November 22, 2022
Shaping Chinese Home Cooking in America
The family behind the wonderful recipe blog The Woks of Life is profiled in Bon Appetit by journalist and author Kat Chow. [more inside]
Coke, Salmon, Synfull and Snacke. They're all good hounds, Edward.
In the early 15th century, Edward, 2nd Duke of York, wrote a list of 1,126 names he considered to be suitable for dogs.
Link to the paper "The Names of All Manner of Hounds: A Unique Inventory in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript" by David Scott-Macnab.
Via Twitter user @WeirdMedieval.
You Don't Need to Make a Pumpkin Pie From Scratch. Ever.
I need to tell you something. Something very important. Geraldine DeRuiter, James Beard Award Winner, (previously, previously, previously) takes on the Pumpkin Lobby (Big Pumpkin?) and their push for all food pumpkin. [more inside]
Paul Madonna severely injured by a hit-and-run.
San Francisco cartoonist Paul Madonna was driving his regular commute in a smart car through McLaren Park, when he was struck head-on by a Mercedes Benz going the wrong way at approximately 50-60 mph. [more inside]
“Facebook [isn’t] utopian or distopian. It’s just massively influential”
In 2017, as #MeToo raged, the fact that you couldn’t say “Men Are Scum” on Facebook went viral.
In 2018, Monika Bickert and her team sat in the “Oh, Semantics” meeting room (a coincience, surely) to re-evaluate this policy.
Simon Van Zuylen-Wood got to sit in and wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair in 2019: “‘Men Are Scum’: Inside Facebook’s War On Hate Speech”
(Hat tip to the most recent episode of Evelyn Douek’s Moderated Content Podcast, featuring Alex Stamos.)
In 2018, Monika Bickert and her team sat in the “Oh, Semantics” meeting room (a coincience, surely) to re-evaluate this policy.
Simon Van Zuylen-Wood got to sit in and wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair in 2019: “‘Men Are Scum’: Inside Facebook’s War On Hate Speech”
(Hat tip to the most recent episode of Evelyn Douek’s Moderated Content Podcast, featuring Alex Stamos.)
Twenty years and eight million nations later
NationStates is a free multiplayer political simulation game founded by author Max Barry back in 2002. Previously. Previouslier. Ten days ago, the game turned 20 years old! [more inside]
Cheat Sheets for Thanksgiving Arguments
Dreading a holiday dinner with more conservative relatives? Are you unwilling to just smile and pass the gravy as your right wing relative spouts some nonsense from the culture wars?
A Redditor has created some handy cheat sheets / study guides for liberal Americans who feel argumentative.
Eurovision rule changes: from 2023, Americans can cast their votes.
Not just Americans - worldwide votes will be counted. Following some jury shenanigans in the 2022 contest, jury involvement has been reduced and other voting changes mean that... "Those watching in the rest of the world will be able to vote via a secure online platform using a credit card from their country, and their votes, once added together, will be converted into points that will have the same weight as one participating country in both of the Semi-Finals and the Grand Final." Initial reaction is mixed. Eurovision 2022 was won by Ukraine; the 2023 finals will be hosted by Liverpool in England.
Cathode Ray Thread
Marine, aka moonovermarine, is a French embroidery artist much of whose work adapts imagery from games, movies, and other cultural wells. Their current project: a series of scenes from the monochrome ZX Spectrum game "Sentinel".
How the Slow Cooker Changed the World
The Crockpot arrived amid a slew of innovations, from the microwave oven to the breadmaker, that promised to save women from the drudgery of cooking for their families. But unlike its technological contemporaries, the slow cooker didn’t speed up a working woman’s cooking, it slowed it down. The crucial part was being absent for almost the entire cooking process: A woman could actually leave the house and enter the workplace, without neglecting her wifely duties. [more inside]
Modern pentathlon votes to swap horse riding with obstacles
In the wake of a coach being ejected from the Olympics in Tokyo for punching a horse, UIPM (the governing body of modern pentathlon) has voted to replace show jumping with a Sasuke-style obstacle course (a.k.a. American Ninja Warrior) following the 2024 Games in Paris. The change does not come without controversy, as several national governing bodies accuse the UIPM of violating its own rules regarding changes to the sport. [more inside]
"Cancer vaccines are an idea whose time has come."
"Although 5 decades of research have yielded many failures, [cancer] vaccines are now positioned for success" While there are currently only a few vaccines being used to treat cancer (as opposed to preventing it), "knowledge gained from [COVID-19] trials and versatile therapeutic potential of the mRNA can be applied for the development of vaccine for the infectious diseases and cancer." There are many cancer vaccines currently in clinical trials (find one) and receiving research grants. [more inside]
25﹪completed
Redditor lg_cuber (also going by Grazzy on YouTube) has been recreating the entirety of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild map in Minecraft, along with the help of a few Minecraft community friends. This is a work in progress. It is glorious to behold. [YouTube] [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
Rollin' Barth
It’s one thing to find Barth’s fiction masturbatory—that’s a matter of taste—but it’s another to hold it morally responsible for the cultural degradation we associate with fast food, commercialism, and televisual self-consciousness run amok (an especial bête noire for Wallace). Such menaces, it seems fair to point out, more likely result from political and technological circumstances coextensive with postmodernity as a historical epoch rather than from the stylistic choices of any individual author, or group of authors. from Life in the Fap Lane
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