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Technoblade, known for farming potatoes and posting the funniest Minecraft videos around, has died of cancer at age 23. His father reads a final letter from him in this video.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:05 PM PST - 35 comments

Country Roads, Let's a-Go (sltumbler)
posted by curious nu at 7:17 PM PST - 3 comments

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday that it has agreed to hear a case next term that could upend election laws across the country with the potential endorsement of a fringe legal theory about how much power state legislatures have over the running of congressional and presidential elections. [more inside]
posted by NotLost at 6:33 PM PST - 116 comments

Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction. Our best hope the next time Earth is in the crosshairs? Capacitors. [Wired; Archive] [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 6:30 PM PST - 13 comments

Recently we learned that 折毛 spent a decade writing fake Russian history. Wikipedia just noticed. [English summary/translated Chinese summary] A good reminder to peruse the list of Wikipedia hoaxes, idly speculate if citogenesis has already occurred, and to pour one out for all the frustrated novelists out there...
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 4:13 PM PST - 23 comments

Tom Cardy: Jurassic Park 12: It's Dino time! slightly NSFW for some lyrics + closed captions, tom cardy [previously]
posted by lazaruslong at 1:00 PM PST - 15 comments

Without the presence of eggs, the average pigeon nest could pass as a coincidental aggregation of twigs or jumble of debris. To our human eyes, a pigeon nest looks objectively half-assed. It is a nest that seems to mock other nests. — Why Do Pigeon Nests Look So Shitty, Sabrina Imbler investigates for Defector
posted by Banknote of the year at 10:07 AM PST - 37 comments

Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in Thursday at noon as the 116th Supreme Court justice and the first Black woman to serve on the high court. At a noon ceremony at the Supreme Court, Jackson was joined by her husband and two children for the swearing in. A formal investiture will follow in fall. Jackson took two oaths during the livestreamed event: a constitutional oath, administered by Chief Justice John Roberts, and a judicial oath, administered by Justice Stephen Breyer. [more inside]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 10:07 AM PST - 33 comments

For the second time in less than a year[YT] Ted Cruz (Republican senator for Texas) has got into a Twitter fight with a muppet; this time 3.5 year Elmo of tickle me fame. The feud the result of the FDA approving COVID vaccines for children under five.
posted by Mitheral at 6:07 AM PST - 54 comments

Bitcoin Is A Hideous Monstrosity Made Out Of Computers And Greed That Must Be Destroyed Before It Devours The World, Part I. On the final day of the first third of the 6th month of Our Year Of The Coin 13 (2022 C.E.) a mysterious account named Michel de Cryptadamus appeared on Twitter bearing a prophecy given to him by The Oracle of Tulips foretelling cryptocurrency's end of days that he had recently inscribed into the hard stone of r/Buttcoin. The redditors of r/Buttcoin, long used to playing the part of modern society's Cassandras, with memes in place of their forebear's mantic verse, watched in amazement as these predictions began to come true. [more inside]
posted by UlfMagnet at 3:27 AM PST - 129 comments

At the 109th annual Virginia Kentucky district fair, one contestant started to win categories. Several categories, including canned fruit, canned tomato, non-cucumber pickled item, relish, jelly, jam, quilt, cakes, pies, cookies, brownies, savory bread, sweet bread, candy, chow chow, corn relish, applesauce, pears, embroidery. Many categories. (Facebook post). But, as 'the internet' goes looking and pesters the wrong person, who is Linda Skeens? And is Robin Moore (best overall pickled cucumber - bread and butter, best overall fruit - peaches, salsa, blackberries) her nemesis?
posted by Wordshore at 12:09 AM PST - 49 comments

This morning, a soft rock station in Vancouver, Canada, played Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine. And then again. And again. They're taking calls for requests!
posted by Pronoiac at 7:34 PM PST - 51 comments

The Naphtha Engine: "After steamboats got a reputation of danger from explosion, the Coast Guard required operators to be licensed, thereby removing steamboats from small owner/operator utilization. The outboard motor would solve this problem eventually, but in 1885 it didn’t exist. In 1883 Frank W. Ofeldt took out a patent on a naphtha engine which was essentially a closed loop steam engine that used naphtha instead of water." A Twitter thread on naphtha launches from Dreadnought Holiday. Some extant examples: "Anita" and "Frieda." See also: Powered by Boiling Petrol.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:44 PM PST - 16 comments

Over the past decade or more, the conquest of the cultural landscape by quippy spandexed superheroes has been Napoleonic. The idea that a citadel of bookishness has fallen to this siege of adolescent fantasia could easily take on outsize importance. from Prestige Comics: On the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:50 PM PST - 6 comments

Farewell to the Last Frontier. "For those who live here year-round—among them, cave-dwelling desert rats, sun-scorched river guides, musicians, alcoholics, survivalists, artists, eccentrics, wanderers (and millionaires camouflaged as one or more of the aforementioned figures)—that sense of isolation is often experienced as a kind of primordial liberation. The feeling of being free from convenience and unshackled from expectations—of existing in “Terlingua time,” as locals put it—has always been as appealing to the flag-waving pilot of a forty-foot RV as to the tent-dwelling, peyote-smoking vagabond. But like some Daoist riddle, the more newcomers seek out Terlingua’s magic, the harder it is to find." (SL Texas Monthly)
posted by Lyme Drop at 12:04 PM PST - 13 comments

This German video of a manhole cover replacement [SLYT] is surprisingly soothing in a kind of How It's Made / Slow TV way, even for those who don't speak the language. (Content Warning: efficient and methodical; discussion of DIN standards)
posted by majick at 11:29 AM PST - 21 comments

Colin Morris scraped 15 years of Reddit comments to perform a detailed analysis of the frequencies of compound-word insults. The results are presented in the document Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin.
posted by dfan at 9:27 AM PST - 87 comments

Terrible National Park Reviews (Illustrated). Designer Amber Share took one-star reviews of American National parks and “put a positive, fun spin on a negative mindset” by creating a set of travel posters.
posted by storybored at 8:23 AM PST - 40 comments

Mobile game ads have gone INSANE (YT)
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:40 AM PST - 52 comments

Glastonbury reminded the world of the power of Paul McCartney, but in 1999 Paul McCartney had to remind himself. And he used Rock 'n' Roll. Following the death of Linda McCartney in early 1998 saw Paul McCartney take time away from music to grieve. His return was the late 1999 release “Run Devil Run”, a quickly recorded collection of covers from the 50s with a few friends… Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Johnny Kidd & the Pirates’ Mick Green. and Deep Purple’s Ian Paice on drums. McCartney mostly stuck to bass, just as in the early Beatles days. [more inside]
posted by ewan at 6:36 AM PST - 5 comments

Hybrid Bharatham EPISODE 5 | Usha Jey Choreography #HybridBharatham is my way of switching between Hip-Hop and Bharathanatyam, 2 dances that I love, learn and respect. My aim is to keep the essence of each dance and create something that do justice to who I am. [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 7:51 PM PST - 10 comments

"This emu has taken over the duck coop and is now diligently siting on goose eggs. I just watched a chicken run in, burrow under him, lay an egg, and leave." [Twitter thread with photos]
posted by readinghippo at 9:50 AM PST - 37 comments

Over in the /r/DCComics subreddit, they've collectively voted on a list of the 71 best runs, "run" in this context roughly meaning a specific creators' tenure on a specific title. Roughly. (SLReddit)
posted by Ipsifendus at 9:11 AM PST - 65 comments

In 1777, the Comte de Buffon studied the odds of landing a round coin on a single square of a tile floor. (Those early probabilists, always thinking about gambling!) Buffon then proposed a famed variation with needles. Though there are no overt circles in this version of the problem, π still shows up in the answer. For a beautiful explanation, trade needles for noodles (YT, 9m 59s; text alternative). You can simulate tossing noodles to empirically calculate π, or count grid crossings to estimate the length of a mountain trail. But that's not the end of the story… [more inside]
posted by aws17576 at 9:08 AM PST - 18 comments

Cowspines is a recent project by photographer Kate Kirkwood that documents the landscapes of cows. (Not landscapes containing cows.)
posted by eotvos at 8:31 AM PST - 5 comments

Last week, the Supreme Court gutted Miranda rights. In Vega v. Tekoh, SCOTUS found that Miranda is merely an evidentiary trial rule (evidence obtained improperly can still be suppressed at trial), rather than a substantive constitutional right. Police can no longer be sued for failing to Mirandize a suspect. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 8:23 AM PST - 37 comments

If you have a minute for a lighthearted break from the general grimness, you might enjoy this video of texts tones as dance moves (on Twitter - here the original video on TikTok), a compilation of 40 text tones with associated dance moves performed by dance/choreography duo Cost n’ Mayor (also on Instagram). Enjoy!
posted by bitteschoen at 6:48 AM PST - 13 comments

Trump's Truth Reuters dives into Truth Social, the Trump-backed social network that, as of this writing, has 2.8 million downloads.
posted by box at 6:14 AM PST - 33 comments

(CW: Just a bit risqué; Twitter links as noted.) Chilly Lake Superior stands with women's right to choose (Twitter), but did you know the lake itself is capable of delivering a massive burn (Twitter)? Gordon Lightfoot might need to put out a new album (Twitter). [more inside]
posted by warriorqueen at 4:15 AM PST - 28 comments

Cody Hovland didn't feel safe biking anymore because nobody heard him coming, so he built a very large and loud bell for his bike out of a barbecue grill, using an inkjet printer, a microwave oven, and organically grown wooden gears.
posted by elgilito at 1:31 AM PST - 23 comments

Ten years ago today, the Twitter account @horse_ebooks tweeted "Everything happens so much". 2016: Present Tense Journal - "The Moral Act of Attributing Agency to Nonhumans: What Can Horse ebooks tell us about Rhetorical Agency?" 2014: Pitchfork - "the strange fatigue of digital life..." 2013: Medium - "Happy third birthday, @Horse_ebooks!." Previously on MetaFilter: Sep '11, Jan '12, Feb '12, Apr '12, Feb '13, Aug '13. Also previously: (23 July 2013) Something is going to happen in 77 days and (24 September 2013) Something is going to happen ... tomorrow (thread contains reveal point, much MeFite arguing, and reactions -ve and +ve).
posted by Wordshore at 12:53 AM PST - 5 comments

Most marketers are aware of the effect color has on consumer behavior. Surveys and studies have shown that: 62%-90% of a consumer’s initial judgment of a product is based on color. 52% of consumers say the color of packaging is an indicator of quality. Color increases brand recognition by up to 80%. So, if you’re thinking about making your entire brand one solid color, go ahead and try your luck. Just don’t pick magenta. from Can a corporation "own" a color?
posted by chavenet at 2:36 PM PST - 47 comments

In 1960, Virginia Prince founded Transvestia magazine, which continued for 111 issues. The FTM Newsletter was first published in 1987 by Lou Sullivan and extended for 67 issues. Starting in about 1971, Adèle Anderson kept a series of thirteen scrapbooks documenting her interest and experience in gender identity. These online resources are a small part of the collated online resources at the University of Victoria's Transgender Archives which can be followed on twitter, itself part of the Digital Transgender Archives network (twitter).
posted by Rumple at 1:41 PM PST - 8 comments

This is the silly, talented video content I needed today. Next, the one about cleaning. I have a crush on Joseph now. [more inside]
posted by theora55 at 1:40 PM PST - 7 comments

In 1903 the Lumière brothers developed the autochrome process, the first viable single-exposure color photography technique, with potatoes. [more inside]
posted by autopilot at 1:06 PM PST - 8 comments

The Constant Restlessness You Feel Has a Name. Even before the pandemic, people were feeling that their work was unsustainable. Many were on the edge of burnout, overwhelmed by the unrelenting frantic and frenetic energy of today’s world. A common experience was, and still is, a mix of fatigue and restlessness, nervousness and dread. It is helpful to have language for what this is, how it works, and what you can do about it.
posted by BeBoth at 11:48 AM PST - 37 comments

On December 19, 1976 a Piper Cherokee light aircraft crashed into the upper deck of Memorial Stadium, 6 minutes after the end of the NFL AFC division playoff game between the Baltimore Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers. The stands, unlikely as it might seem for a playoff game with decent weather, had already emptied out and no one was killed. Circumstances had arranged themselves in such a way that the fate of dozens hinged on the course of the game played out below them. Section 1: A short film from Dorktown (Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein and Dorktown previously)
posted by figurant at 9:38 AM PST - 18 comments

How to Make the Crispiest Homemade Fries Without Deep Frying. This is what the end result looks like. From America's Test Kitchen.
posted by storybored at 8:21 AM PST - 53 comments

What happens when you get 6 historians together to throw factoids around about the Tudor monarchy? You get a delightful amount of informational fiddly bits presented in a fun format! The Great History Quiz: The Tudors [56m] is hosted by Kirsty Young and has Lucy Worsley and Dan Snow as team captains.
posted by hippybear at 7:55 AM PST - 4 comments

Screenwriter Ben Crew calls upon the Twitterverse for movie prompts to turn into Don Draper Mad Men ad pitches. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 5:40 AM PST - 14 comments

For an unlimited time only, low-cost, no-cost commenting opportunities inside ... [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:13 AM PST - 158 comments

Dave Eggers' Anatomy of a book banning is a detailed look at how his novel was removed from school reading lists in Rapid City, South Dakota, US. [SL Washington Post] [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 5:04 PM PST - 33 comments

Director/writer/actor Sarah Polley, who you likely know if you're Canadian, and maybe know if you're not, has published a book, "Run towards the danger." "If there's a through line in Polley’s career, it’s the notion that truth can be a multivalent, contradictory thing, that sometimes you need to fumble toward something even if it will always remain just beyond your grasp."
posted by goofyfoot at 3:30 PM PST - 18 comments

It's actually required by law that every evangelical church have at least one person who takes Irish stepdancing classes (CW: Racism) Jenny Nicholson reviews one Canadian church's Easter plays.
posted by Gorgik at 7:54 AM PST - 39 comments

If you haven't seen this famed reddit post before, today is your day.
posted by rikschell at 4:28 AM PST - 29 comments

"Melbourne alt-soul collective Hiatus Kaiyote tricked out its avant-garde recording studio, The Villa, and lathered it with props: a miniature desk, alien costumes, and loads of furry friends. Frontwoman Nai Palm shared with me the impetus behind the design. "I'm a treasure hunter at heart," she said, "and the beautiful thing about dressing a set with sentimental artifacts from my house is that I feel super comfy to perform." Every intricate detail of this Tiny Desk (home) concert evokes feelings of coziness, psychedelia and joyful performance art." [Abby O'Neill] [more inside]
posted by Thella at 12:23 AM PST - 4 comments

From Threadwood, the many adventures of a typical, non-magical cat! Adventures within. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 8:08 PM PST - 10 comments

Youtube music types Adam Neely and Rob Scallon give each other crash courses in writing and playing songs in their respective genres in: Metal Musician Sucks At Jazz and its companion piece Jazz Musician Sucks At Metal.
posted by cortex at 3:47 PM PST - 14 comments

In most literary novels, there is little indication of how the protagonist earns a living and is able to afford their lifestyle, or if there are attempts at these indicators, it’s clear that the numbers don’t add up. from If They Want to Be Published, Literary Writers Can’t Be Honest About Money by Naomi Kanakia
posted by chavenet at 10:45 AM PST - 59 comments

The She-Wolf of France had had enough (Anne Thériault's 'Queens of Infamy' series for Longreads)
posted by box at 9:50 AM PST - 7 comments

anonymous Aussie twitter poster PRGuy17 unmasks himself to youtuber Friendlyjordies The man behind the formerly anonymous Twitter account PRGuy17 has unmasked himself, after far-right figure and convicted wife beater Avi Yemini attempted to use the courts to reveal whether the account had ties to the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews. Interestingly, PRGuy17 had the facts of the case that Avi Yemeni plead guilty to over the top of his video interview as a watermark, these being "avi yemini threw a chopping board at his ex wife" [more inside]
posted by zog at 8:55 AM PST - 8 comments

"A humorist is a comedian who has been dead for over a hundred years." (Steve Carrell, 2022 Mark Twain Prize ceremony for Jon Stewart) [more inside]
posted by shadytrees at 4:02 PM PST - 39 comments

Take a break and watch some dog grooming. Rottweiler. Pomeranian. Mastiff. Newfoundland shepherd. Springer spaniel. Husky. Australian shepherd. German Shepherd. Cane corso. A duck. Black golden retriever. Chow chow. Bernese. Border collie. English bulldog. Corgi. Goldendoodle. Yorkshire terrier. Shetland sheepdog. Pomeranian. More.
posted by adept256 at 1:44 PM PST - 24 comments

Seth Meyers’ ‘Corrections’ segment keeps that audience connection going We did fall in love with doing the show without an audience. “Corrections” was the way to hold on to a piece and say, “Hey, we also love that thing that some of you at home loved, and so we’re still going to do this because it’s special 20 minutes a week to remember the closeness we had.” Because part of “Corrections” is, if no one is actually in the room with me here, we’re all in the same room. [more inside]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:42 PM PST - 12 comments

Enjoy several daily free-to-play web puzzles or trivia games, playing with math, subway routes, film stills, and more. This list attempts to be comprehensive with (as of this post) 770 games that are in some way like Wordle. Artle: guess the painter/photographer/sculptor. Tradle: guess the country based on its chief exports. Sociolinguist Jessi Grieser is "nominating -le as a combining form meaning ‘internet game that has one solution per day and can share nonspecific results on social media’" for the 2022 Word Of The Year.
posted by brainwane at 7:31 AM PST - 15 comments

People often ask [Erriyon Knighton] whether he wants to be the next Usain Bolt. The comparison is an honor, Knighton said, but, no, he doesn’t want to be the next Bolt. He wants to be the best version of himself. “I didn’t grow up with his name; I grew up with my name,” Knighton said. from This Teen Already Broke Some of Usain Bolt’s Records. He’s Getting Faster [NYT] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:22 AM PST - 5 comments

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade. The opinion: "The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives. " Information about abortion funds in different states.
posted by fight or flight at 7:22 AM PST - 1108 comments

Myrtle Young was an inspector at a potato chip factory who amassed a collection of some 250-300 chips that looked like people, animals, or objects. She became something of a minor celebrity, appearing on numerous television shows, with appearance on The Tonight Show often cited as Johnny Carson's funniest moment ever. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:08 AM PST - 6 comments

This machine makes potato knishes. Previously.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:52 AM PST - 3 comments

As the UK kicks out a Conservative MP in the constituency of Tiverton and Honiton, Russ Jones published a Twitter thread talking about a very, very colourful former holder of the post: Scot, MP, admiral, swashbuckler, significant inventor, stock market fraudster and crucial figure in the foundation of modern Chile (who spoke no Spanish).
posted by rongorongo at 1:07 AM PST - 13 comments

Hot Potato: The Game Show.
posted by clavdivs at 11:54 PM PST - 15 comments

Did it begin here? Well, however it began it’s not stopping.
posted by fallingbadgers at 10:38 PM PST - 4 comments

The 20 Potato a Day Diet versus the Nearly All Potato Winter by Carol Deppe [more inside]
posted by aniola at 9:59 PM PST - 6 comments

“Why did we make fun of Dan Quayle for misspelling the word ‘potato’ when we should have made fun of him for arguments like this?” Mike and Sarah of the You're Wrong About podcast talk about how a real vice president blamed a fictional single mom for causing one of the most divisive events of the 1990s. The "P" stands for "potatoe."
posted by AlSweigart at 9:51 PM PST - 9 comments

No time to travel 1800 light years to visit the potato shaped exoplanet WASP-103b? No problem, the ringed, potato shaped dwarf planet Haumea is only 50 AU away at its farthest. Assuming a perfectly spherical potato of diameter 48mm, that's only 1.5583333e+14 potato-widths distant from home.
posted by sainttoad at 9:08 PM PST - 2 comments

On 5.6.22 I watched this video, and I went down the Potato Rabbit Hole.... Welcome to your Potato Recipe Post! Here you find all Potato Recipe, forever, for all good of humanity, forever, because, potatoes. So, this is a good video to watch, because I came across so many other ways of making potatoes, and was reminded of fabulous potato dishes.
posted by winesong at 8:18 PM PST - 11 comments

Due to a potato shortage, Burger King Japan is offering crunchy ramen instead of fries with burgers
posted by olopua at 8:03 PM PST - 5 comments

Popato [more inside]
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:59 PM PST - 4 comments

If - like me - you've gained a few pounds/kilograms/stone just from reading MetaFilter this week*, maybe you'd like to consider something more healthy for a change? [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:56 PM PST - 9 comments

Meet Joe Potato, P.I. More about Joe.
posted by vrakatar at 7:17 PM PST - 3 comments

While most people think of Ireland when they think of potatoes, Lithuanian cuisine features the tuber most heavily. The nation is so potato obsessed that a Peruvian potato farmer can feel right at home. Try cepelinai, the stuffed potato dumpling named after Graff von Zeppelin, often termed the country's national dish. Try this kugelis, a savory potato cake. (Or this one, or this one, or the Kugelis Cook-Off winner - there are as many kugelis recipes as there are Lithuanian families). Perhaps a flatter potato? Bulviniai blynai is a tasty potato pancake. But that bar food that looks like French fries is actually fried rye bread (kepta duona).
posted by rednikki at 7:11 PM PST - 6 comments

Barbecue, bake, broil, boil, fry...
posted by blue shadows at 6:26 PM PST - 3 comments

Solid Potato Salad [more inside]
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 5:45 PM PST - 5 comments

An Oral History of the Gobbledok

And thus Australia met the Gobbledok: a ravenous extra-terrestrial who, to some witnesses, is still synonymous with Smith’s potato chips, and an icon of millennial Australiana. From 1987 to 1994, his rubber face and pot belly featured in a healthy handful of prime-time TV commercials that were charming, bizarre or downright terrifying, depending on who you ask. But to ad man John Finkelsen, this snack-happy critter was simply ‘the perfect consumer’.

[more inside]
posted by zamboni at 3:35 PM PST - 6 comments

A Cat's-Eye View of Japan Globe-trotting wildlife photographer and filmmaker, Iwago Mitsuaki [portfolio], offers the best of a vast collection of cat footage he took in Japan. On this unique trip around the country, discover the lesser-known charms and customs of regions through the eyes of cats! A collection of beautiful and soothing 5-minute cat videos.
Potato tax.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:29 PM PST - 2 comments

And not just ANY porato-- an AMERICAN potato (though the song is in Italian). In light of the recent Potato Posting Pandemonium, here's a fun little 1977 animated music video from Italian pop star Rita Pavone, who had a minor hit in America in 1965 with "Remember Me"
posted by KingEdRa at 3:26 PM PST - 2 comments

Canadian Potato Museum "may be the least exciting-sounding museum in the world." Get your picture taken with the world’s largest potato sculpture! [more inside]
posted by metaname at 3:13 PM PST - 6 comments

BACH: Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565 by Edson Lopes on classical guitar - this was transcribed and arranged by the artist [more inside]
posted by pyramid termite at 2:49 PM PST - 7 comments

Did You Know Harley-Davidson Tried To Trademark Their Exhaust Sound? [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 1:56 PM PST - 18 comments

Here is Cheryl Wheeler singing about potatoes to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance but first she explains why this is actually more difficult than it sounds.
posted by bondcliff at 1:50 PM PST - 3 comments

A quick one today, but no less incredible - LOOK AT THIS FACE! [more inside]
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:47 PM PST - 7 comments

Who made the potato popular in France? Largely, it was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier! At a time when the potato was feared and despised, he used a variety of novel marketing schemes to change the public perception: bouquets of potato flowers for the queen, lavish potato dinners for dignitaries and a potato field under armed guard. His name lives on in potato dishes named after him and a Paris Metro stop.
posted by snofoam at 1:23 PM PST - 11 comments

From deepest 1980, an SNL "Bad Playhouse" about women and potatoes: The Great Mr. Potato Head Famine Segment begins at 47:00.
posted by the sobsister at 1:15 PM PST - 2 comments

Will meetup with you all at the six-ton potato hotel set on 400 acres of land.
posted by sammyo at 12:58 PM PST - 3 comments

This is my sampler playlist of 12 potato songs from Spotify. They span many musical genres from folk to dance, rap, R&B and early jazz. Some are by musicians you may have heard of like Tyler The Creator, Louis Armstrong, Skunk Anansie, Slim Gaillard, Ike & Tina Turner, Mr Scruff and Jake Xerxes Fussell. Musical acts named Potato include Potato, Potato, Potato, Potato and Potato Potato. [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 12:48 PM PST - 13 comments

Bluegrass Potatoes – What Are They? (and How to Play Them) on mandolin (David Benedict: What are taters?), banjo (Banjo Ben Clark: Banjo Potatoes– Kick off them fiddle tunes with some spice!), and guitar (How to Kick Off Fiddle Tunes on Guitar with Potatoes! ). [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:17 PM PST - 6 comments

The automobile driver's license plate began as a simple way to identify vehicles. However, in 1928, not long after they were developed, officials in one state had the bright idea to use them to promote their state's industry on vehicles roaming the US. The design sparked both controversy and a crime spree as tourists began stealing the unique number plates. [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 12:08 PM PST - 11 comments

Hastings, Florida, a formerly incorporated community in St. Johns County, is the “Potato Capital of Florida.” [more inside]
posted by saladin at 12:06 PM PST - 2 comments

...boiled them for twenty of their minutes, then smashed them all to bits” snarked the aliens in one of the most successful UK TV ad campaigns, for Cadbury's Smash (1973-92), an instant mashed potato food with the slogan 'For mash get Smash'. The jingle writer did not spend a lot of time composing the tune. Models of the alients/robots were made from stolen car parts. With aliens voiced by Peter Hawkins (who also voiced the daleks and cybermen from Doctor Who, and Zippy from Rainbow), the product could also be used to make bread, and joined a range of iconic British convenience foods. Other instant mashed potatoes are available.
posted by Wordshore at 11:32 AM PST - 15 comments

You could consider the potato, but wouldn't you rather have poutine? Or even better: poutine râpée!! Or perhaps Poutine à trou? Or go to the Acadian Kitchen? Or ...
posted by Melismata at 11:29 AM PST - 20 comments

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History provides a quick introduction to the genera we know as yams, sweet-potatoes, and potatoes. [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 11:09 AM PST - 3 comments

Folklore. Warring narratives. Murky origin stories. Documenting the true history of fry sauce can feel as muddled as the condiment itself. But, I wanted the truth. And so I set out to discover the genesis of Utah’s favorite condiment. [more inside]
posted by inflatablekiwi at 11:02 AM PST - 22 comments

Meet Bryan Wada, third generation potato farmer, hailing from southeastern Idaho. He learned to love the soil from his grandfather and father. As an immigrant from Japan, Frank started his family and farm along the California coastline until the tragic events of Pearl Harbor. Japanese-American citizens were forced away from the coast by the attack. The Wadas relocated to southeastern Idaho in 1943. The family’s business has grown there, from a 100-acre sharecropper farm to a 30,000-acre business that grows 450 million pounds of potatoes each year. [more inside]
posted by flug at 11:01 AM PST - 1 comment

At first Ewan Bremner initially had no interest in playing a supporting role in Trainspotting and told his agent to turn it down. He was the only one of the cast from Edinburgh and played Renton in the play. He realized Ewan McGregor was perfect as Renton, so Bremner played Daniel Murphy, better know as Spud. So why is he called Spud anyway? [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:45 AM PST - 6 comments

The tomato took a circuitous route to becoming the most popular garden plant in the United States. Originally cultivated in South and Central America 7000 years ago, the tomato quickly spread throughout the world by the 16th century. [more inside]
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:36 AM PST - 2 comments

"I want people to look at me as an autistic person and say, “You are not like me, and that is fine, and you are still a person.” That, to me, is the ultimate goal of all disability activism: to create a kinder world where there is no standard for what being a “real person” entails and basic respect is afforded to everyone because of their intrinsic value as a living being."
posted by curious nu at 10:30 AM PST - 17 comments

William Whitson breeds, propagates, and sells propagules of minor-in-the-US crops, especially ulluco, mashua, yacon, oca, and Andean potato. If you're interesting in growing them, Cultivariable might be able to sell you seeds, tubers, or tissue culture plantlets. He also has a pleasant forum with a lot of cultivation advice and a podcast on freelance plant breeding. Previously, in a comment.
posted by clew at 10:09 AM PST - 4 comments

You might know by now that the potato was first domesticated around the shores of Titicaca, but did you know that most of the potatoes eaten around the world today originate further south, on the island of Chiloé in southern Chile? And that they have 300 named varieties in a large range of colors? Or that they make all kinds of things with them like Chapalele and Milcao? Or that to properly appreciate them, you really need to be enjoying a huge amount of fish, seafood, pork, chicken and sausage from a hole in the ground?
posted by signal at 9:55 AM PST - 7 comments

Home Grown figurines by Enesco are animal-vegetable, bird-fruit, and other creatures, including such marvels as a zucchini frog, mushroom snail, and pear-penguins. [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 9:31 AM PST - 5 comments

No microwave? No range? No grill? No propane, wood, coal, kerosene or cow chips? Not even a lighter? NO PROBLEM! Nature has ensured you were born with all you need to cook healthy, delicious potatoes! As early as the 1930s, scientists began the first steps down this critical scientific path, and potatoes were there! Surely, as they took those first stumbling steps on the road to the future, these early potato cooking pioneers could scarcely have imagined the scientific and technological marvels their primitive research would one day make possible!
posted by Naberius at 9:30 AM PST - 4 comments

The current Kettle Chips product line features 24 different chip varieties including classics like Honey Dijon and Backyard Barbecue and newer varieties like Pepperoncini and Truffle & Sea Salt. If none of those tickle your fancy, perhaps you'd enjoy Cape Cod Chips, Utz's Dirty and Zapp's lines, Frito-Lay's Miss Vickie's brand, or even Saratoga Chips. Or, if none of these grab you, you could always make your own. [more inside]
posted by box at 8:07 AM PST - 39 comments

A couple years ago, through Ask a Manager comment threads (previously), I learned about the Job Accommodation Network which has a giant organized list of accommodations an employer could make, sorted "by disability, by limitation, by work-related function, by topic, and by accommodation". It's also a useful source of ideas if you're interested in better accommodating yourself as a self-employed freelancer, or supporting your family, friends, or volunteers. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 7:28 AM PST - 6 comments

Garfield, June 9, 1979
posted by chavenet at 6:57 AM PST - 21 comments

Potatoes have inspired a surprising amount of poetry. Some are justly famous, like Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Potato". Others are... really bad. Really really bad. [more inside]
posted by kyrademon at 5:18 AM PST - 13 comments

F.D Signifier has a two-part video series on the manosphere. Part 1, Dissecting the Manosphere, covers white male intersectionality, edgelords, nihilism, ideal hegemonic masculinity, patriarchal dividend, aggrieved entitlement, and the contrasts between the white and black manospheres. Part 2, Connecting the Manosphere, covers Gary Vee, Fresh and Fit, Jordan Peterson, spree shooters, Eren Yeager, and what the left needs to do better. If you'd rather read than watch videos, he has a reading list: [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 4:50 AM PST - 5 comments

The legacy of one persistent public scribbler - a tale of determination and self-determination in Hong Kong. Louisa Lim [author's website] chronicles her and Hong Kong's obsession with one stubborn graffiti "artist." Archived link
posted by Glomar response at 3:54 AM PST - 11 comments

... when you grasp the sense in which your situation is completely hopeless, instead of just very challenging, you can unclench. You get to exhale. You no longer have to go through life adopting the brace position, because you see that the plane has already crashed. You're already stranded on the desert island, making what you can of life with your fellow survivors, and with nothing but airplane food to subsist on. And you come to appreciate how much of your distress arose not from the situation itself, but from your efforts to hold yourself back from it, to keep alive the hope that it might not be as it really was. From Oliver Burkeman's newsletter, The Imperfectionist. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 3:12 AM PST - 29 comments

Approximately 8,000 years ago, the first wild potatoes were harvested from the high-altitude soils surrounding Lake Titicaca at the foot of the Andes Mountains. Since then, more than 4,000 varieties of native potatoes—known in Peru as papas nativas—have been cultivated in the Andean highlands. On a month-long journey through Peru, we encounter the diverse flavors, cultural significance, agricultural challenges, history, and daily uses of papas nativas.
posted by umber vowel at 1:28 PM PST - 18 comments

Cultural psychologist Joe Henrich points to the cassava as evidence that blindly following tradition is sometimes better than individual rational choice. (book, summary article) [more inside]
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:05 AM PST - 22 comments

But the story behind the Milady Maker implosion … is even weirder than it initially seemed, the bizarre tip of an even more confounding iceberg. To understand what happened requires a journey into the kaleidoscopic heart of New York City’s nascent Gen Z art scene, where shitposting, leftism, crypto, fascist occultism, and cyber-libertarianism all congeal together into an amorphous—and nihilistic—cultural blob. via the author's own Garbage Day newsletter
posted by signal at 9:33 AM PST - 28 comments

Writer Mary Annaïse Heglar shows how white supremacy is the throughline between the gun crisis and the climate crisis in The Frontline.
posted by bile and syntax at 6:38 AM PST - 30 comments

corporate libertarianism v synthetic technocracy v digital democracy: "Yes I think the defining political divides of the 21st century will be roughly captured in the terms laid out by Civilization VI: Gathering Storm Expansion... Current crisis is largely transition from the 20th century mode of fascism v communism v democracy to this." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:22 AM PST - 27 comments

Design Fiction has come a long way in the 10+ years since it all began. It's been gaining popularity since then, yet people still misunderstand what it is all about. So its creators made a short film to explain Design Fiction and why it's useful. [more inside]
posted by iamkimiam at 2:54 AM PST - 15 comments

Star Trek: Voyager: The Animated Series Following up on their amazing short Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Animated Series (previously), Gazelle Automations has turned Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold (previously) into another Filmation production! The music is perfect, and do not skip the ending. [more inside]
posted by polecat at 10:28 PM PST - 11 comments

The pseudonymous science writers Slime Mold Time Mold are perhaps best known for their series A Chemical Hunger, which hypothesizes that rising obesity around 1980 may have been due to endocrine disruption caused by PFAS and lithium, particularly in downstream areas along major river watersheds. In the course of their research, though, they found a story of a Washington State Potato Commission guy who ate only potatoes for 60 days, and lost 21 pounds. Digging deeper,* they found more anecdotal cases of all-potato diets. Their reaction: this seems like it can't possibly be true, right? Well, any volunteers to try it out and help us collect data? Their ongoing Twitter thread on the study features a lot of commentary based on their own experiences doing it, and also from volunteers who have tried it out themselves. [more inside]
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:21 PM PST - 66 comments

John Cox has enough enthusiasm for Harry Houdini to share with everyone. For 40+ years he's been obsessed and for 20 years now has been posting deep dives, answers to FAQs (Did the Houdinis have any children?) debunking and deconstructing myths, research and source material to his blog Wild about Harry. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 5:51 PM PST - 7 comments

Potatoes are a land of contrasts. While the definitive microhistory The Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History  bears serious examination, and the fact that POTATO in yoof slang means "People Over Thirty Acting Twenty One.”, this shouldn't discourage You-(K)-On-line. For example..... [more inside]
posted by lalochezia at 4:57 PM PST - 7 comments

During a solo acoustic show in Grand Rapids Monday night, Trey Anastasio noticed 7 year-old Jovi holding a sign asking if she could sing a song with him. He invited her up for the encore and the resulting performance is the feel-good thing you didn't know you needed tonight. (slyt)
posted by bondcliff at 4:35 PM PST - 13 comments

For over 20 years, the annual Roasted Potato Festival has been celebrated in Slovenia, organized by the Society for the Recognition of Roasted Potatoes as a Distinct Dish. They have a song (recording). Other Slovenian potato festivals include "blindfolded potato digs".
posted by brainwane at 2:38 PM PST - 25 comments

Records show police in Uvalde were equipped to storm shooter

Two closed doors and a wall stood between them and an 18-year-old with an AR-15 who had opened fire on children and teachers inside the connected classrooms. A Halligan bar — an ax-like forcible-entry tool used by firefighters to get through locked doors — was available. Ballistic shields were arriving on the scene. So was plenty of firepower, including at least two rifles. Some officers were itching to move.

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 1:41 PM PST - 125 comments

"A recent visit to rural Pennsylvania found GCHG CH Pequest Wasabi, as he is officially known (the letters represent his winning credentials), chilling at home, already semiretired at the age of 4. Bestirring himself to say hello, he did not exactly run, but moved with all deliberate speed, his luxuriant locks wafting like wheat blowing in a breeze."
posted by praemunire at 1:33 PM PST - 9 comments

LGBTQ History Primary Source Sets. Researched & annotated by Wendy Rouse, PhD in collaboration with the History Project at UC Davis, this collection of primary sources are designed for use in the K-12 classroom. Categories include women's suffrage, slavery and Reconstruction, the American Revolution and the Roaring 20s. For older readers who want to nerd out on #queerhistory, Dr. Rouse has you covered too: Need a Pride Month reading list?
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:27 PM PST - 2 comments

Jessica Valenti responds to misogyny bolstered "by established reporters & flashy magazine covers." [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 12:40 PM PST - 49 comments

"I had thought that “cravings” and “bad” foods and striving to eat as little as possible were just facts of adult existence, particularly as a woman. But just trying to eat enough to support my lifting slowly unraveled for me how widely shared, carefully crafted, and viciously protected those delusions were. Building back muscle was a much slower process than I ever realized; even as a new lifter, one pound of muscle a month was as much as I could expect to get. As I regained strength, I came to realize that whatever I had needed to be protected; what I had lost turned out to be critical to the experience of living in my body." CW: discussions of dieting and exercise
posted by Lycaste at 11:41 AM PST - 18 comments

The Stars are Blind (Anna Dorn for Granta)
posted by box at 9:19 AM PST - 47 comments

Hong Kong's famed Jumbo Floating Restaurant sinks in South China Sea [Today] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:16 AM PST - 56 comments

Launched in 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 took advantage of.a rare planetary alignment to send a probe past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Originally designed to last four years, they are now the furthest man-made objects from Earth, now traveling in interstellar space. After 45 years, however, systems on the spacecraft are being powered down, in an effort to conserve power into the next decade. A bittersweet ending to an amazing mission.
posted by MrGuilt at 7:51 PM PST - 65 comments

In his new Senate campaign ad, military veteran and disgraced former governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, goes RINO hunting. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:49 PM PST - 89 comments

An unemployed real estate agent from Victoria, British Columbia is now officially Queen of the Earth. She has her own RV. [more inside]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:41 AM PST - 50 comments

Mark Cuban has set up a new venture - a "cost plus" pharmacy, in order to fight back against rising drug costs. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:38 AM PST - 32 comments

The lack of recreational weed shops in Michigan’s largest city is not exactly by choice. But it wasn’t by accident either. For more than two years, city officials have attempted to launch an adult-use market. But their efforts to ensure that the fledgling industry reflects the city’s demographics by giving preferential treatment to long-time residents or people living in areas disproportionately targeted by criminal enforcement have led to numerous lawsuits and endless delays. The result is a still-born market where everyone is failing. [Politico]
posted by riruro at 9:45 AM PST - 32 comments

From Scarface to Hans Gruber, Twitter Has a Field Day Meme-ing Trump Lawyer’s Request to Join ‘Pardon List’ [CW: Trump lawyers]
posted by chavenet at 7:44 AM PST - 19 comments

With the caveat that none of the platform is officially binding, it's still worth noting just how radical the official plank of the Texas Republican Party is. [NYT gift link] You can find the full platform here [pdf], some of the hightlights (lowlights?) below the fold. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:42 AM PST - 50 comments

The war continues. As the Russian invasion continues into the fourth month and apparently is bogging down, once again Europe has to face the reality of industrial warfare. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 6:06 AM PST - 259 comments

My name is 3Fred, and I'm here to say, this the finest free thread that you'll see today [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:07 AM PST - 112 comments

When my sister’s kids were young, I moved in with them and became a co-parent. Now that they’re college-aged, I asked them what they made of that time, and how they came to think of me as both their uncle and replacement father figure. [CW: article is fine, but site has some NSFW content; links might be jarring]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 2:01 PM PST - 15 comments

Episode 0847 of Sesame Street, aired in 1976, guest-starred Margaret Hamilton reprising her role as the Wicked Witch of the West. After many parents complained her bits were too scary, it only aired once. [more inside]
posted by box at 1:38 PM PST - 32 comments

Always a collector, Cheech Marin brings his art to Riverside The museum is a first, not just for Marin but for the nation. It’s considered the only permanent art space to exclusively showcase Chicano and Mexican American art in the country. [more inside]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:06 PM PST - 9 comments

Notes Toward the Complete Works of Shakespeare is a book written by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe, and Rowa in 2002. They were all Sulawesi Crested Macaques living at the Paington Zoo in Devon. Their work received rather a lot of humorless press coverage. [Includes many screen-shots of articles with no alt-text] [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 12:37 PM PST - 21 comments

Jamie Loftus (previously previously previously previously previously) has a 10-episode "The Lolita Podcast": "This story and its titular character have been adapted, misinterpreted, and twisted over the years by Hollywood, by music, by fashion, by fans of the book, and occasionally by the author himself. Lolita has gone from the tragic story of an abused 13-year-old girl to a cultural narrative that frames her as a seductress and to blame what happened to her. So how did all of this happen?" [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 10:38 AM PST - 13 comments

Meet the superfan who made a plaque marking the site of U2's Joshua Tree. Just west of Death Valley, along a grimy string of semi-active mining settlements and the empty scrublands where the Navy tests explosives, right off the road, there’s a mounted bronze plaque and a dead tree. The plaque asks, “Have you found what you’re looking for?” The dead tree would just be another dead Joshua tree if it hadn’t graced the cover of one of the best-selling albums of all time. Yes, that album. Yes, that tree.
posted by Long Way To Go at 9:49 AM PST - 27 comments

This 715-song playlist is scientifically verified to give you the chills, thanks to “frisson” [Big Think] [Spotify playlist] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:09 AM PST - 54 comments

Jamie Loftus (previously previously previously previously) has a new podcast! Ghost Church is an exploration of Spiritualism, its history, beliefs, regrettable relationship with Black and Indigenous people, and so much more. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:31 PM PST - 8 comments

In 1928 a young writer named Gertrude Beasley sailed from London to New York and was never heard from again. She left behind only one book, My First Thirty Years (Contact Editions, 1925). The strange and horrifying story of Gertrude Beasley, who pulled herself out of poverty to receive an MA in Education in 1918, then wrote a shocking memoir (content warning for talk of child abuse). [more inside]
posted by maggiemaggie at 3:28 PM PST - 15 comments

"Inside a Corporate Culture War Stoked by a Crypto CEO" (SLNYT (archive.org) about crypto app Kraken and CEO Jesse Powell)
posted by box at 1:21 PM PST - 55 comments

Friends build real castle from scratch with simple tools only [more inside]
posted by ilikemefi at 12:16 PM PST - 21 comments

On Twitter, Isle McElroy asks, "can anyone recommend a good slim novel? Looking for something very good--impossible to put down--and unthinkably slim, like zero to zero pages or so." [more inside]
posted by taz at 10:50 AM PST - 34 comments

Electronic pop/dance flourished internationally: Be a Boy, Gina X Performance; Thrash, Cowboys International; Day Breaks, Night Heals, Thomas Leer & Robert Rental; Aurora B., Krisma; Chip 'N' Roll, Silicon Teens; I Need Somebody To Love Tonight, Sylvester; Faites le proton (Inst.), Casino Music; Kameari Pop, P-Model; Margherita (Inst. Hot Edit), Massara; The Visitors (Inst.), Gino Soccio; Alien (12" Disco), Nostromo; Underwater, Harry Thumann. Minimalism too: 1, Galen Herod; Ice Floe, Young Scientist; Have a Good Ride, Pyrolator; Sei Note in Logica, Roberto Cacciapaglia. Trash Theory's Before Are 'Friends' Electric gives a genealogy for high-profile British synth-pop of the year: Electricity (Version II), OMD; Are 'Friends' Electric? Tubeway Army; Cars, Gary Numan. And, technically, it was the year of The New Sound of Music (1979).
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:30 AM PST - 8 comments

The Hollywood Reporter's TV Comedy Actress Roundtable for this year [50m] brings together Amy Schumer, Bridget Everett, Molly Shannon, Quinta Brunson, Selena Gomez, and Tracy Ellis Ross who spend a bit less than an hour in delightful, funny, honest conversation and insights about being them and doing what they do.
posted by hippybear at 7:16 AM PST - 2 comments

The Theft of the Commons by Eula Biss.
posted by latkes at 6:09 AM PST - 27 comments

“We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century” In 1977 Star Wars hit movie theaters, New York City had a blackout that lasted 25 hours, and the Apple II personal computer went up for sale. It was also the year that a remarkable one-page memo was circulated at the very highest levels of US government.
posted by mumimor at 2:49 AM PST - 22 comments

As part of celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the show, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch revealed several of the revision notes he got from Disney Broadcast Standards and Practices. (SLTwitter) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:55 PM PST - 24 comments

Margaret Killjoy after a rousing appearance on Behind the Bastards (previously) has begun her own podcast: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:19 PM PST - 11 comments

Pixar’s Up was inspired by a single image: a house with balloons tied to its roof floating into the sky, far away from the burden of daily life. “It seemed freeing and aspirational"...But the makers of Up knew that even feel-good stories need pathos... The opening of Up, however, is more than just a narrative device. The movie-within-a-movie is as emotionally heavy as Carl’s helium-lifted house is buoyant.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:18 AM PST - 118 comments

A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon [via]
posted by dhruva at 9:35 AM PST - 26 comments

Mesopotamia Online is an immersive exploration of Mesopotamian art objects. The exhibition Mesopotamia: Civilization Begins was on view in 2021 at the Getty Villa. It was organized by the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the J. Paul Getty Museum,
posted by storybored at 9:06 AM PST - 7 comments

"The Western classical music canon is notoriously white and male – so you might assume that a black Renaissance composer would be a figure of significant interest, much-performed and studied. In fact, the story of the first known published black composer – Vicente Lusitano – is only now being heard, alongside a revival of interest in his long-neglected choral music." from The great 16th-Century black composer erased from history [BBC] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:51 AM PST - 5 comments

Read the letter and response – or listen to Benedict Cumberbatch and Sanjeev Bhaskar perform them, playing Jagger and Escher respectively. That closing, though.
posted by gestalt saloon at 7:01 AM PST - 31 comments

After claims of misconduct and alleged affair with a coworker, Vince McMahon has "stepped back" as Chair and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. McMahon's hiatus comes after a week of revelations. The WWE board of directors discovered a US $3 million hush payment from McMahon's personal funds to a former employee, a paralegal, from an anonymous tip from "a friend" of the former employee. The unnamed employee allegedly had an affair with McMahon and (WWE Manager of Talent Relations) John Laurinaitis. McMahon's daughter, Stephanie McMahon, has returned from family leave to serve as the Interim CEO and Interim Chair. She was on a break from her existing role of Chief Brand Officer, after leaving in May to "focus on her family." [more inside]
posted by andreaazure at 5:36 AM PST - 41 comments

On Lake Superior, a $1 billion eco-disaster is swallowing the coast [MLive] It is the enduring legacy of historic mining, a vestige of the Keweenaw Peninsula’s heyday as the world’s greatest source of copper. For more than 100 years, roughly 50 billion pounds [of stamp sand] dumped in a pile so large it once extended a half mile into the lake, has been slowly, inexorably, eroding south.
posted by riruro at 4:03 PM PST - 17 comments

Corporate Memphis dig into the origins of this ever-present art style as seen on Facebook, Hinge, Uber, Google, Flow, Youtube, The Guardian, Spotify, AirBnB, Slack and seemingly every other web3 startup.
posted by Lanark at 3:08 PM PST - 37 comments

How to Make the Perfect Cup of Italian Coffee Unpacking the history, allure, and ways to use the humble Moka pot.
posted by bq at 9:05 AM PST - 112 comments

JUNE 16, 1904: JAMES JOYCE MEETS NORA BARNACLE [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 8:29 AM PST - 37 comments

Interview with a squirrel. In which Janelle Shane puts some previous tomfoolery into perspective.
posted by signal at 7:49 AM PST - 20 comments

Facebook's ubiquitous Meta Pixel has been shown to collect patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments and send it to Facebook. Researcher discovered that one third of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals were sending sensitive data to Facebook, presumably inadvertently. A law professor who studies big data and health care called it "creepy, problematic, and potentially illegal."
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:26 AM PST - 53 comments

.... does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a free monthly music podcast from the former BBC radio DJ and foreign correspondent featuring session guests such as Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Ali Farka Toure, Half Man Half Biscuit, John Shuttleworth and Robyn Hitchcock. There's 14 episodes available so far, and they're all worth a listen.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:06 AM PST - 2 comments

From The Daily Show Youtube channel, Alex Wagner Interviews Trevor [42m]. Real introspective conversation about the things you want to hear that kind of conversation about. I truly enjoyed this The first 4m37s are an entertaining but not necessary montage from TDS.
posted by hippybear at 4:41 PM PST - 5 comments

Why is this tiny frog so awful at jumping? "The moment the pumpkin toadlet leaps into the air, anything seems possible. The tiny frog, which is about the size of a honeybee and the color of a cloudberry, has no problem launching itself high off the ground. But when the pumpkin toadlet begins to soar, something goes awry."
posted by moonmilk at 3:49 PM PST - 70 comments

BBC: "Microsoft is finally retiring the consumer version of Internet Explorer. It announced the plan last year, making Internet Explorer 11 its final version." The Verge: "The aging web browser is being sunset in favor of Microsoft Edge, with support being officially withdrawn for IE 11 today." XDA: "According to the company, Internet Explorer will 'progressively redirect' users to the new Edge browser. In the coming months, more and more users will start seeing Edge open when they try to open IE, until eventually, the transition will be complete. However, Microsoft isn’t saying when this process will be finished." Previously: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018.
posted by Wordshore at 3:44 PM PST - 64 comments

In 2014, Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, published the paper "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious", putting forward the idea that if you accept that matter and physical things are at the root of everything, then if that means you believe rabbits are (or at least, can be) conscious, then the United States is probably conscious, too. [more inside]
posted by danhon at 12:20 PM PST - 46 comments

In an excerpt from her upcoming book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, author Elizabeth Williamson interviews leading Sandy Hook truther Kelley "gr8mom" Watt, to explore the mentality that would lead someone to hold the belief that one of the bloodiest school shootings never happened. (SLSlate)
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:11 AM PST - 135 comments

"For over 30 years during the mid-20th century, a group of women who lived in eastern Oregon went on an annual 10-day horseback ride through the Wallowa Mountains. The women called themselves the Hen Party [archive.ph], and they were led by Jean Birnie, a local woman known for her horse-riding skills, reverence for nature and rejection of modern conveniences." [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 9:38 AM PST - 5 comments

At least seven PC game collectors have publicly or privately identified dozens of suspected forgeries they say [Enrico] Ricciardi traded or sold as far back as 2015 and as recently as last month. Collectors estimate that those trades and sales include games that would be valued at well over $100,000 total on the open market if they were authentic. Ricciardi told Ars he is also a victim who simply unknowingly passed along suspect collectibles without checking them thoroughly enough. Regardless, the overwhelming evidence suggesting that there are many forgeries circulating through the world of rare PC games has shaken the trust of that community to the core. from Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting [Ars Technica]
posted by chavenet at 7:55 AM PST - 28 comments

By a 5-to-2 vote, the Court of Appeals rejected [NY Times] an animal-advocacy organization’s habeus corpus argument that Happy was being illegally detained at the zoo and should be transferred to a more natural environment. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:49 AM PST - 49 comments

Boundary violation in Minecraft "Today my 7 year-old came into the room crying. I asked him what happened and he said that his 5 year-old brother put 80 cows in his house in Minecraft while he was offline and that it was "entirely too many cows" and honest to christ I have no idea how to parent any of this." [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:15 AM PST - 65 comments

Article by novelist Louisa Reid about her time at Oxford University in the 1990s. In an interview, The Poet author Louisa Reid: Posh boys have "learned how to make privilege hot", Reid talks about class, her novel in poetry, Charlotte Mew, the lack of women's writing on A level syllabuses, poetry in prisons, and, in passing, The Archers.
posted by paduasoy at 3:12 AM PST - 19 comments

It can't be any simpler than this: you have some bash script that you want to be executed from time to time. In my case, I have some background processes I need to kill. Nomad is a well-known workload orchestrator. I have decided to automate my homelab cluster using it. I will through this blog post try to walk you through some discoveries I made on the way during the previous couple of months.
posted by geoff. at 2:44 AM PST - 31 comments

Nineteen years after their last live appearance, the satirical Melbourne band TISM have announced their comeback.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:51 PM PST - 13 comments

For the 1-year anniversary of his project, YouTuber BamaBass finally adds Bass to his 5-Acre Pond. Come for the detailed behind-the-scenes shots of stocking a pond, stay for the footage of owls taking a dust bath! [5-acre pond playlist]
posted by rebent at 5:47 PM PST - 23 comments

The Rwanda asylum plan is a controversial new immigration policy introduced by the British (conservative) government. Asylum seekers will be relocated to Rwanda for processing/asylum/resettlement and will not be allowed to return to the United Kingdom to seek asylum. Today the first UK deportation flight to Rwanda was cancelled after an intervention by the European court. [more inside]
posted by Lanark at 4:33 PM PST - 35 comments

Three days before Congress was slated to certify the 2020 presidential election , a little-known Justice Department official named Jeffrey Clark rushed to meet President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss a last-ditch attempt to reverse the results. ... [K]ey witnesses have provided Congress with a fuller account of Clark’s actions, including new details about the confrontation that took place in the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, which lasted nearly three hours. [alt link] ... [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:05 PM PST - 86 comments

On Monday, [Lizzo] announced that she has released a new version of her single "GRRRLS," changing the lyrics to eliminate an ableist slur that received some backlash over the weekend.
posted by Etrigan at 10:21 AM PST - 40 comments

Though we last heard from Zadrożniak and the Floppotron 2.0 in 2018, this month we learned that it is time to goodbye to Floppotron 2.0, and witness the power of the 16 hard disks, 4 scanners and 512 floppy drives of the fully armed and operational Floppotron 3.0.
posted by mhoye at 8:22 AM PST - 24 comments

Last month, YouTuber Ben Kidd—aka: 8-bit Music Theory (previously 1 2)—released his first album, Let's Play, a jazz fusion reimagining of classic Nintendo GameCube era music. In a recent video on his YouTube channel, 8-bit breaks down how he created his arrangement of the Rainbow Road theme from Mario Kart: Double Dash!! [more inside]
posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand at 7:33 AM PST - 3 comments

"LIV Golf is supercharging the professional golf landscape and creating value for fans and players alike." [more inside]
posted by box at 7:05 AM PST - 69 comments

"Datamoshing is a technique of damaging video clips to create a glitch effect wherein frames that should change don't. It's most noticeable between cuts and across motion. Datamoshing is the process of corrupting, removing or replacing I-frames, causing P-frames to be applied to the wrong picture."
posted by gestalt saloon at 6:13 AM PST - 18 comments

I Can Only Count To FOUR. via Garbage Day
posted by signal at 8:14 PM PST - 16 comments

Now hear me out. What makes this song stink: Beverly Hills. I'm not big on harshing anyone's buzz but that's not what's going on here at all. This video is a journey.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:20 PM PST - 57 comments

I called my partner and said: "I beat the horse." And she said: "You're joking?" Despite being awake for 29 hours before the race even started, fittingly-named fell runner and firefighter Ricky Lightfoot has become the first person in 15 years--and the third person ever--to win the 22.5-mile Man vs Horse race across the Welsh countryside.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:09 PM PST - 33 comments

With Celsius freezing withdrawals, and Binance suffering problems, Offline Cash has achieved peak crypto: Bitcoin that's easy to save, spend and hold in a self-sovereign way. [Via Web 3 is going just great, of course]
posted by chavenet at 12:05 PM PST - 80 comments

Would you like some glitchy noise techno goodness? Yes? Well then: Formwork by ESCOTE.
posted by cortex at 11:23 AM PST - 5 comments

From Brian David Gilbert (with Karen Han), it’s the song of the summer. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:21 AM PST - 16 comments

Responses to 10 common criticisms of anti-racism action in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine.
Criticism #4: “I only hire/award/cite based on merit. I do not need to consider race." It should be noted that the concept of “meritocracy” was introduced as satire by novelist Michael Dunlop Young, who believed that a society structured as a meritocracy would appear equitable, but ultimately serve to reinforce and perpetuate preexisting inequality. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:57 AM PST - 10 comments

YouGov reveals where Americans fall on the classic D&D alignment table
posted by Etrigan at 8:48 AM PST - 61 comments

Popular organist and Director of Music at Pembroke, Anna Lapwood, often finds herself rehearsing on the house organ at Albert Hall. While doing so in May, Bonobo's band heard this happen. Within 18 hours she was written into the closing night and completely slayed it. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by majick at 6:26 AM PST - 24 comments

"Humans deserve and require unconditional love." (On the 4th anniversary of the You're Wrong About podcast, the AV Club's Marnie Shure interviews Sarah Marshall.)
posted by box at 5:00 AM PST - 10 comments

Free The _____? a) People, b) Land, c) Thread, d) Nipple [more inside]
posted by taz at 3:11 AM PST - 138 comments

A Record of Our Meeting with the Grand Faerie Lord of Vast Space and Its Great Mysteries, Revised. A not-strictly-linear Science Fantasy short story by A.T. Greenblatt, from Issue #350 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
posted by signal at 8:07 PM PST - 6 comments

April-June 2022 in humanity's exploration of space. Stand by for rocky passengers, glitches, amazing images, a very French rocket name, Earthly politics, and lots of asteroids.

On the Earth In the Himalayas, a liquid mirror telescope came online. France joined the Artemis accords for sustainable space exploration. BRICS nations announced a new space agreement: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 5:42 PM PST - 12 comments

A bunch of random people making a baby's day better (note, vid plays twice) h/t Laughing Squid
posted by Gorgik at 2:04 PM PST - 7 comments

Touring musicians. They're dedicated. Like, REALLY dedicated. Why Am I Doing This? is 2h6m with musicians who just want to work. and are willing to put up with whatever circumstances life throws at them to keep playing their tunes. I loved watching this, maybe you will too!
posted by hippybear at 1:19 PM PST - 4 comments

Running Up That Hill is a track from the 1985 Kate Bush album "Hounds of Love". The song was approved and heard in the recent "I'm still here" scene in Stranger Things (lyrical relevance), resulting in new fans, social media uses, and some chart reappearances. More in The Irish Times, and some words from Kate. (From the same album: Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting, The Big Sky)
posted by Wordshore at 1:04 PM PST - 65 comments

Here's an interesting 25-minute video essay from Mike Rugnetta on dirt on camera lenses, questioning the principle of suspension of disbelief, Descartes vs. Spinoza on evaluating truth, and the nature of our internal engagement with fiction.
posted by cortex at 12:16 PM PST - 5 comments

Researchers’ number-one fear from Syria to Afghanistan is not war or terrorism but the coming shifts in nature itself. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Blake Lemoine works for Google as an AI ethicist and has been suspended for a whistleblower complaint: he alleges that they have created an AI that claims personhood and could pass a Turing test (archive.is of WAPO link). The full interview with LaMDA.
posted by fight or flight at 9:43 AM PST - 194 comments

The 1976 Los Alamos Conference: The Woodstock of Computing. For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing’s top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb. After a multi-year recovery and restoration process, the Computer History Museum is delighted to announce it is making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of this unique conference. You can watch them here.
posted by Westringia F. at 9:35 AM PST - 8 comments

The budget culture blueprint has been copied over and over by financial experts who think they’ve pinpointed the problem keeping us all poor, from lattes to avocado toast to mindset mistakes. But they all really have just one secret to getting rich quickly: aggressive investing. And you can invest as aggressively as you want with $1 or $5 at a time — tons of apps will help you do it! — but you won’t quit your day job that way. The only sure way to make money is to have money, but no personal finance expert wants to admit their wealth is built on anything other than a solid foundation of hard work and self-control — not their degrees in finance, Ivy League educations, middle class upbringings… or their ability to sell you a fantasy. Dana Miranda writes in Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study on why budget culture fails so many Americans.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:00 AM PST - 93 comments

It's Sunday, which means it's time to gear up and hit the twisties! Step inside, we have 99 awesome motorcycles to choose from, ordered by engine displacement. So let's ride! (Our Kickstarter.) [more inside]
posted by swift at 5:28 AM PST - 27 comments

Julee Cruise, best known for her ethereal dreampop songs in the soundtrack of David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series, passed away on Friday after a long illness. [more inside]
posted by acb at 5:04 AM PST - 38 comments

In 2022, it’s no longer fashionable to be fashionably late, a change that seems to have arisen from a pandemic now in its third year. [NYT / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:05 AM PST - 44 comments

"This is a sweet little innocent autistic 9-year-old boy who saw a flag and a bunch of signs with his name on it — and he really thought people were rooting for him," Brundidge said. "He got brave. He got courageous. He did stuff he thought he would never do. Because he thought he saw a sign of support." Last week, Brandon got another nudge of support from someone with experience in "Let's Go Brandon" messaging — President Joe Biden.

How nine year old autistic Brandon found courage through an insult thought up by people too gutless to just say fuck Joe Biden.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:01 AM PST - 19 comments

"They don't have enough fans to worry about." - Billy Martin. Cleveland’s Infamous 10-Cent Beer Night (STYK podcast) or watch on YouTube
posted by shoesfullofdust at 8:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Francis Lam chats with Virgie Tovar on Rebel Eaters Club podcast (transcript included). Re: a family banquet in Hong Kong in their childhood:

"I grabbed my chopsticks [and] grabbed the cheek out of the fish's head. Which was so appalling because you know that the cheek is the best bite of the fish... and in a highly patriarchal, elder focused society, my grandfather is supposed to get [that]. And the whole table, my parents, were like, Oh my God. What animal are we raising? And my grandfather in all his generosity, just laughed and said, this one really knows how to eat."

Lots of awesome episodes of the podcast and journal prompts for self-reflection. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:19 PM PST - 5 comments

The Crypting Point. Max Read reviews Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (SL Bookforum). "Twitter isn’t a deliberative space, where citizens gather to debate politics and lead society—it’s a speculative market, where traders stake out discursive positions against the value of their brands, and fans and partisans gather to imagine unlikely but not impossible new futures." [more inside]
posted by Lyme Drop at 3:19 PM PST - 16 comments

“I started teaching in 1979 as I feared the younger generation would be illiterate, because in the Pol Pot era they could not learn. A 74-year-old man, Kong You, has devoted the past 43 years of his life to teaching the children of Ka’am Samnor commune of Kandal province’s Loeuk Dek district for free, as he has wanted to see them all literate and educated.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:41 PM PST - 4 comments

Every Harry Styles Song Ranked (published just ahead of the release of his most recent record, Harry's House) [Rolling Stone] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:02 AM PST - 12 comments

John Flansburgh, half of the iconic duo They Might Be Giants, was seriously injured in a car crash after performing with the band at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan on Wednesday night. [more inside]
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 6:09 AM PST - 30 comments

A week ago veteran journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous Peoples expert Bruno Pereira went missing, now presumed executed in the far west of the Brazilian Amazon.
The two men had previously visted the Javari Valley in 2018 with photographer Gary Carlton.
Andrew Fishman posts a draft version of Dom's selection of his favorite reporting.
posted by adamvasco at 5:23 AM PST - 6 comments

Jonah disappeared in the early 2000s. When I say disappeared, I mean vanished: No sightings, no social media, no work history, no criminal record, no glimpses of him in the background of a party photo. His family went to great lengths to find him; they found nothing. I have been searching for the past five years, on and off; what I haven’t tried, they tried first.

Rage USA is an essay by Jude Doyle about their high school friend who vanished, and what it’s like to live and grow up queer in the US, and is a part of their Twelve Genders, Full Moon Mixtape series.
posted by Kattullus at 4:07 AM PST - 9 comments

Bandit Heeler is a hero. The cartoon father of Bluey and her younger sister Bingo, Bandit is the much-loved dad dog at the heart of Australia’s favourite four-legged family. He balances the drudgery of housework with the creative escapades of his daughters, repurposing everyday objects and actions for imaginative play and engagement. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 6:21 PM PST - 28 comments

Citizen Scientists! Help Amarillo, Texas identify this oddly-clothed resident frightening cryptocreature... before it starts to realize that there are plenty of cattle around the area to suck the blood out of and it doesn't need their zoo. (Or, that the 7-11 is actually open all night).
posted by not_on_display at 5:47 PM PST - 14 comments

[slyt] An unexpected leak in an aluminium (aluminum) factory causes a fire problem, and eventually a bit of damage to the ceiling. However, the worker still chooses to rescue their phone; the right call to make?
posted by Wordshore at 4:02 PM PST - 49 comments

Things get weird when the $300 million “Titanic Experience” collides with a fake UN department and a possible crypto scam. ... Squires says, on his Linkedin profile and his website, that he’s a strategic advisor for the United Nations Department of Sports, Music, and the Arts. Here’s the thing: There is no United Nations Department of Sports, Music, and the Arts. Adventures in investigation from Kaija Jussinoja and Matt Stickland writing in The Coast.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:39 AM PST - 44 comments

This New Yorker article explores various bits of research into animal language. Not super in depth but definitely a jumping off place if this intrigues you.
posted by leslies at 6:33 AM PST - 12 comments

10 Levels of Sleight of Hand - Cheating at Poker. (YT) "Level 1: this demonstration is based on a routine by Jim Swain, explained on his Miracles DVD set. Level 2: I use a shuffle sequence created by Rod the Hop in this phase and throughout the video. It is explained in Steve Forte's books, Gambling Sleight of Hand Vols. 1 and 2. Levels 3 & 4: these demonstrations are based off of Harry Lorayne's routine Numero Uno, released on Vol. 1 of his "Best Ever" DVD set. Level 5: while different in method, this level is based off of ideas found throughout Jim Swain's act on the first DVD of his Miracles DVD set. Levels 6, 7, & 8: these levels are comprised of a slight variation of Darwin Ortiz's routine Positively Fifth Street, found in his book Lessons in Card Mastery. Levels 9 & 10: this demonstration is a (very) slight variation of the Dai Vernon Poker Demonstration, published in the Dai Vernon Book of Magic." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 6:30 AM PST - 30 comments

Here is a short and very-layperson-accessible linguistics paper that made cartoon steam shoot out of my ears. I hope that you enjoy it as well.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:45 AM PST - 108 comments

Cell Tower, a word search game in which you find words on a grid. Letters must be all connected orthogonally, and read top-down, left-right. Click the hamburger menu to access both the daily and previous puzzles, and instructions. Note that there are lots of words available, but only one solution that uses all the letters in the grid.
posted by Gorgik at 5:37 AM PST - 25 comments

Australia went to the polls three weeks ago* and elected a new federal government. Now anthropomorphised cartoon animals are laughing again. [more inside]
posted by Thella at 4:29 AM PST - 38 comments

Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton has proposed new legislation banning minors from attending drag shows. Florida lawmakers plan to follow suit with a bill that would charge an adult who brought a child to a drag show with a felony and terminate their parental rights. The drag show which prompted the response was also targeted by self-described "Christian fascist" protestors who chanted "groomer" at artists and families leaving the event. Many drag artists have responded, pointing out the hypocrisy of the movement.
posted by fight or flight at 4:13 AM PST - 71 comments

Rethinking healthy eating in light of the gut microbiome was just published yesterday in the open access journal "Cell, Host, and Microbe". It's is a long and enlightening review article about what we know about the human microbiome and nutrition. It's increasingly looking like we can't understand nutrition science at all without understanding the bacteria who help us digest our food. [more inside]
posted by OnceUponATime at 3:32 PM PST - 79 comments

Imagine a world without Bikini Kill, or a world where Heatmiser was cool with Elliott Smith’s songwriting direction. Imagine an indie-rock landscape without Sleater-Kinney circa Dig Me Out through One Beat (or any of the principal members’ excellent releases prior to S-K), or a Pacific Northwest scene where Unwound didn’t have a label that enthusiastically followed their artistic flights of fancy. And that’s just scratching the surface. From the great, weird bands on subsidiary 5 Rue Christine (Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu) to Throwaway Style Hall of Famers Wimps, Kill Rock Stars has endured multiple waves of the so-called death of the music industry to remain one of the most influential record labels in music.
posted by Cash4Lead at 2:34 PM PST - 9 comments

John Cena meets Misha, a teenager with Down syndrome who fled Ukraine after his home was destroyed (YouTube). To motivate Misha on their journey to safety, his mother told him the fantasy that they were on their way to find Cena. They spent the afternoon building blocks and eating cake. [more inside]
posted by Pronoiac at 1:29 PM PST - 25 comments

North of the Border, Canadian maker of things, discloses: I made a Realistic Lego Man and I'm Sorry.
posted by cortex at 12:22 PM PST - 30 comments

No one ever knows what they’re unleashing. They don’t even know there’s a leash. I’ve been given a time machine. Would I send a Terminator back to the web standards meetings circa 1994 to eliminate the element? I don’t know. If anything could defeat a Terminator, it’s attending a web standards meeting. A little HTML widget gave us all-powerful Amazon and Facebook. There's no closing Pandora's text box now.
posted by gestalt saloon at 11:11 AM PST - 58 comments

“No one wanted to be on that project because it ate people. It destroyed people,” one former developer on Fallout 76 told Kotaku. “The amount of people who would go to that project, and then they would quit [Bethesda] was quite high.” Kotaku spoke to 10 former employees of Bethesda and its parent company ZeniMax Media who were familiar with Fallout 76’s development, all of whom shared their accounts only under the condition of anonymity. Some sources said that they signed non-disparagement agreements upon leaving the company, and feared that ZeniMax’s influence in the industry would prevent them from being hired elsewhere.
posted by octothorpe at 10:28 AM PST - 39 comments

Less Alone (on spending a month in a fire-spotter's cabin in rural West Virginia, SLBitter Southerner)
posted by box at 8:44 AM PST - 11 comments

"Cola math" is a silly, twenty-nine-second video: "Circa year 2000 something, cut together from a couple silly student films." Found via Brion Vibber as he was testing video transcoding/deinterlacing. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 8:16 AM PST - 4 comments

[Twitter thread] “I'm reading and watching stuff about 80s and early 90s game development, and it's stuff like this...” by David Stark (@zarkonnen_com)
posted by Wordshore at 8:04 AM PST - 15 comments

"Starting Thursday, lawmakers will begin to lay out findings from their nearly yearlong investigation into the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol." A short primer, with links to live coverage, from PBS's NewsHour. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:56 AM PST - 494 comments

In which we pose a series of questions to the biggest boffins on the planet. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 5:34 AM PST - 34 comments

In A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows, Scott Alexander has a desire to make some very specific images. But, as he finds out, "the artists I’ve asked to design this all balk. I need an artist who works for free and isn’t allowed to say no. Enter DALL-E-2, the new art-generating AI." [more inside]
posted by cardioid at 7:01 PM PST - 73 comments

Samantha Melamed writes about the invention of solitary confinement in US prisons for the Phildelphia Inquirer.
posted by eotvos at 6:45 PM PST - 3 comments

It all started with a tweet from artist Chi Nguyen on Monday. "Twitter, I need your help." Two bowls had become stuck together while doing the dishes, and they would not come apart! [more inside]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 5:39 PM PST - 30 comments

Prescribed Burn Associations are increasing in number across the US. Prairie has been maintained by fire for thousands of years. Over the last thirty years though, cedar has increased by 600%, and trees in general are one of the larger threats to unmaintained prairie. [more inside]
posted by ockmockbock at 5:19 PM PST - 15 comments

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences or hiphilangsci to its friends, is a podcast about linguistics, from its earliest stirrings as a science. It is hosted and produced by James McElvenny, and tries to cover all major intellectual currents in linguistics, from a historical perspective. The associated blog is co-edited by Chloé Laplantine, and has evolved to feature long video interviews and a book series.
posted by Kattullus at 4:40 PM PST - 4 comments

"My Grandpa Dave told me he was sure he was gay when he was moving into his dorm room freshman year of college and there was a boy “with the prettiest eyes;” after Grandpa passed, I learned from my mother who that boy was." Thus begins a truly wonderful twitter thread from Sama’an Ashrawi. Threadreader version. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:17 PM PST - 8 comments

To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus An attempt to place the lambda calculus on an even deeper foundation. Personally, I think people have found way better visualisations for lambda calculus (https://github.com/prathyvsh/lambda-calculus-visualizations) but what I find remarkable here is not the visualisation itself but the metaconcept being used. [more inside]
posted by Burgers at 10:53 AM PST - 10 comments

Artist Paula Rego, known for her visceral and unsettling work, dies aged 87 [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 9:17 AM PST - 8 comments

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream ...
posted by dancestoblue at 8:32 AM PST - 14 comments

"Beyond the triumph of the landings and the enemy defeated, the D-Day literature has never found complacency easy to come by. The tactical performance of allied troops was inferior. The advance from the bridgeheads was disappointingly slow. Allied forces were halted on the German border over the winter of 1944-45 and did not breach the Rhine until March 1945. Meanwhile, Stalin’s Red Army surged across Eastern Europe towards Berlin. The frontline of the Cold War was defined by the sluggish advance that followed D-Day." Adam Tooze: For the anniversary of D-Day - Blitzkrieg manquée? Or, a new mode of "firepower war"?
posted by kmt at 7:49 AM PST - 11 comments

Thailand is a top destination for gender affirming surgery. Low costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

"Since the first operation in 1975, Thailand has gained a reputation as the global expert in this niche field: Foreigners made up 90% of GCS patients between 2010 and 2012. But what is driving this thriving industry in the country goes well beyond the comparatively low cost of care. Over a period of six months, I spoke to a group of trans women* to better understand why many would rather fly halfway across the world than receive GCS at home. Coming from the U.S., the U.K., Norway, Bulgaria, Israel, Canada, and Australia, and facing different personal and social circumstances, they were united in their conviction that their home countries had not presented them with good options and that they had to take matters into their own hands."

This article goes into great depth regarding the gatekeeping, bureaucracy, and bigotry that many trans people who seek surgery often face, and how Thailand has long been a beacon of hope for many of these people. (CW for depression, suicide, graphic details of surgery)
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:51 AM PST - 10 comments

Amino acids found in asteroid samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe. More than 20 types of amino acids have been detected in samples Japan's Hayabusa2 space probe brought to Earth from an asteroid in late 2020, a government official said Monday, showing for the first time the organic compounds exist on asteroids in space. [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 2:49 AM PST - 9 comments

"Crip ecologies, crip time, crip ingenuity, crip spirit radically aim to question root systems that keep our imaginations limited and starved. How can we channel joy within our own skins before there is the stethoscope, the specialist’s jackhammered interrogation, before all the stigma we battle? I am not asking to look beyond it, because these constraints in our beings are here and ever-present. I am asking, as poets, as curious people who want liberation, how do we revel in the grief and also the growth we experience? In what ways does this unpack how we are taught to perceive place and nature?...I cannot discuss just the maroon autumnal leaves of a forest in a poem. You see, for every invitation of publication, every event, in-person and virtual, every residency in the middle of oak trees, there’s a script I have to bring along with me. I am, by default, an unpaid teacher, training: Yes, Disabled and Sick people exist, do in fact care about poetry, but they can’t access the flyer without a description, can’t get to the building because of all the stairs, can’t witness the poetry because there are no ASL interpreters or captions." Kay Ulanday Barrett on poetry, accesabilty, disability & intersectionality.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:37 PM PST - 2 comments

Want to Do Less Time? A Prison Consultant Might Be Able to Help. For a price, a new breed of fixer is teaching convicts how to reduce their sentence, get placed in a better facility — and make the most of their months behind bars. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 1:46 PM PST - 28 comments

Seals & Crofts were a 70s soft rock duo in the 70s with some impressive singles and great albums (with some deeper tracks). Although best known for their bigger hits such as "Summer Breeze" and "Diamond Girl",their albums had some deep cuts including the gorgeous tune "Hummingbird", To my ears this was one one most beautiful songs of the era. Jimmy Seals was 80 when he passed away yesterday.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 12:20 PM PST - 43 comments

Having hit 93 years in the funny pages, the long running spinach chomping sailor undergoes a change as Randy Milholland, creator of the long running webcomic Something Positive, takes over as the regular Sunday strip artist for Popeye. (SLWaPo)
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:18 AM PST - 43 comments

There is a lot of randomness in a game of Slay the Spire. From the cards and relics offered, to the potions dropped, to the map layouts and random encounters, very little remains the same between two playthroughs. This is part of the beauty of the game, forcing you to adapt and make the most out of the resources you have been given in each new attempt. However, with such randomness comes a natural question: can every run of Slay the Spire be won? In this article, I will discuss what I believe to be the current state of knowledge about the answer to this question. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 10:43 AM PST - 30 comments

A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues? by Patrick Radden Keefe Nestled west of Washington, D.C., amid the bland northern Virginia suburbs, are generic-looking office parks that hide secret government installations in plain sight. Employees in civilian dress get out of their cars, clutching their Starbucks, and disappear into the buildings. To the casual observer, they resemble anonymous corporate drones. In fact, they hold Top Secret clearances and work in defense and intelligence. One of these buildings, at an address that is itself a secret, houses the cyberintelligence division of the Central Intelligence Agency. The facility is surrounded by a high fence and monitored by guards armed with military-grade weapons. When employees enter the building, they must badge in and pass through a full-body turnstile. Inside, on the ninth floor, through another door that requires badge access, is a C.I.A. office with an ostentatiously bland name: the Operations Support Branch. It is the agency’s secret hacker unit, in which a cadre of élite engineers create cyberweapons. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 9:59 AM PST - 70 comments

The Jeremiah Rotherman & Co.'s 1904 General Price List mail order catalogue is fun to browse. It becomes interesting around page 10. (via Present and Correct on twitter.)
posted by eotvos at 8:51 AM PST - 20 comments

Blindfold Chess Puzzles uses the Lichess puzzle database to provide free, unlimited chess puzzles that you have to workout without a board.
posted by interogative mood at 7:16 AM PST - 10 comments

The Polyphonic Spree - Austin City Underground [1h37m]. Filmed in 2014. At a church. Which is amazing. Some sunshine music for sunshine days! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:48 PM PST - 11 comments

Vox and The Pudding tracked what happens after TikTok songs go viral (SLYT). To understand how going viral on TikTok affects an unknown artist's career, Vox and The Pudding identified a cohort of 125 artists and analyzed how their careers developed after their big break. “It turns out, this is way more than a story about algorithms or going viral. It’s a story about the longstanding tug of war between artists, platform and music industry giants. You might be surprised who’s winning.” [more inside]
posted by shirobara at 6:58 PM PST - 28 comments

I Am the Man Responsible for Batman’s Rock-Hard Nipples in Batman & Robin "Perhaps no controversy better defines the Batman franchise than the inclusion of ultra-pointy nips when George Clooney donned the batsuit in 1997. Here, costume designer Jose Fernandez explains why the Dark Knight had such dank teats" [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 3:44 PM PST - 53 comments

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" will premiere on August 5th.
posted by Ipsifendus at 10:51 AM PST - 93 comments

Words Without Borders, digital magazine of writing in translation since 2003, has re-launched with a new site design. Check out their educational offerings, events and vast archives.
posted by latkes at 10:22 AM PST - 3 comments

"Purchasing the Queer Games Bundle [Pay what you can edition] is a direct action that you can take right now to support queer people in a life changing way and in exchange you get over 500 amazing, heartfelt, fun, and radical games. " [more inside]
posted by simmering octagon at 9:10 AM PST - 4 comments

It's a good day for longform political profiles: Dianne Feinstein, by Rebecca Traister for New York magazine, and Steve Bannon, by Jennifer Senior, for The Atlantic.
posted by box at 8:57 AM PST - 19 comments

There is Never a Cowboy Around When You Need One... Love the narration and the narrator's accent. Hoping the FedEx truck is not some viral marketing shit. Next generation of ropers.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:31 AM PST - 6 comments

'It's going to be an army': Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections - "Placing operatives as poll workers and building a 'hotline' to friendly attorneys are among the strategies to be deployed in Michigan and other swing states."* [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:00 AM PST - 61 comments

Welcom, Beanlovers! 🏄🏽‍♀️ I'm super-psyched to announce the sale of Highly Desirible original, fresh minted Bored Bean Dinghy Club NFTs 🎯 NOW ONLY for the low, low price of FREE! 🚀 [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:58 AM PST - 62 comments

If you're of a certain age, you might remember watching SP FX: The Empire Strikes Back [48m] on CBS back in the day. But have you ever considered, what a making-of feature for ESB might be like if it were made..... by a FRENCHMAN??? The Making Of The Empire Strikes Back [58m] directed by Michel Parbot.
posted by hippybear at 6:42 PM PST - 11 comments

At their peak, in the mid-1990s, the British population of phone boxes was about 100,000. Now, there are just over 20,000 working boxes left, which still sounds like quite a lot, given it’s hard to imagine anyone actually using one. And yet, they do. According to Ofcom, 5m calls are still made from phone boxes annually. Five million! It seems impossible. A number so surprisingly large it made me think there must be a lone guy in a box somewhere obsessively making one-minute calls all day to random numbers.

—The last phone boxes by Sophie Elmhirst (audio version).
posted by Kattullus at 4:34 PM PST - 48 comments

Remember The Lizzie Bennet Diaries? Ashley Clements is doing a rewatch/discussion show about it. Previous mention of LBD a decade ago here.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:11 PM PST - 3 comments

The 1960 American Institute for Research study report, Psychological and Social Adjustment in a Simulated Shelter, observed volunteers confined for two weeks in simulated fall-out shelters with various temperatures and room sizes. (Via Bill Geerhart on twitter.)
posted by eotvos at 2:51 PM PST - 9 comments

"Cassandra Quave, Ph.D., is Curator of the Herbarium and Associate Professor of Dermatology and HumanHealth at Emory University, where she leads anti-infective drug discovery research initiatives and teaches courses on medicinal plants, microbiology, and pharmacology. As a medical ethnobotanist, her work focuses on the documentation and biochemical analysis of plants used in traditional medicine." [more inside]
posted by sciencegeek at 11:42 AM PST - 3 comments

Free Learning List is a rated/reviewed list of the Internet's Best Educational Resources. "The scores attributed to these resources have been graded on the basis of effectiveness, engagement, design, and popularity/veracity; however they are also largely subjective evaluations. "
posted by storybored at 10:44 AM PST - 7 comments

Baker Boy covers Blur 'Song 2'. Baker Boy is a Yolngu artist, and uses both English and Yolŋu Matha, and sometimes a yiḏaki (didgeridoo). Baker Boy's 'Funk Wit Us'. [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 9:01 PM PST - 16 comments

No, really. A U.S. murder suspect fled to Mexico. The Gringo Hunters were waiting. Officially, they’re the International Liaison Unit. But they’re known by another name: the Gringo Hunters. The unit now catches an average of 13 Americans a month. Since it was formed in 2002, it has apprehended more than 1,600. Many of those suspects were inspired by one of America’s oldest cliches: the troubled outlaw striding into a sepia-toned Mexico in the hope of disappearing forever. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 5:54 PM PST - 34 comments

Shopping malls won over a wide range of admirers, from teens to seniors, by providing something they couldn’t find in their public parks or sidewalks: a safe pedestrian experience.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 10:57 AM PST - 72 comments

A profile of Wendy Froud, puppeteer extraordinaire. Her short list includes The Muppet Show, Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. [more inside]
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 6:28 AM PST - 11 comments

Why Your Favorite Color is Probably Blue
posted by cozenedindigo at 6:28 AM PST - 99 comments

"Einstein’s work as a humanitarian, philosopher, pacifist and anti-racist continued throughout his life. Today Einstein’s fingerprints can be found on many of the technologies that make the modern world work, from lasers to the semi-conductors that power your smartphone. But in the public eye at least, it is Einstein’s image that has most conspicuously endured." The fight to control his image.
posted by blue shadows at 11:16 PM PST - 22 comments

Freedomland, USA. The defunct theme park has an interesting history. 'The Rise and Suspiciously Rapid Fall of Freedomland U.S.A.' (previously)
posted by clavdivs at 6:59 PM PST - 14 comments

Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, the new effort from the indie production team that brought you All Gas No Brakes, visits the 2022 NRA Annual Meetings in Houston, TX, held just after the mass shooting in Uvalde, TX.
posted by killdevil at 5:57 PM PST - 5 comments

Machine Learning researcher Yannic Kilcher trained an AI bot (GPT-3) on 3 years of posts to the notorious anonymous "politically incorrect" /pol discussion board on 4chan (known for spreading hateful memes). He then let it post to /pol itself thousands of times, constituting 10% of all posts for a day. In a youtube video released today, he describes how he was able to evade the Capcha posting barrier, how users slowly started to catch on (by using proxy servers, the posts all appeared to come from the Sychelles), and how he fine-tuned the bot and started it up again. [more inside]
posted by Schmucko at 4:40 PM PST - 25 comments

Patrick Freyne of The Irish Times reviews Obi-Wan: A bunch of baddies arrive on Tatooine looking for Jedis. They’re led by an officious alien named The Grand Inquisitor. He’s “grand” in the UK sense, not the Irish sense (ie, “How’s his inquisiting?” “It’s grand.”)
posted by memebake at 3:24 PM PST - 31 comments

In January 2018 music writer Tom Breihan began writing a column, The Number Ones, for Stereogum. (When this column was started, the #1 song in America was Ed Sheeran's “Perfect”.) The premise is simple: he is going through and writing about every single song to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart in order, starting with the very first #1, Ricky Nelson's “Poor Little Fool” from August 1958, and continuing, presumably, at least until he catches up with the chart. At his current rate of three columns a week or so (and the rate of new #1 singles in the streaming era), it'll be into spring 2024 before that happens, but he's made it through the first 40 years of the chart into 1998, so there's a ton of great writing (827+ columns!) that deserves attention. [more inside]
posted by Superilla at 2:47 PM PST - 31 comments

Why Do So Many Bisexuals End Up In “Straight” Relationships? [more inside]
posted by Neely O'Hara at 1:55 PM PST - 79 comments

"Madam, where you from?", asks the driver as they crawl under the Stepney bridge. His accent sounds gruff and manufactured. She squints at his nametag on the dashboard, but without her glasses there is only a smudge that extends the length of the photograph. In Sri Lanka, every stranger has an opinion on her. She sees it beneath each unctuous smile. In Europe, no one knows nor cares, so she gets to be from wherever she chooses. These days, her job is to brag about her country to strangers who couldn't care less. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 11:47 AM PST - 4 comments

Embracing the Aesthetic of Dead Things. Many pollinators need decay to thrive, whether in Thailand, Great Britain, Germany or the U.S.. Pollinator Week starts June 20th! Bonus track: My Garden of a Thousand Bees.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:43 AM PST - 7 comments

The incredible boxes of Hock Wah Yeo is a deep look into the video game packaging design work of Hock Wah Yeo, by Phil Salvador at The Obscuritory. "Yeo is a graphic designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and through the 80s and 90s, he created the boldest, most unusual packaging in the game industry. While other game publishers were trying to get attention with flashy, colorful, in-your-face aesthetics, Yeo was deconstructing the idea of what a game box could be altogether." [more inside]
posted by Lirp at 10:13 AM PST - 13 comments

The Bleak Spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp Trial (Michael Hobbes, contains descriptions of abuse)
posted by box at 8:19 AM PST - 217 comments

Cue over 100 cherubs with massive phalluses...
posted by signal at 5:20 AM PST - 13 comments

On June 2, Gov. DeSantis' admin. asked the Florida state medical board to ban transition-related care for minors and Medicaid recipients, which would end Medicaid coverage for transgender adults for all of their gender affirming care by declaring all gender affirming care "experimental". (Previously, previously, and previously.)
posted by fight or flight at 4:55 AM PST - 52 comments

The suspects had stashed the van inside a residential garage on Southside drive. At 4:00 in the morning, officers from the Jeffersontown Police Department burst onto the property, raided the garage, and opened the van’s back doors. There, they found their mark: almost 200 catalytic converters, a jagged tangle of rusty parts adorned with hacksaw marks where each converter had been cut from its former vehicle. Popular Mechanics on the catalytic converter crime-wave.
posted by ShooBoo at 9:49 PM PST - 74 comments

MB14 is a French singer/beatboxer. More at YouTube [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 9:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Canadian investigators determined that users of the Tim Hortons coffee chain's mobile app "had their movements tracked and recorded every few minutes of every day," even when the app wasn't open, in violation of the country's privacy laws. (Ars Technica) “Location data is highly sensitive because it can be used to infer where people live and work, reveal trips to medical clinics. It can be used to make deductions about religious beliefs, sexual preferences, social political affiliations and more.” (Privacy Commissioner of Canada) [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:27 AM PST - 94 comments

Alex Villanueva, sheriff of LA County, campaigned on reforming the department. During his first days in office, he seemingly moved against the Banditos, one of the deputy gangs that have long infested the three-billion-dollar-a-year law 'enforcement' agency. As the New Yorker showed this week, however, Villanueva has protected the gangs and ruled the department in a child's idea of the style of a political operator. [more inside]
posted by TheProfessor at 10:24 AM PST - 35 comments

San Diego's Gay Bar History from post-WWII to the present (full documentary on Vimeo and on the PBS SoCal website).
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:04 AM PST - 3 comments

Most of the grouse shot in England has historically gone to clubs like White's and the other St James's clubs. Their names are Wodehousian – Boodle's, Brooks's, Buck's Club, the Carlton Club, the East India Club, Pratt's, the Reform Club (where the fictitious Phileas Fogg started his journey around the world in 80 days) and the Turf Club, to name a few - each of them with an associated interest (the Turf's, for example, is horseracing) and an infantile rivalry that mimics the inter-house competitions of their former private schools. The one thing all of them have typically had in common is that women were not allowed, unless to clean or cook, a quality they share with the most famous public (i.e. private) school for boys in the country: Eton College. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 10:02 AM PST - 22 comments

Metafilter welcomes the Baby Capybara Class of 2022 (so far). Most recently: a quartet of capybara babies have arrived at Vienna's Schönbrunn Zoo. Further capybabies inside. [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 9:12 AM PST - 23 comments

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
posted by rollick at 8:06 AM PST - 65 comments

The Guardian's brief explainer: "A Reddit post said Swedes don’t feed their children’s playmates when they visit. But why – and why has it caused an uproar?" In The Conversation, Timothy Heffernan explains what #Swedengate tells us about food culture and social expectations. From Louise Callaghan on Twitter, "On #swedengate, when I was about seven I had lunch at my friend's house and my grandma called her parents and tried to pay for it." The Daily Beast covered how the #swedengate topic moved from food to racism. There are many Twitter threads and a map that purports to show which nations are willing to feed guests. Reminder: Please keep it civil.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:07 AM PST - 138 comments

Dave Smith, Music Technology Pioneer, Dead at 72 Known for his popular Prophet brand synthesizers and pioneering work on MIDI and music technology, Dave Smith has passed away at age 72. [more inside]
posted by readyfreddy at 3:12 AM PST - 30 comments

Searching 32 million academic papers for obscene acronyms hidden in the titles [CW: obscene acronyms]
posted by chavenet at 1:55 AM PST - 23 comments

Biden administration cancels $5.8 Billion in student loan debt for former Corinthian students. The new announcement brings the total student loan debt cancellation approved under the Biden administration to $25 billion since January 2021. Advocacy groups say they hope the latest Corinthian action paves the way for future discharges for groups of borrowers.
posted by darkstar at 7:49 PM PST - 87 comments

With today's United States Coast Guard Commandant change of command ceremony, Admiral Linda Fagan has become the first woman in US history to hold the top position in one of America's military services. (WaPo, NYT, previous statement from the Office of the President)
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:38 PM PST - 9 comments

"Historians are rediscovering one of the most important LGBTQ activists of the early 20th Century – an Asian Canadian named Li Shiu Tong."
posted by jedicus at 8:38 AM PST - 4 comments

"And maintenance is the sensible side of love / Which knows what time and weather are doing / To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring..." from U. A. Fanthorpe's poem "Atlas". "and I realise that, without me asking / you've stopped what you were doing / to take him outside, so he can continue playing / and I can have a quiet house for my call" -- from a comic by Jordan Bolton, part of Scenes from Imagined Films Issue #1.
posted by brainwane at 7:46 AM PST - 9 comments

See How Much the Biggest U.S. Companies Pay Workers Bigger paydays are on the way for many workers this year—for top earners and those lower down the scales. Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 4.40% is raising its cap on base pay to $350,000 from $160,000, while Apple Inc. AAPL -0.53% said it would raise salaries and its minimum hourly wage for U.S. workers to $22. Starbucks Corp. SBUX 2.33% has promised raises of at least 5% for baristas who have worked for two or more years, and Bank of America Corp. BAC 0.49% is lifting its minimum U.S. wage to $22 an hour starting in July.
posted by folklore724 at 1:29 AM PST - 72 comments