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When puppies meet a robot they want to be friends. Contrast that to Maya the cat's more cautious approach. But a mess of kittens vs. BB-8 will not end well. Bonus: various pets vs. various machines. Extra bonus: okay, it's just an excuse to post Cat vs Printer - The Translation again. (h/t Miss Cellania)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:35 PM PST - 7 comments

Staircases in Space: Why Are Places in Science Fiction Not Wheelchair-Accessible? [io9] “Once you start realizing how many stairs there are stopping you in real life, it becomes impossible not to notice them existing in the sci-fi you adore. Turns out they’re everywhere, in all of our sci-fi. Whether it’s decades-old or shiny and brand-new, our sci-fi imitates a real-world reliance on steps and stairs in our architecture.”
posted by Fizz at 7:04 PM PST - 77 comments

There’s a lot of discussion about how we need to reach out and talk to people who disagree with us – how we need to extend an olive branch and find common ground – and that’s a lovely sentiment, but in order for that to work, the other party needs to be … well, not a raging asshole.
posted by sciatrix at 6:48 PM PST - 85 comments

This tiny Eastern Hognose snake really overplays the death scene. [SLYT]
posted by moonmilk at 5:47 PM PST - 36 comments

Open source rover plans from JPL.
posted by curious nu at 4:40 PM PST - 3 comments

Texan Lawson Craddock is the first American to complete the Tour de France... in last place, earning the Lanterne Rouge. He accomplished this despite a fractured shoulder blade due to a crash on the first day of the race. [more inside]
posted by SansPoint at 4:19 PM PST - 16 comments

Mentor Gaines and Student Cash and their evolving friendship. And here's Cash's plan to expand literary access and mentorship: Wiley Cash Bookclub
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:13 PM PST - 2 comments

Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways, etc.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:00 PM PST - 20 comments

Theodor ‘Dr Seuss’ Geisel's environmental book, The Lorax (Wikipedia; the text of The Lorax ; preview in Google Books), he once explained, "came out of my being angry. The ecology books I'd read were dull. . . . In The Lorax I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might." It came to him in an afternoon, written in a burst after he suffered from writer's block. New research suggests that he was inspired by a trip to the exclusive Mount Kenya Safari Club, where he may have been inspired by the patas monkeys and whistling thorn acacia, which co-exist in commensalism. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:46 PM PST - 17 comments

Allow me to summarize. In less than two years from the time of this article, hundreds of thousands of games are likely to disappear from the internet, forever. Simply no longer playable. Hundreds of millions of views, likes, 5-star reviews, 1-star reviews…all gone. The companies who helped bring these games to life don’t seem concerned. The people who made these games aren’t exactly talking about it, to my knowledge.

That's because Ben Latimore is talking about saving Flash video games once Adobe's support for it expires in 2020.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:15 PM PST - 33 comments

Scott Timberg (L.A. Review of Books) investigates the pernicious persistence of Ayn Rand and Objectivism in: The Bad Idea That Keeps on Giving. [more inside]
posted by Barack Spinoza at 12:51 PM PST - 72 comments

The Magnus Archives is a weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Listen to a trailer or two. Start with episode 1. [more inside]
posted by meese at 10:35 AM PST - 13 comments

(Mild spoilers in all links) Nick Drnaso's Sabrina is the first graphic novel to ever be nominated for the Man Booker Prize. From the Guardian article by Rachel Cooke: Sabrina, which has already drawn extraordinary advance praise – Zadie Smith describes it as a masterpiece that combines all the political power of a polemic with the “delicacy of truly great art” – could not be more prescient if it tried. Its narrative touches with perfect ease on such contemporary matters as fake news, the isolation of the digital age, conspiracy theories and gun control... Review by fellow graphic novelist Chris Ware (The Guardian). Interview with Nick Drnaso (Vulture). Excerpt from Sabrina (Drawn and Quarterly). [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:31 AM PST - 5 comments

The Believer, a five-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a bimonthly literature, arts, and culture magazine based at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. Our poetry section is curated by Jericho Brown, Kristen Radtke selects our comics, and Joshua Wolf Shenk is our editor-in-chief. All issues feature a regular column by Nick Hornby and a symposium, in which several writers expound on a theme of contemporary interest. [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 9:06 AM PST - 16 comments

Here's How America Uses Its Land, a graphic presentation by Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby.
posted by Etrigan at 8:19 AM PST - 33 comments

The achoques have nearly disappeared from Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico. A colony in the care of Dominican nuns offers hope the species can be saved. (slnyt)
posted by Hypatia at 8:03 AM PST - 6 comments

This is my Nerf Blaster. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:54 AM PST - 65 comments

Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland. [sl Guardian Longread] [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 5:04 AM PST - 89 comments

Building neural networks to understand Theory of Mind “Theory of mind is clearly a crucial ability,” for navigating a world full of other minds says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. By about the age of 4, human children understand that the beliefs of another person may diverge from reality, and that those beliefs can be used to predict the person’s future behavior. Some of today’s computers can label facial expressions such as “happy” or “angry”—a skill associated with theory of mind—but they have little understanding of human emotions or what motivates us. [more inside]
posted by RickLiebling at 4:50 AM PST - 4 comments

The time A. E. Osworth was almost targeted by Kotaku In Action. "The cause isn’t in the content, or the severity of the imagined offense. It’s in the gender presentation of the author. Those that the heteronormative world deems masculine people can talk; those they deem feminine people better watch their backs."
posted by storytam at 1:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Noa Smith joins the Rock, Paper, Shotgun video team. She promptly jumps the curb, goes into serious debt, and suffers severe carpal tunnel in Bus Simulator 18. SLYT
posted by Brocktoon at 11:18 PM PST - 6 comments

i'm sure this video has been posted before in the ancient past of MetaFilter, but it's possible we might just need, right now, here in 2018, the 20 seconds that is thx eye.
posted by hippybear at 10:18 PM PST - 16 comments

The fine folks at Stuff You Should know just released a podcast episode [SLPA] about the Cannonball Run, a.k.a. the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. Previously.
posted by mboszko at 8:51 PM PST - 3 comments

An Oral History of ‘Leisure Suit Larry’
posted by Chrysostom at 7:59 PM PST - 41 comments

A nicely illustrated roundup of self-operating machines, from ancient Greece and China, through the 19th-century Golden Age of Automata, to the 2018 AutomataCon (held in Morristown, NJ). From Collectors Weekly. Lots of great links throughout. And don't miss the "related articles" in the sidebar: Attack of the Vintage Toy Robots, The iPod's 4,000-pound Grandfather, and Not Your Grandma’s Cuckoo: Decapitating, Rat-Eating Clocks of the Black Forest. (Previously.)
posted by beagle at 5:55 PM PST - 4 comments

Surveillance video shows trio stealing shark by disguising it as a baby
posted by moonmilk at 5:41 PM PST - 28 comments

Jambinai are a Korean post-rock band who use a variety of traditional Korean instruments in their songs. Earlier this year they played at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics with about a hundred hyeungyom players.
posted by dng at 5:29 PM PST - 6 comments

Take This Cheat Sheet To The Ballpark To Decide When To Leave [Five Thirty Eight] “According to our statistical model, based on 2010-2015 regular season inning-by-inning scoring data, you should leave after the sixth inning if the leading team is ahead by four or more runs. There is a less than 5 percent chance that the other team will deliver a miracle comeback. If the run differential exceeds two at the top of the ninth, it’s safe to head to the exits. What about blowouts in the first inning? If your time is that precious — and you’re willing to view the money spent on tickets as a sunk cost — our advice is to rev up your car’s engine if the leading team jumps ahead by six runs or more.”
posted by Fizz at 3:05 PM PST - 75 comments

Born on this day 60 years ago and 200 years ago: Kate Bush and Emily Bronte. Celebrating the birthday of two artistic icons: Kate Bush, who was inspired to write Wuthering Heights without having fully finished reading Emily Brontë’s novel. (This and 59 other unbelievable facts via The Guardian) [more inside]
posted by Webbster at 2:11 PM PST - 44 comments

Take one typo and leave one schedule supplement and wind up with the latest cock-up from New York City Transit. Or, why an unexpected wall appeared on the express tracks in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, this morning.
posted by dame at 1:38 PM PST - 26 comments

Etienne de Crécy: Motorbass then Superdiscount then Tempovision then Superdiscount 2 then Commercial EPs then The Cube then Superdiscount 3. After EPs 1 / 2 / 3. 2016 Spring Mix then 2016 Summer Mix then 2016 Fall Mix then 2017 Winter Mix then 2017 Spring Mix then 2017 Summer Mix then 2017 Fall Mix then 2018 Spring Mix. House music / French touch / songs for dancing. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:07 PM PST - 5 comments

How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million [slnyt] [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:26 AM PST - 131 comments

The threat to Holleeder’s life stems from a decision that she made, in 2013, to become the star witness in a mob trial. She agreed to testify against the most notorious criminal in the Netherlands, a man known as De Neus—the Nose, a reference to his most prominent facial feature. This was a risky choice. “Everyone else who has turned on him ended up dead,” she pointed out. How a notorious gangster was exposed by his own sister.
posted by zeptoweasel at 11:00 AM PST - 4 comments

From Burgoo to Pear Salad to Slaw Dog Some are very geographically specific, others are just "southern," but they all deserve a resurgence, and many are getting it with the new chefs' versions. Recipes are included. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:47 AM PST - 32 comments

“I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.” [more inside]
posted by oneirodynia at 10:36 AM PST - 20 comments

The first part of a series revealing the effects of China's Belt and Road Initiative on cities around the world.
Analysts predict that China’s online retail market will double in size in the next two years.
But in western China, Beijing is using the most modern means available to control its Uighur minority. Tens of thousands have disappeared into re-education camps. (Uighurs previously)
posted by adamvasco at 10:35 AM PST - 24 comments

Fortyfive years ago the very first (UK) television programme that treated trans people sympathetically rather than as a "problem" and which had them talk about their own experiences was broadcast, thanks in part to David Attenborough. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 10:09 AM PST - 3 comments

The Malaysian Ministry of Transport has issued its 449-page Safety Investigation Report into the disappearance of flight MH370. [more inside]
posted by alby at 9:58 AM PST - 22 comments

Recently, Steam (a digital game storefront owned and operated by Valve) has changed the way that games are published to their platform. Valve eliminated its long-running 'Greenlight' program, which was a voting driven pathway for independent games to get onto Steam given customer interest, and moved to a simpler, fee-based system called 'Steam Direct', which is instead run entirely by Steam moderators and automatic administrative systems. Amid a number of controversies around the decision (summarized below the jump), there are recent reports (link goes directly to a Steam Community page) that a game approved through the 'Direct' initiative was serving as a trojan horse for cryptocurrency mining malware.Eurogamer summarizes the scam in this article. [more inside]
posted by codacorolla at 9:39 AM PST - 42 comments

New York City DSA endorsed Cynthia Nixon for Governor and Jumaane Williams for Lieutenant Governor following internal argument, Cynthia Nixon Thinks You’re Underestimating Her (NYT) - State Attorney General candidate Zephyr Teachout offered a plan to use antitrust laws against tech companies that exert monopolistic power in the news business. - State Senator Martin Dilan (District 18, Bushwick) is claiming that DSA-endorsed candidate Julia Salazar does not fulfill New York State's residency requirements to run for office - NY’s top election enforcement body has ruled a campaign finance agreement between the Independence Party and now-former members of New York's IDC (previously) to be improper, and demanded that former IDC members return the funds - A breakdown of Zellnor Myrie's bid to replace ex-IDC member Jesse Hamilton (District 20, Crown Heights) - Governor Cuomo told the Stonewall Democratic Club that he never "endorsed or financially supported" any IDC members, despite definitely doing that. The Stonewall Club endorsed him. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 8:25 AM PST - 123 comments

In the last couple days of U.S. politics: The New York Times' publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, met with Donald Trump and 'implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism.' Or, as Trump put it, "Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!" [more inside]
posted by box at 8:01 AM PST - 1090 comments

80 years ago today the first issue of a comic, The Beano, was publishing in the UK (well Scotland). It's still going. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:40 AM PST - 31 comments

30 years ago, a look back at 1988 Where were you in 1988? Some remarkable news stories and memories from 30 years ago.
posted by gryphonlover at 10:52 PM PST - 118 comments

What it says in the title eh.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:13 PM PST - 15 comments

Welcome to the Quiet Skies: Federal air marshals have begun following ordinary US citizens not suspected of a crime or on any terrorist watch list and collecting extensive information about their movements and behavior under a new domestic surveillance program that is drawing criticism from within the agency. Under “Quiet Skies” thousands of unsuspecting Americans have been subjected to targeted airport and inflight surveillance, carried out by small teams of armed, undercover air marshals, government documents show. The teams document whether passengers fidget, use a computer, have a “jump” in their Adam’s apple or a “cold penetrating stare,” among other behaviors, according to the records. Air marshals note these observations — minute-by-minute — in two separate reports and send this information back to the TSA. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 10:06 PM PST - 60 comments

In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters (幽霊文字). [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 3:31 PM PST - 30 comments

HBO recently released Believer [trailer], a documentary about Imagine Dragons' lead singer's journey of becoming a Mormon straight ally for the LGBTQ community. Yesterday (Sat, July 28) was the second annual LoveLoud music festival in Salt Lake City focussed on creating community and building self-worth in the LGBTQ Mormon (and outside) population. 8+ hours of quality music! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:49 PM PST - 12 comments

Ramin Nasibov, a designer and art director with an interesting and quirky Twitter feed, tweeted this short (2:12) animated graphic score/musical visualization of Tchaikovsky's "Dance Of The Sugarplum Fairy that was created by Doodle Chaos."
posted by Room 641-A at 1:30 PM PST - 14 comments

Today would be the 122nd birthday of María Rebecca Latigo de Hernández, a Mexican-American rights activist who is considered one of the most important leaders of the Tejano community starting in the 1920s (Google books preview). She formed and lead organizations through the 1970s that were dedicated to civic and political activities to benefit Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, focusing on education, and the rights of women and workers. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:04 PM PST - 3 comments

There was but one invasive animal remaining, the toughest and hardiest creature of them all. For years, no one had figured out how to kill it. For half a century, no one even knew it was there. But it was, in the millions. And now the conservationists turned to face their most tenacious foe: the Argentine ant.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:30 PM PST - 45 comments

After an endlessly dry and hot summer (how people coped), stressing diners and hospitals and crops and disrupting trains, the tube and the Channel tunnel, with wildfires caused by barbeques and (insanely) airborne fire lanterns, some lightning and much-needed rain finally hit the UK. The infrastructure immediately failed. Music festivals (Tom Jones!) were disrupted, flooding occurred, flights and trains were cancelled, roads became impassable. The clouds arrived on cue to hide the Blood Moon while reservoir levels, even in Scotland, continue to be low. Farming reaches crisis point, but there's always imports. As usual, Brits queued for freebies, were advised to chill their sex toys, and politicians went abroad. [previously]
posted by Wordshore at 11:54 AM PST - 23 comments

How I created a database of all interesting Rush Hour configurations — Rush Hour is a 6x6 sliding block puzzle invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the 1970s. It was first sold in the United States in 1996 ... Ultimately I ended up with a complete database of every "interesting" starting position. It was quite challenging (and exciting!) and that's what I want to talk about in this article. My code is open source with a permissive license and the resulting database is available for download. And happiest of all, you can play the puzzles in an excellent browser-based implementation.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:11 AM PST - 10 comments

How Brooklyn’s Native American ironworkers built New York [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:58 AM PST - 18 comments

‘Mission: Impossible’ Is the Best Movie Franchise—Here’s Why [The Ringer] “In this time of expanding cinematic universes, rapidly adapted intellectual property, and the ever-gaping maw awaiting time-killing content, we rank. We rank, therefore we are. Fortunately, the Mission: Impossible movies are worthy of the form, because each entry indicates a shift or improvement in moviemaking strategy and franchise storytelling. It codified—and then broke—the “One Director’s Vision” concept that has become so prevalent in the Marvel canon. It’s a long-running but not urgent property; when a new one arrives, it’s less a consequential continuation of mythology than it is a fun diversion. The stunts are real and the stakes are massive, but the end game is modest: Just wow us.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:52 AM PST - 71 comments

How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
posted by cozenedindigo at 7:49 AM PST - 38 comments

(SLAtlantic 2017) When a person lives in poverty, a growing body of research suggests the limbic system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex, which overloads its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks in the most efficient ways. ... After years of coaching adults and watching those benefits trickle down to children, EMPath has brought children into the center of its model—offering a way out of intergenerational poverty with brain science. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:19 AM PST - 24 comments

Let's start with the biggest red herring of all, the oft-repeated idea that gumbo is a variation of bouillabaisse, the classic fish stew from Provence. This notion is repeated everywhere from slapdash food blogs to peer-reviewed academic books. It's also completely wrong.

For Serious Eats Robert Moss writes about the origins of gumbo. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 1:01 AM PST - 46 comments

Arundhati Roy on the Complex, Shifting Politics of Language and Translation in India
posted by aniola at 10:53 PM PST - 8 comments

Gaming’s toxic men, explained , Colin Campbell for Polygon. With Kate Miltner [site, twitter], Anita Sarkeesian [twitter], Dr. Kishonna Gray [site, twitter1, MIT, twitter2], Soraya Chemaly [WMC, site, twitter, tumblr], Mattie Brice [site] , Bridget Blodgett [site, twitter], Thom Avella [youtube, twitter], Carolyn Petit [twitter, tumblr] , Kahlief Adams [twitter, podcast], Jen Golbeck [site, twitter], and Paul Booth [site]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:39 PM PST - 26 comments

Deep in Italy, One Man’s Surrealist Mini-City Sleeps. t’s a labyrinthine citadel more surreal than even the weirdest of Fellini sets. “La Scarzuola” is a modern wannabe-Utopian estate imagined by one man and built amongst the pointy trees of Italy’s Montegabbione in the 1950s. This esoteric wonderland and its elaborate surrealist structures are awaiting your visit. It's what happens when an idealistic Milanese architect, Tomaso Buzzi, finds a ruin.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:22 PM PST - 10 comments

Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man: Mel Brooks in His 90s (David Denby, The Atlantic) “I’m just a Jew comic!” Brooks said to me at the beginning of our talk in Los Angeles, as if to ask, Why are you interested? But this comic has stormed through 75 years of show business, working in almost every medium imaginable (Borscht Belt, television, comedy albums, movies, musical comedy, one-man shows), and he may have contributed as much as anyone, in his manic style, to the formerly shaky but now sturdy arc of Jewish survival and success.
posted by Room 641-A at 11:09 AM PST - 26 comments

Ahead of Cambodia's July 29th national election, regarded by rights groups as a sham after the opposition party's forced dissolution, Voice of America has released a rich special issue: Cambodia Adrift. [more inside]
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 9:50 AM PST - 8 comments

Heirloom seeds are defined, at least by USDA (PDF), as at least 50 years old. So what do you call 1,500 year old seeds? When she was in New Mexico, Jackie Clay was given old seeds that a neighbor had found in an old clay pot that was sealed with pine pitch. The neighbor's son apparently had a seed radiocarbon dated circa 500 CE. Some 15 centuries later, some of the seeds germinated, producing giant, tough seed pods with soft beans. She calls them Folsom Indian Ruin beans for their proximity to the Folsom Site. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:58 AM PST - 40 comments

You Sing Into Your Mic To Solve Puzzles In This Indie Game [Kotaku] “One Hand Clapping is a experimental project from the University of Southern California’s games program. It mixes music and puzzles—the player needs to hum or sing to create walkways and raise platforms to proceed through a colorful world. It’s short but memorable.” [Northernlion Let's Play] [Trailer] [itch.io]
posted by Fizz at 8:29 AM PST - 13 comments

Vowelless Crossword Puzzles from
Peter Broda [1: .PUZ | .PDF] [2: .PUZ | .PDF],
Neville Fogarty [.PUZ | .PDF],
Trip Payne [.PUZ | .PDF],
Andy Kravis [.PUZ], and
Evan Birnholz [.PUZ | .PDF].
From Broda’s Made Without AEIOU introduction: A vowelless crossword is just like a regular crossword except that the grid contains only the consonants from each answer…Other than that, it's business as usual. [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 8:00 AM PST - 10 comments

The BBC's Ask a Stupid Question explores what a cat's purr means. "Most of us feed the cat before ourselves, which shows how effective their communication is.”
posted by Helga-woo at 7:06 AM PST - 65 comments

See the punderful vegetable sculptures at Lambeth Country Show (For non-Brits: RIP KDale Winton) (previous)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:59 AM PST - 8 comments

Six women accuse the C.E.O. of harassment and intimidation, and dozens more describe abuse at his company.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 2:08 AM PST - 32 comments

A haircut and a healing. [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 8:03 PM PST - 8 comments

People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. Kim Brooks writes in the NYT: "We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second." Unsurprisingly, it's mothers who bear the brunt of criticism for making rational (and legal) parenting decisions.
posted by stillmoving at 5:36 PM PST - 162 comments

Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more. (Adam Eisenstat, Vox)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:54 PM PST - 48 comments

Orange, however, seems to be the only basic color word for which no other word exists in English. There is only orange, and the name comes from the fruit. Color or Fruit? On the Unlikely Etymology of “Orange” by David Scott Kastan with Stephen Farthing via LitHub [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:07 PM PST - 79 comments

U.S. surfer's epic ride of nearly a mile on wave is captured on video. "Perched precariously on his surfboard, the 23-year-old from Hawaii rode a wave off the coast of Namibia, on the western shore of Africa, for 120 straight seconds. He stayed upright for nearly a mile (1.5 kilometers) as he traveled through an unheard-of eight barrels -- the hollow formed by the curve of the wave as it breaks over the rider's head." POV video. Drone video.
posted by Lyme Drop at 11:20 AM PST - 39 comments

Nick Chater posits that There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:48 AM PST - 39 comments

Atop a dark Himalayan ridge, a short, silhouetted climber gazes at the icy jags of Mount Thamserku. That climber is Serap. One of the world's best climbers now sells climbing gear to people who seldom know who he is.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:30 AM PST - 15 comments

“Faris is arguing that unless the progressive majority finally learns to emulate the energy and the fighting style of the Republicans, American democracy could disappear altogether within our own lifetimes.” Battle Hymn Of The Democrats: why it’s time for liberals to fight dirty. (The Guardian) “There are some very good ideas in It’s Time to Fight Dirty, but because Faris doesn’t believe that a good policy creates its own constituency, he ends up preferring complicated technocratic solutions like eight Californias, a rotating Supreme Court or fines for non-voters just to get around the problem that he assumes is a permanent feature of American life: that rural states will always be Republican. The recent red state uprisings like the teachers’ strike leave me unconvinced of that argument.” Review of ‘It’s Time To Fight Dirty’ (Midwest Socialist) Faris interviewed about his book and the things Democrats could do once in power on Zero Hour (41:00) Chapo Trap House (1:10:00)
posted by The Whelk at 9:37 AM PST - 84 comments

On 30 April 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito’s era has yet to be announced, causing concern for diary publishers, calendar printers and international standards bodies. Via
posted by infini at 9:37 AM PST - 29 comments

While overseeing the soundtrack for T2 Trainspotting, Underworld’s Rick Smith arranged a meeting with Iggy Pop in a room at The Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand to discuss working on collaborative music for the film. Their respective tracks "Lust for Life" and "Born Slippy (Nuxx)" had perfectly bookended the first Trainspotting film two decades previously. On arrival, Iggy found a fully working studio set up and eagerness to get cracking. The results are all out now: Teatime Dub Encounters EP ("Bells & Circles" | "Trapped" | "I'll See Big" | "Get Your Shirt")
posted by filthy light thief at 8:49 AM PST - 19 comments

Old, violent, dominant ideologies sense that their demise is coming and therefore need to fight this hard in response. What we are seeing is the oppressive identity of America crying out in pain because of the damage that our awareness has done to it.

[more inside]
posted by bologna on wry at 8:44 AM PST - 26 comments

A review of Wolf, the 1994 computer game, written for wolves. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 8:43 AM PST - 16 comments

Politaire does not assign scores to you or time you. You know better than we when you have done well. It can count your wins and losses, but you can change the counts. [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 8:36 AM PST - 14 comments

Earlier this month, the National Gallery of Art expanded their holdings of women artists by purchasing the Baroque artist Artemesia Gentileschi's Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria. [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 8:08 AM PST - 7 comments

Why don't slow your day down and spend about 10 minutes with folk musician Devendra Banhart, solo and acoustic? (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by Krazor at 7:30 AM PST - 7 comments

Our Bodies or Ourselves - "The collection and storage of people's biometric data fundamentally changes the relationship between citizen and state. Once 'presumed innocent', we are now, in the sinister words of former UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd, 'unconvicted persons.' " (via)
posted by kliuless at 6:14 AM PST - 13 comments

Meet the real-life farmers who play Farming Simulator [The Guardian] “Imagine that you spend most of your day ploughing fields, sowing seeds, spraying fertilisers or pesticides, harvesting crops, feeding livestock (if you have any), repairing fences, and maintaining a half-dozen different kinds of farm machinery. You do this every day, all year, in all weather. And then, in the evening, you sit down at a computer to do it all again – virtually. Farming Simulator is a long-running video game series played by about a million people. The game’s creator, Giants Software, estimates that as many as a quarter of its players are connected to farming in some way, and around 8-10% are full-time, professional farmers.” [YouTube][Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:08 AM PST - 39 comments

What Your Choice of Crisps Says About You - Or: Walkers Sensations have made me lose my mind.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:09 AM PST - 51 comments

This spreadsheet is a collaborative list of strange machine-learning behaviour discovered when the systems exploits a bug or a lack of behavioural constraints. It includes indolent cannibals - AI agents which bred offspring as a free energy source - and a pancake making robot that optimised for pancake throwing height. It is simultaneously wonderful and deeply worrying.
posted by secretdark at 1:29 AM PST - 56 comments

Absolute carnage in the St Teresa's Charity Pantomime Horse Race!! [SLYT]
posted by Grandysaur at 11:47 PM PST - 11 comments

'Problematica' are fossils that are unclassified because "their remains are incomplete, they don’t bear a resemblance to any known form of life or they are just plain weird." They sit in dusty draws, hidden away in museum storage rooms, waiting for new discoveries to help with their identification (maybe).
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:41 PM PST - 8 comments

An antidote to Shkreli-induced heart-rage: “The rhetoric that is espoused by people who defend intellectual property law is that this is theft. If you accept that axiomatically, then by the same logic when you withhold access to lifesaving medication that's murder. From a moral standpoint it's an imperative to enact theft to prevent murder.” So says Michael Laufer, the ringleader of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, [more inside]
posted by cavedweller at 11:30 PM PST - 28 comments

Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27. The longest eclipse of the century will be visible from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, as well as parts of Asia, Australia and South America. Lunar Eclipse 2018 Guide: When, Where
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:41 PM PST - 17 comments

This is the story of how a most unusual piece of fanfiction was reviewed in The New Yorker by Anthony Bourdain. [more inside]
posted by suelac at 8:29 PM PST - 18 comments

The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one. An aspiring streamer needs to be performing at all times, even if nobody is watching, just in case someone happens to show up. [...] It’s a solitary practice where you have to pretend someone is listening, with no idea how long it might be before someone shows up, or if they ever will.
posted by Memo at 7:58 PM PST - 29 comments

The Rabbit Hunt (2017) Every weekend, seventeen year old Chris and his family hunt rabbits during sugarcane field burning and harvesting in the Florida Everglades. [more inside]
posted by JamesBay at 7:12 PM PST - 4 comments

Six months after being laid off by the Fort Collins Coloradoan, journalist Stephen Meyers started delivering mail for the USPS. Now returning to the writerly world, Meyers relays what he learned about America and himself during those two years as a Man of Letters.
posted by waninggibbon at 4:10 PM PST - 46 comments

Orra White Hitchcock (1796-1863) was one of the most remarkable women from a more egalitarian age of scientific study. She had a deep knowledge of botany, zoology and paleontology, and she was also an artist — though that “also” would have seemed unnecessary to her. She produced two albums of botanical illustrations, and later, as introductory materials for her husband’s classes, she diagramed volcanoes, sketched the skeletons of extinct fish and mammals, and drew undulant squids and octopuses on large cotton sheets. They’re all united at the American Folk Art Museum in “Charting the Divine Plan: The Art of Orra White Hitchcock,” a handsome and unexpectedly passionate exhibition on art, science and education in the early American republic.
posted by not_the_water at 3:59 PM PST - 2 comments

Can you identify the breeds in a mutt? Darwin's Dogs, now Darwin's Ark, a project of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and U-Mass Medical School, posted a quiz to help with their project in "conducting ancestry research on thousands of dogs, analyzing DNA saliva samples to tell us the genetic history of our canine companions." The Mutt Mix quiz was given to a self-selected group of participants, some with claimed expertise, some who just wanted to help out. Average users showed a 25% correct ID of at least one breed, self-described experts were only marginally better with a 28% correct response. How well would you do? Take the new Pup Quiz Hint: Wow, some dogs do not look like you think they would. [more inside]
posted by drossdragon at 2:49 PM PST - 31 comments

“The stench of this scene is age-old,” wrote the German philosopher Ernst Bloch in 1935. For Bloch, the appearance of fascism in Europe was not the irruption of an unprecedented evil, but the expression of a deep-rooted structure in contemporary form; it unearths “a piece of fossilized moon,” shining down “a path which one strangely recalls.” Against the characterization of fascism as a unique horror, Bloch saw its orgies of cruelty as an uncanny return. “Old grotesque faces eerily arise […] the Nazi dances all night.” “Both hell and heaven,” Bloch moaned, “have been surrendered without a fight.” [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 1:43 PM PST - 10 comments

This indie tabletop role-playing game was released earlier this week in print. It features a bleak, lightly-sketched setting, and is touted as being ideal for people who want to play an RPG solo or co-operatively as a group, without the traditional game master. The PDF is free. [more inside]
posted by Alensin at 1:39 PM PST - 27 comments

Oh yes! The English are known for attributes such as cricket, tea, and national economic suicide. Perhaps less well known is their preference for intimacy within (or with) hedges. A mumsnet user asks for advice: “I'm so tempted to cough loudly or say something but for some reason I just keep quiet and feel weird listening to other people's sex noises.” Writers are the most notorious: “One year they actually hung signs up on the hedge in the hopes of discouraging him. It didn't work.” And if there's no-one around, then as a distressed topiarist (interview) observes: “I just peered out at about 04:30 in the morning and there was a guy on top of her and going through the motions of having sex with her.” In no-nonsense Scotland, they just remove the hedge.
posted by Wordshore at 11:30 AM PST - 67 comments

Ollie and Harry are two young Scottish brothers who sent their Playmobil toy ship the Adventure on a trip around the world. With GPS tracking and some help from friendly people along the way, the boat has been at sea for nearly a year, making it more than 3700 miles, with stops in Denmark, Sweden, Mauritania and elsewhere. It was last tracked May 12 off the coast of Barbados, but ships are on the lookout. It's all part of the boys' epic list of 500 adventures.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:07 AM PST - 26 comments

American Academy of Pediatrics Says Some Common Food Additives May Pose Health Risks to Children. According to the statement in the August 2018 Pediatrics, “Food Additives and Child Health” (DOI link; published online July 23), some currently allowed chemicals may best be avoided--especially for children. The technical report can be read here (DOI link). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:47 AM PST - 7 comments

The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk? In the first part of a two-part series, Rick Libeling examines how science fictional aesthetics have changed over time, and where he sees them heading now, starting with architecture, and specifically the rising use of Brutalist spaces. [more inside]
posted by Fish Sauce at 7:05 AM PST - 48 comments

to swirl in a small centrifuge? Semen! Featuring: Sperm panic! -- actual research, and lack thereof -- research funding, and lack thereof -- Silicon Valley to the rescue! -- Do social factors influence your sperm counts? -- Awful men on the internet! -- and tiny home centrifuges.
posted by Hypatia at 6:33 AM PST - 40 comments

“How do we negotiate the fact that we have a brilliant author who did some despicable things?” he told me. “And how do we make sure that while studying his work, we don’t inadvertently give the impression that the behaviors are somehow okay?” The question is thornier with Wallace than it would be for most of his contemporaries. Academics explain David Foster Wallace to me by Daniel Kolitz [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:49 AM PST - 60 comments

Every Tuesday at the Oregon Zoo, two tiny goats named after Supreme Court Justices visit the other animals. So far, Ruth and Sonia have met seals, a porcupine, elephants, Chupacabra, giraffes, a hornbill, penguins, river otters, and an aardvark.
posted by chrisulonic at 3:42 AM PST - 29 comments

While national programs haven’t been officially tallied, the research that exists shows library fitness is no small quirk. In 2014, the American Library Association found that about 23 percent of all public libraries offered a fitness class in the last year, while another survey from the same time learned that 37 percent of the libraries they reached out to offered yoga. More than 60 percent of North Carolina library systems offer fitness classes. There’s a lot left to understand about how and why librarians are focusing on physical health and wellness, but the most important thing to know is also the most obvious: The classes are needed.
posted by ellieBOA at 3:00 AM PST - 15 comments

A small Scottish ice cream shop garnered global praise and hatred from their mayo ice cream.
posted by Vesihiisi at 2:18 AM PST - 37 comments

“The gimmick is that heterosexuality is a disaster, toxic masculinity is killing the world, and there are ways out of it aside from fascism or festering away in a lonely bedroom until you are eaten by your starving pitbull or your own insecurities ... The work that the Fab Five are doing for the luckless, loveless men of Georgia is girlfriend work. It is emotional labor, domestic labor, the work that anyone who has ever dated a straight man will recognize.“ [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 11:44 PM PST - 87 comments

"Let's compare 28 different "sky cultures" to see differences and similarities in the shapes they've seen in the night sky"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:34 PM PST - 16 comments

36 NEW SHOWS OF THE HELLISH MID-SEASON TV OF 1979 (slyt) [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 9:31 PM PST - 105 comments

With an exotic cast of characters plenty of chaos and insanity, British humor and definitely NSFW dialogue, [more inside]
posted by Redhush at 8:52 PM PST - 1 comment

As humans gain an ever-increasing understanding of animals’ ability to think, feel, and experience pain, many of us are asking whether eating meat is morally acceptable. Can you care for animals and also eat them? There’s a difference between compassion and sentimentality and, after all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. As I’m grilling steaks later, trying to visualize the cow killed for this meal, I wrestle with the question. (Ephrat Livni, Quartz)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:50 PM PST - 22 comments

A history of Braun Design [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [more inside]
posted by unliteral at 8:41 PM PST - 10 comments

From a servant sporting goalie gloves to a 16th-century child soldier in studs, the self-portraits of Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop reframe African revolt through the lens of foot
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:57 PM PST - 2 comments

Got a pet? Send me a photo and I’ll TOONIFY them.... A twitter thread by magferret that is some of the most fun with animals ever found on the internet.
posted by hippybear at 7:38 PM PST - 5 comments

"Their order is such that they may well be said to have a common wealth, since all they do is common without any private respect. Nihil norunt nisi commune: They work for all, they watch for all, they fight for all…And all this under the government of one Monarch, of whom above all things they have a principal care and respect, loving reverencing, and obeying her in all things.” So wrote the Rev. Charles Butler in his 1609 masterwork, The Feminine Monarchie, Or the Historie of Bees. The book was the first of its kind, an exhaustive treatise on the bee, and especially notable for its radical, carefully-observed proposition: That the leader of this complex society was, in fact, a queen. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:05 PM PST - 3 comments

Abby Johnston writes about her mothers habit of leaving her loving, hand-written notes When I was fifteen, while searching for childhood photos of myself for a project with my dance team, I found another tucked inside a photo album that had been sitting at the top of my closet for years. The notes came unexpectedly, and with them, electric shocks of realization: they often turned up when I wasn’t searching for anything at all. The few times I tore through my possessions in moments of desperation or longing, trying to apply logic to her hiding spots, they never surfaced.
posted by dancestoblue at 6:35 PM PST - 8 comments

Fire in Cardboard City (slyt)
posted by dobbs at 5:26 PM PST - 13 comments

"We really didn’t know how to exercise political power, but we thought we’d have fun with it. And we didn’t like pay toilets." How four high school students created CEPTIA, the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, and were instrumental in ending the burgeoning pay toilet industry in the mid-70s, and kicking off a few citywide bans in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and others. A few first-person accounts on Steve Froikin's blog: the networking, the song, "we never had a 'shit in'" [via]
posted by jessamyn at 4:34 PM PST - 28 comments

U.K. Supreme Court judges "reluctantly" upheld lower court rulings that a joyless marriage is not adequate grounds for divorce without the spouse's consent. Tini Owens has been petitioning for divorce since 2015, but her husband's refusal has prohibited the divorce from going forward. "The appeal of Mrs Owens must be dismissed. She must remain married to Mr Owens for the time being,” the supreme court judge Lord Wilson said in the majority ruling. “Parliament may wish to consider whether to replace a law which denies to Mrs Owens any present entitlement to a divorce in the above circumstances.” The case has brought the lack of "no fault divorce" law into the spotlight.
posted by stillmoving at 3:19 PM PST - 32 comments

Breaking the Ice is an 87-minute long mixtape of rare Icelandic funk- and soul-inspired music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, made by Iceland-born, Oakland-based DJ Platurn, with the crate-digging assistance of his cousin Sveimhugi, and his father's extensive record collection. Released by Needle to the Groove Records, the project started life as a three-part series on the webzine Nerdtorious (parts 1, 2, 3). For more about Breaking the Ice, you can read an article by Brandon Roos, an interview with DJ Platurn by Marke B, a short introduction by DJ Platurn to eight of the seventy records in the mix, or watch a six-minute mini-documentary before diving into the mix. [via RÚV]
posted by Kattullus at 2:34 PM PST - 7 comments

It started as a mystery. Why aren’t women playing adult co-ed sports? And why, once they start, do they so often drop out? The mystery actually started as a question to myself, but it was a different question: Am I crazy?, I texted a friend after a particularly frustrating Friday night soccer game a couple of years ago with my co-ed team... Were the guys really not passing to me, or was I just not as open to receive a pass as I thought I had been? ... And why didn’t any of the other women there seem to be angry?

I know now that I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t alone... Most, if not all co-ed leagues are set up to render women as second-class athletes.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:06 PM PST - 94 comments

Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller has packaging that gamers with disabilities can open without their teeth [The Verge] “Microsoft has clearly focused on accessibility for the controller, but it’s also revealing this week that it has taken a unique approach to the packaging for the product. People spend hours watching gadget unboxings on YouTube, but you rarely see a box that’s designed to be opened as easy as possible. That’s a design consideration that Microsoft has taken to heart for its new Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging. “A lot of these limited mobility gamers are actually used to opening packages with their teeth,” explains Mark Weiser, a packaging designer at Microsoft. The Xbox Adaptive Controller packaging can be opened a variety of ways, and it’s now even easier with or without the use of teeth.” [Previously.] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:06 PM PST - 24 comments

The death toll from a fire that ripped through a Greek coastal town stood at 80 on Wednesday as frantic relatives tried to track down people missing from the inferno and coroners began the grim task of identifying bodies. While the source of the devastating fire in the resort town of Mati is unknown, the fires now (or were recently) burning in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Latvia, and elsewhere are wildfires encouraged by hot, dry weather. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 11:52 AM PST - 50 comments

Mefi’s komara has been sculpting tiny skulls and leaving them out in public as free art for people to find and claim. [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:05 AM PST - 48 comments

Mama Merganser is raising 76 ducklings on a lake in Minnesota. Photos by Brent Cizek.
posted by jeather at 9:30 AM PST - 17 comments

The most likely historical legacy of a no-deal Brexit will be the final refutation of the common British misconception that the UK is still a global superpower, possibly accompanied by Scottish secession and re-entry to the EU, Irish reunification in some sort of federal system, re-acquisition of Gibraltar by Spain, and the disintegration of the Conservative (and possibly Labour) parties at the next general election. I just hope I'm still alive at the end of it.

Charlie Stross (cstross) weighs up "That Sinking Feeling" in relation to Brexit.
posted by rongorongo at 9:05 AM PST - 225 comments

Far beneath the deeply frozen ice cap at Mars’s south pole lies a lake of liquid water—the first to be found on the Red Planet.
posted by thecjm at 7:28 AM PST - 37 comments

First Assassination Markets Appear on Prediction Platform Augur - "Now that assassination markets are here, a fierce debate has emerged in cryptocurrency circles over what — if anything — should be done about them, as well as who should be held responsible for these clearly-illegal death markets."
posted by kliuless at 6:28 AM PST - 36 comments

Rodents in idents: famous movie scenes recreated with marmots (Groundhog Day and The Big Lebowski not included) in TV idents made for French TV channel France 3 (2018). Previous France 3 idents: marmot musicians (2015) (SLYTs).
posted by elgilito at 5:23 AM PST - 3 comments

Metafilter fave Ask a Manager gets a question from a reader still in school: "Will my taste in office supplies seem weird or unprofessional?" Their dad thinks so. Alison disagrees. The internet agrees with Alison with evidence.
posted by like_neon at 2:03 AM PST - 72 comments

Trailer for Peterloo a Mike Leigh film dramatising the infamous 'Peterloo Massacre' of 1819 where 15 people were killed and hundreds injured when cavalry charged a crowd that had gathered in Manchester to hear speeches on political reform. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:58 PM PST - 12 comments

Cyndi Lauper’s 1985 music video Goonies 'r' Good Enough (part 1; part 2) is perhaps one of the single most bat-shit-crazy crossover moments in the history of pop culture – and I mean Japanese Nic Cage commercials crazy. [...] Lauper essentially takes on the role of The Goonies searching for buried treasurer (standard), The Fratelli’s however are replaced by an oddball selection of WWF wrestlers [...] Throw into this the actual Goonies themselves making an appearance in shameless Goonies promo t-shirts and Steven Spielbergo doing a piece to camera like a local sports anchor. It’s sheer 80s gold. Here’s a quick list of the [13] highlights that make this one of the greatest 12 minutes in entertainment and marketing history... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:21 PM PST - 34 comments

For your happy, mellow, summer music needs, the latest video from Youngr: Lost in Translation [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 9:01 PM PST - 1 comment

We Want Plates [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:48 PM PST - 35 comments

Photos by drone of the Georgia coast that fills his soul.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:02 PM PST - 19 comments

An illustrated compendium to Chinese baos with THE ULTIMATE BAO GRAPH - When it comes to Chinese food, few dishes are as beloved and portable as the bao. The etymology of the Chinese character bao 【包】 is “to wrap up,” which is a rather apt description for it. In the West, the term bao is often used interchangeably with dumpling. That’s not entirely accurate—not all baos are dumplings, and not all dumplings are baos. [By Clarissa Wei, Sierra Chao, and Ashley Kung; Goldthread] [more inside]
posted by FJT at 3:23 PM PST - 40 comments

"Florida is no place for those who want to view it from a safe distance. This state is invasive, creeping, needy. Hardy and scrabbling, our peninsula’s sour with poison and rot and choking vines. You fight for the right to live in its greenery, and once you’ve finally carved out a space, you stay tangled in the wreck. Once you’ve left, there’s no coming back. The best you can do is hack out a different life somewhere else. This place isn’t yours to write about. It’s barely mine." Kristen Arnett: The Problem With Writing About Florida
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:43 PM PST - 84 comments

If Brian Wilson was like Paul McCartney, pushing his bandmates to precisely render his sonic fancies, Mike Love was like … well, Paul McCartney, desperately trying to keep all the stakeholders happy and productive. He’s rarely given his due as a songwriter: He sued Brian in 1992 more or less for this reason, eventually winning co-writing credit for 35 Beach Boys tunes. The occasional “Good Vibrations” aside (a lyric written with McKenzie’s “San Francisco” in mind), his gift is punch-ups: tweaking phrases and adding earworms. He scrapped Phillips’ past tense. It sounded like regret, which is not Love’s bag. All he’s ever wanted to do is provide escape. So when it came time to write the chorus, Love sang Melcher a map.
"Kokomo” Is 30: The Strange Backstory To The Beach Boys’ Last Cultural Gasp [Brad Shoup, Stereogum] [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:51 AM PST - 88 comments

How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
posted by Artw at 11:28 AM PST - 144 comments

The evolution of water rendering in video games [Gamasutra] “Water levels in video games may get a lot of flak, but the technology behind how H2O is rendered has only improved over time. A recent video published by Digital Foundry [YouTube] dives into the evolution of video game water from 8-bit all the way to 3D.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:53 AM PST - 23 comments

Smashing Nazism Through Tolkienist Thematics with Feminazgul - Astral Noize I think it’s fair to identify with either side of the conflict in Lord Of The Rings, in some ways. I’ve long held that the orcs should become the proletarian analogy they were born to be and overthrow Saruman and Sauron. But the Feminazgul, in particular… what do the Nazgul do besides find men who have power (the ring) and take that power away from them? Sure, the regular Nazgul then give it back to Sauron, but hey, since I’m making this shit up, the Feminazgul can do whatever they want. So yeah… in short, Feminazgul hunt men who hold power. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 10:50 AM PST - 14 comments

Jerk calls city on kid's hot dog stand to get it shut down. City helps kid pass Health Department certification and pays for his permit to sell hot dogs legally as a pop-up.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:32 AM PST - 20 comments

When you have hearing loss, as I do, sex is always a gamble. "Hearing is intimacy. It’s longing. Hope. Connection. A series of grand and momentous and pointless unities that most of us take for granted. Every interaction, from the briefest encounter with a barista to the most intimate sexual exchanges, becomes a question for me. I’m never sure I’ve gotten it right. I’m never sure I’ve understood you correctly."
posted by AFABulous at 9:20 AM PST - 28 comments

Jordan Raine had a hunch that humans might use roaring to communicate information about size and strength, so he scienced it. He found that we're pretty good at determining whether someone is stronger than us based on their roar, with one exception: In cases where males were weaker than female listeners, they were only correctly identified as weaker 25% of the time.
posted by clawsoon at 8:50 AM PST - 37 comments

In Conversation: Billy Joel -The superstar on his songwriting silence, the country today, and his ideal farewell (SL Vulture)
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:41 AM PST - 68 comments

At first glance, the two histories related above are diametric opponents. One, on the mainstream side, tells of a heroic savior ignored; the other details an antichrist narrowly (if at all) defeated. What unites them is an inaccuracy of memory.

How the history of video games is constructed, and what differing narratives about Myst teach us about that construction.
posted by sgranade at 7:53 AM PST - 80 comments

SLGQ "As the Trump administration and North Korea spun Otto's story for their own ends, I spent six months reporting—from Washington, D.C., to Seoul—trying to figure out what had actually happened to him. What made an American college student go to Pyongyang? What kind of nightmare did he endure while in captivity? How did his brain damage occur? And how did his eventual death help push America closer toward war with North Korea and then, in a surprising reversal, help lead to Trump's peace summit with Kim Jong-un? The story I uncovered was stranger and sadder than anyone had known. In fact, I discovered that the manner of Otto's injury was not as black-and-white as people were encouraged to believe."
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:35 AM PST - 19 comments

Meet the Woman Who Rocked Particle Physics—Three Times (Quanta) - "Sau Lan Wu spent decades working to establish the Standard Model of particle physics. Now she’s searching for what lies beyond it." (via)
posted by kliuless at 6:26 AM PST - 6 comments

Watson hosted a panel consisting of former New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, Soulcycle founder Ruth Zukerman (because of course), former New Zealand soccer player Tim Brown, who now sells shoes, and Ryan Williams, who founded a real estate technology company with Middle East peace envoy Jared Kushner [...] The panel, "How to Succeed In Business Without a Rule Book," offered helpful advice on being rich, like fly "20 hours" if you have to in order to get to an important meeting.

' Fear and loathing at OZY Fest
posted by griphus at 5:37 AM PST - 47 comments

YouTube user glumshoe loves old-timey noir detectives. [more inside]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:01 AM PST - 5 comments

"The Central Station journal has been created by a group of women who love their way of life in the northern [Australian] cattle industry."

My time in the North Australian Beef Industry
The Vegetarian Backpacker
Socialising and schooling in the outback
The Royal Flying Doctor Service
Dealing with depression
School of the Air in the 60’s
[more inside]
posted by mosessis at 12:33 AM PST - 7 comments

You may have seen the reddit post about the Savannah waitress who body-slammed a groper. The Washington Post now has a story with more background (non-paywalled link here). There's also an editorial cartoon in the local paper.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:18 PM PST - 66 comments

Invader Zim, the unlikely sounding pairing from Jhonen Vasquez, the creative mind then best known for Johnny the Homicidal Maniac [previously], and the cable channel for kids, Nickelodeon, is coming back for a movie, and it looks gloriously weird (Invader ZIM: Enter the Florpus Exclusive Teaser | San Diego Comic-Con 2018 - mostly cinematic score with limited sound effects). Not sure what these words even mean? Join me, friends, for more details from a fellow perfectly normal human worm-baby. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:11 PM PST - 40 comments

Review of a new retelling of "Beowulf" for the modern age. With interesting redefinitions of important words, that men have always defined. And here's an NPR interview with the author: Beowulf in the suburbs
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:39 PM PST - 12 comments

It's the fall of 1990. You’re in architecture school. Your assignment is to collect blueprints from a foreign country on the verge of American invasion. Are you helping to preserve threatened buildings—or unwittingly supplying intelligence for more accurate U.S. missile strikes? Geoff Manaugh investigates. [SLDailyBeast]
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 12:57 PM PST - 12 comments

The Hugo Awards and the World Science Fiction convention have been in crisis in recent years (documented in many Mefi posts linked below) as SF's equivalent of Gamergate abused the (easily abusable) nomination process. After rules changes implemented in 2016, the 2017 Hugo nominees were a diverse slate and the awards ultimately nearly swept by women, several of them women of color. The current 2018 ballot is also highly diverse, and many breathed a sigh of relief over a bullet finally dodged. And then the 2018 Worldcon released its proposed programming draft for review by participants. They variously: misgendered a participant; failed to emphasize Hugo nominees in programming and told someone calling for more diversity that it wasn't of interest to enough of the attendance; took programming suggested by people of color and left them out of it. Worldcon's Programming committee has since taken down the draft. [more inside]
posted by Zed at 12:27 PM PST - 156 comments

When Zeid became the UN high commissioner for human rights in 2014, no-one expected him to become a warrior, campaigner, target, hero. Activists were aghast that a Jordanian prince had been appointed to take on the world’s elites. Jordan has historically been more known for torture than democracy, and despite reforms, a recent Human Rights Watch report found “restrictions on free expression, free assembly, and women’s rights.”
posted by infini at 11:54 AM PST - 11 comments

It’s a remake of DOOM in Unity, called 1337d00m. Dario Zubovic, who has released it for free on itch.io, calls it a “hacker’s version of the original DOOM”. [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 10:16 AM PST - 15 comments

BRANT GOT A PUPPY and @dog_rates is on it! Bront, previously on metafilter. [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 10:12 AM PST - 28 comments

Hi everyone! It's Isaac. You may remember me. I got engaged to my fiancée, Amy, a few months ago. It looked a little bit like this. That was a pretty spectacular moment in my life. And, so, I've been thinking about how all of that came to be. And I got a little bit inspired to make another video that might honor the relationships that made my life possible and what might come for Amy and I in the future. So I hope you enjoy it.

[more inside]
posted by bologna on wry at 9:53 AM PST - 6 comments

This post is really about the clones.
Survival Skills Primitive
Primitive Survival Tool
Primitive Tool
Primitive Technology Idea
Primitive Life
And it goes on... They are using digging sticks and woven baskets to make more mud huts, stone houses, swimming pools, and charcoal drinking water filters, and roman houses. All while sticking to the shirtless with shorts aesthetic. I've never been so happy with copy cats. [more inside]
posted by danjo at 9:05 AM PST - 23 comments

As artificial intelligence begins to drive many important decisions (e.g. loans, college admissions, bail), the problem of biased AI has become increasingly prominent (previously, previously, previously). Recently researchers, including at Google and Microsoft, have started taking the problem of fairness seriously. [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 8:01 AM PST - 23 comments

Four decades after his death, a son of Chicago’s Black Renaissance gets a well-deserved survey at the Art Institute. (YT) Non-video option: How Charles White Rewrote the Black Narrative. (Chicago Magazine) [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:39 AM PST - 4 comments

Don't leave a parabolic mirror in your car
posted by alby at 6:03 AM PST - 50 comments

Not as adorable as you may think. Remembering Antarctica's first and only nuclear reactor.
posted by KirkpatrickMac at 8:23 PM PST - 18 comments

What's more fun than watching huskies frolic and complain? Nothing, that's what: Exhibit 1 | Exhibit 2. And because no post is complete without cats*, here are some noisy cats [all videos contain howling and/or yowling].

*Not true. I'm just saying that to be nice.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:12 PM PST - 9 comments

If you're not from the Detroit area, or if you're not familiar with Kid Rock's second album, particularly the single "Back from the Dead" [explicit lyrics], the name White Boy Rick probably doesn't mean much to you. But if you are, he may be more of a myth, the baby-faced mega-dealer who drove white jeep with the words THE SNOWMAN emblazoned on the rear. In 2014, Evan Hughes reported at depth on the unlikely story of the youngest informant for the FBI, who at that time was still behind bars despite the Supreme Court banning mandatory life sentences for minors that saw others released, as earlier reported by Seth Ferranti in The Fix. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:50 PM PST - 7 comments

In a single day, James Gunn went from acclaimed writer/director of one of Marvel’s most successful and beloved franchises, to fired. And, of course, Twitter is to blame.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:54 PM PST - 195 comments

Meet the Subversive Sirens. These 5 women are bringing joy and inclusivity to synchronized swimming. The Subversive Sirens (Twitter) are committed to black liberation, equity in swimming/ aquatic arts, body positivity in athleticism & queer visibility. Check out short video interviews of the members and practice clips.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:35 PM PST - 5 comments

It's always a really fun surprise. More on the costume by the creator, illustrator H. Esdaile, here.
posted by curious nu at 4:25 PM PST - 13 comments

A Tiny Village in Vermont Was the Perfect Spot to Hide Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn didn’t actually write about Vermont. But the Russian author spent almost the entirety of his 20 years in exile here, in the tiny village of Cavendish, before returning to Russia in 1994." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:02 PM PST - 4 comments

Do you really need to properly eject a USB drive before yanking it out? Popular Science says probably not. The internet rebuts. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:02 AM PST - 103 comments

Please listen to President Lyndon B. Johnson order a pair of slacks. SLYT
posted by Grandysaur at 9:33 AM PST - 29 comments

The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature - "As numbers go, the familiar real numbers — those found on the number line, like 1, π and -83.777 — just get things started. Real numbers can be paired up in a particular way to form 'complex numbers', first studied in 16th-century Italy, that behave like coordinates on a 2-D plane. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing is like translating and rotating positions around the plane. Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D 'quaternions', discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin's Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton's, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 8:11 AM PST - 26 comments

Via Forbes.com Described on Twitter as a C- Econ 101 essay, the author continues to defend his position.
posted by k8t at 7:54 AM PST - 110 comments

- B L U R S T - O F - T I M E S -, - S N R U B -, - P U T - I T - I N - H -, - D I S S I N - Y O U R - F L Y - G I R L -, and other dank Simpsons remixes.
posted by milquetoast at 7:17 AM PST - 12 comments

Caper in the Castro was probably the first LGBTQ computer game. The player takes on the “the role of a lesbian private detective, Tracker McDyke, in search of a kidnapped drag queen, Tessy LaFemme.” The adventure mystery game was designed for Apple’s HyperCard, by C. M. Ralph, and released in 1989 as CharityWare, which meant that if people enjoyed playing, they were encouraged to “make a donation to an AIDS Related charity of your choice for whatever amount you feel is appropriate”. Adrienne Shaw of the LGBTQ game archive wrote about the game and interviewed Ralph last year.
posted by Kattullus at 7:09 AM PST - 14 comments

Sheldon County: A Nothing Place [Soundcloud] [Episode 1] “James Ryan, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, uses code to tell stories. Sheldon County is his current project (a proof-of-concept released to Soundcloud earlier this year can be listened to here.) Named in honour of Sheldon Klein, an early pioneer of expressive artificial intelligence, Sheldon County is an AI-powered podcast capable of generating an infinite number of procedural stories. Sheldon County tells the story of a fictional American town and the people who inhabit it over the course of 150 years. It is the result of two programs that run in parallel: Hennepin, which simulates each day and night in the history of a fictional American county over 150 years, and Sheldon, which in turn sifts through this accumulated history to find the interesting storylines and dramatic nuggets that have actually emerged over the course of the simulation based on narrative patterns authored by Ryan.” [via: Eurogamer]
posted by Fizz at 4:34 AM PST - 9 comments

Bian lian is the ancient and secret Chinese art of 'face changing'
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:51 AM PST - 18 comments

Jonathan Gold, Food Critic Who Celebrated L.A.’s Cornucopia, Dies at 57
posted by lalochezia at 8:29 PM PST - 49 comments

Ever wonder what it's like to teach kindergarteners? Perhaps it's like teaching chicks about magnets.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:15 PM PST - 21 comments

The pretty-dresses portion of a traditional festival.
posted by clew at 5:48 PM PST - 6 comments

Emily Carr (December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945) was a Canadian artist and writer, documenting life and locations in and around British Columbia before others. She began painting in an era when women didn’t, at an age when most people shouldn’t, traveling to remote locations that few professional adventurers chose to go. Not only did she adopt the painting techniques of modernism, when such ideas were considered dangerous, Carr chronicled the extraordinary art and culture of native peoples, who were invisible to the dominant culture, as described in the documentary Winds of Heaven (documentary trailer). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:40 PM PST - 26 comments

Kraftwerk's live shows are known for being fairly regimented affairs, but at the Jazz Open Festival in Stuttgart, the band was joined by a special guest for a performance of "Spacelab": ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst, who is currently stationed about the ISS. (SLYT)
posted by SansPoint at 5:23 PM PST - 9 comments

This is the greatest thing you will see today: a group portrait of Ismat al-Muluk, granddaughter of the King of Persia Nasir al-Din Shah, and her relatives, circa 1900. This photograph is part of Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran, an archive exploring the lives of women during the Qajar Dynasty (1796-1925) through a wide array of photographs and materials from private family holdings. Other pictures of Ismat al-Muluk include this funny/strange one featuring her dad, her sister and a chair and this tender one, with her husband and a goat. Also: her sister Fakhr al-Taj (seated) with her mom Ismat al-Dawlah (lying). [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 4:46 PM PST - 9 comments

"The Good Place" season 2 gag reel has been released. [more inside]
posted by rewil at 3:22 PM PST - 21 comments

Long excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt's new book: Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics It's about Richard III of Shakespeare's telling, not the "real" Richard. After all, he was writing for the Tudors, and we all know that victors write the history. But what he has to say about tyranny is as trenchant today as it was then.
posted by MovableBookLady at 3:18 PM PST - 6 comments

A Day in the Life of a Prisoner People are constantly asking me: What’s a day in prison like? Is it boring? Or are you busy? So the other day, I toted a pocket-sized notebook with me everywhere I went, scribbling down every single thing I did. I thought I’d share my findings with you to show you that we prisoners aren’t deadbeats — our days are, in fact, incredibly full.
posted by strelitzia at 12:37 PM PST - 14 comments

The first trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the 35th film, scheduled for the summer of 2019. Stars "Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah", plus some humans including Millie Bobby Brown, Sally Hawkins, Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Ken Watanabe and Charles Dance. Godzilla vs. Kong is scheduled to follow up in 2020. [Twitter][InterWeb]
posted by Wordshore at 12:19 PM PST - 58 comments

we sing of poisonous flowers [more inside]
posted by standardasparagus at 11:54 AM PST - 4 comments

The best on-screen kisses of 2018, according to Proma Khosla at Mashable. Rewatch some lovely kisses from your favorite tv shows and movies and get spoilers for a few you don't watch with utter sweetness. [more inside]
posted by Margalo Epps at 11:39 AM PST - 4 comments

"I think you’re racist. I think I am, too." (full talk) Dr. Robin DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" to describe "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable." She has just published a book on the subject and in this talk for the KUOW Speakers Forum she has particularly pointed words for the fragility of white progressives. [more inside]
posted by Anonymous at 10:39 AM PST - 100 comments

Hermitcraft is a private, whitelisted, vanilla Minecraft server, supporting a number of YouTube Let’s Players and streamers, which is now entering its sixth season. Founded by Generikb - who describes himself as a “gaming hermit” - in April 2012, the server had a rocky start, including losing the first map only a few episodes in. Regrouping, the Hermits started over, but “genny” would leave after a year to focus his time on the older Mindcrack server, to which he’d been invited half-way through the first Hermitcraft season (and which had been the impetus for starting his own survival multiplayer server). The rest of the Hermits carried on, before deciding to reset the map for an official “Season 2” in June of 2013 as Minecraft’s “Horse Update” was approaching a proper release… [more inside]
posted by Auz at 10:30 AM PST - 9 comments

An in depth breakdown of the multi-track master tape of Yes's Roundabout, one of the most complex, adventurous, innovative, progressive records to ever get played (almost) to death on classic rock radio. Thank you, Rick Beato, all purpose everything music guy (previously). [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 10:10 AM PST - 41 comments

The UK's Civil Service has a high opinion of itself and is proud of its history. It publishes a periodical, Civil Service Quarterly, so that its bureaucrats may read about themselves, and the latest edition included a long, illustrated article about the history of public communication. But all was not as it seemed. [more inside]
posted by Devonian at 9:37 AM PST - 13 comments

The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery. The app itself is an art project that reflects on how dependent we are on our phones. But people have actually been using it. On average, 17 people are in the chatroom at once.
posted by adept256 at 9:08 AM PST - 9 comments

$800 Million Says a Self-Driving Car Looks Like This - "It's in the city, though, where Zoox really shines. The screens inside the vehicle show an overwhelming amount of information, as the computer vision software keeps tracks of cars, people, stoplights, and road markers all at the same time. Unlike many self-driving cars, it glides to stops. At an intersection with a left turn, it allows oncoming traffic to pass and then waits for some slow pedestrians. Overall, the vehicle performs so well that you forget no one is driving."
posted by kliuless at 8:08 AM PST - 83 comments

Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
posted by eirias at 4:36 AM PST - 51 comments

"Late one night inside an art-filled home on a tranquil parkway in Silver Spring, Md., a woman decided to take her laptop to bed with her. She clicked on a story about an old picture. Her eyes widened. “No,” Michele Holzman thought to herself. “That couldn’t be me. Could it?”" How a Washington Post story about the two unidentified people in a beautiful old photograph leads to a reunion of one of them and the photographer.
posted by Stanczyk at 4:23 AM PST - 8 comments

"The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Some who pocketed a rock were later guilt-stricken into sending them back, and some even included letters of lamentation and curses. Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, published in November by the Ice Plant, is a photography and archive project by artists Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr to document these stolen fossils and their woeful apologies." [more inside]
posted by lesser weasel at 4:19 AM PST - 7 comments

I am going to give what I will call an elementary demonstration. But elementary does not mean easy to understand. Elementary means that very little is required to know ahead of time in order to understand it, except to have an infinite amount of intelligence. There may be a large number of steps that hard to follow, but to each does not require already knowing the calculus or Fourier transforms. -- Richard P. Feynman

This video recounts a lecture by Richard Feynman giving an elementary demonstration of why planets orbit in ellipses. See the excellent book by Judith and David Goodstein, "Feynman's lost lecture”, for the full story behind this lecture, and a deeper dive into its content. minutephysics takes some time off and lets 3Blue1Brown tell the story of Feynman's Lost Lecture. Orbital mechanics the Elementary way...
posted by zengargoyle at 1:21 AM PST - 5 comments

There are 93 penises in the Bayeux Tapestry What do they tell us? [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 1:19 AM PST - 24 comments

Helena Hauff is a German techno and electro DJ and record producer. She has released a 'short film' / music video Qualm as a teaser for her coming second album of the same name. 'Every woman who DJs and is visible helps to make a change'. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:57 AM PST - 2 comments

The antithesis of your news feed. James Taylor, Martin Luther King... There are times between us, all men and women, living on the earth...
posted by HuronBob at 11:29 PM PST - 7 comments

Inge Ginsberg performs death metal with her band, the TritoneKings Trümmer "As Ms. Ginsberg grew older, she kept writing lyrics and poetry, and realized she needed to find new ways to reach an audience. How was she going to gain attention in a society where older women are neglected, silenced and often cast off? At age 93, she discovered a solution: death metal, where you can shout your lyrics instead of sing them." Fittingly, the tritone is known as the devil's interval.
posted by bunderful at 9:28 PM PST - 11 comments

"Combining virtual hate mobs, surveillance, misinformation, anonymous threats, and the invasion of victims’ privacy, states and political parties around the globe have created an increasingly aggressive online playbook that is difficult for the platforms to detect or counter." Bloomberg's Michael Riley, Lauren Etter, and Bibhudatta Pradham: A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:04 PM PST - 11 comments

This knowledge lends A Bubble the quality of a saint’s relic and makes it nearly unbearable to read. It is a tiny work, less than twenty small pages, and more would seem impossible to handle. The first few times I looked through it, I held my breath, for it is in essence a horror story. I kept thinking of that old urban legend/possible Hemingway apocrypha that the saddest story ever told took only six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” And here is this, a book sized for a toddler’s hands, with its simple colors, its direct language, its bright hope. Baby book, begun in love, never finished: The Saddest Children’s Book in the World
posted by not_the_water at 8:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Alan Sepinwall talks about the difficulties of pulling off season 2
posted by PussKillian at 7:41 PM PST - 11 comments

What Other Games Can Learn From the Bullet Hell Genre [Paste Magazine] “When you hear “bullet hell” what do you think of? It’s not a new term, but it’s gained increasing prominence in the mainstream games discussion over the last decade, and is often associated with any game with overwhelming numbers of enemy projectiles. While these barrages of bullets are what immediately capture attention, the genre is better defined by the way that it forces players to react to space. Taking elements from it can create new, novel approaches to the way we play in already established genres. Like roguelikes, the bullet hell genre has also seen a small number of games do just that, growing a small niche into something more visible and influential. It’s also muddied definitions of what exactly the genre is, and the elements that make it unique. In the strictest sense, “bullet hell” is a sub-genre of scrolling shooters, often but not strictly vertically oriented, that focus on intricate patterns of enemy projectiles, often building to encounters where most of the available play space is blanketed in bullets.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:02 PM PST - 30 comments

The UK's Kennel Club has announced this year's winners of the Dog Photographer Of The Year contest (previously). There are new dogs, there are old dogs, there are friendly dogs. So many good dogs.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:51 PM PST - 13 comments

Recently, Lumberjanes writer Noelle Stevenson tweeted a set of images showing off the art style for her latest project: a reboot of the classic cartoon series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. While the new designs got rave reviews from many fans, a vocal contingent complained that the designs were not "appealing" enough, with some even attacking Stevenson herself over the redesign. In turn, other fans have been fighting back, pointing out how disturbing and creepy their argument really is. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:45 PM PST - 92 comments

Part One. [SLYT 3min 50sec] Part Two [SLYT 2min 45sec] [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 2:46 PM PST - 9 comments

An exhibition in Manchester of painted bees And here's the link to the exhibition, with lots of info on the why and whereofs: Bee in the city exhibition
posted by MovableBookLady at 2:40 PM PST - 8 comments

Lincoln Said What? Bogus Quotations Take On A New Life On Social Media is a 2017 piece noting "But quotations can be bogus in different ways." [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 2:12 PM PST - 26 comments

Food fit for fighting: The surprising origin of Argentina’s brazen pastry names -- A union of anarchist bakers used their pastries as propaganda, assigning them monikers meant to mock those who opposed their efforts. More from Gastro Obscura: How Argentina’s Baked Goods Reveal Its Political Past -- From “monk’s balls” to “cannons,” these pastries get subversive.) || See also: San Diego Free Press's trio of stories titled Seeds of Rebellion, Part I - Zapatista Food Forests | Part II - The Invasion of North American GMO Corn and the Price of Resistance | (Part III coming soon)
posted by filthy light thief at 11:04 AM PST - 4 comments

Our Homes Don’t Need Formal Spaces :On features we think we want but never use.
posted by The Whelk at 10:13 AM PST - 160 comments

Six times per week, an empty plane used to fly from London’s Heathrow Airport to Cardiff, Wales. The next day, the plane would make the return trip without a single passenger.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:03 AM PST - 17 comments

The 1959 film The Cry of Jazz (via Openculture) is a kind of filmed essay presaging the ideas of Black Nationalism, framed by stilted dialogue, and ending in a prophecy about the end of jazz. Written/directed by Edward Bland (NYT obit), music by "The Sun Ra."
posted by kozad at 9:52 AM PST - 4 comments

Tim Heidecker is running for District Attorney of San Bernardino County. Heidecker, formerly of the Tim & Eric duo, was driven into politics after being put on trial for the murder of twenty teenagers at his Electric Sun Music Festival, headlined by Heidecker's own hit electronica project DKR. After the unjust murder verdict put an end to his experiments in cutting-edge virtual reality TV programming, Heidecker found himself driven to seek the sort of justice his action-hero icon Jack Decker famously sought against terrorists and Count Dracula. (Decker's newest season seems to be motivated by Tim's murder trial, too, and by the shadowy foreign conspiracy that Tim claims was truly responsible for all those deaths. [more inside]
posted by rorgy at 8:55 AM PST - 23 comments

Will Not Let Me Go Dallas, Texas. 1996. Fred Strickland has Alzheimer’s. An interactive story about memory, loss, and love. [via mefi projects]
posted by jazon at 6:19 AM PST - 13 comments

Last November, my grandfather told me that he went to the Soviet Union in 1962 as a roadie for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
posted by latkes at 6:02 AM PST - 7 comments

Inakadate is rice paddy art central. (Previously, in 2007)
posted by freethefeet at 5:47 AM PST - 3 comments

So. Y'all remember this picture, right? It's adorable, charing and all over the shop since it first appeared in June last year. Well, there's more. Thing is, the National Aquarium of New Zealand has done it, as advertised, EVERY MONTH since then and, folks, it's a ride. Strap in. (twitter) Jonny(!)@jonnywaistcoat chronicles the Naughty and Good Penguins at NANZ. Thread reader version for those who prefer
posted by chaoticgood at 4:43 AM PST - 30 comments

A new study has warned that consuming some foods can make people unsafe to drive. But how risky are they really? One writer arms himself with liqueur chocolates and a ton of pudding … [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:11 AM PST - 40 comments

Film and Furniture is a lovingly curated online resource which identifies and furnishes you with fascinating facts about the furniture and décor you spot in your favourite films – with details on exactly where to buy these pieces for your own home. In our world, the furniture is the star: From a contemporary item in a current movie to a vintage piece in a classic film. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:03 AM PST - 6 comments

This Is Why You Can't Stop Watching Movie Trailers (slyt)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:17 AM PST - 35 comments

The Opposite of Forecasting (by metafilter's own lownote) is a streaming radio station that turns weather data from Austin, Texas into music. "The resulting music reacts to a number of atmospheric conditions, including the temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind angle, wind speed, barometric pressure, UV, and solar radiation." It's also just really catchy! [via mefi projects]
posted by moonmilk at 8:05 PM PST - 14 comments

The ancient cedars of Lebanon have outlived empires and survived modern wars. Clinging to shrinking patches of territory, these trees stand for Lebanon’s resilience. Now, global warming could finish them off.
posted by standardasparagus at 7:01 PM PST - 8 comments

In 1993, before the magical girl anime Sailor Moon was released in the U.S., there was an alternate vision for it. It was an American vision. A total remake of the show with Saturday morning-style animation, intercut with footage of real-life, all-American high school teens.
posted by RobotHero at 6:18 PM PST - 15 comments

Thor: Ragnarok as an anime intro (slyt)
posted by curious nu at 5:56 PM PST - 21 comments

In 2017, Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco launched the Holman Prize to support the emerging adventurousness and can-do spirit of blind and low vision people worldwide. One of the winners was Ahmet Ustenel who is about to pull off his prize winning proposal to cross the Bosphorus in a kayak, solo. His story is fascinating, and so are the stories of the other winners.
posted by agatha_magatha at 4:07 PM PST - 9 comments

Star Wars: The Clone Wars. [YouTube][Trailer] “Today at the 10-year anniversary San Diego Comic-Con panel for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, fans were hit with news they couldn’t have seen coming even from a galaxy far, far away — after an abrupt ending, Dave Filoni’s CG animated series will return for one last season on Disney’s new streaming service.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 2:40 PM PST - 21 comments

'November Rain' is the oldest music video with a billion YouTube views. What does that mean? [more inside]
posted by box at 2:37 PM PST - 71 comments

Chemistry and Artificial Intelligence can give you all possible outcomes Chemistry coupled with Artificial Intelligence builds a robot that can give all possible outcomes/results from self analysis.
posted by Yellow at 1:45 PM PST - 3 comments

Doctor Who: Series 11 Trailer
posted by Pendragon at 1:03 PM PST - 77 comments

Hollywood home for sale. Perfect for large family with housekeeper, dog*. Space for a live-in cousin. Attic can be converted to bedroom for your oldest girl boy. Not actually haunted, but there might be an occasional UFO sighting. Space in backyard for clubhouse(s) or boat restoration. Spacious living room suitable for building houses of cards. [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 12:56 PM PST - 40 comments

Are you bored of your book club? Do you love old dos games? Why not try out the Dos Game Club! [more inside]
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:24 PM PST - 16 comments

A visit with photos to Max Gate, the house that Thomas Hardy built in 1885 and lived in for the rest of his life. Half his novels and most of his poetry was written there.
posted by Quasirandom at 11:25 AM PST - 6 comments

40 years ago, Shenzhen (Wikipedia) was a quiet market town (China Underground) of 30,000 people on the route of the Kowloon–Canton Railway. That changed (China Daily then-and-now gallery) in 1979 when Shenzhen was promoted to city-status and in 1980 designated China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ), as part of the institution of the policy of "reform and opening" (The Diplomat) in late 1979 when the SEZ was established. Its rapid growth is thanks to foreign investments (Kaizen Corporate Services ltd.) and technology. Letter from Shenzhen -- Chinese tech isn’t an imitation of its American counterpart. It’s a completely different universe. (Xiaowei R. Wang for Logic Mag.) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:00 AM PST - 12 comments

“Key to municipalism is the concept of “predistribution”. The idea is that, rather than attempting to correct malign economic outcomes through redistributive taxes and benefits, government and civil society can get it right the first time by inscribing better outcomes within the economy itself. These common forms of ownership spread democracy beyond the ballot box and challenge the idea that the economy is a realm for technocrats rather than citizens.... In Spain, however, governments are already getting to work rolling back waves of privatisation and building economic democracy within neoliberal urban landscapes. If municipalism is the key to cities built on broad-based ownership and democratic control, then examining how it has worked elsewhere – what knowledge can be borrowed, what theories should be drawn upon, and what is specific to particular places – will be formative to Labour’s own municipal socialist agenda.“ Who Owns The City? Municpalism and communalism. When We Go Into Goverment, We All Go Into Goverment, UK Labour’s plan to undo 40 years of privatization and revanche via mass democracy. Alternative Models Of Ownership (PDF) a Labour plan for a new economy. (Previously)
posted by The Whelk at 10:01 AM PST - 6 comments

Elon Musk’s iPod Submarine, a one page game from Tin Star Games. For less terrible solutions: What Elon Musk Should Learn From the Thailand Cave Rescue (SPOILERS: He chose not to learn those things and, um, went somewhere else)
posted by Artw at 9:59 AM PST - 62 comments

A new revelation has been sending shockwaves through the games journalism community. PC Gamer writer Wes Fenlon realizes he's been WASD-ing wrong his whole life.
posted by backseatpilot at 6:13 AM PST - 143 comments

The story of Ayam Brand, set up in Singapore by a Frenchman, and how it got its name Still French-owned, the company started out selling tinned sardines with Clouet, the name of its founder, on the cans along with a rooster, symbol of France. That led Malays to dub it ‘chop ayam’ – the chicken brand. The rest is history
posted by infini at 4:37 AM PST - 11 comments

Architectural projects for Paris that did not see the light of the day, an ongoing collection by u/BringbackMarchais on r/France (MLReddit). [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 4:30 AM PST - 14 comments

Enough to be on your way If you are sitting in the corner of the basement because the wife is pissed at you and you come across a little known James Taylor video, you are obliged to share it. That is all.
posted by HuronBob at 12:05 AM PST - 17 comments

Decoding tired tropes of flashy architectural graphics Look at architectural renderings on a regular basis and soon you’ll start to spot stylized elements that pop up often enough to be called cliches, every one of them inserted into the image for a specific purpose. It’s all about selling the viewer on the concept, consciously and subconsciously, like any other form of marketing.
posted by MovableBookLady at 11:07 PM PST - 26 comments

Another Kickstarter campaign revealed to be a fraud: How the "Be." battery-free toothbrush faked a demonstration video. Having already collected over $400,000 in donations, the backers have quite a bit of vitriol to dispense (the creators have already labeled the revelation "fake news", despite having immediately removed the incriminating video).
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 9:53 PM PST - 62 comments

Why punk keeps connecting people across space and time , by Miss Rosen, Angela Boatwright & GODLIS.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:28 PM PST - 6 comments

Trevor Noah spends about 8 minutes explaining exactly why Nelson Mandela's birthday is still observed in such a major way in his home country of South Africa, and also around the world.
posted by hippybear at 8:48 PM PST - 15 comments

Around the internet, people have been delighted and uneasy at the news that a gigantic, featureless, sealed black sarcophagus recovered in Alexandria, Egypt, will be opened by archaeologists. Despite stateside hopes, the sarcophagus is unlikely to contain any Elder Gods. It is also unlikely to contain Alexander the Great, even though he was said to have been reburied in a sealed coffin [pdf] full of honey in Alexandria. Since the only clue to the owner's identity is an alabaster bust with the face eaten away, it is no doubt a very ordinary person's burial with nothing amazing about it at all.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:29 PM PST - 68 comments

Superfans The Sevateem (Twitter) have created The Caves, a lush, electro-indie-pop tribute to the classic 1984 Doctor Who story The Caves of Androzani. (Wikipedia) (Tardis Data Core). It's pay-what-you-want, with all profits donated to Doctors Without Borders.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 6:25 PM PST - 5 comments

Alice Bell at Rock Paper Shotgun asks game industry insiders: what would you do to a clone of yourself? [more inside]
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:59 PM PST - 69 comments

New Zealand firm's four-day week an 'unmitigated success'. Reduced hours for same pay increased work-life balance by 24%, cutting stress levels and boosting commitment.
posted by spaceburglar at 5:33 PM PST - 26 comments

Lucy Cooke (previously) has a relatively new book, The Unexpected Truth About Animals. Here are some truths you may not be aware of.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:35 PM PST - 12 comments

S-Town, the controversial hit podcast, is being sued for exploitation [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 4:28 PM PST - 47 comments

Coastlines around the world are revealing the footprints of ancient people gathering together, playing and travelling together, article by Andrew Curry in Hakai Magazine [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 2:07 PM PST - 6 comments

"At this point, I decided the only thing that made sense was to build my own mattress from scratch." [more inside]
posted by rufb at 12:52 PM PST - 91 comments

Guillaume Hebert first merged classical landscapes with photography in his series The Rocks of Taiwan, then The Rocks of Ludao, combining his photographs of seascapes with romantic landscapes. He increased the juxtaposition of the modern foreground with idyllic background in a series titled Updated Landscape, pairing the lighting in his photos with the background paintings from prior centuries. [via Wired] For different takes on merging painting with photography, here's a list of 16 more artists from My Modern Met, and a nod to Painted Land, a film documenting the efforts to track down landscapes painted by Canada's Group of Seven [interview video as trailer].
posted by filthy light thief at 10:52 AM PST - 3 comments

Under a Porcelain Sun [YouTube] [Video Game Trailer] is a first-person adventure set in a surrealist colonial India. It’s about two thieves searching for the mythical city Kayamgadh. Along the way, they’ll encounter castles of glue, wax people, and other strangeness. It comes from a studio in India called Oleomingus and will be out this summer. [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 9:12 AM PST - 16 comments

“...by 1984 the future of the conservative party had already been in Washington for a dozen years. Jesse Helms, a junior senator, was among the group of North Carolinian and Texan conservatives that created their own wave without full national party backing, without complimentary ads from Nixon and his squad, without the money or even full-throated support of the North Carolina Republican Party. His election registered nationally, but only because of what the national media and audience saw as the byproduct—a one-off Republican conservative slipping through while the Democrats picked up two Senate seats and kept a healthy lead over their counterparts in the GOP. Helms was initially cast as an aberration; he wasn’t. He was a reaction, and the future.” How though direct mail, mudslinging, open racism, and television appearances Jesse Helms Invented The Republican Party (Splinter News)
posted by The Whelk at 8:43 AM PST - 27 comments

"Rihanna made headlines last fall when she launched Fenty Beauty, an intentionally inclusive makeup line created “so that women everywhere would be included.” Fenty’s liquid foundation product, Pro Filt’r, was so groundbreaking that it made it onto Time’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017 list. Its claim to fame: the foundation launched with 40 shades “made for women of all skin colors & undertones." But as it turns out, a few other brands had 40 or more shades too, including Make Up For Ever, who was not about to let that fact go unnoticed. Shortly after Fenty’s launch, they challenged the newcomer in an Instagram post noting that 40 shades of foundation was “nothing new” since they’ve had 40 shades since 2015. Rihanna was unimpressed. She quickly shot back with two comments: “lol. still ashy” and “shook.” In other words, Rihanna was implying that Make Up For Ever’s foundation lacked range and would still leave people of color looking “ashy” or slightly gray. So how valid is her comeback? Actually, there’s a way to find out—with data." How Inclusive Are Beauty Brands Around the World?
posted by everybody had matching towels at 6:27 AM PST - 46 comments

What are higher education deserts? The Chronicle of Higher Education explores where and which Americans are the farthest away from colleges and universities.

The Urban Institute offered a somewhat different approach, combining geography and broadband.

The American Council on Education focused on geography, but used a different model to yield different results.
posted by doctornemo at 6:06 AM PST - 12 comments

My great-grandfather, the Nigerian slave trader. A New Yorker article by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani in which she reflects on her family's involvement in the African slave trade, and its ramifications today for the descendants of both the slavers and the enslaved.
posted by tavegyl at 2:14 AM PST - 24 comments

An entomologist rates ant emojis.
posted by Vesihiisi at 12:01 AM PST - 27 comments

Incredibly Detailed Aztec Inspired Pop Culture Illustrations by Jorge Garza
posted by ActingTheGoat at 10:44 PM PST - 6 comments

Nuwaubian group wound up labeled as a hate group by the SPLC. Not long ago in Georgia, black and gold pyramids stood proudly on the 476-acre compound of Tama-Rey. It was the holy “Land of the Sun,” a place where the self-declared God, Dr. Malachi Z. York, manipulated thousands of nationwide followers in the “Nuwaubian Nation of Moors” to believe they were cosmic purveyors of an extraterrestrial truth.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:09 PM PST - 27 comments

Robin Johnson makes interactive fiction and text adventures. [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 7:52 PM PST - 8 comments

"I respect that bakers who are proud of their bagels might get pissed that someone is destroying their creation. But it’s a damn piece of bread. Eat it in a way that makes the most sense to you. If you want to enjoy your sandwich without half of the toppings falling out of the sides, then do what feels right: hold your head high and scoop out your bagel."

posted by Lexica at 7:51 PM PST - 72 comments

The facility, called Diamond Light Source, is one of the most powerful and sophisticated X-ray facilities in the world, used to probe everything from viruses to jet engines. On this summer afternoon, though, its epic beam will focus on a tiny crumb of papyrus that has already survived one of the most destructive forces on the planet—and 2,000 years of history. It comes from a scroll found in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman resort on the Bay of Naples, Italy, that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:41 PM PST - 7 comments

In 1993, writer/director Steven de Souza battled a military coup, an ever-growing cast list and a self-destructing Jean-Claude Van Damme – and came out with a profitable picture. A loving, quite funny reminisce.
posted by smoke at 7:23 PM PST - 22 comments

Justice Among the Jell-O Recipes: The Feminist History of Food Journalism [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 3:39 PM PST - 11 comments

68-year-old artist/musician Lonnie Holley has released the video for his new single, "I Woke Up In A Fucked-Up America." [more inside]
posted by mykescipark at 2:16 PM PST - 7 comments

Library tickets, library cards and library pockets as historical or nostalgic objects: Is the Library Card Dying? by Sara Polski in The Atlantic. [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 2:14 PM PST - 33 comments

Iga, a small town in Japan, and the birthplace of the ninja, is seeking to combat decreasing population by recruiting more ninjas A short (9:30) podcast from NPR.
posted by stillmoving at 1:18 PM PST - 37 comments

We kept all three types stacked high in a kitchen cabinet, a potentially disastrous placement for clumsy kids looking to set the table each night. But these weren’t any plates. They were Corelle, the seemingly indestructible kind still found in immigrant households across the country. [more inside]
posted by Emmy Rae at 12:49 PM PST - 125 comments

Toward a Feminist Reading of "Die Hard"
posted by Scattercat at 11:46 AM PST - 33 comments

We lefts the stadium with no loss, no victory, but plenty of indignation. Thousands of us walked out onto the street through a long dark tunnel, lost in the all-consuming blow of horns and chants of Iraa-a-a-n. The trumpet of God seemed to be calling out the Day of Judgment: Iran gave its best World Cup performance in recent history, and women were allowed inside Iran’s largest stadium for the first time in decades. @Pedestrian writes about women and Iran's World Cup performance for Popula. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 11:38 AM PST - 2 comments

Donald Trump, current occupier of the Oval Office, has returned to the US after a tumultuous six-day international tour in which he again declared himself "a very stable genius" after disrupting the NATO summit in Brussels (Rolling Stone), lied about predicting Brexit while criticizing PM Theresa May over her handling of it (The Sun), called the European Union "a foe" of the US (CNN), and then met with President Vladimir Putin in a two-hour, closed-door, off-the-record session that culminated in a joint news conference so shameful (Washington Post) and obsequious (NYTimes) that people are debating if it was treasonable (Business Insider). … And halfway through this trip, on Friday the 13th, Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a new indictment (PDF) of 12 Russian intelligence officers in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign (NY Times), and on Monday, the Department of Justice DoJ Release: charged Russian national and NRA Mariia Butina, who lobbied the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast on behalf of Russia (New York Times) and met Trump in 2015 (CNN), Conspiracy to Act as an Agent of the Russian Federation Within the United States (DoJ press release). [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:40 AM PST - 2456 comments

Empathy Machines: Fellow feeling as a technologically mediated experience by Olivia Rosane “The narrative about the power of literature, like the current approach to VR, makes historical change not a matter of the resistance efforts of the oppressed and their allies but of relatively privileged people speaking to other relatively privileged people to spark a paternalistic response. [...] By focusing on bringing the experiences of the marginalized to elites, VR developers implicitly endorse a system in which a small number of people retain outsize power.”
posted by Fizz at 8:40 AM PST - 4 comments

While the idea that women are innately nurturing and emotionally sensitive might sound harmless, these ostensibly positive stereotypes are hard-working components in the overall narrative that women are irrational, intellectually inferior, and servile beings who are most at home in the domestic sphere — the exact logic that’s always facilitated women’s oppression. And however innocuous it seems on the surface, this kind of benevolent sexism actually causes more harm than overt misogyny.

For the love of goddesses, stop deifying women
posted by griphus at 8:35 AM PST - 46 comments

The New Story of Humanity's Origins in Africa comes from several new discoveries, which suggest that our species didn’t arise from a single point in space. Instead, the entire continent was our cradle. In reviewing and summarizing recent developments across multiple fields, 23 scientists pose the questions Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter? Researchers have determined that much of human DNA comes from Neanderthals, and at least two other hominid species. And with these re-evaluations come others, including the discovery of ancient (2.1 million year old) tools in China that suggests early hominims left Africa earlier than previously thought.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:33 AM PST - 15 comments

“Outside of Posadism there was Peter Kolosimo, an Italian born anti-fascist partisan and early proponent of the “ancient astronaut” theory that alien visitors kickstarted civilization. After the war, he was kicked out of the Communist Party for his unorthodox views — not because of the alien stuff, but for his support of Tito’s anti-Stalinist Yugoslavian socialism. As a freelancer, he began to dabble in the occult and paranormal. His 1965 work, Not of this Earth, which argued that aliens had influenced — or created — early human civilizations, became a bestseller in Italy.“ THE SECRET HISTORY OF MARXIST ALIEN HUNTERS (The Outline)
posted by The Whelk at 8:22 AM PST - 4 comments

The Socialist Network - "At the heart of the split between liberals and socialists, at least in theory, is the question of what to do about capitalism. Liberals tend to see it as something that needs to be fixed. Socialists see it as something to be defeated. They say they do, anyway. As we've seen, the Millennial socialist intellectuals aren't really calling for government takeover of industry. Still, their stated opposition to capitalism-as-such has consequences for how we address the problems of the modern economy." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 6:33 AM PST - 64 comments

Treasure Planet - Disney's Biggest Mistake [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:20 AM PST - 48 comments

Meet Billy Wayne Ruddick, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest creation. Dr. Ruddick (PhD) runs Truthbrary.org for the good of the American people.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:24 AM PST - 27 comments

One discipline reduces behavior to elegantly simple rules; the other wallows in our full, complex particularity. What can they learn from each other?
posted by spaceburglar at 4:34 AM PST - 11 comments

The American Library Association, through their Officer for Intellectual Freedom, has passed a resolution stating libraries must allow hate groups to book their meeting rooms.. Many librarians and library supporters have taken to twitter to express their opposition using the hashtag #NoHateALA, claiming this decision threatens the safety of their users and staff. Members of the Office for Intellectual Freedom claim the resolution was snuck past to the members. [more inside]
posted by daybeforetheday at 3:01 AM PST - 64 comments

The UK has announced it will be building its first spaceport on Scotland's northern coast.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:57 AM PST - 28 comments

David Roberts argues that journalists' desire to appear unbiased impacts their ability to understand the substance:

[I]magine covering substantive disputes every day but not allowing yourself to develop opinions about them. It takes will & effort!  [ . . . ] Political/policy analysis, when done well, is developed through dialog. [ . . . ] It's a muscle that requires exercise. And "objective" reporters don't exercise it. [ . . . ]  I've seen it again & again: when I can cajole "objective" reporters into sharing their opinions on, oh, the national debt, or climate policy, or electoral dynamics, those opinions are almost always shockingly flat-footed & childlike.

[Threadreader link for the twitter averse] [more inside]
posted by mark k at 8:36 PM PST - 6 comments

Vera Polozkova is a contemporary Russian poet. For most of you, here are some beautifully illustrated English interpretations of her poems. [more inside]
posted by prefpara at 7:26 PM PST - 5 comments

A family created a small scholarly museum of bugs in nowhere Colorado. Driving along a nondescript section of Highway 115 a few miles south of Colorado Springs, it’s hard not to swerve at the sight of a gigantic Hercules beetle, its horns as tall as a house, standing beside a sign for the May Natural History Museum.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:48 PM PST - 8 comments

TwoSet Violin are a pair of blokes from Brisbane who want to make classical music relevant to the modern generation through fun, humour and simplicity. Which explains the existence of Pachelbel's Canon in D performed on rubber chicken.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:34 PM PST - 18 comments

Saturday, July 14 2018. Tweet to Film Critic HULK: "You can replace the cast of any movie with The Muppets, but you keep one of the human actors. What movie and which human do you keep?" [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 5:50 PM PST - 359 comments

The 100 Best One-Star Reviews of The Catcher in the Rye [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:20 PM PST - 78 comments

Ruth Franklin writes about children's Holocaust literature for the New Yorker: There’s something essential about the interactions among generations in the stories we tell about the Holocaust ... a younger person literally bears witness to the stories of an older generation—either by experiencing them herself, as Hannah does, or by listening to the testimony of survivors. And the reader, by imagining herself in the place of the main character, can vicariously bear witness, too. If there’s a consolation in reading these books, that’s where it can be found... “Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory.” We may emerge from these books without grasping the true horror of their stories. But at least we’ve learned how to listen to them.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:09 AM PST - 10 comments

Today is Amazon Prime Day, a 36-hour shopping event invented to celebrate Jeff Bezos’s online marketplace dominance. As comrades around the world go on strike to protest Amazon’s workplace conditions, let’s take a look at the best Prime Day deals: The Motherboard Guide to Amazon Prime Day
posted by not_the_water at 10:59 AM PST - 107 comments

One of the founding members of the NAACP, Ida B. Wells was at one point the most famous black woman in America. A fiery, exacting journalist, she's best known for her work on documenting lynching (and the false premises used to justify it) in her books Southern Horrors and The Red Record, the latter of which is now seen as a pioneering work of early data journalism. Now, a community group is working to create a monument to Wells in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, where she lived and worked. [more inside]
posted by Four String Riot at 10:16 AM PST - 11 comments

Some physically pixelated (voxelated?) foodstuffs from Yuni Yoshida, art director:
- Apple and banana.
- Pineapple.
- Hamburger.
Also tilings and textures and patterns and tilings. [via kottke, c/o mltshp.]
posted by cortex at 10:07 AM PST - 14 comments

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, Defender of the Faith has, among other passions (not limited to corgis) , a love of brooches. She has an impressive collection: Some simply ornamental, and some with more significant meaning. [more inside]
posted by FritoKAL at 9:21 AM PST - 24 comments

It’s early April 2015, and John Marzluff and I are standing with a film crew attempting to capture some footage of a crow funeral to compliment a story they are working on about Gabi Mann. I’ve already set the dead crow on the ground, it’s placed just out from a cherry tree resplendent in springtime blossoms. After only a few moments of waiting, the first crow arrives and alights on the tree.
posted by sciatrix at 9:05 AM PST - 41 comments

Who owns the space under cities? (The Guardian) Airspace ownership and control (Slate) is often discussed with regard to drones. When thinking subsurface, mineral rights (Geology.com) probably come to mind with extractive industries, but what about subterranean management? With city centers fully built, developers are looking down as well as up. Singapore has been doing subsurface planning since 2007 (Science Direct, abstract only) Hong Kong built underground caverns to expand its available real estate space (Wired) after maximizing surface and airspace development, and Helsinki has an underground masterplan (Hel.fi). British Geological Survey's Project Iceberg (BGS) aims to document and better manage underground developments in England. Up next: tunnels to ease traffic congestion. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:27 AM PST - 20 comments

The Mansion of E, the daily fantasy webcomic by Robert M. Cook (who self-admittingly compares his work to that of Henry Darger - minus the creepiness, I assure you), today celebrates its 15th anniversary. If you dare delve through 5000+ strips of the worldbuilding-packed adventures of minor aristocrats in a post-magic world and their mansion so big its basement and garden contain entire civilizations, start in the same place 15 years earlier - or should that be two days earlier? Day 0 goes to July 31 2003 plus the Early Hours strips linked from there. Day 1 (aka the Endless Day) takes up a literal decade. We are currently in Day 2. (There are helpful Recap and Wiki links on the front page and there is also a TVTropes page.)
posted by BiggerJ at 6:52 AM PST - 6 comments

Nintendo Switch Labo Creator's Contest Winners [Nintendo Life] “Nintendo recently shared details surrounding its Nintendo Labo Creators Contest, asking players to come up with the greatest inventions they could muster to earn some fantastic prizes. The contest was split into three categories - Best Decorated Toy-Con, Best Toy-Con Mod, and Best Original Invention - with an emphasis being placed on musical instruments and game ideas when the contest was first announced. Some of the winners included an RC car that was decorated like a dinosaur and a beautiful The Legend of Zelda-inspired Toy-Con Piano, a 'solar-powered' accordion, and a tea-pot.”
posted by Fizz at 6:11 AM PST - 5 comments

Beninese artist Thierry Oussou’s multimedia installation Impossible Is Nothing, is currently on show at the Berlin Biennale. It's a multimedia representation of an excavation carried out in 2016 at Allada in Tokpa, southern Benin, with history and archaeology students from University of Abomey-Calavi. They uncovered the 19th-century royal throne of King Béhanzin, the last ruler of the kingdom of Dahomey. Except the throne has been in possession of the French state since the early 1890s when Béhanzin was defeated, and Dahomey (present-day Benin) colonised and it's currently in the stores of the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 4:35 AM PST - 7 comments

Director Duncan Jones teased his next film would be a comic book movie... now he has revealed it'll be a Rogue Trooper film from the comic 2000 AD [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:20 AM PST - 21 comments

In April 1941 only two decades after the rancor and bloodshed of the Irish War of Independence and its Civil War, with the cautious assent of the first Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland Éamon de Valera who had maintained neutrality from the Allies and the Axis, crews of volunteer firefighters crossed the border into the North (~40min podcast) to help battle the blazes ignited by Luftwaffe bombing in the Belfast Blitz. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 10:48 PM PST - 9 comments

The New York Yankees Are a Moral Abomination: "Soberly considered, the New York Yankees and their fans present a moral dilemma. Our consciences, naturally abhorring everything abominable, tell us that such things simply ought not exist. And yet we also know that the evil they represent is one we would not really want eradicated. " (SLNYT by David Bentley Hart)
posted by crazy with stars at 9:45 PM PST - 44 comments

Haskell is most likely quite different from any language you've ever used before. In Haskell, we de-emphasise code that modifies data. Instead, we focus on functions that take immutable values as input and produce new values as output. Given the same inputs, these functions always return the same results. This is a core idea behind functional programming. [more inside]
posted by hexaflexagon at 6:30 PM PST - 110 comments

In those files, as I found from my own Polish dossier, it’s not only a younger half-forgotten self that you meet. It is also an unrecognisable stranger – yourself, as others have seen you. For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe.
posted by Hypatia at 6:23 PM PST - 5 comments

"It was December 18th, 2016 when we noticed that all the glue was gone and we had no clue why. So when the cavernous shelf was filled, only to be emptied again immediately, we began to speculate. Something as simple as Elmer’s Glue, although a little oddball, did not seem an unlikely victim for whatever might have been caught in the crosshairs of a Pinterest trend. We’d survive- whatever it was. I was in no way prepared for the reality. " [more inside]
posted by Quackles at 5:50 PM PST - 58 comments

Could new science and high-tech training protect dancers from the injuries that end so many of their careers far too early?
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:38 PM PST - 6 comments

Almost nothing is know of Cuban American Felipe Jesus Consalvos apart from his obsessive body of work—over 750 surviving collages on paper, found photographs, musical instruments, furniture, and other unexpected surfaces—discovered in 1980 some 20 years after his death.
posted by adamvasco at 1:22 PM PST - 6 comments

MoviePass, the $9.95/month movie-a-day movie theater subscription service that has changed the moviegoing experience and has nudged the largest movie theater chain in the US to introduce it's own rival service, has reached three millions subscribers. However, because of it's shaky economics the company is not exactly celebrating this milestone. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by FJT at 12:25 PM PST - 66 comments

You learn better from failure than from winning. [guardian] Learning from the team psychologist for England's football team. Alternately, just enjoy seeing the team in a pool on unicorn floats. [more inside]
posted by Margalo Epps at 12:08 PM PST - 7 comments

"Earlier this week, an important chapter in fingernail history came to a close: Shridhar Chillal of Pune, India, got his nails cut for the first time in 66 years." The record-setting nails on his left hand, taken together, measured a total of 909.6 cm. Chillal, 82, has sold them to Ripley's Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum for an undisclosed sum.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:03 PM PST - 28 comments

Sandra Leigh Price, "Emily Brontë and Me" (The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 May 2018): "The first time I read Wuthering Heights a whole world opened up to me: the language – the words steeped in weather landscape, the structure an intricate clockwork of intergenerational trauma, and there was Emily Brontë herself – an astute observer of the natural world around her. The book was like a storm-glass in my imagination – large, wondrous and wild." Other personal essays: SA Jones, "Wuthers: The Book That Saved a Life," and Emily Sullivan, "The Walk To Wuthering Heights." [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:20 AM PST - 15 comments

Burglar breaks into “escape room” business, panics, and calls 911. [Ars Technica] “A burglar in Vancouver, Washington, made four panicked 911 calls after breaking into an "escape room" business last weekend—and having trouble getting out. Escape rooms are timed challenges that let groups of customers test their wits against a series of intricate puzzles. But NW Escape Experience's three escape rooms apparently so unnerved accused burglar Rye Wardlaw that he called 911 on himself.”
posted by Fizz at 5:04 AM PST - 59 comments

In which Jay Rayner eats a pork pie, the product of a town which takes its food seriously. Very seriously (live blogging). This staple, magnificent and traditional West and East Midlands Christmas breakfast has variations, from Yorkshire to Evesham to Rutland. But it should be moist and formally blessed before judged and be from here. Make the pilgrimage to Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe in Melton Mowbray, get one from HRH or a posh shop, or make old-fashioned ones (takes a while) or with piccalilli or aniseed or apple chutney. This is not a pork pie and it is not Australian but can be found in New York. Work off your pork pie ice cream with some golf. Sadly, there is always politics in Brexit-Land, but expect many at the annual PieFest (2017). [previous but generic pie post]
posted by Wordshore at 4:45 AM PST - 48 comments

The wet and cold Arctic climate allows extraordinary preservation of archaeological remains. But new research is showing that we've lost much of the evidence in less than generation due to climate change. [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 12:49 AM PST - 4 comments

The National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year, Winners and Peoples Choice
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:42 AM PST - 14 comments

Today on Little But Fierce, watch how baby boxer Stanley decided he was going to play with his huge foster brothers no matter what — and slowly but surely grew up into a big, rowdy boy! You can keep up with Stanley Woodruff and his family on Facebook. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:10 PM PST - 11 comments

A Goodwill slide projector came with a bonus, family pictures dating from the late 50s or early 60s. Who are these people?
posted by COD at 4:15 PM PST - 40 comments

Aliens: Colonial Marines (prev) is a 2013 FPS developed by Gearbox for Sega, that promised an immersive experience in the Alien universe, but after a troubled development cycle was widely panned at release, with the inexplicably poor AI of the enemies being a common target for complains. More than five years later, a modder working on the game discovered a single-word typo that prevented some of the AI code of the xenomorphs to be executed, making the game ever so slightly better. (Via)
posted by lmfsilva at 2:30 PM PST - 30 comments

RECORD/PLAY. "War, fate, and a broken walkman transcend space and time in this sci-fi love story."
posted by homunculus at 1:55 PM PST - 4 comments

Paula McClain visits Finca Vigía in search of legendary war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and reflects on a woman who refused to be erased.

I feel a powerful urge to shout her name to the tourists who peer in at the window, the ones ogling me ogling them. She was here, I want to shout. And she was extraordinary. (slTown&Country)

[more inside]
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 1:04 PM PST - 5 comments

Do you like to travel AND sew? Great! Row by Row Experience is an annual collaboration between quilting shops in the U.S., Canada, and some locations in England, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands with an annual theme to unify designs, available in four different shapes. There are also some patterns available online and mail-order from past years. Or if you already have surplus fabric, old blankets, or any cloth, you can make an ugly quilt sleeping bag for the Sleeping Bag Project to help the homeless (existing groups are in the U.S., but you can start your own, or maybe just do your own thing).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:23 PM PST - 3 comments

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why. [more inside]
posted by Phire at 9:47 AM PST - 153 comments

“The France of Tomorrow is now one year old and its contours have begun to take shape. The sleek vision of a society of merit and achievement, a revolution of the “outsiders” against the “insiders” has shown its true colors. Macronism is little more than seizure of the public interest by the French business elite.” The France of No Tomorrow (The Baffler) “The disparity between Paris and its banlieues is stark, and last year, when Emmanuel Macron took office, he promised, like presidents before him, to reduce urban inequalities. But with the afterglow of his victory long faded, his campaign pledge to break with politics-as-usual by embracing a so-called radical centrism has ceded to right-leaning policies” ‘The Social Ladder Is Broken’: Hope and Despair in the French Banlieues (The Nation) Seen as out of touch, Macron hits new low in poll ratings (Reuters) In May, Paris anti-Macron protest sees thousands take to streets to protest changes to the labor market, public service, and student’s rights (Channel 4, 8:13)
posted by The Whelk at 9:29 AM PST - 13 comments

Corey Robin reflects on how and why people change their minds on political questions through the lens of Thomas Mann and recent events in US political commentary: How eerie and unsettling it can be when people change their minds
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:18 AM PST - 22 comments

The Trump administration’s policies on family separation and abortion are driven by one view: A woman’s pain is fitting punishment. Last spring, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress worked together to pass a bill that would have gutted the Affordable Care Act. That piece of legislation doubled as an ideological manifesto: By letting states waive insurance protections for women who’ve been pregnant, given birth, survived a sexual assault, or experienced domestic violence, the GOP laid out a medical framework that treated women’s bodies as inherently sick, aberrations from the norm.
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:11 AM PST - 11 comments

The best protest signs for the anti-Trump rally in England, from the Huffington Post, Elle, The Cut, The Independent, The Standard, and a personal favorite from Twitter featuring a lovely knit sign.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:37 AM PST - 44 comments

A lingering dry spell has exposed a previously unknown monument in Ireland's Boyne Valley ... archaeologists confirmed the footprint of an ancient henge, or enclosure, that may be some 4,500 years old. Ireland is famously green... But this summer it's been gripped by an unusual heatwave and a lengthy dry spell. Crops are fading in the drought. And the unusual weather circumstances made the remarkable photos possible. In normal weather, the difference is undetectable — that's why Murphy had flown drones overhead before without noticing it. And even in a drought, it's too subtle to see from the ground. But combine the dry spell with the aerial view, and suddenly the outline is obvious. [more inside]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:10 AM PST - 27 comments

'Dig Hill 80' explores the WWI Ypres Salient battlefield Raising over €200,000 from the public, volunteer archaeologists have explored a German World War I trench fortress that was about to be bulldozed for a housing development. They found more than 100 fallen soldiers. Recently
posted by infini at 4:45 AM PST - 9 comments

Let’s rock! Why Dwayne Johnson is the new Schwarzenegger
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:25 AM PST - 48 comments

Anthrocon 2018, the biggest furry convention in the world, happened last weekend. The official fursuit photo has been released, featuring 1980 fursuiters. Here's the original resolution of the photo, 14920 x 4077 if you want to truly study the details. Here's 500 x 137 so you can click a link and not kill your device and find a menu of other sizes above the picture. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:59 PM PST - 29 comments

The video games of Ecuadorean fishing village Santa Marianita [Polygon] “Yet wherever you go, people seem to find ways to play video games here, despite odds like agonizingly slow internet, limited technology access, low wages and even lower computer literacy. If someone in Santa Marianita was able to research the games they wanted, it’s unlikely they’d have the PC or console to play them, much less the internet speeds to keep them updated or play online with friends. But thanks to those small electronics stores in nearby Manta and the occasional console shipment on trucks inbound from distant Guayaquil, local kids and 20-somethings are circumventing some of these challenges and kindling a ferocious love for games.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:41 PM PST - 2 comments

Seattle's mystery vending machine.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:13 PM PST - 44 comments

Then he meets the guy of his dreams. This is a (hilarious) recording of a live reading that delves into gender, sexuality, and online dating. You'll laugh but also feel for the narrator and the guy he catfishes.
posted by West87thStreet at 5:36 PM PST - 8 comments

Shopping Mall Collapse in Mexico City (no injuries) Every time I look at a tall building, I think about how a misplaced decimal or overlooked soil survey could kill everyone around. [more inside]
posted by TheNegativeInfluence at 5:22 PM PST - 38 comments

It's National Ice Cream Month in the U.S., and Sunday is National Ice Cream Day!* Guess America's favorite ice cream flavor, then go find out where to get free ice cream this weekend! For a great party trick, make ice cream in a plastic bag!


*I know!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:58 PM PST - 31 comments

Minnark is a cat who lives in Al Ain with his camel friends, Mr. Buzzer and Mr. Buzzer’s mom.  Minnark goes for camel rides and traverses camel necks like a bridge. He gets lots of camel cuddles. When winter ends, he chomps off mom’s winter coat. Minnark and Mr. Buzzer enjoy each others’ tails. The camels’ food trough is a great place for cat & camel socializing. Sometimes Mr. Buzzer is a pest. One time this happened.   (All links are to twitter. Names are from google translate.) [more inside]
posted by Mavri at 4:24 PM PST - 15 comments

"In the year and a half since Barack Obama left office, dozens of books have been written about his administration, including memoirs by his official photographer, stenographer, speechwriter, communications director, his foreign policy advisers and his director of national intelligence, not to mention the Obamas’ own forthcoming memoirs. But only one book includes a scene where Obama bursts into a motorcycle gang clubhouse in Delaware, casually toting a sawed-off shotgun, to rescue Joe Biden from a mob of angry, heavily armed bikers." Hope Never Dies (NYT) and link to buy the book.
posted by VioletU at 3:06 PM PST - 18 comments

It's summer in the northern hemisphere, which means archaeologists are sharpening their trowels as they embark on fieldwork projects. Here's a few dig diaries to follow along: The Ness of Brodgar is the site of a stunning complex of Neolithic buildings in the West Mainland of Orkney. Newgrange Farm excavations are investigating a substantial feature discovered through geophysical investigation in 2015. It's the first excavation to take place at the site for 30 years. Bamburgh Research Project is excavating within the walls of Bamburgh Castle, the site of the fortress palace of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria. Waterloo Uncovered works with current and former service personnel, alongside archaeologists and students, and are currently excavating Hougoumont Farm at the battlefield at Waterloo.
posted by Helga-woo at 2:20 PM PST - 12 comments

Fortnite is the most important video game on the planet. Fortnite is successful like no other game before it for a few reasons. This is interesting even to non-gamers. The NYMag article explains the technical and social reasons for the game's popularity. [more inside]
posted by k8t at 12:04 PM PST - 82 comments

OK, at least some dinosaurs probably had feathers or proto-feathers, I've come to terms with that. Then it turns out that dinosaurs may have cooed, not roared (reported in Evolution, June 2016). And now you're telling me that T. Rex couldn't stick out its tongue (reported in PLoS One, July 2018)? Time to think about all those dinosaurs among us. (At least it looks like the impressively armored ankylosaurs slurped food with powerful tongues - that's impressive, right?)
posted by filthy light thief at 11:57 AM PST - 17 comments

James Bridle takes on the nightmare of children's YouTube videos and the sorry state of the internet. (Mild trigger, adult topics.)
posted by loquacious at 11:53 AM PST - 47 comments

Because I'm Me - The Avalanches [SLYT] (previously)
posted by Freeze Peach at 11:33 AM PST - 3 comments

How to Be Anxious [via mefi projects]
posted by ellieBOA at 11:13 AM PST - 10 comments

New York City is not a city of dark, dangerous, moody alleys, but that has not stopped Hollywood from portraying it as such. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:24 AM PST - 48 comments

In 2005, Metzinger put on a virtual-reality head-mounted display. Inside, he saw his own body, facing away from him, standing in a room. He watched as Lenggenhager stroked its back. Metzinger could feel the stroking, but the body to which it was happening seemed to be situated in front of him. He felt a strange sensation, as though he were drifting in space, or being stretched between the two bodies. He wanted to jump entirely into the body before him, but couldn’t. He seemed marooned outside of himself. It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but it was proof that, using computer technology, the self-model could easily be manipulated. A new area of research had been created: virtual embodiment. [slnewyorker] [via radiolab] [previously]
posted by destrius at 7:53 AM PST - 17 comments

This week marks the 30th anniversary of Die Hard, arguably the greatest action movie of all time. To celebrate, /Film is exploring the film from every angle with a series of articles. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:36 AM PST - 91 comments

Mixed-race, queer artist Mojo Juju’s new single ‘Native Tongue’ is a declaration: ethnic identity is not in the eye of the beholder—it’s what you make it.

The opening lines of Native Tongue are softly-spoken, almost apologetic. But as the song builds (with backing vocals by Pacific Island choir Pasefika Vitoria) it’s clear that Juju is over being bashful and polite: “I will not apologise for taking up this space.” Interestingly, this is also a defence used by Australian white nationalists who claim that celebrating multiculturalism has made them feel unwelcome in the only place they can call home.
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 10:40 PM PST - 16 comments

Indigestion, by cyriak. Previously.
posted by hippybear at 8:30 PM PST - 39 comments

Water-bearing minerals reveal that Earth’s mantle could hold more water than all its oceans. So . . . where it did come from? These fragments of crystalline carbon are every bit as precious — not for the diamond itself, but for what is locked inside: specks of minerals forged hundreds of kilometers underground, deep in Earth’s mantle. Not actual drops of water, or even molecules of H20, but its ingredients, atoms of hydrogen and oxygen embedded in the crystal structure of the mineral itself. This hydrous mineral isn’t wet. But when it melts, out spills water. And still the question remains, where did it come from?
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:14 PM PST - 11 comments

Justice Department reopens Emmett Till's murder case [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:54 PM PST - 33 comments

Together, his aptitude and his tastes combine into something one of his editors called “crassmanship”. “When it comes to headlines, as well as the play of stories, Rupert sheds with ease, if not relief, his Oxford prejudices, intellectual pretensions and the mannerisms of his wealth.” The proprietor’s talent is “uniquely geared to attract the lowest common denominator of reader.” [more inside]
posted by runcifex at 6:40 PM PST - 19 comments

When a subatomic particle from space streaked through Antarctica last September, astrophysicists raced to find the source. Multiple teams of researchers from around the world describe the neutrino's source in at least seven papers released on 12 July.
posted by condesita at 4:44 PM PST - 21 comments

Scott Thompson on CODCO, the Hidden Gem of Newfoundland: "One of the first monologues Scott Thompson performed for Kids in the Hall centered on his Canadian identity. 'Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays,' he purred to camera as his foppish alter ego Buddy Cole. So it’s no surprise that one of Thompson’s favorite sketch troupes of all time, CODCO, also reveled in their regional identity." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:24 PM PST - 33 comments

The Tapestry of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence : MetaFilter's own moonmilk took a copy of a copy of the audio data on Voyager's Golden Record, and turned it into a 40-meter-long tapestry of human images-as-sound. Watch it all scroll by. [via mefi projects]
posted by cortex at 1:20 PM PST - 16 comments

A 'pay your age' discount on stuffed bears has led to shopping chaos. Though standing in line is not normally thought of as a positive experience, for special items, it makes you appreciate it even more. Some queues are even events in and of itself. [more inside]
posted by Trifling at 12:58 PM PST - 98 comments

Hollywood Reporter: Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood: Who's the "Crazy Evil Genius" Behind a Global Racket? "For more than a year, some of the most powerful women in entertainment — including Amy Pascal, Kathleen Kennedy, Stacey Snider and a 'Homeland' director — have been impersonated by a cunning thief who targets insiders with promises of work, then bilks them out of thousands of dollars. The Hollywood Reporter has obtained exclusive audio recordings of the savvy imposter as victims come forward and a global investigation heats up." "She speaks in multiple voices, conducts business with victims in multiple territories, and only ever deals with a few thousand dollars at a time, which isn't enough for the FBI to consider getting involved."
posted by bz at 12:35 PM PST - 19 comments

The only good online fandom left is Dune.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:01 PM PST - 143 comments

More than white, wheat and rye, there's a glorious world of breads, and for your enjoyment, here's an alphabet of international bread recipes: Aish Merahrah / Bammy / Česnica / Dosa / Eggette / Flatbrød / Green onion pancake / Himbasha / Injera / Johnnycake / Khanom bueang / Lahoh / Mollete / Naan / Obwarzanek krakowski / Potbrood / Qistibi / Rugbrød / Soda bread / Taftan / Unleavened bread / Vienna bread / Watermelon toast / [nothing for X] / Yufka / Zopf. To take away some of the mystery from these links, there are more descriptions (and more recipes, and MORE BREADS) below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:36 AM PST - 35 comments

The nominations have been announced for the 70th Emmy Awards. [more inside]
posted by numaner at 11:33 AM PST - 50 comments

The problem with [the NES console in Animal Crossing] is that it was thought to be unplayable. Every time you interacted with it, you would just see a message indicating that you didn’t have any software to play.

It turns out that this generic console item actually attempts to scan the memory card for specially constructed files that contain NES ROM images! The NES emulator used to play the built-in games is apparently a complete, generic NES emulator for the GameCube, and it’s capable of playing most games thrown at it.
posted by frimble at 11:31 AM PST - 7 comments

Every Episode of 'The Wire,' Ranked (spoiler alert, slvulture)
posted by box at 10:31 AM PST - 63 comments

Most of us have shuddered on hearing the sound of our own voice. In fact, not liking the sound of your own voice is so common that there’s a term for it: voice confrontation. [more inside]
posted by Emmy Rae at 10:03 AM PST - 47 comments

"Soros is as comfortable with Wittgenstein as he is with Warren Buffett, which makes him a sui generis figure in American life, someone whose likes we will not see again for quite a while. He is extremely perceptive about the limits of markets and US power in both domestic and international contexts. He is, in short, among the best the meritocracy has produced. It is for this reason that Soros’s failures are so telling; - Daniel Bessner [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:31 AM PST - 26 comments

Cuts to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Formerally food stamps ) hurt small to medium hold farmers and thier customers. SNAP is a boon to rural and urban economies, cuts in the Farm Bill May end that. (Civil Eats) Tens of thousands of people are about to loose access to fresh produce. (Modern Farmer) Farm bill targets food stamps — but not the well-off farmers who have been on the dole for decades. (LA Times) Arsenal For Democracy episode: Congressional farm bill and SNAP eligibility revisions.
posted by The Whelk at 9:13 AM PST - 16 comments

Need to blow off a little steam and strike a blow against heartless capitalists? Industrial Accident is your jam. A short-but-satisfying Twine game from John Ayliff.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:07 AM PST - 25 comments

Today as I was walking home after my run I saw a large lemon rolling down the hill. It kept rolling for about a quarter mile. And now you can see it, too. [video on twitter] [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 7:52 AM PST - 46 comments

Originally Staaten Eylandt, no longer a city dump Changing the dump into a park is no easy task
posted by Yellow at 7:35 AM PST - 13 comments

Pioneering Animation Soundtracks From Poland: "From the 1960s onwards, the Polish Radio Experimental Studio created a sonic alphabet for the imagination through sound effects that transformed the world of children's films in Poland, and influenced animation soundtracks for generations to come. Culture.pl looks at some of their most fascinating and important works."
posted by sapagan at 5:52 AM PST - 2 comments

It's sad when a five-year-old dies of cancer, but this is the most fun funeral and obituary you have ever heard of. Garrett Michael Matthias died at age 5 after a nine month battle with cancer, but he's going to have the best funeral ever. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:53 PM PST - 27 comments

Papa John has fallen. John Schnatter, aka Papa John, aka Great AllFather John, aka Pepperoni Paterfamilias, has been brought low by a racial slur and graphic descriptions of violence against minorities during a conference call. In his resignation he has sloppily slid away from his pizza empire, like cheese from an ill-baked slice, leaving only the failure-doused crust of what had once been. Schnatter and his corporation have had a long and storied history of pointless antagonism, horrific racism, consistently terrible politics, and not paying delivery drivers minimum wage. [more inside]
posted by Rust Moranis at 9:52 PM PST - 137 comments

"Ever since its inception, the video game industry and controversy have gone hand in hand. Custer’s Revenge, Death Race, Grand Theft Auto, Sam Fox’s Strip Poker… these titles and many more like them have secured their position in the history books by stirring up trouble, but few have instigating the kind of furore that results in the industry-wide adoption of a ratings classification system. When it comes to notorious video games, Night Trap – recently confirmed for release on the Nintendo Switch – is in a league of its own; the real irony is that its iniquitous status as highly subversive 'video nasty' is almost entirely undeserved." [more inside]
posted by J.K. Seazer at 8:33 PM PST - 18 comments

On Salvador Dali's Wife, Gala.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:07 PM PST - 35 comments

FreelanceWars
posted by gwint at 7:02 PM PST - 18 comments

I Turned My Own Jawbone Into Earrings by writer, poet and podcaster merritt k. CW: descriptions of dysmorphia, surgery.
posted by figurant at 6:18 PM PST - 12 comments

Urban planner Geoff Boeing has calculated some lovely polar histograms of the orientations of American city streets, and further of various cities around the world, along with explanations of the context and methods. [via mltshp]
posted by cortex at 4:08 PM PST - 52 comments

Inside the Guild Wars 2 meeting that’s shaken gaming [Polygon] “Jessica Price, who was fired by ArenaNet last week for arguing with fans of the company’s Guild Wars 2 MMO, said she feels betrayed by how the company “folded like a cheap card table” when confronted by toxic fandom. In an interview with Polygon, she talked about the meeting in which she was fired, and castigated ArenaNet managers for their “highly unprofessional” reaction to a social media controversy.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:03 PM PST - 159 comments

Clickhole's "Well Played" tag follows the ordeals of a mild-mannered man dealing with quiet maladies: struggling with groups and their frequent casual miseries, handling chance encounters with strangers, suffering the minor cruelties of workplaces, failing to romance, sitting wrongly, and just generally being alive. But there's something hidden among those videos. What is it? Just reload those pages a few more times, and try to watch those videos again...

(Explanation here, if you're not seeing it. Discovered through this Clickhole AMA.)
posted by rorgy at 2:10 PM PST - 15 comments

Is Lab-Grown Meat Really Meat? Cultured-meat manufacturers like Just Inc. and Memphis Meats are hoping to provide consumers with meat that is just like its predecessor, that tastes and looks and feels and smells exactly the same as something you might get in stores today but will be more sustainable. Whether that will turn out to be true won’t be clear for some time. But there’s another, more immediate battle heating up between the cattle industry and these new entrants into the meaty ring. So buckle up and put on your wonkiest hat, because the labeling war is about to begin. [SLSlate] [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 1:46 PM PST - 79 comments

Sexism was the last thing I was expecting when I became a daddy. It was homophobia. (SL BBC) The lack of specific gender roles is confusing for some. Mothers I've met have asked if I am somehow the "mummy" - assuming my role as the primary carer conforms to the traditional gender stereotype of a mother. I am "daddy" and my husband is "papa" - we haven't set any ground rules other than to love and care for our daughter come what may.
posted by stillmoving at 12:26 PM PST - 35 comments

Lik the bone I know this is very thin but I couldn't resist my urge to share. a little something to smile about in these grim times.
posted by supermedusa at 12:00 PM PST - 28 comments

In 1979, Queen of the Demonweb Pits debuted at the Origins game convention. This Dungeons & Dragons adventure pitted the party against a minor god, Lolth, in her home plane of the Abyss. It was published the next year as module Q1, the finale to the G (Against the Giants) and D (Descent into the Depths of the Earth/Vault of the Drow) series of modules. [more inside]
posted by rikschell at 11:02 AM PST - 72 comments

Helena Fitzgerald on how Magic Mike XXL both follows and transcends Joseph Campbell’s traditional Hero’s Journey: Campbell’s hero appeals both to capitalism and to the misogyny built into our capitalist society and others like it. Magic Mike, on the other hand, is a story about men doing great things that manages to avoid all the traps of the great man narratives, and the specific ways in which it deviates from these narratives demonstrates exactly what is so useful and maybe even revolutionary about it... Magical Michael is but a simple furniture maker, trying to run a business, attempting to gain enough financial stability to provide healthcare to his one employee. But then — he hears the call.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:28 AM PST - 21 comments

They Meet Up in Motels Across America…to Trade Old Beer Cans: "We’re at the Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Park Inn by Radisson. Collectors from around the United States have gathered to trade, buy and sell beer cans at the annual Spring Thaw Brewery Collectibles Show — also referred to as 'Spring Thaw,' 'Canvention,' or 'Crownvention' — crown being slang for a beer bottle cap." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:09 AM PST - 6 comments

A Spectacle in Motion: The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World North America's longest painting is going to be shown in all its restored glory in New Bedford this weekend. It is a quarter mile long, meant to be shown as a scrolling moving picture (PDF). If you can't visit. there's a stunning GIS-enabled digital version which includes a thoughtful article about Globalization and Diversity of Maritime Industries from New Bedford.
posted by jessamyn at 8:33 AM PST - 13 comments

In a surprisingly Jon Bois-less episode of Dorktown, the discussion turns to looking at the efficiency of passers in the NFL who aren't the guy whose job description is "throws the ball". Turns out, letting someone other than the QB throw is more effective than you'd think. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:13 AM PST - 9 comments

The dashing and grizzled reader rubbed his angular, bestubbled chin. The site had yielded its content without objection - part craven drum beating for a product, yet perhaps just compelling enough to stroke the fires of interest amongst the percipient denizens of Metafilter. Who cares about the best novels? Or the most influential? What if you could automatically rank 5000 novels by vividness?
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:43 AM PST - 18 comments

The Middle Child is Going Extinct By Adam Sternbergh "... here’s a suggestion as to how you can spend the next National Middle Child Day [August 12]: contemplating the extinction of the middle child. Because, like the mountain gorilla and the hawksbill turtle, the American Middle Child is now an endangered species. As the ideal number of children per family has shrunk to two — that’s not me speaking, it’s demographics — the middle child, in a very real sense, is disappearing."
posted by pjsky at 6:46 AM PST - 44 comments

A pair of studies by Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban of the Harvard Business School tracked conversations between employees before and after their office was converted to to an open plan configuration. They found that -- "... conversations by email and instant messaging (IM) increased significantly [...], while productivity declined, and, for most people, face-to-face interaction decreased." [more inside]
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 4:05 AM PST - 155 comments

Hi, sweetie. It’s Mom. Do you remember Mr. Levert? He lived behind the high school with that garden. You’d do yard work over there sometimes? He loved you; I’m sure you remember. Anyway, he was in a car accident. Died on impact. Call me back.
posted by like_neon at 2:10 AM PST - 134 comments

The Guinness and Sprite is a thing, at least in one bar in Seattle. Apparently “It's very English”. It's been made before; the Guinness goes on top as it is less dense. Guinness can also be half-and-halfed with other alcoholic drinks such as Blue Moon, Sam Adam's Cherry Wheat and Magners Cider. In a bar in Romania, a Dark Radler consists of a Guinness and Sprite ('Radler' being shandy in Germany). The Crown Float is half Guinness, half Strongbow. There's also the Guinness Martini, the St James’s Flip (Guinness, egg, condensed milk, rum, nutmeg), the Guinness Chocolate Float and Nutella Guinness stout chocolate milkshakes, the Badger (Guinness and Smirnoff Ice), and the Guinness Bloody Mary, containing Worcestershire Sauce.
posted by Wordshore at 1:00 AM PST - 73 comments

Could this advancement possibly change THE FUTURE OF ROBOTICS AS WE KNOW IT?
posted by Berreggnog at 12:16 AM PST - 15 comments

Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot script for a television series based on his book House of Leaves
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:56 PM PST - 35 comments

An article in Wired reports that now anyone can download plans for guns. A new development in a story previously discussed on MetaFilter and other publications such as Forbes: as of a couple of months ago, distributing blueprints for printing guns is no longer deemed illegal in the USA. [more inside]
posted by StrawberryPie at 9:53 PM PST - 57 comments

Researchers, hospitals, and programs designed to train medical professionals routinely order Liquid Ass. The stench so realistically mimics the human colon, it’s the perfect training tool to teach medical responders how to maintain focus and professional demeanor in the midst of a truly overwhelming smell. And because the stench is universally offensive, psychologists have found it’s the perfect tool for studying the effects of disgust on all sorts of human behavior, from political decision-making to health care choices.

And while we're on the subject, it's been confirmed that Uranus smells like farts.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:19 PM PST - 42 comments

In 1977, Alan Booth needed a break from his life as a writer and film critic in Tokyo, so he decided to walk from Cape Soya, the most northern point of Japan's four main islands, to the most southern point at Cape Sata, . Listen to his thoughts in a short interview with him from the BBC. [more inside]
posted by kmkrebs at 8:39 PM PST - 8 comments

"In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving."
posted by oprahgayle at 8:18 PM PST - 14 comments

When we're free to be ourselves, then we're free [SLYT]. Produced for the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion, Canada Day 2017.
posted by heatherlogan at 8:14 PM PST - 3 comments

50/50: A feminist love song by Garfunkel and Oates Uh....that's all there is to say. If you like them, go hear it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:59 PM PST - 7 comments

Six simple changes restaurants could make to be more inclusive of people in recovery from eating disorders [Eater]
posted by noneuclidean at 6:09 PM PST - 57 comments

A lovely exhibition of the women artists who were there and are often overlooked. Also, here's a link to the Black Mtn College Museum & Art Center in downtown Asheville NC: Shared History
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:28 PM PST - 1 comment

The story behind Starland Vocal Band’s one, big hit : An oral history of "Afternoon Delight" [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 5:23 PM PST - 68 comments

The Atlantic speculates on HBO's future under Warner Media in our Netflix-dominated world. Previously on MeFi: The DOJ has lost its suit to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner.
posted by seemoorglass at 3:34 PM PST - 24 comments

The Audubon Society has been inviting contemporary artists to reimagine the illustrations from The Birds of America (online edition). Some favourites: Gaby D'Alessandro: Ruby Throated Hummingbird; Olaf Hajek, Great Egret; April SGaana Jaad White: American White Ibis; L7m: Southern Caracara. [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 2:51 PM PST - 8 comments

"Conservative actors Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo were initially cast as Supreme Court justices but left upon receiving the script." [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 1:43 PM PST - 75 comments

A magnetic koozie; need I say more? [more inside]
posted by TedW at 11:58 AM PST - 27 comments

The div that look different in every browser , by Martijn Cuppens
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:01 AM PST - 72 comments

“In some ways, I now think that one of the primary functions of the university, for the ruling class, is precisely to train a generation in indebtedness, in a state of being in debt.” ON UNIVERSITIES: ROUNDTABLE - what is a University for? (The White Review) - Season Of The Bitch episode 42: Debt as a feminist issue and possible solutions (1:03:52) - The net worth of college graduates with student debt is truly depressing (Market watch) - Competition: Find the craziest graph that shows how bad the student debt crisis really is (Twitter) - The Debt Collective, organizing as debtors and recourses against predatory lenders and collectors - The New Economy Project , what is the Soildairty economy? (Previously, Letter to an unknown lender. )
posted by The Whelk at 8:30 AM PST - 131 comments

Fell runner Nicky Spinks is the first person to complete the double Ramsey Round, a brutal and technical 116 mile circuit of the hills and mountains above Fort William, Scotland, which includes 24 peaks, 23 of which are Munros. She competed the run in 55 hours and 56 minutes. [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 7:58 AM PST - 17 comments

Who's the man behind the curtain of the Capitalist Subjugation Machine? The ideas of obscure ultra-capitalist James McGill Buchanan are driving America's shift to cutting off and subjugating anyone who's not in the One Percent.
posted by Beethoven's Sith at 7:52 AM PST - 17 comments

The Crown owns all unmarked mute swans on the Thames, and has since the 12th century. Once a year in July an annual swan census called Swan Upping takes place. Led by the Queen's Swan Warden, people in traditional wooden skiffs check for ownership marks and general swan and cygnet health over a five day period. Despite her position, the Queen has only attended one Swan Upping ceremony, in 2009. Impressive current photos and historical photos. [via1, via2]
posted by jessamyn at 7:08 AM PST - 32 comments

"A woman gets on a plane. She’s flying from New York to Dallas, where she lives and works as a personal trainer. A couple asks her if she’ll switch seats with one of them so that they can sit together, and she agrees, thinking it’s her good deed for the day. She chats with her new seatmate and they discover that they have a lot in common: he’s also a trainer, and a former professional soccer player. Maybe there’s a spark of attraction between them, or maybe he instigates the conversation despite her polite signs of disinterest—it’s difficult to discourage someone when you’re trapped together on a four-hour flight. We don’t really know what is going on in her head, and there’s no way that anyone could know. The woman on the plane is unaware that the woman sitting in the row behind her is watching and recording her every move." Ella Dawson: We Are All Public Figures Now
posted by everybody had matching towels at 5:45 AM PST - 100 comments

Since last we checked in the SEC (Bloomberg, settlement pdf) had a go at Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani, followed by federal prosecutors indicting her on criminal fraud charges (Vox). [more inside]
posted by mark k at 10:44 PM PST - 47 comments

"Anne-Gabriela Schmalstieg and Corinna Esterer aren’t your typical foster mothers. ...For six months each year the two 20-somethings dedicate their lives to the birds, living onsite in campers at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna, Austria, and looking after the ibises from sunrise to sunset seven days a week. The entire first month the women must abstain from coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes because they have to spit in the birds’ food to make it easier to digest." "Raising Northern Bald Ibis Chicks Requires a Lot of Cuddle Time ... and Spit," Audubon (Auto-play audio section at top for desktop computers?) [more inside]
posted by sacchan at 9:24 PM PST - 7 comments

The extended interview transcript between John Mellencamp and Jane Pauley is charming and worth reading, across 5 pages. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:57 PM PST - 11 comments

Originally, this FPP was just to say that I have been playing Qwirkle online versus a bot... but then I found the parent site, UltraBoardGames, to house a few more online versions of popular board games, as well as being a repository of rules, tips, variations, Youtube walkthroughs, news, and project kickstarters for a ____ of other board games.
posted by not_on_display at 7:26 PM PST - 6 comments

Sparkling Water Research Lab
Bad Vodka
Travel In Style

French photographer and animator Nicolas Monterrat brings his surreal sense of humor to historical photos, paintings, and other borrowed imagery at Un gif dans ta gueule…
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:24 PM PST - 6 comments

Elderflower wine is a traditional British country wine, “by far the nearest thing to Champagne you can make at home and an essential accompaniment to summer parties.” Recipes historical (Mary Kettilby, 1714; Eliza Smith, 1727) and modern (John Wright, 2011; Hank Shaw, 2016) are available (and not so very different from each other). [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 4:26 PM PST - 18 comments

Tom and Lorenzo present a three-part essay series on costume design for heroic female characters. [more inside]
posted by Hypatia at 3:01 PM PST - 8 comments

The Invisible Child by Tove Jansson, a Moomin short story translated by Thomas Warburton, as read by Bill Nighy.
posted by Kattullus at 1:49 PM PST - 18 comments

Nobody builds churches like they do in this part of India German photographers Stefanie Zoche and Sabine Haubitz noticed these structures during their trips to India between 2011 and 2016 when they were documenting the slow extinction of single-screen cinema halls. They immediately knew what their next photo project would be—churches built in post-colonial India.
posted by MovableBookLady at 11:13 AM PST - 14 comments

"It’s hard to build a service powered by artificial intelligence. So hard, in fact, that some startups have worked out it’s cheaper and easier to get humans to behave like robots than it is to get machines to behave like humans."
posted by clawsoon at 10:09 AM PST - 51 comments

The Terrifyingly Prescient ‘Serial Experiments Lain,’ 20 Years Later [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:58 AM PST - 48 comments

During an interview about Poland's Supreme Court crisis, historian and political scientist Jerzy Targalski was interrupted by a persistent local authority. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 8:47 AM PST - 25 comments

Timehop, an app that reminds social media users about posts from their past, has disclosed that it suffered a major security breach on July 4. According to the company, 21 million users had some form of personal data stolen.
posted by box at 8:45 AM PST - 4 comments

Let Me Clear My Wallet, a fun mix of DJ Kool and Super Mario Galaxy 2 tunes set to Super Mario Odyssey's release trailer, from prolific Youtube mashup artist BotanicSage. [SLYT]
posted by Freeze Peach at 8:16 AM PST - 4 comments

The photographer Garrett MacLean, who’s based in Detroit, Michigan... has been documenting “Resisters of the Rust Belt” in the Trump Era since the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
posted by latkes at 6:55 AM PST - 10 comments

As temperature rises in Wales, archaeologists are able to use aerial photography to discover the location of ancient settlements. [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 6:54 AM PST - 12 comments

An interesting week in the UK, with its new-but-old national (England only) anthem [post]. After Chequers [post], DD (not this one) quits, replaced by Dominic "workhouses for the poor" Raab, with the cabinet in disarray and Boris being Boris. Trump's visit [megathread] means a police redeployment and a large inflatable baby. A civilian dies from Novichok possibly related to the recent poisonings, shops continue to shutter, the heatwave continues [post], ancient sites reveal, CrumpetGate [post], and water supplies diminish. Led by Waistcoat Gareth and Harry Kane and followed by "supporters", the mens footballers are doing well [fanfare], seeds are knocked out of Wimbledon, while electoral law integrity struggles to be heard. [Post title via devonian and twitter, and explained] Ooh I say!
posted by Wordshore at 6:41 AM PST - 258 comments

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are industrially-useful molecules that, in high Antarctic clouds, destroy the atmospheric ozone that protects us from much of the sun's ultraviolet rays. In one of environmentalism's clearest success stories, 196 nations agreed to the Montreal Protocol banning CFC use, and the ozone layer gradually began to replenish itself. But recently... [more inside]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:34 AM PST - 21 comments

Billie is a US razor brand that targets its products at women. Their recently released commercial is unusual, as it shows what their competitors always omit: women shaving – or combing – actual body hair. They have also created an image library devoted to normalizing female body hair on the internet, to which you can contribute using the hashtag #projectbodyhair.
posted by Vesihiisi at 4:14 AM PST - 37 comments

"[B]efore long, there was barely a single facet of English rural life that wasn’t being prevaricated about from the three-for-two table in Waterstones. Joe Kennedy in the New Socialist writes about the intersection of nostalgic cultural criticism, nature-writing, psychogeography, and 'benign' or 'progressive' forms of English patriotism. [more inside]
posted by ocular shenanigans at 3:24 AM PST - 20 comments

In 1999, officials in Vienna, Austria, asked residents of the city's ninth district how often and why they used public transportation. "Most of the men filled out the questionnaire in less than five minutes," says Ursula Bauer, one of the city administrators tasked with carrying out the survey. "But the women couldn't stop writing." - How to Design a City for Women [more inside]
posted by supercrayon at 3:20 AM PST - 27 comments

“I feel like so much of [Bo’s] online tale is about being young, but he’s just such a cranky old man.” — Aidy Bryant
In the three-and-change years since the last previously (and the seven-and-change since the one before that, YouTube-musician/comedian-then-just-musician/comedian Bo Burnham has: had a successful career; burned out of performing due to anxiety and stage fright; and directed the movie Eighth Grade about, well, being in eighth grade, surrounded by social media, and full of anxiety. Writing in The New Yorker, Michael Schulman profiles a young man observing the young, afraid of the world that made him.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:40 AM PST - 6 comments

It's NAIDOC week! This year's theme is Because of her we can!, celebrating Australian indigenous women and their achievements. [more inside]
posted by freethefeet at 10:06 PM PST - 6 comments

Last month, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave the keynote address at the Chatham House London Conference 2018 (slyt; 25 minutes). “I think men should read more stories by and about women. We know from studies that men read men, and women read men and women. Perhaps if men read more women’s stories, they would be more likely to see them as fully human and less likely to see them as objects that exist for the needs of men...Storytelling is the breath and final spirit of all knowledge." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:39 PM PST - 13 comments

The Elsewhere Visitor's Guide is a service of The Lostlands Travel Council, designed to provide more information about some of the locations in Elsewhere*, with a mood-setting soundtrack of gothic dungeon synth, IDM and breakbeats by Face Culler in 12 tracks on Bandcamp, plus 2 tracks on Soundcloud (Castelo de Marcela and Ferryman Acid (tape)). You can also browse the map and location descriptions on Face Culler's Facebook gallery. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:05 PM PST - 5 comments

Now, if we do not take the removed dough to be the hole, then what do we take the hole to be? Are holes material things, where material things are physical (like tables and chairs), or are holes immaterial things, where immaterial things are not physical (like abstract entities)? Or are holes not even things at all?

Suki Finn explores whether a hole is a real thing, or just a place where something isn’t.
posted by Rumple at 4:07 PM PST - 86 comments

Humanity’s discovery of zero was “a total game changer ... equivalent to us learning language,” says Andreas Nieder, a cognitive scientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. But for the vast majority of our history, humans didn’t understand the number zero. It’s not innate in us. We had to invent it. And we have to keep teaching it to the next generation. Other animals, like monkeys, have evolved to understand the rudimentary concept of nothing. And scientists just reported that even tiny bee brains can compute zero. But it’s only humans that have seized zero and forged it into a tool.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:54 PM PST - 24 comments

Scarlett Johansson continues problematic streak, will play a trans man [The Verge] “A year after Scarlett Johansson’s appearance in 2017’s adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, in which she played a canonically Asian woman and sparked a conversation about whitewashing in Hollywood, the actor has made yet another questionable decision: next year, she’ll be starring in Ghost director Rupert Sanders’ Rub & Tug, a biopic based on the real-life story of massage parlor boss Dante “Tex” Gill.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:16 PM PST - 130 comments

Mary Jane/Vickie Jones could belt like Aretha so why not "be" her? A strange and bittersweet ballad of kidnapping, stolen identity and unlikely stardom. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any recording of Ms. Jones anywhere.
posted by MovableBookLady at 11:02 AM PST - 9 comments

If you grew up reading and watching Space Opera science fiction, you may have grown out of it because many of the tropes around gender and relationships are so retrograde. But from over the horizon, here comes Becky Chambers to the rescue! [more inside]
posted by rikschell at 6:46 AM PST - 66 comments

Cruises Are So Uncool They Are Cool: Everything about the weeklong Caribbean cruise is meant to buff life’s unpleasant edges into sea glass. If it sounds like I am making fun, I am not. I love it. Michael Ian Black for the NYT.
posted by ellieBOA at 1:43 AM PST - 158 comments

As outlined in a comprehensive study published Thursday in Science, indigenous dogs migrated to North America at least 10,000 years ago, alongside their human companions—the ancestors of Native American peoples. When the European colonization of the Americas began in the 1400s, these original canines, or “PCDs” (precontact dogs) quickly vanished. [...] The genomic analysis of these dogs revealed that they descended from Siberian canine stock, not wild North American wolves, as previously speculated. Though they thrived on the continent, practically none of their DNA is present in modern North American dogs. “Although greater degrees of PCD ancestry may remain in American dogs that have not yet been sampled, our results suggest that European dogs almost completely replaced native American dog lineages...” The Mysterious Disappearance of North America's First Dogs
posted by not_the_water at 9:44 PM PST - 38 comments

Meet Jax: the Official Stamp Licker at This Scottish Post Office Who's a good boy? [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 9:01 PM PST - 15 comments

Hey Little Liza Jane! [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 8:59 PM PST - 15 comments

NPR compiles a Spotify playlist of their 150 favorite First Album, First Side, First Song tracks across history. The first five are Elton John -- Empty Sky; The Shins -- Caring Is Creepy; Jimi Hendrix -- Purple Haze; Jackson Browne -- Jamaica Say You Will; Living Colour -- Cult Of Personality [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:36 PM PST - 94 comments

In this golden age of board games how can you sift through all the new releases and find the gems and avoid the duds? Shut Up & Sit Down is a website all about board games, card games, and all the other games you can play in your very own house. They have podcasts and videos as well as written reviews. They also have their own convention - Shux18. [more inside]
posted by poxandplague at 7:50 PM PST - 21 comments

Tour de France starts... [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:21 PM PST - 20 comments

Life on the breadline: Australians living in poverty share their day to day lives

Once I have been paid, I have money for that day and perhaps the next if I am lucky. After rent, electricity, phone, gas, internet, registration for the car and petrol for college there is no discretionary income at all. Notice that I haven’t included food. That is because I buy that last with whatever is left over.

According to the latest Acoss (Australian Council for Social Services) poverty report, in 2014 there were 2.99 million Australians living below the poverty line. Of those, 731,000 are children. The Guardian Australia is running a series of stories by these Australians. Meanwhile, business groups, economists and charities are united in their call for an increase in Newstart, the most standard payment offered to jobseekers.
posted by daybeforetheday at 6:44 PM PST - 20 comments

Samantha Mills's short story "Strange Waters" (Strange Horizons, 2 April 2018) received a glowing review from Danielle Maurer at SFFReviews: "Every now and then, you find a story that resonates with you on a deep level. 'Strange Waters' is that story for me." SFFReviews launched last summer in part thanks to this Twitter thread encouraging people to review SF/F short fiction because so much is available--the site has achieved fairly wide coverage but aims for more. Setting aside stories posted previously, a selection of recommendations from other sources offers additional perspective on six months of SF/F short fiction. [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:21 PM PST - 6 comments

People who know me personally will know that I have a dog and that I'm fairly open about it, but it isn't something I discuss much publicly. I prefer to wait a while to introduce people to it, because my dog is difficult. My dog is not a good dog. [more inside]
posted by Adridne at 5:33 PM PST - 25 comments

Overhead, swaying ... a tree in Spain ... some forest birdsong ... in Japan ... a forest at night ... in England ... falling autumnal leaves and rain ... in Italy ... a birch tree, swaying ... in Canada ... a strong wind blows through trees ... in New Zealand ... and some forests, also in New Zealand ... in Wales ... stark Norwegian trees in winter ... in England (and album) ... timelapses through Norwegian forests ... in Scotland ... timelapses of trees in Jämtland, Sweden.
posted by Wordshore at 4:16 PM PST - 19 comments

Kanye publicized a daunting plan to release five records in five weeks back in late April, sparking much anticipation. All artists involved stuck to the release schedule and now it's been a bit over a week since the completion of the so-called "Wyoming Sessions," named for the recording and record release party location of the following records*: Pusha-T - Daytona (May 25); Kanye - ye (June 1); Kanye and Kid Cudi - Kids See Ghosts (June 8); Nas - Nasir (June 15); and Teyana Taylor - K.T.S.E. (June 22) [5x official audio YouTube playlists]. NME has a recap of the records and picks their top 10 tracks, cutting the almost two hours down to around 35 minutes. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:50 PM PST - 19 comments

On the weekend of June 16th 2018, around 300 descendants of the slave population at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation near Charlottesville, attended the opening of new exhibits that “mark the restoration and reopening of a new interpretive approach that centers the experience of the enslaved.” [more inside]
posted by tedious at 2:48 PM PST - 9 comments

Inside Travis Hill, the U.S.'s third public high school within a prison.
posted by queen anne's remorse at 9:35 AM PST - 13 comments

“Everyone hates learning the rules to tabletop games. It's like going to one of those long timeshare presentations before getting your free vacation: if you want to have fun, you have to suffer through boring torture first. That is... until now! My name is Jeff Kornberg, and I make "How To Play" board game tutorial videos on my channel called "The Dragon's Tomb." A lot of other YouTube channels currently make similar kinds of videos, but most of them get the rules wrong, go on too long, or have boring hosts who are nerdy. My channel aims to fix all that. Each one of my videos concisely covers all rules of each game, while being hosted by someone who isn't a nerd (me). I am planning on making a "How To Play" video for every board game that exists, so if you get a new game, please wait until I make a video for it before attempting to play.” [via: Kotaku] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:59 AM PST - 61 comments

Wendy Red Star brings illustrations from the Denver Art Museum’s card catalog to the Crow Nation’s annual gathering.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:52 AM PST - 6 comments

Whatever you do this World Chocolate Day, don’t buy yourself an 85% dark chocolate and sea salt bar solely as a tool to look down on those who prefer white chocolate, because “dark chocolate is real chocolate, unlike that sweet filth other people eat”. Don’t be that person. No-one likes that person. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:05 AM PST - 94 comments

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity. Scientists are finally starting to understand the centuries-old mystery of “ballooning.” ...Erica Morley and Daniel Robert have an explanation. The duo, who work at the University of Bristol, has shown that spiders can sense the Earth’s electric field, and use it to launch themselves into the air.
posted by agregoli at 7:34 AM PST - 26 comments

Authority - "We construct authority. How we construct it is among the most important social, ethical, and technological problems we face." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:36 AM PST - 19 comments

While England has a few more hours to dream, the BBC has a look back at the defining song of Euro 96, as well as a half hour special on 5 Live
posted by hoyland at 4:12 AM PST - 9 comments

Really Techno [more inside]
posted by zarq at 3:42 AM PST - 15 comments

Swimming bacteria can reduce the viscosity of ordinary liquids like water. [more inside]
posted by clew at 11:51 PM PST - 10 comments

Having fun to "Rasputin" by Boney M [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 11:23 PM PST - 39 comments

The Threat of International Adoption for Migrant Children Separated From Their Families "To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past". [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 8:36 PM PST - 22 comments

Steve Ditko, was the co-creator of Spider-Man, The Creeper, Mr. A, as well as being one of the last old guard comic book writers and creators was found dead, confirmed New York City Police. According to the Hollywood Reporter, "Artist Steve Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with Stan Lee, has died at age 90. The New York Police Department confirmed his death to The Hollywood Reporter. No cause of death was announced. Ditko was found dead in his apartment on June 29 and it is believed he died about two days earlier." [more inside]
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 8:30 PM PST - 59 comments

Welcome to the wonderful world of armadillos. Possibly the world's most earnest site about the humble armadillo.
posted by MoonOrb at 8:21 PM PST - 12 comments

Antonio Maria Da Silva mashes up a variety of films to imagine what happened to Jack Torrance after the events of the theatrical The Shining. How many references can you name?
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 7:06 PM PST - 2 comments

Eleanor Pearson, "Mirror Images" (Syntax & Salt, 19 March 2018; selected as an 'editor's choice' story): "My aunt kept every mirror she ever broke. She kept many things: used toothbrushes, twist-ties with the wires sticking out, and those little white squares of plastic that close bags of bread. They lay jumbled at the bottom of old yogurt containers until she pulled them out to clean with or fasten things with. The mirrors, she had no immediate use for." [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:12 PM PST - 4 comments

What do Art Deco and Archaeology have in common? Quite a bit, if you look at enough Art Deco architecture. The artistic movement spanned from the early 1900s in France and lasted until 1945, when the austerity of World War II making the lavish decorations seem gaudy. In the peak of the Deco period, King Tut's tomb was rediscovered in 1922, leading to the marriage of ancient Egyptian design and Art Deco. There were other diverse and "exotic" influences in Art Deco creations around the world, including African tribal design and forms, Mesoamerican forms and decoration, Greco-Roman relief, patterning and materials, and in the American Southwest, Pueblo Deco. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:09 PM PST - 21 comments

In 2015, the Democratic Socialists of America had 6,000 members. Today that number is closer to 43,000 and growing. With high profile wins in PA and NY, the DSA is poised to become a force on the left, pushing the Overton window leftward on everything from immigration to healthcare. While the DSA platform is committed to equality, questions about inclusivity in progressive movements persist. (DSA-talk started to take over the US politics megathread, so please take all your DSA musings here! This is also my first post, so, you know. Grains of salt. I tried to frame it around the conversation that was happening in the megathread, but more links are welcome!)
posted by schadenfrau at 11:59 AM PST - 387 comments

Therese Okoumou spent the 4th of July taking a stand for Liberty. The 44-year-old Congolese immigrant spent July 4th camped out on the Statue of Liberty to protest ICE & Trump's immigration policies. She wore a shirt stating "White Supremacy is Terrorism" and held up a sign saying "Trumpcare makes us sick." After a stand-off with police in which she stated that she wasn't coming down "until all the children are released," she was arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, and interference with government agency-functions and has since been released. Citing Michelle Obama, she stated: “‘When they go low, we go high.’ I went as high as I could.”
posted by sleepingwithcats at 10:46 AM PST - 16 comments

5th annual 4th of July BBQ June 30th from 1 until ? Why do 90% of u think this is an orgy? it's not it's open to all. Is it because I'm on this app? I try to invite all types of people men, women, gay, bi, str8, trans doesn't matter to me.

The wholesome story of Chris Bowman's annual BBQ
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:48 AM PST - 28 comments

This May Be Stanley Kubrick Himself Explaining the End of 2001: A Space Odyssey [YouTube] “According to the YouTube channel that posted the video, the footage is from filmmaker Jun’ichi Yaoi. In 1980, he was making a documentary about paranormal experiences and chose to explore Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining through a set visit and interviews. The feature was never released but, reportedly, a VHS of the raw footage sold on eBay in 2016 and has now made its way online. It’s a full one-hour, 24-minute video [YouTube] which, at one point, features Yaoi speaking to Kubrick on the phone. That’s when he asks him about 2001, which is the clip [above].” [via: io9]
posted by Fizz at 8:50 AM PST - 35 comments

Twitter thread comparing Silicon Valley to the USSR
posted by k8t at 7:37 AM PST - 29 comments

Are Humans Really Blind To The Gorilla On The Basketball Court? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:31 AM PST - 61 comments

Not a lot of Guo Pei's stuff is wearable for anything beyond ordering executions, but you could take this to a cocktail party, where you also order executions.
posted by Nec_variat_lux_fracta_colorem at 6:29 AM PST - 26 comments

Travel writer Helen Moat makes a stop on her bike ride through Denmark in order to learn about the sønderjysk kaffebord – a table set with cakes, hailing back to the Prussian-Austrian occupation of Southern Jutland.
posted by Vesihiisi at 12:11 AM PST - 18 comments

MeFi favorite Sailor J, aka the most hilarious makeup vlogger ever, has signed for a recurring role on AMC's NOS4A2. The hilarious makeup vlogger Sailor J, whom I first learned of via Metafilter (can't find the post) has just signed on to a recurring role in a new AMC horror series about someone that can track an apparently immortal killer who places children in a twisted other realm, based on the Joe Hill book NOS4A2.
posted by Samizdata at 12:10 AM PST - 21 comments

A curated list of Black Outsider Art in a whitewashed world
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:21 PM PST - 10 comments

Chris McGreal in The Guardian blames Amazon for Seattle's endemic homelessness problem (Is Bezos holding Seattle hostage?); Dae Shik Kim Hawkins in The Atlantic (An App for Ejecting the Homeless) examines the intersection of the issue with technology via the city's mobile reporting app; Charles Mudede at The Stranger has opinions about the city government's action and lack thereof (The City of Seattle Appears to Dislike The Atlantic Story on Our City's Homeless Crisis and Anti-Homeless App). [more inside]
posted by bq at 9:48 PM PST - 50 comments

A new company is trying to make literally custom clothes for any body. Right now it's only jeans and T-shirts, but they use different size rivets to scale with the jeans. [more inside]
posted by clew at 8:25 PM PST - 49 comments

"The Testimony of Dragon's Teeth" (Uncanny, March/April 2018) is a brief new addition to Sarah Monette's bookish, M.R. James-ian or Carnacki/John Silence-like series of occult investigation short stories, "The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth," several others of which are online: "Wait for Me," "The Replacement," "White Charles," "The Yellow Dressing Gown," and "To Die For Moonlight." Monette is perhaps more well-known for writing The Goblin Emperor as Katherine Addison, under which name she has also co-written with Elizabeth Bear an upcoming historical mystery (relevant to her research specialty) that has sometimes been called, "Kit Marlowe, Boy Detective."
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:01 PM PST - 14 comments

All right, friends, gather round (or maybe mute me for the next hour or so), because it's just me and a bottle of local rum for this 4th of July afternoon and I'm waiting until later this evening to watch Captain America for the 97th time, so I'mma give you all a DRUNK HISTORY.

In which @lasrina discusses the American Revolution, Fort Macon, Sergeant William Henry Alexander, Josiah Pender, and "how a 50-year-old dude with no backup and no firepower can use bureaucracy to be a hero." [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 4:49 PM PST - 12 comments

Achiever and Founder of Lebowski Fest Will Russell has struggled with mental health, addiction, media and an abandoned amusement park but now he's back with a new project.
posted by hairless ape at 4:28 PM PST - 3 comments

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Scientist? "Rob Wielgus was one of America’s pre-eminent experts on large carnivores. Then he ran afoul of the enemies of the wolf." (slnyt)
posted by Hypatia at 4:15 PM PST - 8 comments

THIS IS IRAQ by I-NZ. Reconceptualization of Childish Gambino's This is America. [more inside]
posted by Corduroy at 2:17 PM PST - 11 comments

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives: A BBC documentary about the man who first proposed the multiverse hypothesis academically and his rock star son.
The many worlds concept in quantum physics permeates modern popular culture (also metafilter). While it had been considered in science fiction (notably, by Jorge Luis Borges, who many believe influenced the theory), it was first formally proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957. His son is the main creative force in the band the Eels.
posted by es_de_bah at 1:50 PM PST - 3 comments

With the "Chuck Tingle Humbles Our Bundle" book bundle you can get a finely curated collection of e-book erotic "tinglers", while also supporting the It Gets Better project. [more inside]
posted by Greasy Eyed Gristle Man at 1:37 PM PST - 10 comments

The Guardian takes a look at the burgeoning sex trafficking industry abusing incarcerated women in the US. The documentary (ten parts of 3 minutes each) is available for free online here.
posted by stillmoving at 11:19 AM PST - 15 comments

Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott showed that a hammer and feather fell at the same rate on the Moon, a modern update to an experiment that Galileo probably didn't actually perform. But if E/c^2 = m, does gravitational binding energy also fall in a gravitational field in the same way as regular mass? Replace the feather with a white dwarf, the hammer with a neutron star, the Moon with another white dwarf, and let's find out! (Cute 3:50 video.) [more inside]
posted by RedOrGreen at 10:53 AM PST - 7 comments

“One, you have a state that loves to drink. Wisconsin has a great thirst. Two, it’s America’s dairy land. If they can find a way to shove milk, cheese or ice cream into something else, they will do it. Third, the blender was invented there. It’s only natural that ice cream drinks are going to come out of that.” About Those Classic Ice Cream Cocktails: From a 1930s mix of "Chablis, gin and ice cream" to the Midwest’s beloved Pink Squirrel, a look at the evolution of the ice cream cocktail.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:44 AM PST - 40 comments

Because it's more confusing than I want to admit.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:37 AM PST - 27 comments

For more than a decade, Mr. Kiefer worked as a janitor at the Customs and Border Protection center in Why, Ariz., before leaving in 2014. There, he collected tens of thousands of items that were confiscated and thrown in the trash by Border Patrol agents from undocumented migrants crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. He began photographing the items in 2007. “I couldn’t leave them,” he said.
posted by standardasparagus at 9:22 AM PST - 15 comments

A day after the 242nd anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the former American colonies of the British Empire now see its executive branch headed by a figure reminiscent of the king they overthrew. And the British aren't looking forward to his approaching visit, either. [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:19 AM PST - 2540 comments

17 Real-Life Would-You-Rathers I, a Woman, Have Had to Ask Myself [SLMcSweeney's]
posted by crone islander at 8:24 AM PST - 45 comments

The web browser extension Stylish can help you customize the CSS of any page you visit. By default, it also sends the url of every page you visit, along with an ID unique to you, to its new owner. [more inside]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:04 AM PST - 25 comments

How video games demonize fat people [The Outline] “When I encounter the fat body in a video game, the disappointment that follows is so hot and pure that there is, as a matter of self-care, an urgent need to remove myself from the moment and get on a plane. I refuse to accept that in the world of prestige video games — AAA in industry speak — a body like mine and those of the people I love and admire, can only exist in one of two ways: a cheap laugh or a site of disgust, usually both. [...] In 2018, the AAA video game remains our most persuasive and powerful cultural product. And yet it almost exclusively depicts the fat body, my body, as a noxious threat, a monstrosity, an object of ridicule, something to be dealt with violently.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:26 AM PST - 43 comments

potofsoup has posted a Captain America birthday comic each year since 2014. This year's features the statue of liberty. [more inside]
posted by Cozybee at 4:30 AM PST - 6 comments

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past. [more inside]
posted by halcyonday at 3:27 AM PST - 7 comments

The long hot crazy summer of rave... 500 years ago. The Dancing plague of Strasbourg in 1518 [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:34 AM PST - 12 comments

The World Cup Round of 16 is over, and winning teams have moved on into the Quarter-Finals. 2018 World Cup Predictions [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:47 PM PST - 60 comments

Whenever a company sends us water to review I always find myself at a loss. From a recent review at ThirstyDudes.com, which has been reviewing nonalcoholic beverages for most of this decade.
posted by MoonOrb at 9:05 PM PST - 26 comments

How medieval artists used monsters as propaganda When someone does something that so viciously lacks in humanity, we call them a monster. Through action or belief, they have removed themselves from human decency, and become something grotesque. But society can also turn people into monsters through the way they’re depicted and treated. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:55 PM PST - 4 comments

Ruth Joffre, "Nitrate Nocturnes" (Lightspeed, April 2018): "Fiona's timer read 40 33 04 21 53 08. Years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. Her first girlfriend had done the math one day in bed. 'You'll be sixty-four when you meet your soul mate. I'll be twenty-two.'" Johanna Skibsrud, "The Origin of Species" (Hazlitt, 26 March 2018): "For the most part, everyone who'd actually seen it agreed that something had happened. Just what exactly was more difficult to say."
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:54 PM PST - 6 comments

"Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years." Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House. [more inside]
posted by mbrubeck at 5:15 PM PST - 44 comments

"I don’t know what it is about songs that can make you feel the weight of people or their loss or the fact of your own. But they do." What Is the Most Nostalgic Song of All Time? Mike Jollett, for The Village Voice.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:31 PM PST - 99 comments

Dan Fowlks and his wife went out on a date and afterwards, while she took the babysitter home, he serenaded his ten-month-old daughter with Bobby Darrin's "Dream Lover." There was a followup video that addressed some concerns.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:12 PM PST - 15 comments

A mid-'90s advertisement for Super-Mario-themed Kraft Mac 'n Cheese, sandwiched around a weirdly compelling yet matter-of fact narration detailing all the parts that went into producing it.
posted by tocts at 3:22 PM PST - 13 comments

Years in the making, Singin' to God, David Minnick's a cappella cover version of Cardiacs' 1995 double album Sing to God has finally been released. [more inside]
posted by Bangaioh at 3:21 PM PST - 4 comments

Itty bitty sites are contained entirely within their own link. (Including this one!)
posted by slater at 2:49 PM PST - 21 comments

"The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless—that its value was above or beyond its cost. College was not a right or a privilege but an inevitability on the way to a meaningful adulthood. What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was seventeen have derailed such a goal." (CW: some discussion of suicidal thoughts)
posted by Lycaste at 1:29 PM PST - 42 comments

If you want to know why women are so angry, it’s because this ritual tends to exclude the injured party. This “talk about how you’re going to do and be better” stuff isn’t actually a great formula for reconciliation. It offers neither retributive nor restorative justice. It privileges public acceptance over making things right with the actual victims, who barely seem to register at all. But it’s pretty effective: In an age of never-ending public relations wars, we’re so starved for any sign of sincere spiritual struggle that we rush to reward self-proclaimed sinners who say they’re trying to make good.

Lili Loofbourow: Junot Díaz and the problem of the male self-pardon.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:41 PM PST - 16 comments

The war was in color. Most of the photographs from WWI are black and white because color photography was in its infancy. This article links to four sources of color photographs, although many images are on more than one site. Content warning: while most images are not graphic, a few are. The post title is from the poem briefly quoted in the article.
posted by angiep at 11:14 AM PST - 11 comments

THINGS I NEED TO FUCKING KNOW: Why every fuckin trans man or nb person I know who binds is like “oh binders are the worst, you can’t breathe in them, I know someone who broke a rib once”. And meanwhile over in historical costuming, we are fucking eating, sleeping, swordfighting, riding horses, and feeling great in smooth-bodiced corsets. What if the secret to making a better binder is to add boning? What might be possible?
posted by sciatrix at 10:49 AM PST - 28 comments

Last week, Scottish Labour Member of Parliament Danielle Rowley explained that the reason she was late to a debate in the House of Commons was because she had her period. She noted that it had cost her £25 already that week and that the annual average cost of menstrual products in the UK per person is £500. Rowley then called for action to address the issue of period poverty in the UK. Meanwhile, Member of Scottish Parliament Monica Lennon (Labour) has garnered support at 96% from all 5 parties for her bill proposing Scottish Parliament provide free menstrual supplies to everyone who needs them. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:23 AM PST - 9 comments

Hollywood history podcast You must Remember This (previously) is back, with a new series fact checking Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon, the salacious and imperfect tell-all that is the origin of many of Hollywood's urban myths. Interview with more on the book and the podcast.
posted by Artw at 9:17 AM PST - 19 comments

Amusing Percussive Daft Punk Medly A medley of Daft Songs played on the RimbaTubes and a plethora of other instruments by Youtuber Snubby J. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 8:11 AM PST - 6 comments

The BASIC Engine is an open-source computer the size of a Raspberry Pi, modelled on the home computers of the late 80s/early 90s. It connects to a composite (PAL/NTSC) monitor/television, has connections for a PS/2 keyboard and a PlayStation game controller, contains a BASIC interpreter with a Commodore-style screen editor and an Infocom Z-Code interpreter, and has 256-colour graphics with software sprites, 5-bit digital audio, a SoundFont-based wavetable music synthesiser and 16 GPIO pins. You can't actually buy it, but for about €10 and passable soldering skills, you can build your own. [more inside]
posted by acb at 7:35 AM PST - 25 comments

A Work of Art by Janet Malcolm [SLNYRB]
posted by chavenet at 3:31 AM PST - 14 comments

Video Game Hell, the all trans woman podcast helmed by Sabbat creator Eva Problems, has completed its first RPG Hell actual-play campaign, never formally titled but which can only be called The Crawl. Run in the Apocalypse World system with prequel specials using Kingdom, it is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humans live alongside anthropomorphic animals, strange cosmic weirdness is leaking into reality, and a settlement has been built on and in a massive tank-like structure of unknown power-source and purpose, whose settlers include a pig-woman who started a cult based on a fansite about the Overwatch character Roadhog. A second season with a different system and, likely, setting is planned. Full episode links for convenience inside. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 11:33 PM PST - 1 comment

Old Gays Try New Gay Slang
Old Lesbians Try New Lesbian Slang
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:30 PM PST - 21 comments

If your job is to constantly share your life, your life becomes a product that you are selling, and every moment, even the worst one, can be a lucrative opportunity to please your audience....There was a time when he was swatted every day for a month. Things reached a crisis point when someone called in a bomb threat on a plane he had just boarded in Phoenix, on his way to a video-game convention, and several of the airport’s runways had to be closed. Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer
posted by meowzilla at 9:47 PM PST - 29 comments

Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton -- this Is Stones Throw Records, the story of an avant-garde label whose love for music found some of the most influential acts in hip-hop and beyond. With interviews from Madlib, Kanye West, Common and more, this is some heavy history of underground influence. [Documentary streaming on Redbull.tv; Stones Throw on Wikipedia, Discogs, SoundCloud and YouTube]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:01 PM PST - 9 comments

45 years ago tonight, David Bowie pulled the plug on his Ziggy Stardust persona. Rock And Roll Suicide, indeed.
posted by hippybear at 8:46 PM PST - 8 comments

7 Days With the Most Talented Theater Teens in the Country (SLNYMAG)
posted by wowenthusiast at 8:42 PM PST - 7 comments

This is a Youtube channel with an extensive catalog of live performances by Les Paul and various guests. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:10 PM PST - 2 comments

Listen to Sailor Moon's Classic Theme on Traditional Japanese Instruments.

Nami Kineie is considered a master of the three-stringed shamisen and lent her amazing abilities to cover "Moonlight Densetsu" earlier this year, creating a truly unique cover. The cover also includes Makoto Takei on the shakuhachi (bamboo flute), Eriko Kumazawa on the 20-stringed koto, Masako Watanabe on the 17-string koto, and Jun Rokei on percussion. [via: Anime News Network]

posted by Fizz at 7:28 PM PST - 9 comments

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
 Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
   In Potter's field. [more inside]
posted by piratebowling at 7:17 PM PST - 9 comments

In his SF/F short story, "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" (Fireside, February 2018), Phenderson Djèlí Clark reimagines a disturbing historical accounting record with remarkable visions of magic and resistance. Clark has written two companion pieces: "On Slavery, Magic, and the Negro Teeth of George Washington," which links to a discussion of historical evidence (see also) and offers backstory for each vignette; and "Imagining the Past: Speculative Fiction and the Recovering of Black History," which compares the aims of the story with those of Pauline Hopkins's 1903 novel Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self (beginning; more installments). Washington's teeth previously on MeFi: "You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you."
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:49 PM PST - 3 comments

Years ago, I worked with a friend who had built a few scheduling calendars in a previous freelancing gig. Sometimes we’d be working on something that tangentially related to time, and as kind of a recurring in-joke he’d always tell me: Zach, whatever you do: just don't ever build a calendar.
Anyway, I’m Zach Holman and I’m building a calendar. [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:05 PM PST - 47 comments

Former Capital Gazette staffer on last week's shooting: "The fight isn’t just about guns or the news media. The fight is also about the idea that any woman owes any man anything." Also, the woman who was stalked by the shooter told authorities, "He will be your next shooter."
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:10 PM PST - 18 comments

An inventive dad gives his daughter a roller coaster ride in the living room [laughter and shrieking]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:27 PM PST - 28 comments

DJ Jazzy Jeff on summer songs, 'Summer Madness,' 'Summertime,' and the 'Summertime' mixtape series (Volumes 1-8 are free to download or stream, and Volume 9 drops tomorrow)
posted by box at 2:03 PM PST - 7 comments

Dublin Bus proud dads “I know how hard it was for my son to come out to me, so I wanted to do something for Pride to show him that I am truly proud of him, not for being gay, or for coming out, but for being who he is. Before all this, I never felt that it was my place to go to Pride, but I’ve realised it really is, because I am proud.”
posted by drunkonthemoon at 12:29 PM PST - 30 comments

Richard Swift, producer of indie stars and solo artist, dies at 41 after a short illness. You might have known him as the production brain behind successful albums from Damien Jurado and Foxygen; you may have followed his work as a member of various indie-darling bands, like The Shins, The Arcs, and the Black Keys. [more inside]
posted by missmobtown at 12:01 PM PST - 20 comments

Reddit, I know, right? But wait! The most upvoted story--and my favorite--so far: "My cat, Tuffy stole a piece of bread off of the stove and put it in the floor next to the cabinet. She then stared at it intensely, and motionlessly for an hour. We thought that was creepy. Then a mouse came out from behind the cabinet to get the bread and she pounced it! She was using the bread as motherfucking bait! This is the same cat who routinely burns her tongue licking lightbulbs, hisses at them, and keeps licking." [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 9:56 AM PST - 127 comments

Tonya Malinowski at ESPN.com writes about a survivor of the Challenger disaster. Many of us in the U.S. who were alive on January 28, 1986 remember where we were when the space shuttle Challenger blew up 73 seconds into its tenth flight. Fewer of us know of the soccer ball that survived that explosion, or the story of how it finally went into orbit. Until now.
posted by lhauser at 9:42 AM PST - 13 comments

"I think a lot about how whales die. That might sound like the ranting of a whale bone chaser gone full Ahab, but my preoccupation is not with the gore of decaying flesh or exploding body cavities (although those don’t really bother me). Instead, I’m fascinated by the details of the what, where, how, and why: what happens to their carcasses, their locations when they expire, how whales perish, and the reasons for their demise. You might think that these facts are easily uncovered in the scientific literature, or in the many accounts of whaling on the high seas. But they aren’t, not for all of the whales that have washed up on the world’s shores or been hauled up by whalers." - Nick Pyenson [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 9:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Modern self-help draws heavily on Stoic philosophy. But Aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness... [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 9:12 AM PST - 31 comments

So it turns out the most influential work of all of modern art (previously), "Fountain" (R. Mutt, 1917), the lowly urinal that changed how we think, isn't by Marcel Duchamp after all. The evidence is quite overwhelming: it's the work of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (previously) - making her the least recognised artist of her time. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 8:48 AM PST - 23 comments

In this month's Body Issue of ESPN the Magazine, Sam Miller looks at the physiology of maturation and aging in your 20s and 30s as shown through four different baseball players at various points in their careers.
posted by Copronymus at 8:34 AM PST - 8 comments

In this excerpt from “The Empty House Next Door,” author Alan Mallach challenges cities to reimagine vacant properties into pocket parks, urban farms and other green space as a permanent commitment to sustainable infrastructure. The Green City
posted by The Whelk at 8:08 AM PST - 8 comments

New images of the universe. Beyond our solar system, one team of astronomers imaged the first ever photo of a planet being formed (study). Citizen scientists created this image of Jupiter's northern hemisphere, based on the Juno spacecraft's raw image feed. Meanwhile, the Dawn probe offered a new set of closeups of Ceres. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 4:30 AM PST - 8 comments

Psychologists and neuroscientists have now identified some of the common mental processes that mark out elite athletes such as [Serena] Williams. And one of the most intriguing aspects appears to be a phenomenon known as the “quiet eye” – a kind of enhanced visual perception that allows the athlete to eliminate any distractions as they plan their next move. Intriguingly, quiet eye appears to be particularly important at times of stress, preventing the athlete from ‘choking’ at moments of high pressure. It may even lead to the mysterious ‘flow state’. [sl BBC Future]
posted by ellieBOA at 4:29 AM PST - 32 comments

Otis is a Former CIA military analyst and wrote a short twitter thread on how to process current modern life when you find it overwhelming. As well as being a former CIA Analyst, Otis has also worked as a White House Intelligence briefer and is currently a Travel and YA Writer. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:38 AM PST - 33 comments

I wake up, late, with a head like a kicked-in toilet and an inbox full of emails. Remember the guy who got to the top of Trip Adviser with a fake restaurant? Now he's done Paris Fashion Week with market-stall jeans.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:10 AM PST - 38 comments

Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian Art Phantasmagoric delicacy marks the best of Enfers et fantômes d’Asie (Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian Art) at Musée du quai Branly. This sprawling show encompasses a wealth of sepulchral, shrouded spirits meandering Asia’s cultural purview: ranging from shadow puppetry, to ultra gory, Thai horror flick clips, through minimal Yase-otoko Noh masks of emaciated men, and flamboyant Kabuki theatre costumes. And much much more. At the Musée du quai Branly (37 Quai Branly, Paris) through July 15th, 2018.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:34 PM PST - 2 comments

A List of the Many Things Stressing out Your Bartender.
posted by storybored at 7:38 PM PST - 36 comments

Kathy Loves Physics is a relatively unknown youtube channel. It tells the story of how humans developed a scientific understanding of electricity, and how we invented the fundamental electric-powered devices. The technical content is supplemented with lots of history about the people and the societal context. Special focus is given to the female researchers whose contributions were often written out of textbooks. Kathy explains the concepts clearly with plenty of humor and not much math. There are dozens of videos already, and she hasn't even gotten to transistors yet!
posted by scose at 5:34 PM PST - 9 comments

Scorpion is a whole shitload of Drake [The A.V. Club] “It is the album-length equivalent of the “get you a man who can do both” meme, and it is longer than hell: over 90 minutes of ceaseless, unyielding Drake, always being Drake as hell, complaining about Instagram and ex-girlfriends and the travails of being Drake. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He’s always had a penchant for the ridiculous, and part of liking Drake is making fun of Drake. But Scorpion is serious about it.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:39 PM PST - 18 comments

"I watched 'The Simpsons' for the first time ever and I couldn't stand it." [more inside]
posted by buzzkillington at 4:22 PM PST - 86 comments

I myself am probably too washed to pinpoint the moment that “washed”—an existential description that has become ubiquitous in the past few years, as the American empire ebbs and exhaustion sets in—first entered the culture. It's not quite “washed up,” with its connotations of lounge singers in Vegas reflecting on their glory days. It's more about that transitive moment: There you are in the train station of life, waving goodbye to your edge and your youth as they depart. You are Eli Manning, and you are no longer a plausible NFL starter in the eyes of some, but you are not yet ready to go to the bench. You haven't been to that particular new restaurant yet, but you've heard it's nice. People tend to use the word “washed” as a pejorative, or as a mild, self-deprecating admission of defeat. But I'm not so sure. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect the word describes something far more ecstatic: In Praise of Being Washed
posted by not_the_water at 3:54 PM PST - 41 comments

#WhatTheFluffChallenge is an adorable Twitter hashtag: humans do a disappearing trick for their pets, mostly dogs. Results are usually amusing and sometimes poignant. Here's a compilation of some of the better ones [overly-chipper sountrack] and here's one on dog logic in general.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:02 PM PST - 33 comments

Marissa Lingen, "My Favourite Sentience" (Nature, 25 April 2018): "Jessa, age 9. Yorknet is my favourite sentience because it is dependable, protective and wise." Premee Mohamed, "More Tomorrow" (Automata Review, 13 March 2018): "Day 5. Anyway, it turns out trilobites aren't very good eating even if you haven't eaten in days." Sarah Hutto, "Modern Tips For Looking After Your Human Husband" (McSweeney's, 1 June 2018): "Get yourself ready. Put on your skin suit." Rachael K. Jones, "Five Functions of Your Bionosaur" (ROBOT DINOSAURS! anthology, May 2018): "Your parents first activate your bionosaur when they bring you home from the hospital."
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:50 PM PST - 11 comments

Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:32 PM PST - 21 comments

On Shikoku, the smallest and least visited of Japan’s four main islands, one woman has had a mind-spinning response to a common crisis (BBC). Ayano Tsukimi moved back from Osaka to her rural hometown of Nagoro or Nagoru (Wikipedia) in Iya Valley, where the population is decreasing. It's a a rugged place of thatch-roofed farmhouses, barley fields, vine bridges (Atlas Obsura) and Anayo's scarecrows, made in memory of former residents and neighbors (Reuters Wider Image), also known as Nagoro Dolls Village (Google streetview), thanks to Anayo's creations. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:38 PM PST - 9 comments

One key reason why we struggle to see progress in the world today is that we do not know how very bad the past was. Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.
posted by cgc373 at 1:02 PM PST - 33 comments

Queer lives are notable for their lack of “chrononormativity,” starting in childhood. "The sociologist Pamela Aronson suggests that the five 'objective life events' still frequently used in mainstream discourse to measure the entrance into adulthood—'completing education, entering the labor force, becoming financially independent, getting married, and becoming a parent'—are based on outdated assumptions about class and gender."
posted by AFABulous at 12:41 PM PST - 33 comments

For USD 2500 per month, Fin simulates the assistant from Her using a 24x7x365 team of humans. Its Feed broadcasts directly from the wants and needs of bi-coastal, telepresence-robot-renting, tiny-home-buying, infant-leather-jacketing, relative-cremating busy people.
posted by drdanger at 12:23 PM PST - 19 comments

Missing Thai Youth Soccer Team Found Alive in Flooded Cave 9 Days After They Went Missing. After a desperate 9 days of searching, rescue operations finally reached the boys and their coach inside the cave. But their ordeal is not yet over - they still need to be removed from the cave. Dive teams are working around the clock, including the Thai Navy SEALs and experts from the US, China, Australia and the UK.
posted by agregoli at 12:19 PM PST - 71 comments

Volcanoes and Patagonia by Francisco Negroni. Featuring Volcano Lightning, which is a thing. [more inside]
posted by mrjohnmuller at 12:01 PM PST - 6 comments

2 Percent Of New York City’s Buildings Emit Half Its CO2 Pollution. They’re Luxury Towers. -- Alexander C. Kaufman (SLHufPost)
posted by MartinWisse at 11:10 AM PST - 21 comments

Last June, NPR Music's Lars Gotrich tweeted just one word: "roséwave." Then, a follow-up that was more like a challenge: "Y'all can already list 5 bands for which roséwave rings true, c'mon." He wasn't exactly describing a genre — more a lifestyle that deserved (or, perhaps, inherently contained within it) its own soundtrack.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:47 AM PST - 21 comments

Dude isn't just a flamethrower-wielding sushi chef who only needs ice water to handle the food with his bare hands, he's a great showman too. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:17 AM PST - 5 comments

“Sometimes I feel a knife floating above my right shoulder. I know it’s not real, but I want to know what it means.” cw: intrusive thoughts [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:14 AM PST - 13 comments

From the human end, Duplex's voice is absolutely stunning over the phone. It sounds real most of the time, nailing most of the prosodic features of human speech during normal talking. The bot "ums" and "uhs" when it has to recall something a human might have to think about for a minute. It gives affirmative "mmhmms" if you tell it to hold on a minute. Everything flows together smoothly, making it sound like something a generation better than the current Google Assistant voice. Talking to Google Duplex: Google’s human-like phone AI feels revolutionary [ArsTechnica] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 9:57 AM PST - 36 comments

"Good morning, sir, how can I help y—" I'm looking for a copy of All-Star.
"Certainly, I think we have a few copies of—" Done as a Bach choral.
"Oh. Yes, Here's a Bach chorale, can I—" No, but—I meant with a vocoder.
"Vocoder Bach chorale, abso—" Wait wait no actually can you make it Ligeti?
"Ligeti. Legeti? Okay. All-Star as Ligeti, here's a—" I meant jazz, sorry, I'm sorry, have you got jazz?
"I—yes. Yes, we have All-Star as jazz. Is there anything else I can do for you today, sir?" Nope, that's it, thanks so much.
"You're very welcome, have a nice d—"
oh wait have you got any Despacito
posted by cortex at 7:43 AM PST - 43 comments

The King in the City of Angels Under cover of darkness and all by himself, Magic Johnson arrived at LeBron James’ Brentwood house at 9:01 p.m. on Saturday. He knew — he just knew — that if he could look James in the eye and talk to him, they’d connect. They had too much in common for that not to happen. [more inside]
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:28 PM PST - 42 comments

How women confronted harassers with fashion.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:02 PM PST - 25 comments

"Touting the prestigious addition to their comedy portfolio, executives from YouTube announced Monday that a 47-second clip from the third season of Family Ties is now available on their video-sharing website." [more inside]
posted by bologna on wry at 7:09 PM PST - 60 comments

"The Great Awake" by Julia Armfield (The White Review, April 2018): "When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked about my room for several seconds and sat down in the chair beside my bed. This was before it became so usual, the shadow-forms of Sleep in halls and kitchens, before the mass displacement left so many people wakeful at uncertain hours of the night." Shortlist announcement. Winning story announcement. Two nominees previously.
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:48 PM PST - 5 comments

Al Hirschfeld was an American caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of Broadway stars and other celebrities. Born in 1903, his career, spanning over 80 years and consisting of thousands of works, made him famous for drawings that were often said to look more like the person they pictured than the actual person himself. His linear calligraphic style captured the essences the people, plays and movies he drew. [more inside]
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 2:21 PM PST - 17 comments

NYT's podcast "The Daily" from June 22 [~25m]: The 2018 World Cup is now underway in Russia. The story of how it ended up there involves some names you might recognize: James Comey, Robert Mueller and Christopher Steele. Guest: Ken Bensinger, author of the forthcoming book “Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World’s Biggest Sports Scandal.” [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 1:53 PM PST - 2 comments

Since last Saturday, many Facebook status updates can't be read by blind people. [more inside]
posted by Gin and Broadband at 1:33 PM PST - 37 comments

"It’s not easy to find quotes of Noether reflecting on the significance of her work. Once she made a discovery, she seemed to move on to the next thing. She referred to her own Ph.D. thesis as 'crap,' or 'Mist' in her native German. But Noether recognized that she changed mathematics: 'My methods are really methods of working and thinking; this is why they have crept in everywhere anonymously,' she wrote to a colleague in 1931." [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 12:08 PM PST - 15 comments

"In the last few years I have lost count of the times mental illness has been compared to a broken leg. Mental illness is nothing like a broken leg." [SL Guardian] [TW: Suicidality] [more inside]
posted by Charity Garfein at 11:51 AM PST - 30 comments

1 July is Canada Day. But in Quebec, which has twice had referendums on independence, it’s when tenancies traditionally end – leading to mayhem on the streets. [more inside]
posted by cynical pinnacle at 10:45 AM PST - 31 comments

Sheep (YouTube, 5:46) is an animated short film created with Lego. It cleaned up at the 2017 Brickfilmers Guild Film Festival, receiving awards for Best Cinematography, Best Story and Screen Play, Best Sound Effects, Best Music Score, and Best Brickfilm. [more inside]
posted by nickmark at 10:43 AM PST - 10 comments

Amanda Ripley of The Atlantic spent three months working with mediators, psychologists, and rabbis to learn how to disrupt toxic narratives and help people open up to new ideas. After spending more than 50 hours in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I’ve overestimated my ability to quickly understand what drives now people to do what they do. I have overvalued reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I’ve been operating like an economist, in other words — an economist from the 1960s. [more inside]
posted by suelac at 10:14 AM PST - 30 comments

Someone once said that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. "But really, once you start looking, economics is everywhere in science fiction": an extensive interview with the editor of SF magazine Vector all about money, markets, crypto, Le Guin, Doctorow, scarcity and postscarcity, supply and demand, AI economic planning, digital platforms and national deficits, and what the hell economics actually even is.
posted by scissorfish at 9:39 AM PST - 28 comments

*Your* Netflix Is Special - infact very individually, especially, catered to *YOUR* personal tastes. It might come as a surprise to you that the Netflix experience you get from using the service is no where universal - and it's not just about what media is available in differing geographical regions. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 8:16 AM PST - 113 comments

Parent coaching, and specifically, home visiting, is not new. The most famous study, which took place in Jamaica in the 1970s, showed that well-trained home visitors supporting poor mothers with weekly visits for two years led to big improvements in children’s cognition, behavior, and future earnings. One group of infants in that program who received coaching in their earliest years earned 25% more than a control group more than 20 years later. But Brazil’s ambition is audacious.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:08 AM PST - 7 comments

This is a thread about what my friend found in her attic. (Single link Twitter thread by Gavin McGregor, best to read first.) [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 6:26 AM PST - 9 comments