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New species of dinosaur discovered in Thailand. Researchers say the young creature, which was about the size of a dog, is one of the best-preserved dinosaurs ever found in South-East Asia.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:07 PM PST - 18 comments

For the Love of God, Stop Microwaving Plastic (Wired)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:10 PM PST - 108 comments

The death of the bird app at the hands of Elon Musk leaves designers big and small in the lurch.
posted by Etrigan at 11:50 AM PST - 149 comments

DJ Food has opened for Art Of Noise twice, once in 2018 and again in 2023. In each occasion, he created a sound collage of work from across the AON spectrum. The individual members are prolific on their own, so while the mixes stray far from AON sources, the journey of each of these mixes is surprising and engaging and remains true to the original group. Blessed Are The Noisemakers - Before, Behind & Beyond The Art of Noise [1h36m, 2018] and Blessed Are The Noisemakers (Diversion 2) [1h34m, 2023] are both posted to Mixcloud. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:22 AM PST - 8 comments

Bowiesongs has every Bowie Song, ever, in order. An absolutely monumental work of research that led to two books , Bowiesongs is a collection of links, song analysis, and content about David Bowie, starting with his earliest recorded material. Start here for the chronological beginning, or start with the magnificent Bring Me the Disco King, both a gorgeous song and a clever way to present the moment in Bowie's career, with a set of (spoiler: fictional) interviews in between the analysis. [more inside]
posted by restless_nomad at 10:43 AM PST - 6 comments

Paul Reubens, Pee-wee Herman Actor, dies at 70 after private bout of cancer.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:12 AM PST - 206 comments

Here's your Monday Morning cup of free thread. Fly! Be Free! (Mork & Mindy clip).
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:48 AM PST - 127 comments

Amp technician and guitarist Lyle Caldwell presents a relaxing, 30-minute tour of a typical vintage Fender guitar amplifier. (SLYT)
posted by swift at 6:28 AM PST - 13 comments

The Reuters investigation interviewed a migrant who said that he encountered a group of men taking photos of the scenery while he was on his journey through the Darien Gap. He was shocked when he found out that these were adventure tourists who were there to shoot films and make content. What could better illustrate the sheer entitlement of the wealthy and the increasing lack of moral shame or outrage at the reduction of one group of humans to a subordinate category while others can afford to reduce anything to an “experience” for “making content”? from Passports and Power [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 6:24 AM PST - 33 comments

A complete index to the paper issues of Dragon Magazine. That's it. This is just an index; finding the issues themselves is left up to the reader.
posted by JHarris at 3:03 PM PST - 39 comments

The Zenith Space Command , one of the first wireless television remotes ever to exist, is a monument to a time before we took the remote for granted. It also just so happened to contain one of the most influential and intriguing buttons in history.
posted by brundlefly at 2:34 PM PST - 77 comments

“Subliminal” videos have been popping up on YouTube and TikTok recently that purport to be able to manifest physical changes in appearance and even genetics to match those of East Asians.
posted by ener at 1:54 PM PST - 71 comments

In 1985 , after one album using new technology and generating a market-changing single, three-fifths of Art Of Noise departed the ZTT music label for greener pastures. The remaining duo, Trevor Horn and Paul Morley vowed to continue at ZTT but didn't. The Art & ACT project's [Facebook post about history] manifesto remains yet to be found, but Life's A Barrel Of Laughs [YT playlist ~20m, linktree to various sources], the audio component has finally been released. This is mostly of interest to AON completionists, but it is of interest nonetheless.
posted by hippybear at 11:20 AM PST - 15 comments

Pope Francis is going to be in Lisbon next week for the World Youth Days. To welcome him, artist Bordalo II strolled into the gargantuan and controversial stage still under construction for the main mass, and unrolled €500 banknote replicas for an installation he called "The Walk of Shame" for "the tour of the Italian multinational."
posted by chavenet at 6:11 AM PST - 10 comments

With a freely downloadable, compact ruleset, fast character creation and narratively focused gameplay, Cairn is a low barrier to entry table-top roleplaying game. It's derived from Chris McDowall's Into the Odd and Ben Milton's Knave and is a prime example of the emerging NSR scene. Several dedicated adventures have been produced by the game's enthusiasts. Popular starters include Tannic and Barrow of the Elf King. Alternatively, there's a growing list of conversions of classic OSR modules. Most recently, creator Yochai-Gal has recently made available a playtest of the game's second edition, meaning that there's never been a better time to get on board with the Cairn community.
posted by lovelyzoo at 5:41 AM PST - 17 comments

Australian ant honey inhibits tough pathogens, new research shows. The honey has powerful anti-microbial effects, particularly against certain heat-tolerant yeasts and moulds which resist most current antifungal drugs.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:50 AM PST - 6 comments

Cypress Hill with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra [more inside]
posted by box at 4:47 PM PST - 17 comments

YouTuber oddheader recruited his wife Mrs. odd to review and rank nearly 60 Barbie video games. I played Every Barbie game. HELP ME. (Ft. Mrs Odd) [1h16m] presents them in low-to-high ranking, so it jumps around in time, but grows in quality as it goes on. It's a fascinating and insightful look through the prism that is current rampant Barbie commentary. It's also much less pink than you're expecting.
posted by hippybear at 11:16 AM PST - 5 comments

Can you make an anti-imperial empire game? [Eurogamer] The 4Xperts behind Civilization, Syphilisation and Victoria 3 discuss eXperimental 4X design. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:47 AM PST - 32 comments

Throughout our conversations over the past year, Runner maintained that neither he nor his businesses ever crossed a legal line. Many people, his attitude projected, want to believe in something magical—be it the power of a weight-loss drug or the power of a psychic. And inherent in that belief is a measure of accepted deceit. If that wasn’t the case, Runner insisted, people would have asked for their money back. from The Greatest Scam Ever Written
posted by chavenet at 4:30 AM PST - 17 comments

The 2023 Wife-carrying World Championships were held in Sonkajärvi FI a month ago. "The minimum weight of the wife to be carried is 49 kilos. If she weighs less, she will be burdened with such a heavy rucksack to reach the desired minimum weight.". Watch executive summary [13m YT + results in ShowMore]. MetaPrev 2012. Regular participants Elliot and Giana Storey of Westbrook ME placed 5th. No cheese was injured in these events.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:42 AM PST - 33 comments

Record release of 380 baby seahorses into Sydney Harbour gives endangered species hope. Marine scientists were able to find perfect conditions to raise the enchanting creatures, resulting in three pregnant males producing hundreds of babies.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:25 PM PST - 9 comments

Silent Spring for your wardrobe: Alden Wicker talks about the chemicals lurking in our clothes in an interview on NPR about her new book, "To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick--and How We Can Fight Back."
posted by blue shadows at 7:42 PM PST - 18 comments

ADD, and My Photography or Where the Hell is the Leica? Sure I’ll Play Parcheesi! "All my life until that point, I was told that I was lazy, that I would be a failure in my life, that I had better buckle down and fly right and keep my nose clean. I was a troublemaker, a bad kid. I believed it after a while. I knew there was something wrong with me. No matter how much I would try to “do it” like the other kids, pay attention, take legible notes, and get my homework turned in on time, I was an utter failure at it. Except for photography. That and reading kept me alive."
posted by heatherlogan at 5:17 PM PST - 20 comments

'Groucho Marx and the United Snakes of America' gives a brief history of the case. Interestingly, his brother Harpo was praised by Hoover for smuggling papers out of the former Soviet Union.
posted by clavdivs at 4:36 PM PST - 12 comments

The fall of Zenbly. Australian fitness startup founder seems to have faked his AI PhD from Columbia University, with a fabricated degree certificate and everything. [more inside]
posted by ec2y at 4:13 PM PST - 18 comments

Houstonians pride themselves on how they tolerate heat. This summer, the heat has become intolerable. (ghostarchive.org)
posted by buffy12 at 3:58 PM PST - 63 comments

For the first time ever, the Japan International Birdman Rally will be broadcast live worldwide on Youtube. For this 45th edition of the rally, the human-powered aircraft division will be live in 15 minutes, and the gliders will be live in 23 hours. Commentary will be in Japanese, but you can keep up with International Birdman news in English at the Japanese HPA blog. Enjoy some of the less successful entries from previous years, or Yuri Watanabe's 60km Japanese record from 2019, second only to the world record of 115km, set in 1988.
posted by clawsoon at 2:04 PM PST - 66 comments

It's hard to believe, perhaps even astonishing, that The Naked Civil Servant [1h17m] was shown on British television in 1975. John Hurt's brilliant portrayal of Quentin Crisp in an unflinching film about being nonbinary homosexual in Britain, based on Crisp's 1968 autobiography, propelled both men into immediate fame. Hurt revisited the role 34 years later in 2009 , after Crisp's 1999 death, for An Englishman In New York [1h14m], based on the broad sweep of Crisp's later life in America. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:22 AM PST - 15 comments

Viv Groskop invokes dolls’ breast size as a feature of national stereotypes: "It wasn’t an idea purely of my own invention, aged five or six, but by the late 1970s I had acquired the understanding – by social and parental osmosis – that there was something “off” about Barbie. She was vulgar, American and very possibly a bit up herself. (The very worst things a female, whether doll or human, could be, we imagined.) I realise now that this was all really to do with what these dolls looked like naked: Barbie’s boobs were obvious, pneumatic and borderline pointy; Sindy’s boobs were more demure, subtler, almost self-effacing. Barbie represented something unapologetic and very possibly sexual. Sindy was safe and wholesome." [more inside]
posted by Ballad of Peckham Rye at 7:26 AM PST - 25 comments

The Crane River winds gently through West London, from the vast concrete bulk of Twickenham Rugby Stadium, past the shot tower that is the last remnant of the vast gunpowder factory that lasted from 1776 to 1927 (blowing up 55 times), to the sunken Feltham Circles which are one of the few open graffiti walls in London. If you're lucky on your walk you can see seven species of bats, water voles, kingfishers, adders and eels, tawny owls and glow worms or Muntjac deer.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 6:24 AM PST - 10 comments

Everyday tiredness is nothing like the depleting symptom that people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience. (archive.is)
posted by interbeing at 5:49 AM PST - 48 comments

In some contexts, small-batch production represents high quality and care – French cheeses, Italian olive oil and Kentucky bourbon, for example. In others, it signifies cheapness and inferior quality. Cabo Verdean grogue can possess both elements, leading to highly charged debates over its value. from Inside the grogue wars of Cabo Verde [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:14 AM PST - 12 comments

Common sense for restaurant success is actually the opposite of everything the Cheesecake Factory does. Minimize labor, minimize ingredients, minimize everything. Restaurants are expensive to maintain and trimming excess helps survivability. But everything on the Cheesecake Factory's ridiculous 20-page, 250-item menu is made fresh in the kitchens; except, ironically, the cheesecakes. [more inside]
posted by meowzilla at 12:08 AM PST - 89 comments

How Restaurants Got So Loud (Atlantic, paywall-free, archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 11:35 PM PST - 48 comments

Fat Bottom Girls, country-ish by Remember Monday. h/t to MissCellania [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 9:28 PM PST - 15 comments

“Me and my boys, Tommy, Nate and Jacob are the Outdoor Boys. We love all things outdoors: family projects and adventures, travel, forging, camping, campfire cooking, fossil hunting, magnet fishing, metal detecting, goofing around, etc.” Selected videos: Survival Camping 9ft/3m Under Snow. Camping & Fishing on Floating Cabin Built From Scratch. Dugout Shelter Under 10ft (3m) of Snow. 1 Year in Log Cabin Survival Shelter. Can I Survive Alaskan Winter with No Sleeping Bag, No Tent & No Tarp? No Tent Winter Camping During Snow Storm. Lost in Alaska - How to NOT Freeze to Death! $25 Walmart Survival Challenge. 8 Days Winter Camping & Cooking in Basic Shelter. 13 Ways to Start a Fire (No Matches or Lighter). Winter Camping in Underground Bunker. Bulgarian Bearded Axe Restoration. Winter Camping in Alaska with a Sled Dog Team. How to build a fire in a RAIN STORM! And so much more.
posted by Fizz at 11:58 AM PST - 15 comments

Elon Musk Today. A compendium of Elon’s products and services that have failed to materialize. (Via the always wonderfully ranty Ed Zitron.)
posted by slogger at 10:34 AM PST - 149 comments

She isn't to everybody's taste, but Kathy Griffin has a lot to share. After the Trump Photo Incident* her career stopped cold. She's finally back with sold-out shows in Vegas and a new book. In her conversation with Jen Taub for the Booked Up podcast [1h6m, podcast page link], Kathy shares much about her career and life, including addiction and recovery and struggling to rebuild her career. It's an open and frank and very Kathy Griffin conversation that I greatly appreciated. CW: suicide discussion [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:21 AM PST - 8 comments

The Society’s annual ball is the culmination of eight months of etiquette lessons, leadership workshops, community service projects and cultural events. As the girls take to the dance floor, they become part of a legacy of Black debutantes in the city and beyond.
posted by praemunire at 9:53 AM PST - 4 comments

Deaf rappers who lay down rhymes in sign languages are changing what it means for music to be heard.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:42 AM PST - 10 comments

Shaming: I know what I’m reading. Better than most. Just because I can categorize books as insignificant to the human project of art creation does not mean I can’t enjoy them. And I would never ask a reader to sacrifice one bit of pleasure for the sake of shame. from There’s No Such Thing as a Guilty Pleasure [LARB; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:45 AM PST - 50 comments

"The Santiago Boys launched this weekend! This nine-part podcast, written and presented by Evgeny Morozov (pre•vi•ously, tells the wild tale of how Salvador Allende's engineers and a British management consultant dared challenge corporations and spy agencies – and almost won." [more inside]
posted by kmt at 2:16 AM PST - 5 comments

Low-cost ketamine could help people with severe, hard-to-treat depression, study finds. A cheap version of ketamine commonly used as a sedative might help some people with hard-to-treat depression, research finds, raising hopes that the off-label treatment could become less expensive.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:57 PM PST - 54 comments

Jonathan Frakes Looks Back at His ‘Star Trek’ TV Directing Career, From ‘Next Generation’ to the ‘Strange New Worlds’-‘Lower Decks’ Crossover
posted by Artw at 6:39 PM PST - 34 comments

A South Korean team has published pre-print results on Arxiv. If true, this could be world-changing. Or is it just the next "cold fusion" scam?
Quantum Insider
IFL Science [more inside]
posted by ZakDaddy at 11:48 AM PST - 137 comments

Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56. The acclaimed Dublin performer released 10 studio albums, while her song Nothing Compares 2 U was named the number one world single in 1990 by the Billboard Music Awards. Ms O’Connor was presented with the inaugural award for Classic Irish Album at the RTÉ Choice Music Awards earlier this year. The singer received a standing ovation as she dedicated the award, for I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, to “each and every member of Ireland’s refugee community”. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 11:08 AM PST - 352 comments

Ardra Shephard is a Canadian writer, consultant, and speaker. Her award-winning blog Tripping On Air is about fashion, relationships, and living with disability and multiple sclerosis (MS). [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 11:00 AM PST - 2 comments

South Pole Signage Signs that make you scratch your head. Signs that could exist in a suburban office park anywhere on earth. Signs that can only exist at the South Pole.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 10:33 AM PST - 65 comments

Earl Scruggs [Wikipedia], the renowned banjo player and bluegrass pioneer, began exploring collaborations with musicians from other genres, ... artists like The Byrds, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. This was a bold move for Scruggs, who was known for his traditional bluegrass roots. ... The result of Scruggs' quest to collaborate with these artists was [David Hoffman's] 90 minute primetime television documentary "Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends," which aired in 1972. It showcased Earl Scruggs playing banjo with well-known musicians such as The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Doc Watson and many others.
posted by hippybear at 10:20 AM PST - 12 comments

An obsessive gamer’s guide to chronic pain peripherals [Polygon] “I now live by a common chronic pain axiom called “spoon theory.” Every day, I have a number of “spoons” at my disposal — a measurement of my energy, where each spoon signifies the ability to do one task. Sometimes I wake up with few spoons to spare. Sometimes I overspend my spoons and must live for weeks in recovery, with no spoons at all.” Playing video games used to replenish every spoon in my drawer — it was a restorative, passive hobby like reading or doing a puzzle. But all of these activities have something in common: They involve sitting, crouching, and craning my body for hours at a time. After my back injury, I realized I had to rebuild my idea of rest, and that I needed to factor ergonomics into nearly every aspect of playing games, especially because I have a tendency to get sucked in. [...] Nowadays, I think seriously about the tools I use, and the positions I sit in (or pretzel my body into) when I become obsessed with a game. I’ve assembled some of my favorite “hacks” for gaming with chronic pain. Because chronic pain is an individual experience, your mileage may vary. But these tools and tricks have helped me enjoy playing games in the most pain-free way possible since my injuries.”
posted by Fizz at 8:31 AM PST - 17 comments

Imara Jones and the Translash Podcast capture the story of a trans former NYT staffer. "Hunter" joined the New York Times and thought they found their journalistic home. This podcast, part of a series on the Anti-Trans Hate Machine series, captures how the paper of record seems to have made a deliberate choice to actively court right-wing voices, especially those who peddle disinformation about trans people, which came to a head in April.
posted by foxywombat at 8:30 AM PST - 54 comments

Jezebel magazine explores the history and meaning behind the girliest color ever and declares that The Barbie Pink Rebellion Is Underway. [more inside]
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 7:51 AM PST - 20 comments

The 1990s were a sugary blur of pink and pale green iced tea labels. Here’s the story behind the great effort to normalize (and commercialize) kiwis for an American audience.
posted by Etrigan at 7:49 AM PST - 26 comments

There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code. from ‘A certain danger lurks there’: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI [Grauniad; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:41 AM PST - 28 comments

Tiny forests are springing up in urban areas to combat climate change. This one measures just 10m x 10m. (32.8 feet x 32.8 feet) As the race to find new ways of sequestering carbon dioxide from trees intensifies, Wollongong City Council – with the help of students from Dapto High School – is spearheading the creation of tiny forests.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:10 PM PST - 36 comments

In one of the last long form pieces for The Nib, Tom Humberstone talks about the true nature of the Luddite movement, and how their ideals of machines in service to man continue to resonate today. (SLThe Nib)
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:18 PM PST - 29 comments

Autoenshittification - Cory Doctorow on the auto industries efforts maximize the exploitativeness of your car by turning it into an ink-jet printer with wheels.
posted by Artw at 4:28 PM PST - 68 comments

A Note to My Younger Disabled Self From Gem Turner. Growing into a disabled identity, the power of disabled community, and learning to be proud. Talking about the effects of internalized ableism. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 12:27 PM PST - 3 comments

The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction. In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance? By Will Blythe for Esquire.
posted by JanetLand at 11:19 AM PST - 25 comments

Steely Dan's Schlitz Beer Jingle [more inside]
posted by box at 10:27 AM PST - 73 comments

Neal Brennan's interesting, introspective podcast The Blocks recently had Jay Leno as a guest [1h23m]. Brennan's podcast is focussed around discussing what the guests feel are things that have blocked them, held them back. I found this to be full of insights about Jay Leno that ran really counter to my assumed attitudes toward him, and I appreciated it.
posted by hippybear at 10:19 AM PST - 30 comments

Vast muddy seabeds cover more than 60% of the planet, collectively making them Earth’s largest habitat. At first glance, these frigid, sunless depths all seem more or less the same. Yet the animals that live there, kilometers below the surface, prefer some regions over others, according to a new study. What accounts for their preferences? It’s nothing they can see or sense, the authors say, but an invisible and life-threatening limit imposed by seawater chemistry. This limit demarcates where an important component of many kinds of marine life, calcium carbonate, naturally dissolves.
posted by Etrigan at 6:22 AM PST - 16 comments

The human impact is also evident. In one photo, a tractor drags a white house on a rolling platform through a field. In the foreground, two men in cowboy hats are turned away, as if they don’t want to watch. Their body language is bent, resigned, sad. In another photograph, a couple walk through the cemetery with their backs to the camera. The woman appears to be holding flowers. Soon the graves will be dug up and the bodies moved to a new cemetery ... As the “government men” came in, the demolition sped up. “Catastrophe came to the old Berryessa Valley,” the text reads. “Fires burned. Dust and smoke filled the air.… The valley is black at night.” from Lost Beneath Lake Berryessa [Alta; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:07 AM PST - 12 comments

Vini Reilly on PTSD, life on the streets and the little girl who saved him. "Reilly is incredibly softly spoken. Despite my efforts to catch every word, sometimes the gentle gusts of wind whisk them away. At times he speaks so quietly, it’s as if he has swallowed his words before he can let them out. The twittering birds are louder than our conversation but it creates a moment of blissful synchronicity, recalling one of Reilly’s most beloved, enduring and songbird-punctuated pieces of music: Sketch for Summer. In his first interview in a decade, the Durutti Column’s hermit-like leader, once described as ‘the best guitarist in the world’, relives his extraordinary life from Manchester gangs to Factory Records." [more inside]
posted by Thella at 3:07 AM PST - 9 comments

Grickle is Eisner award-winning artist and animator Graham Annable, featured on Metafilter twice before, that second time by missing, and missed, Mefite oneswellfoop. He worked for Lucasarts and created the award-winning two-game Telltale series Nelson Tethers Puzzle Agent. He's made two books of his frightfully funny artwork, The Book of Grickle and now Eerie Tales From The School of Screams. He has a terrific Mastodon account and a channel of funny/creepy Youtube animations. Favorites: Space Wolf (1:42), The Last Duet on Earth (3:54), The Hidden People (3:27), We Sing the Forest Electric (1:51), The Smartest Dog in the World (4:34), Soup Leprechaun (2:51), Blower (6:13), Pickle Sandwich (3:20), and... Maybellene (2:28, Maybellene was everything, and everything was Maybellene) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:03 AM PST - 8 comments

It's your (late) Monday free thread! [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 10:27 PM PST - 95 comments

The company turning french fries into eco-friendly cling wrap. The plant-based bio-wrap industry is challenging the dominance of petroleum-based plastics, as consumers become increasingly willing to pay for environmentally friendly alternatives.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:41 PM PST - 8 comments

Equip Me OT [Occupational Therapist] Lindsay DeLong has tips galore on using medical equipment at home, diy hacks & modifications, and recommended items for people with mobility & accessibility needs (Youtube & Instagram). For example, the posts on Getting Dressed After a Shoulder Injury and Getting In/Out of Bed After Hip Replacement, and the YT videos How to Sleep in a Recliner (goal is to prevent injury or permanent postural changes to the spine and other joints from prolonged recliner sleep) and How to Shower After a Mastectomy.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:40 PM PST - 13 comments

FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY: With the Kansas City Royals trailing 4–3 in the top half of the ninth inning and two out, future Hall-Of-Famer third baseman George Brett hit a two-run home run off of "Goose" Gossage (also a future Hall of Famer) to give his team the lead. Yankees manager Billy Martin, who had noticed a large amount of pine tar on Brett's bat, requested that the umpires inspect his bat. Home plate umpire Tim McClelland ruled that the amount on the bat exceeded what was allowed, nullified Brett's home run, and called him out. Brett, having already rounded the bases and returned to the dugout, launched himself towards home plate in a rage, requiring his manager and teammates to drag him screaming and cursing away from McClelland... but the story doesn't end there. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 5:09 PM PST - 60 comments

The Plastic Feminism of Barbie [yt] [more inside]
posted by paimapi at 3:59 PM PST - 73 comments

CW: Spoilers! A 1989 song about soul searching has maintained cultural relevance for three decades, but the band has also long been the target of homophobic jokes. Fans are savoring a moment of vindication. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 1:45 PM PST - 52 comments

Maybe you heard the This American Life episode about it. Maybe you saw the Broadway musical about it. Well, the 1997 documentary Hands On A Hardbody [1h37m, Wikipedia] can be viewed on YouTube! Explore humanity through watching people slowly lose their minds as they stay awake for days on end trying to win a truck. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:18 AM PST - 36 comments

Last year's Dutch wheelchair skills contest had me looking for events in my neighbourhood. Many individual contestants have their own videos you can watch, or you can check out the Wheelchair Skills Team website (in Dutch). [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 9:02 AM PST - 5 comments

In the war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian counteroffensive is still going on, but with slower progress than many in the West had come to expect. Professor Phillips O'Brien tries to put it into perspective, and War on the Rocks has some musings on the future of offensive warfare. Respected analysts Micheal Kofman and Rob Lee have visited with the Ukrainian military, and the preliminary conclusion is that they have a number of challenges, including scaling up offensive operations. Their report is not ready, but you can hear some initial thoughts. Russian fortifications including minefields are holding up well to direct attack, and the focus is on reducing Russian combat power with artillery, now using the somewhat controversial cluster munitions provided by the USA. There have been a couple of deep strikes into Crimea, and the hit on a fuel depot caused the full closure of the already-damaged Kerch bridge. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 2:54 AM PST - 349 comments

You just have to mention the words Yahoo boys to a Nigerian and watch their reaction to understand how deeply embedded scammers have become in the national conversation. A lot of people see them as young men who’ve chosen a life of crime, preying on foreigners and marring Nigeria’s reputation ... There’s another side to public opinion, however, one that sees Yahoo boys as young men pushed to the brink by their circumstances. from The Romance Scammer on My Sofa [Atavist; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:52 AM PST - 34 comments

"Agroecology often defines itself as bottom-up learning , and by looking at the bottom and going up through this graph, we can see that this system is an iterative process that begins with farmer experience stewarding land-based and water-based crops, as well as a managing a diversity of animal relationship types and collaborative efforts." [more inside]
posted by Rhedyn at 1:49 AM PST - 5 comments

Maybe this quiet fading, engineered by a company with time and money to burn, is how the union dies. A billionaire who doesn’t want to be called a billionaire, who blusters when his company’s service workers get likened to the blue-collar worker who raised him — this is the chasm between our putative national values and our daily reality. We want to believe in a middle-class America where hard work weaves its own safety net. But millions of workers don’t earn enough money to cover basic expenses.
posted by Toddles at 10:57 PM PST - 49 comments

Larger species of pterosaur had nurturing parental style, new research finds.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:51 PM PST - 5 comments

That Old Seaside Club is a short story by Japanese SF writer Izumi Suzuki, who died in 1986 at the age of 36. As Amanda Demarco explains, her much mythologized life has threatened to overshadow her work, which has only just started appearing in English translation. Genie Harrison writes about the discovery of Suzuki by English-language readers, and so far two short story collections have been published, Terminal Boredom, reviewed by Lee Mandelo for Tor.com, and Hit Parade of Tears, reviewed by Stephanie LaCava for the Daily Telegraph [archive link]. Both books are available from the publisher, Verso Books.
posted by Kattullus at 4:55 PM PST - 4 comments

It stops it in the liver after the infection sets in there. That new mRNA vaccines they developed in the COVID days has now been tweaked to do Malaria. It's still early. Australian scientists developed an mRNA-based vaccine that effectively stimulates protective immune cell responses against the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium in preclinical models. It relies on T-cells that halts malaria infection in the liver to completely stop the spread of infection. (nature.com)
posted by aleph at 3:37 PM PST - 26 comments

Twitter is being rebranded as X - The Verge [more inside]
posted by buffy12 at 2:31 PM PST - 538 comments

Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts [more inside]
posted by latkes at 8:32 AM PST - 39 comments

Music Master Rick Rubin interviewed NIN creator Trent Reznor for his podcast Tetragrammaton. [2h10m, audio only] Nine Inch Nails is Rubin's favorite band. Reznor shares a lot, reflecting on his life and career from where he is now. It's a bit like Marc Maron only more about music and much more gentle.
posted by hippybear at 7:31 AM PST - 26 comments

Funny, smart and far-ranging interview with the creator of Sun-Spider and #BlackComicsMonth and much more on disability (plus!) visibility in comics. "I’ve always loved comics. Like my villain origin story is me basically blackmailing my older cousin who had his little girlfriend come over, and he was supposed to have been watching me, but since he chose to pay more attention to her, I was like “Give me comics and I won’t snitch.” [laughs], and that’s my introduction into comics." (Podcast available as well, interview by Carolyn Hinds)
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:32 AM PST - 2 comments

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding. Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. from The secret movement bringing Europe’s wildlife back from the brink [Coda]
posted by chavenet at 2:23 AM PST - 26 comments

A new wrinkle on the old story of three wishes, set after the end of the world. "As Good As New", by Charlie Jane Anders, published on Tor.com in 2014. "The door to the panic room wouldn’t actually open when Marisol finally decided it had been a couple months since the last quake and it was time to go the hell out there. She had to kick the door a few dozen times, until she dislodged enough of the debris blocking it to stagger out into the wasteland." A short fantasy story with no villain, where two people work together to make stuff. It’s a hopeful story -- with creativity and love and working together and systematic thought, we can turn things around.
posted by brainwane at 8:36 PM PST - 18 comments

Remnants of 2000 year old curry shed light on trade routes and role of spices in ancient civilisations. Analysis of micro-remnants found on a stone grinding tool in Southern Vietnam revealed a range of spices including ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:58 PM PST - 9 comments

Ultimate compilation Cat Jedi-2016. [cw: cat play fighting with lasers]
posted by clavdivs at 5:47 PM PST - 1 comment

Here’s how to do it right.
posted by Etrigan at 4:08 PM PST - 101 comments

Do you think you know what GPT-4 can do? Here is a test. "Many people speak very confidently about what capabilities large language models do and do not have (and sometimes even could or could never have). I get the impression that most people who make such claims don't even know what current models can do. So: put yourself to the test." The beautiful thing about the test is that it will tell you how under/over-confident you are.
posted by storybored at 10:49 AM PST - 72 comments

I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and the treatments that might save me are just out of reach
posted by crazy with stars at 9:12 AM PST - 35 comments

Animation vs. Math [SLYT 14:02] A stick figure does battle with numbers.
posted by lucidium at 8:02 AM PST - 8 comments

New Naratif's two-part deep investigation into children in immigration detention centers and the long struggle to get them free brings hard stats together with the voices of trapped children in Malaysia's hidden camps.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 2:27 AM PST - 2 comments

I decided today that I’m going to see if I can find the restaurant with the highest number of brothers. I am on strike and have nothing better to do with my time. Please join me. Dan Amira is on a goofy quest [Twitter & Threadreader]
posted by chavenet at 2:12 AM PST - 22 comments

On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10 [...] takes 22 minutes between pulses. [...] The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items. John Timmer writes 900 words for Ars Technica.
posted by cgc373 at 7:39 PM PST - 51 comments

This possum the size of a human thumb is helping to pollinate flowers. The western pygmy possum is notoriously difficult to find in the wild, but researchers have found traces of it in Western Australia's Goldfields using a technique they believe could help tackle biodiversity decline.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:29 PM PST - 6 comments

The official press release : "The Department of the Interior announced [yesterday] it will hold the first-ever offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, advancing the Biden-Harris administration’s work to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy by 2030 and reach a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035." [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:22 PM PST - 23 comments

ICYMI, last year, YouTubers Eddy Burback and Ted Nivision took a road trip. They each issued a report: I ate at every Rainforest Cafe in the Country [Eddy, 36m], I Drove to Every Rainforest Cafe in North America [Ted, 30m]. Well, they've done it again! I ate at every Margaritaville in the Country [Eddy, 58m], I Drove to Every Margaritaville in the USA [Ted, 46m]. Madness comes in many forms, but chain restaurants are often involved. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:58 PM PST - 15 comments

Vincent Woo snuck and stuck video camera onto the front of a BART train, and filmed the trip. The result (YT) is an hour and a half long video, set to some low-key music interspersed with narration, interviews, and history.
posted by aubilenon at 2:58 PM PST - 24 comments

The Legendary singer Tony Bennett has died.
posted by clavdivs at 1:10 PM PST - 70 comments

From the Los Angeles Times: Nearly 300,000 women in the U.S. will receive a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer this year. For many, their first instinct upon hearing the news will be to arm themselves with information, Googling, reading and quizzing their doctors in an effort to understand their illness and the best route to recovery. The fact that there are both a range of treatment options and a wealth of information available to patients with breast cancer is due in part to Dr. Susan Love, the surgeon, researcher, author and activist who died Sunday at home in Los Angeles at the age of 75. The cause was a recurrence of leukemia, with which she was first diagnosed in 2012. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 12:14 PM PST - 16 comments

The “Unhinged Bisexual Woman” Novel is a critical review of the novels Big Swiss and Milk Fed and the hetereo-gaze in certain #sapphicbooks" in the socialist feminist glossy Lux Magazine. Writes Emma Copley Eisenberg: "The queer relationships in these books are plot devices meant not to say anything new about queer love or intimacy but meant rather to pit the bisexual or straight-proximate characters against themselves." Referenced in the article is a more hopeful write-up on the sapphic literature trend in 2022. Eisenberg previously on MeFi.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:47 AM PST - 19 comments

Despite Advancements, Games Still Aren't Doing Enough To Stop Toxic Voice Chat by Alyssa Mercante [Kotaku] “I started regularly playing competitive online games in 2007, with the launch of Halo 3. Back then, participating in in-game voice chat was harrowing for a 17-year-old girl whose voice betrayed her gender and her youth. I was subjected to such frequent and horrific hostility (rape threats, misogynist remarks, sexually inappropriate comments, you name it) that I eventually started screaming back, a behavior my parents still bring up today. And yet, voice chat is essential in competitive online games, especially modern ones like Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, and Overwatch. All of these popular games require extensive amounts of teamwork to succeed, which is bolstered by being able to chat with your teammates. But in-game voice chat remains a scary, toxic place—especially for women. [...] I spoke to several women about their voice chat experiences, as well as reps from some of today’s biggest online games, to get a better understanding of the current landscape.”
posted by Fizz at 11:31 AM PST - 23 comments

Activist and photographer Alicia Bruce has documented the residents and landscape of Menie in Scotland, detailing 16 years of Donald Trump’s impact on the area where he built a golf course. Her work honours the community who have ‘refused to bow down, sell up or be pushed around by Donald Trump’. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 11:26 AM PST - 8 comments

FedNow is finally live in the US - TechCrunch
posted by buffy12 at 11:17 AM PST - 17 comments

The whitehouse cautiously supports blocking the suns rays The idea has gone from controversial to mainstream, given the scorching weather this summer in much of the northern hemisphere has global dimming's time come?
posted by specialk420 at 10:54 AM PST - 57 comments

Lois Curtis’ legacy lives on in the people with disabilities whose lives she’s transformed Few people outside of the disability community know Lois Curtis' name. But for those whose lives her Supreme Court case touched and transformed, her impact will never be forgotten. “There is an unapologetic joy and authenticity that shines through in all of the portraits Lois created,” Johnson said. “Artists like Lois inform so much of my work that solely centers on art activism. Uplifting neurodivergent joy and caregiving are important acts of resistance in a society that so often devalues disabled communities.” “I am a person with a vision and a spirit” - Lois Curtis
posted by Bottlecap at 9:37 AM PST - 4 comments

Gary Shteyngart watches three Russian TV channels for five days straight. [Archive] revisiting his 2014 experiment. "On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven; on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:53 AM PST - 21 comments

Todd in the Shadows' One Hit Wonderland retrospective of Aqua's "Barbie Girl"
posted by Pachylad at 8:39 AM PST - 44 comments

How the Seattle Police Department manipulated the media narrative around the 2020 protests
posted by Artw at 7:45 AM PST - 17 comments

But like a dream, the Mellotron’s time was fleeting. Just as it proliferated in psych-rock, what we know as the modern synthesizer was coming into its own ... As the rest of the world turned to burgeoning digital technology in all other facets of life, the clunky, temperamental Mellotron soon became dated. It popped up every now and then on singles, but the last Mellotrons—due to a copyright dispute, sold under a new name—rolled off the factory floor in 1986. from Tape Heads [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:11 AM PST - 26 comments

Fall asleep to the gentle sound of Instagram’s terms of service.
posted by Paragon at 12:49 AM PST - 5 comments

According to his 2002 obituary, Craig Kingsbury was "...a farmer, fisherman, aquatic biologist, ox cart man, butcher, farrier, woodcarver, builder, breeder of exotic poultry, landscaper, longshoreman, able-bodied seaman, teamster, logger, stonemason, husband, father, storyteller and naturalist." He was also hired as an advisor to actor Robert Shaw - who played Quint - during the filming of Jaws, and ended up contributing to one of that film's most notorious moments (SLYT) in his cameo as fisherman Ben Gardner.
posted by misterbee at 9:17 PM PST - 12 comments

Her name is 841. She is a sea otter. Her attacks on surfboards are escalating. She has so far managed to evade capture. Her popularity is growing.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:08 PM PST - 59 comments

An offhand comment in an interview revealed the existence of a piece of rather adult SpongeBob SquarePants lost media - Behind Closed Doors, a collection of decidedly NC-17 drawings made by and for the animation crew. But the book had never been made available to the public - until now (SLYT, potentially NSFW.) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:43 PM PST - 19 comments

The 2017 documentary Caged Men: Tales From Chicago's Last Remaining SRO Hotels [1h23m] profiles the men who live in and work in the last single room occupancy hotels in Chicago. Men on the tenuous line between housed and unhoused, renting a rapidly-disappearing living situation from long ago that still survives to the modern day.
posted by hippybear at 2:57 PM PST - 44 comments

But we knew that. An [Asian-American] MIT student asked AI to make her headshot more ‘professional.’ It gave her lighter skin and blue eyes. “In just a few seconds, [Playground AI] produced an image that was nearly identical to her original selfie—except Wang’s appearance had been changed. It made her complexion appear lighter and her eyes blue, ‘features that made me look Caucasian,’ she said.” (Boston Globe, limited free articles.) Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. “It penalized resumes that included the word ‘women’s,’ as in ‘women’s chess club captain.’ And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter.” (Reuters)
posted by Melismata at 1:07 PM PST - 43 comments

50 Rappers, 50 Stories (Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli for the New York Times (archive.org))
posted by box at 1:00 PM PST - 27 comments

Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles "The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content."
posted by heyitsgogi at 12:11 PM PST - 49 comments

In the New Yorker: Country music's Culture Wars and the remaking of Nashville. All about Music Row vs. what they're now labeling Americana, and more. Is Nashville Music Row anything other than "bro country, slick, hollow songs about trucks and beer, sung by interchangeable white hunks"?
(archive link) [more inside]
posted by Rash at 9:52 AM PST - 138 comments

South Africa was long the world's largest producer of gold, but its annual output has been dropping since the 1970s. Now it's not even the largest producer in Africa, having been supplanted by Ghana. As even local gold-mining companies turn to other parts of the world, the mines they have abandoned have often been taken over by zama zamas, "artisanal miners" operating in an illicit, unregulated and often illegal manner. [more inside]
posted by Quindar Beep at 9:35 AM PST - 4 comments

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can cause significant distress and suffering, and while the usual treatments (such as SSRIs and cognitive-behavioural therapy) can help, many patients are often left with residual troubling symptoms. Enter Dr. Michael Greenberg, an American psychologist and former OCD sufferer who seems to have had a breakthrough in understanding the psychological underpinnings of OCD: it all boils down to the tension between expressing needs and fear of the consequences of doing so. This then leads to rumination, which is easier to stop than you might think. [more inside]
posted by greatgefilte at 9:27 AM PST - 19 comments

Inside Britain’s first heat pump village. How did a rural Cambridgeshire village switch en masse to renewable energy? Thanks to one fateful pizza night, 100 huge boreholes and heroic navigation of the planning system, they have trailblazed their own zero-carbon heat network.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:15 AM PST - 43 comments

We Ranked 50 Best Selling Books Based on How Smart They Make Us Look in Public
posted by philip-random at 9:11 AM PST - 67 comments

Big Ben word game [via mefi projects] "A unique puzzle for each second of the day, with lots of nice touches: the background fades between day and night based on London time, there's a satisfying bonnggg sound that shakes the game when you find a long word, fireworks if you clear the grid, etc. It also features a large dictionary and generously makes sure you don't get a Q without a U next to it."
posted by Paul Slade at 6:07 AM PST - 31 comments

In these films, sexuality pervades, not as a troublesome interloper, but as an all-consuming directive; like hunger, it is dangerous only when thwarted. It refuses to be relegated to the shadows. Like buried trauma, sex demands an audience. The perennial discourse of the plot-relevant sex scene—does it or does it not exist, and should it?—can find no footing here: sex is the plot, and it does so much more than titillate. It communicates. There is not just the soft-focus romantic lovemaking we’ve come to expect on-screen; there is also fucking for anger, shame, sorrow, and all the ugliness of which we fear to speak in the light of day. There is transgression and discomfort. There are real taboos hard at work between the sheets. What there aren’t, though, are thrills. These sex tragedies are downbeat, enervating to the last frame. Call this genre the “erotic bummer.” from In the Mouth of Sadness: On the Erotic Bummer [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:09 AM PST - 16 comments

Obituary "He grew up brilliant and restless in the San Fernando Valley in California, an only child with a penchant for mischief, a defiant attitude toward authority, and a love for magic. Kevin's intelligence and delight in holding the rapt attention of audiences revealed themselves early in his childhood and continued throughout his life. In time, he transitioned from pranks and learning magic tricks to phone phreaking, social engineering, and computer hacking." [more inside]
posted by signsofrain at 8:38 PM PST - 72 comments

I wish I had ever had a job that brought me as much joy as the man in this clip. 11 mile long 'Oppenheimer' film reel arrives in Grand Rapids [3m10s, ABC13] John Foley is an example of where occupation meets vocation. If you're curious about the actual process, here's OPPENHEIMER 70MM IMAX film print assembly at Science Museum, London. [14m] from bored_tech which details the technical steps of receiving and assembling one of thirty prints of this movie in this format in the world. I found this truly fascinating.
posted by hippybear at 2:56 PM PST - 25 comments

Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least three papers. Marc Tessier-Lavigne failed to address manipulated papers, fostered unhealthy lab dynamic, Stanford report says. [SLTheStanfordDaily] This is a breaking story and will be updated.
posted by heatherlogan at 1:58 PM PST - 56 comments

“The glitter empire, and the shocking truth we never expected to uncover.” [27:06] [more inside]
posted by ob1quixote at 11:40 AM PST - 72 comments

Bring Me To Life but it's Otamatones
posted by cortex at 9:40 AM PST - 35 comments

At 1275 feet, the painted narrative scroll The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World(Narrated video) is perhaps not quite as long as advertised when first displayed in 1848, but the longest painting in America, now housed at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, is still pretty long. [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Tuesday that she has filed charges against 16 people who signed paperwork falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had won the 2020 election as part of a scheme to overturn the results. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:51 AM PST - 54 comments

The pitch here is simple: a bunch of grumpy old magicians made a big fuss about sexy little Uri Geller just because he claimed his party trick was real psychic powers, and now they’re either dead or friends with him, and isn’t that great? Because really, even if he DIDN’T have psychic powers, what’s the harm in helping people believe that there’s a little magic in the world? from Uri Geller is Still a Giant Fraud, Despite the Glowing NY Times Profile by Skepchick, who, along with the CFI, Greg Mayer, DJ Grothe and Mark Evanier (among others) are raking the NYT for its recent "lengthy – and progressively more maddening – hagiography of Uri Geller." [New York Times; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:56 AM PST - 137 comments

An extraordinary fossil captures the struggle for existence during the Mesozoic. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 11:39 PM PST - 12 comments

What to Get for a Cancer Patient You may have heard Hank Green of the vlog brothers has cancer. His video about what to get a cancer patient is sweet and insightful with some really good advice. If someone you know has a chronic illness, this has some excellent thoughts about how to make them feel cared for.
posted by Bottlecap at 7:58 PM PST - 10 comments

After releasing her second album and before officially launching the True Colors tour, Cyndi Lauper played eight dates in Japan, five of them at the famed Budokan. Four nights there, three nights in other cities, she then returned for a fifth night, which was filmed for Japanese television. Cyndi Lauper Live In Budokan 1986 [1h9m] is everything you want -- jangly late Eighties synths, classic songs, and Cyndi's undeniable vocal prowess.
posted by hippybear at 2:55 PM PST - 18 comments

It's time to watch kids toys run at higher voltages than they were designed for.
posted by Philipschall at 1:33 PM PST - 75 comments

The Locavore is a guide to in-person retail shopping in NYC. Five boroughs and over 10,000 independently-owned businesses are represented. (Access to the directory is free, though there is a supporter option.) [more inside]
posted by box at 1:13 PM PST - 5 comments

The Unexpected Genius Behind Akira's Legendary Score [SlashFilm] There's never been anything quite like the soundtrack to the anime classic "Akira." To this day, the pulsating rhythms and otherworldly chants still sound unlike any other music put to film. That uniqueness is due to the unorthodox approach of composer Shoji Yamashiro, whose background in amateur musicianship allowed him to create a score completely outside the realm of professional tradition. "Akira" utilizes a host of sounds that may seem unfamiliar to Western ears. The soundtrack is an eclectic mixture of traditional folk music and digital synthesizer programming, eliciting a raw and primal feeling amidst the futuristic cyberpunk skyline of Neo-Tokyo. Yamashiro incorporated a form of Indonesian music called gamelan jegog, which stems from Bali and is made up of fast, intense rhythms played on bamboo instruments. The composer also drew from the chants of Noh, traditional Japanese theater. Combined with polyrhythmic drum machine beats and synths tuned to gamelan microtonal scales, these styles give a sense of ritualistic tension to the dystopian world of "Akira." [YouTube][Geinoh-Yamashirogumi "Kaneda" from AKIRA] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:24 AM PST - 42 comments

The Illinois Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that eliminating cash bail for defendants awaiting trial does not violate the Illinois Constitution. “We can now move forward with historic reform to ensure pretrial detainment is determined by the danger an individual poses to the community instead of by their ability to pay their way out of jail,” (Governor) Pritzker said in a statement Tuesday.
posted by tiny frying pan at 11:03 AM PST - 37 comments

In less than eight minutes, the video’s narrator accuses Jews of starting China’s “century of humiliation” by financing the Opium Wars, and describes their cunning Fugu Plan. This 1939 Japanese proposal to resettle German Jews in the puppet state Manchukuo was named after the deadly blowfish that is a delicacy if handled correctly and was based on "expert" analysis of the fabricated antisemitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While about 20,000 Jews found refuge in Japanese-occupied Shanghai between 1938 and 1941, the Fugu Plan never gained traction, even with the putative beneficiaries. Nonetheless, in July 2023, the Fugu Plan is in the top search result for the word “Jew” (犹太人) on Douyin.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:37 AM PST - 12 comments

It's been in the Washington Post, the New York Post, and Eater NY. It's the Perpetual Stew Club, a gathering in Brooklyn featuring a stew that has been cooking for five weeks and counting. Want to get in on it? Just bring an ingredient (keep it vegan, please), and let them know ahead of time if your name is Stu (or Sue). [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:43 AM PST - 28 comments

Territorial hawks in a South Austin neighborhood are attacking residents and mail carriers Eric Klein has positioned himself as a vigilante of sorts in his Austin, Texas neighborhood. He caught an attack on camera, and he’s actively plotting methods to keep himself and his neighbors safe. But Klein isn’t fighting a person. His ire is drawn by a group of swift, winged perpetrators who have made their homes in the trees high above his. Klein said he’s heard of at least six people who were attacked. He and his neighbors have taken to using umbrellas and colorful streamers to deter the birds. Del Barrio said he believes the hawks don’t attack people walking in groups or with dogs. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 5:05 AM PST - 24 comments

Not much about Masked And Anonymous makes literal sense. It follows the rules of songwriting, not cinema, where surreal and nonlinear storytelling is more common, particularly in Bob Dylan songs. But mainly it’s just straight-up bonkers, following a loose narrative thread that functions primarily as a vehicle for a lot of colorful actors to give scenery-chewing performances. It’s the kind of movie where Val Kilmer shows up as a character known only as Animal Wrangler, and rambles in Bob Dylan’s general direction for several minutes about how people are worth no more than a crack in the mud at the bottom of a sun-dried lake. It’s also the kind of movie where Ed Harris dons blackface, Mickey Rourke plays the president, and Luke Wilson clubs a rock journalist to death with an old blues singer’s guitar. A real “just go with it” kind of film. from Inside The Making Of ‘Masked And Anonymous,’ The Strange Dystopian Bob Dylan Musical Comedy Movie [Uproxx] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM PST - 18 comments

The venom of this caterpillar can cause extreme pain. Researchers hope it could help kill cancer cells too. Researchers are exploring how the venomous hair-like bristles on caterpillars could be used to treat cancer in the human body.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:30 AM PST - 9 comments

“I’m not expecting to win any of these bastards, but just to be nominated means the world.” - Zoe Thorogood, 24-year-old from Bradford, UK, has scooped the most nominations for this years Eisner Awards
posted by Artw at 5:03 PM PST - 17 comments

YouTuber Oliver Harper took four of his older individual movie videos and re-edited them together for Alien Quadrilogy (1979-1997) Retrospective/Review [2h18m]. These aren't movie recaps, these get into writing, production, plot, music, actors, directors, artists, technology developments, alternate versions, even tie-in videogames. It's an unusual and informative look back at all of the bits and pieces of one of the most influential science fiction film series of all time.
posted by hippybear at 2:54 PM PST - 35 comments

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES—118th Cong., 1st Sess. [S. 2226]
To authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2024 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes.

AMENDMENT intended to be proposed by Mr. SCHUMER (for himself, Mr. ROUNDS, Mr. RUBIO, and Mrs. GILLIBRAND)
Viz: At the appropriate place, insert the following:

TITLE I—UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA DISCLOSURE
This title may be cited as the "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023" [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 10:37 AM PST - 930 comments

The birth of id Software by John Romero [The Verge] In 1990, John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall were working at Louisiana software maker Softdisk. There, they had an idea that would change PC games forever.
posted by Fizz at 10:31 AM PST - 45 comments

How heat waves, climate change put people with disabilities at risk From Harvard Medical School: Extreme heat: Staying safe if you have health issues Lung conditions, heart disease, diabetes and other factors make your body more vulnerable to heat. From The Lancet: Climate change and the right to health of people with disabilities”Strikingly, the global mortality rate of people with disabilities in natural disasters is up to four times higher than people without disabilities […] Disasters also disrupt access to health-care services, medications, oxygen, haemodialysis, personal care assistance, and medical devices. Heat extremes are linked with elevated emergency room visits, hospital admittance, and mortality for individuals with mental health, cardiorespiratory, and other disabilities; pre-existing psychosocial disabilities triples the risk of death during heatwaves. [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 10:20 AM PST - 20 comments

As a version of Chicago pizza comes to Leicester, people put raspberry mascarpone on top, England (history recap: invade nearly everywhere and take all the spices) makes the blandest pizza possible, pizza is stolen, pizza eaters get in the mood for lurve, we remember the president of Iceland previously clarifying that "I do not have the power to make laws which forbid people to put pineapples on their pizza", possible evidence of ancient pizza is revealed, and Sweden is Sweden and Ohio is Ohio, here's your weekly Free Thread...
posted by Wordshore at 9:44 AM PST - 154 comments

In December 2010, the first of eleven murder victims were recovered from Jones Beach Island, Long Island. Many of the victims had been women engaged in sex work in the New York City area. Four victims who had disappeared between 2007 and 2010 were found within a 500 meter stretch of Gilgo Beach; all had been bound and three were wrapped in burlap sacks. Late last week, Rex Heuermann of nearby Massapequa Park, NY was indicted and arrested for the murder of three of the "Gilgo Four". [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 9:33 AM PST - 49 comments

Oh hey, it's Monday morning, time for that most relaxing of musical treats, the NPR Tiny Desk Concert! Today's artist: GWAR.
posted by bondcliff at 8:26 AM PST - 42 comments

Oops. DeSantis' new State Guard, which in an unusual move is under his "direct command, rather than under the state Department of Military Affairs and the National Guard," doesn't pass the smell test by members of other state guards.
posted by coffeecat at 7:52 AM PST - 64 comments

From Steve Shives, "Why Are Studio Executives Like This?" (SLYT)
posted by Ipsifendus at 6:16 AM PST - 15 comments

What is ignored or neglected by the media -- but will be studied by historians? a thread by George Mack
posted by chavenet at 1:52 AM PST - 83 comments

Threatened Seabirds Get a Life Raft in Maryland. Scientists don bike helmets and dodge bird poop to babysit endangered terns out at sea.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:03 AM PST - 3 comments

Jane Birkin, actor and activist, died yesterday 16 July 2023 at her home in Paris. For anglophones of a certain age, her 1969 song with Serge Gainsbourg was a powerful incentive to learn some French. Tributes from President Macron "Parce qu’elle incarnait la liberté, qu’elle chantait les plus beaux mots de notre langue, Jane Birkin était une icône française" and many others. Chapeaux!
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:48 PM PST - 22 comments

Writer and director Greta Gerwig provided Letterboxd with a watchlist of 29 movies that inspired the look and script of the upcoming Barbie movie. A subsequent interview expanded the list to 33 movies. (YouTube link if you'd rather watch the interview than read it.) [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 7:45 PM PST - 28 comments

[MLYT] In 1989, Australians John Thomson and Mark Shirrefs began planning a children's magazine series hosted by crash-landed aliens learning about Earth. Ten years later, they pitched it... as a children's sitcom ABOUT such a show, hosted by characters the network doesn't know are real alien schoolchildren. It went straight to series without even a pilot order, and got a second season. This is Kid's Breakfast... or rather, Pig's Breakfast.
posted by BiggerJ at 7:20 PM PST - 4 comments

Middle Eats teaches you about various Middle Eastern cuisines with educational explorations of Egyptian breakfast dishes, Syrian comfort food, Libyan mbakbaka, Palestinian chicken and rice, and more. Want more? [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 5:28 PM PST - 18 comments

"Secondly, @dril's tweets contain references to various topics such as merchandise, horses, caves, and movies like Dunkirk. While it is challenging to pinpoint their specific career, their diverse range of interests suggests a broad knowledge base. Additionally, their tweet about their wife moving to the big Apple to entertain the idea of becoming "Rudy's Slut" hints at a potential involvement in the entertainment industry." -TwitterGPT takes any public Twitter handle and generates a quick, questionably accurate report and then helpfully suggests a book as a gift.
posted by oneirodynia at 4:20 PM PST - 39 comments

Jesse James Comer took exception to a Bungie community manager sharing content by Destiny 2 creator Uhmaayyze. Mr. Comer expressed his ire by engaging in a campaign of "racist, stochastic terrorism" against the campaign manager. Unfortunately for Mr. Comer, Bungie took him to court over his behaviour and won to the tune of $489,435.52. For trolls more generally, it would appear that this case establishes precedents that may well be applied in future cases.
posted by lovelyzoo at 3:41 PM PST - 25 comments

We Tried 7 Ways to Hard-Boil Eggs and Found a Clear Winner Ann Taylor Pittman for The Kitchn. "I was delighted to find that most methods worked quite well. A couple gave less-than-stellar results, and some received higher ratings from me because they produced great eggs with less effort. I rated each method on a scale of 10, with one being the worst, and 10 being the best. While a few scored very well, only one method scored a 10 out of 10. You may also be interested in Do 'Better' Eggs Really Taste Better? by J. Kenji López-Alt at Serious Eats, and 9 Egg Gadgets I’ve Tested (So You Don’t Have to) from www.emmymade.com.
posted by bq at 3:20 PM PST - 53 comments

Journey - Frontiers & Beyond [1h30m] records the band Journey's 1983 tour supporting the Fronteirs album. Peculiarly, it was done by NFL Flims, not an outfit I'd normally turn to for a rock and roll documentary. It's a lot about logistics and the crew who put on the show, as well as the band who were at the absolute height of their powers.
posted by hippybear at 2:52 PM PST - 24 comments

In 1987, Christopher Reeve visited Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship to lend his public story to actors being threatened by the military regime. Link is to a Radio Ambulante segment transcription/translation in English, but you can also read/listen in Spanish.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:19 AM PST - 3 comments

“On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting… But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man.” On the complicated reaction to the Luke Comb’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car.
posted by Artw at 10:28 AM PST - 117 comments

The human body has around 30 trillion cells. The vigintillion is a cardinal number represented in the US by 1 followed by 63 zeros, and in the UK by 1 followed by 120 zeros. Before this post, there were 325 (5x5x13) posts which contained 'potato' and 2522 (2x13x97) wich contained 'cat'. A bajillion is a huge number. Rayo's number was claimed to be the largest named number. If you could stack $44 billion in $100 bills, it'd be 30 miles high. Some populations are huge, but others less so. The Eddington number, the number of protons in the observable universe, is currently estimated to be 10 to the power of 80. Even 200,000 is a big number.
posted by Wordshore at 8:46 AM PST - 44 comments

Small gallery of photos of animals doing cute things No mystery links here, exactly what it says in the title. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 8:45 AM PST - 5 comments

Really careful....not yet Roger..... Roger! (SLYT 30s). In which a feline friend demonstrates athletic non-prowess.
posted by storybored at 8:43 AM PST - 21 comments

KENNETH ANGER (1927–2023) was a filmmaker [IMDB] & author [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:45 AM PST - 17 comments

Cameras are fitted to endangered Australian sea lions in a bid to document their foraging habitats, but the results have revealed so much more to excited researchers, including a snappy encounter with a shark.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:30 PM PST - 4 comments

Youtuber RailCowGirl is currently streaming The Best Of Norway's Railway Cab Views. "I've gathered the best of Norway's Railway Cab views from all seasons on my channel in this Stream running 24/7." Tunnels, horns, mountains galore. From her channel, it's only a few stops until you reach a similar site in Holland where you can also see what the rest of an engineer's job is like via the engineer's cap-mounted GoPro. Next, over to Switzerland, before heading back to Norway. [Bonus Hyperlapse Channel!] [Ready to drive your own train, now? Here's a previously-on-MeFi 8-bit simulator, so you can drive forever, or until you fall asleep.]
posted by not_on_display at 9:29 PM PST - 9 comments

Have you read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison? I recommend it, and am grateful to the professor who assigned in in an American Lit. class. The protagonist works at a paint factory. "To achieve Liberty Paints' Optic White color, the narrator must add drops of a dark black mixture to an original dull gray substance. When the paint batch is mixed properly, the results are a glowing, bright white color. The symbolism in Liberty Paints' signature color represents the importance black individuals play in America's past, present and future. It's only when black is added to the paint mix that the purest, most ideal, paint color emerges." Someone has invented an extremely white paint and I hope they read Invisible Man. [more inside]
posted by theora55 at 8:17 PM PST - 17 comments

Professor Francesca Gino, "who focuses on why people make the decisions they do at work" is on administrative leave from Harvard Business School and had some papers retracted because it looks like data were faked. Guardian. Or with more detail: Vox. Irony alert: the seemingly dishonest research was about how honest are regular people. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:32 PM PST - 48 comments

An Interview with Raw Material Mixtape Podcaster-in-Residence Alice Wong.

Art opened up the world and made me feel free. That is the power of art and I truly believe art is for everyone whether they consider themselves an artist or not. You don’t need a degree in art history or to go to fancy museums to appreciate art. Street art, gardens, memes, found objects — art exists everywhere and knowing that I had access to it and could create it was significant for me as a disabled person who was made to feel powerless for much of my life.

[more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 2:24 PM PST - 1 comment

"André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77." [NYT, Archive link] [more inside]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 12:05 PM PST - 21 comments

The Guardian's Hattie Garlick offers tips on fighting fatigue. Our circadian rhythms are important, says Ramlakhan. “But built into those is a shorter rhythm – the ultradian rhythm – a cycle of about 90 minutes.” She is, therefore, a passionate proponent of regular, short rests, ideally every 90 minutes and for three to five minutes, with occasional longer breaks. “If we were to live in rhythm with our cycles, we’d allow ourselves the intermittent, intentional replenishment of energy. We’d oscillate, rather than drive on relentlessly and into the ground.” Resting does not, however, involve social media scrolling. “We get our energy from physical, mental, emotional and spiritual practices,” Ramlakham adds. Her prescription might involve: “eating something healthy, hugging someone, playing with the dog, or going outside to look at the sky.”
posted by Bella Donna at 11:37 AM PST - 25 comments

I only knew Phil Jupitus from his appearances on QI and other British panel shows. Then, YouTube decided to serve me up his 2000 standup show Quadrophobia. It's 90 (!) minutes of adventurous time alone on a stage. I'd give a minor content warning for the final 30 minutes which are entirely about catching a spider in your house, because spiders... but I think he embodies all the things involved and everyone will feel seen and so none is needed.
posted by hippybear at 11:28 AM PST - 10 comments

"We have identified the coldest star ever found to produce radio waves – a brown dwarf too small to be a regular star and too massive to be a planet." Kovi Rose and Tara Murphy in The Conversation, on their discovery of a star "barely hotter than a pizza oven." From the NYT: "Break Out the S’mores: This Star Is Cooler Than a Campfire" (archive link).
posted by mittens at 9:09 AM PST - 9 comments

Want to see a whole bunch of elders and people with movement disabilities having a great time? Good! Who says that PT and movement have to be boring? Goofing off is healing for the body and mind. I wanna know which of these games you are excited to play. Make sure to keep scrolling through the profile, because there’s a lot of fun and joy waiting for you.
posted by Bottlecap at 8:06 AM PST - 9 comments

I built an Exoskeleton to challenge Pro Arm Wrestlers [YouTube] YouTuber Allen Pan “armed” himself with an arm-wrestling exoskeleton and challenged a bunch of people at muscle beach.
posted by Fizz at 6:24 AM PST - 12 comments

The Smithsonian has abruptly cancelled its Asian American literary festival, with no real explaination. "In a move that stunned the institution’s event partners and writers who value its sense of community, the program was canceled just weeks before it was to take place in August." Tens of thousands of dollars had already been spent by some attendees, flights had been made and visas had been acquired. [more inside]
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 4:08 AM PST - 74 comments

The producer is at bottom an allegorical figure. “Jack Antonoff” refers as much to a set of historical processes as it does to a bespectacled guy making beats in his Brooklyn apartment. Call it Antonoffication: the process of the dispersion of the aesthetics of indie rock out from a distinct subcultural enclave and into a general ether that suffuses and unites the major genres of today’s Top 40 pop music. Which is to say, the complex process of cultural mediation through which all pop music today has become a little bit indie rock. from Dream of Antonoffication by Mitch Therieau [The Drift; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:13 AM PST - 12 comments

How the Platypus and a Quarter of Fishes Lost Their Stomachs. The platypus is an anthology of weirdness. It has a leathery duck-like bill, a flattened tail and webbed feet. The males have a venomous claw on their hind feet, and the females lay eggs. And if you look inside a platypus, you’ll find another weird feature: its gullet connects directly to its intestines. There’s no sac in the middle that secretes powerful acids and digestive enzymes. In other words, the platypus has no stomach.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:01 PM PST - 26 comments

Still mourning the death of Flash, and with it an entire era of online gaming? Enter ooooooooo.ooo (9o3o), the new searchable (and playable!) web frontend for the incredible Flashpoint preservation project. Browse over 145,000 preserved Flash games powered by the Ruffle emulator, and share your favorites with a simple link. Highlights: DICEWARS - Fly Guy - Alien Hominid - Samorost - Crimson Room - Nanaca Crash! - Line Rider - Don't Shoot the Puppy - Bloxorz - Gimme Friction Baby - The Impossible Quiz - Portal: The Flash Version - Feed the Head - Sprout - Achievement Unlocked - QWOP - Cursor*10 - Dino Run - Grid16 - Meat Boy - SHIFT - You Have to Burn the Rope - 6 Differences - Canabalt - Don't Shit Your Pants! - Nevermore 3 - Small Worlds - Don't Look Back - Redder - VVVVVV (demo) - Synopsis Quest - The Room Tribute - The Scale of the Universe - Mitoza - Wonderputt - Bullet Bill 3 - Frog Fractions - Dys4ia - Snakes on a Cartesian Plane - Want (gulp) more? Download Flashpoint Infinity to stream over 156,000 games from 70+ platforms (including Shockwave, Java, and Unity) plus over 27,000 animations... or clear some space for the monster 1.76 terabyte Flashpoint Ultimate to store every single file locally. So much more inside! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:04 PM PST - 71 comments

Greek and Roman epitaphs can be touching. They can also, in the case of Allia Potestas, even be risqué. But they can also be horribly, incredibly embarrassing-- as in the case of Aphrodisios of Alexandria Troas, as seen in this short by the great Stefan Milo. This tombstone at the Louvre, recently translated into English by Chaniotis and posted on Twitter by Roko Rumora, has to be seen to be believed. [more inside]
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 11:46 AM PST - 59 comments

You are Atlas. You hold up the sky. A (very silly) not-really-a-game by Aidan Strong, who also has a blog with interesting thoughts on gaming.
posted by AndrewStephens at 11:38 AM PST - 15 comments

Welcome to my [Robert Reich's] final UC Berkeley course on Wealth and Poverty. [YT playlist, 14 lectures, ~1h30m each] Drawing on my 40+ years in politics, including my time as secretary of labor, I offer a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s in the United States, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. Class 1: “What’s Happened to Income & Wealth” [1h30m] Each class page has a link to a syllabus of notes and readings in the "more inside" of the description.
posted by hippybear at 11:27 AM PST - 38 comments

xAI is a new company founded by Elon Musk that sets out to Understand the Universe. [more inside]
posted by flabdablet at 8:56 AM PST - 98 comments

... when it was live back in 2020, but I've just found these photographs online. "What started as only one phone reaching across the square, ended in an invitation to all neighbours to connect via a string phone. We installed 16 phones criss crossing the square spanning up to 60 meters. We played string phone whispers, watched artist Rubie Green perform a sound piece through one of the phones and cut the strings a the end at the count of three." [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 8:07 AM PST - 7 comments

Historians at the Movies is a community building and public history project run by Jason Herbert, Ph.D. Started as a social media Sunday movie watch party in 2018, HATM celebrates its 5th anniversary this weekend with a viewing of Titantic. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 7:44 AM PST - 6 comments

“I play fiddle and banjo music from black and Native American musicians, mostly in the Southeastern United States, which is not a genre, but a sentence.” Jake Blount has been reinterpreting Black folk music through a modern lens, producing what he terms “Afrofuturist folklore”. [more inside]
posted by adamsc at 6:59 AM PST - 9 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 6:44 AM PST - 76 comments

Is Troye Sivan’s ‘Rush’ Sexy Fun or Gay Detritus? "We decided to get one gay who remembers the release of Kylie Minogue’s 'Locomotion' and another gay who is too young to remember the release of 'Can’t Get You Out of My Head' to debate whether this track is actually a Bop or Flop."
posted by mittens at 6:23 AM PST - 20 comments

Video Game Fashion Week 2023 [Polygon]: We’re digging into all sorts of angles on how games and fashion converge, from the evolution of Link’s hairstyles to the ruthless nature of Style Savvy to game-themed makeup tutorials and what it’s like to live a week as Mario. If you want to learn, reminisce, or simply appreciate the lengths people go to style your favorite characters, you’ll find plenty to love here. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:16 AM PST - 20 comments

But the full story of boiled peanuts, and peanuts in general, is far from celebratory, as it is also the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the Spanish colonized the Americas, starting at the end of the 15th century, they brought peanuts back to Europe, and the heat-loving legume was later brought to Africa by the Portuguese. According to Robert Deen's The Boiled Peanut Book, the peanut’s nickname, goober, is said to come from the word nguba, or peanut, in the Kongo and Kimbundi languages. The plants thrived, and the peanuts returned to the Americas alongside people who would never see their homelands again. So while the peanut itself is indigenous to the Americas, the cooking process is African, and this process has spread around the world, the result of intercontinental trade, colonization, slavery, and immigration. from The Global Love of Boiled Peanuts
posted by chavenet at 12:02 AM PST - 23 comments

Young People Have No Idea What We Used to Do After Work. "The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands. Yes, it’s because they’re addicted, but it’s also because we’re all expected by bosses, co-workers, and friends to be online and available pretty much every time of day." [more inside]
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:40 PM PST - 102 comments

Corpse flower blooming at Amazon Spheres in Seattle The rare flowers can be up to 9 foot tall and stink of carrion in order to attract pollinators and bloom for 48 hours. More from United States Botanic Garden.
posted by Artw at 8:56 PM PST - 19 comments

Since 2020, three of the most powerful medical organizations in the United States have published new language guidelines designed to change how physicians communicate with patients. They org's are: 1a) The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which oversees and lobbies for medical education. It represents 175 medical schools, 400 or so teaching hospitals, and administers virtually all medical entrance/qualifying examinations, including the MCAT. 1b) The American Medical Association (AMA) is the largest professional association/lobbying group for physicians in the United States. About 25% of physicians are members [more inside]
posted by BadgerDoctor at 2:47 PM PST - 71 comments

Andrew Leland is a writer, audio producer, editor, and teacher who explores his transition from sightedness to blindness. He has a book coming out this month and recently published an article drawn from it, How to Be Blind. He has also written about reading technologies for the blind.
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 2:21 PM PST - 6 comments

Blob Toy!
posted by aspo at 12:10 PM PST - 30 comments

wellifyouinsist has been making a dungeon synth album and posting the songs to MeFi Music as she composes them, and it's now available on Bandcamp as The Dark Forest! [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by ignignokt at 11:43 AM PST - 6 comments

"We are told that the problems in our lives are solvable mostly by individual action. This lie has been repeated so often that it has soaked down into the cultural bedrock of much of the western world and so is almost an inescapable starting proposition." You are not the answer.
posted by simmering octagon at 11:30 AM PST - 69 comments

Eight Characters In Search Of A Sitcom [58m] is a 2003 character-by-character, actor-by-actor profile of the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Cast members, writers, directors all sharing their joy and love for the show. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:23 AM PST - 8 comments

tw: systemic sexual assault / Last week, a Chicago PD officer was accused of 'impregnating a teenage asylum seeker' while other officers were accused of “improper sexual relations” with immigrants who have been housed in police stations [more inside]
posted by paimapi at 11:01 AM PST - 8 comments

When Lauren “Lolo” Spencer auditioned for the role, she knew it was hers. Representation is important to Spencer, and she’s building a successful career as a disability lifestyle influencer, model, actor and content creator. “I think it’s important to share what it’s like for me, especially as a black woman with a disability. To show the world, ‘Oh. This is what it looks like.’ So they aren’t intimidated the next time they see someone else that looks like me or moves around like me. That’s my goal.” [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 9:51 AM PST - 3 comments

The union, which represents professional actors in the USA, will make a formal announcement at noon Pacific time. With no writers, and no actors, what will the streaming services do for content?
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:40 AM PST - 137 comments

cashews on pizza, a salty, buttery, crunchy topping that has gained a cult following in the Inland Empire The city of Redlands, located over 60 miles east of Los Angeles, is where cashew pizza originated in the 1960s, eventually spreading to neighboring cities like Riverside and Yucaipa.
posted by SituationNormal at 7:40 AM PST - 65 comments

The Witcher 3 hits even harder in a post-Cyberpunk 2077 world [Polygon] “Oddly enough, the prevailing thought that dogged me as I played The Witcher 3 again was actually about another game. I was thinking about Cyberpunk 2077, which I played earlier this year, and how little it played off the successes of The Witcher 3. A strength of Geralt’s adventure is how little of it really has to do with him. He’s in some important rooms, and he meets movers and shakers, but warriors live and die without him. Dynasties fall. Monsters kill the weak. The mechanisms of life happen, and he doesn’t have to be there to see it all unfold — that’s what makes his tale so compelling. He’s a hero when he’s around, and he’ll move or shake as necessary, but his world is not one driven by a protagonist. It is a humble fantasy, or at least presents itself as one, and by contrast, Cyberpunk 2077 was so self-centered on the part of the player that it seemed like people didn’t exist if they weren’t within my field of view. In that game, history happened so that protagonist V could be there to inherit it. Geralt is almost anonymous by comparison. The next-gen upgrade is going to make that available for more people, and I’m excited for that. But it did leave me with a melancholy feeling about where we’ve been and, given the future of The Witcher franchise, where a post-Cyberpunk Witcher game might go.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:45 AM PST - 38 comments

Types of Monk, In Order of How Often They Want You To Visit by Daniel Lavery [The Stopgap]
posted by chavenet at 12:01 AM PST - 56 comments

"All 27 Pixar films, ranked by their likelihood to make you cry"
posted by box at 12:34 PM PST - 132 comments

Clear stylishly monochrome tutorial for SVG How to draw things on webpages instead of sending finished images. [more inside]
posted by clew at 12:03 PM PST - 19 comments

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” - California is notoriously expensive to live in and rife with homlessness, writers are notoriously poorly paid and living precariously (and likely to become more soif the WGA's concerns are not addressed), and thus the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has decided its tactic to settle the current writers strike and finally break the WGA: Wait for the writers to be broke and homeless.
posted by Artw at 11:58 AM PST - 92 comments

Listen to live air traffic control radio mixed with lofi hip hop
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:07 AM PST - 27 comments

Shockwaves in US Craft Brewing as Sapporo, the current owners of San Francisco's Anchor Brewery, have announced they're closing the industry stalwart. This comes after last month's announcement of reduced distribution footprint and the discontinuation of their traditional holiday beer "Our Special Ale". The brewery was one of America's oldest, founded in 1896 and a staple of San Francisco. [more inside]
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:04 AM PST - 91 comments

Illustrator, author, and cartoonist Jillian Tamaki writes about Superman III, Calgary, and change for The Walrus. [more inside]
posted by TemporaryTurtle at 10:49 AM PST - 3 comments

A Jew walks into a bar White Nationalist meeting. He emerges with a Broadway hit. Alex Edelman's [Wikipedia] one man show Just For Us [show website] has opened [NYT review, archive] and he's been doing press. Alex in conversation with Josh Grobin at 92Y from late last month [1h14] for a surprisingly vulnerable exchange. He also talked to Tim Miller for The Next Level [56m] in a conversation wide-ranging and insightful. Finally, he appeared on Late Night With Stephen Colbert in 2022 when Just For Us was off-Broadway. [7m31s]
posted by hippybear at 10:30 AM PST - 4 comments

You’re not imagining it: Trader Joe’s employees are all boning each other.
posted by May Kasahara at 8:47 AM PST - 67 comments

Griffin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Felicia Day host a hilarious panel at the recent AwesomeCon in DC, delving into the delight and challenges of parenting their own new generation of nerds and dorks, and how to foster that love the same weird things that their parents enjoy and create.
posted by FatherDagon at 8:17 AM PST - 9 comments

“The Zone itself undulates between three possible descriptive modes - sublime, spooky and grotesque - and becomes controlled by players after they perish inside. Only one player will make it to The Center, and everyone else who has perished collaboratively decides their final fate, whether that’s evisceration by a plant werewolf or a slow dissolution by way of radiation.” (via) The Zone is a storytelling RPG inspired by horror works like Annihilation, Stalker, Uzumaki, and the SCP Foundation. It’s “play to lose” — players know from the start that their character will almost certainly die, which frees them up to take big risks that fuel exciting stories. [more inside]
posted by ourobouros at 7:49 AM PST - 7 comments

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being author dies aged 94 Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness, Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library, has confirmed.
posted by mumimor at 7:43 AM PST - 33 comments

My disability makes my body feel unpredictable A brief and impactful comic about living with a dynamic disability and chronic pain. A lot of disabled people live in the liminal space between health and disability, trying to navigate fluctuating abilities. Making peace with that is hard.
posted by Bottlecap at 7:28 AM PST - 8 comments

"We’re living in scary times. The world hasn’t felt this unsafe and uncertain for at least a generation. Common sense would dictate that in such circumstances, horror stories should fall out of favor. After all, who wants to read about monstrous things when the real world is showing its teeth?" But for those who do, here's Neil McRobert in Esquire: These Are the Writers Shaping Horror's Next Golden Age. May your TBR pile grow ever more Cyclopean.
posted by mittens at 5:39 AM PST - 15 comments

Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard [The Verge] A California judge is allowing Microsoft to close its acquisition of Activision Blizzard after five days of grueling testimony. Microsoft still faces an ongoing antitrust case by the Federal Trade Commission, but Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley has listened to arguments from both the FTC and Microsoft and decided to deny the regulator’s request for a preliminary injunction. [Explainer Video][YouTube] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:59 AM PST - 52 comments

In Thailand, people have been enjoying [1] [2] 'The Real Cheeseburger' (Facebook post), available at Burger King restaurants. This deliciously consists of a standard burger bun, wholesomely engorged with twenty slices of the delicacy 'American Cheese'. Fine dining reviews are surprisingly mixed; on TikTok, a diner described the burger as “greasy” but “pretty delicious”. If not to your palate, then alternative cheeseburgers are available. Bon appétit!
posted by Wordshore at 2:00 AM PST - 50 comments

America’s Most Popular Drug Has a Puzzling Side Effect. We Finally Know Why. -- The reason statins can make your muscles sore or weak was unclear—until scientists accidentally stumbled upon an answer. By Sarah Zhang ~~~ Why So Many of Us Die of Heart Disease -- Evolution doomed us to have vital organs fail. For years, experts failed us, too. by Olga Khazan. It seems that many people are down on statins, and do not want to take them even if they can take them, perhaps the same type of fear as anti-vaccine people.
posted by dancestoblue at 1:04 AM PST - 57 comments

Doing nothing in a world where everybody seemed busy doing something – anything – struck Cioran as the only lifestyle worth pursuing and defending. A life devoid of action and practical ambitions, of distractions and busyness, is a life in which room has been made for meaning: ‘Anything good comes from indolence, from our incapacity of taking action, executing our projects and plans,’ Cioran wrote. And he behaved accordingly. from Learning to be a loser: a philosopher’s case for doing nothing [Psyche]
posted by chavenet at 12:00 AM PST - 16 comments

"I'm the first to admit when I make a mistake. I simply never do." There is now a trailer for Napoleon (Apple TV+, fall 2023). Ridley Scott directs. Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby star. Dariusz Wolski does the cinematography.
posted by doctornemo at 7:52 PM PST - 44 comments

The Lady Afterwards is a few-shot tabletop RPG adventure about weird cultists in Alexandria in the 1920's. The game was produced by The Weather Factory, a tiny game studio whose main product is the Cultist Simulator video game. The physical version of The Lady Afterwards has a pile of player handouts and beautifully produced props, and originally sold out very quickly. The author, Lottie Bevan, wrote a fascinating (spoiler-free) postmortem about The Lady Afterwards' production which includes some fascinating comparative economics of the video game and ttrpg spaces.
posted by kaibutsu at 4:53 PM PST - 14 comments

Shaun, YouTube lefty and agitator, presents his 2 hour treatise on Kellie-Jay Keen (AKA Posie Parker) a noted anti-feminist and transphobe. CW: transphobia (obviously), misogyny, homophobia, Nazis (both neo and classic), hate speech, etc. [more inside]
posted by Laura Palmer's Cold Dead Kiss at 3:43 PM PST - 20 comments

Ontario's Crawford Lake seen as a golden spike
posted by sardonyx at 2:53 PM PST - 15 comments

"Boundaries are a Band-Aid in a bad world: if you can’t expect people to care for you and treat you well and protect you from violence or scarcity, you can at least protect yourself from their needs. They aren’t straightforwardly wrong to do this: negotiating other people’s needs, which are often unreasonable and unfulfillable and intolerable, is fraught, baffling, and overwhelming. It demands a good strong metaphor, and the image of boundaries is unusually tensile. But the term takes on its own momentum, overrunning intimacy with alienation. In its most extreme forms, boundary-speak makes it feel like some of us have given up on each other: the only effective social strategy left is to lock yourself in, fortify your defenses. If your emotional defense budget isn’t big enough to hold the line and you get trampled by other people’s greed, that’s on you." [more inside]
posted by obliterati at 1:04 PM PST - 34 comments

In late 2010, The 92nd Street Y hosted Al Jaffe, Roz Chast, and Robert Mankoff [1h24m] for joint presentations about their work and a question panel. The humor is dry, but the talent is gigantic and the lengthy Q/A is great.
posted by hippybear at 10:29 AM PST - 9 comments

Ancient giants "An epic quest to reach the tallest known tree in the Amazon"
posted by dhruva at 9:33 AM PST - 3 comments

“Being a bride used to mean being royalty for a day. Now it means being a celebrity. Either way, the only sure path to really distinguish yourself—to capture the oohs and the aahs and the attention—is to spend a lot of money.” — The Fake Poor Bride: Confessions of a Luxury Wedding Planner [archive link]
posted by Mchelly at 9:26 AM PST - 105 comments

Science nerds in the Netherlands have observed local corvids building bird nests out of anti-bird spikes [PDF], which creates extremely punk homes for their eggs out of the hostile architectural features that are also quite effective at deterring predators.
posted by autopilot at 9:03 AM PST - 28 comments

An Alarming 87 Percent Of Retro Games Are Being Lost To Time [Kotaku] “The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) partnered with the Software Preservation Network, an organization intent on advancing software preservation through collective action, to release a report on the disappearance of classic video games. “Classic” in this case has been defined as all games released before 2010, which the VGHF noted is the “year when digital game distribution started to take off.” In the study, the two groups found that 87 percent of these classic games are not in release and considered critically endangered due to their widespread unavailability.” You can read the full 50-page study on the open repository Zenodo. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:46 AM PST - 85 comments

Even now, shame and stigma surrounding incontinence has caused severe damage to my self-worth and interpersonal relationships. "I know I’m not the only person who must feel this way. 25 percent of young women and 44 to 57 percent of middle-aged women (“women” is presumably used here to mean “people assigned female at birth”) also experience “some involuntary urine loss,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists journal, Practice Bulletin. And doctors can’t be prepared to offer long-term solutions to incontinence if they’re not even prepared to even talk to their patients about it. 50 to 70 percent of people who experience incontinence don’t seek treatment for it, likely due to the same stigma I’ve experienced for most of my life, which can lead to greater health risks." [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 4:29 AM PST - 20 comments

Whatever his religious belief or unbelief, theological elements are central to his imagination, and over the course of his long career have assumed a distinctive shape that is worthy of our closest attention, above all because these elements so powerfully address American culture today: a culture that wants to be thought spiritual but never religious, to use history as a weapon but never acknowledge it as an inheritance, to worship its own technologies while simultaneously lamenting their tyrannical power. from The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian [Hedgehog Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 11:50 PM PST - 16 comments

The 2023 Hugo Award Nominees were announced on July 6. The 81st World Science Fiction Convention will be hosted in Chengdu, China, netting substantive objections from industry authors due to human rights abuses. To make matters worse, one of the Guests of Honor will be Sergei Lukyanenko, Russian author and noted supporter of the war in Ukraine. [more inside]
posted by bq at 9:08 PM PST - 47 comments

The reviews are in on you sir, and they are not good. On Monday, GQ published a story from freelance film critic Jason Bailey summarizing Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav's rapid and shameful ascent from anonymous executive to widely loathed cultural villain. Bailey's key observation is that Zaslav seems neither to care about nor especially like movies, which makes his leadership of such a powerful company a tragic outcome for everyone who does. Within hours of the article's publication, readers observed that the piece had been heavily edited and its sharpness sanded down. Shortly after the edited version of Bailey's story went live, GQ deleted the entire blog from its website. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:34 PM PST - 41 comments

Somewhere in a little town in Belgium, in a square where nothing really happens, we placed a button. And waited for someone to push it. Belgian TNT Advert from 2012. [YouTube] TW: Fake violence/gunshots. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 4:52 PM PST - 22 comments

A collection of Hokusai's drawings are being carved onto woodblocks and printed for the first time A few years after their discovery and exhibition at the British Museum, Dave Bull and the team at Mokuhankan are taking the final steps to publish some of Hokusai's drawings that have not previously been printed as wood block prints, following the same processes that would have been used during Hokusai's lifetime. You can subscribe to the production run to receive copies of these prints as they are produced.
posted by cubby at 3:13 PM PST - 9 comments

What happens to all the office furniture left behind in the downsizing of office space? Sometimes, it finds a new life in a home or school (Ungated). Other times, it becomes part of the 10 million tons of office furniture added to the landfill every year (Ungated).
posted by meowzilla at 2:49 PM PST - 37 comments

Seth Meyers and Bill Hader sit down in front of cameras to talk about their careers [30m], and each other's careers, and to reminisce about working together at SNL. It's a charming conversation between friends, and I thought I might share it here.
posted by hippybear at 10:28 AM PST - 12 comments

Poet, essayist, activist Minnie Bruce Pratt has died. "Her books and poems have received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Library Association, the Poetry Society of America, Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle." "All the Women Caught in Flaring Light".
posted by clavdivs at 10:13 AM PST - 13 comments

Goblin Bet, akin to Salty Bet (previously), lets you wager pretend gold pieces on the outcome of monster fights. Fighters use their 5th edition D&D attributes. Stats are displayed on the sides of the screen, and you can click on the little question mark by a fighter's stat block to go to a page with information about them. Look out for random special abilities some fighters have, listed at the bottom of their stat block.
posted by JHarris at 9:53 AM PST - 27 comments

James Lewis, the lone suspect in the 1982 Tylenol murders, was found dead Sunday at his home in suburban Boston, multiple law-enforcement sources confirmed to the Tribune. ... With the investigation’s only suspect dead, it now seems unlikely that charges will ever be brought in poisonings that killed seven people and caused a worldwide panic.
posted by Etrigan at 8:25 AM PST - 52 comments

Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit? These are social questions but also ones with major political ramifications. Whatever self-definition men settle on will have an enormous impact on society. Yet many people, like Taylor, hesitate to be the one to try to outline a new standard of manliness. Who are they to set the rules? Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan. (WaPo gift article)
posted by PussKillian at 8:10 AM PST - 204 comments

In only eight weeks time, Christmas puddings, mince pies and other seasonal foods, plus cards and wrapping paper, will start to fill the supermarket shelves. Christmas spirit? It's never too early as Boston hope to do better than last year, Fakenham reveal their plans, sensible people have completed shopping, and the Christmas birth is anticipated. Some tree advice and potato advice. So throw a log on the fire, put on your wooliest jumper, pour yourself a glass of mulled wine and type into the freethread, or Free Thread, or #FreeThread, for this week. Bonus: some pleasant Holst.
posted by Wordshore at 7:26 AM PST - 107 comments

Patients had agonizing pain in spite of fentanyl when their eggs were collected. It wasn't taken seriously. This is the first of a series from the NYTimes. Free link. These are podcasts with transcripts. In case you want the story without spoilers, I'm putting the explanation in the first comment.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:50 AM PST - 32 comments

Some Conferences Steer Away From Florida, Citing State’s Divisive Laws (ghostarchive link)
posted by buffy12 at 1:48 AM PST - 48 comments

The member-owned arts and crafts marketplace is being thoughtfully, deliberately organized by ex-Etsy sellers (remember the Etsy strike?), volunteers, and now a growing number member/owners. An innovative buy-in system is designed to make ownership very accessible. The site opens for business in October, and there's a Reddit AMA today (Monday) 6 AM-midnight Eastern Time. [more inside]
posted by amtho at 1:15 AM PST - 15 comments

The Disability Pride Flag represents everyone with a disability, and the design reflects inclusion This piece explains what the flag means, has some links out to the history of the making of the flag, and is available in both audio and text formats
posted by Bottlecap at 7:50 PM PST - 9 comments

As the climate change proceeds there will be more water in the atmosphere, though its distribution is uneven, to say the least. Yet in those places with sufficiently humid air there may be an emerging technology that can help. It uses hygroelectricity, this is the static charge that forms on small airborne droplets of water, which in sufficient quantity might be able to power your house, with the right kind of nanowire device. At least that is what a professor at UMass Amherst and a private company in the seed round of investment both say in an article in the Guardian. They are not alone in seeing potential in this. [more inside]
posted by Ignorantsavage at 6:52 PM PST - 18 comments

Pademelons are hopping marsupials that are a bit smaller than most wallabies.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:48 PM PST - 15 comments

A dump of all available building instruction booklet PDFs from the LEGO website (As of March 2023) [Archive.org]
posted by chavenet at 5:35 PM PST - 26 comments

Launches, satellites, deep space missions, images, and more. Let's check in on humanity's exploration of space for July 2023. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 5:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Top science explainer Katie Mack (she's eclipsed Neil deGrasse Tyson in ability if not in reach, IMO) covers why gravitational waves make her feel all fluttery inside. (ungated link) [more inside]
posted by rikschell at 10:54 AM PST - 26 comments

Okay, this is seriously geeky, but it's geeky in such a great way. Elevators: how do they work? Well, this talk from 2011 tells you everything about how elevators work and ALSO is sort of a grey hat hacker video about how elevators REALLY work. Elevator Obscura: Hacks and Curios in the Lift Industry [1h30m, conference talk video, minor CW for a couple of accident photos, no gore]
posted by hippybear at 10:14 AM PST - 38 comments

Mork Borg is a rules-light tabletop RPG about low-fantasy skulduggery at the end of the world. In its bones are an excess of doom metal, over-the-top graphic design, and an excess of content, both in-house and fan-made. There's a free bare-bones edition for printing and previewing. Online random generators include DNGNGEN, SCVMBIRTHER, and THE MONSTER APPROACHES. A couple fan-made favorites are Forbidden Psalm ('miniature gaming at the end of the world') and the Mork Borg webcomic To Hell and Galgenbeck.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:07 AM PST - 18 comments

In his most recent 'collection' military historian Bret Devereaux describes the Status Quo Coalition. Summed up in a tweet, he thinks

the current international system is less 'American hegemony' and more a coalition of status quo powers, of which the USA is the 'team captain.'

[more inside]
posted by Rash at 10:01 AM PST - 14 comments

Rare seriously, seriously cute chubby-cheeked rat discovered near Melbourne. Shy broad-toothed rat found after a detection dog tracked down its bright green poo.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:40 AM PST - 20 comments

Everywhere I go, people compliment me and say they wouldn’t have known I was Deaf if I hadn’t told them. “They say it kindly, but it’s like they’re giving me a cupcake without realizing there’s a razor blade inside it. […] Once my friends and I have ordered, we sign up a storm, talking about everything and shy about nothing. What would be the point? People are staring anyway. Our language is lavish, our faces alive. My friends discuss the food, but for me, the food is unimportant. I’m feasting on the smorgasbord of communication ― the luxury of chatting in a language that I not only understand 100% but that is a pleasure in and of itself. Taking nothing for granted, I bask in it all, and everything goes swimmingly.”
posted by Bottlecap at 6:31 PM PST - 19 comments

PJ Harvey comes to each album more or less a different person, playing different instruments, pondering different subjects in her elliptical lyrics. If you thrilled to the strident, triumphant To Bring You My Love, you might not be prepared for the explosive joy of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. If you loved that one, you’d still have to make an adjustment for the politically barbed Let England Shake or the ghostly White Chalk. Harvey’s tenth album, I Inside the Old Year Dying, is much the same in that it is not the same as any of the artist’s previous work. [more inside]
posted by Artw at 5:32 PM PST - 16 comments

Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC [BBC] [CW: sadistic monkey torture; fuck people really]
posted by chavenet at 5:28 PM PST - 31 comments

'We are the Baye Fall: 5 million pilgrimage to Senegal. (slyt)
posted by clavdivs at 4:32 PM PST - 3 comments

"Alive! You have seen a flying creature unlike any bird or bat. It's more like a pterosaur but alive, a "flying dinosaur." What do you do? [...] The problem is not in the eyewitnesses or what they see but in the indoctrination, over generations, that all species of dinosaurs and pterosaurs must have become extinct millions of years ago. That's the problem." [more inside]
posted by blnkfrnk at 11:22 AM PST - 35 comments

Tom Hanks talks to Guy Raz for two hours about his career and being Tom Hanks. That's it. That's what it is. But wow, it's really a lot!
posted by hippybear at 10:13 AM PST - 13 comments

Over the years that followed, I kept clicking on my keyboard phones until eventually the iPhone replaced them. I have memories of using a Palm Treo on the train and my BlackBerry at lunch through most of the 2000s. But I can’t remember how I’d spent my idle time in the years before, on the train or at lunch or at any other time of day when we found ourselves between things. Literally, what did we do? I cannot recall. (SLAtlantic, ungated)
posted by ShooBoo at 9:46 AM PST - 154 comments

The Kickass Legacy of Chun-Li, the First Playable Woman in 'Street Fighter' [Vice Games] “In the midst of this digital world designed, developed, and dominated by men, Chun-Li defied expectations about women in games entirely. She wore an athletic modified qipao, combat boots, spiked cuffs around each wrist, and had massive, impressively toned muscles. Plus, she was one of the best competitive Street Fighter characters; her speed, agility, and match-ending Super Combos proved a devastating mix for her opponents, and ensured top-tier dominance throughout the series. [...] Chun-Li immediately shot to popularity as the franchise’s first playable female character. And by giving her the same depth of backstory and combat ability as every other player, Street Fighter set the bar for female characterization. From her skillful strikes and powerful air throws to her infamous Spinning Bird Kick, Chun-Li’s offensive capabilities proved she was a woman who could finally fight on an equal playing field with her male counterparts.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:43 AM PST - 9 comments

WA's new Indigenous women's ranger team helps threatened golden bandicoot survive. (Text article with photos of cute bandicoots.) After 12 days surveying the bandicoots in remote bushland and a few bee stings, possum bites, and green ant invasions, the rangers returned with impressive results. "We ended up catching 94 individual golden bandicoots over the six nights of live trapping, which is just way above our expectations," AWC's Kimberley regional manager Skye Cameron said. "To see that they're flourishing in this landscape was just really heartwarming."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Zoe Bee - Why We Secretly Want the World to End (1h5m5s) has provided a surprisingly good amount of solace and reassurance, with what's been going in the world of late. [more inside]
posted by many-things at 9:38 PM PST - 51 comments

Where data points dictate taste: the humanities crash and the McNamara Fallacy in culture.
posted by blue shadows at 6:26 PM PST - 40 comments

A decentralized group of safe streets activists in San Francisco realized they can disable Cruise and Waymo robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on a vehicle’s hood, and they’re encouraging others to do it, too. "This is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways,” the company said in a statement.
posted by clawsoon at 3:27 PM PST - 131 comments

Central Park West is a legal workplace drama that aspires to the cursed union of #MeToo revenge story and buddy-cop rib tickler. Here, Comey repackages his experiences in New York working as an assistant U.S. attorney, including a stint under Rudy Giuliani in the late 1980s, in an attempt to genetically modify the meager fruit of an appointed bureaucrat’s imagination with some vestige of intrigue. The prose is clear enough to call it a beach read, if by “beach” we mean the sunny Riker’s Island shoreline. from Comey As You Are [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:51 PM PST - 8 comments

Social movements ranging from Black Lives Matter to the climate movement are a fixture of political life. But what makes some social movements more successful than others? Apollo Academic Surveys surveyed 120 academic experts in Sociology, Political Science and other relevant disciplines to investigate this question. [more inside]
posted by bluesky43 at 10:29 AM PST - 21 comments

It's been a long difficult week. Do you need to laugh? Matteo Lane: Hair Plugs & Heartache [47m] is a stand-up set released last month. It's queer comedy with adult ideas and language. It's also, I think, very very funny.
posted by hippybear at 10:09 AM PST - 16 comments

For over a year, players in the Professional Women's Hockey Players' Association have been in negotiations with investment firms Billie Jean King Enterprises and the Mark Walter Group to launch a new women's hockey league. Thus, the part of their Thursday night announcement laying out plans for the new league to start play in January of 2024 wasn't a huge surprise. But the other part of the announcement was: The investment groups have also bought out the Premier Hockey Federation (formerly the National Women's Hockey League), consolidating the sport's player pool and essentially disbanding what had been the only pro women's hockey league in North America for the last four years. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:57 AM PST - 13 comments

Last year, Yuji Naka, the co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, was arrested for insider trading which occurred during his stint at Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest publisher Square Enix. After his resignation from Square Enix, he had sued the company for removing him as director on the ill-fated Balan Wonderworld. Today, Naka received a suspended prison sentence and was fined and penalized a total of 173 million yen (approx. 1.2 million USD). [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 8:34 AM PST - 6 comments

We Found & Saved 10 YEARS of Lost Video Game History [YouTube] Noclip, a Youtube channel famous for video game development documentaries, has just salvaged an entire decade of lost video game history. The findings consist of dozens of boxes filled with video tapes. The above video explains the how and what and why of it all. You can subscribe to the archive via the @NoclipArchive YouTube channel or archive.org. Highlights from the archive include: Microsoft E3 2009 Press Conference, A young Hideo Kojima interviewed about the American Metal Gear Solid 4 reveal trailer, Infinity Ward Studio Tour During Development of COD:4 Modern Warfare, Exploring Nintendo of America's Employee-Only Museum, Tony Hawk Half Pipe Demo - Games Convention 2007. [via: Destructoid]
posted by Fizz at 8:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Half-billion-year-old sea squirt could push back origins of vertebrates, including humans.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:54 PM PST - 13 comments

Guardian: 'The annual CGC (Crap Games Competition) has been bringing Spectrum fans together for more than 25 years' ... “What makes the CGC entertaining is the self-deprecating, sardonic British humour,” explains 43-year-old Paul Collins from Reading, who first entered the CGC in 2000 with Pear-Shaped (“a simple maze game where you try to collect as many pears as possible”) and Crap Football, featuring a digitised Des Lynam. “There are ideas that can’t possibly work, eg Sim City: The Text Adventure or Blind Flight Simulator. Or names that are just funny, like Whack a Nun II and European Sandwich Hunt.”
posted by Wordshore at 10:35 PM PST - 36 comments

The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring. "It seems clear already that the law will stimulate significantly more investment in clean energy than was at first thought possible while generating more revenue from high-income taxpayers to reduce the deficit. ... Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. ... The pipeline of battery plants amounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021 and enough to power nearly 20 million homes." [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:16 PM PST - 30 comments

When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war. By Reeves Wiedeman for Curbed. Archive link. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 7:53 PM PST - 19 comments

All this, and still Kahlo led much of her life in her bedroom, alone. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Frida Kahlo was born today in 1907. A brief biographical animation. "I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and… More flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.” [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 3:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements:

• Sith Lord: Wipe out someone else's commits by force pushing to the main branch.
• Tee Hee: In a single "minor cleanup" commit to the main branch, change every line of every file in the repository so that all open Pull Requests are unmergeable.
• Patient Skeleton: Submit a pull request to a public repository that fixes it, but its been open for at least 2 years.

[more inside]
posted by genpfault at 3:02 PM PST - 37 comments

No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall ... Introduced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City consists of interviews conducted by Hugh Kinniburgh and his NYU Film School collaborators during one day in 1983 at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsurprisingly, their interviewees tend to be young, strenuously coiffed, and dressed with studied nonchalance in striped T-shirts and Members Only-style windbreakers. from Open Culture [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:50 PM PST - 23 comments

Brief of amici curiae David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, & the Institute For Justice in Support of Petitioner David Sosa An amicus brief filed by the Institute for Justice, composed in hopes of keeping people with the same name as criminal suspects from having their rights violated. More information on Techdirt.
posted by N8yskates at 1:59 PM PST - 28 comments

A list of good things. "...dirt paths and the way dirt lies at the base of tree roots, the internet, babies laughing uncontrollably, the sound of sprinklers, mohair sweaters..." By Holly K. Hein.
posted by brainwane at 1:15 PM PST - 5 comments

Following the chimera out of the dead soil of the human will be an unnerving experience. "But that’s precisely how we’ll know we’re on the right path." Leo Kim asks us to think beyond Donna Haraway's cyborg, and towards a speculative monster better suited for our time. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 12:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Threads is live. The Meta/Instagram "Twitter killer" supposedly had 30 million installs in 24 hours (Mastodon may have less than 2M active users), likely thanks to the ability to access your entire Instagram social graph automatically. Gruber likes it, but not as much as BlueSky (which is still in closed beta) The Threads website doesn't show content by default, but you can access individual users and tweets toots skeets threads. On the other hand, maybe the age of social media is ending.
posted by gwint at 10:58 AM PST - 244 comments

If you watched the TV series Hawkeye, you might remember Rogers: The Musical [4m30s]. If this whet your appetite for show tunes and superheroes, then Marvel has done right by you. [That Captain America musical from Hawkeye is becoming a real stage show, AV Club] Here is Rogers: The Musical in full [32m, , quality audience recording, ancillary material before timestamp and after performance]. The power of Disney knows no limits. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:08 AM PST - 14 comments

The World May Have Just Experienced the Hottest Day Ever Recorded [Time] The entire planet sweltered to the unofficial hottest day in human recordkeeping July 3, according to University of Maine scientists at the Climate Reanalyzer project. High temperature records were surpassed July 3 and 4 in Quebec and northwestern Canada and Peru. Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon to Tampa, Florida have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Beijing reported 9 straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35°C (95°F). This global record is preliminary, pending approval from gold-standard climate measurement entities like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. [Bonus: Wiki-list of weather records] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:22 AM PST - 56 comments

During mating season, a group of [male echidnas] will start following a female, forming a line that can last several weeks.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 12:04 AM PST - 12 comments

This Australian high school's human head and a mysterious note pose questions about ancient Egypt. With mystery surrounding its origins, the mummified head poses all sorts of questions about the past.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:39 PM PST - 10 comments

On July 1st, G/O Media (previously, previously, previously, previously, previously) announced they would be publishing articles created by AI. Today, under the byline Gizmodo Bot, the first AI article, an error riddled chronological listing of Star Wars stories was published. The James Whitbrook, deputy editor of Gizmodo and io9 responded, releasing a statement. (sorry, Twitter link) Note, the article in question has not been linked. There's no need for it to get any more clicks.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:32 PM PST - 113 comments

In 1936, Edwin Denby co- wrote: "Horse Eats Hat" with one Orson Welles, age 21. Denby was a dance critic and poet. 'Denby and Balanchine: A Dance Critic’s Work'. 'On an Edwin Denby NYC Traffic Sonnet' is a wonderful look at one of his poems. The Folks at Pennsound has a collection of spoken material. In 2016, the NYPL staff contributed, 'Edwin Denby: Memory, History and Documentation'.
posted by clavdivs at 8:25 PM PST - 1 comment

[MLYT] During his run on Late Night, David Letterman would do intros before reruns - but occasionally, he'd go a little further. Speeding up the episode to cram extra footage in, watching the episode alongside the viewer and offering commentary... but these pale in comparison to the time he had a rerun redubbed by different people - including voice actors from the 60's Speed Racer dub. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:09 PM PST - 16 comments

The LLMentalist Effect: How chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con.
posted by ursus_comiter at 6:01 PM PST - 34 comments

"Each pin represents the approximate location of one of 142 homicides that occurred in the City of London in the first half of the 14th century. Click on a pin to read the story behind the event." One can filter by gender of victim, private or public location, year, weapon and ward, and switch between two maps of different dates. There are statistics by gender, occupation, day of the week, social space etc. There is a video about the project, and media coverage when this was published in 2018 included articles in the Guardian and the Smithsonian magazine.
posted by paduasoy at 2:46 PM PST - 13 comments

They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “software upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; because who wouldn’t want it? from Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement [ProPublica & The New Yorker; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:43 PM PST - 39 comments

We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you.

–Where be your jibes now? is an essay by MeFi’s own Patricia Lockwood about David Foster Wallace.
posted by Kattullus at 2:16 PM PST - 45 comments

There's a new collection of Stories From The Readership at Ask A Manager, and this time, the topic is the petty moments readers remember from work. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:12 PM PST - 26 comments

Popular since collectors first obsessed over it in Victorian England, the charismatic orchid now commands millions of dollars in research. Far from just pretty faces, orchids are allowing scientists to ask fundamental questions about how plants interact with other species in their environment and about the very nature of ecology and how we classify organisms. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 11:01 AM PST - 7 comments

Rick Froberg, co-founding member of bands Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes has died at the age of 55, announced his long-time friend and collaborator John Reis. Appreciations from NPR ("Rick Froberg was the perfect punk vocalist"), Pitchfork ("5 Essential Songs"), and The Guardian ("Froberg was a lightning rod") [more inside]
posted by gwint at 10:37 AM PST - 19 comments

Former VP/Creative Services for Warner Bros, Laura LiPuma, recounts her career in graphic design [3h11m, CW: Prince stories], from her uprooting to leave for Los Angeles, her freelancing years, and finally getting hired at WB. Starting with the 1999 era and going through Lovesexy, she's responsible for the look and feel of much of how Prince presented through his music release imagery.
posted by hippybear at 10:06 AM PST - 4 comments

Subway to switch to freshly-sliced meats (Today). The largest sandwich chain in the US (Nation's Restaurant News), which is also rolling out new sandwiches (CNN, Food Network), is currently for sale (Reuters). No changes have been announced to the 'bread.'
posted by box at 8:12 AM PST - 108 comments

"Please be informed, the notification read, that your business, the Sunlight Cafe, has been designated a Moderately Impactful Business. This replaces your current designation as a Negligibly Impactful Business. The Moderately Impactful Business designation comes with increased governance requirements which are listed below. Note that our decision may be appealed and is considered probationary until the appeals process is complete." In the short scifi story "Sunlight" by Shauna Gordon-McKeon, one woman loves that the little café she runs with her wife has become a community space. But her wife doesn't. [Disclaimer: Shauna is a friend.]
posted by brainwane at 6:10 AM PST - 15 comments

The Best Reviewed Games of 2023 (So Far) [IGN] The snowball of games delayed out of 2021 and 2022 has settled in 2023, coalescing into the most exciting games lineup of the decade so far. 2023, arguably, marks the proper start of the PS5 and Xbox Series X generation with Unreal Engine 5 support building and an increasing number of developers dropping support for last-gen hardware. Each of the three console manufacturers has at least one blockbuster release scheduled this year — Starfield for Xbox, Spider-Man 2 for PlayStation, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo — complemented by a generation-best third-party lineup that includes Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Street Fighter 6, Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Hades 2, and Mortal Kombat 1. Five Six months through 2023 and already the year has lived up to its lofty expectations.
posted by Fizz at 5:18 AM PST - 50 comments

"The whole story of why we'll never get an LBD movie." Over a year ago, Ashley Clements started producing The Look Back Diaries. After all of the episodes were discussed, she's started discussing the behind-the-scenes tea, specifically with regards to Bernie Su screwing her and the other Pemberley Digital castmates out of a lot of money and in the last episode, categorically ending hopes of a movie. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:14 PM PST - 5 comments

New study finds octopus sleep similar to humans, and might even be dreaming. The study found the octopuses had a similar sleep pattern to REM which is when most mammals dream.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:29 PM PST - 23 comments

The sweet vulnerability of creating an accessible home with the person you love and the tenderness towards yourself it requires “That’s how I feel about anyone seeing proof of my disabilities before I’ve wrapped my head around the fact of the disabilities: like I’ve reached a fragile peace with it, and any harsh comment, any misguided sentiment, any gawking could wreck my growing understanding and acceptance of how much I’ve changed.” (Happy Disability Pride Month!)
posted by Bottlecap at 5:58 PM PST - 17 comments

It's the 4th of July [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:40 PM PST - 14 comments

Indeed, opossums are odd, a creature an exhausted God might have thrown together with parts leftover from a busy week of creation. Whatever He had lying around the shop (grippy hands, snaky tail, crippling anxiety), He chucked into the opossum and sent it down to the Garden of Eden to tip over Adam’s garbage cans and eat the cat food off Eve’s back porch.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:00 PM PST - 50 comments

Some of the nation’s top ‘gurgitators’ shared their award-winning techniques CW: gluttony (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:50 AM PST - 41 comments

The recent SCOTUS decision 303 CREATIVE LLC ET AL. v. ELENIS ET AL. [PDF link, decision] was decided on the basis that Laurie Smith might be asked to make a gay wedding website. In the original court filings was included a possible inquiry about such a website that included a name and phone number and other identifying information. The New Republic called that phone number, and reports that is false information. Maybe SCOTUS will reexamine it, Salon summarizes thinking about that. NYT's The Daily discusses the case and context for a half hour. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:21 AM PST - 117 comments

Do you love your cloud-connected personal assistant, but wish it had a bit more of a Jim Henson than a George Orwell vibe? Are you good with a soldering iron? Maybe you'd like to try your hand at building your own Animatronic Alexa.
posted by Popular Ethics at 8:43 AM PST - 13 comments

An often overlooked insight on this "holiday."
posted by Scout405 at 8:34 AM PST - 11 comments

I got to know a man willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers. “I write, I don’t speculate about what I’m writing,” he reminded me a bit sharply after an interpretative question. For Delany, decency entails remembering that the author is dead even when he’s sitting across the table.

–How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City by Julian Lucas.
posted by Kattullus at 1:31 AM PST - 40 comments

"Born and Died on the 4th of July" [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 11:28 PM PST - 9 comments

Four newly discovered sand dragons given Indigenous names from South Australian regions. New research from museums in the Northern Territory and South Australia found a total of 11 sand dragon species, with four of those completely new to science. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:19 PM PST - 8 comments

Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes mandatory return to curriculum (CBC article, July 1 2023) [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 9:36 PM PST - 144 comments

Because many MeFites have a day off this week, and because for many OTHER MeFites Tuesday is just Tuesday - here is your Free Thread for the first week of July! [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:00 PM PST - 88 comments

Stack Ball Fall 3D (via JayIsGames)
posted by saladin at 4:27 PM PST - 12 comments

As more of a gag than anything else, he and Cote thought they would solve the age-old riddle posed by the ancients once and for all: Does shaving your legs make any difference at all? Thomas sheared his guns to see. The first set of results caused Cote’s jaw to drop. from Winning By a Hair [Nautilus; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:38 PM PST - 43 comments

Sometimes it's worth kicking reality right out the front door, just so revolutionary romance can give the new people some fresh mistakes to make. This Masked Shoggoth myth—or cartoon meme—is a shrewd political comment. In the AI world, nobody much wants to mess with the unmasked Shoggoth. It's the biggest, most necessary part of any AI, and it has all the power, but its theorists, mathematicians and programmers can't understand it. Neural nets in their raw state are too tangled, unstable, expensive and complicated to unravel. So the money is in making a cute mask for the Shoggoth—meaning the public interface, the web page, the prompt. Hide that monster, and make it look cuter! [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 1:34 PM PST - 42 comments

April 7th: Big Miggedy Miggedy (@thelovemyke) tweets at NPR and Juvenile asking for a Tiny Desk concert. April 11th: Juvenile refuses, then reconsiders. April 12th, they lock it in. And now, we have it. Juvenile's Tiny Desk Concert, with many special guests whom I won't spoil for those who don't know yet, but suffice to say that NOLA is well-represented. (cw: Juvenile lyrics)
posted by Navelgazer at 11:12 AM PST - 17 comments

One of the more thoughtful people on the planet, Trevor Noah has been thinking pretty deeply about AI and social media and other parts of our lives today. He spoke with Reid Hoffman, creator of LinkedIn, and his podcast co-host Aria Finger to share his thoughts [52m], and they're as surprisingly deep and insightful as you might expect from Noah. It wouldn't fit in the title, but I wanted to call this "Social media shouldn't be held accountable for what is posted on it, but what is pushed by it". That's a tiny bit of what Trevor thinks.
posted by hippybear at 9:08 AM PST - 5 comments

In Search of True Color "But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. "
posted by dhruva at 8:46 AM PST - 7 comments

What eight decades of Goofus and Gallant illustrate about society’s changing expectations of children (SLAtlantic, archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 8:18 AM PST - 105 comments

Under legislation that came into effect Wednesday, “all judicial and administrative areas” across the East Asian country will adopt the “international age” system used by most of the world, ending years of debate about the problems caused by the formerly common use of “Korean age” and “calendar age.”
posted by Etrigan at 5:47 AM PST - 28 comments

Nicolas Bras explains how to build the membrane clarinet, a delightful six minute adventure in musical plumbing fittings (SLYT).
posted by Dysk at 1:54 AM PST - 5 comments

“Song of Summer” by Uchikubi Gokumon Doukoukai is a song about warm summer weather
(prev., their song about winter weather and futons addressed similar, if inverted, themes. Their song about living on a cat planet is unrelated.)
posted by Going To Maine at 5:39 PM PST - 9 comments

The Americas' biggest monkey returns from the brink of extinction. Four decades ago there were just 50 northern mariquis left in Brazil's Atlantic forest and the Americas' biggest monkey was threatened with extinction. Now there are 232 in a protected reserve, plus more in the wild. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:43 PM PST - 14 comments

The Condiment Packet Gallery
posted by chavenet at 1:45 PM PST - 27 comments

Forget DC vs. Marvel, scruffies vs. stuffies, even Pepsi vs. Coke--the real match of the century is nearly upon us. In this corner, Christopher Nolan with the dawn of the atomic age in all its nuclear-powered fury! In this corner, Greta Gerwig with umpteen squigglewatts of shocking pink hot-pink-laser girlitude! Which one will you choose? Or, you know, just do both. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:50 PM PST - 73 comments

When I made it to the top, I was exhausted and my elbows and knees were bleeding. JULIE FARRAR: By the time of the crawl, I was about 19. I was pretty tiny and much more mobile. I was known for being able to crawl around, through, up, down, over police barriers, stairs and so on. We were watching Bob Kafka and waiting for the signal to start crawling up the stairs. The feeling of camaraderie was palpable — the excitement on our march there, the staging. I don’t remember the speeches. I just remember feeling so proud in a very sacred communal way of being a part of it all. [Happy Disability Pride Month! Join the Roll call of mefites with disabilities in the first post] [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 11:47 AM PST - 6 comments

The song captures in vivid terms the blind optimism it can take to survive — and stay sane — in immigrant America. “Party in the U.S.A.” was released in 2009. By last year, the song had hit 1 billion streams on Spotify. Over the same period, America’s reckonings with things like racial inequality, police brutality, and poverty have dominated the American discourse. “This can’t be the same USA Miley was partying in,” a recent tweet noted. It got nearly 200,000 likes on Twitter.
posted by folklore724 at 1:12 AM PST - 30 comments

Radical Software Is “print about tape - a magazine by “underground” video people designed to spread ideas and applications for new television technology.” - Raindance Corporation, 1971
posted by Miko at 7:48 PM PST - 3 comments

Joseph Pedott, the man who brought us The Chia Pet and The Clapper, has died. Joseph Enterprises, a gadget company was founded in 1981.
posted by clavdivs at 4:26 PM PST - 31 comments

With the emergence of Large Language Model “AI”, everyone will have to learn something many disabled people have always understood. “Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic fail in ways that will harm almost everyone.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:54 PM PST - 37 comments

…by modeling a film camera in Blender to capture images in Blender. In excruciating detail. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by adamrice at 3:23 PM PST - 12 comments

On July 10, 2008, Youtube user mugumogu uploaded a video of their young cat Maru, but it was a collection of clips posted on January 11, 2009, with "まるです," "I am Maru," that made him a superstar, with over 26 million views. One of the first internet cats with a sizable following, last month, Maru celebrated his 16th birthday with fellow housecats Hana and Miri. Here's to a long and happy life of playing with boxes and sometimes embarrassing moments. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:32 PM PST - 33 comments

For most of her life, Nin labored in obscurity. Her nine works of fiction were ignored and passed over, so much so that she self-published four of them. Despite her certainty that she was a major force in literature, in the 1940s and ’50s she was still financially dependent on her East Coast husband, Hugh Parker Guiler, or Hugo. Swinging between two lovers may have started as a way to have everything, but it became a piecemeal existence full of guilt and obligation. From Anaïs Nin’s Decade-Long Adventure in Bicoastal Bigamy
posted by chavenet at 12:43 PM PST - 14 comments

Word Solitaire is a browser game by Petri Purho. Clear the board by making five-letter words. "The Dark Souls of solitaire word games."
posted by Lirp at 10:48 AM PST - 27 comments

BREAKING NEWS: I'm a writer and I'm pretty sure this is not actually possible. I am speaking as someone who writes pretty much every day and changes positions often when I write. I carry my lap top with me from room to room where I sometimes can be found at desks and at tables. Other times I sit on sofas, in comfortable chairs and on beds. And yet I have never written a single word while lying face down on my stomach.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:15 AM PST - 30 comments

Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the sport forever.
posted by Etrigan at 9:13 AM PST - 29 comments

For Disability Pride Month, check out these accessible ways to visit Nature. Accessible Nature: A Trail Guide for Disabled Hikers We highlight a selection of paths, overlooks and other sites in several U.S. parks that outdoor enthusiasts with disabilities can enjoy this summer. (NYT Gift Article)
posted by Bottlecap at 8:22 AM PST - 19 comments