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Last Moments is a powerful photo series by Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer Ross Taylor, who was invited to document the intimate last moments in a beloved pet’s life when the owner must deal with a painful farewell. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:26 PM PST - 32 comments

Wilmot's Warehouse [YouTube][Launch Trailer] “In the game, you control Wilmot, a square person who is in charge of a warehouse full of similarly sized squares with pictures on them that abstractly represent what they contain. One might have a bird head on it, while another might have an alternating series of red-and-white diagonal lines. As Wilmot, it’s up to you to run the warehouse by organizing it however you see fit and retrieving items from it when requested. This naturally splits the game into two separate stages, which manage to test your puzzle-solving abilities in different ways. The organization stage tests how good you are at sorting everything in the warehouse while also planning ahead. During the retrieval stage, you’ll need to remember where you put things, and you’ll also learn if you made your warehouse navigable.” [via: The Verge] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:28 PM PST - 21 comments

Foot rails in bars are noticeable mostly when they’re absent. You belly up to a bar, start pawing one foot in the air like a dog begging for a treat and find no firm platform upon which to land. You wonder: What kind of place is this?

From Imbibe magazine: Mixopedia: The Origin of the Bar Foot Rail
posted by Lexica at 8:07 PM PST - 19 comments

Glenlivet has some time on their hands, and is clearly down with the youths (tm) Glenlivet has devised whiskey cocktail capsules for popping in your mouth. Like a tidepod that wont poison you. Except if you have too many of them.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 7:32 PM PST - 87 comments

Gnossiennes No. 1 Forever is a generative, unending version of Erik Satie's minimalist piano composition, Gnossiennes No. 1. It uses digital sheet music, markov chains, and browser-based midi to extend the composition indefinitely. Watch creator Mouse Reeve explain how (and why) they made it in their recent talk, Minimalist Piano Forever, at the Strange Loop conference.
posted by Lirp at 5:57 PM PST - 19 comments

Empowerment through layoffs. We’re here to empower journalism. We’re so passionate about empowering journalism,” said Heckman, hours after laying off dozens of journalists. “We’ve been doing this for decades, and our goal is that when you work you gain equity, and you build wealth for your children and your children’s children. That’s our goal.” [more inside]
posted by jojo and the benjamins at 3:54 PM PST - 24 comments

The College of New Rochelle has a 15.6-acre campus with tree-lined paths and a 19th-century castle and it’s just 20 miles from New York City. But is it worth $50 million?
posted by Etrigan at 3:41 PM PST - 23 comments

Horse racing doesn’t have a national regulatory body, and so keeping track of its fatalities presumably falls on the 38 separate state commissions that oversee it. Beginning in 2015, Battuello began sending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to each commission, asking for the names of the dead. He publishes his findings on a website he founded called Horseracing Wrongs, and they include more than 5,000 racetrack deaths (he calls them “kills”) over the last five years, with names, dates, and locations. The man who would end horse racing (Deadspin) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:44 PM PST - 36 comments

Announced at New York Comic Con yesterday was the news that Steven Universe, instead of a season six, would be getting an epilogue series, Steven Universe Future, along with a trailer. Previously... - Fanfare [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:39 PM PST - 23 comments

600 Years of Grape Harvests Document 20th Century Climate Change: By mining archival records of grape harvest dates going back to 1354, scientists have reconstructed a 664-year record of temperature traced by fruit ripening. [...]“Hot and dry years in the past were outliers, while they have become the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988,” Labbé and his team wrote in their paper, which was published in August in Climate of the Past [direct open-access link to the journal article].
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:02 PM PST - 10 comments

Diahann Carroll, the groundbreaking and award-winning African American actor, has died at 84. From 1968 to 1971, Carroll starred in the TV series Julia as single mother and nurse Julia Baker, whose husband had been killed in the Vietnam War. This was the first major non-servant role for a black woman on American TV and had a profound influence as other black single mothers and their children saw their family structure represented in a positive way. (Carroll’s performance won a Golden Globe in 1969.) She also made history as the first African American woman to win a Tony Award: in 1962, she won for her lead role in No Strings, a musical written specifically for her by composer Richard Rogers. Carroll was also nominated for an Academy Award in 1975 for the lead role in the movie Claudine. Some tributes and reactions to Carroll’s death from colleagues and those who looked up to her.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:28 PM PST - 39 comments

Focusing on the global implications of decolonisation, Achille Mbembe calls for the reformation of reason as a shared human faculty towards repairing and caring for life. by the Norwegian team from the newspaper Klassekampen
posted by Mrs Potato at 3:32 AM PST - 13 comments