MetaFilter

The sport of zorbing (previously) originated in the 1990s in New Zealand and is now done around the world. In Russia, zorbs have been adopted as a symbol of the 2014 Winter Olympics, which is being held in Sochi, Caucasus Mountains. However this video of a recent zorb run in Sochi shows it's not always fun and games. [Caution: Shows events leading to a fatality but not actual fatality.] For background and the rest of the story.
posted by stbalbach at 10:34 PM PST - 39 comments

Lena Dunham shows her art-world roots in her 2009 web-series: Season 1 at Index Magazine, Season 2 at delusionaldowntowndivas.com. Meanwhile Season 2 of Dunham's HBO series "Girls" arrives Sunday night, expect online fireworks.
posted by Artw at 9:53 PM PST - 51 comments

Vini Reilly, of English post-punks The Durutti Column, had been through a rough couple of years. His friend and mentor (and Factory Records boss) Tony Wilson died, and then the already fragile guitarist suffered a series of strokes. Unable to play, and frustrated in his attempts to secure government assistance, he found himself having to sell his studio gear in order to make rent and pay off debts. Then his nephew decided to rally the fans.
posted by misterbee at 9:43 PM PST - 26 comments

Just a short, beautiful video of a man walking a highline at Cathedral Peak against the background of a rising moon.
posted by Scientist at 9:19 PM PST - 13 comments

Western tourists (mostly female) visiting Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali) are ending up dead, likely poisoned. Local officials have blamed the use of the insecticide DEET as an exotic ingredient in so-called "Bucket Drinks", or the use of Chlorpyrifos in hotel rooms. But Deborah Blum, an author and poison expert, doesn't buy into the insecticide theories offered by local officials. She thinks this looks like targeted murders. Since writing about the poisonings, she says she's been contacted by people who claim poisoning foreigners is common in 5-star hotels, and the police and owners cover it up.. A Facebook group was formed not only so that world travelers could share safe travel tips, but also so that notice of the unexplained, and often uninvestigated, deaths could be made public.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:34 PM PST - 75 comments

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed (previously), a textbook example of fair use, has been removed from YouTube after Lionsgate's attempts to monetize with ads it were met with resistance by the video's creator. "This is what a broken copyright enforcement system looks like." [more inside]
posted by ODiV at 7:59 PM PST - 37 comments

In case you missed it the first time around, on January 1 Phyl Gyford launched another cycle of daily posts by Samuel Pepys, the British diarist who started his journal on Jan. 1, 1660. The previous cycle started Jan. 1, 2003 and finished May 31, 2012. Previously. [more inside]
posted by beagle at 5:56 PM PST - 15 comments

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we'll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination
posted by growabrain at 5:32 PM PST - 26 comments

Which TV markets are condemned to watch the worst American football teams play? SLDeadspin
posted by Renoroc at 5:08 PM PST - 35 comments

"...on the Internet, a sockpuppet is an alternate account that lets people post anonymously. And that's where we get our drama." Based on, and linked to, actual comment exchanges at LiveJournal, YouTube and elsewhere, performed by some of the top voiceover artists* and lip-synced by... duh, sockpuppets! So obviously they had to call it Sockpuppet Theater. In the words of your host, Jonas Sock, "How Meta.**" [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:18 PM PST - 19 comments

"Hiring a nanny is nervewracking. You want someone who's great with kids, who can speak three languages, and who has impeccable virtue, yet you also want someone who will work for free. It's a delicate balance. One Queens, NY couple has a very specific idea of the kind of adult in whose care they will leave their children: a lost soul who's willing to tackle the epic quest of slogging through their 65-question survey."
posted by zarq at 3:32 PM PST - 205 comments

Listen, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take missed calls anymore. (SLYT)
posted by cmoj at 3:24 PM PST - 48 comments

"It looked like any neighborhood tavern in Chicago. The beer was cold, the bratwursts hot."

"The Mirage Tavern was a drinking establishment at 731 N. Wells St. in Chicago purchased by the Chicago Sun-Times in 1977 to investigate widespread allegations of official corruption and shakedowns visited on small businesses by city officials. The journalists used hidden cameras to help ensure that city inspectors caught accepting payoffs for ignoring safety hazards were all properly documented."

Thirty-five years ago this week, the Sun-Times began a 25-part series, which documented its work with government watchdog organization Better Government Association and venerated TV news program 60 Minutes* to capture the shakedowns, shoddy inspections, and graft galore. And now Sun-Times digital editor Marcus Gilmer is reposting every story on the day it ran in 1977 here along with additional reporting and details. [more inside]
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:14 PM PST - 12 comments

"You know why we did [that]? So a DJ could take a lunch break. When you have all three-minute records, you don't even have time to go to the bathroom. Or you just want to stop for a minute. So that's 19-and-a-half minutes of 'I don't have to worry about a thing.' But I didn't do it to create this thing. I just did it to help the DJs out."
posted by .kobayashi. at 2:59 PM PST - 19 comments

"Rumours have been swirling for years about a possible sequel to Black Isle’s legendary and powerful roleplaying game Planescape: Torment, but the closure of the original studio and the jealous guarding of the Planescape rights by owners Wizards of the Coast seemed to have put paid to any comeback. But with original Interplay boss Brian Fargo very much back in the RPG business with current studio inXile’s wildly successful Wasteland 2 crowdfunding, everything changes. He and his team have come up with a way to make a new Torment game: this is really happening." [more inside]
posted by Paragon at 2:55 PM PST - 17 comments

Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights: an inter­view with H. P. Love­craft on a single postcard.
posted by brundlefly at 2:37 PM PST - 20 comments

Amateur archaeologist and "forensic hairdresser" Janet Stephens has discovered how to recreate the Seni Crines, the elaborately braided hairstyle worn by the vestal virgins. Don't miss Stephens' other classical hairstyle videos.
posted by Miko at 2:28 PM PST - 37 comments

Animals Adopting Other Animals (SLYPlaylist)
posted by empath at 2:20 PM PST - 8 comments

Don't worry; it's just ESD! (SLYT)
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:05 PM PST - 16 comments

Ava Luna is a Brooklyn-based band that plays a unique combination of soul and mo-town-inspired jams, with complex rhythms and noisy guitar breaks.
posted by deathpanels at 1:51 PM PST - 7 comments

Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan? Much has been said about how San Francisco should build up and become a new Manhattan. (Previously.) Similarly, much has been said about the utterly boring suburban sprawl that is Silicon Valley. (At least in San Jose.) The Awl's Ken Layne points out that there's a lot of underdeveloped land in between that isn't exactly virgin wilderness- and suggests making more out of it: an entire metropolis, in fact. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic Cities mentions that Redwood City is the neighborhood of the future. [more inside]
posted by Apocryphon at 1:37 PM PST - 134 comments

Yesterday at CES, Plastic Logic unveiled PaperTab, a "tablet" that is thin and flexible like paper. Here's a hands-on video with Time Magazine, and here's another demo. The company had a very public failure three years ago with its cancelled Que tablet (previously), but now says it is focusing on licensing the technology to companies that want to make "the paper of the future."
posted by jbickers at 1:34 PM PST - 29 comments

North Korea follows only three people on Twitter. One of them, for some reason, is 25-year-old Coldplay superfan Jimmy "Jammy" Dushku.
posted by davidjmcgee at 1:00 PM PST - 31 comments

Darth Vader has some trouble hearing through his helmet. [SLYT]
posted by AgentRocket at 12:57 PM PST - 20 comments

Photographer Ronen Goldman recreates images from his dreams.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:32 PM PST - 9 comments

Sol Yurick, author of the book that was the basis for Metafilter favorite film The Warriors, has died at 87.
posted by rhiannonstone at 11:59 AM PST - 15 comments

Journalism and Revolution is a review from Dissent Magazine about the biography of Ryszard Kapuściński. This was Neal Ascherson in LRB.
Both of which are very different from Jack Shafer´s take down obituary piece in Slate.
posted by adamvasco at 11:36 AM PST - 13 comments

Whether made of wood or glass, the phone booth stands apart, and is made to stand apart, from the normal flow of life in which it is situated.
posted by EvaDestruction at 10:57 AM PST - 20 comments

Keith Richards saw it fourteen times, albeit not for it all, which is what you get here:
Jazz On A Summer's Day [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 10:48 AM PST - 8 comments

Edward McClelland made a crack on his blog about 80s pop star Richard Marx. He didn't expect Marx to respond....
posted by Chrysostom at 10:45 AM PST - 141 comments

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “It was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.” [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 10:40 AM PST - 106 comments

Get in the car, it's a lion! Maybe... [more inside]
posted by fuse theorem at 10:04 AM PST - 15 comments

"I am currently hiking the 1,700 mile proposed Keystone XL route. I started in Denver, hitchhiked across the Canadian border, took a flight over the Tar Sands of Alberta, and commenced my walk in Hardisty, AB, the northern terminus of the soon-to-be pipeline." Heading southward, Ken Ilgunas is currently in Nebraska. This is his blog chronicling the landscapes, weather, people, animals and everything else he encounters. [more inside]
posted by resurrexit at 10:00 AM PST - 8 comments

"Release the Kraken!" [Discovery] "Scientists and broadcasters have captured footage of an elusive giant squid, up to eight meters (26 feet) long that roams the depths of the Pacific Ocean." [Video] [Image 1] [Image 2] [Previously] [Previously]
posted by Fizz at 9:54 AM PST - 26 comments

F**king Cruise Ship (SLYT. Bleeped Cursing.)
posted by Apropos of Something at 9:38 AM PST - 30 comments

A few select posts from the politest, most quietly despairing subreddit, r/Britishproblems (background)
posted by The Whelk at 9:31 AM PST - 76 comments

Paul Stankard is a virtuoso with glass. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the studio glass movement, Stankard started as a tradesman, a scientific glassmaker, and his work is not blown, but instead is flameworked. He creates miniature botanicals—at first, exact representations of existing flowers, and now, credible but imaginary plants, complete with human roots. His work, and his day to day life, is influenced a great deal by Walt Whitman. Stankard says, "I'm not wise enough, not educated enough to experience Whitman at his absolute fullest; I have to work at it." And he works at it through glass.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:29 AM PST - 12 comments

When classes resumed after the holidays, David and Exavier overheard another boy saying he received no gifts for Christmas. "He didn't have a Christmas tree, so Santa didn't bring him nothing," David said. . . . It was then that the two teachers in Room 117 realized what was happening. They were witnessing what Bukosky would later describe in a letter to Principal Wendell Smith as "the most amazing random act of kindness by first-graders."
posted by Madamina at 8:44 AM PST - 32 comments

Mars One is now accepting applications for its Human Settlement on Mars in 2023. Here is how you apply.
posted by rokabiri at 8:41 AM PST - 88 comments

Crow attempts cunning distraction to steal a pan. [slyt]
posted by quin at 8:29 AM PST - 55 comments

A London resident named Steven Whyley has just finished running the courses of all of London's Underground routes to raise money for brain cancer research. But because this is MetaFilter, it's interesting to note that he did so in honor of another, younger person who was also raising money for brain cancer -- until he succumbed to the same disease. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 7:44 AM PST - 4 comments

Doom 3 Gagnam Style... in webGL. That is all.
posted by ChrisR at 7:28 AM PST - 12 comments

A comic written by Julian Bond and published in 1967, after he was expelled from the Georgia House of Representatives for opposing the war in Viet Nam. [Warning: n-word is used once as an example of hate speech] [more inside]
posted by laconic skeuomorph at 6:49 AM PST - 17 comments

With the help of Stargazing Live, 10,506 citizen scientists are exploring the surface of Mars like never before.
posted by Dr. Fetish at 6:28 AM PST - 8 comments

"The Big Bang Theory is the worst kind of bully – the one that pretends to be your friend and then takes the piss out of you behind your back. It will take your viewership, it will take your money and it will laugh in your face as it systematically puts you down." The Problem with The Big Bang Theory.
posted by mippy at 3:38 AM PST - 264 comments

Fomalhaut is a magnitude 1.16 star in the "Piscis Austrinis" or "Southen Fish," and one of the first stars discovered with an extrasolar planet (previously). It has been dubbed "The Eye of Sauron" after a stunning picture taken in 2008 of its debris ring. There was some controversy about the exoplanet, dubbed "Fomalhaut b" though as it turns out, its orbit is stranger than expected.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:39 AM PST - 13 comments

Put it in H. A Tumblr of images (and gifs) from The Simpsons, captioned with classic lines. [more inside]
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 12:39 AM PST - 15 comments