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50,000 years ago, Australia had vultures. When the megafauna went extinct, so did the vultures.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Alan "Draknek" Hazelden is an industrious creator of charming, handcrafted, fiendishly difficult puzzle games with a retro 8-bit feel (most using the open-source, HTML5-compliant Puzzlescript engine). Highlights: Sticky Candy Puzzle Saga - Spikes 'n' Stuff - Spooky Pumpkin Game - Boxes Love Boxing Gloves - Frog Wizard Gem Quest - Train Braining - A Sneeze a Day Keeps the Crates Away - Cyber-Lasso - Mirror Isles - Slime Swap - A Good Tunnel is Hard to Dig - Mouse Wants Cheese - You're Pulley-ing My Leg - I Have No Mouth, And I Must Create Blocks On All Sides Of Me - More? Check out a list of all games (older ones may break), all Puzzlescript games, iOS and Android games. Also check out the homepage for gamedev partnerships, contact info, and more commercial offerings.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:46 PM PST - 8 comments

Joseff Gnagbo is a journalist, academic, and political activist from Cote d'Ivoire who was granted political asylum in the UK and placed in Cardiff, where he learned Welsh and quickly became involved with the Welsh language movement. Now he is the new Chair of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the pressure group that fought via direct action, including serving prison terms, to get legal protection for the Welsh language. Siôn Jobbins interviews him (in English) to discuss his experiences and commonalities he sees between Cote d'Ivoire and Wales.
posted by Rhedyn at 11:30 AM PST - 5 comments

Al-Nakba A four part video series on the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’ of 1948 that led to dispossession and conflict that still endures. Scroll down for the videos (4X 45 min) First aired in 2008.
posted by Lanark at 9:21 AM PST - 15 comments

The rise and fall of AppHarvest, a startup promising to gainfully employ blue-collar Appalachians, provide sustainable produce, and address the problems of agriculture in a changing climate. In the end, it did none of those things, employing contract migrant workers, letting the work environment reach unsafe temperatures, using considerable amounts of power to control the grow environment, and training their workers so poorly that yields of usable produce were low. (slGrist) [more inside]
posted by jackbishop at 8:23 AM PST - 53 comments

Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone. from Loved, yet lonely
posted by chavenet at 2:36 AM PST - 35 comments