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Got some pesky free time you want to destroy? Here's three gorgeously overdesigned freeware Windows games from the 00's with an absolutely preposterous number of levels between them: Dr. Lunatic: Supreme With Cheese, the ridiculously large top-down action game with optional vastly largerer fandom-made expansion pack (lotsa info after the jump, including more free games from the dev). Enigma, the also obscenely big Oxyd-inspired marble-rolling top-down action-puzzle game. And the non-mind-bogglingly-huge but still beautifully overdesigned (in its earlier incarnations) Little Square Things - in completely different '19, '08 (also bundled together on Steam) and '01 (browser-based) flavors - a Sokoban-descended puzzle game where there's many kinds of boxes... and you control most of them! [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:42 PM PST - 7 comments

Peeta Peppa and Tony Roni, hosts of the Eats-A-Pizza Show, visit The Sawmill in Seaside Heights, New Jersey to review their famous monster slice. [SLYT]
posted by ob1quixote at 6:33 PM PST - 15 comments

Language Keepers. Episode One introduces listeners to the language revitalization efforts of the Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni and Kawaiisu Indigenous communities in California.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:05 PM PST - 2 comments

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining the faculty of Howard University, creating a center for Journalism and Democracy. Hannah-Jones' has a sharp and clear statement on her new job and her mistreatment by the University of North Carolina. [more inside]
posted by Nelson at 11:32 AM PST - 49 comments

From Laura Paddison in Reasons to be Cheerful: When Karen McGlathery used to swim in the coastal bays off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the water would quickly turn cloudy and brown as sediment swirled around her. Now, 25 years later, for as far as she can swim the water remains clear. ... McGlathery, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, is part of a team running the largest seagrass restoration project in the world in these coastal bays — and one of the most successful. The two-decade-long project is a “blueprint for restoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems,” according to a 2020 research paper, and proof that marine habitats can be brought back to life in a way that’s self-sustaining.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:37 AM PST - 14 comments

Robert Wright, Ode to a world-saving idea: attribution error. "If I had to pick only one scientific finding about how the human mind works and promulgate it in hopes of saving the world, I’d probably go with attribution error."
posted by russilwvong at 9:19 AM PST - 16 comments

Richard Donner, prolific director of Superman, the Lethal Weapon series, and The Goonies (and many, many more) has passed away at the age of 91.
posted by zardoz at 4:35 AM PST - 53 comments

This wasn’t about, say, calling escargot “liberty snails” or a croque monsieur an “Uncle Sam-wich,” although surely someone has thought of that. It was about taking a beloved, ubiquitous staple and putting a nationalist mark on it—not the same culinary colonialism and appropriation of, say, calling chana masala “The Stew” or roti “balloon bread,” or the long-term transition of diners into a symbol of conservative small towns, but an intentional, blatant provocation intended to needle political opponents while saying, “this is ours, actually.”

A history of “Freedom Fries”, the hyperbolic W-era nationalistic rebranding of French fries in the wake of France opposing the Iraq war as a moment in the ongoing American culture war, and a beating of the bounds between the in-group and out-group of “Real America”.
posted by acb at 2:15 AM PST - 106 comments