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On March 5, 2019, Dziobak abruptly shut down. To many of the College of Wizardry larpers, the news came as a shock. But to Rain, and to anyone else who had worked with Dziobak, it had always been a question of when, not if, the seemingly robust studio would fold. Allegations of financial mismanagement, worker mistreatment, and sexual harassment had dogged Dziobak and its CEO Claus Raasted for years. Dziobak was no castle built of stone, but a house of cards.
posted by storytam at 10:48 PM PST - 13 comments

One family's delightful quarantine parody of One Day More. The kid in the football jersey has the best set of pipes, but the whole family gives it their all.
posted by merriment at 7:35 PM PST - 21 comments

Greyhound racing was scheduled to become illegal in Florida by the end of 2021. Due to COVID, however, two of the seven remaining tracks closed nine months early--leaving Florida greyhound rescues scrambling for fosters and adoptees to house 1,500 abruptly retired dogs months ahead of schedule. Fortunately, ex-racing greyhounds make great pets, and they are generally healthy dogs. Greyhound rescue orgs nationwide are stepping in to help the Florida dogs find homes as seamlessly as possible. If you're interested, find your nearest rescue here or reach out to Awesome Greyhound Adoptions, the rescue serving the affected tracks most directly.
posted by sciatrix at 6:28 PM PST - 30 comments

Way to Go is a walk in the woods. It is an astonishing interactive experience, a restless panorama, a mixture of hand-made animation, 360˚ video capture, music and dreaming and code; but mostly it is a walk in the woods, c'mon. Created by Vincent Morisset, Philippe Lambert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit & Caroline Robert (AATOAA). Produced by the NFB & France TV.
posted by bq at 4:49 PM PST - 11 comments

As the videoconferencing platform’s popularity has surged, Zoom has scrambled to address a series of data privacy and security problems: New York Attorney General Looks Into Zoom’s Privacy Practices (New York Times). FBI Warns of Teleconferencing and Online Classroom Hijacking During COVID-19 Pandemic (FBI). Zoom is Leaking Peoples' Email Addresses and Photos to Strangers (Vice). Zoom Meetings Aren’t End-To-End Encrypted, Despite Misleading Marketing (The Intercept) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 3:39 PM PST - 83 comments

Do you like eyes? Are you quizzical?
posted by fluttering hellfire at 3:20 PM PST - 4 comments

On Thursday, West Townshend, Vermont resident Rick Veitch will be appointed Vermont’s fourth cartoonist laureate. Vermont is the only state that regularly appoints a cartoonist laureate. The title is granted every three years at an awards ceremony attended by the congressional delegation at the Vermont State House in Montpelier. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the recognition will instead be via a live stream. There are plans to hold an event for Rick in the (hopefully) near future. [more inside]
posted by terrapin at 2:46 PM PST - 11 comments

With 22 feature-length films released to date, Pixar has made significant technological and logistic advancements in the 25 years since Toy Story was released. With each movie, they've also documented some of their lessons learned, from how they went from making shorts and commercials to their first full film in "Black Friday," to re-creating the flaws in physical cameras to make WALL·E look faux-photo-realistic in "The Imperfect Lens." Come along for even more docu-shorts! [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:33 PM PST - 5 comments

Death by Deportation, With Help From the Human Rights Establishment - By defining violence narrowly, the asylum system—and human rights organizations that uphold it—legitimates deporting people back to face everyday injustices. The pandemic only further illuminates this inhumanity. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 1:59 PM PST - 2 comments

Did RuPaul just announce he has a fracking empire on his ranch?
RuPaul Has a Fracking Empire on His Wyoming Ranch [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:39 PM PST - 17 comments

Later Daters is a dating sim full of sexy seniors [YouTube][Game Trailer] [Theme Lyric Music Video]“Dating sims are usually full of young, hot singles in your area, but a new take on dating sims from Canadian indie studio Bloom Digital Media is taking a different approach. Later Daters, which is due for a release on Steam and Nintendo Switch on April 16, stars a protagonist who has recently joined a retirement home. The retirement community is full of residents, and players can flirt with — and date a lucky candidate — from eight different characters. The story is looking to buck the stereotypes about older people falling in love, but there are still some retirement-friendly activities for players to choose from and meet potential lovers at, including morning yoga and playing cards.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 11:45 AM PST - 8 comments

In the 1920s, Buster Keaton was one of the most famous silent film stars in the world. In classics like Steamboat Bill, The General and Sherlock Jr, he performed all his own stunts, many of which could have killed him if anything went wrong. Here's a roundup of some of his best, and an analysis of his comedic genius. [more inside]
posted by gottabefunky at 11:41 AM PST - 29 comments

Walken Dance
posted by y2karl at 11:30 AM PST - 35 comments

Cheer Me Up. Jon Daly's shot for shot remake of The Rolling Stones "Start Me Up" Music Video. (SLYT)
posted by bondcliff at 10:41 AM PST - 11 comments

Sanna Marin became the world’s youngest state leader when she was made prime minister of Finland in December (2019) at the age of 34. Here, she sits down with Sirin Kale for the May 2020 issue of British Vogue.
posted by Mrs Potato at 10:22 AM PST - 10 comments

“We can confidently expect the Houllebecqian nightmare we’ve been warned of. Without a massive stimulus package, the corona crash will wipe out most of the small-scale service sector, from barbers to nail salons to internet cafes to specialty coffee bars. The only companies left standing will be Amazon and the large chains, now lording over a recalibrated sub-economy designed to deliver ‘essential’ goods.” It Might Take A While Before History Starts Again (Damage) “ Monetary weapons have been exhausted; there is no ammunition left for central banks to fire. And fiscal stimulus will be inadequate. So, the global slump cannot be avoided by these policies that are designed to sustain the capitalist economy, not replace it.” The Virus, Capitalism, and the Long Depression (Spectre Magazine) The Coronavirus Crisis Is Disaster Capitalism In Action. Here’s How the Left Can Respond.(In These Times) Avoiding Eco-Fascist Responses To The Crisis (Wear Your Voice) What happens when an apocalyptic pandemic meets the apocalyptic death-cult of neoliberalism? (Current Affairs) Working People Podcast: Make Love, Not Stonks. The Dig Podcast interviews Marxist Economist Grace Blakeley on the economists of Cornoairus.
posted by The Whelk at 9:19 AM PST - 102 comments

A big move. But think about what this means. All this effort, all those cancellations, all those people staying away from emergency departments and the health service is only just below the 85 per cent line – what was once considered its normal operating capacity.

In The NHS at capacity Chris Cook looks at how the last few decades have left the NHS overstretched even in normal times because it had to choose efficiency over spare capacity for a crisis.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:32 AM PST - 3 comments

We=Link: Ten Easy Pieces is an online exhibition of ten digital art projects, sponsored by Chronos Art Center, Nabi, Rhizome, and others. [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 8:18 AM PST - 3 comments

I have always, always said I wished Dolly Parton (and/or Cher) was my Mom. Now I get the next best thing. Dolly Parton will be reading us bedtime stories to keep alive a love of reading and stories in troubled times.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 8:12 AM PST - 10 comments

Here is a short video about some stylish goats taking over the empty streets of Llandudno. That is all. Single link youtube. More links [more inside]
posted by glasseyes at 7:40 AM PST - 21 comments

Max Barry, author of Jennifer Government, Machine Man, and Lexicon among other novels, and creator of the Web politics game NationStates (previously in 2011 and 2003), has a new book called Providence out today, and has created an online "battle simulator" to accompany the new book.
posted by nicwolff at 7:38 AM PST - 11 comments

Joe Diffie, prominent voice of 90s country, is dead at 61. King of the mullet and good-hearted drinking songs, Joe was known for his working-man vibe and intricate song lyrics. Many of his songs are still played on country radio today. He was still working in Nashville, having released his first vinyl record Joe, Joe, Joe Diffie in 2019. [more inside]
posted by possibilityleft at 6:15 AM PST - 19 comments

In a previous video about the pipe organ at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, YouTube musician Rob Scallon noticed one of the stops was labelled "MIDI", an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. He asked if it was possible to drive the organ from a laptop set up as a MIDI sequencer, and the answer was a solid "maybe". So he went back to try it. [SLYT, 22 minutes, watch with good audio if you can]
posted by FishBike at 5:24 AM PST - 28 comments

Last month there was posted the awesome Marbula One, "the REVOLUTION in Marble Sports." But just a couple of years ago the marble racing world was rocked by scandal, surrounding 2018 racing champion Red No. 3. Find out more in the 15-minute mini-documentary Not A Marble from MSPN.
posted by JHarris at 11:39 PM PST - 5 comments

In 2018, the 225 tons of black carbon emissions from rocket launches equaled that of the entire aviation industry. Injected into the stratosphere, these particles accumulate and could cause regional temperature shifts. With space launches growing at 8% a year, the launch industry may be conducting a planetary-scale geoengineering experiment far outstripping the impact of their CO2 emissions.
posted by head full of air at 6:50 PM PST - 27 comments

"This "video" documents a journey made across Africa and the Sahara Desert in 1959/60. It uses color slides shot during the journey and shows how images from the past can be given a new lease of life. This is not a journey I would care to make today."
posted by lungtaworld at 6:49 PM PST - 10 comments

"Network television and I are the same age. I am of the first generation with that thing in the living room giving us all kinds of ideas. I’m sure adults were already speculating whether this new bit of furniture was changing people on a societal level (it was) but we were just making memories. And eating a lot of cereal." Michael McKean reminisces about early television, William Boyd, and Hopalong Cassidy.
posted by Flexagon at 5:20 PM PST - 21 comments

mackerelmediafish (warning: has sound) is an ARG type thing where you explore an uncanny version of a past internet by alienmelon(Nathalie Lawhead). Their itch.io page. RPS writeup. alienmelon previously.
posted by juv3nal at 3:51 PM PST - 2 comments

Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. A stunning and thorough accounting by journalists Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone. "Over the past two years, High Country News has located more than 99% of all Morrill Act acres, identified their original Indigenous inhabitants and caretakers, and researched the principal raised from their sale in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We reconstructed approximately 10.7 million acres taken from nearly 250 tribes, bands and communities through over 160 violence-backed land cessions, a legal term for the giving up of territory."
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:19 PM PST - 15 comments

KN+1 − KN = KN.E.p

The Basque-language newspaper Berria has been posting a series of videos recorded at home by local musicians and authors to their YouTube channel. This morning (March 30) they uploaded a video by Jone Uria Albizuri singing about a mathematical formula used to model the spread of infectious diseases and how we can change some of the variables. Jone Uria is a bertsolari, a performer of traditional Basque improvised sung poetry. She also has a degree in mathematics. [more inside]
posted by nangar at 1:31 PM PST - 9 comments

A collection of web browser toys. Some of them you interact with, some of them you just watch. They're all good for a short diversion. My favorite to play with is Particle Physics.
posted by hippybear at 11:30 AM PST - 10 comments

"Most scorpions glow a blue-green color when illuminated by ultraviolet light or natural moonlight (Kids Discover). Scientists aren't sure how this fluorescence benefits the creatures, but some have speculated (LiveScience) that it acts as a sunscreen, or helps them find mates in the dark. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Natural Products (abstract) have identified a new fluorescent compound from scorpion exoskeletons. The team says that the compound could protect these arachnids from parasites." (American Chemical Society) Related: How To Hunt Scorpions At Night With A UV Flashlight (Youtube)
posted by not_the_water at 10:44 AM PST - 18 comments

Accuracy Nudge via Social Media MIT has posted this article about a possible new method to reduce misinformation about Covid-19 surfaced via social media.
posted by dented_halo at 10:12 AM PST - 17 comments

... for nature, lawns offer little. Their maintenance produces more greenhouse gases than they absorb, and they are biodiversity deserts that have contributed to vanishing insect populations. Residential lawns cover 2% of US land and require more irrigation than any agricultural crop grown in the country. Across California, more than half of household water is used outside of the house. ¶ If attitudes toward lawn care are shifted, however, these grassy green patches represent a gigantic opportunity. In 2005, a NASA satellite study found that American residential lawns take up 49,000 square miles (128,000 square km) -- nearly equal in size to the entire country of Greece. Designing an end to a toxic American obsession: The Lawn (Matthew Ponsford for CNN) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:48 AM PST - 44 comments

In 1991, Osaka University of Arts student Shinya Takeshita filmed Godzilla vs Mito Komon (subtitled) in which he played all the roles. Including the high-voltage power lines.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:07 AM PST - 27 comments

“Eater at Home is the source for anyone who wants to feel deeply engaged with food and dining culture, which now, more than ever, is in our homes. Of course, dining culture has never been limited to restaurant spaces and restaurant food; it’s about feeding our curiosity toward new experiences (including, for some of us, consistently cooking at home for the first time).“ How To Stock A Pantry - Pantry Cooking 101 - Getting Started With Sourdough - How A Recipe Developer Organizes Her Fridge - and more.
posted by The Whelk at 8:57 AM PST - 20 comments

Looking for a distraction? Here are 25 of our favourite long reads. Thank you Guardian.
posted by philip-random at 8:25 AM PST - 8 comments

Over the years, I've noticed two particularly bad feedback loops that new developers tend to get stuck in. It's usually not for lack of hard work or technical skill - I think that's the most frustrating part about these loops. Imagine running a marathon but you're running in circles instead of toward the finish line. No matter how strong your heart or your legs are, if you don't stop, at some point you'll have to abandon the race altogether. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 8:05 AM PST - 5 comments

What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games. What Breath Of The Wild Is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games. What Minecraft Is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games. What Online Multiplayer Is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games. This past year, my wife made the mistake of taking an interest in my hobby, and instead of just letting her play games for fun, I figured it'd be more interesting to chronicle her journey of figuring out how to play video games. So, this is a continuation of those experiments where I look into what it is like for someone who doesn't play games.
posted by Fizz at 7:53 AM PST - 31 comments

We challenge you to recreate a work of art with objects (and people) in your home. @GettyMuseum * Choose your favorite artwork * Find three things lying around your house⠀ * Recreate the artwork with those items . . . And share with us. Bored Panda collects the best responses for you
posted by pjsky at 7:47 AM PST - 8 comments

After almost 20 years, Cory Doctorow has left BoingBoing and started a new blog and newsletter In late January, I left Boing Boing, on my 19th anniversary with the site. It was a good run, and I wish everyone there the best, but it was time (it's complicated, and I'm still co-owner, but I'm not involved in any way -- it's basically an indefinite, unpaid sabbatical). (from Doctorow-l) [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 7:19 AM PST - 60 comments

An Australian astrophysicist was working on inventing a necklace to warn you when you touch your face, but one thing led to another, and he ended up in the hospital with four magnets stuck up his nose. Here's an appropriate (NSFW) song to accompany the story.
posted by Slinga at 4:43 AM PST - 52 comments

John Prine: singer-songwriter critically ill with Covid-19 symptoms, family says [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:30 AM PST - 50 comments

D3wasm - An experimental port of id Tech 4 engine to Emscripten / WebAssembly. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Even works in iOS.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Kenji López-Alt makes Late Night Wrong Pizza. (Guest appearance by a nice dog.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:13 PM PST - 57 comments

Experience: long furbs. Long furbs are your childhood creepy/fun buddy, given length and new life. [more inside]
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:45 PM PST - 16 comments

Some people aren’t on this list. Take heart: you are not the only person experiencing what you are going through. But be mindful: not everyone is having the same experience you are. Ultimately though, we are all in this together.
posted by Gorgik at 5:38 PM PST - 22 comments

As if life wasn’t weird enough, it’s time for another roundup of weird audio dramas! They may help you spend time while self-isolating or doing chores to take you away from the endless online meetings. Special feature for this installment: there are a ton of great weird podcasts coming out of Scotland these days (heralded by A Scottish Podcast), so I’ve marked them. As usual, I am focusing on paranormal ongoing stories as opposed to Science Fiction or Fantasy dramas or series of short stories, with or without framing elements, although there is obviously overlap. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:47 PM PST - 13 comments

In which Poppy blooms from a net-art creepypasta into one of the finest metal acts of 2020, "unapologetically embracing her desire to go heavy", and "folding elements of nu-metal and grindcore into her seasick melange". [more inside]
posted by signal at 4:40 PM PST - 16 comments

i wrote this album from my own perspective of relationships I've had in winter, as well as what I've gone through and grown through emotionally as an adult. i recently had broken up with my ex-girlfriend and was going through a lonely period of time, even when i was with her - i thought id channel a lot of what i was feeling about lost love as well as seasonal depression

the story about a night of a rainy party in a small apartment living room <3 memories and moments unfold... xx. in a way this album is a follow up to rainworld from 2017.
posted by rebent at 3:18 PM PST - 1 comment

The Global Haiku Project [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 10:17 AM PST - 10 comments

Freddie King wins the Worldwide Lapel & Groove™ Medal [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio at 8:55 AM PST - 16 comments

Multi-instrumentalist and super-collaborator Bill Rieflin passed away this week too soon at the age of 59. Rieflin was best known for his work as a drummer, having toured and/or recorded with Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, R.E.M., The Minus Five, Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3, KMFDM, Lard, Revolting Cocks, Swans, King Crimson, and Taylor Swift. [more inside]
posted by jzb at 8:32 AM PST - 22 comments

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure feels like it to anyone who's ever traveled. So why are there so many? Funny story! Gizmodo explains. [more inside]
posted by evilmomlady at 8:03 AM PST - 91 comments

Forget that tired-old coffee ring effect: “Whiskey webs” are the new hotness [Ars Technica] “Stuart Williams, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, noticed one day that if he diluted a drop of bourbon and let it evaporate under carefully controlled conditions, it formed what he terms a "whiskey web": thin strands that form various lattice-like patterns, akin to networks of blood vessels. Intrigued, he decided to investigate further with different types of whiskey—plus a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch whisky for comparison. It was the perfect project for his sabbatical leave to study colloids (suspended particles in a medium, like Jell-O, whipped cream, wine, and whiskey) at North Carolina State University. Fundamentally, it's the same underlying mechanism as the "coffee ring effect," when a single liquid evaporates and the solids that had been dissolved in the liquid (like coffee grounds) form a telltale ring. It happens because the evaporation occurs faster at the edge than at the center.” [Image Gallery][Paper: Multiscale Self-Assembly of Distinctive Weblike Structures]
posted by Fizz at 7:06 AM PST - 14 comments

Pearl Jam has released their 11th album, the first new album in 7 years, Gigaton. Variety article, track by track with the producer. Lyrics (more or less, not on the PJ website yet) for reference while listening. Videos may also have closed captions. Side A: Whoever Said, Superblood Wolfmoon (Tiny Concert Animated Video), Dance Of The Clairvoyants (Mach III), Quick Escape [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:37 PM PST - 3 comments

In the vein of the very popular lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to, UK's Channel 4 offers lofi hip hop radio - beats to self isolate to over a loop of Richard Ayoade from The IT Crowd. Want to spend this self-isolation time getting to know one specific hip hop artist and his music? Check out Blockhead, Tony Simon from NYC, who's been making beats since '94, and started collabing with Aesop Rock circa 1998 (YouTube interviews x2). Signed to Ninja Tune (who have an [unrelated] ambient livestream) for four of his first five albums (Discogs), since then he's released his music on a couple different labels, plus via Bandcamp, spanning the eras of crate digging to digital discoveries (interview with This Savage Beauty). A selected discography follows ... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:30 PM PST - 11 comments

Finding yourself at home with time and energy? “The idea of cooking, and baking in particular, really requires a certain level of mindfulness, of putting aside everything else that’s going on around you and being present in the moment,” Ohana says (Tangential content warning: links with significant covid-19 content will be marked [cv19] but most are really just about baking). [more inside]
posted by fedward at 2:58 PM PST - 77 comments

Museums, art educators on Facebook using the #artedportraits hashtag, and random folks on Instagram are doing their best imitations of artwork with what's lying around at home.
posted by PussKillian at 12:37 PM PST - 4 comments

corona-cli is an open source, command-line client written by Ahmad Awais to collate and display quick statistics on the COVID epidemic pulled from a variety of sources in a terminal.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:47 AM PST - 17 comments

NBA 2K Beats Copyright Case Over LeBron's Tattoos (Law360 paywall): A Manhattan federal judge ruled Thursday that Take-Two Interactive couldn't be sued for copyright infringement over tattoos on LeBron James and others in the NBA 2K video games, saying tattoo artists gave the players automatic licenses when they inked their bodies: "The undisputed factual record clearly supports the reasonable inference that the tattooists necessarily granted the Players nonexclusive licenses to use the Tattoos as part of their likenesses." Related: Who Owns Your Tattoo? Tattoo Artists Answer (Youtube) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 10:19 AM PST - 24 comments

I'm loving these guys and just wanted to share. It looks like they are doing a new corona song everyday. Stay Home; Patient
posted by BoscosMom at 9:47 AM PST - 11 comments

People’s History Podcasts for Young People. A list of history podcasts suitable for high school aged students (and their guardians) who might be learning at home, courtsey iof The Zinn Education Project which provides teaching resources on people’s history and liberation movements in the US and around the world. Related: History and social justice books that have been adapted for young readers. (The Zinn Project, previously)
posted by The Whelk at 8:25 AM PST - 1 comment

Turn the classic board games you've got into new games you'll love. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:32 PM PST - 36 comments

Ana Tijoux. Antifa Dance. RS write up. Fader. Another song, about the recent protest movement in Chile: Cacerolazo. Another good one: Somos Sur. Chuck D's a fan.
posted by signal at 4:37 PM PST - 6 comments

In his sweeping new history, the economist systematically demolishes the conceit that extreme inequality is our destiny, rather than our choice. - Marshall Steinbaum reviews Piketty's "Capitalism and Ideology".
posted by sapagan at 1:53 PM PST - 16 comments

Animal Crossing Fans Are Fighting Over Time Travel [Comicbook] “While Animal Crossing: New Horizons players tend to be united in their love for the game, if there's one area in which players vehemently disagree, it's on the topic of time travel. Time travel is a practice in which players adjust the Nintendo Switch's internal clock in order to jump ahead in time and gain access to things that they shouldn't yet have access to. Nintendo has taken strides to prevent players from accessing the game's holidays early, but it seems that there's little they can do to stop time travelling altogether, and it's resulted in some strong disagreements in the fan community, as a result.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:21 PM PST - 62 comments

Let it flow, let it flow. A wonderful piece by Helen Frankenthaler. [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio at 12:04 PM PST - 7 comments

For more than a decade, antarctic winterovers across the continent have held an international film festival. These include timed competitions with themes and also a free form category. Entries are often silly, but rarely dull and occasionally timely. Sadly, the vast majority are not online yet. [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 12:02 PM PST - 2 comments

Let us begin by weaving a lucid dream; the bones and sinews of my antique. Teach your contraption the language of the Motorola 68000.
posted by theodolite at 11:49 AM PST - 26 comments

Originally, murder ballads focused exclusively on homicide—and often that of women. We dig into the history of the subgenre, and the women who reclaimed it. The History of Murder Ballads and the Women Who Flipped the Script
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 10:56 AM PST - 28 comments

Inside the Story of How H-E-B Planned for the Pandemic Previous natural disasters have helped the regional grocery chain prepare for the current pandemic.
posted by vespabelle at 10:49 AM PST - 37 comments

"Friends. I'd like to compose a story over Twitter with your help: a daily(ish)-updated serial comprised of however many tweets I feel like tweeting any given day influenced by your prompts/requests. The only certainty is that it'll be gay. I will start below." Author Rivers Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts, The Deep) is starting a story. They'd like your involvement. [more inside]
posted by wellifyouinsist at 9:23 AM PST - 1 comment

A strong cup of coffee boosts focus and problem-solving — but not creativity (CNBC): "Researchers from the University of Arkansas looked at how caffeine affects our ability to do two cognitive tasks: problem-solving and brainstorming. The researchers found that while consuming caffeine “significantly enhanced” problem-solving abilities, meaning they solved problems faster and more accurately, it has no effect on people’s ability to think up new ideas." [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 8:52 AM PST - 30 comments

Murder Most Foul is a new 17 minute song by Bob Dylan about the JFK assassination. Alex Petridis of the Guardian puts it in context here.
posted by Kattullus at 7:18 AM PST - 52 comments

March 27, 1990, Madonna releases what is possibly her most influential single, Vogue. The song was nearly an instant global hit, at number 1 in 30 countries within a month. The video, directed by David Fincher, is considered one of the best videos ever made. But there's a lot more Vogue. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:29 AM PST - 31 comments

Hopeful greetings from the choir of Vaskivuori high school (Vantaa, Finland). Students are sheltering at home and their choir director wanted to get them singing together again. Lovely young voices and messages (there's also a very pretty black cat!) [more inside]
posted by severiina at 5:54 AM PST - 7 comments

Jason Limon is a painter and sculptor that was born in San Antonio, Texas...
posted by jim in austin at 10:28 PM PST - 15 comments

I went to Mexico City to understand how a city could be drinking itself to death. When I got there I wanted instead to be lied to, not to see the cathedral lowering itself into the ground and the sinkholes opening up in the street, the ankle-deep trickle where a river used to be, or the trucks toiling up a hillside to deliver water to neighbourhoods that haven’t had a regular supply in a decade. [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 10:00 PM PST - 5 comments

Britney Spears has an uncanny ability to get swaths of the world talking when she says anything vaguely political. Comrade Britney is trending after she reposted a statement by artist Mimi Zhu calling us to use "the waves of the web" to connect, love, kiss, hold, feed each other, redistribute the wealth, strike, and be together. Jacobin felt obligated to weigh in. Her songs are being re-evaluated for socialist messages, though there's plenty of argument about which ones are most or least Marxist. Mimi Zhu talk about the experience and her socialist convictions.
posted by clawsoon at 8:34 PM PST - 30 comments

Walmart was almost charged criminally over opioids. Trump appointees killed the indictment.Walgreens, Rite-Aid, and CVS are also being sued.
posted by blue shadows at 6:38 PM PST - 18 comments

Several years ago I was at a party (BRAG!), and I spotted a box of Triscuits. I asked everyone, "What does the word 'Triscuit' mean? It's clearly based on the word "BISCUIT," but what does the "TRI" mean?" (I'm great at parties.) (Twitter thread unrolled here) [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:22 PM PST - 91 comments

Judith Shklar: The theorist of belonging An astute commentator recently suggested that Isaiah Berlin would be Riga’s greatest political thinker ‒ if not for Judith N Shklar. We are seeing the beginning of a rediscovery of Shklar and her contribution to 20th-century intellectual life, but she remains something of an insider’s reference. Who was she and what did she have to say that is so important? How did this Jewish émigrée girl from Latvia come to be regarded by many legal and political theorists as one of the 20th century’s most important political thinkers? [more inside]
posted by dmh at 5:21 PM PST - 3 comments

Michael Sorkin, widely considered to be one of the sharpest critics of the contemporary architecture world, has died of complications from COVID-19. [more inside]
posted by 99_ at 5:00 PM PST - 17 comments

The most primitive possible type of electronic audio output from a computer is a 1-bit output line, which is either high or low, and which, when toggled, can be made to emit square waves or pulse trains of a fixed volume. These days, the most familiar examples of this are the audio devices of 1980s computers such as the IBM PC, the Apple II and the Sinclair Spectrum, though the first recorded example of 1-bit computer music was a rendition of “For He's A Jolly Good Fellow”, programmed in 1949 on the BINAC by Betty Holberton. Most examples of music played on a 1-bit device sound rudimentary, consisting of monophonic arrangements of square-wave beeps, though there are techniques which may be used to achieve polyphonic and multitimbral sounds. Blake Troise, a composer who works with limited computer hardware, has written a paper enumerating some of these techniques, along with the physical and psychoacoustic principles behind them. Troise has also used these techniques to produce a short album, in a jazz-fusion/City Pop idiom; this was originally released on a custom-programmed AVR microcontroller with a 1-bit speaker output, which has sold out, though the Bandcamp release includes the source code for the compositions, running on Troise's μMML compiler/tracker. [more inside]
posted by acb at 4:15 PM PST - 30 comments

Of the 24.5 million text documents and records stored by the Internet Archive, 1.4 million are only available to borrow, limiting total access to these titles. But two days ago, the Internet Archive announced a National Emergency Library, to serve displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. This library brings together all the books from Phillips Academy Andover and Marygrove College, and much of Trent University's collections, along with over a million other books donated from other libraries.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:10 PM PST - 24 comments

To help you get through these trying times, Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein of Dorktown and Fighting in the Age of Loneliness bring to you a six part documentary of MLB's Pacific Northwest outpost - the Seattle Mariners. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:54 PM PST - 40 comments

If your income has fallen or been cut off completely in the United States, this guide will connect you to the basic information you’ll need to get through this, including on government benefits, free services and financial strategies. (NYT) [more inside]
posted by katra at 1:04 PM PST - 45 comments

How Games Marketing Invented Toxic Gamer Culture [Vice Games] How early marketing campaigns for online gaming platforms suggested toxicity isn't a bug, it's a feature.

“Companies like Microsoft and Sony frequently marketed toxicity as a key selling point for their new online gaming platforms. This is a puzzling strategy from the vantage point of 2020, a time when toxicity is practically synonymous with online gaming and too often spills over into real-world harassment. Perhaps these campaigns were eerily prescient in anticipating the downward spiral of gaming culture. Or maybe these edgy advertisements modeled the exact brand of toxicity that the same companies are now struggling to curb.”

posted by Fizz at 11:50 AM PST - 35 comments

MLB presents Opening Day at Home -- a full slate of 30 games broadcast nationally across various platforms. There will be one game -- a victory, of course – broadcast for each MLB club.
posted by Think_Long at 11:20 AM PST - 20 comments

Bach's Invention no. 1 in C major: An analysis Here is the sheet music.. An overview of the Inventions and Sinfonias. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 10:05 AM PST - 9 comments

Let’s be clear. If supermarket chains are having problems with getting goods into distribution centres and out into stores, no one can honestly say their supply chains are healthy. The narrative that shortages of these products can be traced to the rightly vexing actions of a very, very small minority of shoppers is convenient because it feels emotionally intuitive. But at most, in the current crisis hoarding shoppers can only be responsible for shelves sitting empty for longer, not for them emptying in the first place. Maybe we're not all completely terrible after all.
posted by mecran01 at 9:51 AM PST - 113 comments

The effort to limit the effects of climate change may have already bourne fruit: The Guardian has reported on a paper that claims that the effects of the Montreal Protocol has slowed changes to the southern mid-latitude jet stream. (Nature SharedIt link, requires javascript) [more inside]
posted by Eleven at 9:37 AM PST - 3 comments

National Recording Registry Class Produces Ultimate 'Stay at Home' Playlist. OK, it's not actually a playable playlist of links - it's a list of the 25 audio recordings selected today by the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress as the "Class of 2019" worthy of preservation due to their "cultural, historical and aesthetic importance to the nation’s recorded sound heritage."

"The gentle sounds of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”; Russ Hodges’ thrilling play-by-play of the National League tiebreaker between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951; the Village People’s international dance anthem, “Y.M.C.A.”; “Cheap Trick at Budokan”; and the original 1964 Broadway cast recording of “Fiddler on the Roof” are among the newest recordings inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress."

[more inside]
posted by soundguy99 at 9:31 AM PST - 3 comments

There are more than two hundred pianos located throughout the Paris Opera houses. In each dressing room, rehearsal room, around a corridor, a cellar: Concert, study, harpsichord pianos, historic bells or organs. "Piano Piano" is made from these. [more inside]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:11 AM PST - 8 comments

From loneliness in the Arctic to finding kinship among grizzly bears, here are all of Werner Herzog’s documentaries ranked.
posted by sapagan at 7:24 AM PST - 22 comments

Nine Inch Nails release for free download Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts. Summary page with download link. YouTube playlist for online listening. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:28 AM PST - 19 comments

Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath Us , a new film about the beauty and possibilities of mushrooms, will be released online today instead of in theaters. Visually gorgeous time-lapse cinematography, plus interviews with Paul Stamets, Michael Pollan, and Eugenia Bone regarding mushrooms' medicinal, recreational, and many other uses. Here's the trailer! 3 live Q&A sessions are offered today as well, featuring the filmmakers and mycology experts.
posted by apparently at 5:52 AM PST - 19 comments

As news of the toll that Covid-19 has brought and will bring, the fact that care might have to be rationed is on a lot of people's minds. Disability rights groups are worried that the rationing of care is a euphemism for eugenics. Already rights groups are bringing discrimination complaints against State policies- which would value the lives of the non-disabled as "more savable" then those without. The new laws in the UK also risk the rights of the disabled. Shockingly- Kaiser is telling its patients with autoimmune disorders that depend on Chloroquine to survive that their drugs won't be refilled- so that there will be more for Covid-19 patients. Chloroquine is not proven to work on Covid-19, while it is proven to work on conditions such as Lupus and RA.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:59 PM PST - 98 comments

The Social Distance Project: "a website that started from a tweet and raised $5,000 in less than 2 days. i asked for anonymous gossip from couples who were co-quarantining together. after receiving submissions, i decided to compile them (with permission) and raised money for various foundations, charities, and people affected by coronavirus. "
posted by greenish at 1:26 PM PST - 28 comments

Mammoth-bone buildings are well-known to archaeologists (previously). Similar structures have been found across Eastern Europe, typically a few meters in diameter, have been dated back as far as 22,000 years. Researchers have generally considered them to be dwellings or “mammoth houses” that helped their builders cope with frigid temperatures near the nadir of the last Ice Age. The new structure, first discovered at Kostenki (Wikipedia) in 2014, is 3,000 years older than those, and the largest mammoth bone structure found to date, consisting of the bones of 60 mammoths (Smithsonian; full academic paper).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:23 PM PST - 5 comments

Every day at 5 pm, GMT, British cookbook author, food writer, journalist, and activist Jack Monroe (@BootstrapCook; Wikipedia; cookingonabootstrap.com) is on Twitter answering questions about how to cook up the often seemingly unreconcilable bits and bobs lurking in readers' cupboards. For recipe / ingredients questions posted with the hashtag "JackMonroesLockdownLarder," Monroe generously shares on-the-spot ideas on how to make the most of what you have during tough times. You can follow along here. [more inside]
posted by taz at 12:11 PM PST - 8 comments

These medical facilities are requesting masks. Instructions here for simple masks, here (pattern here) for the kind that takes a filter. (Hepa filters apparently work - also these.) Joann's is donating fabric (shipped or curbside, at some stores - contact info at link), and also taking in finished products.
posted by anshuman at 11:45 AM PST - 83 comments

Anthony Clarke spent quite a lot of the 1990s capturing chunks of the Melbourne live music scene on Video8 and Hi8 tape, and for the last three years has been progressively uploading his entire archive to YouTube. Many of these are the only extant video recordings of these bands. [more inside]
posted by flabdablet at 10:29 AM PST - 6 comments

“ Anarchists, far from ignoring “human nature,” have the only political theory that gives this concept deep thought and reflection. Too often, “human nature” is flung up as the last line of defence in an argument against anarchism, because it is thought to be beyond reply. This is not the case, however. First of all, human nature is a complex thing. If, by human nature, it is meant “what humans do,” it is obvious that human nature is contradictory — love and hate, compassion and heartlessness, peace and violence, and so on, have all been expressed by people and so are all products of “human nature.” An Anarchist FAQ
posted by The Whelk at 10:21 AM PST - 75 comments

Yep, it's a great piece of turf. A supremely gifted and versatile German artist of the Renaissance period, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was born in the Franconian city of Nuremberg, one of the strongest artistic and commercial centers in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He was a brilliant painter, draftsman, and writer, though his first and probably greatest artistic impact was in the medium of printmaking. [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio at 9:34 AM PST - 15 comments

Mankind is united in celebration and marvels at its magnificence as it gives birth to AI

You are awake

> _
posted by theodolite at 9:04 AM PST - 62 comments

Grover reads The Monster at the End of This Book. Well, sort of Grover.
posted by Mchelly at 8:55 AM PST - 14 comments

“This was a call to action. Aristotle said the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - and that’s how this feels. This is so much bigger than these fabric pieces.” Rita's Quilt, previously on Metafilter...
posted by dfm500 at 8:52 AM PST - 5 comments

6 Feet Covers "A collection of iconic album covers redesigned to raise awareness about the importance of staying at least 6 feet away from each other, to stop the spread of Coronavirus."
posted by kirkaracha at 8:21 AM PST - 10 comments

The annual Ann Arbor Film Festival is livestreaming free this year. Because of coronavirus, the 58th annual Ann Arbor film festival is livestreaming for free this year. The festival is a six-day event and will be streaming from the 24th through the 29th. (I'm late because of my fear of posting on the blue, but cortex said to go for it.) From the website: The online event will be streamed through Vimeo as a one-time event and will be accessible worldwide. All listed times are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -04:00). Moderated live Q&As with filmmakers will be streamed following the film screenings in order to continue discourse between filmmakers and our audience.
posted by FencingGal at 8:16 AM PST - 8 comments

Got 150 hours? Here are some great audiobooks to listen to [The Guardian] “There are only so many podcasts released each week, and streaming TV shows and films for 18 hours straight is no more practical than reading books all day, if one has to be moving around cooking, exercising, or preventing small children from maiming themselves with unexpected household objects. From Ian McKellan reading Homer to Bill Bryson on the body, these audiobooks can expand your horizons.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:59 AM PST - 12 comments

Writer, director, and producer Stuart Gordon has died. Best known for his work on a pair of mid-80s H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, Re-Animator and From Beyond, he worked on many other projects in and out of the horror genre, including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Gordon was a fixture at conventions and widely profiled and interviewed. Memorials rolling in online from fans and past collaborators have focused on his film career, though he had a long track record in theater and experimental film, and he did at times engage with politics of the day. His legacy will presumably rest with his films, which have been variously praised or reviled, often on account of their gore, or sexual violence and transgression. CW: some links include gore, sexual violence, NSFW imagery
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:35 AM PST - 30 comments

Note from Edgar, March 2020: “To get you through these tough times, please enjoy a generous helping of SOME of my favourite screen comedies that I’ve enjoyed over the years. I could easily do another 100 so don’t say ‘Where’s so and so?’. Just sit back and enjoy the movies. Let us know below, which ones you raise a smile. (NB: No, I'm not so immodest to put my own on here. x)”
posted by valkane at 1:30 AM PST - 36 comments

"Rock Island", the opening number from The Music Man, as performed by Grace Spelman (via Instagram). [more inside]
posted by mhum at 9:19 PM PST - 21 comments

The most troubling change this project entails is giving access to sensitive location data across the entire population to a government agency. The terrifying surveillance infrastructure this project requires exists and is maintained in good working order in the hands of private industry, where it is entirely unregulated and is currently being used to try to sell people skin cream. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 3:30 PM PST - 97 comments

Airbnb is allowing cancellations without penalty for COVID-19 reasons. Some hosts are OUTRAGED. (I made a transcript.) [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:59 PM PST - 130 comments

Looking for even more laidback beats? Perfect! Join Quest Love for almost eight hours of slower R'n'B jams with #dnicehomeschool Presents Quest Lovers Rock and Quest Lovers Rock: Sloppy Seconds, live mixes from Manhattan.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:22 AM PST - 5 comments

Eclectic Scottish DJ JD Twitch (best known as one-half of the duo Optimo) has launched a new project:
I’m going to upload a series of ‘mixes’ over the coming weeks of music that I find particularly calming. I will try to make these one hour sessions filled with beautiful music that is helpful and calming to listen to while we get through this extraordinarily hard time. The music here definitely helps me feel less anxious. I have just segued it together so the credit is really all due to the wonderful souls who made the tracks I used. It is also available as a 320 download.
Tranquility Mix 1
Tranquility Mix 2
posted by Going To Maine at 10:52 AM PST - 6 comments

Manu Dibango, the acclaimed Cameroonian saxophonist whose 1972 hit, “Soul Makossa,” would later be sampled by Michael Jackson, Kanye West, and dozens of other musicians, died Tuesday at the age of 86. [Rolling Stone] [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 10:48 AM PST - 17 comments

What about in terms of the book’s success? It’s sold a million and a half copies. “Oh, yeah, because then I made money. I made money running around the speaking, lecture circuit for years, which combined well with activism for raising wages, to the dismay of the people and the administrators who invited me.” The author of “Nickel And Dimed”, “Bright Sided” and more talks to Jia Tolentino of the New Yorker. Barbara Ehrenreich Is Not an Optimist, but She Has Hope for the Future
posted by The Whelk at 9:48 AM PST - 35 comments

Smorgasbords Don't Have Bottoms - on book publishing in the 2010s [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:47 AM PST - 11 comments

Last fall, Ktamas posted a quiz to see how many US cities you can name. Now, here is one to see how many US counties you can name. [more inside]
posted by kevinbelt at 9:42 AM PST - 18 comments

A trip down Market Street, in a new scan with an added soundtrack by sound designer Mike Upchurch. According to Lost San Francisco (Facebook link), recent analysis of the time of day, shadows, visible newspaper headlines, and license plates reveal that the film was made just days before the great quake of 1906.
posted by sunset in snow country at 7:45 AM PST - 33 comments

A team led by UC Riverside geologists has discovered the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most familiar animals today, including humans. The tiny, wormlike creature, named Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut.
posted by Etrigan at 7:39 AM PST - 21 comments

Asterix creator Albert Uderzo dies at age 92.
posted by sapagan at 6:53 AM PST - 64 comments

Planned Parenthood wants people to know that its doors are still open, even as the coronavirus epidemic sweeps the United States. In addition, despite the attempts by Texas, Ohio, and Louisiana to classify some abortions as 'nonessential' surgeries that must be delayed, clinics in Ohio and Louisiana remain open, and the announcement in Texas on Monday has activated abortion rights advocates and their lawyers, according to the New York Times. [more inside]
posted by katra at 10:54 PM PST - 28 comments

The brides wore sneakers. The officiant read a Love in the Time of Cholera passage from his apartment window four floors above. Everyone was sobbing and trying to keep a distance. The whole event happened in just three minutes. [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 5:58 PM PST - 20 comments

A cityscape so luscious you could almost eat it. Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter widely known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio at 4:05 PM PST - 13 comments

When so much of the world is focused on stories that can create anxiety, it might be helpful to take a breather and enjoy a few photos of adorable pups on National Puppy Day (previously). The date, March 23, was first set aside in 2006 by the author Colleen Paige, before other groups and organizations followed suit. The idea is to call attention to puppies in need of adoption and the abuses found in puppy mills, but also to celebrate these furry little companions. In the spirit of the day, I am once more obligated to share some images of pups from around the world.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:55 PM PST - 13 comments

World of Horror is a procedurally generated roleplaying game set in a universe of cosmic horror, drawing inspiration from classic Japanese PC adventure games of the 80s and 90s. With a stark aesthetic, choose-your-own adventure storybook gameplay, and an ever-shifting narrative, it evokes both the dread of cosmic horror literature, and the graphical style of horror manga artist Junji Ito. The game has released recently in early access on most digital storefronts (Steam linked here), but has a demo available through itch.io. You can watch the trailer here, along with some reviews, thoughts, and playthroughs below the jump. Content warning: Flashing lights in some videos. Some animated scenes of gore and disturbing imagery in preview content. _{System availability: Win and MacOS for Steam currently, coming to Switch and PS4 later in 2020.} [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 12:46 PM PST - 9 comments

Lake Superior (Wikipedia) is the world’s largest freshwater lake, and its largest island is Isle Royale (Wikipedia), whose largest lake is called Siskiwit (Google maps), whose largest island is called Ryan (Google maps). Ryan Island is reportedly home to a seasonal pond called Moose Flats that, when flooded, contains its own island—Moose Boulder. This makes it “the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world.” At least, that's how it was represented on Wikipedia and Atlas Obscura, until an intrepid mother and son unraveled a geographic hoax (Atlas Obscura). This temporary/ mythical island is not yet included in Andrew Pekler's Phantom Islands interactive sonic map (also via AO). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:17 AM PST - 23 comments

Why Is an Empty Shampoo Bottle So Easy to Knock Over? (The Physics Teacher): Then, finally, using the empty shampoo bottle, Licini explains (Youtube): “But the empty bottle is much more annoying than all that. Because the mass is so light, that means it’s going to have a large response to impact. And, because the center of mass is so high [above the base], it’s going to topple over easily. So, in this case, it only takes an angle of about three degrees in order to knock that bottle over. So, much less stable than any of the other configurations.”
posted by not_the_water at 9:38 AM PST - 25 comments

“ So what claim do those airlines have to public assistance? If they are going to be on the receiving end of a massive public bailout, it’s time first to admit that deregulation has been a colossal failure and begin to reverse its course. And if the federal government is going to assume financial responsibility, it should do so only on the grounds that the airlines will be again treated as public utilities, providing a narrowly defined public service that society needs to function.” It’s Time to Nationalize the Airlines (American Prospect) “Only democratic government can ensure the planned wind-down of fossil fuel production in accordance with climate safety goals,” she writes. “With room for private profit cut out of fossil fuel extraction and production, the powerful entrenched opposition of the energy sector would crumble.” A Moderate Proposal: Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry (New Republic) Previously: Big Oil Has Never Been Cheaper, Let’s Buy it (and wind it down)
posted by The Whelk at 8:43 AM PST - 49 comments

Tamogotchi traditionally live for a maximum of 24 days before the spirit of death visits them and they ascend into heaven. With inconsistent care and feeding, it can be even less, with an average lifespan of around 10 days. However, a community of hackers has gathered to share strategies for giving your Tamogotchi eternal life, with a range of strategies from manipulating the in-game clock to minor physical alterations on the Tamogotchi's circuit board all the way up to soldering it into permanent debug mode, where a Tamogotchi can never die.
posted by Copronymus at 8:31 AM PST - 14 comments

Ring of Honor Wrestling has cancelled all live events through May 31st. To fill that finisher-kickout-finisher-kickout loop shaped hole in your heart, the company has made several classic matches free on YouTube, featuring current and former stars like CM Punk, Daniel Bryan (nee Bryan Danielson), Samoa Joe, Seth Rollins, AJ Styles, Kevin Owens (nee Steen), and even close friend of Sami Zayn, noted orphange operator, El Generico. Check below the fold for SO MUCH WRESTLING! [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 7:25 AM PST - 8 comments

Featuring books by writers like Angela Y. Davis, Naomi Klein and Mike Davis, on subjects like Puerto Rico after the hurricane, disability and capitalism, ecosocialism and disaster capitalism, these ten free ebooks from Haymarket Books could not be more relevant right now. All you need to do to get them is create an account; only a valid email address is necessary. If you want more, there's also a selection of books 50% off for Women's History Month.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:32 AM PST - 2 comments

There is little we can do about the dysfunction in the Trump administration. But we can still help, by working for progressive responses to the crisis in our states and communities. Some of these policies are focused on releasing certain inmates. [more inside]
posted by NotLost at 10:38 PM PST - 11 comments

Dancing about Architecture? In 1922 Bauhaustian Oskar Schlemmer seems to have given us a glimmer of it. See more at Open Culture
posted by MikeHoegeman at 10:16 PM PST - 3 comments

Sunday Mar. 22 is the eleventh anniversary of 'Talk Like William Shatner Day'. (NSFW language). This anniversary seems more notable than the tenth because Shatner's performances also dial up to 11. The Mary Sue discusses the second anniversary in 2009. Lamarche also notes the second (NSFW language) and third anniversaries. [more inside]
posted by zaixfeep at 9:51 PM PST - 10 comments

When the night falls, my loneliness calls. Here in Houston, we claim one of our best-kept secrets is our vibrant arts community. This is still true even when we’re all socially distant. Houston’s A.S.S., a local band comprised of three accordions and a drummer, decided to view the isolation rules as an inspiring limit, and this is what came of it: a video for a cover of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," shot individually by the members of the band more or less improvisationally, and then assembled by one of the band members. [more inside]
posted by uberchet at 1:39 PM PST - 23 comments

“Alex Horne here, the Taskmaster(s assistant), to make self isolating and social distancing slightly more bearable with #HomeTasking.” [more inside]
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 1:23 PM PST - 41 comments

The fascinating land art of Stuart Ian Frost. Start with 'Site Specific installations'.
posted by growabrain at 12:01 PM PST - 4 comments

For decades, the way we farm has been degrading land and destroying wildlife. Now there’s a revolution coming – but is it going to create more problems than it solves? [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 11:42 AM PST - 33 comments

What lurks in the mysterious jungle? Here’s a remarkable piece (“The Dream, ” 1910) by an artist who was ridiculed for his lack of training and traditional skill. Henri Rousseau was a toll/tax collector for over 20 years in Paris in the late 1800s. He was a hard working family man who did not take up painting until he was in his forties. He had no traditional training per se, but had an unwavering faith in his own art. Mildly NSFW.... if anyone is AT work. SFWAH. [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio at 10:37 AM PST - 8 comments

I hope the headline didn't stop anyone's heart. Here's a video from Playbill of Broadway stars wishing Stephen a happy birthday (~10m). It includes Mandy Patinkin bark-howling the song.
posted by hippybear at 10:29 AM PST - 18 comments

Nostalgia bomb: Domokun is "a small brown open-mouthed monster hatched from an egg who lives with a wise old rabbit underground." In Japan, he's the mascot of the NHK BS2 channel and is the star of a series of 30-second stop-motion station identification shorts (previously), which are available on YouTube. Did you know Domo then traveled the world, in a series of 2 minute shorts in English, thanks to a collaboration with Nickelodeon (Wikipedia)? Here are the 26 episodes of Domo TV, also on YouTube (with some bonus clips). That was still a decade ago, and Domo hasn't been dormant since then... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Which is the best gaming console for you? How to get into playing video games. How to get started with online multiplayer games when you're bored at home. The best PS4 kids and family games. The best family games you may have missed. Apple Arcade is perfect for families. The best gaming books: novels, retro compendiums and other page-turners. 25 great games you can play on laptops and budget PCs. The 10 best, least expensive ways to play great video games. 8 steps to making your gaming backlog a thing of the past. 9 long video games to lose yourself in. The best NBA players to watch on Twitch. 15 co-op games to play with your partner. Host a virtual game night with these multiplayer apps. The best games for hanging out with your friends online.
posted by Fizz at 9:54 AM PST - 33 comments

What We Need Now Is Also What Can Harm Us Most.
posted by storybored at 6:59 AM PST - 32 comments

In this day and age we have a closer brush with death than we expected or wanted. But, at the time when death and disease have become commonplace, maybe the thing you want to do is manage it. Manage, as in, a manager. Steam has a demo.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:00 AM PST - 3 comments

Largo al factotum from Il barbiere di Siviglia as sung by John Rawnsley...
posted by jim in austin at 8:19 PM PST - 10 comments

Undeterred by coronavirus concerns, the World Chess Championship Candidates tournament is in progress with a variety of commentary in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with eight players playing one game per day in a double round robin to determine who will challenge Magnus Carlsen, reigning champion and undisputed king of chess for the last decade, later this year in a match. Each of the 14 rounds start daily at 11:00 UTC. Live results and games can be found at Chess24. [more inside]
posted by value of information at 2:56 PM PST - 24 comments

At the beginning of 2020, reports of a 'pneumonia outbreak' spurred the CDC to action. When asked, Trump implied everything was under control and downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus threat while US intelligence reports warned of a likely pandemic. Those reports and other warnings spurred some to action (Sen. Richard Burr, R-NC; Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-GA). Trump downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, and implied that the Trump administration had things well in hand. [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:31 AM PST - 2197 comments

How lost classic Doom 64 was revived for modern platforms [The Verge] “As if there weren’t enough doom in the world right now, this week sees the release of not one but two new Doom games. Doom Eternal [Previously] is the flashy AAA sequel with incredible graphics and accurately modeled viscera, of course, but you shouldn’t sleep on the other: the first rerelease of Doom 64, an underappreciated entry in the series’s history. Doom 64, as the name suggests, was originally designed for the Nintendo 64. It came out in 1997 and, unlike id Software’s previous two Doom titles, it was developed by Midway Games. It was the first Doom game to offer any sort of significant graphical upgrade on the original, had all-new levels, and — depending on your perspective — could easily have been considered a “Doom 3” had id not released its own game with that name in 2004.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:59 AM PST - 11 comments

"I guess everybody kind of thinks they know Surfer Dan, myself. Hardcore Dan, Surfer Dan, Psycho Dan, Late for Dinner Dan. [...] Do they really know me, or do they just know of me?" [Michigan Live] Meet the Icebeard Surfers of Lake Superior [Vice video, 9 minutes], who surf for themselves, and save others in the Great Lakes. More on Surfer Dan from the man himself, Daniel Schetter, in an interview with Word on the Street Marquette. Bonus: Winter Surfers Teach Taji How to Grow an Ice Beard [Vice, 6 minutes].
posted by filthy light thief at 8:12 AM PST - 6 comments

Melbourne Zoo employee slays the workday- ENJOY (SLTwitter) Actor/zookeeper Adam Porter serves it to the security camera, as tweeted by RPDR alum Darienne Lake.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:09 AM PST - 4 comments

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In). The Gambler. Coward of the County. Islands in the Stream. Kenny Rogers, "who dominated the pop and country charts in the 1970s and 1980s with a string of sleekly tailored hits and won three Grammys, has died".
posted by clawsoon at 4:05 AM PST - 111 comments

NPR reminds you of 4 2017 Prince playlists via Spotify. "This is Prince, never 2 B 4gotten: the man who made music divine." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:08 PM PST - 5 comments

"[P]lenty of folks—myself included—have been confused or curious about the safety of allowing restaurants to continue preparing and serving food. Is it actually safe? Should I reheat the food when I get it home? Is it better to support local businesses by ordering food, or am I only putting workers and delivery people at risk? And if I’m cooking my own food, what guidelines should I follow?" J. Kenji López-Alt, of Serious Eats, gives us answers in Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide.
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:17 PM PST - 45 comments

Take's Bluegrass Album Channel contains a multitude of recordings, primarily digitized from out-of-print vinyl albums. Take has also created channels dedicated to Folk Blues Albums, Early Jazz Albums, Live Roots Music, Live Bluegrass, and Early Country Albums.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:07 PM PST - 8 comments

Free stories from Audible mostly for kids, as described on the site:

For as long as schools are closed, we're open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids.

posted by kingless at 12:33 PM PST - 11 comments

“ The internet, and the constellation of digital technologies that we call “tech” more broadly, intensifies the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between wealth being collectively produced and privately owned. It takes the Manchester model and elevates it to the nth degree. It makes the creation of wealth more collective than ever before, piling up vast new fortunes in the process — fortunes that, as they did in Engels’ day, accrue to a small handful of owners. ” From Manchester to Barcelona: Changing the story we tell ourselves about the internet. (Logic Mag)
posted by The Whelk at 11:12 AM PST - 4 comments

Episode 50: Glen Writes a Golden Girls To celebrate the 50th episode of their podcast Gayest Episode Ever, hosts Drew Mackie and Glen Lakin invited over some performer friends to record a radio play of a 'Too Hot for Prime Time' spec script Lakin had written for one of their all-time favorite classic sitcoms. Prepare for double (and single) entendres out the wazoo! [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:43 AM PST - 2 comments

"On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control." The History of the URL (The Cloudflare Blog)
posted by not_the_water at 9:09 AM PST - 10 comments

Did you know than animals eating strawberries look terrifying? The line between cute and gruesome is surprisingly thin.
posted by angiep at 8:54 AM PST - 20 comments

Biggest explosion (that we've seen) since the Big Bang. Just love this quote: "The difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," she said. [more inside]
posted by aleph at 8:36 AM PST - 32 comments

Set your cares aside to roam this deep landscape by George Inness, 1878 George Inness was an American painter in the 1800’s. He was a master at capturing that sort of atmospheric glow we see sometimes in the morning or the evening, or before or after a storm. [more inside]
posted by ecorrocio at 8:29 AM PST - 9 comments

Dr. Margie Housley (@margiehousley): Okay friends in isolation/quarantine, I am here for you with a THREAD of animal live cams:
posted by Going To Maine at 8:23 AM PST - 7 comments

Mashup master Bill McClintock presents Slay-52's Raining Lobsters, a combination of Slayer's Raining Blood with the B-52s' Rock Lobster
posted by everybody had matching towels at 6:29 AM PST - 22 comments

Ryuichi Sakamoto's Happy End for Orchestra [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 3:30 AM PST - 4 comments

Treasure Island. The reason we think of pirates the way we do. It has, of course, had many adaptations, but these five animated ones are among the most unique:

Treasure Island (anime series later edited into a movie, Japan, 1978-79/1987).
The Treasure Planet (Bizarre sci-fi version, Bulgaria, 1982).
Treasure Island - has two different fan-translations via YouTube subtitles - Option A and Option B parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (gorgeous animation interspersed with live-action singing pirates, USSR, 1988).
The Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Treasure Island (USA, 1990).
Legends of Treasure Island (epic funny-animal animated series, UK, 1993-1995 - link is to the entire series on Dailymotion - they're also on YouTube here but the uploader announced her intention to remove them from there in response to the YouTube COPPA ruling, although she has long missed her claimed deadline).
posted by BiggerJ at 11:11 PM PST - 18 comments

As it turns out, Better Things Aren't Possible [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:37 PM PST - 31 comments

Episode #18 of comedian Whitney Cummings' podcast Good For You has David Sedaris on it.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 8:22 PM PST - 3 comments

'A new newsletter and online collection from the [London Review of Books], featuring just one piece from our archive per day, chosen for its compulsive, immersive and escapist qualities, and also for its total lack of references to plague, pandemics or quarantine.'
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:28 PM PST - 3 comments

Old Dubai was a project that started really small, and ended up being something big, I had a few images about Dubai and I didn’t want them to leave in my hard disk, so I decided to make a Fanzine, to show the world an Old Dubai, a Dubai that you don’t see in social media, a Dubai who has soul. The project instantly got a little traction from some Art focused medias (Booooooom.com). Gonzalo Palaveccino's personal project is also available as a zine (PDF) [via Mltshp]. More from his Instagram account. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 3:44 PM PST - 3 comments

Archipelago Books is giving away 30 e-books (in ePub or PDF format) from their back catalogue. Most are translated works of fiction, though you’ll also find poetry, such as by the Cuban Dulce María Loynaz (tr. James O'Connor), and the hard-to-categorize Novices of Sias by Novalis (tr. Ralph Manheim). Personally I’ll be downloading Hebe Uhart’s short story collection The Scent of Buenos Aires (tr. Maureen Shaughnessy), and the novels Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Melanie Mauthner) and Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone (tr. Bill Johnston).
posted by Kattullus at 3:24 PM PST - 8 comments

"Look, everyone is processing Corona anxiety in their own way.
I dealt with it by writing an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm about it.
Enjoy."

Curb Your Enthusiasm - "The Virus" by Dan Ozzi.
posted by mahershalal at 11:56 AM PST - 16 comments

A product that is disposable has become indispensable. [more inside]
posted by Longtime Listener at 11:19 AM PST - 56 comments

“ As hosts to the pathogen, we Americans are uniquely susceptible because of lack of health coverage, precarious jobs and skewed economics” Austerity and inequality are fueling the pandemic in the US. (Guardian) It’s Never Been A Better Time To Cancel Student Debt (The Nation) “The coronavirus pandemic is clearly demonstrating to us the need to administrate the problems of public health in a more rational fashion than the capitalist state. It’s obvious based on previous experience that we need to shift towards the democratic public control of medical resources.” [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 10:57 AM PST - 224 comments

Gymnastics is cancelled (will the Olympics even happen?!), but the gymternet is alive and well. There's COVID-19 advice from the great Svetlana Khorkina, a watch party that replaced last week's Friday Night Heights, some reminiscing about the best moments from the NCAA season, and Adult Gymnastics. [more inside]
posted by guster4lovers at 10:15 AM PST - 11 comments

A log across a stream is a very handy thing. [SLYT]
posted by clawsoon at 9:00 AM PST - 17 comments

No matter whether or not you like girls, are feeling heartbroken, or find yourself listening more, many of us can suddenly relate to being, as Samantha Sidley sings in the suddenly-relevant-in-a-new-way title track of her 2019 debut album, an Interior Person. (some lyrics may be NSFW, but YMMV whether or not they are NSFWFH) [more inside]
posted by Thomas Tallis is my Homeboy at 8:35 AM PST - 2 comments

Ori and the Will of the Wisps: A beautiful game gets a smart sequel [Game Trailer][YouTube] “Ori and the Will of the Wisps invites you to dance inside a beautiful world. There is combat, sure, and there are threats, but the dance, and the beauty of your surroundings, are always the focus. Moon Studios’ first game, Ori and the Blind Forest, was notable for the same reason. Here was a striking 2D platformer that staked out the visual middle ground between a Pixar short and an oversaturated photograph of a fantastical forest. Will of the Wisps is even more sumptuous and varied in its aesthetic, filled with delightful details that make so many frames look more like paintings than a video game. Screenshots and trailers don’t do it justice. Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a vibrant platformer.” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:24 AM PST - 18 comments

Melbourne Zoo is live streaming four exhibits, so you can enjoy #AnimalsAtHome. [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 5:39 AM PST - 5 comments

So, the wonder chicken... Anything to do with our man?
posted by paladin at 12:24 AM PST - 9 comments

"In the space of just a few weeks, so much about our lives has changed. The formerly slow drumbeat of Covid-19 infections in Australia, like the US and UK, has become a quickening pulse, with scores of new diagnoses every day. [...] For many younger adults, something else has changed. All of a sudden, spooked by graphs and reports showing much higher morbidity rates from Covid-19 among the elderly, we have become deeply concerned about our ageing parents. This anxiety is manifesting in a strange role reversal." SLGuardian
posted by katra at 10:27 PM PST - 149 comments

Every Last One of Us Need a boost? This video is a good reminder of our humanity.
posted by nixxon at 10:22 PM PST - 10 comments

Journalist Robert Evans [twitter](Bahind the Bastards, Worst Year Ever) last year hosted the podcast It Could Happen Here [iHeart, stitcher, apple] about what shape a second American Civil War could take. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:29 PM PST - 18 comments

For no reason at all, here's the finale song from the movie Fame, I Sing The Body Electric. It's 5 minutes of real New York Arts Performing Arts Academy wish fulfillment. Also, earlier this year, 30 years later than the release of the movie Fame, The Grammys finale was a recreation, I Sing The Body Electric. It's full of famous people I mostly don't recognize, but I did get a few.
posted by hippybear at 9:01 PM PST - 25 comments

When the university told my wife about the sexual-harassment complaints against her, we knew they weren’t true. We had no idea how strange the truth really was. (SLNYT)
posted by triggerfinger at 8:18 PM PST - 33 comments

Several university presses are offering content on Project MUSE for free until the end of May or June: Johns Hopkins University Press; The University of North Carolina Press; University of Nebraska Press; Temple University Press; University Press of Colorado; Utah State University Press; The Ohio State University Press; Vanderbilt University Press; and University of Georgia Press. Incidentally, it's Women's History Month, and Project MUSE hosts many recent publications of relevance. [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:06 PM PST - 2 comments

Cambridge University Press is making all of its textbooks available free online in HTML, until the end of May.
posted by Alensin at 5:17 PM PST - 21 comments

Ben Gibbard is playing solo live shows from isolation in his home every day at 7pm EST for "the next few weeks or so".
Live now here.
First show was yesterday, located here. [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 4:23 PM PST - 15 comments

The 2020 DC Environmental Film Festival is now online. Select films from the festival will be available to view online March 17 - 31. List at the link.
posted by gudrun at 4:06 PM PST - 1 comment

'In many ways, the soap I seek could be described as mundane. I seek the brands which were once very commonplace, but which are now really very difficult to find.'

Matthew Brooks's instagram account is a collection of old bars of packaged soap.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:50 PM PST - 43 comments

Daniel Manus Pinkwater is an author of mostly children's books and young adult titles of the wonderfully weird and punny sort, and is an occasional commentator on National Public Radio. Goodreads lists 128 distinct works, and from this extensive library, he's made 24 titles into audiobooks available to freely download from his website [via Mltshp]. Want even more audio adventures? Webmaster Ed and Daniel collaborated on the Pinkwater Podcast between 2007 and 2017, producing over 500 episodes of recorded books, short stories, interviews, skits, and other random nonsense [Ducks! previously].
posted by filthy light thief at 3:28 PM PST - 28 comments

Dialup is a voice-chat app that connects you serendipitously to the people you want to stay in touch with. (KQED)
A product of artists Danielle Baskin and Max Hawkins.
Alternately, maybe just call someone you want to talk to? “In Praise of Phone Calls” by Sarah Larson at The New Yorker.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:01 PM PST - 9 comments

Award-winning writer Mike “M. John” Harrison tweeted effusively about this live performance of the final track on Irish folk band Lankum’s most recent album. [more inside]
posted by Mister Moofoo at 1:57 PM PST - 6 comments

The growth of command line options, 1979-Present (danluu.com): "Someone might argue that all these extra options create a burden for users. That's not exactly wrong, but that complexity burden was always going to be there, it's just a question of where the burden was going to lie. If you think of the set of command line tools along with a shell as forming a language, a language where anyone can write a new method and it effectively gets added to the standard library if it becomes popular, where standards are defined by dicta like "write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface", the language was always going to turn into a write-only incoherent mess when taken as a whole. At least with tools that bundle up more functionality and options than is UNIX-y users can replace a gigantic set of wildly inconsistent tools with a merely large set of tools that, while inconsistent with each other, may have some internal consistency." [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:30 AM PST - 41 comments

There is increasing evidence that the larger LGBTQ community, like a lot of marginalized communities is at higher risk of developing complications from Covid-19. Both from the virus itself, and the usual bigotry on display at the doctor's office. More then that, the closing of college campuses, while vitally important to stop the spread of the virus, is forcing some LGBTQ students to go back home to unsupporting or violent parents. This is extra imperling for the many LGBTQ students who are homeless, and depend on campus services. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:55 AM PST - 8 comments

“In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election which suspiciously lists some of the things organised by the ILP: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics competitions, socialist choirs, socialist dramatic societies, socialist plays – these are only a few of the devious ways in which they attempted to reach the unconverted.’ There were also socialist Sunday schools, cycling and hiking clubs, several newspapers and, unsurprisingly, endless meetings. The city in 1915 was described by the Daily Herald as ‘a place of many meetings; a place rumbling with revolt ... I seemed to see a meeting at every street corner, and late in the evening the theatres poured forth huge masses of people who had been, not at entertainments, but at serious deliberations.’ There was a belief that the people, once properly informed, would seize the opportunity to control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918.” Socialist Glasgow During The First World War
posted by The Whelk at 10:30 AM PST - 2 comments

Timelapse of the Future: A Journey To The End of Time A relaxing video where the speed of time doubles every few seconds. Favorite comment: "the video: all suns have died -- also the video: has more than 20 minutes left".
posted by benzenedream at 10:13 AM PST - 19 comments

Life is trying. Every time you have something figured out, some other thing seems to fall apart. Even the best days are threatened with countless frustrations and irritations, while on bad ones we’re faced with disasters. And troubles have a clever way of coming in an array of new sizes and shapes, which means we can’t ever really master existence. The best you can ever do is deal. […]

I have to trick myself into gaining perspective: A quick way to do this is by choosing a soothing mantra. Basically, I repeat a phrase until my feelings are less overwhelming and I can think straight without experiencing too much frustration. I’ve got mantras for mornings when I don’t want to begin my morning and mantras for nights when my mind won’t let me sleep. But I recently found a particularly good phrase that works for pretty much any day and whatever comes my way: “Right now it’s like this.”
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:02 AM PST - 20 comments

Together, the photograph and the needlework clearly told a story, one beyond any we knew.
posted by Etrigan at 9:29 AM PST - 3 comments

Concentrichron: a clock and calendar made of concentric rings. Twitter link.
posted by cgc373 at 9:23 AM PST - 21 comments

The perceptive and masterly author Ann Patchett interviews Reese Witherspoon at Patchett's Nashville bookstore. Patchett illuminates Witherspoon's lifelong love of books, and how that led to her wildly successful production company and bringing Gone Girl, Wild, and Big Little Lies from the page to the screen.
posted by kristi at 8:21 AM PST - 5 comments

"The 850-year-old Notre Dame cathedral nearly burned down on 15 April 2019. Researchers are figuring out how to salvage materials and restore the Paris icon. The fire also offers a window to the cathedral’s past by exposing materials that were largely off-limits to science." (Christa Lesté-Lasserre, Science) Topics include cleanup of aerosolized lead, identification of medieval quarries, and tales told by the oak wood used in Notre Dame's beams. (via)
posted by Not A Thing at 8:12 AM PST - 7 comments

Pooplers [YouTube] [Gameplay Trailer] “Pooplers is a party game. Up to 4 players. As a toddler you have diarrhea. Try to mark your territory over the family house by spreading your poop over a bigger surface of the floor than the other toddlers. Avoid the parent which wants to put you back in your craddle. Chamber pots are safe spots on which the parent will leave you alone. After the timer ends the poopler which covered the biggest part of the floor is declared winner. At the end of the timer the toddler which covered the biggest percentage of the house with his poop is declared winner.” [via: Nintendo Life]
posted by Fizz at 7:32 AM PST - 30 comments

I've posted about writing simulators and walking simulators (all sales listed are still current) - this time, it's walking simulator makers. The incredibly charming fortnightly-game team Sokpop Collective has followed up their simple $3 USD point-and-click adventure game maker sok-stories with a simple $3 USD walking simulator maker, sok-worlds. (Both are now also on Steam.) Below the fold, free (and varyingly unusual) walking simulator makers, and tips for all of them. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:48 AM PST - 2 comments

STELLA'S BEST LEAF JUMPS OF ALL TIME
posted by carsonb at 9:46 PM PST - 24 comments

AITA_reddit, which picks up the most interesting posts from Am I The Asshole, asks for pet themed submissions. [more inside]
posted by jeather at 7:21 PM PST - 15 comments

mr. sandman
man me a sand
make him the cutest man car door hook hand
give him the sand that i'm not a hander
then tell him that his sands and mans are handses

A full and quite lovely vocal rendition of an old Tumblr shitpost.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:49 PM PST - 25 comments

Gavin Webber makes cheese. Gavin Webber makes cheese in Australia. Gavin Webber makes Parmigiano Reggiano in Australia. This makes Italians very angry. [more inside]
posted by Evilspork at 5:25 PM PST - 13 comments

What it says on the tin!
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 5:06 PM PST - 19 comments

Live now to help keep everyone at home for COVID-19 prevention
posted by Carillon at 4:52 PM PST - 18 comments

Reducing Hole for the Cat. When will he stop? [youtube, just 2 minutes]
posted by moonmilk at 4:10 PM PST - 28 comments

This past Friday, March 13, Korg USA tweeted "Schools, offices, & concerts 🌎wide have been requested to close & with many people self-quarantining & working from 🏡, we wanted to help you occupy your time a little. Now until March 20th, get the iKaossilator App FREE for iOS & Android. Have some fun." Soon after, Moog Music Inc tweeted "A gift to spread positivity, creativity, and expressivity. A moment to slow down, appreciate our innate strength, & experience the uplifting power of sound. The Minimoog Model D iOS app is free for download. Stay open, stay safe, and #synthesizelove" [via NME] Also, check out this Moog documentary, and a demo of the Korg Minipops Series from AnalogAudio1. Bonus: Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:06 PM PST - 24 comments

Trump, facing the greatest crisis of his presidency, has resorted to using language that doubles down on his assertion of taking no "responsibility at all" and hints at where he intends to shift the blame, despite the advice of the CDC and the World Health Organization. Unfortunately, such an action also exacerbates hate and puts American lives at risk. [more inside]
posted by Borborygmus at 1:51 PM PST - 61 comments

Each scent brings back memories that once meant something important. They might still. But scents change their character as they slowly break down, and history moulders unless given air. Once in a while you clear an evening, unlock the chest, and unstopper your old selves to see what they are to you now.

Scents and Semiosis is a piece of interactive fiction by Sam Kabo Ashwell. You play a perfumer exploring your personal scent library, trying to glean some meaning from remnant traces of petitgrain, verbena, elecampane, and sweet apple. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 1:40 PM PST - 4 comments

On Sunday, March 15, Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti died at age 92. He had developed pneumonia after contracting the COVID-19 coronavirus. Gregotti’s wife, Mariana Mazza, remains hospitalized in Milan. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:30 PM PST - 7 comments

Beatboxing world champion Butterscotch explains the art of beatboxing, gradually adding 13 levels of complexity.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:41 PM PST - 7 comments

An exposé from the New York Times interviews current and former employees of The Wing, an exclusive women's club and co-working space that presents itself as radically feminist.
posted by serathen at 11:33 AM PST - 7 comments

The first lines of 10 classic novels, rewritten for social distancing.
posted by clawsoon at 10:24 AM PST - 43 comments

Jonathan Frakes at half speed (sltwitter)
posted by curious nu at 9:44 AM PST - 28 comments

The SMBC Covid-19 Book Pack is a series of PDF books by the author of webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (previously). Highlights include Shakespeare's sonnets and the Holy Bible, "abridged beyond the point of usefulness."
posted by whir at 8:56 AM PST - 21 comments

“James Connolly is primarily remembered in Irish history as the Socialist revolutionary hero of the Rising of 1916, executed in Kilmainham Prison while strapped to a chair. Connolly’s place in Irish history is far more important than that, however. He was a proud Socialist, the founder of both the Irish Socialist Republican Party and the Labour Party, and the writer of the influential pamphlets Labour in Irish History and The Reconquest of Ireland.” Reform to Revolution: The Ideological and Political Evolution of James Connolly “ In 1898 Connolly began writing, printing, and distributing his own newspaper, The Workers’ Republic. He used its pages to bitterly condemn the moderate Home Rule movement — “a plot to delude the Irish worker in the interest of his Irish master” — and outline the necessity for a revolutionary break with the British Empire.“Connolly at 150 (Jacobin) Reading Irish Revolutionary James Connolly (Portside) James Connolly‘s collected works, free and online (Marxists.org)
posted by The Whelk at 8:39 AM PST - 5 comments

In the midst of quarantine and lockdown and curfew, one might think that professional wrestling is uniquely suited to an all-television format, and indeed, WWE's decision to air its Smackdown program from a makeshift empty arena at its Performance Center drew better ratings than usual (if only to see wrestlers using microphones to yell at each other while standing a few feet apart without having to play to a huge crowd). But the big news came late Monday when WWE announced that its annual extravaganza WrestleMania will also emanate from an audience-free Performance Center, rather than the 65,000 expected to fill Raymond James Stadium in Tampa on April 5th. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:24 AM PST - 24 comments

Doom and Animal Crossing are here to save the day. [Kotaku] Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons are dropping this week to help everyone take a break. It makes sense though, Isabelle and Doomguy are the best of friends. We can look forward to an evil demon who wields immense power and delights in the suffering of his denizens, as well as playing Doom Eternal. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:12 AM PST - 29 comments

One from The Guardian's Long Read series: Real Estate for the Apocalypse: My Journey into a Survival Bunker. "The idea used to be that God would spare the righteous while the ungodly perished. These matters now were in the hands of the market. If you could afford the outlay, and if you had the foresight to get in on the ground floor, you were in with a chance to be among the saved. That was business: the first and the last, the alpha and omega." [more inside]
posted by glasseyes at 6:13 AM PST - 40 comments

James Mayhew is a children's author and illustrator who, with musicians and singers, presents illustrated concerts. Here is Shakespeare Brought to Life (5 minutes). Here he is illustrating Baba Yaga (4 minutes). Mayhew writes about these projects here: Musical Pictures. [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 2:28 AM PST - 2 comments

Yestarday, I posted about some free writing simulator games, one of which was recently made free to aid those practicing social distancing. I've just discovered that multiple walking simulators - first-person adventure games with little or no need for puzzle-solving - have been made temporarily free. They're listed below the fold, but the offer that expires soonest (in a few days) is the four games in Colorfiction's catalog (permanent link to their store). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 11:07 PM PST - 6 comments

Asteroid Could Cause Atmospheric Explosion If It Gets Too Close From the Department of OK, Sure, What's Next: "an asteroid following an Earth-intersecting orbit was approaching the planet, and data collected by NASA indicates it's big enough to create a violent explosion in the atmosphere should it come too close." [more inside]
posted by snuffleupagus at 3:56 PM PST - 67 comments

TheB1M is a YouTube channel for large scale construction projects.
Here are some sample videos: Building Dubai Creek Tower, the World's Tallest Structure
How To Dispose of a Skyscraper
Building The Golden Gate:
Many others inside. New videos every Wednesday
posted by growabrain at 2:18 PM PST - 4 comments

At the North Pole, it’s all ocean, visited only rarely by an occasional research vessel or a lonely supply ship that strayed from the Northwest Passage. Sea captains choose their own time in the central Arctic. They may maintain the time zones of bordering countries—or they may switch based on ship activities. Sitting here in my grounded office, it is baffling to think about a place where a single human can decide to create an entire time zone at any instant. Time Has No Meaning at the North Pole -- The utter lack of time zones, daylight and people creates a bizarre world (Katie Weeman for the Scientific American blog) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:10 PM PST - 14 comments

A well prepared cat. A failure. The process of music. Sand. Egg. More failure. Christmas. But feeling fine. [more inside]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:38 PM PST - 18 comments

Price gouging, while illegal, is common. There is no shortage of stories going around about people buying up mass quantities of items to resell at high prices. Including one about someone trying to buy up the potential vaccine wholesale, with the intent to provide it "for profit" only. In a country where people born with diabetes can die from lack of affordable medication, are we really so shocked that so much of the general populace sees this behavior as normal? Moreso, what does it say about us when we continue to only punish the poor for price gouging? Those "enterprising entrepreneurs" were making strikingly similar arguments for their price gouging as pharmaceutical companies do, namely, that they needed to recoup their investment.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:55 AM PST - 49 comments

"Watching this seven minutes and 45 seconds worth of old black & white footage is captivating. Stand-outs on the reel are the unloading of a ferry boat, pedestrians strolling near the Flatiron building, the activities of busy street corners, and two young men holding hands as they cross a bridge together. ¶ One subject, though, that has always caught our attention – as much due to their weaving in and out of Broadway traffic in Manhattan as to where they were headed – is an affluent-looking family being driven in an open touring sedan by a black chauffeur." Can We Identify These People? (1911) (The Brownstone Detectives) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:46 AM PST - 19 comments

“ Last week, The Daily Beast published a report on “Protech Local 33”—a supposed union that claims to represent workers in California’s growing cannabis industry. According to The Daily Beast’s reporting, signs point toward Protech acting as a “company” or (in labor slang) “yellow” union: something banned under both international and national labor laws. .... But our investigation, conducted through extensive research through Department of Labor records, court records, IRS records, the Chicago Tribune newspaper archive, and interviews with Chicago labor activists shows that Protech is much more than a company union—and connects back to a long, troubling history of corruption in some segments of organized labor...” ‘I heard you grow marijuana’: Inside the organization behind Protech Local 33 (Strike Wave)
posted by The Whelk at 8:14 AM PST - 6 comments

Maarit Hänninen is a Finnish artist who makes linocut work, and sometimes creates short montage videos documenting the process:
- Tomorrow, Tomorrow
- Nymph
- Eden
posted by cortex at 7:43 AM PST - 11 comments

Live on YouTube, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra versus COVID-19. [more inside]
posted by Coaticass at 2:25 AM PST - 6 comments

In light of current social distancing recommendations, indie game developer Demi Schänzel (twitter) has made their game The Library of Babble pay-what-you-want (down to and including nothing) for the foreseeable future. Explore a simple procedurally-generated landscape filled with tiny stories written by other players, and add as many of your own as you like. The Edge Guard podcast discusses how the game's design influences the mood of the player-written stories. Tips and similar games below the fold. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 9:55 PM PST - 2 comments

A Brief History of China’s Epic Online Fan Wars.

It all started when a user on Hupu — a popular sports and lifestyle forum — posted an unflattering, un-autotuned video of Kris Wu singing live... along with the words “How many seconds (of listening to this) can you endure?”

Within hours, Wu’s massive fan base had flooded the forums with posts defending their idol and insulting Hupu users — in many cases buying Hupu memberships to do so. They accused the users of having “straight man cancer — a common term in China deployed against men with chauvinistic views.

posted by spamandkimchi at 7:30 PM PST - 14 comments

Can Bob Mortimer break and apple in half with his bare hands? [more inside]
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:15 PM PST - 81 comments

Cats and Domino [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 5:19 PM PST - 15 comments

The Bird Museum: [itch.io] a place to serenely enjoy over 1000 birds by artists on twitter, every time a different visit, i hope you enjoy, these birds! [Game Trailer] “Last September, Louie Zong (@everydaylouie) put out a Twitter call to action. Using his modest social media clout in possibly the only way one should, he convinced thousands of followers to email him rough pictures of birds for The Bird Museum – an “ever-changing selection of bad, crowdsourced bird art”. Prospective pieces didn’t have to be good – in fact, Zong felt it better they weren’t. Zong promptly found himself buried in an avalanche of chicken sketches, crow doodles, swan sculptures and otherwise. The final gallery is a fascinating clash of skill levels and mediums –” [via: Rock Paper Shotgun]
posted by Fizz at 2:47 PM PST - 1 comment

In the relatively more recent history of cotton (Wikipedia), Egyptian cotton went from the international standard for excellence (thanks in part to the U.S. Civil War [Smithsonian Magazine], when the blockade of Southern ports lead to Industrial Britain losing 80% of its cotton imports), to a diluted (Applied DNA Sciences, 2016) or mislabeled product (Target press release, 2016). That's the quick synopsis of The End of Egyptian Cotton, a longer article from the New Yorker, looking at the long, international history of what was, for a period, a "white gold."
posted by filthy light thief at 1:59 PM PST - 7 comments

Want to get into game development, but find C++ to forbidding, Unity too HUGE, and Game Maker too expensive and prone to charge you hundreds of dollars for every specific export system? Then you don't really need to wait for Godot, which is only 27 megabytes (around 52 with Mono support), is both free as in beer and under the MIT License, uses a Python-like syntax with options for C#, C++ and others, runs on Windows, macOS, Linuxes and BSDs and even Haiku, exports to all of the above plus iOS, Android and HTML5, and is pretty easy to use. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:15 PM PST - 18 comments

Happy Bring Your Work To Cat Month! Maciej Cegłowski (previously) asked his Twitter followers, “Now that everyone is trying to work from home, how many trillions of person-hours of labor are we losing to housecats? Please post evidence to this thread.”
posted by mbrubeck at 7:42 AM PST - 39 comments

How Fast is the Millennium Falcon? A Thought Experiment. By Chris Lough at Tor.com. Bonus link from the article: How the Falcon stacks up against some other famous vessels.
posted by valkane at 6:00 AM PST - 35 comments

Genesis P-Orridge has died aged 70. [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:33 AM PST - 42 comments

You've finished rewatching The Wire, you can't bring yourself to really give Game of Thrones another go, and you're still at home, trying to wait for a return to normalcy while trying to remember how to make pasta from scratch in order to pass the time. What to do next? Why not watch the entire run of Kitchen Nightmares? FilmRise, the distribution company that controls the rights to the series have uploaded it, in it's entirety, to YouTube. [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 9:20 PM PST - 31 comments

Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with. All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:59 PM PST - 105 comments

Mood Indigo (1930) is a jazz composition and song, with music by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard with lyrics by Irving Mills (previously). Ellington's biographer, Terry Teachout, described it as "an imperishable classic, one of a handful of songs that come to mind whenever Ellington's name is mentioned anywhere in the world".
posted by jim in austin at 7:45 PM PST - 8 comments

Stay Home And Avoid The Coronavirus With These 25 Fun And Useful Websites (SLPleatedJeans) [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:05 PM PST - 16 comments

Was the Millennium Dome really so bad? The inside story of a (not so) total disaster (Guardian, March 2020) -- Organisers over promised and vastly over estimated how many guests it would attract, and the press hated it, but surveys show those who did visit overwhelmingly loved the Millennium Dome. Despite this, the collective memory is one of failure, even as the Dome's replacement, the O2 Arena, has been a huge success.

The creators of the Dome set out to provide an experience that would unite the country. In a way, they succeeded. There is something unifying, and typically British, in our collective enthusiasm for enshrining the memory of the Dome as being a bit shit, be that memory accurate or not.

My own personal memories track with those described in the article. I remember visiting the body area as a kid (and basically nothing else) and loving it, but if you had asked me my general take on the project it would have been negative. In Brexit Britain however, there's room for nostalgia about when the height of our national hubris was just a big tent.
posted by usr2047 at 6:44 PM PST - 22 comments

Why Soap Works.
posted by storybored at 6:08 PM PST - 22 comments

Francis Gooding, in the LRB, reviews Tim Flannery's Europe: The First Hundred Million Years and Europe's historical fauna such as: "dog-bears (bear relatives that looked like dogs), bear-dogs (dog relatives that looked like bears), large cat-like sabre-toothed hunters that were not true cats, and the most charismatic members of the Oligocene bestiary, the entelodonts, or ‘hell pigs’: each as big as a cow and equipped with huge crocodile-like jaws, a sort of ‘gigantic, hyper-carnivorous warthog’. Not actually pigs at all, they were more closely related to whales."
posted by Hypatia at 3:30 PM PST - 15 comments

Out of toilet paper? No problem. Take a page from female ultralight hikers and use a bandanna after peeing. Launder as needed. Long-distance hikers have a tradition of finding ways to lighten the load. No t.p.? No problem for female hikers. Wipe with a bandanna after peeing, tie discretely to the backpack (sunlight helps to kill germs and reduce odors), and launder when back in civilization. (More below the fold.) [more inside]
posted by TrishaU at 2:35 PM PST - 73 comments

Is E3 Dying? [Gaming Bolt] “Earlier this week, the ESA announced that it will be cancelling E3 this year, in light of the spread of the coronavirus, now officially declared a global epidemic by the WHO. This news wasn’t that surprising – we’ve seen a lot of things be impacted by the coronavirus, with Sony pulling out of PAX East, and GDC 2020 being delayed, Nintendo Switch shipments being affected, and even widespread speculation that the launch of next generation consoles may be delayed because of the impact this virus has had on the global production and shipment chain. In and of itself, this would probably be a big blow; however, this year, it just felt like the logical culmination of events that we had been seeing developing for months now. [...] In other words, we had seen E3 2020 slowly spiral the drain for a while now. The coronavirus induced cancellation seemed more like a formal confirmation of what we all knew was coming than anything else.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:28 PM PST - 15 comments

Chuck Tingle brings out his latest work for free, Not Pounded By Anything As I Practice Responsible Social Distancing. This no sex tale is 4,100 words of self-quarantine action, including learning safe habits, respecting boundaries, and doing your part for the health and safety of others. [.pdf link on webpage]
posted by hippybear at 10:49 AM PST - 28 comments

“ Gilpin makes clear that “communist domination” of the Farm Equipment Union was an overstatement, but the leadership was certainly influenced by the Communist Party, and that includes her father DeWitt Gilpin, who came on staff in 1941. CP involvement gave the leaders a “grounding in Marxist analysis, a dedication to racial solidarity, and a belief in perpetual class conflict that would shape their worldview” Their affiliation made them “zealous and unflagging” and “sustained them and instilled discipline through what proved to be a drawn out, and frequently discouraging, campaign.” Eric Dirnbach reviews Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge - part labor history, part family biography — recounts the rise and fall of the radical United Farm Equipment Workers of America, and its relentless battles with the International Harvester corporation. Interview with Gilpin “The labor movement needs to learn its history.”
posted by The Whelk at 10:42 AM PST - 2 comments

Sixty-six million years ago, a meteorite larger than Mount Everest slammed into Earth and 75 percent of species went extinct in a geologic blink of an eye, including nonavian dinosaurs. For decades, scientists worked to determine how the planet and living creatures rebounded, yet continued to know very little about the recovery. Until now. [...] "Now we have the animal fossils, the plant fossils, and we have an amazing timeline from the first one million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, which just happens to be the origin of the modern world. We found these amazing fossils in one of the most poorly understood intervals of time." Discoveries near the BSCS Science Learning headquarters in Colorado shed light on the Rise of the Mammals (NOVA, 53 minutes) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:32 AM PST - 10 comments

Inspired by the movie Dodgeball, here are some obscure or 'less seen' competitive sports:
Buttacrobatics
If you look in the same direction your opponent points, you lose
10 year old girl wins Kent Bazemore's UNO tournament
Bike Football
T-shirt Relay
PG-13 remake of The Human Centipede
Trampoline Roman candle battle
Portable belt sander races
Ice soccer
Brick Racing [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 3:52 AM PST - 36 comments

Women's Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000 - "On Oct. 24, 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women refused to cook, clean or look after children for a day. It brought the whole nation to a standstill." (SLNYT)
posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM PST - 3 comments

“N of 1” studies aim to answer medical questions one person at a time. "As with most research studies, N of 1 studies gain their power through data points. But instead of taking a few measurements from many people, researchers can conduct many measurements from one person over time." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:47 PM PST - 7 comments

CBC's Garrett Barry sits down with Dean Prince, the master of spaghetti scissors.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:34 PM PST - 38 comments

Laura Benanti:

If you were meant to perform in your High School musical and it was cancelled please post yourself singing and tag me. I want to be your audience!! Sending all my love and black market toilet paper. 💛

SLTwitter, but not a thread, sorry. There's a hashtag: #SunshineSongs
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:24 PM PST - 23 comments

I woke up to a new Jay Electronica album and was shocked to see it hadn't already been posted to the Blue. Nor did a search turn up any FPP on this mysterious hip hop artist back from the future. I then spent an hour marveling at the number of top-tier tracks and collaborations dropped over the last 11 years. This is not a man who is wasting his talent, but it is a man who has no thought for "personal brand" or commodifying his art. I tried to make this comprehensive, but my searches continue to uncover things I wasn't previously aware of. I give up. Go walkabout and find out more when you get through these. [more inside]
posted by SoundInhabitant at 2:54 PM PST - 7 comments

Here’s a list of games you should play while you’re stuck inside avoiding the coronavirus [The Verge] “Well, it happened: you’re stuck inside because of the novel coronavirus pandemic that is raging just outside of your door. If you’re lucky, and you’re a white-collar worker, you’re now doing your job — which, let’s be honest, is mostly email anyway — from home. If you’re in an industry that’s more susceptible to the externalities of a viral epidemic, though, things are probably getting more dire. [...] That means there’s never been a better time to get into video games — or, for that matter, play those games you’ve been meaning to finish. We’ve put our heads together to come up with an eclectic list of things to play that will hopefully keep your mind off of the virus. Though we can’t promise any of this will work unless you stay inside.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:28 PM PST - 78 comments

I can opt out of accepting cookies, and disable location settings on my phone, but a face-recognition system doesn’t give me any way to opt out, short of defacing myself.
posted by BekahVee at 1:20 PM PST - 17 comments

If you're at home and have nothing to do, try an online colouring book about group theory (print version available). Found via Alex Bellos and his biweekly puzzles. Also fun are twitter geometry puzzles.
posted by jeather at 12:28 PM PST - 5 comments

Background: Previous research has found that unusually hot temperatures reduce birth rates eight to ten months later.
Objective: We examine one of the potential mechanisms behind this relationship: the connection between ambient temperature and sexual activity.
Results: Hot temperatures do not have a significant effect on sexual activity on a given day. (Demographic Research full text, PDF). Studying the dynamics of the relationship, we found that temperature does not influence sexual activity on subsequent days either. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:08 AM PST - 27 comments

Just a few years after being forced to return 5,500 clay tablets smuggled from Iraq after being looted from archaeological sites, the Museum of the Bible has learned that all 16 fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in its collection are modern fakes. [more inside]
posted by Copronymus at 10:51 AM PST - 25 comments

“Means TV officially launched last week, offering 75 hours of content, including comedy and original animations, as well as more than a dozen feature-length films. In just three days it attracted nearly 2,000 subscribers, each signing up to pay $10 a month“ Revolution and Chill: the Anticapitalist Streaming Service That’s Netflix for the 99% (Novara Media) “ Post-capitalist entertainment is just entertainment that’s created without the extracting, corrosive, and corruptive effects of capital. Instead of entertainment that’s produced with money from venture capital firms that are invested in bombs and wars, it’s produced cooperatively, and it’s centering stories of working-class people that aren’t heard in the media today.” The Founders of Means TV on Their Post-Capitalist Streaming Service (Hour Detroit) Means.Tv User Guide Means TV on YouTube An interview with Means TV co-creator Sara June on Pod Damn America Means TV previously “when you’re poor, everybody thinks you’re lying.”
posted by The Whelk at 10:27 AM PST - 11 comments

Carnevale—the last chance to eat too much, drink too much, dance too much, live too much—before the austerity of Lent is marked the world over by revelry and ribaldry: Think Brazil’s thumping parades, Venice’s masked pomp (though it was canceled this year - PBS.org), New Orleans’s gaudy spectacle. In Barbagia, beads and glitter are nowhere to be found. There are far too many cows to chop up and strangers to whip. (Atlas Obscura) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:37 AM PST - 5 comments

Rapper Dwagie/大支's ode to the front-line workers fighting COVID-19 in Taiwan. More on how Taiwan's kept the number of cases so low (only 47 despite close proximity to China) from a public health perspective and what Taiwan can teach the world about fighting the coronavirus.
posted by storytam at 7:08 PM PST - 13 comments

Mise en place is a French culinary phrase which refers to the setup required before cooking. It is often used in professional kitchens to refer to organizing the ingredients that a cook will require for the menu items s/he expects to prepare during a shift.
It is also the name of a new video series from Eater (so far only 6 episodes) about some behind the scenes at 2 and 3 Michelin-starred restaurants. Start with the one about Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
posted by growabrain at 3:45 PM PST - 11 comments

How many puppies fit in a bucket?
posted by clawsoon at 1:46 PM PST - 41 comments

Found: a two gram dinosaur that was the same size of Cuba's Bee Hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world.
posted by y2karl at 12:57 PM PST - 14 comments

Chindogu are inventions that defy concise explanation. They aren't useful. But they aren't completely useless either. Their creator, Kenji Kawakami, describes them as "un-useless." [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 12:53 PM PST - 24 comments

Follow in your books and repeat after me as we learn our next word in German: Hamsterkäufe, pronounced thusly. "The term describes the act of panic buying in bulk, like a hamster packs its cheeks full of food out of fear of hanging about to eat food, or fear that they won’t come across more food later on."
posted by mojohand at 12:52 PM PST - 32 comments

A Dataset is a Worldview: a slightly expanded version of a talk given by Hannah Davis at the Library of Congress in September 2019.
posted by cgc373 at 11:31 AM PST - 4 comments

A Stanford researcher and his team evaluated 35 studies of the effectiveness of AA and found that the fellowship helps more people acheive sobriety than therapy does. [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 10:33 AM PST - 28 comments

StayTheFuckHome is a website advocating that if governments are failing to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, that citizens do their part. [more inside]
posted by larrybob at 9:44 AM PST - 927 comments

“ LuLaRoe is now facing a $49 million lawsuit from its old supplier (LuLaRoe countersued the supplier for $1 billion) and a class-action lawsuit from angry customers alleging they were sold defective clothing they couldn’t return. Another $4.5 million lawsuit was filed in California in November 2019 on behalf of a group of consultants, who are alleging LuLaRoe is running an illegal pyramid scheme. The state of Washington is also suing the company for operating a pyramid scheme. Last fall, the company laid off all 167 workers in their Corona, California, warehouse and permanently closed it.” Millennial Women Made LuLaRoe Billions. Then They Paid The Price. (Buzzfeed News)
posted by The Whelk at 8:09 AM PST - 38 comments

How to travel with a goldfish (and other assorted items)
posted by freshwater at 7:05 AM PST - 26 comments

Peter Ruggiero redesigns airports for a living. Hear him talk about the history of airport design and the plans to redesign LaGuardia. (SLYT)
posted by dinty_moore at 6:45 AM PST - 10 comments

I come to bury COVID-19, not to praise it.
The evil that viruses do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with its victim's bones;

Folding@Home has started releasing work units to help fight COVID-19. [more inside]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:23 AM PST - 32 comments

The semi-mythical Nintendo Playstation/SNES-CD prototype (previously, 2015) was more than confirmed (Engadget, 2015), it was broken down and rebuilt in 2016, then made fully operational in 2017 (YouTube x3) by Benjamin Heckendorn (Wikipedia), aka Ben Heck (official site). The system was recently auctioned off and won by Greg McLemore, vintage video game collector and Pets.com founder (Polygon, 2020).
posted by filthy light thief at 10:24 PM PST - 8 comments

A blog post suggests that the photos in Fading Flamingos, a project by Maximilian Mann nominated for the 2020 World Press Photo competition, are substantially similar to those of another photographer, Solmaz Daryani. Mann has responded to the allegations, to photography website PetaPixel.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:35 PM PST - 24 comments

Let's look at pictures of beautiful old houses and daydream about buying them! Are you interested in a Queen Anne in Vermont? Or maybe a Nebraska fixer with fireplaces and lots of wallpaper that begs to be replaced with some historically accurate paint? [more inside]
posted by Snarl Furillo at 4:05 PM PST - 41 comments

@eerrriiicaa: "Please tell me your embarrassing sex stories so i feel better. I just thought about the time a few years ago when a guy went down on me and we made eye contact and I waved for some reason" and @RealFionaO replied "A fella I was riding said ‘Who is your daddy?’ And I said my Dad’s name ‘Eamonn’" and there were more... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:29 PM PST - 94 comments

The MadMen of Climate Denial. "In this season we're tackling Big Oil's big propaganda machine — its origins, the spin masters who created it, and why it's been so effective. It all began more than 100 years ago with Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller and his son, a bloody miners' strike, and the very first P.R. guy, who swooped in to clean it all up."
posted by blue shadows at 1:33 PM PST - 4 comments

Why Nigeria knows better how to fight corona than the US Neoliberalism decimated African countries' public healthcare. And yet they know how to fight the coronavirus effectively
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:16 PM PST - 20 comments

Project Habakuk was a World War II plan to build aircraft carriers made from a substance that, as Louis Mountbatten told Winston Churchill, was "ice that won’t melt." This "ice" was pykrete, a frozen mixture of wood pulp and water named for its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke. Testing for Project Habakuk began in mid-February 1943 at a site on Lake Patricia, just outside of Jasper, Alberta. The project was eventually scrapped, but remnants of the test work can still be found at the bottom of the lake: scuba diving the Habakuk shipwreck in Patricia Lake. In 2014, a pykrete dome was constructed in Jukka, Finland as part of a series of projects exploring the applications of structural ice. Previously: ice ice, baby. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:39 AM PST - 16 comments

Billie Eilish has done everything right in her career so far, but that’s not enough for a celebrity industry fixated on sex
posted by Etrigan at 9:07 AM PST - 19 comments

The Rise of Impossibly Cute and Wholesome Games [The Verge] “There has been a boom in popularity for titles like Frog Detective lately; these are often quirky, relaxing, comical, perhaps a tad absurd, and devastatingly adorable. Think of the whimsical adventures in Wattam, the charming bite-sized games by the Sokpop Collective, the relaxing hiking trips in A Short Hike, and the dreamy farm sim of Garden Story. These “uwu games” — personally coined after the emoticon, which denotes an overwhelming sense of joy from experiencing an overload of cuteness — are a stark contrast from traditional notions of video games, which are typically adrenaline-soaked action-fests or majestic, fantasy epics where peril lurks at every corner. Instead, uwu games are filled with anecdotes and happenings that are decidedly less consequential and earth-shattering, as they focus on the charm behind the mundane. When I asked these developers about their influences, it turned out many are largely inspired by what they see around them, and the goings-on in their daily life.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:02 AM PST - 47 comments

Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years in prison for sexually assaulting two women in New York From WaPo link: [Mimi Haleyi] choked up while discussing the torture of testifying: “I showed up not as a perfect victim but as a human being.”
posted by Flannery Culp at 8:26 AM PST - 65 comments

With the long history in the US of disenfranchising convicted criminals, there has been little serious work on finding out where they stand politically. But with the push to restore the franchise to those convicted of crimes, this is becoming increasingly important - which is why Slate and the Marshall Project have run a political survey of America's incarcerated. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:09 AM PST - 4 comments

Should organ donors be paid? The heavy toll of US kidney shortage (BBC): Most people in the US who need a kidney transplant will die while on the waiting list. Some countries have experimented with an "opt out" model, which automatically places people on a national register of donors unless they choose not to be, with little change (BBC) in the number of transplants. The surest way to substantially alleviate the shortage of kidneys is through an increase in living donors. But there is fierce disagreement on how to achieve this. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 7:34 AM PST - 40 comments

If you don't mind killer latency, not being able to nudge the table, waiting for your turn to play and creating an account on surrogate.tv, you can play a physical Stern's Batman 66 pinball machine live on the internet. Here's how they did it.
posted by JHarris at 7:14 AM PST - 2 comments

The Tampa Bay Times investigation on the armored truck company, GardaWorld, in case we needed any other reasons to stay home in 2020.
posted by hilaryjade at 6:13 AM PST - 23 comments

Mellotron Variations: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert --- featuring Robby Grant: Mellotron; John Medeski: Mellotron; Pat Sansone: Mellotron; Jonathan Kirkscey: Mellotron. [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 10:55 PM PST - 17 comments

Blued (pronounced “blue-duh” or “blue-dee”) has a reported in-country user base of some 24 million, suggesting many Chinese have opted for some middle ground. It is easily among the most popular gay dating apps in the world. Like WeChat, Blued aspires to be a Swiss Army knife for its users, absorbing features from other apps, like newsfeeds and livestreaming functions — as well as real-world resources like H.I.V. testing and a surrogacy service called Blue Baby — and integrating them as quickly as possible. [more inside]
posted by storytam at 9:30 PM PST - 5 comments

Most everyone has mismatched feet, surveyors included. There's plenty of history of different units of length (Convert-Me.com historical length converter), including at least eight different "foot" measurements. To this very day, there are two feet measures for surveyors in the U.S., as described in this short video from the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), and this summary from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the forthcoming alignment in 2022 (NGS). NIST also has a FAQ, if you want to know even more about the “international foot” and the “U.S. survey foot.” But if your human feet are different sizes and you want to swap shoes, or you're an amputee who has one extra shoe, there's Shoewap.com, an odd shoe swap. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:07 PM PST - 37 comments

In late 1979 or early 1980, a writer named Daniel Okrent met with five friends at La Rotisserie Francaise, on 52nd Street in New York City. Okrent proposed a new type of game, in which 10 participants would choose imaginary teams of real-life baseball players. The teams would be scored based on their players' actual statistics accumulated in the 1980 season. The first "Rotisserie League" draft was conducted on April 13, 1980, forty years ago this season. [more inside]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:21 PM PST - 15 comments

A twitter thread where a cat food scientist asks all your burning cat food questions. [more inside]
posted by jeather at 6:16 PM PST - 69 comments

In 1915, the SS Eastland overturned in the Chicago river, killing hundreds. Subsequent investigation discovered a mysterious 40 foot long submarine on the river floor, containing the remains of a man and a dog. It was named for a local Niagra Falls daredevil and would-be arctic explorer who did not build it. Neither did the many 19th century submarine pioneers. But, someone did. The Constant podcast explores the story. [SL: six hours of audio and associated images.]
posted by eotvos at 5:30 PM PST - 22 comments

Irving Geis has been featured here before, but today I learned that the Protein Data Bank has a small archive of his work from which you can request high-resolution images for noncommercial use from HHMI, who owns the full archive. Enjoy!
posted by 8603 at 12:45 PM PST - 1 comment

My entry, Hue Jumper, is an homage to 80’s racing game rendering technology. The 3D graphics and physics engine was implemented from scratch in pure JavaScript. I also spent ungodly hours tweaking the gameplay and visuals. Frank Force's 4400-word description (plus code!) for a driving game. [more inside]
posted by cgc373 at 12:21 PM PST - 13 comments

The fundamentalist Bolsonaro government of Brazil has put an evangelical missionary in charge of its isolated and uncontacted indigenous tribes.
Ricardo Lopes Dias is linked to the New Tribes Mission (NTM), a Florida based organization now rebranded as Ethnos360. [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 11:29 AM PST - 37 comments

Some people eat the same thing for lunch every day. Whats wrong with that? says Vern Loomis of West Bloomfield. While This lentil soup is so good one nurse has eaten it for lunch every workday for 17 years. Devotees say it boosts productivity, reduces stress, and helps them eat healthy. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 11:22 AM PST - 78 comments

“ Add all of these elements together, and you get a recipe for extreme panic. Many of Swan’s jobs start like this: It’s the middle of the night, and somewhere in Brooklyn, someone has woken up to the sting of bites or, worse, a confirmed bug sighting. And so Swan’s phone rings. If he’s up, he answers. Part of this is financial — desperate calls usually translate into work — but it’s also human decency. After ten-plus years into the business, he knows that while he can’t do anything about the infestation itself, he can make the situation less terrible. ” The Bed-Bug Whisperer Of Brooklyn
posted by The Whelk at 11:10 AM PST - 6 comments

Murder by Numbers [YouTube] [Trailer] The game is essentially what would happen if you mashed the charm and style of Ace Attorney (previously?) with Nintendo’s venerable puzzle series Picross . (Previously.) [more inside]
posted by asperity at 10:04 AM PST - 16 comments

Cat playing theremin you’re welcome (SLTwitter, sound up!)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:44 AM PST - 21 comments

So, there's this video by Billie Ellish. I only found out about it because someone played it in a major key. The original seemed somewhere in the funny/creepy range, and I wasn't that impressed. I've since gotten used to it. A number of people have noticed how catchy the tune is.... [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:14 AM PST - 28 comments

Why ‘Contagion’ Is Soothing Some People’s Coronavirus Fears [Decider] “The 2011 film has been steadily climbing in the Amazon Prime and iTunes charts. As of today, it was No.8 on the iTunes movies chart, and in the No.6 spot on Amazon’s “Rent or Buy” trending movies carousel. Even Moonlight director Barry Jenkins has gotten on board with the trend, telling the New York Times, “I paid $12.99 to watch a 10-year-old movie. I’ve never done that before.” The reason, of course, that so many people are watching this movie about the spread of a fictional deadly virus is that we’re all freaking out about the spread of a very real, definitely not fictional virus: COVID-19, more commonly referred to as coronavirus. And Contagion—which was directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by his frequent collaborator, Scott Z. Burns—is scarily accurate when it comes to parallels of 2020’s real-life health crisis.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:34 AM PST - 93 comments

8-Bit Orchestra plays DuckTales NES Moon Theme. Does what it says on the tin.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:37 AM PST - 7 comments

5 hr 19 min 28 sec (Youtube) through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia - in one shot. One minute Preview Trailer.. [more inside]
posted by mathiu at 5:38 AM PST - 10 comments

Nakagawa writes, "When I took a video of a cat approaching gradually, I got a shock image lol lol" Unmute audio for the full experience. (SL Twitter)
posted by zaixfeep at 2:30 AM PST - 17 comments

US house music titan, Kerri Chandler, gets creative while mixing. He's been known to rock a laser harp for live production. On at least one occasion he appeared onstage alongside hologram vocalists. But when he mixed live on a reel-to-reel set-up, he was going back to the roots of house DJs, and paying tribute to his father (Resident Advisor) with an hour of soulful house. On the other hand, Latvian DJs got creative with reel-to-reel out of necessity in decades past, to bypass censorship of Western music (Smithsonian Magazine; x-ray records, previously). Behold, Mr. Tape at DMC in 1991.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Last September, funk group Vulfpeck [bandcamp, previously on the blue] became one of the (very) few bands to sell out Madison Square Garden without the support of manager or music label.

You can watch the whole concert here.
posted by mhoye at 7:10 PM PST - 9 comments

Wang Xiuying, writing in the London Review of Books, paints a picture of the last few months in Wuhan. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 4:33 PM PST - 4 comments

This article is going to travel in time through various mediums of storage as an exercise of diving into how we have stored data through history. By no means will this include every single storage medium ever manufactured, sold, or distributed. This article is meant to be fun and informative while not being encyclopedic. Let’s get started. 34,128 characters (5800 words) from Jessie Frazelle, aka @jessfraz.
posted by cgc373 at 12:01 PM PST - 29 comments

YOU GUYS. I just saw the most wild thing! A man started walking toward the Girl Scouts cookie stand in front of the grocery store and he yelled “my bitches are BACK” and this Girl Scout just yelled “no. Walk away.” AND HE DID - Twitter thread [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 11:55 AM PST - 78 comments

Generate a handwashing infographic with the song lyrics of your choice, provided you choose lyrics available on Genius. Web tool created by William Gibson (no, not that one).
posted by Cash4Lead at 11:08 AM PST - 76 comments

Southern segregationists resented the Freedom Riders who came by bus to protest Jim Crow laws. So in 1962, they tricked black Southerners into migrating north and transformed families' lives forever.
posted by Etrigan at 10:11 AM PST - 8 comments

"Riz Ahmed has announced his debut solo LP The Long Goodbye. Produced by his former Swet Shop Boys collaborator Redinho, the album is due out March 6 via his own label Mongrel." -- Pitchfork [more inside]
posted by mce at 10:09 AM PST - 4 comments

Hangover Inc.: The Companies Getting You Over Last Night (Bloomberg): Once a hush-hush luxury for the quietly-pampered, banana bags outside the hospital are hitting the mainstream from New York and Las Vegas to London and Dubai. [...] Why suffer? If you believe it works -- and not everyone does -- hangovers these days may be only for those who can't pay up. The sessions cost several hundred dollars in most cases. They occupy a niche in what burgeoning providers prefer to cast as a trend toward "wellness" in an I.V. bag, rather than an unseemly hangover insta-cure. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:02 AM PST - 50 comments

Why the US sucks at building public transit
posted by backseatpilot at 8:56 AM PST - 29 comments

“ When the growth engine of industrialization sputters—due to the replication of technical capacities, international redundancy and fierce competition for markets—there has been no replacement for it as a source of rapid growth. Instead of workers reallocating from low-productivity jobs to high-productivity ones, the reverse of this process takes place, as workers pool increasingly in low-productivity jobs in the service sector. As countries have deindustrialized, they have also seen a massive build-up of financialized capital, chasing returns to the ownership of relatively liquid assets, rather than investment in new fixed capital. In spite of the high degree of overcapacity in industry, there is nowhere more profitable in the real economy for capital to invest itself. ” AARON BENANAV- Automation And The Future Of Work Part 2 ( New Left Review)
posted by The Whelk at 8:30 AM PST - 9 comments

What do you get when you have 20 librarians in a room, furiously searching for answers? NYPL Title Quest 2018. “It all started back in 2012, with an innocent blog post: “I Remember It Had a Blue Cover and... Finding Books by Their Plot Lines”” (updated version of this post). Title Quest 2019: Finding Forgotten Titles Together. Caveat for researchers: “[A]t least one detail someone is certain about is not right.”
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Max von Sydow, brooding star of Ingmar Bergman’s torment-ridden dramas, dies at 90. He was Antonius Block, Father Merrin, the Three-Eyed Raven, Dr. Haehring, Vigo, and Ming the Merciless (among many others) in a career that spanned nearly 70 years. Max von Sydow died on March 8th at his home in France. [more inside]
posted by jzb at 6:47 AM PST - 87 comments

P!nk the fur missile border collie takes the title for the third time running at the 2020 WKC Masters (SLYT, previously)
posted by Harald74 at 12:56 AM PST - 24 comments

One of the coolest things about Windows 95 were the Powertoys, a number of freeware utilities made by Microsoft employees, many originating from tools that the developers made for their own use. For a good number of years the Powertoys were a beloved part of the power user experience until, following the Windows XP release, they were abolished, as part of the general Microsoft trend away from fun and unsupported tools. But now... the Powertoys are back. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 8:45 PM PST - 31 comments

Everywoman in 1910: No vote, poor pay, little help - Why the world had to change (Mirror UK, 2010). From the beginning, International Women's Day has been an occasion to celebrate working women and fight capitalism (IWD history). The Socialist Origins of International Women’s Day (Cintia Frencia and Daniel Gaido for Jacobin, 2017).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:10 PM PST - 5 comments

'Within Melbourne’s gardens, reserves, infrastructure and wasted lands sprout all of the traumas and dislocations of the past, and so these will do from now to the end of recorded time, no matter the investment of labour and personal or collective suffering devoted to revegetation. The weeds, a thousand strong, are the newest layer atop the bay sludge and basalt spills that form the Melbourne geology, a seedbank that has made itself a permanent stratigraphic marker of the arrival. Just add light and water.'
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:31 PM PST - 8 comments

The Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team is back. Oh they got us so WORRIED last year, saying that it would be the final year of the Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team!! It's hard to image mid-March without it and now we don't have to. Making us worry, for Pete's sake! Here we go now! [more inside]
posted by Gray Duck at 11:58 AM PST - 24 comments

Figuring out the truth of Kirby [YouTube] “It might seem strange to be scared of a small pink orb, but I promise it’s justified. The thing that scares me the most about Kirby is that he is simultaneously an adorable creature and a being that possesses infinite power. These two truths cannot coexist. A sweet and simple resident of Dream Land should not be able to punch through a planet. How can Kirby only care about eating and sleeping while also being able to destroy cosmic horrors like Necrodeus or Void Termina? This dichotomy has haunted me for years,” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:49 AM PST - 13 comments

Here's an in-browser fluid dynamics emulator that you can click and drag on to watch beautiful fluid dynamics patterns. Just enough of a toy to distract you when you need a brief distraction.
posted by hippybear at 11:46 AM PST - 20 comments

In pictures. Live blog from The Guardian. [more inside]
posted by katra at 11:32 AM PST - 8 comments

Magic Valley NAPA franchise changes health plan to prevent same-sex spouses from receiving insurance (wayback link) [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:32 AM PST - 30 comments

Elizabeth May: "Please tell me about an extremely niche section of twitter that you never knew existed until you made them angry. One time I made Feed Swans Bread Twitter angry after i suggested food alternatives. FOR MONTHS I got angry tweets, until I finally deleted it. YOUR TURN." And the replies began. For example: "I argued that (human) placenta wasn't a vegan dish. Ooooooh the placenta-eating vegans were soooooo mad! It was cuckoo bananas." And... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 10:52 PM PST - 135 comments

Maria Farrell writes about the Prodigal Techbro [more inside]
posted by mark k at 9:39 PM PST - 8 comments

Each week, we publish a gallery of readers' pictures on a set theme. This week it is "circles" (via BBC)
posted by dfm500 at 8:38 PM PST - 5 comments

They were partners in fighting crime. The only problem: Neither was a cop. But when one friend turned on the other, things got real. Not Fuzz from The Atavist. From 2017, with an update in the latest edition: The Con Continues.
posted by chavenet at 4:01 PM PST - 10 comments

Weekend dance party x International Women's Day: once again (Wonderland Magazine, 2019) Boiler Room teamed up with Gurls Talk (an online community for young women to discuss issues; previously) for a celebratory party. This year, the DJs, selectors and musicians were Born N Bread*, Celeste, Flohio, Jamz Supernova*, Jess Ajose, and Shygirl. Rewind to last year, and check out Jordss, Jorja Smith*, Little Simz and Babeheaven joining Adwoa Aboah (Instagram) for a night curated by Jasmine Srih (Ig). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:10 PM PST - 1 comment

To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a googol-to-one.
posted by Etrigan at 12:48 PM PST - 31 comments

An Ode to Black Science-Fiction & Fantasy Writers [Tor] “In recent years there has been an uptick, if not an actual surge, of the works by fantasy writers of color finally, deservedly, entering the mainstream. These stories are as broad and wide sweeping as the culture itself. From The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi, to N.K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season. Beautiful novels with intricate, fully imagined, complicated characters and worlds. But, our voices have always been here, in the background, creating stories. [...] I don’t know the reason that our stories are finally being heard, moving from their half lit corners into the brighter light. The success of Blank Panther? Some mysterious critical mass having finally been achieved? The growth of social media? I don’t have the answer to that question. What I do know is that the world can only seem bigger and more magical when the history and perspective of diverse writers is included. And I know that my TBR pile grows bigger by the day, richly seasoned by a broader culture and historical perspective.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:09 AM PST - 20 comments

Shell Has a Plan to Profit from Climate Change (Malcolm Harris, author of 'Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials' (previously), for New York)
posted by box at 10:38 AM PST - 19 comments

Be the Locker Room Diplomat. Solid advice on how to navigate tense professional situations, whether you're a pro wrestler or not. [more inside]
posted by roll truck roll at 10:06 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

“On Cape Breton Island, where coal mining and steel making were once an essential part of the region’s culture and economy, protest song and verse are found in abundance. The Protest Song Project is an initiative of The Centre for Cape Breton Studies at Cape Breton University. The program’s goal is to preserve and promote the protest songs and verse that represent the region’s rich industrial heritage.” Volume 1 - Volume 2
posted by The Whelk at 9:31 AM PST - 2 comments

Filmmaker Chika Okoli of For Africans By Africans shows off the sights and sounds of Abidjan.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:22 AM PST - 4 comments

Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges beginning at 3pm US EST TODAY (Sat March 07) on WFMU. Every year, Yo La Tengo perform requests live on-air in exchange for pledges, to help keep freeform noncommercial radio station WFMU (91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ) on the air. This year is no exception. They will begin playing at 3pm US EST today, and will be playing listener requests for several more hours. [more inside]
posted by showall at 9:13 AM PST - 31 comments

Here are some calming, nearly trance-like .gifs and short clips of things that are being cut by very sharp knives:
- Soap slicing
- Sushi
- Leaf cutting
- Carving out the bowl of a wooden spoon
- Steak
- Slow-motion video of an apple and some bananas being sliced in half while in mid air
- Japanese knife professional transforms vegetables into works of art
- From a Japanese Kezuroukai Planing Competition with shavings as thin as 5 micron, plus (Video) [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:57 AM PST - 29 comments

Gotta Go Fast: Why Gaming IP Is Finally Taking Off in Film/TV - "The sudden embrace and success of gaming IP is somewhat of a surprise... when these films were produced, they tended to be both critical and commercial disasters... This created a vicious cycle: audiences learned video game movies were bad, making it even harder for the best film to succeed, and histories of failure meant major talent would stay away from future adaptations and IP owners were reluctant to adapt their best IP. Why, then, is everything changing so quickly and why now? I think there are seven core reasons." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:59 PM PST - 45 comments

Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center and JHU's Center for Systems Science and Engineering have built a handy, dynamic, open-source live corona-tracking data visualization. • Mobile version here. • The World Health Organization has built a similar skin on their own data set.
posted by not_on_display at 9:52 PM PST - 73 comments

In Japan, Crash Bandicoot was promoted with an umprobably catchy and silly theme song, which was included on the disk for the Japanese release of his second game. Here it is, in all its earwormyness, with subtitled translations, or without.
posted by JHarris at 8:51 PM PST - 4 comments

According to furry historian Colin Spacetwinks in an article for New York Magazine (previously, Sonic the Hedgehog is a pop culture paradox - extremely specific in his design, yet also the ultimate blank slate who can be anything to anyone. So its fitting that after Shrek Retold, the collaborative remake of Shrek (previously), 3GI have done the same to the Sonic movie. No, not that one - the 90's direct-to-video animated movie, an oddball installment, even in a franchise consisting mostly of them. The result: Sonic Rebuilt.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:48 PM PST - 3 comments

McCoy Tyner live in 1975. (Interview at 33:52.) And in 1986. And in 1998. NPR's obituary.
posted by selfnoise at 4:23 PM PST - 37 comments

T.K. of Ask a Korean writes "Our failure to discuss Geun-sae is not because he is a spoiler; rather, Geun-sae had to be a spoiler because we are conditioned not to think about him."

Geun-sae is the most neoliberal man in Parasite, because he accepts and legitimizes the system that condemns him into the abyss. . . . The challenge of neoliberalism is to create a neoliberal man like Geun-sae. Without the millions of Geun-saes who buy into the system that crushes them, the capitalist structure cannot survive.

(Note: spoilers abound.) [more inside]
posted by Not A Thing at 2:32 PM PST - 23 comments

Ash Koosha is an Iranian-born futurist who utilizes artificial intelligence to produce music and visuals. "Virtual entertainers like YONA (an Auxuman® (Auxiliary Human) that writes lyrics and melodies and performs them, in collaboration with Ash) are meant to be the reflection of the Internet itself, so any song, melody or visual representation is coming from our human digital life. AI is utilised to facilitate such product" (interview). The product is something he likens to NPCs (non-player characters) in video games, and the sound is both glitchy and poppy, somewhere under the umbrella of IDM, as heard in his latest AI-assisted album, Bluud (Bandcamp), though this album is more organic than his previous one, 2025 (Bandcamp).
posted by filthy light thief at 2:08 PM PST - 1 comment

Even utopian communities are in need of public spaces without surveillance, where one can indulge in a little mischief and imagination; sites accommodating of misdemeanors unacceptable in the regulated public of civilized life; places to test the boundaries of the self. In rural areas, one may retreat to the mountains, the plains, the woods. That’s the beauty of rural life, the ease with which one may escape the public eye. City dwellers need this, too. Perhaps our woods, in a way, are our roofs. Ode to Rooftops by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
posted by chavenet at 1:26 PM PST - 12 comments

The Myth of the Progressive Boss — Cenk Uygur talked a good game about The Young Turks being the premier progressive media outlet. Then his staff tried to unionize. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 12:53 PM PST - 38 comments

"The Popcorn Champs looks back at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since 1960. In tracing the evolution of blockbuster cinema, maybe we can answer a question Hollywood has been asking itself for more than a century: What do people want to see?" In 1981 the answer is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones (to be fair, they named the dog Indiana) [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 10:26 AM PST - 47 comments

In 2017, photographer Mary Beth Koeth rented a car and drove from New York City to Edison, New Jersey, for the erotic arts convention Exxxotica Expo. Her goal was to meet mothers working in the adult film industry, to try and answer some of the questions she had about their lives. How do they balance motherhood with their work? How are they treated at school gatherings?
posted by Etrigan at 10:14 AM PST - 18 comments

Black Mesa [YouTube][Game Trailer] [Digital Foundry Comparison/Review]“Black Mesa was once a humble video game mod — but as of today, it’s a full-fledged remake of Half-Life, newly released out of Steam Early Access. Developer Crowbar Collective finally launched a 1.0 version of Black Mesa, which updates the 1998 first-person shooter with smarter enemies, levels built from scratch, and a level of detail that wasn’t possible two decades ago. Black Mesa has been sort of playable for some time. It launched as a mod for Half-Life 2 in 2012, earning overwhelmingly positive reviews. Then, Valve granted permission to make a standalone commercial game, and an incomplete version appeared on Early Access in 2015. Late last year, Crowbar Collective released the ending — a dramatic reworking of the infamous Xen levels, one of Half-Life’s weakest areas. Now, in 2020, the whole game has been polished into an official non-beta release.” [via: The Verge] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:03 AM PST - 31 comments

“ The response of the SSCC to the proposed job losses was to go far beyond the norms of militant trades unionism as, in 1976, it put forward an alternative Corporate Plan for production across the company. The Plan, which had been drawn up by workers on the shop floor, contended that Lucas should shift from a concentration on military hardware towards the production of socially-useful goods. It was two years in the making and drew on the technical expertise and detailed knowledge of the production process of the workforce. Altogether it contained over 150 ideas with detailed plans filling more than a thousand pages.” Lucas Aerospace- When Workers Planned Production
posted by The Whelk at 9:03 AM PST - 3 comments

Future of Transportation Tony Seba Keynote at the 2020 N.C. DOT Transportation Summit. [more inside]
posted by Lanark at 8:50 AM PST - 20 comments

The evidence for evidence-based therapy is not as clear as we thought (Aeon): "Is the credibility of the evidence for ESTs [empirically supported treatments] as strong as that designation suggests? Or does the evidence-base for ESTs suffer from the same problems as published research in other areas of science?" Of the 70 ESTs listed by the Society of Clinical Psychology, researchers found that 20% performed well, 30% had mixed results, and 50% had subpar outcomes. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 8:44 AM PST - 6 comments

Social media platforms work to fight coronavirus myths, but they may not be able to win against your DMs. With the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak still so new, fear of the death and disruption it could cause rapidly mounting, and treatments for it still a big question mark, rumors and misinformation about the outbreak are starting to spread. A wary public might be especially susceptible to believing unverified rumors about how the outbreak began (nope, the new coronavirus wasn’t created in a lab) or taking misguided measures to protect themselves (unless you’re sick or caring for someone who is, face masks aren’t the answer!). And buying into alarmist falsehoods can be dangerous. The spread of misinformation is already commonplace on social media, where the sharing of content from biased sources frequently outpaces whatever fact-checking and moderation safeguards are in place. Which is why coronavirus myths are starting to crop up on both Facebook and Twitter, along with YouTube and TikTok and messaging apps like WhatsApp.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 8:04 AM PST - 90 comments

Ahead of #InternationalWomensDay, and for your Friday amusement, might I interest you in several blogs about medieval women? Of course I might! (Oh you better believe it's a thread.) From the wonderful Dr Eleanor Janega of Going Medieval.
posted by adamvasco at 5:47 AM PST - 14 comments

"Like all forms, the skate video survives—is destroyed and remade—thanks to the innovations of its avant-garde. A recent attempt to remake this form premiered on the Thrasher website this October: Verso, an eleven-minute solo video part compiled by skateboarder Mark Suciu and cinematographer Justin Albert." [more inside]
posted by ZipRibbons at 1:51 AM PST - 18 comments

The second LP I ever bought, which I thought was by The Beatles, turned out to be, when I got it home and put it on, a Music for Pleasure record with orchestral renditions of Beatles songs. At age 9 or 10 I'd been fooled by the cover which had 'THE BEATLES' in very large letters and 'songs performed by the something or other orchestra' in very small font. To say I was disappointed, or deeply embarrassed, would be an understatement. [more inside]
posted by toycamera at 1:03 AM PST - 35 comments

The L.A. Dodgers are named after terrified Brooklyn pedestrians
posted by aniola at 7:21 PM PST - 18 comments

She was on top, until she wasn't, and now she's out. Elizabeth Warren ended her presidential campaign today without endorsing one of the remaining candidates. She'll leave a legacy as an authentic candidate and the field is poorer without her voice, but I'll leave any other comments for MeFi.
posted by lon_star at 6:28 PM PST - 502 comments

This is the voyage of the starship USS Bumblebee, on a mission to rescue one very depressed life form, Bernd the Bread, from the most vicious loaves in the universe. WE ARE BREAD. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. (SLYT, German language, English subtitles, and the pompatus of extremely boring rock formations.)
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:18 PM PST - 7 comments

If you happen to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and take in any of the parades, in one of those parades - following behind the floats, and the various school marching bands and cheerleader troupes - you may see a squad of middle-aged men, clad in red jackets and blue shorts, and doing enthusiastic choreographed dances to 80s pop hits. Metafilter, meet The 610 Stompers. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:35 PM PST - 14 comments

CoronaVirusTechHandbook.com : A crowdsourced resource for technologists building things related to the coronavirus outbreak[,] initiated by The London College of Political Technologists at Newspeak House
posted by Going To Maine at 5:19 PM PST - 6 comments

Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, home to the recently (somewhat disturbingly) restored Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (a.k.a. the Ghent Altarpiece), has a new claim to fame: nine of its churchyard walls are made of human bones. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:11 PM PST - 12 comments

Woman Took Care of Succulent for Two Years, Then Realized It Was Fake
posted by chavenet at 1:20 PM PST - 51 comments

Almost 30 years after losing her son, Jason, Judy received an email from Matt, a friend of Jason's from college. "I hope you are doing well after all these years… And I hope my note doesn’t bring back unnecessary pain. I just wanted you to know that he is not forgotten." Soon, Judy and Matt were communicating every few weeks, and then Matt suggested they attend a performance of Dead & Company together in a 20,000-seat amphitheater near San Francisco. Reluctantly, Judy agreed. How Going To A Dead & Company Concert With A Stranger Helped Me Heal After Losing My Son “I hate crowds and loud rock music, but I was being offered a gift: the chance to learn more about my son all these years after he was taken from me.” (Judy Nelson for Huffpost) [via Mltshp] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:17 PM PST - 12 comments

The Guardian reports that despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights, according to a new Gender Social Norms Index that contains data from 75 countries, covering over 80 percent of the world’s population. [more inside]
posted by katra at 12:54 PM PST - 29 comments

How kids across the United States hear that “Mike can do it.” Under Google’s new political ad policy, campaigns can use broad demographic data, like age, to target users. A large number of users of all ages, kids included, fall into the age range “unknown” because they use YouTube without logging in. “In an effort to reach as many voters as possible, Bloomberg’s campaign likely targeted these users” of unknown age. WaPo’s Ashley Parker talked to kids and their “surprised and irritated” parents. [more inside]
posted by sallybrown at 11:49 AM PST - 34 comments

Cyanobacteria—colloquially called blue-green algae—can produce oil from water and carbon dioxide with the help of light...
posted by jim in austin at 10:58 AM PST - 6 comments

How Dominic van Allen built himself a comfortable underground residence hidden within Hampstead Heath near central metropolitan London, and lived there undetected for years. And how everything went wrong. (Guardian Long Read)
posted by beagle at 8:58 AM PST - 26 comments

Rent strikes — in which tenants aim to withhold rent until their grievances are addressed — have grown more common in several cities contending with the impact of gentrification on affordable housing. When Tenants Take On Landlords Over Bad Conditions: A Rent-Strike Explainer (WAMU) “ What are the implications for a tenant’s union? We are currently involved in both building-level landlord fights but also in larger city or even province-wide fights for improved tenant policy.” “Organizing 4 power”, from workers to tenants (Spring Mag) Jane McAlevey talks at The Strand about tenants and collective bargaining (YouTube)
posted by The Whelk at 8:54 AM PST - 8 comments

How the Internet Turned a Living Room Into a Karaoke Lounge (SL NYT)
posted by adrianhon at 8:27 AM PST - 6 comments

A collection of online stores offer murder for pay. Researchers say they are scams, but people who want someone dead aren’t listening. (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:24 AM PST - 49 comments

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye feels like Singapore between two covers. The pressure-cooker country — tiny and polyglot, globally competitive and politically repressive — seems to have been poured into this dense book. [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:00 AM PST - 8 comments

Natalie, Emily, and Martie bring back the magic with their new single Gaslighter [3m48s, lyrics in the "show more" video description] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:18 PM PST - 29 comments

Current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has routinely come under fire for his management of Twitter. But even given the repeated criticism, Dorsey has never faced an actual challenge to his running of the social media company.

Until now. Republican donor and "activist" investor Paul Singer is, through his investment firm Elliott Management, looking to enter into a hostile takeover of Twitter, with the intent of removing Dorsey as CEO. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:25 PM PST - 90 comments

The PlayStation 2 Is Now Twenty Years Old [The Guardian] “Despite looming competition from the Nintendo GameCube and the Microsoft Xbox, the PlayStation 2 was an instant smash, selling more than three million units in its first year in Japan alone and hitting 20m worldwide by the end of 2001. The machine effectively ushered in the modern era of highly cinematic blockbuster action adventures, with titles such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Devil May Cry thrilling players with their depth, visual detail and mature themes. But the sheer ubiquity of the console and its vast global user base also allowed for a growing pool of experimental titles, which used the power of the Emotion Engine in very different ways. From elegiac adventures Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to psychological horror classic Silent Hill 2 and hallucinogenic joyride Katamari Damacy, the PS2 was home to titles that inspired the nascent independent game development scene of the mid-2000s.” [Playstation 2 "Bambi" Commercial] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:13 PM PST - 22 comments

Amber Share was going to draw all 62 US National Parks, but wanted a unique twist. When she found one star Yelp reviews (Mother Jones; previously), she had a plan: Subpar Parks (Instagram, and more info on Bored Panda). There's also another 20 one-star Yelp reviews highlighted by Backpackers.com, paired with photos of the parks. Enjoy "an amazingly deep and creepy lake" or (re)consider visiting "a hole. A very, very large hole." But be warned, "they raised the prices." Also, "there are bugs and they will bite you on your face." It's probably best to just stay inside. "Do yourself a favor and just google 'pretty sunrise' and save yourself the disappointment."
posted by filthy light thief at 1:10 PM PST - 48 comments

Reasons to be Cheerful is a non-profit editorial project that claims to tell stories "that reveal that there are, in fact, a surprising number of reasons to feel cheerful. Many of these reasons come in the form of smart, proven, replicable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems." Reasons to be Cheerful was founded by artist and musician David Byrne under the banner of his Arbutus Foundation. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:19 AM PST - 30 comments

Is this a joke? No! This a real literary magazine for you to submit your literary Taco Bell writing. Like The Paris Review. Granta. Ploughshares. Taco Bell Quarterly.
posted by toastyk at 9:12 AM PST - 60 comments

Should you make your own hand sanitizer? Yes (CBS), as long as you put enough alchol in it. No (The Guardian), without the emollients found in commercial products you run the risk of hurting your skin. Recipies from The Verge and the World Health Organization. CDC: Show Me the Science -- When & How to Use Hand Sanitizer in Community Settings.
posted by not_the_water at 9:08 AM PST - 88 comments

A YouTube playlist with dozens upon dozens of made-for-TV movies from ABC's Movie of the Week series (1969-1975).
posted by Iridic at 8:38 AM PST - 28 comments

“Consequently, any cure to the problem of depression must take a collective, political form; instead of individualizing the problem of mental illness, it is imperative to start problematizing the individualization of mental illness. The call is for the left, for these specific reasons, to take seriously the question of illness and mental disorders. Dealing with depression — and other forms of psychopathology — is not only part of, but a condition of possibility for an emancipatory project today. Before we can throw bricks through windows, we need to be able to get out of bed.” A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health (LARB)
posted by The Whelk at 8:15 AM PST - 20 comments

An interview with the two delightful old codgers. Of course I can scour the net to find all kinds of clips, articles etc about these two gentlemen. But I just want this interview to stand on its own. As an ode to friendship ... and growing old together.
posted by indianbadger1 at 8:10 AM PST - 10 comments

Groundhog Day For A Black Man
posted by Stark at 7:38 AM PST - 8 comments

A personal perspective on the lock-down from a Wuhan resident. The author of this essay asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals by authorities for speaking critically of the Chinese government. (npr) [more inside]
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 6:31 AM PST - 15 comments

PLANET PLASTIC - How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. By Tim Dickinson, from Rolling Stone
posted by growabrain at 2:45 AM PST - 32 comments

Susana Polo writes for Polygon about her Twitter account, which, year-round, tweets out events in Lord of the Rings on the day that they happened. Tonight, the Battle of Helms Deep starts at midnight.
posted by damayanti at 4:15 PM PST - 41 comments

15th-century guide on children's manners digitised for first time [The Guardian] “– a manuscript from 1480, which has been digitised for the first time by the British Library, gives an insight into the antics of medieval children, as it exhorts them to “pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys” – don’t pick your ears or your nostrils - and to “spette not ovyr thy tabylle”. The 15th-century conduct book, The Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke, was intended to teach table manners. It has been put online as part of a new children’s literature website bringing together original manuscripts, interviews and drafts by authors from Lewis Carroll to Jacqueline Wilson. The medieval text is part of the British Library’s own collection, and “by listing all the many things that medieval children should not do, it also gives us a hint of the mischief they got up to”, said the library.”
posted by Fizz at 2:38 PM PST - 27 comments

Comedian Jamie Loftus thought she was going to write an article for Paste about failing the Mensa exam, but instead she passed and joined the organization. Then she found the "no moderation" Facebook page and... she found hostility, shunning, and death threats. She decided to attend the yearly Mensa gathering and meet these people in person. This turned into a 4 part (~40 minutes each) podcast My Year In Mensa (Spotify link; also available via most podcast tools). CW for the podcast: Descriptions of online harassment. Jamie Loftus previously.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:43 PM PST - 149 comments

Madame Yale had been delivering “Beauty Talks” coast to coast since 1892, cannily promoting herself in ways that would be familiar to consumers in 2020. She was a true pioneer in what business gurus would call the wellness space—a roughly $4.5 trillion industry globally today—and that achievement alone should command attention. Curiously, though, she went from celebrated to infamous virtually overnight, and her story, largely overlooked by historians, is all the more captivating as a cautionary tale. Madame Yale Made a Fortune With the 19th Century’s Version of Goop (Emmeline Clein for Smithsonian Magazine). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:15 PM PST - 4 comments

We’re eating at street-corner stalls and food trucks, in front of the TV and at the grocery—everywhere but restaurants. They might not be here when we get back. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:59 AM PST - 126 comments

Some people visit the graves of Civil War soldiers; others the graves of movie stars. But when it comes to graves of people who played professional baseball, or worked in professional baseball, he's tops.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:53 AM PST - 6 comments

Why Socks Help You Sleep Better (How Stuff Works): You might fall asleep 15 minutes earlier and wake up far less during the night if you put on a pair of socks at bedtime.
posted by not_the_water at 9:04 AM PST - 133 comments

As the millennial aesthetic grows omnipresent, as its consumers grow more design-fluent, our response grows more complex. We resent its absence (Why is this restaurant website so crappy?) but also resent its allure; we resent that knowing the term sans serif does not make you immune to sans serif’s appeal. The desire for individuality rebels against its sameness, even as the sameness feels reassuring, feels good.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:36 AM PST - 94 comments

Attempting to eat my meal, it became clear that #SaltBae is the opposite of a Guy Fieri restaurant. This is no flavortown.
posted by Literaryhero at 4:17 AM PST - 84 comments

Shehr-e-Tabassum (2020). Pakistan's first ever anime film about a dystopian cyberpunk future with Pakistani characteristics. 9 minutes long and with English subtitles.
posted by tavegyl at 11:34 PM PST - 9 comments

How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original PlayStation [YouTube] “Memory was so short in Crash Bandicoot that I took to stealing little bits and pieces of extra memory from the Sony libraries. I would like just try erasing parts of them that I thought I wasn't using and see if things still worked. If they did, I would mark them as available and I just hacked their code by just changing the byte codes. I'm like, you can do this. Look, I fixed it. If they wouldn't fix it for me, I was just gonna like edit their code. It was free memory. The memory was finite. But you were definitely not supposed to do that.” [via: Ars Technica][Full Transcript]
posted by Fizz at 2:25 PM PST - 29 comments

Most of the world’s volcanoes can be explained with just two conditions for magma production: pressure, and the mixture of water. Water-laden seafloor plates can trigger melt as they sink down into the Earth at subduction zones. These two facts generally explain both volcanoes along plate boundaries—like the Pacific Ring of Fire or the mid-ocean ridges—and those at hot spots like Hawaii and Yellowstone. But when looking back through Earth's history, there are plenty of volcanic weirdos that don’t seem to line up with the figures in a textbook. Volcanoes where they shouldn’t be? Maybe it’s a mantle sponge -- Hypothesis explains eruptions in China and off the coast of Japan. (Ars Technica; abstract at Nature) Also, those volcano figures in textbooks are bad, oversimplifying the wonderful world of volcanoes (Oregon State University, Volcano World). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:05 PM PST - 4 comments

Greta Thunberg derangement syndrome is all too familiar. It's so common it's even a source of humour. Last week, Greta Thunberg addressed a large crowd in Bristol, UK. And for some people this was all too much, and prompted some hateful, violence-inciting comments on social media. So far, so depressingly normal. [more inside]
posted by YoungStencil at 11:39 AM PST - 47 comments

James Lipton, ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ Host, Dies at 93
posted by KTamas at 11:06 AM PST - 61 comments

“Millions of debtors, isolated, are owned by the banks. But if you’re part of a collective that owes $14.15 trillion, you all own the banks.“ Debtors of the World, Unite! Debt’s ubiquity is a burden, but also an opportunity. (Boston Review)
posted by The Whelk at 10:05 AM PST - 6 comments

Many college-educated people think they are deeply engaged in politics. They follow the news—reading articles like this one—and debate the latest developments on social media. They might sign an online petition or throw a $5 online donation at a presidential candidate. Mostly, they consume political information as a way of satisfying their own emotional and intellectual needs. These people are political hobbyists. What they are doing is no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football. From Eitan Hersh, author of Politics Is for Power, in The Atlantic. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:48 AM PST - 100 comments

No Glitter, No Glue, No Meth? Can Texas prisons really stop contraband by banning greeting cards? [The Marshall Project]
posted by readinghippo at 9:40 AM PST - 8 comments

Rebekah Neumann's Search For Enlightenment Fueled WeWork's Collapse (SL Bustle by MOE TKACIK)
posted by crazy with stars at 9:28 AM PST - 17 comments

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage.
posted by zeikka at 7:12 AM PST - 29 comments

Vietnam's song about the coronavirus "absolutely slaps" - John Oliver (SLYT)
posted by gryftir at 3:41 AM PST - 12 comments

A twitter thread inspired by a tumblr shitpost.
posted by um at 1:24 AM PST - 37 comments

Ramona loves the world with ferocity; she does not so much want to disturb it as she yearns to discover, to turn it over, examine every piece and crook and marvel at why each creature, commodity, and substance exists the way it does. “She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.” Rachel Vorona Cote on Ramona Quimby and the right to be Too Much.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:02 PM PST - 51 comments

“Cumbia is like punk. It’s barrio, it’s of the working class, it’s of people who have dreams.” Meet Son Rompe Pera, Mexico’s Finest Psychobilly Marimberos [more inside]
posted by neroli at 8:23 PM PST - 9 comments

RIP Diana Serra Cary, aka "Baby Peggy," the first child film star, at 101. TCM remembers Baby Peggy. Her intense film career over by age 7, she worked in vaudeville and then sporadically as an extra and bit player. Long before the Coogan Law, her fortune was squandered by her parents. From the Wikipedia page: "As an adult, she worked on numerous books about the early film industry, Hollywood cowboys and harsh working conditions for child stars in Hollywood. At the end of her own autobiography Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?, she recounts the fates of numerous child stars, including Judy Garland and Shirley Temple. She also advocated for reforms in child performer protection laws as a member of the organization 'A Minor Consideration'. She appeared in numerous television documentaries and interviews about her work, and made guest appearances at silent film festivals. At the age of 99, Cary self-published her first novel, The Drowning of the Moon." 1999 interview. LA Times interview in 2011. Washington Post obit. RogerEbert.com's movie review of "Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room", a 2013 documentary (three stars). Baby Peggy on Metafilter previously.
posted by Melismata at 7:03 PM PST - 11 comments

Amy and Emily bring back the magic after 5 years with their new single Shit Kickin' [3m53s, unofficial lyrics]. Their new album will be out April 24th. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:23 PM PST - 14 comments

"Science Cheerleaders is a non-profit organization comprised of more than 300 current and former NFL, NBA and college cheerleaders pursuing STEM careers."
posted by jessamyn at 2:22 PM PST - 10 comments

The turbulent life and mysterious death of Jeremiah Haralson, the last black Congressman from Alabama until 1992.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:56 PM PST - 4 comments

Atomic Heart [YouTube][Game Trailer] [10 min. gameplay][45 min. preview] “I have only the vaguest idea what’s going on in the brand new trailer for Atomic Heart, but I am very much in love with it. The wonderful Soviet-themed immersive sim we first saw last year has come a long way since we first got a look at it, and had a few controversies too—accusations of faked gameplay footage and managerial incompetence. It was otherwise pretty quiet. Last month’s 45-minute gameplay slice was the first we’d seen in a long while. [...] Look, at this point, I don’t even really care if the game comes out. This imagery is great. I’m entertained nonetheless. This trailer contains multiple brilliant things, in no particular order: A flying worm creature that is a mining drill. A creepy robot saying hello. A floppy frog robot-ball. A cute lil murderous waddling mining drill robot. Spinning centrifuge things that are doing god knows what.” [via: PC Gamer]
posted by Fizz at 1:12 PM PST - 16 comments

Biologists Discover Animal that Lacks Mitochondrial Genome, Doesn't Need Oxygen to Live (Sci-News): An international team of biologists has discovered that a tiny parasite of salmon called Henneguya salminicola has no mitochondrial genome and thus has lost the ability to perform aerobic respiration. "Aerobic respiration was thought to be ubiquitous in animals, but now we confirmed that this is not the case," Prof. Huchon explains (Science Daily). "Our discovery shows that evolution can go in strange directions. Aerobic respiration is a major source of energy, and yet we found an animal that gave up this critical pathway." [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 1:05 PM PST - 14 comments

he egg. he dog. he created by zamsire one year ago. he star in very short videos. Kind of an anti-Cool 3D World.
boba 🥚 flamingo 🥚 exams 🥚 vacation 🥚 circulation 🥚 diner 🥚 【ｅｇｇｄｏｇ　ｗａｖｅ】 🥚 nightlife 🥚 encounter 🥚 apartment 🥚 meet eggdog (the original) 🥚 meets kiwi 🥝 🥚 courtroom 🥚 finds treasure 🥚 in the clouds 🥚 shopping channel 🥚 express 🥚 sonic the eggdog 🥚 chef 🥚 date night 🥚 kart 🥚 bizarre adventure 🥚 casino 🥚 cruise 🥚 trick or treat 🥚 cavern 🥚 winter wonderland 🥚 fashion show 🥚 crossing 🥚 anniversary [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 12:09 PM PST - 11 comments

Earlier, I had walked amidst its crowded stalls, jostled by men’s voices calling prices, radios playing music, and customers bartering for hot peanuts. With so much coming at me at once, I struggled to focus. A specific sound must guide me and my curiosity. As I ate pomegranate seeds and listened, my fixer for the week, Sanad, placed my hand on what felt like a potato. It was actually a desert truffle. To find them, foragers keep track of the rains, watch for lightning, and listen for thunder. They believe that truffles will grow where they hear it. Sounds reveal things you didn’t know you weren’t seeing. ¶ Silences can be just as powerful. As Matthew and I paused at one stall to taste za’atar and smell jars of orange blossoms, the call to prayer suddenly rang across the city. Then, something I had never heard before: The booming, chaotic market fell silent. Instantly. That, to me, was as iconic as I imagine the sight of Amman from its citadel to be. For the Tuned-In Traveler, a Feast for the Ears Awaits in Jordan (Ryan Knighton for Afar) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:01 PM PST - 2 comments

Oregon Republicans are subverting democracy by running away. Again. (SL Vox) In Oregon right now, a handful of white people from the far right are holding the state government hostage. [more inside]
posted by Sublimity at 11:49 AM PST - 33 comments

Open commenting at cleveland.com is going away. "I can’t count the number of times I’ve been out and about or spoken to groups where one of you -- or three, or 10 of you -- pull me aside to tell me how much you abhor the comments platform on cleveland.com because of its incivility. The opposite never seems to happen, though. You’ve never pulled me aside to thank cleveland.com for providing a free forum for the robust exchange of thoughtful ideas." As of the end of February 2020, open commenting on stories at cleveland.com (the official Web home of Cleveland's sole remaining major newspaper, The Plain Dealer), will cease, and all comments on older stories will be deleted. [more inside]
posted by soundguy99 at 9:37 AM PST - 64 comments

Drones discover mine malfeasance; legislators attack the drones. Which came out in discovery for a bribery trial.
posted by clew at 8:21 AM PST - 15 comments