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I didn’t expect to have a profound reckoning with my relationship to my own lesbianism and womanhood. I didn’t expect to make friends I hope to keep for a long, long time. I didn’t expect that spending a few days with a couple thousand lesbians on a floating hotel/casino/mall/amusement park would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d been carefully and painstakingly planning for myself.

Shannon Keating went on an Olivia cruise, run since 1990 by the legendary lesbian record company and didn't expect much beyond having a good time. It ended up overturning her entire life.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:09 PM PST - 42 comments

This is a song about potatoes.
posted by MoonOrb at 9:36 PM PST - 12 comments

A Garfield-licensed restaurant has opened in Toronto. My first question was direct, “Why Garfield?” [more inside]
posted by knile at 9:13 PM PST - 42 comments

Author Ada Palmer on writing, pain, and teamwork.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:44 PM PST - 15 comments

As human teardrops dry, salt and other substances in the teardrop bunch together and crystalize in intricate, snowflake-like shapes (Discover Magazine). Do the tears caused by onions look the same as those provoked by sadness? Photographers Rose-Lynn Fisher (Smithsonian) and Maurice Mikkers (Medium) have both explored the composition of the three types of tears: basal (ever-present fluid that protects the eye), reflex (triggered by an irritant), and psychic (triggered by emotions). The verdict: they all look different but not because of the type of tears. “There are many factors that determine the look of each tear image," says Fisher (New Yorker), "including the viscosity of the tear, the chemistry of the weeper, the settings of the microscope, and the way I process the images afterwards,”
posted by not_the_water at 3:47 PM PST - 8 comments

The Skatune Network Presents: The Impression That I Get, Except It Changes Genre Every 15 Seconds
posted by everybody had matching towels at 3:16 PM PST - 37 comments

Want some classic Bowie recordings remixed into a reggae structure? Well, here's David Bowie - The Next Dub, one of over a dozen dub remix projects by musical entity Black Market. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 12:56 PM PST - 13 comments

Truckla, the new Tesla Pickup. "Available nowhere." (Except in Simone Giertz's driveway.)
posted by dobbs at 11:28 AM PST - 50 comments

The actual story of famed and disgraced auto designer John DeLorean would probably make a pretty good movie. Probably wouldn't have any time machines in it though. It would be more like The Wolf of Wall Street, but with cars.
posted by COD at 10:03 AM PST - 41 comments

Youtuber Tom Scott and friends has a go in the Royal Navy's Damage Repair Instructional Unit, also known as the HMS Excellent. While water is pouring in and the unit is listing, they are trying to apply damage control procedures that the Royal Navy would use in a real situation (SLYT).
posted by Harald74 at 8:58 AM PST - 25 comments

Author Michael Lewis has a new{NYT] podcast called[FT] "Against The Rules" [spotify, apple, stitcher] that's all about referees and refereeing [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:29 AM PST - 20 comments

As early humans spread across the earth, they persistently hunted down the largest beasts around. Along with climate changes and human-caused ecosystem change, many researchers implicate hunting as a death knell for creatures from the giant ground sloth (Inverse; full paper) to the wooly mammoth and other megafauna (Geology Page; full paper in PDF). From this perspective, humanity’s late arrival to New Zealand simply delayed the moa’s execution date. When the Māori First Settled New Zealand, They Hunted Flightless, 500-Pound Birds (Atlas Obscura) -- but how did Māori best these beasts? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:25 AM PST - 5 comments

Looking back at the show’s history, queer content has come in a few distinct forms. Tracking the evolution of these forms across the years can give us an appreciation for just how far Saturday Night Live and we, its fitfully patient (and just as often impatient) queer audience, have come.
posted by Etrigan at 6:32 AM PST - 24 comments

Can the small Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i and its utility get along well enough to teach the rest of the world how to get off fossil-fueled electricity? [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 6:01 AM PST - 14 comments

A brief history of cheating at video games [Engadget] “For as long as we've played games, there have been players willing to break the rules in order to win. Whether it's rolling weighted dice, counting cards, or hip checking pinball machines, you can bet your bottom dollar that if there's a game of chance, someone's working to work the odds in their favor. [...] Whether you exploit them or not, cheats are an intractable facet of modern gaming. They help developers test and debug their programs faster, with less effort, while providing a leg up for players otherwise overwhelmed by a game's difficulty.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:30 AM PST - 25 comments

A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans. [The Atlantic]
posted by jim in austin at 4:12 AM PST - 33 comments