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Pioneering wind-powered cargo ship sets sail.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:43 PM PST - 31 comments

Coffee City, Texas has 250 residents, and 50 police officers. More than half of the have been suspended, demoted or dishonorably discharged from their previous jobs.
posted by Artw at 8:11 PM PST - 42 comments

We know our bodies are paralyzed during REM sleep, and we know they twitch. We thought our muscles were somehow reacting to our dreams. But what if the twitch comes first? What if, in fact, the paralysis of REM sleep is a way to learn what it means to have a body--to test the boundaries and movements of the dreaming self, one muscle at a time? What Are Dreams For?, by Amanda Gefter for the New Yorker, explores this intriguing view and the research behind it.
posted by mittens at 4:27 PM PST - 35 comments

US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network [Grauniad; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:59 PM PST - 31 comments

“I vividly remember being violently hungover on a cold winter morning in New England, passionate kisses playing loudly in the background as someone’s grandma slowly searched her purse for coupons, fluorescent lights inescapable as I prayed for a swift end to my existence. Hell is real and I’ve lived it.” Passionate Kisses: The Soundtrack at CVS, by Mitch Therieau (The Paris Review). [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:46 PM PST - 21 comments

"I propose it has consequences to democracy how available to the public are their laws, their policies, their judicial decisions, their holy texts, and even their academic papers about literature. The W3C spent decades insisting in utter folly that they were right in their conception of how ordered lists work, in the face of the whole world, and in doing so they frustrated the transparency on which democracy rests." [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 2:08 PM PST - 51 comments

It seems like nearly every week I am having arguments about how bike infrastructure is ableist. It’s not.
posted by aniola at 1:21 PM PST - 53 comments

Burger King must defend its Whopper size in court. Other fast food chains may follow [CBC] Includes a quote by "the Vanilla Vigilante" lawyer Spencer Sheehan.
posted by readinghippo at 10:41 AM PST - 80 comments

"He’d had enough of being at the animal shelter, so Scout the dog climbed over one tall fence and then another, crossed a busy highway in the darkness, entered the automatic doors of a nursing home down the road, walked unnoticed into the lobby, hopped onto a couch, curled into a ball and quietly went to sleep for the night."
CW - sympathetic mention of animal abuse at the start (non-graphic).
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 10:16 AM PST - 36 comments

From just a few weeks ago, Maria Bamford – 28th Annual OCD Conference Keynote [44m] has Maria Bamford, um, giving the keynote address to the 28th Annual OCD Conference. She speaks at length about her intrusive voices and OCD, which sounds horrible but she makes funny.
posted by hippybear at 8:50 AM PST - 13 comments

For men awaiting execution in Texas, illicit games of Dungeons & Dragons became a lifeline. CW: Discussion of violent crime and execution
posted by Etrigan at 7:08 AM PST - 11 comments

Apparently the "infectious" choreography for Jungle's "Back on 74" has been going viral on TikTok, with everyone from the international touring cast of West Side Story to Emily Ratajkowski getting in on the trend, but I learned about it from this LA Times interview with Shay Latukolan, the choreographer, who has previously lent his talents to videos for Rosalía's "SAOKO" and Stormzy's "Vossi Bop". [more inside]
posted by sigmagalator at 12:30 AM PST - 11 comments

As natural disasters loom, these towns are taking control of their power by building microgrids. Two communities that went without power during Black Summer are getting a microgrid to keep the lights on during network outages. As another dangerous fire season looms, is this technology the way forward? [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:58 PM PST - 36 comments

“There are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several that are deadly, They can look similar to popular edible species. A poor description in a book can mislead someone to eat a poisonous mushroom.” - AI generated mushroom foraging books are spreading on Amazon, placing the public at risk.
posted by Artw at 7:43 PM PST - 51 comments

Courtesy of a British radiologist: Sword Swallowing And Its Side Effects
posted by BadgerDoctor at 5:25 PM PST - 26 comments

Low-tech Magazine (many previouslies) created a solar-powered version of their website a few years ago (previously). Since then they've realized that most of the financial and carbon cost of their solar website comes from using batteries to keep it on all the time. They explore the implications of using the sun's energy when it's available, including experience from the Living Energy Farm, in Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries.
posted by clawsoon at 4:16 PM PST - 20 comments

My criticism of the empty atom picture isn’t meant to shame people’s previous attempts to describe atoms and molecules to the public. On the contrary, I applaud their effort in this challenging enterprise. Our common language, intuitions and even basic reasoning processes are not adapted to face quantum theory, this alien world of strangeness surrounded by quirky landscapes we mostly cannot make sense of. And there is so much we do not understand. from We are not empty by Mario Barbatti
posted by chavenet at 3:59 PM PST - 40 comments

Vagina Rehab Doctor aka Dr. Janelle Howell (Instagram, Twitter and podcast) dresses up as your pesky bladder, suggests exercises for incontinence, cringes at "good coochie" brags and gives a rundown on possible signs of pelvic floor dysfunction. Content note: profane humor and lots of illustrations of vulvas on Dr. Howell's IG. Title taken from the recent Double Shift post on pelvic floors. Interview on Dr. Streicher's menopause podcast. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:34 PM PST - 9 comments

The Hoopla was a Razzle-Dazzle ride in the Pavilion of Fun at Coney Island's Steeplechase Park. Several dozen people sat on a ring suspended from a central pole, rather like a sit-down giant stride. It is documented in a newsreel, a painting and a postcard. The Pavilion of Fun was a vast, glass box, an ocean-front Crystal Palace erected by George Tilyou in 1909 and demolished by TFG's father in 1966 (although the Hoopla had been deleted twenty tears previously). See what it was like in this British Pathé Let's Go Coney! (Island) newsreel, which also has the Human Roulette Wheel and the Human Pool Table, but the Hoopla is shown at the very beginning. [more inside]
posted by Rash at 11:28 AM PST - 22 comments

As part of his Factually podcast, comedian and WGA representative Adam Conover interviews Defunctland's Kevin Perjurer about what drew him to theme parks and their history, how such parks factor into our culture, and how services like YouTube are enabling a new breed of fandom documentarian. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:14 AM PST - 24 comments

You're doing it wrong. People tend to overestimate the climate benefits of recycling. One study led by a researcher at the University of Leeds placed recycling second-to-last among more than 50 actions people can take to reduce their carbon footprint.
posted by folklore724 at 8:27 AM PST - 132 comments

Dating Roundup #1 - This is Why You're Still Single is a long commentary that mixes surveys on dating and relationship attitudes, common strategies and their pitfalls along with crossfire commentary from other viewpoints. Some of the language is absolutist so ymmv. (20-30 minute read) [more inside]
posted by storybored at 7:52 AM PST - 46 comments

On a sunny winter morning, dog trainer Mario Fortebraccio slowly bends toward a line of potted olive trees and indicates it with his hand. Waiting for that signal, Paco, a three-year-old white Labrador, rushes through the row of plants with his head tilted, sniffing each pot at the root, the rhythm of his inhaling echoing through the greenhouse. The dog is carefully scouting for something humans can't sense: Xylella fastidiosa, a type of bacterium that has been ravaging southern Italy's olive fields for the past decade. Paco and a few other four-legged colleagues make up the highly trained Xylella Detection Dogs team.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:33 AM PST - 6 comments

Accessibility should not be a grudging afterthought. With planning, it can lead to elegant, beautiful, and engaging art. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 6:40 AM PST - 16 comments

Rick Beato sat down with the Emily Saliers half of Indigo Girls for a conversation about her decades of making and recording music: In the Room with Indigo Girls’ Emily Saliers [50m]. It's a free-wheeling talk that I, as a long-time IG fan, felt was revelatory and insightful. And there's a lot of joy happening here, too! Includes solo performance of song Look Long.
posted by hippybear at 6:31 AM PST - 8 comments

50 years later, is there anything left of hip-hop? (SLDefector, archive.org)
posted by box at 5:36 AM PST - 34 comments

Greater bilby numbers soar through Taronga Western Plains Zoo rehabilitation program. The quest to save Australia's threatened greater bilby has been an amazing success at Taronga Western Plains Zoo where the population has jumped from 18 to 136 since 2019.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:43 PM PST - 13 comments

Scientists solve mystery of why thousands of octopus migrate to deep-sea thermal springs [more inside]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 7:39 PM PST - 15 comments

The subject of all great literature is either about redemption or its loss. Soteriology—that is the branch of theology that concerns itself with salvation—is the only worthy topic of prose, poetry, or drama. Whether you take any of that God stuff literally or not is irrelevant to this discussion. Noble, heroic, and good people corrupted or degenerated; sinful and wicked men made whole—either/or—those are the narratives which should concern any genuine art, because the turmoil within an individual mind, the canker and possible curing of the soul, is the only drama commensurate with the broken, flawed, limited, damning, painful, horrible, and beautiful experience of being trapped in a human body and a human life. from Darkness Visible [Ungated] [CW: alcoholism]
posted by chavenet at 3:58 PM PST - 38 comments

Japanese band Number Girl played their last show on November 30, 2002, performing "Omoide In My Head" as their final song. The bittersweet finale was captured on video and you can hear the crowd let out their last scream for the band. 20 years later, Number Girl played the song again for the first time in front of an audience and it feels just as ephemeral.
posted by donuy at 3:40 PM PST - 5 comments

"America has been slow to learn the lessons of overpumping." The New York Times offers a powerfully researched and visualized account of the building crisis in America's groundwater supply. (SLNYT)
posted by doctornemo at 3:17 PM PST - 24 comments

How the GOP and Christian millionaires plan to syphon billions of dollars from public schools
Florida is just the start.
posted by Artw at 1:46 PM PST - 32 comments

NPR, in association with LG U+ and Something Special, has launched Tiny Desk Korea. First up is 김창완 밴드 (KIM CHANG WAN BAND). More about the project here, and more about artists to come here.
posted by carrienation at 1:22 PM PST - 3 comments

You need to do a thing - NOW! For when you need to calculate a thing, or look up a thing, or be able to do the thing in your Browser without any faff. Most of the tools listed are NOT from https://freetinytools.com/ but I had to put a link in the description.... [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 9:15 AM PST - 48 comments

The University of Michigan, a community of over 120,000 people, has gone offline in response to a security incident. [more inside]
posted by Nelson at 8:04 AM PST - 127 comments

--about a question that has been plaguing me for months: Why is this bridge here?" The deepest of deep dives into the history of a seemingly trivial phenomenon: a footbridge over a suburban freeway south of Minneapolis. At the same time, an amazing piece of citizen research and reporting on a bit of pre-internet local history. (via)
posted by Kat Allison at 7:18 AM PST - 58 comments

Latinas are breaking generational curses, so why are we seen as malcriadas? [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 6:16 AM PST - 6 comments

The Incredible Edible Egg, the symbol of life. There's been a long debate about the health benefits and negative effects of the humble egg, but for many, the scrambled egg is the go to breakfast choice. The real question is which scrambled egg? Milk? Cream? Nothing? Salt? No Salt? Again, as with all things culinarily inclined, this list is short sighted, full of gaps, holes, glaring errors and misconceptions, etc. Feel free to scramble over any and all bare spots! [more inside]
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:47 PM PST - 92 comments

Life-saving seagrass meadows sprouting in tropical first, a decade after Cyclone Yasi destroyed them. Hundreds of volunteers are replanting seagrass meadows off Cairns and Mourilyan Harbour. Now, it's hoped the dugongs, turtles and other marine animals that once lived there will return.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:43 PM PST - 6 comments

Ryan Broderick on The Verge writes on the possible end of the Googleverse. Mentioned: Usenet, Altavista, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Myspace, AI, the sameness of recipe sites, Blogger, Google Reader, Perez Hilton and Anil Dash. Not mentioned: Google Plus.
posted by JHarris at 6:52 PM PST - 71 comments

If one of the major narratives of 21st-century Hollywood has been the steady erosion of what were once referred to as midrange studio movies—films produced and aimed at a level somewhere between blockbusters and the indie/art-house scene—the increasing indistinguishability of theatrical and VOD aesthetics, in combination with the severe narrowing of theatrical release windows, has resulted in a crowded yet intangibly barren cinematic landscape. from Did You Even Know This Movie Exists?
posted by chavenet at 3:57 PM PST - 64 comments

Dr. Glaucomflecken has been a busy doctor comedian since his last appearance on the blue. His specialty is satirical videos about doctors and health insurance. That are a bit too on the nose. [more inside]
posted by KaizenSoze at 2:09 PM PST - 15 comments

America's Most Polarizing Foods [more inside]
posted by box at 1:34 PM PST - 175 comments

Rather than actually booking women stand-ups and comedians, a club in Quebec decided to take a different approach. The club owner made up a fictional woman and added her to the regular lineup (and then "cancelled" all of her appearances). But it's all fine. You see, this way, he is "promoting the cause" of women comedians.
posted by sardonyx at 12:53 PM PST - 16 comments

Joe Murray created Rocko's Modern Life, Camp Lazlo, and Let's Go Luna!. He wrote a book a while back about animating for TV, web, or film. It went out of print. So Joe decided to make it available for download for free. "As payment, maybe you can donate to a food bank, or simply pay it forward somehow."
posted by Etrigan at 11:06 AM PST - 3 comments

How pop culture (specifically movies) have helped shape our views on nuclear weapons. The questions at the center of “Oppenheimer” don’t feel theoretical to me. From 2012 to 2017, I worked on nearly 300 nuclear silo alerts [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 10:45 AM PST - 39 comments

Continually updated list of independent Canadian professional, digital-first news outlets.
posted by aniola at 9:40 AM PST - 21 comments

I Made a 32-bit Computer Inside Terraria (From Scratch, YouTube/Piped, 15m25s)
posted by flabdablet at 9:29 AM PST - 4 comments

In response to the NCAA saying he was punished for "pay to play" benefits, former USC running back Reggie Bush has sued the organization for defamation, as part of a push to have his Heisman Trophy reinstated. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:28 AM PST - 13 comments

Weak laws discouraged police from investigating a serial cyberstalker who was spreading nude photos of several women online. (WaPo gift link).
posted by PussKillian at 9:22 AM PST - 19 comments

Free Bird is a song by Lynyrd Skynyrd, released on their 1973 debut album. The notorious now cliched encore request for "Free Bird!" stemmed from Skynyrd's 1976 live album One More from the Road, where Van Zant can be heard asking the crowd, "What song is it you want to hear?" The calls for "Free Bird" led into a fourteen-and-a-half-minute rendition of the song. In 2016, an attendee of a Bob Dylan concert in Berkeley, California, shouted for "Free Bird" to be played, and Dylan and his band unexpectedly obliged. Happy Monday, friends, here's your Free Thread.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:42 AM PST - 168 comments

Historical NSFW content presented only for consenting adults to view in the privacy of wherever they deem to be private.
Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy [Wikipedia] is a 1976 American erotic musical comedy film [1h18m, IA] loosely based on Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Chatterbox [Wikipedia] is a 1977 American comedy film [1h13m, IA] about a woman with a talking vagina. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:21 AM PST - 43 comments

On the surface, Alaska as a whole appears an odd choice for cattle: mountainous, snowy, far from lucrative markets. But we’re here in June, summer solstice 2022, at “peak green,” when the archipelago oozes a lushness I associate with coastal British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. The islands rest closer to the gentle climate of those coasts than to the northern outposts they skirt. So, in the aspirational culture that Alaska has always embraced, why not cattle? from The Republic of Cows [Hakai]
posted by chavenet at 3:56 PM PST - 13 comments

For Michael Oher, understanding the truth of the document he signed when he was 18 was, he says, a final, deep betrayal. Michael Oher, a former NFL player whose story was told in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” filed court documents Monday alleging that a Tennessee couple he once called mom and dad had falsely claimed that they had legally adopted him when he was a struggling teenager. Oher further alleged that Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy had him sign conservatorship papers that he didn’t realize would give the couple power to make business deals for him. As a high school student in 2004, Oher signed the paperwork, believing it was part of the adoption process, according to his petition filed in a Tennessee probate court. He realized in February that the paperwork stripped away his rights, the petition says. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 1:51 PM PST - 51 comments

YouTube's Swell Entertainment [YouTube video page link] attends events. But she doesn't go to create glamour Instagram moments, she goes to review the actual experience of attending the event. An interesting comparison/contrast are her videos lunacy at the furry convention [33m] and Anime Expo feels unsafe [37m]. But it's not just conventions, here is i snuck into Renee Rapp's listening party [20m]. I think she's great, and doing a thing nobody else is doing, and doing it with an attitude I enjoy.
posted by hippybear at 5:56 AM PST - 7 comments

Arleen Sorkin, noted stage and television actress who was the inspiration and first voice actress for Batman: The Animated Series and DC villain Harley Quinn, has passed away at 67 following a long term illness.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:50 AM PST - 32 comments

The Lunar Codex Will Archive the Work of 30,000 Artists—on the Moon. A series of time capsules will honor and preserve contemporary art from around the globe. Among the works selected for the Lunar Codex are Ayana Ross’ painting New American Gothic, Pauline Aubey’s Lego portrait Emerald Girl and The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon, a commissioned poetry anthology with works from every continent, including Antarctica, per the Times. It also features pieces by the Ukrainian printmaker Olesya Dzhurayeva, who had to flee Kyiv last year in the wake of the Russian invasion, and Connie Karleta Sales, an artist with the autoimmune disease neuromyelitis optica who creates paintings using eye-gaze technology.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:44 PM PST - 17 comments

Creators of the 2005 web series Yacht Rock and the subsequent podcast Beyond Yacht Rock, JD Ryznar, Hunter Stair, “Hollywood” Steve Huey, and David B. Lyons are returning Labor Day Weekend with two new podcasts: The Yacht or Nyacht Podcast, in which they'll pick up where they left off in the Yacht or Nyacht “minisodes” of BYR in 2019, rating songs on the Yachtski Scale, where songs 50 and above are yacht rock* and those below 50 are nyacht rock; and Billion Dollar Record Club, where they'll “listen to an underloved album every week and cause its value to soar”. [more inside]
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 8:27 PM PST - 62 comments

Forty years on from the magnificent album sequence that began with Swordfishtrombones, collaborators and fans including Jim Jarmusch and Thom Yorke discuss Waits’s journey from bar-room balladeer to conductor of the ultimate junkyard orchestra from ‘All these bulletproof songs, one after another’: remembering Tom Waits’s extraordinary mid-career trilogy [Grauniad; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:54 PM PST - 51 comments

Bob Barker the host of "Truth or Consequences, "The Price is Right" and animal activist has passed away, at age 99. A constant figure on TV for 50 years. Always mostly seemed like a good guy. Had some #metoo things in that timeframe, but, one of the folks I remember growing up watching TV.
posted by Windopaene at 3:05 PM PST - 52 comments

Cannonball: The Most 1993 Song of All Time
posted by Artw at 10:29 AM PST - 66 comments

"If that had been us that attacked the Capitol a couple of years ago, they would have shot us." Remembering the March on Washington 60 years ago.
posted by binturong at 10:16 AM PST - 4 comments

Conduction, convection, and radiation through windows suck heat out of the house in winter and give it easy entry in summer. Cooling the heat caused by solar gain from a home's windows may be 50% of peak load. Limiting unwanted solar gains in summer, while keeping desired passive solar heating in winter can be a balancing act in some climates, but keep in mind solar impact on roof and wall temperature is lower in winter than summer due to shorter days and lower intensity sunlight. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:08 AM PST - 52 comments

In the immediate aftermath of a thrilling final that saw Spain's first Women's World Cup victory, Luis Rubiales, the president of Spain's soccer federation, kissed player Jenni Hermoso, which she has said was done without her consent. FIFA has suspended him for 90 days, but Rubiales refuses to resign, the Spanish soccer federation is threatening to sue Hermoso for giving her side of the story on Instagram, and the entire women's team is on strike.
posted by Etrigan at 9:18 AM PST - 86 comments

Wordward Draw is a browser game in which each word you type must be either an anagram of your previous word or identical to your previous word with just one letter changed. If you can reach certain goal words (which are gradually revealed), you get to see a little picture. That's it! See all the pictures! [more inside]
posted by nobody at 7:32 AM PST - 34 comments

Naomi Klein discusses how being confused with Naomi Wolf went from amusing to disturbing as the pandemic lead her “doppelgänger” to right-wing prosperity.
posted by adamsc at 6:11 AM PST - 61 comments

There are stand-up specials, and there are stand-up specials. Part Dmitri Martin, part Andy Kaufman, Kristen Schaal: Live at the Fillmore [2013, 1h] is hilarious, inventive, surprising, and, well, um... yeah. I'm still not entirely sure what I've seen, but I think that's part of the point. NSFW for subject matter, not visuals.
posted by hippybear at 5:51 AM PST - 17 comments

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk: Better Red than dead [Shack News] “Set in a funky, futuristic New Amsterdam, the world of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is ruled by crews of graffiti artists-slash-DJs-slash-superheroes(?). The constant power struggle is a bid to become “All City,” the top of the top. You start as Faux, someone seemingly crucial to the current rankings. But before you can escape a mysterious holding cell and figure out what’s up, another crew leader lops your head off with weaponized vinyl. You wake up with a new (robot) head, a new name (Red) and a new crew, and set off to get your head back and become All City on the way. [...] If you’re an old school Segahead, there are definitely a few holes in your heart in need of filling. Jet Set Radio, which hasn’t seen a new game since the Xbox, is one of the biggest. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk has appeared like a beacon of hope to fill that void, and it does so while bringing new stuff to the table. This game is like a long-lost Dreamcast game in so many different ways, and most of them are good. Clearly, the developers at Team Reptile understand the concept of love.” [Launch Trailer][Gameplay Trailer]
posted by Fizz at 5:39 AM PST - 14 comments

Golden bandicoots were locally extinct last week. Now, they're back — and growing. Golden bandicoots were last sighted in this area in 1967. Now a translocation project is aiming to revive the marsupial's population.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Conveyor Belt Salmon Nigiri vs. Conveyor Belt Tuna Nigiri - only one can win.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:32 PM PST - 15 comments

It has struck me lately that the recurrent frenzy of destruction of prized objects in popular culture may tell us less about our current relationship to the past than it does about our fears for the future. After all, each effort a culture makes to preserve an object of admiration involves a wager about how later generations will need access to material that is already in some measure outmoded. If every museum may be understood to indicate something about what a culture anticipates or hopes will happen in the years ahead, to depend on a secular prophesy of value, the loss of protection, the acceptance of injury, even the cheerful anticipation of acts of violence may in turn need to be understood to be forceful indications of fundamental changes in values. from In The Age of Artpocalypse; Beauty and Damage on TV
posted by chavenet at 3:53 PM PST - 11 comments

• How to draw Ronald McDonald
• How to be a Playboy bunny
• How to care for your Pet Rock
• How to run the Haunted Mansion
• How to fly to the Moon
• How to commit sabotage

A selection of digitized manuals from the Internet Archive curated by Jason Scott
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:07 AM PST - 46 comments

Fred Clark of Slacktivist (previously) quotes Biblical scriptures on honest weights and measures while critiquing corporate survey metrics and their dishonest usage by bosses to punish individual workers. "Your job is simply to give all 5s. To everyone, everywhere, every time. This is your task because it is the only honest answer available to an honest person. Because 4≠0. Because differing weights are an abomination and false scales are not good. Because your wealthy are full of violence with tongues of deceit in their mouths and bags full of dishonest weights." From June 2019.
posted by brainwane at 9:20 AM PST - 90 comments

The Little Widow From the Capital is a short story by Yohanca Delgado. It appears in the Best American Short Stories 2022. The link gives just the first three pages of the story but you can listen to it whole at NPR's Selected Shorts. Scroll down to "Best American Short Stories", story starts at 5min 30s. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:54 AM PST - 5 comments

Bad-ass writer Niko Stratis on the frustration of being talked about without being talked to in media (slPasteMagazine) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:43 AM PST - 15 comments

Armored Core 6 brings mecha to the masses [Polygon] “The rebooted Armored Core is not a sprawling adventure game à la Elden Ring or Bloodborne, nor does my experience with those games make me a capable mech pilot. Instead, Armored Core 6 is a reconsideration of a classic game series infused with a decade of studio growth, expertise in combat and level design, and the heightened expectations of FromSoftware fans. Armored Core 6 is a faster, more refined Armored Core experience that streamlines the mecha franchise in clever ways. [...] It’s noisy, chaotic, and starkly beautiful, all this clanging metal, ricochets, and explosions. It’s unlike many of the FromSoftware games you may have played over the past decade, to its benefit.” [Launch Trailer][Overview Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:38 AM PST - 42 comments

"As I pen down these words in my office at the Armenian Theological Seminary of the Holy See of Cilicia, it’s heartrending to acknowledge that over 120,000 Armenian individuals, including children in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) within the South Caucasus, are facing the dire fate of starvation. Unlike many other instances of famine, this crisis has been inflicted upon them due to the actions of their neighboring country, Azerbaijan. By blocking the sole connecting road to the Republic of Armenia, known as the Lachin Corridor, Azerbaijan has triggered and augmented this suffering. For more than a week, 400 tons of vital humanitarian aid have been stranded along the road to Artsakh, all due to Azerbaijan’s political agenda of ethnic cleansing in the region, with the aim of asserting the entire territory as part of Azerbaijan." [more inside]
posted by kmt at 1:44 AM PST - 21 comments

How these small bedrooms have renewed hope for endangered eastern freshwater cod. The eastern freshwater cod has been described as just as important as a crocodile or white shark. Now, experts have designed a nesting box that has delivered promising results.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:31 PM PST - 9 comments

The news came out of nowhere as WWE Chief Content Officer Paul "Triple H" Levesque tweeted: "Windham Rotunda - also known as Bray Wyatt - unexpectedly passed earlier today". Bray Wyatt -- one of the most charismatic and creative professional wrestlers of the current era -- was 36 years old.
posted by Etrigan at 5:26 PM PST - 28 comments

... during the writing process for this production. Breaking Bad 2 (official trailer). WARNING: pretty damned graphic etc.
posted by philip-random at 3:55 PM PST - 26 comments

As the U.S. crept toward an overreliance on mono-agriculture, it eroded native pollinator populations, forcing the country to rely more and more on a species (European honeybees) that is both invasive and increasingly unstable. We strip the land to make more of the same crops and in doing so refortify our economic tentpoles and hasten our agricultural demise. The more the system grows, the more it precipitates the upheaval of the very thing it is most reliant on. from America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem [The Ringer] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:52 PM PST - 28 comments

Liam Carps makes Youtube Shorts about living in Germany.
posted by backseatpilot at 1:23 PM PST - 17 comments

If the Indigenous community has its version of the Met Gala, this would be it. Inlaid turquoise sunglasses? Don’t mind if I do. AuntieCreations - Lynn Traylor - making the ultimate beaded hat. Goodday, bringing it as always. “When you and your silly jingle chain make it to Vogue.” IndigiGoth looks. On Wednesday we wear pink to the Native Guitars Tour. Your earrings should be bigger. There are ribbon skirts, and then there are ribbon gowns. Raven Bright showing us how to move. Velvet and a wealth of turquoise. It’s the bomber jackets for me.
posted by Bottlecap at 11:58 AM PST - 17 comments

A guessing game of animal categories.
posted by clew at 10:25 AM PST - 33 comments

Trans teachers fired. Trans inmates detransitioned. Adult care banned. Allies killed. We are entering into a new phase of anti-trans politics, and eradication is the goal. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 7:53 AM PST - 83 comments

"The makers of The Atomic Cafe [1982, 1h26m] sifted through thousands of feet of Army films, newsreels, government propaganda films and old television broadcasts to come up with the material in their film, which is presented without any narration, as a record of some of the ways in which the bomb entered American folklore. There are songs, speeches by politicians, and frightening documentary footage of guinea-pig American troops shielding themselves from an atomic blast and then exposing themselves to radiation neither they nor their officers understood." - Roger Ebert [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:42 AM PST - 24 comments

Split-screen tonight in America: The first Republican presidential primary debate of 2024 starting in 10 minutes (moderated by Sean Hannity and featuring DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Pence, Haley, Christie, Scott, Hutchinson, and Burgum) vs. a counterprogramming interview between Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump on Twitter starting in 5. Live resources: Brian Tyler Cohen's debate livestream (with commentary) - Nitter mirror of @TuckerCarlson for those not wanting to patronize Musk/bowtie - FiveThirtyEight liveblog - NYT liveblog - Debate bingo and drinking game - MeFi chat for real-time discussion
posted by Rhaomi at 5:50 PM PST - 136 comments

The underwater Amazon off Australia's coast that could help tackle climate change. New research shows the climate benefits of protecting and restoring underwater kelp forests could be equivalent to planting a billion trees.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:25 PM PST - 5 comments

Since 2020, Americans have experienced rising food prices while farm closures have ticked steadily upward. Inflation and supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic have been explicitly or implicitly blamed in the news. However, the inflation narrative overlooks a more endemic, structural problem with the industry at large. from The Cartel That Controls the US Meat Industry
posted by chavenet at 3:51 PM PST - 9 comments

Sir John Eliot Gardiner has reportedly struck a singer after a performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Berlioz Festival in France. "According to our informants, and with confirmation by a person authorised to speak on Gardiner’s behalf, Gardiner was annoyed that the English bass singer, William Thomas, 29, left the podium on the wrong side. Backstage, in the wings and out of sight of the audience, Gardiner, 80, rebuked Thomas in front of the cast, then slapped and punched him in the face." [more inside]
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:25 PM PST - 32 comments

BBC: Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin presumed dead after Russia plane crash [more inside]
posted by Major Clanger at 11:17 AM PST - 435 comments

A zoo in Tennessee says it has welcomed a rare giraffe that does not have any spots. The spotless giraffe was born at Brights Zoo in Limestone, Tennessee, on July 31 and the zoo says experts believe she is the only solid-colored reticulated giraffe on the planet.
posted by Etrigan at 10:11 AM PST - 30 comments

A home for retired playground animals just opened in NYC. "The ‘retired’ animals were put in parks across NYC under former parks commissioner Henry Stern, who asked designers to incorporate animal art into every new playground in those decades. Some of them, like the frog, were made in-house, but the others were prefabricated. Once these playgrounds were renovated with new and accessible play features, the need for these animals disappeared. Until now, these animals were just thrown out, but starting now, they'll be added to the 'retirement home' at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park."
posted by moonmilk at 8:35 AM PST - 20 comments

The Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-3 Vikram lander has successfully touched down near the moon's south pole. This video of the ISRO control center during Vikram's descent and soft landing from earlier today is tense and joyous.
posted by mhoye at 7:23 AM PST - 52 comments

With Oppenheimer quickly becoming one of the biggest [heh] movies of all time, there has been a lot of discussion about film format floating around lately. Here with a complete explainer about film formats is Analogue Resurgence with 70mm: From Oklahoma to Oppenheimer (Or, How Very Big Film Was Used to Make Very Big Movies) [46m]. It's a romp across cinema through the lens of, well, the lenses. And the film stock. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:12 AM PST - 15 comments

How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat. Angus Trumble at the Public Domain Review on 'Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company's curious but longstanding fixation with the furry oddity that is the wombat — that "most beautiful of God's creatures" which found its way into their poems, their art, and even, for a brief while, their homes.'
posted by misteraitch at 3:43 AM PST - 27 comments

Last month, the Panama Maritime Authority published its final report [pdf] into the 2021 grounding of the Ever Given (MeFi previously). Mike Schuler summarised the findings at gCaptain, noting that:

The report was highly critical of navigation decisions made by the SCA pilots. According to the report, they did not take bad weather conditions into account, gave improper instructions to the helmsman, and did not communicate effectively with the bridge team due to language difficulties. The vessel was also traveling faster than the maximum speed, which the report noted is common.

Some lessons clearly remain to be learned though, because today, the 300m LNG carrier BW Lesmes also got itself jammed sideways in the canal, and the Cayman Islands tanker Burri ran into it. This time however, both ships were freed within a few hours.
posted by automatronic at 1:22 AM PST - 9 comments

Idaho Legislature’s decision to disband board came as two hospitals that serve rural areas announced they would stop providing services for expectant mothers From the Idaho Capital Sun [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 12:30 AM PST - 35 comments

A Universal Germanic Dialogue (SLYT, make sure sound is on) Is it possible to construct a paragraph in Dutch, German, English, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish that are all mutually comprehendible? That is my plan.
posted by gwint at 8:05 PM PST - 46 comments

Worst to Best: Music Videos Set in Movie Worlds (SLThe Reveal, a Substack that's mostly about movies)
posted by box at 3:37 PM PST - 33 comments

"Well, one day I found out he was actually coming into town to play as the featured soloist with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra." A sweet story by a pianist about a risk she took when she was much younger, and what happened next. Told in a Mastodon thread, 8 posts long (you'll have to tap/click "Read more" to read each post in its entirety).
posted by brainwane at 3:32 PM PST - 15 comments

Yet within the sport, and even for the larger world, the Giants remain a cautionary tale: a high-profile example of what can happen when prejudice derails a talented organization or team, when discord and distrust become everyday elements in a workplace. Instead of dominating the big leagues with their core of talented Latino and African-American players, the Giants were perennial also-rans for most of the 1960s. from Giant Missteps
posted by chavenet at 3:19 PM PST - 1 comment

A semester inside the siege: New College professor defends her progressive haven from DeSantis’ conservative coup. “If I just walk away,” she thought, “who will stand up for this place? ... I want to try to preserve the things that make New College unique and wonderful." Amy Reid, a professor of French language and the director of the gender studies program, has worked at New College of Florida her whole career — nearly half her life.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:52 AM PST - 60 comments

From million-dollar slide shows to Steve Jobs’s introduction of the iPhone, a bit of show business never hurt plain old business. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 10:04 AM PST - 18 comments

The failure of Luna 25 cements Putin’s role as a disastrous space leader. [Ars Technica] The destruction of the lunar probe--which would have been Russia's first lunar mission since a Soviet uncrewed probe in 1976--is the latest in a long line of failures and downgradings of the program that once accomplished the first successful satellite launch, the first man and woman in space, and the first spacewalk. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:49 AM PST - 68 comments

"Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023. Human Rights Watch research indicates that, at time of writing, the killings are continuing. Saudi border guards have used explosive weapons and shot people at close range, including women and children, in a pattern that is widespread and systematic." Saudi Arabian Mass Killings of Ethiopian Migrants at the Yemen-Saudi Border (HRW report) (One of the many consequences of the Tigray War where it's "estimated 162,000–⁠600,000 people were killed" between 2020 and 2022)
posted by kmt at 5:07 AM PST - 9 comments

How methane from food waste contributes to climate change and why small efforts to stop it can make a big difference.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:21 AM PST - 44 comments

While hunger may be the best sauce in the world, most prefer something with a bit more taste. And since it's summer and beautiful herbs abound, let's look at many ways of bringing a "green" zip to the plate. (Plus it's Hatch Chile season!) As with all things culinary, this will be woefully incomplete, short sighted, lacking the complete picture and not the way your nana made it and that's great - more green sauces! [more inside]
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:10 PM PST - 40 comments

The Ideal Viewport Does Not Exist - the results of a little investigation into how fragmented browser sizes are across users, with some fun visualization.
posted by Artw at 7:57 PM PST - 27 comments

This works unreasonably well: a mashup of Anaconda, by Nicki Minaj, and Phantom of the Opera
posted by Pronoiac at 6:54 PM PST - 9 comments

Clone-a Lisa: Can you paint a copy of the Mona Lisa in 60 seconds? "Anything over 80% is good, 85%+ very good, and 90% may be possible if you're extremely fast and accurate." [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:20 PM PST - 67 comments

In 1969, BBC News spoke to Mr Glynne Wood - who had a pigeon living on his head. [SLX]
posted by chavenet at 1:15 PM PST - 28 comments

"Healthy eating education was a trigger for 14 percent of the patients, and ... early adolescents were especially vulnerable." The Washington Post describes how childhood education about "healthy" eating can actually cause eating disorders like anorexia nervosa. (archive.org link)
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:39 AM PST - 36 comments

It’s-a-no-longer me: Charles Martinet steps down as Mario’s voice
posted by May Kasahara at 9:58 AM PST - 15 comments

Kellogg’s is going to war over Mexico’s nutrition label rules. A similar fight is coming to the U.S. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:56 AM PST - 22 comments

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule: How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in. The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new....But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. [more inside]
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:02 AM PST - 63 comments

Vores Øl, in English Free Beer,is a Danish brand of beer that markets itself as being the world's first open-source beer. And this is your free thread! Happy Monday.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:32 AM PST - 84 comments

elections are bad for democracy [slnyt]

[archive.org link]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:21 AM PST - 87 comments

集団行動　group action 2011年　Japanese Precision Walking Competition [14m] I won't even pretend to understand much of what is going on here. The introduction is long, and the real action begins around 1m42s. There's a grace and skill and wit on display here, and if you're around for the very end, they execute some maneuvers that even to my amateur eye look VERY amazing, as if they hadn't done enough before.
posted by hippybear at 6:37 AM PST - 24 comments

Kris Nóva has died in a climbing accident. Creator of the Nivenly Foundation, inspiration for Hachyderm, Nóva was a software engineer, author, public speaker, alpinist, and transgender advocate, maybe best known for her work on Kubernetes. [more inside]
posted by box at 6:35 AM PST - 23 comments

This link takes you to today's Guardian story about Bragg's new song. And here's the song itself. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 6:28 AM PST - 67 comments

Listen to 28 Australian animal sounds, from a poll looking for Australia's favourite. [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 4:59 AM PST - 6 comments

What do magpie calls mean? Australian Magpies [Gymnorhina tibicen, from the family Artamidae; they are not closely related to the European magpie Pica pica, from the family Corvidae] are incredibly musically versatile, with 900-ish known syllables and a four-octave register — a wider range of notes than Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:09 AM PST - 11 comments

Only Italians Will Understand This In a world tipping towards monoculture, it’s not hard to understand the nostalgic appeal of regional accents, local food, and traditions. But when exaggerated to the point of caricature, Italian American culture becomes little more than engagement bait. While Italian Americans have long been generally integrated in the United States, the internet cannot resist the cultural cachet—and hearty follower counts—that comes with emphasizing difference.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:56 PM PST - 86 comments

Asking for Love was a music video made by Egill Eðvarðsson in 1973 for a song by Jóhann G. Jóhannsson, who was filmed walking backwards around downtown Reykjavík, and then reversed to make it seem everyone else’s walking backwards. Now, fifty years later, Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Ívar Kristján Ívarsson have recreated the video with singer-songwriter Árný Margrét, walking the same route backwards, for her song Waiting.
posted by Kattullus at 2:31 PM PST - 16 comments

The tension at the heart of the natural proofs barrier is that the task of distinguishing high-complexity functions from low-complexity ones is similar to the task of distinguishing true randomness from the pseudorandomness used to encrypt messages. We’d like to show that high-complexity functions are categorically different from low-complexity functions, to prove P ≠ NP. But we’d also like for pseudorandomness to be indistinguishable from randomness, to be confident in the security of cryptography. Maybe we can’t have it both ways. from Complexity Theory’s 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge
posted by chavenet at 1:13 PM PST - 10 comments

Mapping where the earth will become uninhabitable. By the year 2100, all areas that are red in the visualisation will become “uninhabitable”. Extreme heat, tropical cyclones, rising sea levels, water stress or a combination of those are projected to make it difficult or impossible to live there.
posted by johnxlibris at 11:05 AM PST - 42 comments

Online merchants changed the way we shop—and made “reverse logistics” into a booming new industry. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:42 AM PST - 32 comments

Mulgaras (tiny carnivorous marsupials) return to island home. Mulgaras were one of 11 native animals wiped out on Dirk Hartog Island, off Western Australia, after Europeans arrived. Now the little marsupials are making a comeback, with the help of scientists and Indigenous rangers.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:18 AM PST - 7 comments

Veritasium on the p-adics - "There's a strange number system, featured in the work of a dozen Fields Medalists, that helps solve problems that are intractable with real numbers." (p-adics previously)
posted by kliuless at 11:26 PM PST - 30 comments

The Real Cost of Good Movies lays out the issues in the media strikes - streaming (non)-royalties, digital likenesses, and LLM's - while sketching the reductions in quality and choice for media consumers. Concludes with a suggestion to burn it all down and replace it with BandCamp for video.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:17 PM PST - 51 comments

Printed books from this period cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always find them far more interesting — more beautifully designed, more strange, more intriguing — than modern books. The rest of this post is a few thoughts on why. from Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful by Benjamin Breen [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:07 PM PST - 4 comments

TNT Boys as BeeGees Too Much Heaven on a show called, "Your Face Sounds Familar". From 5 years ago. (YouTube) [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 12:57 PM PST - 9 comments

'My Generation' Anthem for a Forgotten Cohort
posted by box at 11:15 AM PST - 111 comments

Gene splicing treatment cures Simian Immunodeficiency Virus in non-human primates, next will be HIV in humans. "Analyses showed that EBT-001 was broadly distributed, reaching tissues throughout the body, with evidence of gene editing of SIV proviral DNA in all significant viral reservoirs. Moreover, EBT-001 was well-tolerated at all dose levels, with no evidence of toxicity in clinical examination of the animals or following histopathological investigation." [Medical Express]
posted by hippybear at 10:56 AM PST - 12 comments

She hired him as a caregiver for her family. They fell in love. Sanhai’s husband had died a few years earlier of a heart attack, leaving her to raise her two sons as a single mother. Not long after they relocated, the family faced another crisis in 2014: Sanhai’s father had a stroke, sending her on a desperate search for a caregiver. Her job as a scientist was demanding, and Sanhai needed someone to tend to her father — who moved in with her family after the stroke — as well as help out with her two sons, then 16 and 10. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:40 AM PST - 7 comments

The rumour about the Jews is an essay by Prof. Francesca Trivellato about how Jews expelled from France in 1394 were falsely credited with inventing the bill of exchange. She was interviewed at length on this subject by Nachi Weinstein for the Seforim Chatter podcast. The historiography of Jews and finance was the subject of Prof. Julie Mell’s The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, which she summarizes in a brief radio interview with the Carolina Journal. For a more in-depth interview, you can listen to Scott Ferguson interview her for the Money on the Left podcast (incl. transcript) or read the three critiques in a forum on the book hosted by the Marginalia Review, and Prof. Mell’s response.
posted by Kattullus at 6:59 AM PST - 21 comments

Instead I was cast as the villain whose feminism betrayed the integrity of the show
posted by Etrigan at 6:33 AM PST - 31 comments

How a kitchen table discussion led to a $5 million solar farm funded by residents to provide local power. Three-hundred residents in the New South Wales city of Goulburn band together to build their own solar energy project on the edge of town.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:12 AM PST - 13 comments

By Watterson’s own admission, he cannot accurately recall a whole decade of his life because of his “Ahab-like obsession” with his work. “The intensity of pushing the writing and drawing as far as my skills allowed was the whole point of doing it,” he says. “I eliminated pretty much everything from my life that wasn’t the strip.” While Watterson’s wife, Melissa Richmond, organized everything around him, he furthered his isolation, burrowing ever more deeply into the strip’s world. There was no other way, he believed, to keep its integrity absolute. “My approach was probably too crazy to sustain for a lifetime,” he says, “but it let me draw the exact strip I wanted while it lasted.” [The American Conservative]
posted by riruro at 8:54 PM PST - 64 comments

There's no sign that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes will let up anytime soon, as Hollywood creatives ratchet up the rhetoric by calling for the breakup of the studios on antitrust grounds. As Matt Stoller reports, this makes strange bedfellows: "Most of the public noise during this period of chaos is coming from the more labor oriented activist-types, but behind the scenes, the serious financiers and producers are worried as well, because the ability to actually make money by making and distributing films and TV shows is falling apart."
posted by rhymedirective at 1:38 PM PST - 50 comments

It makes sense to be wary of scams: you should not reply to your spam emails, no matter how much you’d like to help a prince retrieve millions from his trust fund. But there are costs to excessive scepticism, too, for both the self and the social order. A diverse body of evidence from psychology and behavioural economics can help us understand those costs. On a personal level, the fear of being suckered can encourage someone to be risk averse, to avoid the kind of cooperation that is essential to any new venture. At the systemic level, the stakes of distrust are even higher. from ‘Wait, am I the fool here?’ [Grauniad; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:05 PM PST - 42 comments

Could weathered rock be the magic dust that vaults us towards our climate goals? "Previous research has looked at the huge potential of rock weathering—the process through which rain that captures CO2 from the atmosphere as it falls, reacts with rock to form carbonates which capture the carbon. ... ‘Enhanced’ rock weathering is a process that relies on first grinding the rock up to increase the available surface area for the weathering action to occur. Vast tracts of farmland provide the ideal real estate where this technology can be applied at scale—and farmers benefit, as weathered basalt enriches the soil with crop-boosting minerals over time." [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:51 PM PST - 51 comments

Bayt Al Fann ("Art House") is a website featuring Islamic art, architecture, food and history, including detailed artist interviews. They have a very active Twitter presence and archive many of those threads, including beautiful Hajj certificates, Kufic script, Ismail al-Jazari, the "father of robotics", paper quilling and Islamic art, ancient manuscripts of Mali and Timbuktu, Turkish ebru marbling, the Middle Eastern roots of the samosa, and mosques in Malaysia, the Philippines, China and ancient Africa as well as mosque ceilings from around the world. [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 11:57 AM PST - 5 comments

You know the scene in Ghostbusters where the power's been shut down, the ghosts have broken containment, and they start to run amok in New York? The distinctive, eerie song- "Magic" by Mick Smiley- that accompanies it exists only in the film and on the soundtrack; it was never released as a single and Smiley never released it himself. But who even is Mick Smiley? In 2016, Josie Riesman tracked him down and got his story.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:29 AM PST - 49 comments

The history of television is a vast wasteland of terrible decisions. For every groundbreaking show like Breaking Bad, Star Trek, and All in the Family that got on the air, there are 50 duds like Capitol Critters, Homeboys in Outer Space, and Joanie Loves Chachi. For every brilliant network idea, like NBC allowing Jerry Seinfeld to make a “show about nothing,” there are 100 insane ones, like ABC allowing Jim Belushi to create 182 episodes of According to Jim across eight seasons. (archive,today link) [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:25 AM PST - 170 comments

Here's why Americans can't stop living paycheck to paycheck - "The typical worker takes home $3,308 per month after taxes and benefits, based on the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But when you take a look at the cost of some of the most essential expenses today, it's easy to see why consumers feel strained." [link-heavy FPP! :] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:19 AM PST - 48 comments

Mschf, those merry pranksters of the internet, have invented a new take on collaborative reanimations (not listed there is one of the newest: the excellent Popeye: Barbecue for Two): The Free Movie, a collaborative redrawing of Bee Movie that anyone could collaborate to. It's bee-n completed already, and you can watch it in full (complete with MSDCHF-suppoied voices and sound effects), but they're currently making a second one: John Wick 4 Free. Draw as many or as few frames as you like, or as much or as little detail as you like, with only a single-pixel brush, an eraser, an undo button and a preview button. If you don't think you can draw your assigned frame, just reload for another. (Contains violence, inevitable drawings of dicks, and Bee Movie.)
posted by BiggerJ at 5:34 AM PST - 3 comments

YouTube link to a Guns N' Roses song called "Perhaps."
posted by cgc373 at 12:46 AM PST - 36 comments

"An incredibly rare find": This ancient amphibian almost ended up forgotten inside a sandstone slab wall. Almost 30 years after a chicken farmer found an almost perfectly preserved fossil in a slab of sandstone, scientists have identified the skeleton as a prehistoric amphibian.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:47 PM PST - 5 comments

Very rarely can we see an entire system reflected in one person. The creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” is such a person. (Seth Simons, Longreads; content warning for sexual assault)
posted by dismas at 4:38 PM PST - 154 comments

Lawyer behind hundreds of food lawsuits faces sanctions in Starbucks, Walmart cases [Reuters, July 2023] [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 3:16 PM PST - 44 comments

You’re a Cyclist Who Was Just Struck by a Car Driver. Here’s Why It Was Your Fault [more inside]
posted by aniola at 2:25 PM PST - 87 comments

Follow along as Jason Hibbs of Bourbon Moth Woodworking turns his riding lawnmower into a tank.
posted by bondcliff at 12:19 PM PST - 9 comments

The Pig Racing Woodland Finals! [16m] was enough of a curious title that I had to click on it when YouTube put it in front of me. Apparently this is the finale of the NINTH season of pig racing, so it's a bit like starting with the final chapter, but it only made me want to go back and watch more. The League Of Pigs YouTube Page has over 100 videos of adorable piggy action for any others who might also be interested. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:49 AM PST - 4 comments

Philip K Dick Speaks in Metz, France in 1977 [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 11:00 AM PST - 8 comments

Most US Millennials Finally Own Their Own Homes
posted by Selena777 at 10:49 AM PST - 116 comments

On August 15, 1998, Apple introduced the iMac. It's very easy to go all fanboy/fangirl when discussing anything Apple, but it's no exaggeration to say that this 15" Bondi blue, all-in-one computer saved Apple from bankruptcy. The Verge looks back. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 9:46 AM PST - 57 comments

Don Martin, host of Head on Fire pod, wishes to unite us under the banner of BimboLunch (slTikTok) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 9:22 AM PST - 7 comments

Yellowknife, the largest settlement, capital, and only city in Canada's Northwest Territories, is being totally evacuated by land and air due to an encroaching fire. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:30 AM PST - 53 comments

Satrapi spoke to PW while on vacation in Stockholm about her shift from comics to film, the banning of books in America, and her pride in Iran's young revolutionaries.
posted by Etrigan at 5:58 AM PST - 2 comments

South Scrimshaw, Part One (free gog.com) is a beautifully hand drawn visual novel/documentary about a whale calf in an alien ocean three million light years away. PCgamer. Youtube walkthrough.
posted by adept256 at 4:22 AM PST - 2 comments

My Parents Are Dead: What Now? A resource (aimed at Millennials, but useful to people of any age) for those who have no idea what to do when their parents die. From the last days through the funeral to probate and beyond, useful advice and links for folks who are working through one of the awful parts of adult life. US-centric.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:48 PM PST - 55 comments

Two new Australian mammal species just dropped – and they are very small. Some planigales weigh less than a teaspoonful of water. Despite their size, these fierce predators often take on prey as big as themselves. To date, there are four known species of planigale found across Australia. We have recently discovered another two species, both inhabitants of the Pilbara region of northwest Western Australia: the orange-headed Pilbara planigale (Planigale kendricki) and the cracking-clay Pilbara planigale (P. tealei).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:39 PM PST - 18 comments

Linus Tech Tips has long been known for forthright tech review videos, even if Linus himself is a little clumsy. Linus Sebastian got his start doing product demo videos for now-defunct retailer NCIX in the early days of streaming video content, and has turned that into a YouTube empire, with 100 staff and multiple channels producing daily video content for his Linus Media Group. But recent events, brought to light by YouTube tech peer Gaming Nexus, show a disregard for truth or good journalism, and has turned the fandom against them. [more inside]
posted by thecjm at 3:17 PM PST - 45 comments

Adults have spent years immersed in our culture’s troubled relationship with death. We may not like the various boundaries this relationship imposes, but we have been conditioned to accept them. For children, it’s different. from Notes from Grief Camp by Mitchell Consky [The Walrus; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:58 PM PST - 13 comments

Like many, I've surmised that the reason Lindsey Graham went from Never Trump to Trump's Biggest Champion was because Donny had some kompromat on him. But after listening to the podcast from The Bulwark's Will Saletan, The Corruption Of Lindsey Graham [Bulwark link, podcast overview, individual episode pages are full of ancillary material, no listening links], I'm not so sure. He might have just sold his soul on principle. Here's Episode 1 of 7 "Graham's Moral Clarity" on YouTube [26m], with the full YouTube Playlist [annoyingly not in order] and the PDF book The Corruption Of Lindsey Graham by Will Saletan, upon which the podcast is based. The rest of the episodes on YouTube are listed below the fold. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:48 AM PST - 29 comments

After Cyberpunk 2077's rocky launch, it's time to bring back Deus Ex [PC Gamer] “Currently published by Square Enix, the Deus Ex series has been on hiatus since 2016, after the (mostly good) Mankind Divided failed to match sales expectations. But the huge attention and commercial success Cyberpunk has garnered, combined with its equally significant problems, has opened up a window for the series to return. This would really be things coming full circle. Deus Ex essentially served as the template for Cyberpunk 2077's core, boasting the same blend of fighting, sneaking and hacking. It also shares plenty of themes, like body modification and corporate conspiracies. For all intents and purposes, Deus Ex is a cyberpunk game. [...] Deus Ex's superiority is particularly evident when it comes to the RPG side of things. Putting aside the bugs and the technical issues, Cyberpunk's biggest problem is that its RPG systems are either poorly implemented or simply don't work at all.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:01 AM PST - 25 comments

Mashup Master Bill McClintock has appeared on Metafilter several times before, most recently here. I recently stumbled across his mashup of James Brown and Judas Priest which may be one of the most amazing things I have ever seen!
posted by wittgenstein at 9:50 AM PST - 15 comments

Why do great games fail? Matt Horton (previously) chats with a game publisher to understand why indie darlings like Season vastly under-perform in sales even after a strong indie game hype cycle and being featured in multiple game events.
posted by simmering octagon at 9:32 AM PST - 24 comments

Planet of the Bass - DJ Crazy Times ft Ms Biljana Electronica As we proceed further along the Goncharov timeline, a 90s Eurotrash classic has been unearthed. Though if you missed the actual way you encountered it, someone uploaded their VHS copy. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 9:11 AM PST - 28 comments

It's been long known that the purchase of Twitter, while primarily funded by Elon Musk, was done through a consortium of investors. In a piece by the Washington Post, they pull back the curtains on who's in that group. (Alternate link) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:02 AM PST - 23 comments

Or afternoon, or evening, or whatever it happens to be where you are. Either way, maybe waking up would be easier if the iPhone alarm were a piano ballad? [more inside]
posted by Spinda at 6:57 AM PST - 21 comments

It's an icon on I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati. It's inspired a soccer match, stickers, and beer. A billboard with a red "H" has become a bit of a symbol of region. But what's the story behind "Hell is Real?"
posted by MrGuilt at 5:11 AM PST - 53 comments

I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything. Although “Animal House” was a professedly anarchic comedy that identified with the freaks, the misfits and anyone wanting to fight for their right to party, the movie ironically helped crystallize a new strain of cultural and political conservatism that started on campuses and ran all the way up to the National Mall and Wall Street. In other words, “Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s.
posted by Toddles at 6:57 PM PST - 74 comments

An online gallery for the winners of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 From the Sombrero Galaxy to a moon gleaming next to a skyscraper, to misty green rivers under the aurora borealis and the sun's rays rendered as tree rings, these images brought a dose of wonder to me today
posted by MarianHalcombe at 2:32 PM PST - 14 comments

The 2023 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners. pre vi ous ly [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 12:58 PM PST - 32 comments

In a nearby town square, a skinny child in a Steph Curry T-shirt climbs a tree. A few blocks away, a three-wheeled mototaxi whizzes by, a San Francisco Giants sticker affixed to its bumper ... More extravagant emblems of San Francisco appear unexpectedly and often, alongside crumbling adobe huts, stray roosters and heaps of singed garbage. Handsome new homes, some mansions by local standards, some mansions by any standard, rise behind customized iron gates emblazoned with San Francisco 49ers or Golden State Warriors logos. from This is the Hometown of San Francisco’s Drug Dealers [SF Chronicle]
posted by chavenet at 12:55 PM PST - 24 comments

“There was this delicious mushroom dish. I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties...I learned that later.” Janet Yellen visited a Yunnan restaurant during an overseas visit and enjoyed local mushroom cuisine: jian shou qing, which means "see hand blue", referring to the blue stain the mushroom makes when bruised or cut. The dish is made with a local bolete mushroom called Lanmoa asiatica. When not properly cooked, the mushroom has been reported by some sources to have hallucinogenic properties.
posted by dantheclamman at 12:39 PM PST - 31 comments

I'd really only known Rich Hall [Wikipedia] from his appearances on BBC panel shows. It turns out, he has a whole career doing documentaries trying to explain the United States to a UK audience steeped in US mass media. Rich Hall's Red Menace [2019, 1h30m] begins with an atom bomb and follows the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR as depicted in cinema and contrasting that with actual history. But he's done so many more! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:06 AM PST - 31 comments

Arkansas rejects AP African American Studies, cites Arkansas law on "prohibited topics" (Judd Legum's Popular Information) [more inside]
posted by box at 10:35 AM PST - 38 comments

Game designer Amabel Holland asks what kinds of human things the medium of board games can express and explore once we let go of winning or losing as sources of meaning. She looks at four games – two of her designs, and two from other designers – and how each game approaches their victory conditions, or lack thereof. (SLYT, 14:15)
posted by Etrigan at 9:14 AM PST - 27 comments

Northumberland coastal village Newbiggin-by-the-Sea has embarked on one of the world's largest genealogy projects. The town of roughly 6,500 people has worked to create an enormous family tree featuring 40,000 individuals stretching back to around the year 1200. The Times. (Archive)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:39 AM PST - 8 comments

Along for the ride with Sebastian Davis, who’s built an empire of weaponized righteousness on YouTube based on a simple idea: Putting your shopping cart back is a test of your character [The Ringer]

“I think Cart Narcs has taken off because it’s just such a great study in the human condition,” Renae Ravey, a cohost on The Woody Show, told me over the phone. “Something as simple as putting a cart in a cart corral, and you get busted not doing it, and your immediate response is you want to beat this guy to death because he’s caught you. … I think that’s why people gravitate towards it.” [more inside]
posted by riruro at 6:31 AM PST - 207 comments

It's okay to be bad at games [EX | Substack]

“The thing that I eventually came to realize is that it's all about people's expectations. Everything when you're talking about difficulty in games has to be framed in terms of, how do people expect this run to go? And how did it actually go? And are the points of difficulty in the places where I expected them to be? A game is marked out as hard if you expected to be able to do things and you couldn't do them. And it is marked out as easy if the things you expect it to be able to do you could do even if there's a lot of repetition.”

A Q&A with Bennett Foddy, the high priest of videogame difficulty.
posted by Fizz at 5:27 AM PST - 33 comments

When Mississippi Once Banned Sesame Street. The show ran into problems during its first season in 1970 when a small group of Mississippi television consultants found it too controversial. The reason? Black cast members.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:21 AM PST - 16 comments

Richard T. Rodriguez in the LA Times on why British post-punk matters to US Latinidad. For the Latinx community, British post-punk music (sometimes called new wave or alternative) has become, as Welsh writer Raymond Williams defined culture, a whole way of life. From Facebook fan pages offering insights about the music to the two Cruel World music festivals held in Pasadena where brown bodies swayed to their favorite bands and singers from across the pond, it’s impossible not to recognize this deep connection.
posted by LemmySays at 1:06 AM PST - 3 comments

98 Pages, 19 Defendants, 41 Charges. Now with RICO. [more inside]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:33 PM PST - 1050 comments

Why can’t triple-A games come out with perfect polish from day 1? A response by Brandon Sheffield to IGN's Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic video which itself was a response to Xalavier's (of Hypnospace Outlaw fame) twitter thread about "gently, pre-emptively pushing back against players taking that excitement [about Baldur's Gate 3] and using it to apply criticism or a "raised standard" to RPGs going forward"
posted by simmering octagon at 1:30 PM PST - 77 comments

La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano (previously) is an series of extended improvisations with a piano tuned to 7-Limit Just Intonation. While LMY is very protective of his work, and recordings are almost completely absent on streaming sites and YouTube, there is a 5 hour recording available on archive.org. [more inside]
posted by q*ben at 1:00 PM PST - 11 comments

Yet the case still might have fizzled if not for the presence, in Tulsa’s Riverside Street Crimes Unit, of an officer with the improbable name Kansas Core ... the cat racket was hardly a choice assignment. “There’s this ‘We don’t care about catalytic converters, because it’s a property crime’ ” camp at the department, Staggs says. “It’s not a sexy crime. It’s not the robberies and the homicides.” When the previous commander gave Core the case, it wasn’t exactly hazing, but it wasn’t far off. “I’m pretty sure that lieutenant basically was like, ‘Core, you’re the up-and-coming guy,’ ” Staggs says. “ ‘Your last name is Core, and all the criminals call these cores. Here you go.’ ” from How Tulsa cops brought down a $500 million catalytic converter crime ring [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:53 PM PST - 33 comments

‘This is a monumental decision,’ said a lawyer for the young plaintiffs, and could influence how judges handle similar cases in other states [previously]
posted by brundlefly at 12:37 PM PST - 13 comments

How America Got Mean (archive link) is David Brooks' musings on why Americans are so sad and why Americans are so mean. [more inside]
posted by misanthropicsarah at 12:12 PM PST - 90 comments

One day after California green-lighted a massive expansion of driverless robotaxis in San Francisco, the implications became clear.
At about 11 p.m. Friday, as many as 10 Cruise driverless taxis blocked two narrow streets in the center of the city’s lively North Beach bar and restaurant district. All traffic came to a standstill on Vallejo Street and around two corners on Grant. Human-driven cars sat stuck behind and in between the robotaxis, which might as well have been boulders: no one knew how to move them. [more inside]
posted by Artw at 10:34 AM PST - 96 comments

An important study for uterus-carriers and period-havers... but also cw: discussion of body stuff. "The study was conducted by Dr Bethany Samuelson Bannow and a team of colleagues, in an effort to demystify and destigmatize heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) which, as it turns out, actually affects around one third of people who menstruate." [Marie Claire: The First Ever Period Product Study Involving Actual Blood Just Proved Why We Needed It]/[Link to BMJ study (free)] [more inside]
posted by eekernohan at 9:19 AM PST - 41 comments

Was your prior job at the Kentucky Museum of Feet?
posted by clawsoon at 8:41 AM PST - 13 comments

Bösendorfer’s legendary Model 290 Imperial concert grand piano has 97 keys that cover a full eight octaves. Sauter’s Microtone upright piano also has 97 keys, but they only cover a single octave. It’s one of 15 “metamorphoser” piano designs patented by microtonal music pioneer Julián Carillo; the prototypes, built by Sauter, were introduced at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. This Microtone piano is tuned “with only 1/16 step between the keys so that on this instrument what appears to be a fifth actually sounds 1/16-step less than a half-step,” i.e. 96 steps per octave; the other designs had 36, 48, 60 or some other number of steps per octave. See and hear the Microtone in action in this performance of Bruce Mather’s Étude pour piano en seizième de ton (2001).
posted by mcwetboy at 8:31 AM PST - 22 comments

In MIT Technology Review Mara Kardas-Nelson looks at organizational changes that have been made since 2019 to Kiva.org, the well-known microlending organization, including multi-million dollar salary hikes for executives, charrging fees to the borrowers, and a lenders' strike organized by contributors who were disturbed by the changes. (MIT Tech Review allows some free articles, but you might hit the paywall)
posted by briank at 8:20 AM PST - 19 comments

An autograph is a personal thing, a marker of someone’s identity, a few dashes of ink that can help preserve a legacy. Short or long, sloppy or neat, every player has a story behind their signature. There are more demands on athletes’ time than ever, so there’s a balance at play when it comes to the art of signing. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 7:32 AM PST - 4 comments

BBC: "At ice cream parlours around Germany, you might come across a perplexing menu item, simply labelled Spaghettieis." Some pictures on Flickr. Metro: "5. Optional: grate some white chocolate over the top for ‘Parmesan’." (Previously) And what's your favourite regular or combo or speciality ice cream, or just talk about everything because it's your Free Thread.
posted by Wordshore at 6:25 AM PST - 126 comments

Why solo diners are being judged A Michelin restaurant in London charges single diners double, which has led to opinions in The Guardian by Jay Rayner and Megan Nolan. But others have given thought to the pleasures of dining alone this year, and earlier. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 2:03 AM PST - 99 comments

Scientists are decoding saltwater crocodile talk. And the reptiles have a lot to say. Despite their reputation for being stealthy, crocodiles are very vocal. Now a group of Australian researchers are using video and audio monitoring to try to decipher what their calls mean.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:42 PM PST - 13 comments

The Fender Rhodes electric piano was everywhere in the 70's and 80's - and remains popular into the present. Its inventor Harold Rhodes was a piano teacher who during WWII was asked to develop a musical therapy for wounded soldiers recuperating in the hospital. Rhodes designed a small piano that could be played in bed by the recovering patients. It was a successful project, and he continued to develop his design further in the post-war years, first on his own then for the Fender company in the 60's and 70's. Rhodes died in 2001 (NYT obit, non-paywalled link). [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:51 PM PST - 35 comments

There are two ways of reading the central Maríasian lesson that we are nothing more nor less than the stories we tell about ourselves. In its negative form, it admonishes us that life is a brittle, insubstantial thing, a story that goes on falsifying itself day after day. In its positive form, it posits that we are constantly inventing ourselves afresh—indeed, that there is something fundamentally life-affirming in the phantasmal nature of the self. from Empty Suits by Bailey Trela
posted by chavenet at 12:28 PM PST - 1 comment

In “The World Is Not Ending,” [2:21:28, CW] video philosopher Sophie from Mars discusses what is to be done and her recent attempts at growing culinary mushrooms at home.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:58 AM PST - 6 comments

misinformation susceptibility In this study, you will be asked to rate 20 news headlines as real or fake and answer a few optional questions about your background. Results given in four categories, including:
- Veracity Discernment: 100% (ability to accurately distinguish real from fake news)
- Distrust/Naïvité: 0 (ranges from -10 to +10, overly skeptical to overly gullible) [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:28 AM PST - 106 comments

You might already know that political / reporting / general nonfiction comics outlet The Nib is closing down at the end of August. It was too good to last.
You might not know that The Nib is making all fifteen issues of the magazine free to download as PDFs! Consider kicking back a few bucks to help them preserve the website in the meanwhile.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:43 PM PST - 8 comments

Scientists successfully reintroduce locally-extinct Australian mammals to safe fenced-in zones. Species which once roamed freely (including bilbies, shark bay bandicoots and golden bandicoots) now thrive in a fenced-in safe haven (free from feral cats and feral foxes) created in Sturt National Park, part of one of the world's biggest mammal reintroduction projects.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:39 PM PST - 4 comments

The Marion Kansas Police Department raided the offices of the Marion County Record which was investigating allegations that Marion police chief Gideon Cody had retired from his previous job with the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department to avoid punishment over incidents of sexual misconduct.. [more inside]
posted by Reverend John at 9:34 PM PST - 48 comments

Luke O'Neil asked a bunch of people for their top 5 favorite R.E.M. songs. (scroll down a bit, or CTRL-F "andrew sacher")
posted by Etrigan at 9:12 PM PST - 77 comments

U.S. judge sends FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over witness tampering
posted by buffy12 at 12:49 PM PST - 62 comments

Wes Anderson looks around one of the last remaining video stores in Paris and enthuses about some of his favourite movies; Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy do the same. These are the latest in a series of Video Club clips at YouTube featuring directors, actors & others waxing lyrical about cinema. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 12:31 PM PST - 8 comments

There's only one internet, but strains can show when it connects countries that are at odds, for example when the Chinese government blocks Google and Facebook or US companies sever their connections to Russia's internet. These techno-political tensions have spread to the world of subsea cables. from The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet
posted by chavenet at 10:53 AM PST - 19 comments

Anarcha-feminist writer RiotLinguist on Qanon: It is important to understand that QAnoners consume QAnon AS pornography. it is NOT about "protecting children," it's about the consumption of children's bodies as sites of highly sexualized boundary violation, the "violated innocence" fantasy (link to original twitter thread).
They've (under the name narcissus) written about the problems with the book Harmful to Minors, how body autonomy [of children and adolescents] is not synonymous with “sexual availability,” and misogynists and pedophilia apologists in anarchist movements. Content warnings for (non-specific) discussions of child sexual abuse and predatory behavior, additional content warnings in individual essays.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:12 AM PST - 56 comments

I don't really have an issue with car rental companies except the cost of car insurance and extra expenses but thought this link on returning rental cars with an empty tank was amusing. [more inside]
posted by Narrative_Historian at 3:07 AM PST - 26 comments

Not only knowing obscure words, but memorizing tiles and strategizing: why the simple looking 'tan' was a stunningly resourceful play. [YouTube]
posted by blue shadows at 6:38 PM PST - 19 comments

The Mayor of New York City tells a personal story that is compelling and often untruthful. With a thin list of accomplishments so far, can he address the city’s problems? [original link]
posted by Selena777 at 3:31 PM PST - 52 comments

How the news either ignores or distorts the actual substance of the ideas held by people challenging the status quo.
posted by ropeladder at 2:40 PM PST - 46 comments

395 years ago today, the warship Vasa sank in Stockholm harbor on her maiden voyage, after sailing just a short distance. Found in the late 1950s and raised in 1961 after 333 years, the ship now rests in the Vasa Museum. The museum has a series of videos showing the interior of the ship, answering questions such as why bowling shoes are the preferred footwear onboard Vasa, how the interior spaces are believed to have been used, and what the plans for the future is in order to preserve the ship.
posted by rpn at 1:26 PM PST - 29 comments

Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence ... How often has a top 5 hit been written only by women in the last 10 years? It’s likely rarer than you think.
posted by chavenet at 10:48 AM PST - 31 comments

Transportation journalist, radio personality and voice-over artist Bernie Wagenblast has been the iconic voice of the New York City transit system for over a decade. Last fall, at the age of 66, she presented herself publicly as a transgender woman.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:16 AM PST - 12 comments

4 hours of gentle wind and blowing grass in the mountains
posted by Fizz at 9:59 AM PST - 6 comments

David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” was livid that he got a $50 ticket for going 36 miles per hour in a school zone. His response drew a lot of responses. [The New York Times]

“What sort of off-brand city sends me a $50 camera ticket for speeding in a school zone for racing at 36 mph in a 25 zone at — wait for it — 5:40 a.m. in total darkness on a morning in — wait for it — mid-July?” he wrote. “Two-word clue: Yankees Suck.”

An Open Letter to David Simon, Who Tweeted NYC Is ‘On the Make’ Because He Got a $50 Speeding Ticket [HellGate NYC]

Thursday’s Headlines: Wow, the Guy Who Created ‘The Wire’ is a Real Jerk Edition [StreetsBlog NYC]
posted by riruro at 8:24 AM PST - 225 comments

“It’s honestly souring my opinion of Jeopardy! for putting us in this position, having to choose between supporting the strike and going back on the show that many of us have loved our whole lives,” says a season 38 champion.
posted by Etrigan at 7:36 AM PST - 33 comments

Flamy Grant responds to Sean Feucht [who?] on TikTok and rallies the troops. [TikTok, 4m11s] Paste Magazine lays it all out from a couple of weeks ago. Drag Queen Flamy Grant Tops the iTunes Christian Charts Fast forward, this past week, Good Day landed on the Billboard Christian Digital Sales Chart at #20 [Billboard]. Also: Christian drag queen Flamy Grant's No. 1 album is battle cry against 'terrible theology' of religious bigots [Entertainment Weekly] The song in question: Good Day [audio only, 5m, and oh goodness!] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:04 AM PST - 11 comments

How Fanatics is Building a Weird Monopoly Over Sports Trading Cards (From Matt Stoller's BIG, a newsletter about monopolies)
posted by box at 4:53 AM PST - 8 comments

Tasmanian Quoll Joeys Engage in Really Cute Play-Fighting (Youtube video). While mum’s away hunting, her six little joeys engage in endless play-fighting, wrestling matches and general mischief. It’s a valuable training ground for when they grow up and must deal with other quolls.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:04 AM PST - 17 comments

‘I’ll never know where I’m from’: plight of the adopted children of Bangladesh’s Birangona women and "‘My mother spent her life trying to find me’: the children who say they were wrongly taken for adoption" - two excellent long reads from the Guardian today interviewing Bangladeshi adoptees with complex stories.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:13 AM PST - 6 comments

Findings show the peer group punishes those who do not have highly valued traits such as being good-looking or being good at sports.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 11:26 PM PST - 53 comments

Recommendations included a bleach “fresh breath” mocktail, ant-poison and glue sandwiches, “bleach-infused rice surprise” and “methanol bliss” – a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast.
posted by clawsoon at 7:16 PM PST - 43 comments

More revelations emerge about billionaires’ gifts to Clarence Thomas (ghostarchive link)
posted by buffy12 at 6:20 PM PST - 76 comments

blackout.tilde.town is "a tool for making blackout poetry using nine million chunks of text extracted from Project Gutenberg." [more inside]
posted by ourobouros at 1:13 PM PST - 21 comments

.

The last public writer for the Vietnamese postal service passes away at the age of 94. In 1990, he retired but was given special permission to continue to work in the Saigon central post office as a "public writer," a position he retired from in 2020. From 2019: Every morning, he tapes a piece of paper with the words “Public Writer” in French, Vietnamese and English near his table at the Saigon Central Post Office. Ngo has written letters for hundreds of people in Vietnamese, English and French in the past 28 years. From 2007: A Day with Saigon's Last Public Letter Writer.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:57 PM PST - 12 comments

The deviance of a tiny particle called the muon might prove that one of the most well-tested theories in physics is incomplete. (NYT gift link)
posted by praemunire at 11:09 AM PST - 53 comments

With Hillsborough County Public Schools only allowing excerpts of Shakespeare's plays in Florida classes due to "Don't Say Gay" and other rightwing laws, I thought it was time for us to loudly say gay and check out some 2023 books with LGBTQ+ themes! [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 10:50 AM PST - 21 comments

The authors of the study therefore proposed a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages, with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a subsequent branch northwards onto the Steppe, as a secondary homeland for some branches of Indo-European entering Europe with the later Yamnaya and Corded Ware-associated expansions. “Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses”, remarked Gray. from New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 10:10 AM PST - 3 comments

Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols artwork was a glorious assault on authority. Taking dada and adding a snotty British energy, the late artist gave punk its sharp edges and revolutionary force. Here's a dive into Jamie's history and artwork.
posted by NoMich at 7:56 AM PST - 7 comments

Pollo del Mar wants to be hated. As a bad guy (or heel) in the NWA—the National Wrestling Alliance, a professional wrestling company owned and operated by the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan (no shit!)—it’s her job to get heat, i.e. the boos and jeers and chants that separate professional wrestling’s villains from its heroes. There’s just one problem: She’s a drag queen, and it’s made her too popular. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 7:31 AM PST - 7 comments

Serving as a tour for both her mammoth Like A Prayer album and her Dick Tracy/I'm Breathless project, Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition Tour ended in Nice, France on August 5 [1h53m]. It's like a Broadway Musical Tone Poem, with gigantic set pieces, a loose storyline across a 4-act structure, and some of the best concert performances and pop choreography ever put before an audience. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:00 AM PST - 12 comments

Human Genome Recovered From 5700-Year-Old Chewing Gum [Smithsonian Magazine]. The piece of Birch tar, found in Denmark, also contained the mouth microbes of its ancient chewer, as well as remnants of food to reveal what she ate.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:57 AM PST - 29 comments

When Sixto Rodriguez released his albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality in the late 1960s, his music was unheralded in his home land. He became a folk hero in apartheid-era South Africa, and he received a late-career boost as the result of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man [FanFare]. After a stroke, Sixto Rodriguez died this morning. He was 81.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:20 PM PST - 28 comments

Robbie Robertson, front man for The Band, has died at 80. Additional obits from Rolling Stone and The LA Times.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 2:03 PM PST - 95 comments

The Next Front in the GOP’s War on Women: No-Fault Divorce. Steven Crowder is part of a growing right-wing chorus calling for an end to modern divorce laws. [more inside]
posted by hydra77 at 1:29 PM PST - 165 comments

David P. Anderson, founder of volunteer scientific computing software BOINC, looks back at its successes and failures. BOINC is still available and providing researchers with PetaFLOPS of computing power, but maybe hasn't achieved what Anderson wanted: "I thought that volunteer computing would become an important paradigm for scientific computing, and that it would last forever. But somehow - in spite of the efforts of me and lots of others - it doesn't look like this will happen."
posted by Tehhund at 12:48 PM PST - 28 comments

The Legal Assault on Corporate Diversity Efforts Has Begun [WSJ gift link] "Employment lawyers say it is likely a matter of time before one of these cases reaches the Supreme Court." Last month, a group of GOP state attorneys general sent a letter to Fortune 100 companies warning them against "race-based preferences in hiring, promotions and contracting." [gift link] The Democratic Attorneys General Association responded with their own letter "pushing back against claims that common efforts to diversify workplaces violate state or federal discrimination laws." [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 11:58 AM PST - 19 comments

A practical explanation of how weak entropy can ruin your day - and your savings. Short version: A popular tool used to generate private keys for cryptocurrency wallets used 32 bits of system time as its random seed. "A 32 bit key space is 2^32, or 4,294,967,296 different unique combinations... Spoiler: That’s not as many combinations as it sounds. With enough optimizations, a decent gaming PC can do a brute-force search through 2^32 wallet combinations in less than a day... Attackers are actively exploiting this and have been draining funds..."
posted by clawsoon at 11:52 AM PST - 55 comments

Karawynn Long on looking for the reason why the ability to recommend a book to your library’s buyers disappeared from all OverDrive web portals. On the KKR sale: the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction, and the ones like my friend, a NYT business journalist, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream emoji. (SL Substack). Bonus: a librarian on their experience purchasing for a single branch library that is part of a state wide consortium.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:55 AM PST - 40 comments

With his combative style and a business model centered on grabbing revenue that would otherwise go to big drugmakers, Sherman had accumulated his share of enemies in the pharma industry. In an interview for Prescription Games, a 2001 book by Jeffrey Robinson, Sherman had said he wondered why a big drug company didn’t “just hire someone to knock me off.” He’d continued: “Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened.” from Murder, Money and the Battle for a Pharmaceutical Empire [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 10:07 AM PST - 18 comments

Soap Bubbles, mid-winter Quebec. Explanation: "When a liquid freezes, it releases excess energy as heat. In freezing conditions, a bubble's bottom freezes first, releasing heat that warms the adjacent liquid. This causes water to flow to the top of the bubble, where more heat is released, creating stress on the freeze front. This stress leads to the formation of tiny ice crystals that slide across the bubble's surface. Despite the appearance of multiple freeze fronts, it's actually just one freeze front."
posted by storybored at 8:41 AM PST - 6 comments

Fade in the water. The Alabama Sweet Tea Party. Malice in Montgomery. A massive brawl between white boaters and Black bystanders in Montgomery, Alabama, has gone viral, leading to some of the best jokes, memes, and videos Black Twitter has to offer. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 7:24 AM PST - 89 comments

'Hearts Aglow' is a video for a song from Weyes Blood's album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow.
posted by box at 6:59 AM PST - 5 comments

"Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder. Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it’s creative coding and simulated cities, code poetry and bulletin board systems. It’s websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart sing. And it’s sometimes even spreadsheets, coerced to dance and do all manner of weirdness." Samuel Arbesman aggregates these quirky bits of old web joy in the Garden of Computational Delights.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:25 AM PST - 4 comments

A new clue to the reason some people come down with long COVID (NPR)
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:41 AM PST - 12 comments

13-Foot Endangered Sawfish Spotted in Northern Florida Hints at a slow recovery. Scientists tagged the rare animal farther north than any such fish in decades, suggesting the species is returning to areas it once lived. (Smithsonian Magazine).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:01 AM PST - 7 comments

Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, Tuesday's sole ballot item that sought to make it tougher to amend the state constitution: under 1, constitutional amendments would have required a 60% majority instead of 50%. Ohio will be voting on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in their Constitution in November; 1 was an attempt to prevent that. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 9:07 PM PST - 59 comments

Garry Shandling only ever filmed two stand-up specials. Alone In Vegas [50m] was released in 1984 for Showtime and along with his guest hosting on The Tonight Show helped springboard him into his Showtime series It's Garry Shandling's Show [Theme Song]. His second was Stand Up [52m] in 1991, now for HBO, released shortly before his HBO series The Larry Sanders Show [Theme Song] began airing. Please read below: [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:04 PM PST - 10 comments

"The sandwich was unlike anything I’d ever tasted. It was creamy from melty mozz and a little tangy from jarred artichoke hearts and marinara sauce, hefty without spilling out of the sides."
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:42 PM PST - 42 comments

Today 8/8 is Father’s Day in Taiwan. St Crispin’s Day is not until 25th October but here’s a somewhat rambling reflection All things are ready, if our minds be so by The Reluctant Carer on what it takes to care for an aged, frail, previously absent [merchant seaman] father. The point, for all the warlike connotations of that speech is that your brother can be anyone – and so is everyone your brother. “This did the good man teach his son”, and I never even realised it was happening. For all they cannot do, words somehow did all that, and then did all this too. cw: blood, bathroom. Why not give the reading a heroic soundtrack? [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:51 PM PST - 2 comments

Snellings Museum of Sound & Vision: a UK-based collection of "an idiosyncratic mix of all things audio video from the very early days of radio leading right up to the present day".
posted by misteraitch at 11:14 AM PST - 12 comments

While we may not have a face and a name, at this point we have a pretty good idea of how the site is run: it’s a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe. from archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet
posted by chavenet at 9:41 AM PST - 33 comments

The Tangent piano looks like a harpsichord or an 18th century Viennese fortepiano. The sound is similar to a harpsichord, a harp, or a hammered dulcimer. Occasionally, at least in my opinion, it also resembles an asthmatic fortepiano. [more inside]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 9:20 AM PST - 7 comments

Kimberly Winter could feel a bubble rising through her digestive tract. She smiled before opening her mouth, believing the noise she was about to produce would cement her name into history. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 7:12 AM PST - 28 comments

Tim Blais is a Canadian science communicator and edutainer from Hudson, Québec. He reworks hit pop songs into educational and entertaining videos about science on his channel A Capella Science: Evo-Devo (Despacito) is a favourite, The Science of Love (Queen) is masterful, and his latest - Leukocyte (BTS Dynamite) - represents another level of his talent, skill, and dedication.
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 4:55 AM PST - 9 comments

A "supermajority" of Marvel's 50-plus visual effects crew signed authorization cards with the union. [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 12:44 AM PST - 21 comments

Platypuses found in Sydney's Hills District for first time in 25 years. An ecologist says she's surprised the elusive monotremes are surviving so close to residents and urban development.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:48 PM PST - 14 comments

An experiment on coral reefs provides the first evidence that predators use other animals for motion camouflage to approach their prey without detection. "A new study provides the first experimental evidence that the trumpetfish, Aulostomus maculatus, can conceal itself by swimming closely behind another fish while hunting – and reduce the likelihood of being detected by its prey."
posted by dhruva at 7:10 PM PST - 5 comments

Paramount announced that, after the Justice Department successfully sued to block Penguin from purchasing Simon and Schuster late last year, that the have sold the publisher instead to KKR for $1.6 billion. Clearly everything is fine, and there is nothing to worry about... [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 6:15 PM PST - 34 comments

Skibidi Toilet [SLYT] is a series of so far 55 minute-long animated episodes featuring an invasion of roving heads-in-toilets taking over the world as they sing remixes of "Brr Skibidi Dop Dop Dop Dop Yes Yes Yes Yes" by Turkish music group Biser King. (CW: Mild jump scares) [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 5:46 PM PST - 25 comments

A doctor writes about the trauma of CPR - both for the patient and the doctor - and how few patients actually benefit from CPR. “The bioethicist Nancy Jecker has written that “reflexively using CPR” suggests a fear of failure, of “losing the war we wage against disease.” Over the years, patients and families have told me that CPR represents a human right, a decision to go down fighting, a show of advocacy for their loved one, and a sign that everything possible has been tried. For doctors, too, it’s a ritual, a talisman of care. I’ve seen colleagues not offer surgery to patients who are too sick to survive an operation; kidney specialists will stop dialysis for patients whose hearts can’t handle the side effects. Yet these same physicians struggle to recommend against resuscitation, despite knowing that death is certain and near.”
posted by Bottlecap at 5:32 PM PST - 37 comments

If you don't want any spoilers at all, here's the Steam link for There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension [$13]. This Guardian review has mild spoilers, and Wikipedia has even more spoilers. But I found real delight in watching these two nerds at Animators VS Gamers do a full play through [3h43m]. Their joy was infectious, and I solved some puzzles before they did which made me feel smart.
posted by hippybear at 3:52 PM PST - 12 comments

William Friedkin, director of 'The Exorcist' and 'The French Connection,' dies at 87. A Discussion with William Friedkin: ‘I See a Diminishing of All Art Forms These Days’
posted by clavdivs at 3:49 PM PST - 31 comments

Weird World of LLMs is a concise, true, and very funny rundown of the actual technology behind the latest Internet Gold Rush. (from Simon Willison)
posted by panglos at 3:48 PM PST - 21 comments

How to fit the keyboard onto an upright harpsichord. The oldest known surviving stringed keyboard instrument is a clavicytherium too. They don't all have soundboards as big as the case, which puzzles me but is very pretty. Tabletop version with singer; lautenwerk ("gut"-strung) version.
posted by clew at 2:50 PM PST - 7 comments

In a self-help-y/inspirational vein: "just as yeasts free-floating in the kitchen alight anew on resting dough long after the bread that brought those species there was baked and eaten", "Honestly, it's all single steps, right to the finish. And if you don't make it a thousand miles, you at least get a change of scenery." Sometimes, "not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak". But also, "people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm’s length continuously for seventeen years".
posted by brainwane at 1:31 PM PST - 4 comments

Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958–1971 I have not been this excited about a new collection of vintage blues and African-American music in years...And this is as good as it can get. [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:27 PM PST - 7 comments

Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor emeritus of war studies at King's College London and prolific writer on strategy, turns his analytical gaze to the Barbie movie and Ken's strategic dilemmas.
posted by Jakob at 10:20 AM PST - 22 comments

Who Owns the Most Land in the World?
posted by chavenet at 9:38 AM PST - 46 comments

The math around creating a fair and fun set of bingo cards is a lot more complicated than I thought. Anyway, here's your free thread for the week!
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:18 AM PST - 64 comments

. . . from this world to that which is to come. John "Camino" Brierley, copious writer of guide-books to the Caminos de Santiago, died on 2nd July in Dartmouth, England. Obits: The Camino Society and The Guardian. Himself talking about empty mind (YT-4½min). Sort of related: BBC essay about The Camino Inglés to Santiago from Reading to Southampton. Ultreïa? Sing it! [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:42 AM PST - 7 comments

City Quiz is a fun little webgame where you literally just name every city. It breaks down by the whole planet, or just one continent, or just one country, and scores you based on number of cities or percentage of the population. [more inside]
posted by andreaazure at 6:02 PM PST - 72 comments

A study into toxicity on Economics Job Market Rumors says it uncovered IP addresses for posts, linking many back to universities. The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, was presented at the NBER summer meeting and starts with a content warning on racism, sexism, and threats of violence. Study authors note, "Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of the scheme by which [algorithmically-assigned] usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which most posts were made to be determined with high probability." Approximately 10% of posts originated from university IP addresses; about 10% of all posts were categorized as toxic. A small proportion of IP addresses generated more than 60% of toxic posts. EJMR, previously on MeFi.
posted by eirias at 1:13 PM PST - 68 comments

Despite our love of building community around uniting behind one love interest or the next, or our general consensus that one love interest is superior — no one likes Wickham over Darcy — some might say that our interest in love triangles might point to a wider cultural desire to explore polyamory. While I don’t doubt that many are curious about exploring options outside of the dominant form of monogamous relationships, I disagree that the classic love triangle is a good example of this. from The enduring allure of a good love triangle
posted by chavenet at 9:28 AM PST - 43 comments

Talk at the American-Scandinavian Foundation A talk about why the Danish Jews were saved. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 8:15 AM PST - 8 comments

Western Quolls disappeared from this region 100 years ago. Ecologists are bringing them back from the brink. The tiny, native western quoll that was all but wiped out in Western Australia has been reintroduced to parts of the state, and this time their welfare is being watched over by drones.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:41 AM PST - 17 comments

Unveiling Ravenchord: A Radical Piano Redesign from Dan Harden. I'm pretty sure based on the page that this instrument is just a design prototype that hasn't been built. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at; I'd love to hear it played.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:35 PM PST - 54 comments

John D. Clare of 'Facts and the teaching of History' posits: "EH Carr's What is History?...Carr - very correctly - argues that 'the belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively independent of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy." Then it unravels into historiographical relevance of fact. Nearly 20 years later, the methodology of History/ historiography is changing. 'How AI is helping historians better understand our past' and 'Digital doping for Historians: Can history, memory, and historical theory be rendered artificially intelligent'
posted by clavdivs at 9:59 PM PST - 6 comments

Bram Moolenaar, the Dutch software engineer, creator and maintainer of long-lived text editor Vim, has died.
posted by cgc373 at 7:21 PM PST - 70 comments

In today's special episode, we're looking back at the CRAZIEST TOTK builds from July. (SLYT)
posted by rebent at 6:48 PM PST - 8 comments

The Rotten Science Behind the MSG Scare by Sam Kean is a brief history of the MSG scare, when a single letter by Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, led to a racist reaction that touched off decades of panic around the seasoning monosodium glutamate. Over the decades, two men claimed to be the authors of the letter, Dr. Kwok and a Dr. Howard Steel. The latter even told his story to a professor at his alma mater, Dr. Jennifer LeMesurier, who had written a detailed journal article tracing the history of the racist myth. However, Dr. Steel’s story fell apart when reporter Lilly Sullivan looked into it for This American Life.
posted by Kattullus at 4:32 PM PST - 72 comments

The 20 Year Evolution of Fast and Furious Car Chases [1h11m, CineFix/IGN] was released before Fast X, but there's still plenty of material there. If you like this kind of thing, you'll like this.
posted by hippybear at 2:54 PM PST - 13 comments

At a GameStop store on Launch Day of PS2 in 2000 [YouTube] ““There was a sense that video games were toys. And Sony is not a toy company.” That’s how a new mini-oral history about PlayStation revolutionizing console gaming begins over at IGN. The words belong to former head of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, and they ring true for anyone who grew up with an NES or SNES. The Nintendo consoles built for angular cartridges could take a beating like children’s building blocks, and the games often revolved around colorful worlds full of knights, dragons, and magic mushrooms. In the ‘90s, PlayStation felt like something entirely different. [...] In addition to the pitch of bringing arcade-level graphics into the home, there was the idea of a video game console that could channel the same feeling of cool imbued in the Sony Walkman and your older sibling’s collection of grunge and hip-hop CDs.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 12:41 PM PST - 15 comments

Most people struggling through cannabis prohibition wanted legalization or at least decriminalization, and to empty the prisons. But the way legalization was implemented in California, it remained unclear if the crop was a drug or an agricultural product; stuck in limbo with the worst of both options proved in time to be the worst way to go. Overregulating certain aspects, treating cannabis as a drug, and under-regulating other aspects led to an economy-of-scale agricultural consolidation... We are left in a situation where the rich history of California cannabis is being eliminated one farm at a time. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 11:54 AM PST - 47 comments

They had no grand design on establishing a baseball association, though: The two simply loved baseball -- DeSantis learning the game back in America, while Dorji fell in love while attending the World Children's Baseball Fair in Japan -- and wanted to offer it to the children who lived nearby the military barracks in Thimphu. from In the mountains of the world's most remote country, baseball takes hold
posted by chavenet at 9:27 AM PST - 14 comments

The World’s Last Internet Cafes.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:33 AM PST - 32 comments

TikTok users in Europe will be able to see recommended ‘For You’ videos that don’t rely on tracking their online activity. “These changes relate to DSA rules that require very large online platforms to allow their users to opt out of receiving personalized content — which typically relies on tracking and profiling user activity — when viewing content recommendations. To comply, TikTok’s search feature will also show content that’s popular in the user’s region, and videos under the “Following” and “Friends” feeds will be displayed in chronological order when a non-personalized view is selected.” [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 3:09 AM PST - 8 comments

It is not okay for men to "help" women who they don't know without asking consent/permission first. "A man tried to help me fix my bike despite me asking him not to. Time for men to learn that this shit is not helpful, it's control."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:23 AM PST - 119 comments

Yes, we’re a world-class destination for art, but now we’re so much more. We strive to be something for everyone or nothing for anyone, we forget. [McSweeney's]
posted by blue shadows at 10:49 PM PST - 15 comments

Top 10 The Weakerthans Songs To Cry To On A Long Drive
posted by crazy with stars at 4:24 PM PST - 21 comments

YouTuber Any Austin has a quirky approach to his presenting, and to his subject matter. My favorite I've seen is Snow! (this is about video games) [16m30s]. He also explores "unexpected and odd places" in several games, including Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (2005) [14m], Skyrim [14m], even Mario Kart 8 [13m]. Here's the first part of a series on breath holding for different characters [13m]. One of his unemployment surveys of video game towns [Castle Town, Twilight Princess, 18m]. His YouTube page lists many more.
posted by hippybear at 2:23 PM PST - 4 comments

EVERY GENRE OF ROCK/METAL
posted by box at 1:22 PM PST - 38 comments

The Big Ten Conference started as a Midwestern group of colleges. It grew beyond its original number in the 1990s by adding Penn State, then in the 2010s by poaching Nebraska from the Big 12, then Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East, then USC and UCLA from the Pac-12. And now it's made its biggest expansion yet in both rainfall and geography, stretching the B1G footprint all the way to the Pacific Northwest with the addition of Oregon and Washington. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:34 PM PST - 51 comments

Maybe it started with this viral French telecom ad (you don't need the subtitles), but we're halfway through the World Cup going on in Australia and New Zealand. The group stage is over, and the round of 16 begins this weekend... [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 10:53 AM PST - 52 comments

Crip Up the Kitchen is a cookbook that makes home cooking more accessible and culturally relevant for cooks and would-be cooks with disabilities. The book organizes recipes by the level of effort required to make them and recommends tools that help prevent pain and reserve energy, using methods similar to Spoon Theory. [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 10:47 AM PST - 18 comments

Welcome the world largest Online Toaster Exhibition... The revelation that somebody collects toasters often leads to the same reaction: awkward pause, nervous laugh, then: "...Toasters?" The problem is not, to collect toasters. The problem is, to have hundreds of them. The result: They simply call you crazy. Well, and sometimes I think they are right! [Toast, previously]
posted by chavenet at 7:11 AM PST - 45 comments

A new exhibition in the Cape Ann museum in Gloucester explores the love that the two had for the area. It also looks at their relationship, with Jo directing the "Hopper brand." (WaPo gift link) [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 7:02 AM PST - 7 comments

Oldest Martian Meteorite on Earth Traced to Its Origin on the Red Planet. Researchers used machine learning algorithms to determine which crater on Mars the space rock came from.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:18 AM PST - 16 comments

Exposure to Certain Fragrances During Sleep Dramatically Boosts Cognitive Function [more inside]
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:14 PM PST - 113 comments

I'm going to post these in the order that Billiam posted them, but I think, for an old like me, they should really be watched in reverse order because that's chronological rather than working backward from modern outrage to historical corruption. Anyway: 1: TLC'S Biggest Lies [26m] 2: The TLC Iceberg [44m] 3: When TLC Killed “The Learning Channel” [29m]. I remember The Learning Channel, and 3 was like being reminded of watching my favorite pub burning down.
posted by hippybear at 2:18 PM PST - 31 comments

CT’s first school for LGBTQ+ students could open this fall [more inside]
posted by buffy12 at 2:18 PM PST - 31 comments

Megan Thee Stallion raps and dances in A24’s wild first movie musical. Bowen Yang plays God, with Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally also starring in the Larry Charles film written by Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson. [TRAILER]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:43 PM PST - 28 comments

Reading has been my lifeline after seven years in solitary confinement. With my earplugs jammed in deep—sometimes too deep—I’ve read books, magazines, and newspapers and found respite amid tortuous conditions. ... While male prisoners in the restricted housing unit are often there because they have been identified as belonging to gangs, that’s not the case in female prisons. Women are assigned to live here for different reasons. It could be a consequence for behavior, like having phone sex with a partner; for violence, like assaulting staff members; or for rule violation, like having contraband (even if someone set you up with it). Sometimes, it’s outright discrimination: I’ve seen women get sent to the hole for speaking in an Indigenous language while talking to their parents on the phone. From Slate and Open Campus: Kwaneta Harris on lessons from her time as a prisoner in solitary confinement. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 11:31 AM PST - 19 comments

Every European Dance Song in the 1990s [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 10:08 AM PST - 80 comments

"There are places where the public transport instructions tell you which day of the week the bus will be, but don't include waiting for the right day in the travel time." New game, find two points in the UK on Google Maps where it says it is quicker to walk than to catch public transport. Furthest distance/time wins. (SL Twitter thread).

"Quite a few on the outskirts of Norwich where radial bus routes mean going into the city and out again." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:49 AM PST - 18 comments

20 years on, the Tomb Raider story told by the people who were there [Eurogamer] “There are conflicting reports about the origins of Tomb Raider, but everyone agrees that it was Toby Gard who created the Lara Croft character and came up with the idea for a third-person adventure game in which the player explored tombs. Legend has it that Frances Gard, Toby's younger sister, was the inspiration for Lara Croft. The devil is in the detail - some remember seeing prototypes that included an Indiana Jones-style male character, and that Core's bosses were terrified it would spark a lawsuit. Others insist Gard had envisioned a female character from the very beginning, although at first she was called Laura Cruz. Whatever the truth, Gard was the driving force behind Tomb Raider, even if others played a crucial role in bringing his vision to life. Jeremy Heath-Smith is clear in his mind how Tomb Raider came to be. "Tomb Raider came out of my trip to the States," he says, "where Ken Kutaragi showed me the PlayStation. "I got back on a plane, flew home, and called an off-site meeting of the company.” [The history of Tomb Raider][YouTube] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:52 AM PST - 8 comments

He did not merely attempt to imitate his social betters, impersonate a gentleman, or claim the privileges of Whiteness. Instead, he deployed style and self-presentation to invent a new kind of negro. In a city where “Black gentleman” and “Black dandy” were unthinkable oxymorons, and where Black men in fine dress were read either as liveried servants or absurd, out-of-place upstarts, Raúl forced White Porteños to contend with and make sense of a flamboyant Black man who turned style into a feature of his singular brand. And not just, as his studio photograph attests, the prescribed buttoned-down style of the “gentleman”, but the more knowing, often outrageous style of the bohemian dandy. from The Black Dandy of Buenos Aires, Racial Fictions and the Search for Raúl Grigera [CW: historical racism] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:10 AM PST - 2 comments

“At four in the afternoon the streets can feel like dealer central,” Funding for Measure 110’s promise of increased services comes from Oregon’s marijuana tax revenues. After a slow start, more than $265 million has flowed to programs that try to make drug use safer by providing clean needles and test strips, offer culturally specific peer support and provide shelter for people newly in recovery. But residential treatment for addiction has yet to be substantially expanded. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 6:26 AM PST - 103 comments

"At a time when most consumers enjoy free or low-cost calling, prison phone calls at their peak in California cost more than $6 per 15 minutes via a private telecommunications provider. That allowed only hurried, superficial conversations between the siblings — with one eye always on the clock. " Los Angeles Times: California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation
posted by Harald74 at 3:38 AM PST - 9 comments

"We are celebrating": Vaccines help Brazil's golden lion tamarins rebound from near-extinction. Once on the brink of extinction with only about 200 animals in the wild, the golden lion tamarin population has rebounded to around 4800 individuals hopping between branches in the Brazilian rainforest.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:24 PM PST - 7 comments

For decades, the St. Louis music scene had a solo-dancing, enigmatic, and polarizing weirdo haunting live music shows, big and small. The mop-topped Robert Matonis, a.k.a. Beatle Bob, has passed away, after a cruel decline from ALS, on July 27.
posted by 2N2222 at 8:09 PM PST - 23 comments

"Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name. Yet this wound provides our new identity, at once the thing that gives us the right to speak and the only thing we have left to say when we do. Underwritten by its literalism, our trauma is the guarantor of what we believe we are owed." How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives. (NYMag)
posted by obliterati at 3:21 PM PST - 48 comments

Box Office Bombs: Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is a Deeply Personal Requiem for the Superhero Era
posted by Artw at 3:19 PM PST - 84 comments

The Hōkūleʻa, a traditional Polynesian outrigger, and crew are underway on their 43,000 nautical mile, 4 year journey, circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean. With Port Hardy and Hakai behind them, passing through the Johnstone Straight on the inner passage of Vancouver Island, the boat is soon within range of many a mefite! Follow along or try to catch up with them on the Americas’ left coast September 2023 - April 2024. [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 3:09 PM PST - 23 comments

YouTuber Poseidon Entertainment, who spends a lot of time examining dead amusement park rides and has been more increasingly critiquing amusement parks, has a thesis: Disney Brand Fatigue Is Damaging Its Parks [35m]. His experience looking back at things that have ceased to be gives him some insight into how modern attraction development might be creating a future trap for Disney. It's an interesting perspective that maybe Iger needs to listen to.
posted by hippybear at 2:17 PM PST - 55 comments

Dear Counsel: Scientists have found that the octopus is bizarrely adept at navigating mazes. [PDF]
posted by brundlefly at 12:13 PM PST - 11 comments

Uh, to Be Clear, Remembering Auschwitz Is Not the Key to a Happy Marriage [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 12:05 PM PST - 68 comments

YouTuber Nahre Sol is a classical pianist and composer, and as such posts videos on the creative and technical aspects of making music. But today I'd like to present two of her more personal videos, which she made with her non-musician mother. In the first, she and her mom play a piano duet. In the second, they compose a piece together. The videos are about 10 minutes each and heartwarming as heck. There are some sweet mother-daughter moments (some funny, some touching), cute dogs, and, of course, good music.
posted by mpark at 9:27 AM PST - 5 comments

Analog horror filmmaker Alex Casanas (MISTERMANTICORE) is perhaps best known on YouTube for the Monument Mythos. This is a wide-spanning series of alternate history of the US, past and present, but it mainly focuses on the time of the 37th President, James Dean, and occasionally his best friend, Richard Nixon.
The lore goes three seasons deep, but it begins simply, with the CORNERFOLK, and goes into rich, strange places, some more like short fiction than film -- the LIBERTYLURKER (3:48), the mitosis of Alcatraz (4:07). It's best to take them in order to catch the full scope of exactly what the hell is going on here, which, by turns, is dreadful, hilarious, and heartbreaking -- as when the Ever Given got up and walked away (16:22). [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 9:01 AM PST - 3 comments

It’s curious that fiction’s decoupling from what Shields called the “burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened”—or what the German sociologist of economics Jens Beckert calls the “doubling of reality”—is simultaneous with financial markets’ embrace of the unreal. Especially since it wasn’t always this way. The story of these divergent literary and financial trends starts in the Eighties and Nineties, back when fiction was still fiction, and finance was still math. from Double Reality, Hedging the Novel in the Postfictional Age by Jessi Jezewska Stevens [The Point; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 7:09 AM PST - 22 comments

SuperEyepatchWolf details Roman Reigns' journey from The Shield to The Bloodline , perhaps one of the most bizarre and disastrous stories in pro wrestling.
posted by Pachylad at 6:59 AM PST - 13 comments

Tourist To Your Own Culture By Veerender Singh Jubbal [Gamespot] “Venba is a game that has been on my radar since its announcement trailer was released in 2020. It comes from a mainly South Asian development team, with its aesthetics, character designs, and sound design drawing its inspiration from the culture to tell a story about a South Asian family trying to reclaim and archive their own underrepresented culture after immigrating to Canada. It is an incredibly ambitious title to pursue when many video games do not try to engage with having cultures or identities outside of the white/western represented. Venba is about trying to figure out your own identity (or sometimes lack thereof) in an all-new environment. This new environment is not kind or accommodating to people who are not considered white, and if you are underrepresented from a culture of color you are swayed and forced to assimilate, leaving what made you unique behind to survive this new place.” [Game Trailer][YouTube] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:29 AM PST - 5 comments

Happy Dogust to shelter dogs of indeterminate birthday everywhere! FTFA:

Dogust, which takes place Aug. 1 each year, is a nationwide celebration for dogs whose birthdays are unknown. It’s been a holiday since 2008, when staff at the North Shore Animal League America of New York set out to ensure even dogs without official birthdays still get their own special day. “[It’s] the official birthday for all rescued puppies and dogs to celebrate their importance in our lives,” says Joanne Yohannan, North Shore Animal League America’s senior vice president of operations.

[more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 6:16 AM PST - 28 comments

The Curse of the Long Boom (wired)
posted by signal at 5:46 AM PST - 23 comments

Very old hummus, old hummus, creamy hummus, Claudia Roden hummus, store bought hummus, not hummus [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 4:19 AM PST - 35 comments

In a follow-up to their histories of the Seattle Mariners and the Atlanta Falcons, Jon Bois and the team at Secret Base are releasing another team history - this time of the NFL's purple-clad Midwestern outpost - the Minnesota Vikings. (SLSecret Base) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:51 AM PST - 23 comments

The invention helping Cambodian villagers produce clean drinking water for free. A small sticker that uses UV light to indicate when contaminated water is safe for drinking is revolutionising life for villagers in South-East Asia.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:11 PM PST - 8 comments

On August 31, 1946 The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to a single 31,000 word article by John Hersey. The U.S. military had taken significant measures to suppress and censor reporting about the impact of the bombs dropped on Japan. General Groves even assured Congress that it was "a rather pleasant way to die." [more inside]
posted by bunderful at 9:11 PM PST - 29 comments

After her conservatorship ended, some of her fans latched onto a new theory. What if she had never been freed at all? (archive link)
posted by Kitteh at 5:35 PM PST - 18 comments

Donald Trump indicted again by DC Grand Jury. This time it's for his attempts to interfere with the electoral count on Jan 6, 2021. [more inside]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:49 PM PST - 413 comments

The Australien Government made an ad about its bid to host the 2026 UN Climate Summit (COP31) with the Pacific, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative.
posted by flabdablet at 12:16 PM PST - 6 comments

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes? More like Earth’s Mightiest MENACES! It’s no secret that the Avengers cause a lot of collateral damage — so they have to prioritize who to save and when. Ever since Thor flew through the local Halal Guys, I’ve found myself thinking about which ones I can count on to have my back if they know I’m Muslim. Here’s my best guess, arranged in a neatly ranked list based on existing reports.
posted by Etrigan at 12:04 PM PST - 35 comments

Shutting Down Feminist Frequency [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 11:04 AM PST - 33 comments

TODAY: 99-year-old trucking company Yellow shuts down, putting 30,000 out of work, including 22,000 Teamsters. NPR reports that both the Teamsters and Yellow's management blame each other for the shutdown, with the freight company claiming that the threat of a strike induced volatility and crashed the stock price. What else is going on in organized labor in the U.S.? [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:01 AM PST - 22 comments

On the erosion of film criticism by influencers. Manuela Lazic laments the decline of film criticism's vitality.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:36 AM PST - 49 comments

Sleep is a liability for creatures as soft and tasty as humans. If humans have evolved into such a liability, there must be a benefit to balance the risk. There is evidence that sleep in general and dreaming specifically provides a state for association. In our dreams, we can revisit memories and make connections in ways not possible while consumed with the activity of consciousness. This would allow strengthening associations through repetition without having to repeat the physical event ... While computers are ideal for multitasking, they have performance differences in trying to develop associations as events unfold versus processing and pruning after the fact, once removed from the situation (like humans, robots benefit from hindsight even without rear-facing sensors). Despite the apparent benefits, when dividing human and machine tasks for optimization, one would expect resistance to signing robots up for nap time. from Why Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [Modern War Institute] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 6:25 AM PST - 19 comments

How To Get Into the Ever-Growing Yakuza Series [Game Informer] It's never been a better time to be a Yakuza fan – if only due to the sheer amount of Yakuza games there are. Across the mainline series, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has released 15+ Yakuza games since 2005. But with that kind of output, it can be a little confusing to know where to start and in what order you should play the games (spoiler: not in release order or chronological order!). [Yakuza (franchise) wiki] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:09 AM PST - 25 comments

Hangzhou zoo insists animals are real after video of one standing on hind legs triggers online speculation

A zoo in eastern China has denied suggestions that some of its bears could be humans dressed in costumes, after video of one standing on its hind legs circulated online.

Video of a sun bear standing on its hind legs had circulated on social media, with people noting that its slender legs and folds of fur made it look like a human was acting the part of the bear.

But in an audio recording circulating on WeChat, a spokesperson for the zoo said the animal was real and that such deception would not happen at a state-run facility. He also noted that in the 40C (104F) summer temperature, a human in a fur bear suit “would not last more than a few minutes before collapsing”.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 5:36 AM PST - 42 comments