxlin (who surprisingly never seems to have been featured on Metafilter) has also built a cedar-strip canoe, built some flame throwing greeting cards, and sent her Miss America crown to the edge of space.
posted by clawsoon at 2:42 PM PST - 150 comments

"We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders." In May, Exxon senior lobbyist Keith McCoy explained to an undercover reporter why the company lied about climate science and sought to kill climate policy for the last 40 years. Yesterday, on June 30, 2021, journalist Lawrence Carter at Greenpeace's investigative arm, Unearthed, published Inside Exxon's playbook, the first of several reports to come. Today, Emily Atkin covers how the sausage got made in her excellent newsletter, Heated. The story has been covered in various outlets, including The Guardian.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:57 AM PST - 60 comments

Elis Regina & Tom Jobim – “Águas de Março” (1974) [more inside]
posted by oulipian at 7:33 AM PST - 28 comments

Elvis Costello Gives Courtney Love a Lesson in How to Deal With Plagiarism Allegations [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:02 AM PST - 52 comments