December 6, 2022

Advent Incremental

Advent Incremental is an advent calendar style incremental game by The Paper Pilot with new layers opening up each day leading up to Christmas.
posted by juv3nal at 9:39 PM PST - 140 comments

Pneumonia in the Time of an Antibiotic Shortage

My 4 year old couldn't breathe. And the medicine was gone.
posted by foxfirefey at 9:37 PM PST - 35 comments

The Great Purpling

The sky over the city of Vancouver was the color of a television tuned to a Prince concert. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 2:57 PM PST - 52 comments

privatization, technological innovation & other familiar bromides

The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. Review essay by Laleh Khalili on When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm. A US government website records federal contracts given to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and others. Homeland Security and the Pentagon paid lavishly for ‘engaging human-centred design’, developing a ‘culture of continuous improvement’ and other meaningless bits of management-speak festooned with cryptic acronyms. Two contracts with the federal procurement agency, which earned McKinsey $1 billion between 2006 and 2019, had to be terminated because the company refused to submit to an audit. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:12 PM PST - 42 comments

Election Finale

5 key questions the Georgia Senate runoff will answer. The election could say a lot about candidate quality and whether Democrats can replicate their success in the state.
posted by team lowkey at 1:07 PM PST - 83 comments

Treacherous trees

Michigan’s famous Christmas Tree Ship sank 110 years ago
posted by tiny frying pan at 10:31 AM PST - 9 comments

"Home of Florida Man"

Gymkhana 2022 (previously) features a crazy guy doing crazy things in a crazy car. [more inside]
posted by box at 9:54 AM PST - 21 comments

Strke the earth!

This is a new release of Dwarf Fortress. All craftdwarfship is of the highest quality. [more inside]
posted by nathan_teske at 9:35 AM PST - 39 comments

Honouring the victims of Montréal's École Polytechnique Massacre

Fourteen beams of light will illuminate Mount Royal to commemorate the victims of the École Polytechnique massacre, an anti-feminist mass shooting that occurred 33 years ago on 6 December 1989 at École Polytechnique in Montréal, Québec, Canada. [more inside]
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 9:09 AM PST - 17 comments

Union is strength.

The rise of the video game union: [Polygon] is an all-in-one explainer on why game workers are unionizing and the specific steps that future organizers may take. We encourage you to share the link, and we’ve also prepared a zine version that you can print and distribute in your community. In legal speak, the zine is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US), which permits distribution of the zine provided that it is not altered or modified, or used commercially. Learn how to print it in your town. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:21 AM PST - 5 comments

Some juicy linguistic morsels from English

Spending too much money on food and drink is an act known as abligurition, according to one 18th-century dictionary – the result of which might be a feeling of barleyhood (a Tudor-period word for a hangover), or crapulence (defined by Samuel Johnson as “sickness by intemperance”). And after all that overindulgence you may well need to swadge (to relax after a large meal), and be in dire need of a yulehole – a term defined by the superb Scottish National Dictionary as “The hole in the waist-belt to which the buckle is adjusted to allow for repletion after the feasting at Christmas.” (Should you need it, the excellent Scots word pang, according to the same source, can be used to mean “to force an unwanted article on someone”. Ergo, it is the perfect word for Boxing Day, or for all the Bounty bars left in the bottom of your tub of Celebrations.) Author Paul Anthony Jones reveals the roots of his love of obscure words in The Guardian.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:59 AM PST - 31 comments

My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer

A few days before he ended things the second time, we had a fight about my writing and ethics, specifically the question of whether I would write about our hypothetical future child.
posted by folklore724 at 2:05 AM PST - 100 comments

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