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Blacklisted for speaking out at home, Eartha Kitt campaigned on Australian causes. Long before Leonardo DiCaprio lent his voice to environmental causes in Tasmania, legendary American musician and actress Eartha Kitt joined the fray — and it wasn't the only cause close to her heart in Australia.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:39 PM PST - 3 comments

Look, Dan Harmon is a complicated person. Between Community and Rick And Morty he's done a lot. He's also incredibly self-destructive and willing to be open about that. His podcast was popular enough that he went out on a tour, and Harmontown [2014] is the film that documents that tour. This extended version runs 2h40m.
posted by hippybear at 4:15 PM PST - 19 comments

From the BBC Archives: Schoolchildren in 1966 Predict Life in the Year 2000 [6:17]

"If something's gone wrong with their nuclear bombs, I may be sort of coming back from hunting in a cave." "I don't like the idea of sort of getting up and finding you've got a cabbage pill to eat for breakfast or something." "Computers are taking over now, computers and automation. And in the year 2000, there just won't be enough jobs to go around, and the only jobs there will be will be for people with high IQ who can work computers and such things, and other people are just not going to have jobs." "I don't think I'll still be on Earth. I think I'll be under the sea."

[transcript, via Tildes] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 4:00 PM PST - 5 comments

Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify? [NYT] by Brett Martin [archive link] is an essay about Matt Farley, who we last met ten years ago when he had released 14 thousand songs on Spotify, earning him 23 thousand dollars per year in royalties. Now he’s pulling 200 thousand dollars from 25 thousand songs. He’s also made multiple movies. Farley’s website, Motern Media, has a decent overview of his creative output.
posted by Kattullus at 1:25 PM PST - 32 comments

Move the sliders to guess the background RGB color.
posted by chavenet at 12:29 PM PST - 18 comments

Derek Gerard interviews people in a library, albeit quietly, over at The Library Show on YouTube. The latest episode is with LysiL, his ex from 3 years ago. What follows is a sometimes uncomfortable, yet honest and often humorous look back at their relationship and why it failed.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:59 AM PST - 1 comment

Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer-prize winning debut novel The Sympathizer is now an HBO Max mini-series helmed by legendary director Park Chan Wook and executive-produced by Robert Downey, Jr., which will premiere April 14. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 7:17 AM PST - 15 comments

This Brisbane magpie can make the sound of a blaring siren — but that's not unusual. When we think of birds mimicking sounds, we typically think of some kind of parrot, lyrebird or maybe even a cockatoo. However, Australian magpies (Gymnorhina tibicen, no relation to British/European magpies) are among the best of the sound-sampling songbirds out there.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:56 AM PST - 8 comments

Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a seminal work which examines how we view art.
posted by chavenet at 12:43 AM PST - 10 comments

A legislator in Illinois, USA, has proposed giving certain categories of people $1,000 monthly on a continuing basis. That is the boldest plan for guaranteed income in the U.S. since 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s idea to give everyone $1K each month. [more inside]
posted by NotLost at 10:06 PM PST - 53 comments

Python found to be the most efficient form of livestock ever studied. Farmed pythons grow fast on a diet of waste and produce a sustainable meat that a researcher says tastes a bit like chicken. Dr Natusch, from Macquarie University's School of Natural Sciences, said the reptiles were an efficient source of protein because of the way they processed food. "Warm-blooded animals waste about 80 to 90 per cent of the energy they get from their food in heat production," he said. "Cold-blooded animals such as pythons don't have that constraint — they're able to allocate far more of the energy they get from their food into things like growth."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:42 PM PST - 62 comments

When a hurricane struck Florida in 2018, Christina’s neighborhood lost electricity, cell service and internet. For four weeks her family was cut off from the world, their days dictated by the rising and setting sun. But Christina did have a vast collection of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, and a portable player that could be charged from an emergency generator. Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity, as were movies that could captivate restless and anxious children. “I don’t think 99% of people in America would ever stop to think, ‘What would I do if I woke up tomorrow and all access to digital media disappeared?’ But we know,” Christina told me. “We’ve lived it. We’ll never give up our collection. Ever. And maybe, one day, you’ll be the one to come and barter a loaf of bread for our DVD of Casino.”

The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: As more movies vanish from streaming services, cinephiles are rallying to physical media. Can they save a seemingly dying format?
posted by Rhaomi at 4:32 PM PST - 75 comments

"Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts" A letter from The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) editor Chris Quinn
posted by box at 2:58 PM PST - 46 comments

"During our research [we] encountered an interesting python hallucinated package called “huggingface-cli”... In three months the fake and empty package got more than 30k authentic downloads! (and still counting)... Our findings revealed that several large companies either use or recommend this package in their repositories..." [via The Register]
posted by clawsoon at 2:52 PM PST - 15 comments

A sophisticated backdoor in Linux's xz compression tool, apparently inserted by a long time contributor, was fortunately discovered yesterday in the latest unstable distribution of Debian, before it could be spread more widely.
posted by lucidium at 2:21 PM PST - 65 comments

The Apple Jonathan : A Very 1980’s Concept Computer That Never Shipped [more inside]
posted by Lanark at 2:10 PM PST - 7 comments

As part of their regular updates to the English lexicon, the Oxford English Dictionary has added a number of Japanese loan words, most notably the term for a notorious genre of anime and manga - isekai, or "portal fantasy". [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:02 AM PST - 50 comments

A visit to a supermarket with Sidney Poitier in 1965, a short clip from A Patch Of Blue. So many cans! [more inside]
posted by Rash at 9:44 AM PST - 15 comments

THE GOOD: "Unique and surprisingly fun." THE BAD: "It’s damn heavy." "Unimpressive display specs for the price." "Battery life can be an issue." "No water resistance." You can purchase one for $1197 on Amazon. It weighs 28 pounds. It can lay flat for touchscreen games like chess or when playing music. The Verge reviewer Chris Welch adds, "But it’s… it’s unique as hell." [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 7:41 AM PST - 33 comments

He wasn't always a minor character, a glorified extra. Earlier today, on another forum, I made a (lame) joke about Lobot, the silent assistant to Lando Calrissian. I always thought he was a just an extra, but instead he was a proto-meme, before there was internet. Also, there's a huge backstory in his bio. The list of things Lobot did in his lifetime is quite impressive. [more inside]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:49 AM PST - 22 comments

Ten days after Bolt announced its Series E in January 2022, Breslow tweeted a flurry of insults at investors Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator, who he called the “Mob Bosses of Silicon Valley” and accused of colluding with payments competitor Stripe. Representatives of both firms rejected the claims on Twitter, with Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire calling them a “steaming pile of [poop emoji].” Six days later, Breslow abruptly stepped down as Bolt’s CEO to become its executive chairman, telling CNBC the decision was his own and had come to him while meditating. (Breslow’s title is now chairman, according to the company.) from The Billion-Dollar Unraveling Of The 'King' Of Silicon Valley [Forbes, ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:06 AM PST - 16 comments

Ladybirds "ferocious as a shark" used to target invasive insect pest. There are some things that are cute to us like ladybirds — but not if you're a tomato potato psyllid, a wasp-like pest that can halve crop yields.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:04 PM PST - 7 comments

The forgotten history of Australia's convicts - Radio National, from the Australian ABC. [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 5:19 PM PST - 9 comments

The Asylum presents their newest mockbuster, Monster Mash. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 2:50 PM PST - 20 comments

Brailliance is a puzzle game where you guess the word by adding up Braille dots. [more inside]
posted by motty at 2:32 PM PST - 4 comments

From Neha Gohil in The Guardian: Louz, a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, is one of several Palestinians living in the UK who – in the absence of a separate visa scheme – have resorted to fundraising campaigns to secure their family’s evacuation from the besieged strip. The Hamas raids into Israel on 7 October, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, led to a continuing military offensive in Gaza that has so far killed an estimated 32,000 people. Since the attack, 55,000 donations have been made and 430 funds have been set up in the UK mentioning “evacuate” or “evacuation” in relation to the crisis, according to exclusive figures shared with the Guardian by GoFundMe. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:32 PM PST - 24 comments

March 18: NY's Appellate Court prohibits the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office from retrying a defendant in a murder case in which the judge declared a mistrial. This leaves the accused in an unusual legal position: not exonerated or found "not guilty", but immune from prosecution unless the state's highest court intervenes. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:25 AM PST - 5 comments

Announcement video: ”Hello, my name is Nicholas Whyte and I have a baller accent.” (video with transcript). Text announcement on the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon Bluesky account. Full list of finalists with details about nominating numbers and disqualified or self-withdrawn items is online at File 770.Previously, censorship report- Previously, scandal erupts - Previously, 2023 boycotts - Previously, full tag list.
posted by bq at 8:28 AM PST - 41 comments

Geoguessr shows you a Google street view scene and challenges you to guess where it is. Here’s a 170 page document to help find yourself in Mongolia.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:57 AM PST - 22 comments

Crystal Mason: Texas woman sentenced to 5 years over voting error acquitted. Mason, who has remained out of prison on an appeal bond, said in a telephone interview on Thursday evening that she received the news while going through a drive-through and became emotional. “I was thrown into this fight for voting rights and will keep swinging to ensure no other citizen has to face what I’ve faced and endured for the past seven years, a political ploy where minority voting rights are under attack,” she added.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:19 AM PST - 42 comments

We all make lists, if only to buy bread and milk. But we tend to forget how mythic and subversive, joyful and maddening, enchanting and sobering, and utterly chilling lists can be—and what they can do. To love a list is to partake in letter and word, form and change. To make lists is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to break down the artificial wall that separates thinking and doing, thinkers and doers. from One Thing After Another: A Reading List for Lovers & Makers of Lists by Kanya Kanchana [Longreads]
posted by chavenet at 12:51 AM PST - 13 comments

SA's spring-fed limestone waterhole home to plants not seen underwater anywhere else in the world. The filtered limestone environment of the Ewens Ponds provides the perfect condition for plants that don't usually grow fully submerged in water. This is one of the sinkhole's many unique aspects.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:57 PM PST - 4 comments

I don't know if you've seen The Completely Made Up Adventures Of Dick Turpin, but you've maybe seen Noel Fielding on Bake-Off. Here is a conversation with Fielding, show producer Kenton Allen, and Vulture's Jesse David Fox: Apple TV+’s The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin: Noel Fielding and Kenton Allen [51m].
posted by hippybear at 9:50 PM PST - 23 comments

"He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it." [more inside]
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 5:47 PM PST - 125 comments

"Wilderness Medicine Wednesday" is a series of ten-minute YouTube videos by Brett Friedman, a wilderness first aid instructor and a former paramedic. So far he's covered snakebites, hypothermia (including demonstrating the effects of mild hypothermia on himself), ticks, and CPR in the backcountry. In longer videos he's shared his perspective on other YouTubers' recordings of their wilderness mishaps, such as a burn and a hiking misadventure.
posted by brainwane at 5:17 PM PST - 10 comments

Are the Middle Ages a good destination for a bachelor party? What backstory should you use to avoid saying you're a time traveler? Will you be instantly identified as a witch and burned at the stake? Here's some advice for time traveling to medieval Europe (and an addendum with the answer to some common questions)
posted by simmering octagon at 12:44 PM PST - 34 comments

I have been pregnant five times, and intimately involved in two pregnancies not my own. My experiences of pregnancy have led me to a conclusion that has not been stated clearly or often. The word “pregnancy” must always be preceded by the definite article this.

(archive.org link, cw for some detailed talk about a miscarriage) [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 12:00 PM PST - 6 comments

March 28, 1999: Futurama. It seems to go on and on forever. In fact, the pilot episode of the original run aired 25 years ago tonight, kicking off what would become one of the smartest and most hilarious comedies in TV history. So celebrate with an overview of character intros, ★ key scenes, clips, ♫ songs, and other links, why not? [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:59 AM PST - 49 comments

Richard Serra (1938-2024) -- Archive link
posted by falsedmitri at 10:30 AM PST - 31 comments

The latest victim of a criminal magician.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:20 AM PST - 24 comments

BBC article. He is planning to appeal. Failing that, I believe he should (under US federal-crime sentencing guidelines) have to serve at least 21 years of the 25. [more inside]
posted by humbug at 10:07 AM PST - 62 comments

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began in 1979 when a small group of gay men in San Francisco donned the habit of Catholic nuns, and used camp to subvert expectations & promote social and political change in San Francisco. Sacrilege or serious parody? Illicit joy or elicit compassionate apraxis? The Sisters have grown into an organization of queer joy with 65 houses in 10 countries. This Sunday Easter in the Park: Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary Competition is set to attract 10,000+ attendants, but the works of a Sister is never done. [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 9:51 AM PST - 11 comments

"Discover the evolution of explosive chemical experiments, with the maestro of chemistry Andrew Szydlo." Explosive chemistry - with Andrew Szydlo [1h] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:59 AM PST - 21 comments

Secretly filmed inside the IRA, it then vanished.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:36 AM PST - 18 comments

Moonshot mania is already blasting off (previously, previouslier), but scientists are worried our celestial neighbor will be strip-mined and built out before it's fully studied. The cosmic land rush to build moon bases and harvest space helium-3 has researchers pleading to protect lunar zones that could hold the key to alien life and the universe's deepest secrets. [more inside]
posted by criticalyeast at 8:28 AM PST - 21 comments

Searching for the American Folk Horror Zine: An Investigation
posted by Artw at 7:42 AM PST - 14 comments

"If you stand before a Van Gogh painting, its meaning is not self-evident; maybe the shoes on the floor are the point, maybe the angle of perspective is the point, maybe something about the market for yellow pigment is the point, and so we have to process what is before us. If you stand in a yoga pose at the Immersive Van Gogh Morning Class, contemplation isn’t the goal; total sensory fusion is. This shift from contemplation to intense experience is sold as liberating, but it parallels other social and economic shifts that aren’t so great." A Jacobin interview with Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism.
posted by mittens at 5:46 AM PST - 31 comments

You might be more likely to send a text or email these days, however, some people still use letters to send fan mail. While plenty of celebrities receive messages of adoration, it turns out that you can also send fan mail to the “Mona Lisa.” Thanks to a special mailing address as well as a mailslot in the Louvre that’s located in the area of the famous artwork that was created by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503, those who feel inclined can write a message to the beloved masterpiece. What could they possibly say in their notes? Artnet explains: [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 2:17 AM PST - 5 comments

The Achilles Trap doubles as a surprisingly sympathetic study of a man who, as his powers slipped away, spent the last decade of his life jerry-rigging monuments of his own magnificence. Coll draws much of his material from extensive interviews with retired American intelligence officers and former members of Saddam’s bureaucracy, as well as from a previously unavailable archive of audio tapes from Saddam’s own state offices. What emerges is a portrait of Saddam as an eccentric in the mold of G.K. Chesterton—if Chesterton were bloodthirsty, paranoid, and power-mad—a man driven ultimately by deep reverence for the sense that hides beneath nonsense. from Saddam’s Secret Weapon, a review of The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll [The American Conservative]
posted by chavenet at 1:42 AM PST - 12 comments

"In the past nine years, [Nick Cave] has lost two sons – an experience he explores in a shocking, deeply personal new ceramics project. He discusses mercy, forgiveness, making and meaning." A longish interview from this morning's Guardian.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:09 AM PST - 7 comments

Animal Hybrids That Exist in Nature, From Narlugas to Grolar Bears to Coywolves [Smithsonian Mag]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:08 AM PST - 9 comments

Her work looked at how race and power are experienced in America. In 2022, she filed a lawsuit saying that the appraisal of her home was undervalued because of bias. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 7:47 PM PST - 23 comments

How many days are in a week? The debate began on 2008, on the forums of bodybuilding.com, when a user asks ‘ Is it safe to do a full body workout every other day?’ The answer is yes…the question is, if you do that, how many times a week are you working out? (Trigger warning for words some people thought it was ok to use in 2008, and fatphobia). [more inside]
posted by bq at 6:49 PM PST - 73 comments

Former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman has died at 82 from complications from a fall. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:14 PM PST - 73 comments

The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story

Miles Morales struggles to balance his responsibilities as a teenager, friend, and student while acting as Brooklyn’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. After a particularly challenging day living with these pressures, Miles experiences a panic attack that forces him to confront the manifestations of his anxiety and learn that reaching out for help can be just as brave an act as protecting his city from evil. The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story was developed and produced in the inaugural year of Sony Pictures Animation (SPA) and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ (SPI) Leading and Empowering New Storytellers (LENS) program, a 9-month leadership training program that provides candidates from underrepresented groups with an opportunity to gain valuable leadership experience in animation.

Sony Unveils First Look At Spider-Verse Short Film Tackling Mental Issues & Showing Miles Morales Suffering An Anxiety Crisis
posted by Rhaomi at 11:57 AM PST - 14 comments

Explore the undersea world of the Florida Keys off the dock in eight feet of water. I love a good snorkeling experience and this live webcam fits the bill. Bonus points for the VIVA THE KEYS spreadsheet that confirms my fish I.D. book sightings over the past several months. Yes, those are double-crested cormorants diving after the gray snappers and parrot fish (trigger warning because they do occasionally catch their meals). [more inside]
posted by TrishaU at 10:46 AM PST - 5 comments

Zoe, The Leftist Prepper, on supporting one another after disaster. From the Struggle Care podcast, with an auto-generated transcript. It's this rugged individualism that I think combined with gun love, because they are in my comments every single day... 'Oh, I'm gonna come to the blue state when the apocalypse hits and just take all your stuff.' And it baffles me... like, don't you care about the old granny next door who may need help opening her cans? I just, I don't get it. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:15 AM PST - 74 comments

Jenny Hagel on the queer joy of D.E.B.S. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:06 AM PST - 4 comments

Phenomenal aurora australis thrills observers across southern coastline. A camera is often required to get a glimpse of the southern lights, but the display recently was so powerful it could be seen with the naked eye.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:48 AM PST - 9 comments

10 different 10-minute guided mediations by crunk progenitor Lil Jon. Lil Jon is very serious about meditation, and sharing its benefits. These 10 guided mediations include ones focusing on boosting focus, gratitude, grief, deep sleep, and much more.
posted by Shepherd at 5:14 AM PST - 16 comments

It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. Particularly in On Kings (2017), his collaboration with his mentor Sahlins, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow and completed just a couple of weeks before his death, Graeber’s politics grew more “mainstream” in a number of respects, even as his narrative of the origins of political authority and economic hierarchy remained fresh, radical, and richly documented, and even as his prose style retained all its charm. But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all. from What Happened to David Graeber? [LARB, ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:41 AM PST - 23 comments

"We learned when somebody's back is up against the wall, they come up with a lot of creative solutions. And if they don't have a lot of money, like Ukraine doesn't, they can figure it out." As crucial American aid remains tied up in Congress, Ukrainian defenses have been forced to improvise with cheaper, lower-tech, but surprisingly effective countermeasures, from bleeding-edge first-person piloted kamikaze drones and repurposed Soviet tech to pickup truck-mounted MIRV launchers and "FrankenSAM" hybrids to Project Safe Skies: a donation-driven network of 8,000 cellphones and mics on sticks whose crowdsourced acoustic monitoring detected 84 out of 84 Russian UAVs in one day and shot down 80 of them with anti-aircraft fire -- at a cost of only $500 a pop.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:42 PM PST - 79 comments

Lorikeet, miner or magpie — what is Australia's most commonly spotted bird? Last October, 60,000 people spent at least 20 minutes outside to identify the country's bird species and submit their tallies into the Aussie Bird Count app
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:39 PM PST - 10 comments

Lucid Rhythms is a Youtube channel with long, slow, calm videos and streams generated by audio synthesis software written by sound designer Mirko Ruta. Ruta also has a separate YouTube channel for music synthesized by hardware- synths, sequencers, and modular contraptions.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 2:10 PM PST - 9 comments

GeriPal podcast has over 300 episodes on geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care (with transcripts!) that are accessible to the layperson and feature a wide range of interviewees. One standout episode is The Language of Serious Illness with Sunita Puri, Bob Arnold, and Jacqueline Kruser: "[doctors] just offer options without context. And given that the culture of medicine is always to do more, the context will always push people to try something." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:29 AM PST - 6 comments

The European Commission opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act into Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple's rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta's 'pay or consent model, as well as Amazon self-preferencing own branded products in searches -- all in violation of the requirements of the DMA. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:15 AM PST - 62 comments

The 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge opened in 1977 as an outer crossing of Baltimore Harbor, over the Patapsco River, according to the Maryland Transportation Authority, its operator. It was struck around 1:30 am EDT by a container ship on its way out to sea. “What’s been indicated is the vessel lost power, and when you lose power you lose steering,” Cardin said. “But they’re doing a full investigation.” [more inside]
posted by hydra77 at 7:18 AM PST - 260 comments

"Procedural narrative is the design strategy, emergent narrative is the goal, the player’s experience." Game design previously.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:17 AM PST - 2 comments

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.” ... A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.” from Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control [NY Magazine; ungated] [CW: abuse & manipulation]
posted by chavenet at 2:19 AM PST - 142 comments

Have you ever wondered what it looks like and sounds like when a 3.9 metre (12.7 feet) crocodile is humanely trapped for relocation? [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:48 PM PST - 16 comments

Who was Jack Lord. "When Jack Lord died, he left 40 million dollars to charities in Hawaii. There is Jack Lord's Special Memory of Elvis.' 'Stoney Burke' fan? Jack Lord has a collection of selected works. "This is a critical lesson for any young writer. We want our characters to be “real.” We want our heroes to be “relatable.” But characters are not real and heroes are not normal. They can’t be. If they were, they wouldn’t be heroes." 'The Jack Lord Rule'
posted by clavdivs at 10:44 PM PST - 16 comments

Thousands of spectators gathered to watch more than 200 servers compete in Sunday's "Course des Cafés," the newly-revived version of a century-old race. Waiters and waitresses traversed a 1.2-mile loop starting and ending at City Hall, suited up in traditional crisp white shirts, black trousers, neatly tied aprons and in some cases, bow ties. They each carried a tray loaded with a croissant, a full water glass and an empty coffee cup.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 10:20 PM PST - 5 comments

[newsroom.wcs.org] "The identified herpesvirus can be carried by healthy pigeons but may cause fatal disease in birds of prey including owls infected by eating pigeons. This virus has been previously found in New York City pigeons and owls. In Flaco’s case, the viral infection caused severe tissue damage and inflammation in many organs, including the spleen, liver, gastrointestinal tract, bone marrow, and brain. [...] Toxicology testing also revealed trace amounts of DDE, a breakdown product of the pesticide DDT, but the levels detected in Flaco were not clinically significant and did not contribute to his death. Although DDT has been banned in the United States since the early 1970s, it and its breakdown products are remarkably persistent in the environment, and this finding is reminder of the long legacy of DDT and its dire effects on wild bird populations." Previously and previously.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:46 PM PST - 15 comments

Laurent de Brunhoff, ‘Babar the Elephant’ author, dies aged 98 [CNN]; Laurent de Brunhoff, l’un des pères de Babar, est mort [Le Monde]; Décès de Laurent de Brunhoff, père d’un Babar controversé [Le Soir] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:36 PM PST - 37 comments

Woman mistakes bobble for baby hedgehog and rushes it to Cheshire animal hospital. "Volunteer Danielle Peberdy, 36, said the kind-hearted woman had done the right thing in not ignoring a hedgehog out in the day. She said: "Hedgehogs shouldn't be out in the day so she did the right thing; the only problem was that it was a bobble.""
posted by fight or flight at 1:17 PM PST - 49 comments

"You will probably never read all twenty of Les Rougon-Macquart. I know that. You know that. Let us accept this truth between us. If I had to send you on your way with some minimally sufficient quantity of Zola, let me propose the following, which to me are the greatest examples of Zola’s art..." Brandon Taylor in the LRB, on his two-year project of reviewing Zola's cycle of novels: Is It Even Good?
posted by mittens at 12:33 PM PST - 12 comments

"I was at a party in space with creatures of all kinds and shapes you can imagine, and this was the music playing, the vibe was unbelievable. Influenced by the 1970s space disco, with its synthesizers, funky grooves, and a certain psychedelia, the space DJs know what they're doing, it's time to listen to the voice that comes from beyond, or rather, from the infinite and beyond." COSMIC GROOVES - A Funky, Disco & House Grooves MIX from Outer Space [2h]
posted by hippybear at 11:16 AM PST - 7 comments

A new report on on rural homelessness Finding Home: A True Story of Life Outside (full report) and press release. Of the hundreds of homeless Oregonians interviewed for the report, roughly 60% are employed but cannot earn enough money to meet income requirements, credit scores, and security deposits necessary to re-enter the rental housing market. Interview with report author and former mayor of Ashland Oregon Julie Akins: At what point do we accept that? That you can be a working person and still homeless? That you can be a retiree who worked your entire life — and now you’re unhoused because your wife died, and only one Social Security benefit is not enough? [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:48 AM PST - 47 comments

“Equations are just a way of describing nature [...] Air is a fluid and blood is a fluid, so the same equations that model the air around an aircraft are the ones used to model the blood inside your body.” Joe Zadeh writes 6500 words for Noema magazine [via Arts & Letters Daily] [more inside]
posted by cgc373 at 4:57 AM PST - 31 comments

Freediving is a style of underwater experience gated by breath-holding. Do you swim? Do you dive? How low? Or talk about anything you like!
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:41 AM PST - 104 comments

"Dune - Melange Spice" is about attempting to create a spice blend mimicking the flavor of the geriatric spice described in Frank Herbert's Dune. It discusses flavor profile, descriptions in the novel, and coloration: "There are accounts in Herbert’s later novels of the spice giving off a blue glow, or of the sand where a spice eruption had taken place being a deep purple color. I really like the idea of that, visually, but as it’s complicated enough to get the flavor right, let’s just focus on that for the time being." It's from The Inn at the Crossroads, the noted fantasy cookery website (previously).
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:23 AM PST - 28 comments

The story was so extraordinary that they decided to document a full account in book form. That account, titled An Adventure, was published in 1911. It became the literary sensation of its day, running to numerous editions. As incredible as the tale was, perhaps the most astonishing part was yet to be revealed, for Morison and Lamot did not exist. The real authors of An Adventure were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, the Principal and Vice-Principal, respectively, of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford—two highly esteemed academics hiding their names to protect their identities. from The Respected Oxford Professors Who Say They Time Traveled [Atlas Obscura]
posted by chavenet at 1:50 AM PST - 16 comments

Winter 2021: Philadelphia native Dr. Ala Stanford had been all over the city, administering free COVID-19 tests with her staff to anyone who wanted them. [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:10 PM PST - 2 comments

Researchers over the moon as puggle is born in Sydney's Royal National Park. (A puggle is the word for a baby platypus.) The six-month-old female platypus is the first-known animal of its kind to be born in Australia's oldest national park in more than 50 years, and its arrival comes despite a series of recent pollution scares in local waterways.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:36 PM PST - 12 comments

In the film, one of the representatives of the AI, the villainous Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving, tells Morpheus that the false reality of the Matrix is set in 1999 because that year was “the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.” Indeed, not long after “The Matrix” premiered, humanity hooked itself up to a matrix of its own. There is no denying that our lives have become better in many ways thanks to the internet and smartphones. But the epidemic of loneliness and depression that has swept society reveals that many of us are now walled off from one another in vats of our own making.

25 Years Later, We’re All Trapped in ‘The Matrix’ [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:30 PM PST - 58 comments

The Tapa Room Tapes are a collection of recorded performances by various Hawaiian artists (includingi Alfred Apaka and Jules Ah See) from the Tapa Room of the Hawaiian Village in the late 1950s. Originally uploaded by British steel guitarist Basil Henriques. The sound quality can be variable, but the music is hot Hawaiian swing with plenty of steel guitar.
posted by wellvis at 4:33 PM PST - 8 comments

We hear from Budapest that the eminent composer Peter Eötvös died today. He was 80 and had endured a long illness. After an apprenticeship with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eötvös emerged in the 1980s as a leading voice in late and post-modernism. Four of his operas were internationally premiered – Three Sisters at Lyon, Love and Other Demons at Glyndebourne, The Tragedy of the Devil at Munich and Sleepless (2021) in Berlin. His final opera Valuska, was premiered in Budapest on 2 December last year.
posted by chavenet at 2:07 PM PST - 5 comments

I'll just put this here. Maybe people will enjoy it. Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four (Full Movie) 2015 [1h24m]
posted by hippybear at 1:42 PM PST - 31 comments

A Bronx Teacher Asked Tommy Orange to Visit His Class. “In our 12th-grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in an under-resourced but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you’re our rock star. Our more than rock star. You’re our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness.” [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:00 AM PST - 17 comments

Ruth Brownlee's evocative work is described as 'very much about Shetland and its elements' [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:52 AM PST - 5 comments

Punk beetle's chance discovery was almost disregarded as bird droppings. Researchers investigating the discovery of the spiky-haired specimen say nothing of its kind has been seen in Australia before.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:40 AM PST - 7 comments

But the underlying online vs. real life opposition is harder to dispel. Here it is attached to consumerist identities, like an exploded version of the chain stores vs. mom-and-pop stores opposition from the No Logo era. There is a genuine, authentic way to make a spectacle of the self, but it needs to tap into a rooted habitus and recondite practice (a “context”), and not simply reflect haphazard free play with readily available cultural signifiers (mere “content”). That is, the correct and real self is rooted in distinction (in Bordieu’s sense) and not differentiation. The internet is supposedly undermining the kind of distinction that should matter and proliferating the kinds of differences that are superficial rather than culturally binding. from Spacing the cans by Rob Horning
posted by chavenet at 2:58 AM PST - 23 comments

The superbly preserved remains of a Bronze Age settlement offer a glimpse of a “colorful, rich, varied” domestic life circa 850 B.C. Franz Lidz for the New York Times
posted by bq at 8:18 PM PST - 17 comments

Parents Are Highly Involved in Their Adult Children’s Lives, and Fine With It New surveys show that today’s intensive parenting has benefits, not just risks, and most young adults seem happy with it, too. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 7:08 PM PST - 50 comments

“The Apothecary Diaries” is an anime (/web novel/novel/light novel/manga/other manga) that takes place in a fictional kingdom based on Imperial China. Youtuber LibeliumDragonfly, a Chinese-Canadian translator, provides an episode-by-episode “viewing appendix” to separate the facts from the fiction. (SLYTPL)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:54 PM PST - 15 comments

As the 'last of the McKellens', Sir Ian admits to a degree of melancholy as he delves into his family history [1h]. But the results pay off richly for one of Britain's greatest actors and civil rights champions. Ian's journey uncovers a theatrical ancestor, a Victorian political activist and a link to an ancient druidical landmark in the Lake District. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:45 PM PST - 11 comments

Welcome to Picotron: Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format. [more inside]
posted by SaltySalticid at 1:36 PM PST - 16 comments

Need some mesmerization in your life? Gaze deep into Life Universe, a zoomable, infinitely-recursive Game of Life simulator [technical explanation]. Inspired by the classic video Life In Life and the OTCA Metapixel (previously). From shr, the developer behind Bubbles (previously), Blob (previously), and a wide variety of other fascinating and fun physics web toys.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:30 PM PST - 7 comments

What happens when an AG dares to investigate Leonard Leo’s network (Heidi Przybyla, Politico, 2024-03-23). [more inside]
posted by Not A Thing at 9:49 AM PST - 48 comments

“Negro Artist. At Mr. McLean’s, Watch-Maker, near the Town House, is a Negro man whose extraordinary Genius has been assisted by one of the best Masters in London; he takes Faces at the lowest Rates. Specimens of his Performance may be seen at said Place.” [more inside]
posted by bq at 9:13 AM PST - 4 comments

We attempted and succeeded in, as far as we know, the first ever wireless drive-by attack on a truck. In the paper Commercial Vehicle Electronic Logging Device Security: Unmasking the Risk of Truck-to-Truck Cyber Worms [PDF], researchers from Colorado State take over a transport truck and outline the risk of self-spreading fleet-wide infections. An article in Fleet Maintenance Magazine puts this risk in broader perspective.
posted by clawsoon at 5:39 AM PST - 37 comments

Ukrainian painter Vachagan Narazyan is an inspiration to many, including artist Vanessa Lemen, who has written about him a couple times. He's shown at various galleries, including just pre-pandemic at James Yarosh. He came of age as a painter as a Soviet nonconformist artist. His work has been described as "symbolic visions of a deeply personal nature." If video is more your thing, check out this video that James Yarosh shared on YouTube that evokes the feel of Narazyan's work. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:48 AM PST - 8 comments

"I could watch Carrie and her pig blood, Pam on a hook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I didn’t mind Seth Brundle spouting wings and pus, Regan MacNeil going from twelve-year-old girl to devil spawn. But when Tom gets bolder, when he transforms, I found it hard to stomach. I didn’t watch the movie again for years. Conceiving of Tom as only a murderer—sociopathic, obsessed platonically—I could ignore how queer he really is." from My Funny Valentine, an essay about The Talented Mr Ripley and realization by Michael Colbert
posted by chavenet at 2:20 AM PST - 8 comments

This week, Jasmin Paris became the first woman to complete all five loops of the Barkley Marathons (NYT, gift link) a mere 99 seconds ahead of the 60-hour cutoff time. Only twenty competitors have ever completed the (absolutely bananas) Tennessee event often called the "World's Hardest Race." [more inside]
posted by charmedimsure at 11:41 PM PST - 22 comments

Welcome to the Fish Doorbell. Will you help fish pass the city boat lock? Every spring fish migrate upstream, in search of places to spawn. They swim through the centre of the city of Utrecht. Unfortunatly, the boat lock is closed during spring. You can help the fish. Do you see a fish? Press the Doorbell! All the photos are collected. When there are enough fish waiting, the lock will be opened. This is the link to a cartoon about it. This is the link to the official doorbell site.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:18 PM PST - 19 comments

Dr. Fatima presents a video essay on decolonizing astronomy. (slyt, 2h 51m) She focuses on the proposal to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, but is able to wind her way through several heavy topics with grace. She dives into the scientific efficacy of the site, the history of colonization on Hawaii, and an aside on Palestinian liberation and solidarity, before finishing with both pathos and praxis. [more inside]
posted by crossswords at 3:16 PM PST - 7 comments

Backstage with Austin City Limits (ACL): Five Decades of Music | SXSW 2024 [1h] is a panel of people who create the legendary music show talking about the history of the music show. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:02 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Hi! I’m Noel – an archaeologist from Singapore living and working in Bangkok. I’ve been involved with Southeast Asian archaeology for over a decade now, and have been interested in it for a lot longer. Growing up in Singapore, there was not much opportunity to learn about archaeology in a formal setting – there are no archaeology degrees offered in the country, and the closest was in high school history. So I began this website in 2006 to collect news about the archaeology of the region, mainly as a way for me to learn what was going on in the region, and since then the site has grown to become an educational resource for the public

posted by infini at 1:44 PM PST - 4 comments

Princess of Wales says she is undergoing cancer treatment

The princess's statement explains that when she had abdominal surgery in January, it was not known that there was any cancer. "However tests after the operation found cancer had been present. My medical team therefore advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy and I am now in the early stages of that treatment," said the princess. The chemotherapy treatment began in late February. The palace says it will not be sharing any further private medical information, including the type of cancer. [...]

There have been calls for privacy from the palace after weeks of speculation and conspiracy theories about the royal couple. This had intensified after the withdrawal by photo agencies of a photograph of the princess for Mother's Day, on 10 March, because of concerns over digital alterations, for which the princess subsequently apologised.

Full statement [transcript + video] - Related: King Charles diagnosed with cancer, Buckingham Palace announces
posted by Rhaomi at 12:35 PM PST - 115 comments

After a failed adaptation in 2017, Netflix has finally released the home-streaming adaptation of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. How will the slow build to epic scope that prevented some readers from finishing the book series fare in the hands of the same showrunners that brought you Game of Thrones? Binge ready for the weekend (trigger warning: starts with violence). [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 11:52 AM PST - 95 comments

AN EXHIBITION BY Houston-based artist David McGee is always a cause for celebration. A master of portraiture, modernism and abstraction, with works in the permanent collections of museums across the country, McGee, like many artists, clung to his practice like a lifeline throughout the worst months of the pandemic and the political upheaval that still plagues the country today. His new and highly anticipated show at Inman Gallery, The Tarot Cards and The Gloria Paintings (Sept. 16 – Nov. 1), is infused with that resilience, and is his most politically charged, and deeply personal exhibition to date. [more inside]
posted by bq at 11:00 AM PST - 2 comments

Ted Gioia: "Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology. And the audience started booing." [Xitter link] Gioia argues that users are becoming much more wary, not only about "AI," but about tech in general. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:05 AM PST - 111 comments

Meet Kermitops, the newly discovered prehistoric creature named after Kermit the Frog. There were definitely no muppets 270 million years ago, but there was a Kermit — or at least an ancestor of modern amphibians, according to scientists who uncovered its fossilised skull.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:46 AM PST - 16 comments

What we’re witnessing is the rise of Wishful Verbiage, a use of language which is replacing the old-fashioned lie. A lie was something someone said which they knew wasn’t true. Wishful Verbiage is something someone says because it sounds better than what’s true, even if it’s the opposite of the truth, and that’s OK because it conveys aspirations that are more valid than accuracy. By Armando Iannucci
posted by h00py at 5:11 AM PST - 33 comments

I don’t think it has anything to do with the audience for this stuff. I don’t think it has anything to do with the buzziness or the culture surrounding the site itself. I think it is just these money people coming in and making bad decisions. If they’re going to lay off people in Boeing and cut safety protocols or whatever, they’ll do it to anyone. from The Oral History of Pitchfork [Slate]
posted by chavenet at 1:45 AM PST - 9 comments

Books on Black history, immigration found in trash by Staten Island school, sparking investigation. Gothamist obtained photos from a Brooklyn book lover that showed boxes of kids’ books left with the garbage at PS 55, known as the Henry Boehm School. Some had sticky notes on them detailing themes and content in the books, which appeared to be part of a 2019 initiative to diversify school materials. The city education department launched an investigation after Gothamist shared the images (Jessica Gould for Gothamist) [more inside]
posted by bq at 7:46 PM PST - 11 comments

This is one of the best Blake's 7 fan fictions that I have ever read. Avon and Blake both survive Gauda Prime - but can Blake ever trust Avon again? and can they win the war against the Federation? In the Bleak Midwinter by x_los.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:20 PM PST - 19 comments

DARPA has asked for proposals to build an American train on the moon, to compete with proposed Chinese base proposals, and Northrop Grumman has responded with a concept study. But will this be a levitational railway, or a more standard broad-gauge one to suit the lower lunar gravity?
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:17 PM PST - 96 comments

From February, two pieces on learning and adhering to medical instructions. Zareen Choudhury's short comic "Fasting or No Fasting?" starts: "Last year, I had to take a blood test for Lupus during Ramadan." (Image descriptions are available for each cartoon panel.) And "Doctor's Orders: Making the most of the best care you can get", by an anonymous trans woman, is about the necessity and difficulty of following one's care plan after gender-affirming surgery.
posted by brainwane at 4:33 PM PST - 6 comments

A long time ago in a place called Olympia, Washington… The Transmetropolitan Review places Frank Herbert’s Dune within the anarchist history of the Pacific Northwest.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:30 PM PST - 34 comments

The IPCC, the world authority on climate science, advises we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than half by 2030, and get emissions down to net zero by 2050, if we want a chance of limiting average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Actually, we've already crossed that threshhold, kind of. Information Technology itself may contribute as much as 5% to global greenhouse gas emissions. Internationally recognised methods and standards for assessing the environmental impacts of AI don't yet exist, although they will. Are AI revolution futures compatible with net zero futures? Are science and technology still on the same team? [more inside]
posted by scissorfish at 11:33 AM PST - 40 comments

Roger Langridge's wonderful Hotel Fred diary strips have been away for a few weeks while he got on with other projects. A new sequence of ten strips appeared this week about the recent illness of Luna, his family's much-loved dog. I think you'll like them. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 11:00 AM PST - 4 comments

Korean webtoon platform Bomtoon has made available a guide on creating webcomics as a series of 5 YouTube videos. Videos are in Korean with English subtitles. [more inside]
posted by needled at 10:53 AM PST - 2 comments

Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studio and creator of the Alt-Right Playbook) dusts off a video script he's had kicking around, and explains in detail why everybody but him is wrong about Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Cornetto Trilogy. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:48 AM PST - 25 comments

For 3/21 World Down Syndrome Day, the NDSS created "Assume That I Can So Maybe I Will" A video PSA which is a short course in the importance of presumed competence starring Madison Tevlin, who was in the 2023 movie Champions.
posted by plinth at 8:54 AM PST - 11 comments

'Stay Strapped or Get Clapped' How the media misses the story of companies seeking profit by keeping traumatized veterans armed and enraged (Rick Perlstein (previously), The American Prospect)
posted by box at 8:45 AM PST - 25 comments

"When you make a promise like that, you have to keep it. It's a contract." More about the positive impact the project had on struggling Ontarians. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 8:29 AM PST - 11 comments

If animals are going to use touchscreens, how should we design for them? New research from Rébecca Kleinberger’s lab at Northeastern University delves deep into the data on how parrots use touchscreen devices, with the help of a bespoke gaming app. [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 8:09 AM PST - 8 comments

Ambigram(Wiki): a calligraphic composition of glyphs that can yield different meanings depending on the orientation of observation. MakeAmbigrams will take a word or pair of words and generate an ambigram that reads the same right side up or upside down (or mirrored).
posted by Mitheral at 7:13 AM PST - 7 comments

Kevin Roose writes in today's NYT about how content moderation made Reddit what it is today - a successful IPO "Today, Reddit is a gem of the internet, and a trusted source of news and entertainment for millions of people. It’s one of the last big platforms that feel unmistakably human — messy and rough around the edges, sure, but a place where real people gather to talk about real things, unmediated by algorithms and largely free of mindless engagement bait. " No, really. Just ignore the porn, and everything is great. Really.
posted by briank at 6:36 AM PST - 61 comments

moviegrid.io - "Select a movie for each cell using the clues that correspond to that cell's rows and columns... Each game, you have nine movie guesses to fill out the grid. Each movie, whether correct or incorrect, will count as one of your nine guesses. If a movie poster pops up, congratulations -- you got it right you little cinephile." [more inside]
posted by quintessence at 6:30 AM PST - 10 comments

"The book club edition. You probably remember your first encounter with this indecent denizen of the book world. It wasn't pleasant, was it? Learning that your priceless first edition─the one you had considered selling so you could buy that NHL skybox─was...what? Worthless? Really? Why, you wondered, is this sneaky breed of book imposter allowed to trick and taunt the hapless collector? Why are book club editions even a thing?" [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:20 AM PST - 34 comments

By all accounts, my father was not a punk. Nothing about the clothes he wore made me think he was punk. I don’t know much about his music taste. He saved a Prince concert ticket in a childhood photo album along with CDs by the Fugees and KRS-One that I found with his other belongings, which also included lectures from Islamic scholars of the early ‘90s. From the books he left behind, I knew he was political and very pro-Black. I knew he converted to Islam when he was young and had an affinity for ‘90s clothing. He was stylish, but it wasn’t anything I could explicitly link to a subculture. Yet somehow, he found himself listening to a band called Fishbone. from Finding Portals: Fishbone’s “Fishbone” EP [Bandcamp] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:18 AM PST - 24 comments

In the end, this is all that really matters: my most important video in 12 years (Louis Rossmann, Piped/YouTube/Invidious, 9m41s) in which Louis thanks a departing employee and wishes him well with his future endeavours. Corporate America take note: this is how it's done.
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 AM PST - 4 comments

Vernor Vinge, author of many influential hard science fiction works, died March 20 at the age of 79.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:06 AM PST - 90 comments

Making the ultimate Hackintosh: the Brewintosh
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:07 AM PST - 10 comments

Sperm whales drop bubble of poo off WA to prevent orca attack in rarely recorded encounter. Observers look on in amazement as sperm whales off Western Australia's southern coast successfully defend themselves from a pod of attacking Orca by defecating at will, creating a cloud of diarrhoea.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:58 PM PST - 19 comments

Shohei Ohtani, singular baseball talent and recent recipient of the largest contract in sport history, has always been close with his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. On Wednesday Ohtani's lawyers have accused Mizuhara of a massive theft to pay off gambling debts. The day before Mizuhara and Ohtani's camp had a different story: Ohtani knew about the gambling debts and had agreed to pay them off. Was Ohtani just covering for a friend, or was he taken advantage of? Did he knowingly pay off a bookie despite MLB rules against such interactions?
posted by thecjm at 4:55 PM PST - 44 comments

If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who will play a key role in LAPD surveillance of Deckard — and in the changed emphasis of four subsequent versions of Blade Runner released over the next twenty-five years. from Minute 9: Blade Runner [3 am magazine] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:59 PM PST - 30 comments

TRIGGER WARNING His fall from the pinnacle of the New York art world involved murder, torture, tax evasion, extortion and two terms in prison. Clay Risen NYT
posted by bq at 3:35 PM PST - 12 comments

Well isn't this a fine kettle of fish. Is the orchestra the audience? What's in her lap?lap? Is it the latest Birkin bag, or a camera case...Queensland Orchestra said they wanted to use artificial intelligence to be "innovative".
posted by Czjewel at 2:32 PM PST - 35 comments

An Expert Who Has Testified in Foster Care Cases Across Colorado Admits Her Evaluations Are Unscientific Diane Baird labeled her method for assessing families the "Kempe Protocol" after the renowned University of Colorado institute where she worked for decades. The school has yet to publicly disavow it. [ProPublica]
posted by readinghippo at 1:18 PM PST - 29 comments

Massive Missing Head of Ancient Ramesses II Statue Uncovered. "Egyptian and American researchers recently uncovered the top half of an ancient statue depicting the pharaoh Ramesses II, completing a puzzle that has remained unsolved since 1930, when German archaeologist Günther Roeder initially uncovered the bottom half." [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 12:16 PM PST - 19 comments

There are two kinds of people As MetaFilter well knows, there are infinite varieties of "two kinds of people" in the world: Askers and Guessers, those who Face the Spray vs. those who Face Away, Standers vs. Sitters. Welcome to the fray, mise en place!
posted by epj at 11:45 AM PST - 60 comments

Elle Cordova is a poet, singer, comedian, filker, science geek and more. She recently published three hilarious brief skits where she embodies 20 fonts hanging out and gossiping. Compiled with open captions 4:12 at this single YouTube link. With her former Raina del Cid persona previously and previouserly
posted by Jesse the K at 11:05 AM PST - 13 comments

Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go (Samantha Schuyler in MIT Technology Review)
"They weren’t there to exceed 245 meters—a depth they’d reached three years earlier. Nor were they there to set a depth record—that would mean going past 308 meters. They were there to test what they saw as a possible key to unlocking depths beyond even 310 meters: breathing hydrogen."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:51 AM PST - 20 comments

Mountaineer and Cinematographer David Breashears dies at 68 [more inside]
posted by Kangaroo at 10:16 AM PST - 10 comments

More in my series curating work by finance expert Daniel Davies, this time focusing on academia and on the cultures and norms of research in general. In "why i am (still after all) an economist" (2023), he asks, "Is there anything that is actually definitional, something that you have to believe or you’re not an economist?" and offers his answer, which is that (I'd summarize) economics treats historical facts as descriptive but not necessarily prescriptive. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 9:23 AM PST - 5 comments

This is just a few TiKToks celebrating the fun of having a library card, that is all.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:17 AM PST - 44 comments

IKEA's recently introduced SILVERSIDA line of blue-speckled white ceramic dinnerware are made with ~60% post-firing ceramic waste. Broken pottery is ground up into powder then mixed with a portion of raw clay and water and used to make these new pieces. [more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:35 AM PST - 20 comments

"...[W]hile both context collusion and context collision are examples of collapsed contexts, they are conceptually and consequentially distinct from each other. The intentionality of the individual and their role in either allowing new information to come forth—as in the case of context collusion—or if it is unbeknownst that this information will be introduced—as in the case of context collision—is crucial. We also contend that context collapse is linked to an individual’s perception of face." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:27 AM PST - 13 comments

The youngest Baby Boomers are turning 60 this year, but they have more in common with their Gen X counterparts. (slVancouverSun)
posted by Kitteh at 5:05 AM PST - 121 comments

Poor Dame Edna got caught out, and tossed from the royal box during the 2013 Royal Variety performance.
posted by Czjewel at 3:11 AM PST - 4 comments

Long ago, back in 2008, Dave Faris posted a link to FontStruct, a simple, yet deceptively versatile, free system for constructing fonts on the web, which you can then download as TrueType fonts for yourself, or even allow others to use. This is to inform you that FontStruct is still operational after 16 years at a different address! And it hasn't stood still during that time, it has steadily been updated with new features! [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:52 AM PST - 6 comments

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. from The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud [MIT]
posted by chavenet at 1:44 AM PST - 14 comments

When Azeez Sulaiman arrived in Qatar, he thought he was going to play football. Instead, he ended up forced to work in construction, in dangerous conditions and for meager wages. But a new calling emerged from these trying circumstances: advocating for the rights and safety of his fellow workers. Writer Anthony del Col and graphic designer/graphic novelist Deena Mohamed help to tell Sulaiman's story.
posted by Jeanne at 8:58 PM PST - 3 comments

Why do quolls have spots, and zebras have stripes? When it comes to blending in, there's a lot we can learn from the animal kingdom. And while the reasons for camouflage vary, they all come back to survival.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:52 PM PST - 4 comments

Want to watch the fantastic Soviet Ukrainian animated Treasure Island movie (previously) but don't have the time? Here's some shorter options: a 35-minute collaborative reanimation of everything up to the apple barrel, and a 21-minute YouTube Poop of the entire film.
posted by BiggerJ at 5:08 PM PST - 4 comments

We Roleplayed the End of the World with 4000 Other People (People Make Games Youtube video) showcases Wasteland's fully immersive Mad Max inspired vibe. Start with Quintin's poor preparation and imminent heat stroke, stay for Chris "the most adorable and earnest war boy I've ever seen!" This is an exception to the rule, you should read the comments under the video.

comments my husband made on muckraker, fondly I will say:
"He looks like an adolescent war boy"
"He's not a war boy he's a newsboy"
"He's precious"
"He is a little war brother"
😂❤
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:09 PM PST - 2 comments

I don't know if the name Erma Bombeck means anything these days. For decades she epitomized a middle America observational kind of humor that was present in a lot of magazines about suburban life. While most of her material was written, she did put out one comedy album: The Family That Plays Together (Gets On Each Other's Nerves) [YT playlist, 1977]. I don't know if we have any equivalent voice in America today and maybe not all the humor works today, but this is a historical document that I got on vinyl from the Columbia House Record Club, and I'm happy to share it here today.
posted by hippybear at 4:01 PM PST - 34 comments

For decades, babysitting was both a job and a rite of passage. Now it feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era. (SL Atlantic / Archive)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:40 PM PST - 59 comments

Stardew Valley has received a huge new update on PC to celebrate the 8th anniversary of the game (with Switch and other versions coming soon). 1.6 has been a long time in the making from creator Eric Barone (otherwise known as ConcernedApe). Want to know what's going on? Read the patch notes (contains spoilers!) or browse the wiki. Yes, it's time to fetch that hoe out of the shed and get those hands dirty!
posted by fight or flight at 1:25 PM PST - 23 comments

An unexpected side effect of genealogical DNA sequencing has been to reveal something of the true dimensions of the population of children born of incest. In almost all cases where both parents can be identified, the father is either the girl's father or an older brother. Archive link.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:19 PM PST - 67 comments

Virtually every role draws on a self-possession you get from growing up in a place like Mart. It’s why some of our most celebrated Texas actors—Barry Corbin, Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew McConaughey, Sissy Spacek—all hail from small Texas towns. There is something innate, a soulfulness it instills that never leaves you, no matter how far away you might move, how glamorous your surroundings become. It’s inside everything Plemons does, imbuing even his tiniest on-screen role with uncommon depth. [Texas Monthly]
posted by riruro at 11:42 AM PST - 22 comments

Ewe might not expect 8000 year old technology to undergo a revolution, but in the 1990s Australian scientists invented BioClip, a way for sheep to practically shear themselves (tiktok). [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 11:03 AM PST - 17 comments

Starbucks announced it will be ending its Starbucks Odyssey (previously) virtual loyalty program. The related NFT market remains open. [more inside]
posted by box at 8:30 AM PST - 22 comments

Reintroducing large mammals could restore the world's ecosystems. Just 20 large mammals, including beavers, bears and bison, could bring back communities across a quarter of the planet.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:40 AM PST - 47 comments

"Picture a savoury condiment that's so creamy and delectably tangy that you want to dip all your food in it for the rest of your days. Now picture some smart alec coming along and mixing the sweetest food known to humankind into this sauce for a bit of a laugh." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:31 AM PST - 35 comments

Menopause has evolved only once in terrestrial animals - in humans - but at least four times in toothed whales. in a paper published last week in Nature, The evolution of menopause in toothed whales, a team of researchers examined whale life histories to evaluate five different hypotheses for menopause: Live-long vs. stop-short, and the grandmother hypothesis (previously) vs. reduced reproductive conflict vs. extended male lifespan. University summary, NYT summary, NYT archive. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 4:06 AM PST - 9 comments

Using only aluminum foil, vinegar and a brayer, oh, and a printing press you too can become a lithographer. This is quite fun. I've actually done this. The kids will enjoy this too. Make your own greeting cards, etc.
posted by Czjewel at 3:33 AM PST - 13 comments

There is only one state in the entire country—Illinois—where child influencers are legally entitled to a percentage of the money they help earn by being featured in monetized content. Although similar legislation has been introduced in several states this year, the fact remains: As of publication time, the vast majority of children who generate profits for their influencer parents—whether through brand deals, sponsorships, or direct payment from platforms—are legally unprotected and could be left with nothing in an industry valued at $21 billion in 2023. In the teeming, controversial world of family content creators, what happened to Vanessa is not uncommon. She spent the majority of her life up through her teenage years working on and being featured in her mother’s profitable blog and social media accounts, and she never saw a dime for her labor. from What’s the Price of a Childhood Turned Into Content? [Cosmopolitan]
posted by chavenet at 2:14 AM PST - 19 comments

The Making of Star Trek Deep Space Nine Trials And Tribble-ations [32m, complete with commercials] was a documentary which was broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US on November 4th, 1996. The documentary looks at the writing and production of the episode [Wikipedia] and features footage filmed during production of the episode.
posted by hippybear at 9:17 PM PST - 24 comments

This endangered butterfly is a fussy eater, so a nursery is helping grow its food. A Victorian plant nursery is growing a native shrub to help expand the habitat of the golden-rayed blue butterfly, found exclusively in western Victoria.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:20 PM PST - 3 comments

Disinformation has one goal: To change the perception of reality of every American....[F]ake news ... [is] actually an old term used by the Soviet Union as a reference to disinformation campaigns that the Soviets and now the Russians have long used to destabilize the West.... The Kremlin’s messaging has an extraordinary reach: In the first year of the Ukraine war alone, posts by Kremlin-linked accounts were viewed at least 16 billion times by Westerners."Bots, trolls, targeted ad campaigns, fake news organizations, and doppelganger accounts of real Western politicians and pundits spread stories concocted in Moscow." The purpose of the propaganda is to further Putin's policy goals: to recolonize Ukraine, to destabilize the West and to power the rise of fascist-friendly governments. How does Putin expect to achieve that? Through conventional warfare, indoctrination, and covert anti-semitic and anti-migrant propaganda.

[more inside]
posted by Violet Blue at 3:20 PM PST - 480 comments

Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.

Blogger John Salvatier talks stair carpentry, boiling water, the difference between invisible and transparent detail, and how paying closer attention to the beguiling complexity of everyday life can help you open your mind and break out of mental ruts and blind spots. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:28 PM PST - 48 comments

As seen on perennial MetaFilter favourite Ask A Manager, one user shares their experience having an old Glassdoor account linked to their name due to an email. [more inside]
posted by warriorqueen at 7:13 AM PST - 21 comments

We've been enjoying Eugene Levy's The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+ -- this week's episode saw him in the South of France, where we delighted in his confusion about two (Provencal) or three (St Tropez) cheek kisses on greeting someone. How many would you give? (Or talk about anything you want!)
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:38 AM PST - 100 comments

Four years on from Britain's exit from the EU, how's it going? Swimmingly, say its supporters, who argue that we should stop blaming Brexit for our economic ills. Most people in the UK have more of a sinking feeling about it, but the prospects for repairing or reversing the damage are unclear. [more inside]
posted by rory at 6:16 AM PST - 65 comments

"Enjoy an evening of tap dancing and jazz music celebrating the art of improvisation. Watch as dancers and musicians improvise together and pull rhythm and melody “Out of Thin Air.” [56m] The program will feature Colburn School's talented faculty and musicians as well as an array of guest artists including tap legends Sam Weber and Josette Wiggan."
posted by hippybear at 6:14 AM PST - 2 comments

Fran discusses the joy of revenge, holding grudges, and why Men shouldn't dye their hair.
posted by Czjewel at 5:01 AM PST - 2 comments

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise. from Ten Years without Gabriel García Márquez: An Oral History [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:30 AM PST - 3 comments

22 of the funniest novels since Catch-22 (SLNYT)
posted by storybored at 10:27 PM PST - 29 comments

Whale fossil in river sheds light on how pre-historic beasts morphed into today's giants of the sea. A fossil from the distant past is rewriting the narrative of how, when, and where baleen whales — such as the blue whale — became some of the largest animals to have ever lived on the planet.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:23 PM PST - 1 comment

Classicist Mary Beard [Wikipedia] is apparently well known for studying Ancient Rome. Comedian David Mitchell has read a lot about the British monarchy. Between them they can cover Julius Caesar to Elizabeth I, and they sat down together for a conversation for How To Academy in Rulers and Power | Mary Beard and David Mitchell [1h13m].
posted by hippybear at 6:26 PM PST - 13 comments

there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop. A short prose poem by Vinay Krishnan. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 4:56 PM PST - 18 comments

Move Over Cadbury, We Have A New Favourite Mini Egg (Canadian edition)
posted by sardonyx at 2:49 PM PST - 58 comments

"Revisiting Greek Automata: Clockwork Robots from the Ancient World" is a video from @fraserbuilds, in which John Fraser makes one of 1st century Greco-Roman engineer Hero of Alexandria's self-driving cars self-propelled automata, with some help from a hand made blow-torch powered by olive oil and pit fired pottery.
posted by gwint at 2:05 PM PST - 3 comments

Madeleine Pelling (The Telegraph, 3/17/2024), "Seriously scandalous and surprisingly sexy: how the Georgians redefined graffiti" -- archived: "In October 1731, ... 'Hurlothrumbo' set out into the freezing streets of London. Armed only with a pencil and paper, he was on a most peculiar hunt. His quarry? The graffiti that lined the city's many surfaces, left behind by its inhabitants." The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, part 1 and 2, 3, & 4. The play Hurlothrumbo. Pelling on women archaeologists in the 1780s via the Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Pelling's Writing on the Wall, reviewed (archived) and at Goodreads / StoryGraph. Pelling's podcast, most recently discussing St Patrick.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:26 AM PST - 14 comments

After 4 nail-biting months of gibberish, Voyager 1 is making sense again. Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing trouble with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, it hasn't contained any usable data. Now, there may be hope for recovery.
posted by signsofrain at 9:05 AM PST - 51 comments

Dementia Patients Used Morse Code Training to Escape From a Senior Living Facility
posted by latkes at 8:22 AM PST - 38 comments

In Live at Massey Hall: Geddy Lee [55m, CBC], Geddy spends some time talking to his old friend Alex, and then reads a bit from his book. If you like this kind of thing, maybe you'll like this example of this kind of thing.
posted by hippybear at 7:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Trevor Tordjman & Jordan Clark get drawn into the greatness of Moses Supposes [via TMN] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:01 AM PST - 33 comments

Tiny ants are changing the diet of Kenya's lions. Invasive ants are affecting how lions hunt. The insect invasion has led to the loss of cover for lions to ambush zebra from and forcing them to target buffalo instead. An army of big-headed ants is changing the food chains of the savannah. Though they’re little, these ants are fierce. Their arrival in parts of Kenya has decimated populations of local ants which usually live in and protect the whistling-thorn tree. Without the insects’ protection, these trees are increasingly being eaten by elephants, providing less shelter for a range of species. One animal this has had a particular impact on is the African lion. These big cats usually use the shelter of trees to sneak up on zebras. But with fewer trees, this strategy becomes increasingly risky.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:32 PM PST - 7 comments

As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk. [...] We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification. We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.

Ars Technica: Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance” [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 9:58 PM PST - 73 comments

Tucker Carlson Duped By YouTubers Into Interviewing Fake Kate Middleton Whistleblower
posted by chavenet at 1:33 PM PST - 32 comments

Top 100 CG animations of an Eternal Ascent from 2800 submissions [more inside]
posted by Gyan at 12:34 PM PST - 17 comments

"We should tell you that we've run out of new things to say about Everything Everywhere All At Once, so although we’ll try our best to stay on topic, we'll most likely go on a bunch of tangents about the state of the world, the impending climate crisis, the collapse of consensus truth, the rise of AI, the importance and impossibility of self care, and our collective responsibility as storytellers to confront the issues of our time, because that's probably going to be what's on our mind, but we can't make any promises, but at times we don’t feel qualified to talk about any of that stuff, anyway we hope you enjoy our SXSW keynote!" [1h] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:16 AM PST - 4 comments

Free Mixed Media Art Supplies Compatibility Chart by Artist, Designer and Educator Nela Dunato: "Behold: the most detailed free art mediums compatibility reference! The chart shows how different art mediums interact together and whether they can be safely layered on top of each other." [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 9:43 AM PST - 15 comments

Which animals cause the most deaths in Australia? Horses: 172 total deaths between 2001 and 2017, many of them from falling off a horse. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:53 AM PST - 82 comments

Shigeichi Negishi, the inventor of the world's first commercially-available karaoke machine, has died in Japan. He was 100 years old. [more inside]
posted by snofoam at 4:06 AM PST - 24 comments

This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. from The Great American Novels [The Atlantic; ungated] [CW: a list which almost by definition lacks your favorite American author or novel]
posted by chavenet at 2:19 AM PST - 73 comments

Solving for the feminist roots of crossword puzzles in a fun article by Sophia Stewart and what looks like a great book by Anna Shechtman on how crossword puzzles, those traditional cultural touchstones in Western English media that are becoming more diverse and contemporary.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:46 PM PST - 12 comments

Trans Person Infiltrates CPAC 2024 Part 1, Part 2. Dead Domain, a nonbinary creator who often talks about game design and who you may have seen go undercover at a hate church, decided to create the persona of vaguely right-wing podcaster Keith to attend CPAC, and gifts us with three and a half hours of troubling content and commentary. [more inside]
posted by Mizu at 11:04 PM PST - 7 comments

“About the LEMR Housing Monitor

The Low-End of Market Rental (LEMR) Housing Monitor is a centralized data mapping tool that presents critical information on the location and characteristics of the affordable “low-end” of market rental housing stock in six urban regions across Canada: Calgary, Halifax, Greater Montreal Area, Greater Toronto Area, Metro Vancouver Area, and Winnipeg.” [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 9:54 PM PST - 61 comments

Snif & Snüf (five minutes), a cartoon about two friends who find a couple of mysterious shapes, by Michael Ruocco, an animator who's worked on New Looney Tunes, the Cuphead Show and Bojack Horseman.
posted by JHarris at 9:30 PM PST - 8 comments

AARO Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I, February 2024 (PDF): AARO assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence. AARO notes that although claims that the USG has recovered and hidden spacecraft date back to the 1940s and 1950s, more modern instances of these claims largely stem from a consistent group of individuals who have been involved in various UAP-related endeavors since at least 2009.
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 PM PST - 25 comments

Scientist busts five common arachnid myths. Animal behaviouralist James O'Hanlon is debunking five long-held myths about spiders.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:49 PM PST - 19 comments

Is This The Greatest Tiki Bar In The World? [46m] It probably is because the guy who created it spent YEARS purchasing tiki from all over the history of tiki bars, having some custom made, and designing a space that is a living museum as well as a thriving party joint. Here's NPR from 2016 discussing Let's Talk Tiki Bars: Harmless Fun Or Exploitation? because this is a loaded topic. But I hope we can discuss the amazing bar in Michigan most of all! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:43 PM PST - 25 comments

moai.games is a list of 954 examples (and counting) of moai seen in video games, compiled by MeFi's Own game designer gingerbeardman. Why? "Moai are cool. And video games are cool. Oh, and lists are cool too." Read the NintendoLife interview for background on the project, get educated on the history of the grand sculptures (and real-life efforts to preserve them), or if you crave mo' moai, check out MoaiCulture.com's "Popular Culture" page for a comprehensive illustrated guide to 500+ moai in television, film, animation, comic books, literature, poetry, music, board games, magazines, advertising, and more. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:20 PM PST - 9 comments

"A while ago my wife introduced me to Stand In Pride, where queer people can find stand-in family members for support and indeed often for big life events — when their biological families don’t show up. And so it came to pass that a couple of weeks ago I had the singular honour of walking Taylor down the aisle to marry Ruth. Family is what you make it. Love endures." (via @chrisphin on Mastodon, with their permission and featuring lovely pictures of the wedding.) [more inside]
posted by chococat at 2:48 PM PST - 16 comments

A serendipitous follow up from my previous Othello post, this new paper from Hiroki Takizawa claims that Othello is solved: "It is computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw. Strong Othello software has long been built using heuristically designed search techniques. Solving a game provides a solution that enables the software to play the game perfectly." GitHub link to C source code included (it's a modified form of Edax.) [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 1:16 PM PST - 19 comments

Mexican artist crushes Tesla under giant stone head [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:52 PM PST - 38 comments

Rare Footage Of Leonard Nimoy Hosting 1975 Special Presentation Of Star Trek’s “The Menagerie” In 1975, Paramount produced a special movie presentation for syndication of the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie,” hosted by TOS star Leonard Nimoy. The original Spock recorded introductions for each part of the episode as well as closing remarks for the special presentation. In the special, Nimoy explains how “The Menagerie” uses footage from the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage” and more. Originally recorded February 6, 1983 from KAUT in Oklahoma City.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:15 PM PST - 12 comments

The Ars guide to time travel in the movies: a non-comprehensive list and ranking of 20 time travel movies, exploring the plausibility of their time travel mechanics, and also, how entertaining they are.
posted by toastyk at 9:25 AM PST - 91 comments

More importantly, what does the person feeding the fox wear? A wildlife center in Richmond, VA makes the news for an inventive way of preventing human imprinting on a fox kit. Associated Press story and video
posted by emelenjr at 8:00 AM PST - 7 comments

Escaping Hostile States for Transgender Community (slElle)
posted by Kitteh at 7:07 AM PST - 29 comments

The IATA officially announced: “In a significant achievement, 2023 saw no fatal accidents or hull losses for jet aircraft, leading to a record-low fatality risk rate of 0.03 rate per million sectors.” [more inside]
posted by fairmettle at 2:18 AM PST - 27 comments

The society’s traditions extended to what historian Holger Hoock describes as “an elaborate set of pseudo-Masonic ceremonies and symbolism.” Membership, strictly capped at 24 men, was a coveted privilege, even for George IV, the Prince of Wales, who had to wait his turn. New members underwent highly theatrical initiations, pledging their oath with a kiss on the beef bone of the day, blindfolded and led by a mitre-wearing guide while other members, as Arnold describes in his account, were “all decked out in incongruous and absurd dresses.” from A Rare Look Inside Britain’s ‘Sublime Society of Beefsteaks’ [Atlas Obscura]
posted by chavenet at 1:51 AM PST - 6 comments

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the finalists for the Nebula Awards. [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:19 PM PST - 41 comments

I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples. Until recently, people had no reason to suspect that a $1,200 sofa would be anything less than high quality; the vast majority of the stuff in stores was fairly well made, and you could sit on it to test it. Today, not so much. [...] A combination of factors, including world-altering shifts in labor, manufacturing, transportation logistics, and middle-class American aesthetics, has created a grim scene: a two-year-old, $1,200 Instagram sofa—busted, on the curb, waiting for the large-item trash pickup or an enterprising scavenger who doesn’t realize just how shitty this thing is.

Dwell.com asks: Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad?
posted by Rhaomi at 8:15 PM PST - 116 comments

In another interesting interview for Q on Canadian radio, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd on LOTR, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and their incredible friendship [33m] explores how Dom and Billy have talked about doing the Stoppard play since filming The Two Towers, and they're finally doing it. Other things are also talked about.
posted by hippybear at 7:36 PM PST - 11 comments

In a speech on the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the U.S.’s highest ranking politician of Jewish descent, offered the greatest departure from support of Israel’s Netanyahu government to date. Full speech (DoubleLYT).
posted by rubatan at 4:33 PM PST - 306 comments

If, like me, you saw the recent Rick Beato interview with Michael McDonald and thought "I could use more Doobie Brothers in my life right now," then you could do worse than this 1982 outdoor concert in Santa Barbara, California during the band's "farewell" tour. Apparently ripped directly from SelectaVision VideoDisc, the concert is presented in glorious 480p and has excellent sound. Bonus: footage of McDonald on a Christopher Cross session. [more inside]
posted by swift at 3:06 PM PST - 28 comments

Echidnas caught eating the eggs of Queensland's bum-breathing turtles, potentially endangering the reptile's future. Echidnas are known for laying eggs and eating ants, but it turns out a few have developed a hunger for the eggs of endangered turtles. There are six different species of freshwater turtle found in the Fitzroy, Burnett and Mary catchments. But it's the two threatened species that breathe oxygen underwater through their bums, whose eggs have been most predated by echidnas. Ms Robinson said the the difference in depredation might be because the Fitzroy River turtles' burrows are shallower. The distance from the burrow opening to the top egg is just 14.2 centimetres (5.5 inches) which is about the same length as an echidna beak.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:56 PM PST - 13 comments

RuPaul is building a bunker, and Kate Middleton has gone missing. One of these things is definitely confirmed. RuPaul is taking things to a place of societal collapse. He said so while promoting his forthcoming memoir “The House of Hidden Meanings.” He’s fortifying his compound in Wyoming for him and his hot rancher husband with morally ambiguous wealth to ride out the civil war he believes is imminent.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:52 AM PST - 127 comments

In about 24 minutes from, Space X will attempt the third launch of its Starship rocket. YouTube Live, Space X live feed
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:01 AM PST - 76 comments

In 1977 in San Francisco, about 150 disabled radicals occupied the fourth floor of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for 25 days. “Blind people, deaf people, wheelchair users, disabled veterans, people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities and many others, all came together,” leader Judith Heumann later recalled. “We overcame years of parochialism.” A long read published in The Guardian, adapted from Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 2:58 AM PST - 5 comments

The aircraft they are following, the one they have been looking for, is not like the others in the group. She wears a paint scheme any other Liberator would think humiliating—white from chin turret to trailing edge, covered in a pox of bright red and blue polka dots about 18 inches in diameter. Aft of the trailing wing edge, she is army green, but the pox extends down her flanks in garish red and yellow dots. And she has a face... perhaps it was meant to be that of a shark, but it grins like a dim-witted dachshund. It seems to pant in the heat of the turbulent air. The spotted markings make her look like a massive flying bag of Wonderbread. from Polka Dot Warriors – The Assembly Ships of the Mighty Eighth
posted by chavenet at 2:43 AM PST - 18 comments

The strange world of crocodile hairballs and the Queenslanders who collect them. Anyone with a pet cat will have borne witness to the nauseating process of hairball expulsion, but it is also necessary for crocodiles. (The fur that they are expelling is from furry creatures that they have eaten, like wallabies or kangaroos.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:03 PM PST - 16 comments

"Polio" Paul Alexander spent 70 of his 78 years alive inside of an iron lung. He was paralysed from the neck down due to complications from Polio. Despite this he became an author and lawyer.
posted by robotmachine at 8:58 PM PST - 29 comments

Colorblindness was the goal, color-consciousness the remedy. Nikole Hannah-Jones (previously) examines the historic and present-day use of colorblindness to oppose Black progress. (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 8:39 PM PST - 9 comments

Vihart is back with a meditation on the discovery of folded circle snack (and more)
posted by Gorgik at 8:10 PM PST - 8 comments

After Mrs. Dalloway and before To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf wrote her first essay for The Yale Review. Nine more followed.
TYR republished them online today, with an introductory essay by Claire Messud.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:08 PM PST - 6 comments

Insurance costs to customers are going up, maybe because costs of damage are going up; which is inflationary. [more inside]
posted by clew at 5:34 PM PST - 19 comments

"The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later." Earth Abides, perennial MeFi favorite (DuckDuckGo search ), is slated to begin production in April. [more inside]
posted by Conceptual Nomad at 3:52 PM PST - 15 comments

RIP Karl Wallinger. [NYT, ungated] Keyboardist for The Waterboys [Wikipedia] and creative force behind World Party [Wikipedia], he passed of undisclosed reasons this past Sunday at 66. He was well known for Put The Message In The Box, Private Revolution, and Ship Of Fools. The Guardian has a truly lovely write-up about Wallinger. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:16 PM PST - 39 comments

A conversation between environmental modeler Trevor House and journalist David Roberts. TLDR: did what it said on the tin Economic and environment models have come a long way and can now provide real- time assessment and predictions for proposed legislation.
posted by Dashy at 1:54 PM PST - 14 comments

"Last of all comes the pavement trodden by imperial feet, made of disks of porphyry and serpentine, not thicker than a silver dollar, framed in in segments and lines of enamel, white and gold, white and red, or white, red, and green. The colors are perfectly brilliant. Fancy the deck of a modern yacht inlayed in enamel." from Roman Emperor Caligula's coffee table [CBS]
posted by chavenet at 1:01 PM PST - 7 comments

Vancouver, BC has been dealing with a major housing crunch for years due to a number of factors. But the Squamish First Nation has an answer - Sen̓áḵw, a major urban mixed use development on Squamish land in the Vancouver metro area - which means that it can be developed bigger and denser than Vancouver regulations would allow...and without NIMBY interference. (SLMacLean's)
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:23 AM PST - 81 comments

Continuing my series curating work by finance expert Daniel Davies, some of his commentary on travel, Ezra Pound, coffee, and the culture of the Internet and how to manage one's equanimity while writing for strangers. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 10:10 AM PST - 10 comments

In Gaza, death seems to be closer than water - Maha Hussaini: 'During one of the relatively ‘safe’ times in Gaza, around the summer of 2022, I sat on a comfy couch, soft music playing in the background, a cup of cold fresh orange juice in my hand, and I thought: "When will I lose all of this?"' || Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism (by Raz Segal & Luigi Daniele) - The very different ways in which Holocaust scholars, on the one hand, and those working in Genocide Studies, on the other, have responded to the unfolding mass violence in Israel and Palestine after 7 October point to an unprecedented crisis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. We argue that the crisis stems from the significant evidence for genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has exposed the exceptional status accorded to Israel as a foundational element in the field, that is, the idea that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide || Killed in Gaza database (you can search either in English or in Arabic) || CNN visual presentation of dead children [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 7:28 AM PST - 251 comments

The seemingly dormant push to target ultrapopular video platform TikTok on national security grounds roared back to life this week as the House teed up a surprise bipartisan vote on forced divestment of the app's US operations. An attempt by Chinese parent company ByteDance to mobilize users against the legislation clearly backfired, angering lawmakers into delivering a unanimous vote to proceed. Critics warn the app offers the increasingly authoritarian CCP government reams of sensitive data and an unprecedented insight into the American psyche (along with a potent avenue for propaganda and influence operations), while defenders cite the company's diversified ownership and ongoing efforts at re-shoring US data operations. Bolstered by support from the White House (and a troubling intelligence report on election interference), the bill sees likely passage in the House today and an uncertain path in the Senate, as well as a long legal battle after that. The biggest twist: former president Trump, a longtime Sinophobe who signed a failed executive order banning the app, has suddenly flipped in favor of it as a counterweight to Facebook -- a move many insiders see as calculated to undercut Biden's already precarious support from young voters. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:45 AM PST - 145 comments

What changed since 2008 is a vivid example of a larger upheaval in American politics. The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still say raw milk is dangerous and the state dairy lobby sent lobbyists to the Iowa Capitol to defeat Schultz’s bill. But Iowa has flipped — it’s a Republican state now, from the presidential vote to the governor’s office to the near-supermajority Legislature — and that flip has occurred alongside even larger shifts in national politics, spurred on by the rise of Donald Trump. With Trump has come a new GOP electorate, one more rural, more working class, less ideological and generally more distrustful of lobbyists, big business and “the experts.” And that has been a big help for a cause that is bucking just about every one of those groups. from How Raw Milk Went from a Whole Foods Staple to a Conservative Signal [Politico]
posted by chavenet at 1:50 AM PST - 67 comments

Spanish police uncover syndicate allegedly selling fake Banksy pieces for up to $2480 each. Four people have been arrested as part of the syndicate suspected of selling up to 25 pieces world wide.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:59 PM PST - 11 comments

From TED To PERNOCTATED, Scrabble’s Best Player Knows No Limits by Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak
posted by lalochezia at 8:28 PM PST - 6 comments

Tech firms and Silicon Valley billionaires have been pouring money into nuclear energy for years, pitching the sustainable power source as crucial to the green transition. Now they have another incentive to promote it: artificial intelligence.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:38 PM PST - 49 comments

Reported by the BBC. "The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday. It said the 62-year-old had died from a "self-inflicted" wound on 9 March and police were investigating. [...] At the time of his death, Mr Barnett had been in Charleston for legal interviews linked to that case. Last week, he gave a formal deposition in which he was questioned by Boeing's lawyers, before being cross-examined by his own counsel. He had been due to undergo further questioning on Saturday. When he did not appear, enquiries were made at his hotel. He was subsequently found dead in his truck in the hotel car park."
posted by AlSweigart at 4:45 PM PST - 111 comments

Daniel Davies is a finance expert, journalist, and former investment banker whose writing I've been reading for over 20 years on Crooked Timber and on his own blog as well as elsewhere. Sometimes he writes analogies, games, or flights of fancy to help readers think about complex issues more clearly. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 12:58 PM PST - 17 comments

Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges beginning at 9pm US EDT TODAY (Sat March 9) 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 9pm US EDT Tuesday March 12, and will be playing listener requests for several more hours.
posted by trashflow at 12:23 PM PST - 20 comments

They're still working on figuring out what caused the Champlain Towers South Condo to collapse in Miami in 2021 [Wikipedia]. There was an update of the NIST engineering investigation earlier this month, and Jeff Ostroff will take a half-hour to explain everything they've learned so far. Photos, video, deep analysis... It's a fascinating update to a recent tragedy that is still getting resolved.
posted by hippybear at 11:30 AM PST - 12 comments

Is Super Mario Marker beaten yet? Back in 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, which allowed users to create their own Mario levels and upload them for others to play. Over 8 million levels were created for the game. On March 31, 2021 Nintendo "discontinued" the game, which meant no new levels could be uploaded. Then the second shoe dropped: Nintendo announced the Wii U servers would be turned off forever on April 8, 2024, effectively removing all of these user levels from existence. Upon hearing this news, the Super Mario Maker community began to rally around a single goal: clear every single level uploaded to the servers before the shutdown date. [more inside]
posted by lubujackson at 10:55 AM PST - 54 comments

Zeteo is a new media venture from news personality Mehdi Hasan, who was previously host of the long-running MSNBC/Peacock show The Mehdi Hasan Show. Zeteo is currently a Substack newsletter, YouTube channel, and on TikTok as well. Hasan plans to evenually offer a weekly news program and a podcast. He promises: content anchored by Mehdi Hasan and his sharp-edged journalism, the kind that takes the power of the media as a public service seriously. You’ll also see original content from an array of high-profile contributors: award-winning journalists, New York Times best-selling authors, Hollywood celebrities, and others. He began the debut with Debunked! The Top 7 Lies About Gaza. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 9:44 AM PST - 12 comments

“It’s not quite the same fun festival if I don’t protect Grandpa.” The Frozen Dead Guy and his quirky eponymous festival have been moved to Estes Park, Colorado after troubles keeping the freezer on 40 miles south in Nederland, establishing the world’s first cryonics museum. [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 9:32 AM PST - 7 comments

This Place has Everything!!!! (SL NYMag) No spoilers. Just a rolicking California real estate story. ungated
posted by wowenthusiast at 7:17 AM PST - 25 comments

How SARS-CoV-2 contributes to heart attacks and strokes. The virus that causes COVID-19 can infect coronary arteries and increase inflammation in atherosclerotic plaques. An NIH-funded research team, led by Dr. Chiara Giannarelli at New York University School of Medicine, analyzed coronary artery tissue samples from people who died of COVID-19 between May 2020 and May 2021. Results appeared in Nature Cardiovascular Research on September 28, 2023.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:46 AM PST - 20 comments

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies LexisNexis, which generates consumer risk profiles for the insurers, knew about every trip some G.M. drivers had taken in their cars, including when they sped, braked too hard or accelerated rapidly.
posted by spork at 6:15 AM PST - 128 comments

"For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us." (slCBC)
posted by Kitteh at 5:20 AM PST - 59 comments

Maybe you've heard of Smashmallow; maybe you even bought some. In the couple of years before the pandemic, they were everywhere. Now? Pfft. The problem wasn't the marshmallows — they were, by all accounts, delicious. The problem was scale. Smashmallows were designed to look like an artisanal, boutique product, but that wasn't enough for Sebastiani: He wanted to manufacture billions of them, to build a company that would bestride Candyland like a squishy colossus. That meant he had to grow fast and figure out the engineering on the fly — the classic entrepreneurial strategy of Silicon Valley. When it works, you get Tesla; when it doesn't, you get Theranos. from Silicon Valley tried to mass produce fancy marshmallows. It got messy, fast. [Business Insider]
posted by chavenet at 2:30 AM PST - 28 comments

Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge/Princess of Wales, hasn't been seen since Christmas. Kate was announced as having "planned" abdominal surgery in January, with a two week period of time in the hospital and resuming her royal duties has so far been postponed to at least Easter (a notice saying she'd be at an event in June was forcibly recalled). Kate has not wanted her medical issues disclosed (fair, since the most likely medical issues that take that long might be TMI), but after over two months of her not being seen in public, people started to get concerned. Kensington Palace refused to say much of anything on the topic and nobody seems to know anything. Finally, "proof of life" photographs were produced, BUT.... [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:31 PM PST - 370 comments

'Novae.' A supernova's vision.' by Thomas Vanz. (slyt. 3:09)
posted by clavdivs at 8:11 PM PST - 3 comments

Researchers use CT scans to peer inside the 100-million-year-old jaws of an ancient marine reptile. The rare Australian elasmosaur fossil gained global attention when it was discovered on an outback Queensland property in 2022.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:37 PM PST - 2 comments

Jakob Nielsen has a very long history in web UX design. His most recent post claims Accessibility Has Failed: Try Generative UI = Individualized UX. Accessibility pioneer Adrian Roselli summarizes the responses from many disabled web designers with equally long histories at Jakob Has Jumped the Shark. [more inside]
posted by Jesse the K at 3:51 PM PST - 29 comments

"Ghosting" by Kelly Lagor (2023) is an uncomfortable science fiction novella involving reinvention, memory, betrayal, drugs, sex, and a drier, hotter Southern California. She thought of her trunk, covered in stickers from places she could only confirm she’d been to by looking at entries she had no memory of putting in her diary. But these people were fellow like-minded misfits. They felt like a kind of home. She didn’t want to lie. Author's commentary.
posted by brainwane at 1:15 PM PST - 5 comments

It's your weekly free thread!
posted by Gorgik at 12:29 PM PST - 68 comments

Are We Watching the Internet Die? (Edward Zitron's 'Where's Your Ed At' newsletter)
posted by box at 11:52 AM PST - 67 comments

Andrea Long Chu, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and recently interviewed on the new podcast The Critic and Her Publics, argues the moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies. [more inside]
posted by overglow at 10:27 AM PST - 79 comments

Pro-climber Emil Abrahamsson tries a strongman grip strength competition [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 10:05 AM PST - 16 comments

Motor City's Burning: Detroit from Motown to the Stooges [1h, 2008, BBC] Is a look at the history of Detroit through the lens of music, from John Lee Hooker to Eminem. It's a really interesting scope through which to view this city.
posted by hippybear at 8:52 AM PST - 15 comments

Alabama's Biggest Secret - Operation Paperclip Video description posted to the YT channel: In the north of Alabama is the city of Huntsville. It's here where German scientists built NASA in secrecy after World War II. Operation Paperclip is still somewhat not talked about today in Huntsville. And for those who know, there are mixed feelings about it. Today we meet up with the grandson of one of the original German scientists to get an inside look at Operation Paperclip and how it left its permanent mark on the city of Huntsville. [more inside]
posted by elkevelvet at 7:24 AM PST - 33 comments

"Bizarre BEACHCOMBER war erupts over marbles deliberately tipped into ocean to be 'frosted', with purists saying its destroyed novelty value of finding one of the glass balls." A longer, more nuanced take from 2017 in Beachcombing Magazine. Also from 2017, "Is Seeded Glass Sea Glass?" Sea glass in the NYT back in 2010 [Archive]. Note that beachcombing is different when robots do it. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:49 AM PST - 79 comments

To know a tree best, it’s important to move beyond biology and to the emotions and sensations it stirs. Beauty as a branch of biology is underrated. from The Extraordinary Lives Of Coast Redwoods [Noema]
posted by chavenet at 2:32 AM PST - 5 comments

Waves are nature's ball-builders, working in various media including ice, algae, grass, and needles.
posted by a feather in amber at 8:52 PM PST - 2 comments

Docile, curious bandicoots thriving on fox-free island after close call with extinction. The eastern barred bandicoot was formerly extinct in the wild on the Australian mainland, but an increase in numbers on Phillip Island is giving conservationists cause to celebrate.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:29 PM PST - 5 comments

Cows: Nature's enemy. By turning grass into methane, cattle threaten to kill us all. But we know the cows themselves are not to blame; there are bacteria within their guts producing the methane. Now, scientists investigate the viruses lurking within the bacteria, that make methane production possible. "Microbial viruses act as secret drivers of climate change, new study finds." [more inside]
posted by mittens at 2:51 PM PST - 35 comments

They aren't all pets, and they aren't all funny, but they are all animals and they are all entertaining to watch. The FUNNIEST Pet Videos of 2023! 🤣 | BEST Compilation [1h20m]
posted by hippybear at 2:27 PM PST - 19 comments

Ken Block, a data expert hired by the Trump campaign in 2020, writes that he shot down false claim after false claim in an election that was not stolen. Block's account, “Disproven,” will be released Tuesday, and Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (recipient, along with his family, of death threats in the months following the election) provided the foreword. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:38 PM PST - 26 comments

What if we could see Spacetime? An immersive experience (SLYT)
posted by supermedusa at 10:53 AM PST - 7 comments

Chewing gum sales plunged during the pandemic as consumers stepped back from contexts in which they needed fresh breath. They still haven't recovered, and gum manufacturers are pivoting to marketing gum as stress relief. No matter what, we'll always have Annie's 2004 classic "Chewing Gum".
posted by escabeche at 9:08 AM PST - 36 comments

"When one shuts out the fact that the British infantry are mainly decked out in nylon tunics, and that some of the then historical detail regarding the battle has since been proven incorrect, nevertheless the action scenes, directed by Douglas Hickox, are remarkable in showing panoramic views of the battlefield ... In fact, no more than about 4,000 extras were used, but each part of the attack jig-saws very well together in showing the immediacy of each moment as it could well have been for those involved at the time."
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:50 AM PST - 33 comments

Their newly released cover of the Britney Spears' classic "...Baby One More Time" is just plain fun. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 6:00 AM PST - 18 comments

I'm far from being a balletomane. But these are extraordinary. I know nothing of the ballet world. I may have seen 2 in my entire life. [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 5:11 AM PST - 17 comments

Thank You For Listening is an intimate and sometimes harrowing gift from Joshua Ray Walker, one of the finest voices of any generation in country music. The stories he tells are familiar, relatable, and when he starts singing it's a revelation. If you listen to nothing else, check out Dumpster Diving. [more inside]
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 5:04 AM PST - 11 comments

The dexterity required bears emphasizing because resistance to the idea that an enslaved 12-year-old person of color could make a major botanical discovery endured well into the 20th century. In a 1938 racist historical novel Les Vanilliers, white French author Georges Limbour depicts Albius as possessing “the clumsiness of an ignorant insect.” Many botanists had tried to work out how to pollinate the plant by hand and failed. In the 1830s, Charles Morren, professor of botany in Liége, Belgium, successfully pollinated vanilla using a microscope and tiny scissors. But the method “takes probably 20 minutes” Jennings says, and was not useful for agriculture. from The Boy Who Was King of Vanilla [Nautilus; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:26 AM PST - 7 comments

Sycamore Gap tree seedlings sprout, bringing refreshed hope after landmark was illegally felled. Seeds from the iconic Sycamore Gap tree that was illegally felled in the UK last year are springing into life at a specialist conservation centre in an effort to give the tree new life.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:14 AM PST - 5 comments

You'll remember eco-communist philosopher Kohei Saito from our previous discussion of his surprising bestseller on the connection between Marx and the environment. But...was there a connection, or was Saito seeing an eco-Marx who never existed? More to the point, must we give up All The Things under communism? Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips offer a resounding 'no,' in their Jacobin review of Saito's newly-translated book: "Kohei Saito’s 'Start From Scratch' Degrowth Communism."
posted by mittens at 4:32 PM PST - 35 comments

Koalas were assumed wiped out from north-west Sydney by this fire but sightings are rewriting the story. Devastating bushfires left koalas no chance of survival in 2002 but confirmed koala spottings in the area are signalling a population bouncing back.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:09 PM PST - 7 comments

The Getty museum has released a huge trove of images under a CC0 license (essentially waiving copyright). Images can be downloaded in high resolution. [more inside]
posted by adamrice at 1:00 PM PST - 16 comments

My Cat Shoots Rubber Bands From Her Paws [6m16s] My black cat Serena has not only learned how to shoot rubber bands, she has mastered the art. I feel like a circus hawker, but YOU WON'T SEE THIS ANYWHERE ELSE BUT HERE! ... Serena is a 4 year old Domestic Short Hair. She has no top incisors, so her tongue sticks out ALL THE TIME!!!! 😺
posted by hippybear at 11:59 AM PST - 20 comments

"As soon as Senator Katie Britt started speaking, I knew exactly who she is. She is so many of the pastor's wives and Sunday School teachers I knew growing up in an Evangelical church. Be sweet. Obey."
posted by clawsoon at 11:37 AM PST - 93 comments

PSA: Like a lot of MeFites, I keep up with the site via RSS -- specifically Feedly. In fact, their stats show there are nearly 2,000 subscribers to the same MetaFilter feed I use on Feedly alone. Unfortunately, this feed is hosted on Google's aging Feedburner platform, which is increasingly unreliable as a service. This manifested last month when Feedly was unable to update the MeFi feed for several days. If Google eventually shuts down the service, then anyone depending on that feed to stay engaged with MeFi may lose contact with the site without even realizing it. The good news is that the site has a new set of self-hosted feeds that should remain active no matter what Google does. So, if you read the site using an RSS reader, please take a moment to update your reader to the new feeds -- and check inside for a list of FPPs you might have missed during the outage. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:09 AM PST - 6 comments

Circles and Slashes. We see these everywhere. Where did they come from? And what do you call it? Designed by committee. Really unpopular in North America, until a movie legitimized it with an incorrectly drawn example. It’s everywhere telling us what not to do.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:11 AM PST - 28 comments

What the hell is Peepy? "A peepy thrives in the shadows, using its wit to stun enemies. Its ability to steal may surprise you. It loves peanuts and will commit any heinous act to get them." In our sad real world, Peppy is a little plush animal that's vaguely peanut-shaped itself, with a beak and big eyes both round. In the lore, a Peepy has two loves in life: eating peanuts and committing crimes. The adventures of Peepy and "friends" on video are part of an elaborate ad campaign by itemLabel with a jolly but vaguely unsettling vibe. Most of it has strange and infectious music by Japanese musician Emamouse. Here's Peepy's Theme Song; a Nintendo DS-like console explains how to care for Peepy; and then there's the amazingly trippy animation Peepy's Secret (warning: bright lights and flashing). [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:34 AM PST - 14 comments

"Abarat IV and V are amongst the books at my feet. So is the Third and final book of The Art and the sequel to The Thief of Always. There are also return visits to characters and mythologies you may have thought I would never return to. I hope I am still able to surprise you in the decades ahead." Legendary horror author Clive Barker announces plans to end convention appearances, having decided it is time for him to direct his focus fully back to writing.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:27 AM PST - 28 comments

The concept of the revue is that "Howard" stages a musical. As he struggles to do so, dealing with the large egos of performers or scenery gone wrong, he hears the words of his high school counselor, "Miss Roundhole". She sarcastically said, "When pigs fly!" in response to his ambitions. The characters in the revue (all played by men) appear in sketches: a song to unlikely loves ("Torch Song #1"); four life-sized queens from a deck of playing cards ("You've Got to Stay in the Game"); and dancers make a case for being yourself ("Light in the Loafers"). "The Melody Barn" is a take-off on classic summer stock themes; "Laughing Matters," is a defense of fun in sad times. [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 4:05 AM PST - 1 comment

Who knows where we get our desires from? That’s a question feminists were asking back in the 1960s. And also: Would it be possible to exorcise patriarchal or heteronormative desires from a feminist sexuality? There are quite considerable debates right now about whether we can identify healthy or authentically feminist sexual desires, because how do we know which ones are created by the patriarchy? A young woman’s interest in romantic heroes, for example, could be entirely dependent on a patriarchal fantasy. But how do you get rid of that particular fantasy? I don’t think it’s possible. from Is This Desire?, an interview with Clarissa Smith [CW: talking about porn]
posted by chavenet at 2:54 AM PST - 12 comments

90s Time Traveler Discovers Apple Vision Pro [5:14 YT] Another series by Pitch Meeting’s Ryan George. (Seriously, the eyes are creepy so be prepared.) [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 7:42 PM PST - 14 comments

Researchers discover Earth's earliest fossilised forest in UK. Scientists discover the oldest fossilised forest known on Earth, dating back 390 million years, according to a new study. To put that in context, dinosaurs first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:29 PM PST - 6 comments

There are thirty Reversi (also known by the trademark name Othello) board game apps in the Google Play store. This is the best one and you can play it here in your browser. No ads, no trackers, no in-app purchases. It's a web app (the mobile app just opens the website.) A simple user interface with a minimalist approach to configurations. Completely free and open source. Written in Rust and TypeScript by Nate Stringham. Othello is a simple game but widely explored in computer science. [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 7:19 PM PST - 21 comments

You're an actual Vault Dweller! A new Fallout tv series trailer has dropped.
posted by doctornemo at 6:59 PM PST - 18 comments

It is one of the most devastating weapons a fast bowler can own — but the art of swing is steeped in mystery and myths that only science can explain. Inside the science of what makes a cricket ball swing - A(ustralian)BC [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 6:48 PM PST - 7 comments

"When the academic reviews of The New Science of the Enchanted Universe began to appear, following its publication a year after Sahlins’s death, I noticed a strange phenomenon: For a genre conventionally prosaic, the scholarly critics kept having encounters with the metaperson of Sahlins himself. When Katherine Pratt Ewing, a professor of Islam at Columbia University, sat down to write her review at her dining table on a Sunday morning, she suddenly found herself slipping into “an almost hypnagogic state in which Marshall was a felt presence,” she recalled in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. “It wasn’t a matter of belief about whether this was possible—it just was.” 'The enchanted worlds of Marshall Sahlins' (via A&L Daily)
posted by clavdivs at 4:36 PM PST - 3 comments

To be born beautiful is a gift, but to end up hot can be a curse. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is also true that you can look in the mirror and be the beholder of yourself. Beauty is something intriguing; “beauty is not a need but an ecstasy,” the poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote. “A heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.” This is not the same thing as being hot. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 2:50 PM PST - 76 comments

George Santos announced last night, during the SOTU address, that he's running for Congress. His new target is NY 1 (Eastern Long Island). [more inside]
posted by Marky at 1:34 PM PST - 41 comments

Hell Gate writer Esther Wang shares a Slack discussion “as a public service, so that no cis man will ever clown you for assuming, as I did, that they don't want to get piss on themselves when they pee.”
posted by Going To Maine at 9:55 AM PST - 195 comments

About five years ago, Seth Rogen posted a picture on Instagram of seven rudimentary clay objects with the caption: “So maybe I joined a pottery studio so I could start making my own ashtrays.” Now, he’s taken his love for pottery to the next level by signing up as an executive producer for the competition show The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down. He also appears throughout the series as a guest judge. Seth tells Tom Power what inspired his love of pottery, if he finds it therapeutic, and how the imagery and design around weed paraphernalia has changed since legalization. [31m]
posted by hippybear at 7:12 AM PST - 11 comments

The British Library explains what happened and why recovery took so long. Part of the problem: "Our major software systems cannot be brought back in their pre-attack form, either because they are no longer supported by the vendor or because they will not function on the new secure infrastructure that is currently being rolled out." [more inside]
posted by humbug at 6:34 AM PST - 35 comments

Dragon Ball Creator Akira Toriyama, also character designer for video games like Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest has passed away at age 68.
posted by Pachylad at 5:46 AM PST - 37 comments

The Sea Creatures That Opened a New Mystery About MH370. Could freaky barnacles do what advanced technology couldn’t — find the missing plane?
posted by goatdog at 5:31 AM PST - 22 comments

"1980 was an ambitious year for the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union (VSU), the largest and oldest Spiritualist association in Australia, and the world’s longest continuously running Spiritualist organisation. That year, the VSU hosted the Australian visit of renowned British spirit artist, medium and author Coral Polge (1924–2001). The VSU had been trying as far back as 1975 to bring her out and finally succeeded five years later. Polge appeared in two shows at the Kew Civic Centre, a large venue in Melbourne’s affluent inner eastern suburbs. The VSU advertised these in a short-lived New Age newspaper, Ziriuz, alongside articles on alternative medicine, astrology, yoga, vegetarianism, biodynamic gardening and Buddhism." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:37 AM PST - 4 comments

You can build a complex society on that pairing, and many times over the course of human history, people have. In the ancient Middle East, lentils were one of the main sources of protein, far more important in most people's diets than meat or animal products. from How the lentil was tamed – and helped human societies thrive [BBC] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:37 AM PST - 37 comments

A series of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones and variations in which it asserts ownership over its “5x6 grid” and “green tiles to indicate correct guesses.”
posted by one for the books at 1:18 AM PST - 34 comments

Program providing artificial leopard furs for religious/cultural use to save the life of real leopards. After discovering that Shembe followers were using as many as 15,000 leopard furs during religious gatherings, Panthera, in partnership with the leadership of the Shembe Church, initiated the Furs for Life program in 2013. Working with the Shembe community and graphic designers, Panthera created high-quality and affordable synthetic leopard fur capes, known as Heritage Furs or amambatha. Supported by Cartier for Nature Philanthropy, the Royal Commission for AlUla, and Peace Parks Foundation, the program has distributed more than 18,500 capes to the Shembe Church, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in authentic leopard fur use. Heritage Furs have thus prevented thousands of leopard deaths and have even resulted in some wild leopard populations stabilizing or increasing in the region, all while promoting a culturally sensitive conservation solution supported by Shembe leaders.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:49 PM PST - 4 comments

The man in the iron lung (The Guardian). Paul Alexander interviewed during the COVID pandemic about surviving polio for a long life with his yellow iron lung, and his life as an angry activist. An invigorating and inspiring interview - and I checked, he’s still with us!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:50 PM PST - 9 comments

"An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge." More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output. [more inside]
posted by pfeffernusse at 8:19 PM PST - 16 comments

"As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in is entirety."
Ubuweb, founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, was the best repository of avant-garde material in the Internet. Over the decades it accumulated an unparalleled collection of poetry, mp3's and video. [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:32 PM PST - 18 comments

In the Washington Monthly, How to End Republican Exploitation of Rural America and in the Washington Post, this book about Trump voters goes for the jugular. (gift link) [more inside]
posted by Rash at 5:30 PM PST - 57 comments

Video: Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes (with transcript)! web3isgoinggreat's Molly White's fantastic explanation of how to get started and lots of other useful advice. White suggests that new editors to get started writing about something they know nothing about: for example, the silverspotted tiger moth. If you are a subject matter expert in a particular topic, you don't know what other people don't know and may not be able to write a good 101-level entry. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:12 PM PST - 21 comments

With dismissing the also-rans and cementing a rematch few wanted, the 2024 presidential race has officially entered the general election stage -- just in time to watch Joe Biden's 2024 State of the Union address (in about an hour -- 9PM Eastern). The first before Speaker Mike Johnson (and potentially the last of his presidency), the address is especially high-stakes this year, with anxious Democrats counting on Biden to demonstrate competence, energy, and a hopeful vision amidst a slew of dismal polling. Anticipated topics include Ukraine funding, abortion and personal freedom, fighting corporate price-gouging, the GOP-blocked border bill, and a new plan to construct a humanitarian seaport in Gaza. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:01 PM PST - 276 comments

Nick Knacks is a retrospective series on the history of children's entertainment network Nickelodeon, looking at the network's growth and philosophy by taking a look at every show it aired in (mostly) chronological order. The series - now covering 1991, one of (if not the) most important years for the network - has hit a milestone with the primary series hitting episode #100, which covers the network's first "traditional" multi-camera soundstage sitcom, Clarissa Explains It All. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:50 PM PST - 32 comments

The Oregon Trail is not just a game, it's a cherished piece of gaming history that transported players to a bygone era of exploration and survival. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:55 AM PST - 34 comments

Very Rare Yellow-Billed Loon Visits the Las Vegas Strip, Hangs Out in the Bellagio Fountains. The out-of-place bird prompted the hotel to put its famed fountain show on hold before biologists captured and moved the bird—one of the country’s ten rarest—to better habitat.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:49 AM PST - 9 comments

The Son Of Dracula film featured here is not the early 40s Lon Cheney film from Universal, but instead is the 1974 film from Apple [Wikipedia] (as in The Beatles), starring Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson. If you insist on watching this, here is the full film, Son Of Dracula [1h30m]. If you insist on torturing yourself further, here is the Son Of Dracula Soundtrack Album [YT playlist, background]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:14 AM PST - 18 comments

Rooster Teeth is shutting down. Warner Bros. Discovery is ending the Austin-based media enterprise after 21 years.
posted by doctornemo at 7:20 AM PST - 31 comments

The nation of Haiti has been rocked by far more than its fair share of disasters in recent decades, from major hurricanes to a devastating 2010 earthquake (which killed upwards of 200,000) to the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic. The humanitarian situation has been worsened by escalating political instability, with the "legal banditry" of President Martelly followed by the 2021 assassination of President Moïse amidst a wave of mass protests and criminal violence. The ongoing turmoil reached a fever pitch this week as gang leader Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier led an audacious jailbreak of the country's prisons, freeing thousands of convicts that have joined forces in a united front that controls most of Port-au-Prince and credibly threatens to overthrow the government. Acting president Ariel Henry (himself a prime suspect in Moïse's murder) remains stranded outside the country, having secured a deployment of Kenyan police to bolster a multinational force. Most Haitian citizens, however, oppose foreign intervention -- understandable after the last UN mission triggered a major cholera epidemic. The Biden administration is allegedly pressuring the embattled Henry to resign (an improvement over the last time the US was involved in Haitian politics). For their part, a coalition of Haitian civil society offers a possible solution in the Montana Accord, a multi-stage plan to restore electoral democracy. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:32 AM PST - 45 comments

Changing lives through a love of books and reading What's your favourite source of legal and free ebooks ? [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 5:23 AM PST - 23 comments

Mike Mignola on Hellboy, drawing, creativity, and monsters at the Society of Illustrators in 2019. [SLYT][1h56m]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:27 AM PST - 7 comments

The consequences of sustained population contraction are the stinger in the tail of our current predicament, because it wasn’t just our technologies that were designed around the short-term condition of rapid growth driven by abundant fossil fuel energy—so were our economies. It seems like simple common sense to most people nowadays that assets will on average increase in value, investments will yield a return, and businesses will make a profit. Stop and think about that for a minute, though. Why does this happen? Because the economy grows every quarter. Why does the economy grow every quarter? There are many reasons, but they all ultimately boil down to the fact that the population increases. With every passing year, there are more people joining the workforce, buying assets, making investments, and purchasing goods and services. Thus population growth is the engine behind economic growth. from An Unfamiliar World by John Michael Greer [Ecosophia]
posted by chavenet at 12:51 AM PST - 62 comments

In the past week or so, the internet has suddenly become incredibly aware of a unique approach to sponsorship taken around twenty years ago, when a beer company in Chile sponsored TV broadcasts of the Star Wars trilogy with no commercial breaks. Instead, they inserted small, subtle edits for product placement along the way from time to time. Needless to say, people have been enjoying riffing on this particular theme.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:38 PM PST - 22 comments

Research project focused on crucial ecosystem gets $1.4m boost. A major university research project into critical peatland ecosystems in Western Australia has been given $1.4 million Australian ($921,707 US) by a philanthropic organisation.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:41 PM PST - 1 comment

Okay, so there's a bug in the bottom corner and a timecode and a pesky watermark, but this MTV News special feature about Generation X from 1991 [50m] is still pretty amazing. Narrated by Kurt Loder.
posted by hippybear at 6:06 PM PST - 126 comments

"...Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari and other researchers..., though they may treat hunter-gatherers with respect, still claim that settling down is a form of progress, leading toward more social complexity, with accompanying political and economic advantages. And so, agriculture is still seen as a checkpoint on a one-way road to progress and the development of large societies. This remains a familiar story. It is also wrong."
posted by clawsoon at 5:32 PM PST - 28 comments

It is no surprise that even today, Europe only feels guilt about the episode of the Holocaust and not the principle of genocide which made it possible... It seeks penance for the Holocaust but reconciles itself with the principle of genocide which has been ongoing for centuries, and which was perfected in colonial occupations. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:25 PM PST - 77 comments

Enforcement of the Digital Markets Act began today in Europe. The Verge covers how various big "gatekeeper" tech companies have adjusted or augmented the services they provide in Europe, and in some cases globally, to comply with the law, which among other things, mandates new requirements for data portability and sharing between services owned by different companies, and limits on sharing data between services owned by the same company. This new regulation targets six tech giants, all of which have publicized at least some of their plans and intentions to adjust their offerings to align with the new law in public statements (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft). But as the deadline to comply has approached there's also been a fair amount of sniping, as well as some questionable decisions and outages possibly caused by last-minute DMA-related updates to services. [more inside]
posted by potrzebie at 4:21 PM PST - 11 comments

Major newspapers restructure their comics pages and guess who's missing? The answer will probably not surprise you, but it's disheartening anyway. [more inside]
posted by kittensyay at 12:53 PM PST - 54 comments

Look, I’m sure a ton of science and hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) worth of research went into creating Giro’s new time trial helmet, which was recently unveiled on Visma-Lease a Bike’s Instagram. And I’m sure its design helps save a watt or two, which, at the upper echelon of bicycle racing, absolutely matters. Especially when you’re talking time trials. But… and it’s a big but… look at this thing. from Visma-Lease a Bike’s New Time Trial Helmets Are Ridiculous [Bicycling]
posted by chavenet at 11:55 AM PST - 37 comments

Playbill gets Bebe Neuwirth to sit down and talk about her history in theater. Two-time Tony winner Bebe Neuwirth discusses Chicago, A Chorus Line, and her Broadway return in Cabaret. [... and so much more, 40m] She is so full of joy and thrill about her career, it exudes through the screen and runs all over the place. Watch with care. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:50 AM PST - 12 comments

"Some of the most heated debates on online forums involve definitions. What is a Euro game? What is a medium-heavy game? What constitutes “too much luck.” The definition of worker placement is no exception."
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:12 AM PST - 37 comments

Bert Stiles (1920-1944) was a writer of short stories who began flying B17 Flying Fortress missions into Europe with the USAAF in April 1944. He was killed in November the same year. His memoirs were published by his mother as Serenade for the Big Bird (1947UK/1952US). Here's a 5 minute excerpt read at the Cambridge American Cemetery by a British WWII history buff. Google Books:Text starts "There are all kinds of people, senators and whores and barristers, and bankers and dishwashers . . ." [cw: next sentence contains a MeFi-banned slur] [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:09 AM PST - 21 comments

Markets are inherently fragile, rooted as they are in a common delusion, and the carbon market was especially chimerical because so many participants knew that they were profiting from a farce of their own making. They were trading for the sake of trading, fabricating the impression of value and demand where none existed. “In some countries,” Europol reported, “up to 90 percent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.” from Watch It Burn; Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century [Atavist; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:38 AM PST - 3 comments

Bob became well-known for designing the concept of modern rock and roll systems we see today. Bob designed touring sound systems for rock and roll bands such as the Grateful Dead, the Who, and many others. Bob’s career was jumpstarted when the Grateful Dead arrived in St. Louis to play the Fabulous Fox in February 1970 without a sound system. [more inside]
posted by readyfreddy at 11:06 PM PST - 20 comments

Sea urchin roe provides international opportunity for NSW factories and workers alike. Workers from Australia and overseas help far south coast sea urchin factories crack the export market for the roe of a marine menace. Left unchecked, too-high numbers of sea urchins can devastate the marine environment. (Off the coast of California, for example, sea urchins were devastating the kelp forests until the otter population started coming back, eating some of the sea urchins, and letting some of the kelp forests grow back.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:16 PM PST - 6 comments

Shafiqah Hudson, who had worked in nonprofits but from 2014 on dedicated herself to Twitter activism--spotting and combating the "#endfathersday" scam ten years ago--died on February 15, at 46. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 8:13 PM PST - 32 comments

When it is warm, or warm enough, the site is gentle, a haven. [...] Your fellow man, the government, Klaus Schwab, the Dobbs ruling — their tentacles of harm and control feel very far away. [New York Magazine]

Why did a mother with no backcountry experience take her sister and 13-year-old son to live off the grid on a 10,000-foot mountain during a Colorado winter? [Outside Magazine]
posted by riruro at 8:11 PM PST - 27 comments

YouTube has decided that modern dance groups are the thing to share with me right now. Three very different but thrilling examples: Here's dance group CDK doing a phenomenal routine to Somebody That I Used To Know. [3m50s] And Moon Dance performing at the World DanceSport Federation Championship last year [7m]. And finally, personal favorite Avantgardey performing as part of a larger ensemble for the Year Of The Dragon [7m]. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:09 PM PST - 19 comments

The folks over at Stonemaier Games have a nice, lengthy set of pages and links about how to design a tabletop game. Game design previously.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:06 PM PST - 14 comments

You may remember Ottawa County for the national headlines it made when Jamestown Township defunded (and then re-funded its library.  or perhaps you remember reading about the takeover of the County Board by a slate of ultraconservative political newcomers.  Since they've come to power 'Ottawa Impact' has both flailed and failed, alienating community groups and provoking numerous lawsuits. See inside for the latest updates. [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:50 AM PST - 16 comments

The Art and History of Lettering Comics is available free on letterer Todd Klein's blog. Originally planned as a print book, he's posted the whole thing online. From the early 1900s to today, Todd covers the evolution of word balloons, special effects lettering and comic book and newspaper comic letterers known and unknown and much more.
posted by marxchivist at 10:34 AM PST - 21 comments

The Controversial Sound Only 2% Of People Hear (Benn Jordan, YouTube/Piped/Invidious, 32m38s): Since the early 1960's, an increasing number of people have been hearing (and feeling) a sound causing everything from annoyance to psychosis to death. We have a deeply objective look at what could be causing it.
posted by flabdablet at 10:15 AM PST - 89 comments

The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs’s Greatest Rival Gareth Edwards has begun a series of articles on the other characters of Silicon Valley called The Crazy Ones. In this article, he tells the tale of Adam Osborne, writer, publisher, computer as a product genius, and the person who brought us the first portable computer, as it had everything you need and a handle. [more inside]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:22 AM PST - 25 comments

Super Tuesday, when the greatest number of states hold primary elections, is a sleepier affair this year with Joe Biden and Donald Trump almost certain to win their respective nominations. But there are still some interesting results to look out for, namely: Can Nikki Haley win any contest outside of D.C. (and what will she do after today)? How significant will Biden's "uncommitted" protest vote be? Whither California on policing and crime -- and which two candidates will emerge from the state's blanket Senate primary? Does a new Trump protégé rise in North Carolina? And will establishment Republicans be able to derail their most problematic House candidates? More: FiveThirtyEight looks at California, Alabama / Texas, and North Carolina - Your guide to every state voting on Super Tuesday - How to watch the Super Tuesday results like a pro - States with same-day voter registration - Find your polling place
posted by Rhaomi at 7:31 AM PST - 185 comments

(The child has opened the book again)
INDISS: Hark. (Closing the book with one enormous hand, scattering the dried flowers) Look not too closely, girl.
CHILD: I want to hear the voice, Indiss!
INDISS: (holding the book) I’m sorry. It isn’t fair. But we live beyond the end of such things. In the shadow of a great catastrophe. Or within its bleaching light.

Evan Dahm just finished the first passage of his latest web comic, 3rd Voice. In his words: 3rd Voice is a long-format fantasy graphic novel updating with one scene or so a week. It concerns an invented world in a state of apocalyptic crisis, and the precarious lives of many people therein. [more inside]
posted by destrius at 7:28 AM PST - 15 comments

Millenials and other oldsters might remember the "Netscape Now!" buttons of internet yore. Today, these buttons are nothing more than a low resolution memory, but the operator of hellnet has done the work to bring them back. They did so by scanning the internet archive's Geocities archive for 88x31 pixel resolution images. Now, thanks to their work, you too can experience the surprisingly rich creative possibilities afforded by such a humble canvas.
posted by signsofrain at 7:01 AM PST - 26 comments

I've never seen anything like this before, really. Here's Purrlude in D for harp (Miss Kitty), a single instrument. But also a String Quarcat no.4 (Cotton) or a Quincat no.2 in G (Snickers) Or even the large ensemble Sympawny no.4 (Chubby Cat). The entire account of Sympawnies by Noam Oxman is full of musical whimsy that combines art and composition and animals. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:32 AM PST - 8 comments

Weed that costs farmers $100 million a year could help create sustainable cement alternative. Prickly paddy melon is a major problem for the Australian agricultural industry but researchers say it may have potential to reduce soil erosion and offset the construction industry's large carbon footprint.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:00 AM PST - 17 comments

There are no rules on literary adaptation. You’re trying to keep the plot. And obviously there are key plot things that we do keep. And we keep almost all the dialogue: apart from one big scene, with the secretary and the date, almost all the dialogue’s from the book. Because I think Brett has a great ear for dialogue. But as a novel, American Psycho is quite experimental. It’s very slippery. It shifts unexpectedly from first person to third person. It’ll go from something very realistic into a sort of dreamscape or something very hallucinatory. from On adapting ‘American Psycho’ by Mary Harron [LRB] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:15 AM PST - 6 comments

The Lost Universe (science.nasa.gov, 03/04/2024): "A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth's timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge? This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system." Adventure design by Christina Mitchell. Graphic design by Michelle Belleville.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:12 PM PST - 14 comments

Eyeglasses’ Arrival: How Immigrants Transformed Medieval England’s Vision. Eyeglasses can be considered one of the most important inventions of the Middle Ages. A recent study shows that by the 1440s people in England could buy their own spectacles, thanks to a group of immigrants living just outside of London.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:54 PM PST - 23 comments

Fran Drescher Interviews Barbra Streisand--SAG 2024 Life Achievement Recipient [35m] Because 50 hours of autobiography audiobook might not be enough.
posted by hippybear at 1:35 PM PST - 2 comments

Supreme Court rules states cannot remove Trump from ballot for insurrection The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states cannot disqualify former President Donald Trump from the ballot for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. In an unsigned opinion, a majority of the justices held that only Congress – and not the states – can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to disqualify individuals from holding office who had previously served in the federal or state government before the war but then supported the Confederacy, against candidates for federal offices. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 11:36 AM PST - 92 comments

If you're a gamer of a certain age you've probably played a fair amount of "boomer shooters". Your Dooms, Quakes, Dukes, Unreals....you get the picture. Pretty much any FPS pre-CoD and Halo. The unquestioned king of the boomer shooter is Civvie11. [more inside]
posted by Diskeater at 11:16 AM PST - 36 comments

Purim, the Jewish Carnivale/celebration of averted genocide/celebration of violent revenge, is fast approaching. It's a complicated story that brings up complicated feelings, and usually we only tell the fun parts to our children and focus on dressing up in costumes, having fun with noisemakers, getting so drunk we can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, and arguing about whether Hamantaschen are actually decent cookies or not. Let's do that last one! [more inside]
posted by cabbage raccoon at 9:42 AM PST - 37 comments

From 2003: Danny O'Brien wrote:

...we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t....There are only two registers on the Net; public and secret.

with further thoughts on implications for conversation and norms. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 9:36 AM PST - 18 comments

Strands is a new word game from The New York Times, released in beta today.
posted by box at 9:22 AM PST - 29 comments

10 Iconic Fantasy Novels Ripe for Rediscovery
posted by Artw at 9:11 AM PST - 109 comments

Full Of Themselves A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. Here's a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 7:41 AM PST - 77 comments

In Canada, the maple trees are roaring early; some producers started tapping in early February. But not all of that syrup hits the shelves. Some of it winds up in the world's only Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. What do you use maple syrup for, or do you prefer an alternative plant extract? Or, talk about anything you like!
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:33 AM PST - 123 comments

"In this sense, the understanding of cartomancy that the authorities had was the direct opposite of how it often worked in practice: far from ‘sowing discord in social relations, and mistrust within families’ as one journalist put it, cartomancy aimed to mend broken relations by reconnecting each card to its wider system of meanings. ... What this meant for clients in practical terms was rarely articulated by cartomancers." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:34 AM PST - 4 comments

One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern London was plague. Starting in 1603, government officials published weekly plague mortality statistics in a broadside series known as the Bills of Mortality. The bills grew to include not just plague deaths but also dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their continued publication for decades after the final outbreak of plague in England. Between 1603 and 1752, almost 8,000 different weekly bills were published. Death by Numbers aims to transcribe and publish the information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational analysis.
posted by chavenet at 1:39 AM PST - 10 comments

Cole Brauer’s Instagram feed hardly feels like the work of someone racing a 40-foot sailboat around the world in the Global Solo Challenge. But Ms. Brauer, 29, is not an average ocean racer. In 2022, Ms. Brauer had tried out for another competition, the Ocean Race, which is considered the pinnacle of professional ocean racing. Sailors in that race are highly trained, wear matching foul weather gear and have corporate sponsors. And most of them are men. Ms. Brauer, who had sailed thousands of miles on high performance ocean racing boats, felt she was ready to join their ranks. (NYTimes - archive) But after competing in trials in France, Ms. Brauer was told she was “too short for the Southern Ocean” and was sent on her way.
posted by ShooBoo at 8:15 PM PST - 16 comments

Brisbane City Council to reintroduce koalas to four bushland areas. Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has announced a partnership with the University of Queensland to reintroduce koalas in areas across the city, including Mt Coot-tha.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Kate Wagner (a cycling journalist best known for her blog McMansion Hell) takes a trip to the Austin Grand Prix for Road and Track magazine as a guest of INEOS F1 team. A subeditor chose the pull quote “If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.”. Shortly after, an editor chose to pull the article entirely.
posted by ambrosen at 4:31 PM PST - 90 comments

The Fall of Minneapolis (IMDb), a right-wing conspiracist documentary arguing that Derek Chauvin was innocent of wrongdoing against George Floyd, has recently gained some traction in more “respectable” conservative circles.
Long-time police reporter Radley Balko (mefi’s own) has written a three-part critique of the documentary breaking down the film’s inaccuracies, the naïvely positive coverage it received in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and the various corporate and social systems that work to protect police racism and violence: “The Retconning of George Floyd” · “The Autopsy” · “The Great Flattening” [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 3:08 PM PST - 22 comments

Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked the socks off the straight fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday in her home in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 102. [New York Times; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:34 PM PST - 33 comments

An eighteen-year-old Karen Carpenter going wild on the drums on Dancing in the Street (and the same song again). This is from back when the Carpenter siblings were two-thirds of the Dick Carpenter Trio. At fifteen she was already a fantastic drummer, as can be heard on their cover of Caravan. Here she is in 1976 on stage doing a drum solo on multiple sets that turns into a drum duet and here's a similar routine from the 1976 Carpenters TV special except she's duetting with herself. By then she rarely drummed on their songs, though here she's drumming on Help in 1974. But in 1971 she still drummed on most tracks and that version of the band was recorded for the BBC in a 40 minute concert. Finally, here's a discussion thread by fans about her as a drummer.
posted by Kattullus at 1:53 PM PST - 13 comments

Maybe you remember YouTuber Ted Nivision from a previous post. Here we find him slowly dissolving his sanity in a new adventure: I Watched Every Barbie Movie Ever Made [1h50m], which culminates with the 2023 Barbie film. It doesn't go well.
posted by hippybear at 9:32 AM PST - 10 comments

Mexica, Mercedes, and Indigenous Voices in Maps "There’s a popular poster of the world composed of satellite images, with continents arrayed horizontally like the Mercator wall map we knew in grade school. [ . . . ] consider the choice to view the world from such a distance, without borders or place names, where green, brown, deep blue and icy white surely obscure all traces of civilization, along with the harm humans have done."
posted by Blue Genie at 9:27 AM PST - 1 comment

"Tzatziki made Greek yogurt famous, and gave life to the tasteless cucumber. More garlic is used in Greece to make Tzatziki, than any other dish in our cuisine. There is no order given in a restaurant without saying 'vale kai ena tzatzikaki'. There would be no gyros without it, no fried zucchini and no lamb on the spit without a side order of TZATZIKI."
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:11 AM PST - 29 comments

What value do we put on labour and can you copyright a tuber? Loved this glimpse of a fervent hobby and the associated economy, with shades of tulipmania delving into thoughtful comments on what it means to make a living from what you love.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:42 AM PST - 15 comments

How We Fix Wealth Inequality (Gary's Economics, Piped/YouTube, 13m37s)
posted by flabdablet at 3:27 AM PST - 40 comments

The amount of profit that Amazon makes from third-party sellers, as opposed to AWS or some other division, might sound like a technical distinction, but it’s essential to the case against the company. The FTC alleges that Amazon’s low-price image is a mirage: According to the FTC, the company actually keeps prices higher than they would be in a competitive market—not just on Amazon but across the internet—squeezing consumers and small businesses in the process. from Amazon’s Big Secret [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:26 AM PST - 12 comments

Ezra Klein calls for Biden to step aside. Decrying the seeming inevitability of the Biden nomination, Klein calls for a hard look at Biden's many weaknesses (Gaza, age, polling against TFG), and points out that a candidate can be selected at the convention. Subsequent discussions focused on historical convention selection and answering a wide range of listener questions. [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 7:03 PM PST - 688 comments

This was a way to experiment, free of the pressures of a formal publication TinyLetter shut down on February 29th. [more inside]
posted by craniac at 5:02 PM PST - 11 comments

It’s early 2024, nights are shortening (at least in the northern hemisphere), and here’s another roundup of weird audio dramas to take your mind off other horrors. While these roundups are, of course, invaluable, you might want to check out the Audio Drama Directory as a searchable guide to audio dramas and actual plays (mostly SF, Fantasy, and/or Horror). [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:41 PM PST - 11 comments

Laurie Anderson has been working and playing with a model of her late husband for years. The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:26 PM PST - 14 comments

ContraPoints has a new video essay out, titled simply Twilight [2h53m]. It covers quite a lot. Like a lot more than you think it's going to cover. I enjoyed it and learned things.
posted by hippybear at 12:33 PM PST - 19 comments

daniel schmactenberger on the metacrisis. [slyt] "why is it that no literally no country, no company, in the world wants climate change. no nobody is like climate change is the world that I want, but we're orienting to it so fast and we can't stop and nobody can stop it because we all want stuff that requires energy that is driving that thing and nobody wants species Extinction and nobody really wants to live in a world with automated AI weapons but we're all racing to build them so what is actually driving the world to a world that literally nobody wants I think there's a deeper analysis of that and the market is a part of it" [more inside]
posted by danjo at 11:47 AM PST - 28 comments

"It is common to describe worldbuilding projects as encyclopedic, but few worldbuilding projects have the space (or the interest) to investigate the depths of historical-psychological complexity, ambiguity, unknowability, and irreducibility that might be seen in the edit history of a single contested Wikipedia page—to say nothing of the epistemological failures of Wikipedia itself, its biases and overwhelmingly vast absences. Worldbuilding as a totalizing project cannot help but fail." Vajra Chandrasekera (author of The Saint of Bright Doors), "The Lone and Level Sands"--a brief but critical look at worldbuilding that starts with last year's profiles of Brandon Sanderson and grows to take in the entire project of writing fiction (ed. note: i died at the sentence, some books are television). [more inside]
posted by mittens at 10:20 AM PST - 35 comments

Things Unexpectedly Named After People. For example: Main Street in San Francisco is named after Charles Main. By Roland Crosby. Via.
posted by russilwvong at 9:12 AM PST - 76 comments

She is a brilliant fluffy asshole with a million opinions who barks at anyone with the audacity to walk past her property as though she is going to tear them limb from limb and has never, ever been physically aggressive with anyone. Content warning: pet illness; it's very very dusty in here. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:08 AM PST - 14 comments

Asian Elephants mourn and bury their babies, Indian study finds. A study conducted between 2022 and 2023 finds elephants travel a great distance to bury their young with care.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:23 AM PST - 14 comments

"Storytellers say that for the World’s Fair, Bertha asked The Palmer House pastry chef to create a small cake or confection that could be included in boxed lunches for ladies visiting the fair. The pastry chef developed a thick, dense, fudgy chocolate bar, covered in walnuts and a sweet apricot glaze. It was unlike any other confection and became incredibly popular." Should they be cake-like or fudge-like? Do we actually know their history? Any way you cut it Wikipedia has a lot of information about the brownie. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:50 AM PST - 32 comments

A favorite section of mine. Einstein on the Beach... knee play#5 My favorite part of the American opera by Phillip Glass (music) and Robert Wilson (visuals), and Lucinda Childs (choreography). At 4.5 hours long and no [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 3:33 AM PST - 13 comments

Sites that are for adults should cater to all of grown-ups’ interests. Lots of people who are over 18 like sex, but they also like comedy and sports and music, so [it’s about] being able to cater to our audience base and to be able to provide opportunities for creators. from Keily Blair, OnlyFans: ‘We are an incredible UK tech success story’ [FT; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:25 AM PST - 16 comments

The Corey Helford Gallery in downtown Los Angeles announced its next group show collaboration: Care Bears Forever, in partnership with the official owners of the Care Bears brand (Cloudco Entertainment). On view through March 30, this exhibition features new and original, one-of-a-kind artwork inspired by the characters, from over 75 international contemporary artists.
posted by neuracnu at 9:28 PM PST - 3 comments

What do Nona Hendryx, Rough Trade, Ultravox, Pere Ubu, The Police, Jonathan Richman, Nash the Slash, Sun Ra, Martha and the Muffins, John Cale, Alex Chilton, Joan Jett, XTC, the Cramps and so many more have in common? Obviously it's the fact that they all played at the Edge, a 200 person concert venue and eatery in Toronto in the late 70's. Not bad considering the place was only open for 2 and a half years. [more inside]
posted by ashbury at 8:33 PM PST - 6 comments

Everyone's favorite queer YouTube Marxist media analyst Alexander Avila looks back at the career of recent Grammy winner Miley Cyrus and her alter egos Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana in his video Hannah Montana's Guide to Life Under Capitalism [1h26m] And there's a LOT he will pull out of this series, and I found it all worthwhile. One small note: automated voices of famous people are used to read passages of text, and it can be a bit jarring.
posted by hippybear at 7:34 PM PST - 7 comments

I play music covers using electric toothbrushes, credit card machines, typewriters, and other electric devices. I control the devices using a microcontroller, some wires, and my programming skills. Thanks to the ideas of my subscribers, my devices now have googly eyes, and some even wigs and pipe cleaner arms. Sometimes I also make the devices perform choreographies, by making the devices move each other. it's Device Orchestra [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:22 PM PST - 10 comments

Garfield (2004) was a game for the Playstation 2 and PC. It was a pretty lackluster 3D production where the idea was to help the cartoon cat clean Jon's house within eight hours (real time!) or else be put on a diet. The few places that reviewed it gave it extremely low scores (0/10!). Youtuber planet clue recently had a look at the game (20 minutes) and, while agreeing it's no great work of art, saw that there was still a bit of fun to be had, if it could be made to run on Windows 11, and if one could get over its issues. So, they went about hacking it to correct its more egregious flaws, and when they were done put their improved version online, as Garfield+ (Windows only).
posted by JHarris at 3:38 PM PST - 4 comments

What do King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Aragorn and Paul Atreides have in common? Call it Magic Dick Theory. (Although on closer inspection, maybe not Paul so much.) The Ringer offers up a "psychoanalytic reading of canonical chosen-one narratives in fantasy and science fiction."
posted by gottabefunky at 3:11 PM PST - 62 comments

Welcome to improv church, where God gets funny (SLWaPo Gift Link) The actual URL
posted by kittensofthenight at 10:57 AM PST - 7 comments

"The aim of this website is simple. It's to gather the global wisdom, skills, experience, empathy and generosity of those who share this name, to do good stuff as far and wide as possible, for people across the world with the first or last name TREVOR." Trevor Cunningham told the Guardian about setting up the website and support network Trevors Together.
posted by paduasoy at 10:35 AM PST - 15 comments

"There are, however, a few surpring similiarites in our practices and customs. For example, the prominenance of chilies in both Indian and Mexican cooking. In the global gastronomic geography the two cuisines share a single place that can only be called eccentric: they are both imaginative and passionate infractions.... There is an undeniable similarity between curry and mole: the combination of sweet and the spicy, the reddish color full of sumptuous reflections, and its accompaniment to a meat or vegetable. ...Is [mole] an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce? Our perplexity increases when we consider that there is not one but many kinds of curries and moles." -"In Light of India", Octavio Paz, Nobel Laureate in Literature & Mexican Ambassador to India [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 10:18 AM PST - 21 comments

The "Atlanta Magnet Man" bikes around Atlanta with a hitched trailer that uses magnets to attract metal debris that poses a risk to people’s car tires. The idea is completely his own, and he does it for free. “I can’t really find anybody that says what I’m doing is a terrible thing unless, you know, they own a tire shop,” he said.
posted by constraint at 6:38 AM PST - 55 comments

Although lefse was available year-round in Norway, it is more often a holiday food in the U.S., served especially around Christmas. Want to know more about lefse? Life in Norway has you covered, as does Lefse Time. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:29 AM PST - 44 comments

The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between. from We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them by Brad Bigelow [The Neglected Books Page] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:49 AM PST - 16 comments