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"Don’t call them the Glennallen Panthers. Or the Tok Wolverines, or the Barrow Whalers. They are the Alaska Heat, and while every kid on the team has an allegiance to one of those schools, they gladly put aside school pride in order to play high school hockey." [more inside]
posted by vespabelle at 7:47 PM PST - 7 comments

A user read through the terms and conditions of his Wacom drawing tablet, and discovered that Wacom collected Google analytics data. He went on a journey to see exactly what that data was. Wacom responds.
posted by aeroboros at 7:43 PM PST - 26 comments

Maybe we could go to the moon using four USB chargers instead of the original Apollo 11 computers.
posted by cortex at 4:43 PM PST - 94 comments

Few items of clothing have stood the test of time like the Members Only jacket. Whether you were an original purveyor of the 65 percent polyester, 35 percent cotton jacket back in the 1980s, or part of the millennial hipster generation that brought it back in the early 2000s, one thing has always been clear: There’s just something about this simple jacket that makes it eternally relevant. An Oral History of the Members Only Jacket [MEL Magazine]
posted by chavenet at 2:16 PM PST - 83 comments

David Roberts[twitter] is a journalist at Vox who writes about energy and climate change. He tackled the question of how renewable energy sources, like wind, solar and hydroelectric, can integrate with existing electrical grid architecture and provide power to people in the United States: Clean energy technologies threaten to overwhelm the grid. Here’s how it can adapt. -" Now, I grant you, “grid architecture” is not a term designed to set the heart aflame. But it is extremely important, and the stakes are high. The danger is that policymakers will back into the future, reacting to one electricity crisis at a time, until the growing complexity of the grid tips it over into some kind of breakdown. But if they think and act proactively, they can get ahead of the burgeoning changes and design a system that harnesses and accelerates them. Now is the time to rethink the system from the ground up." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:06 PM PST - 14 comments

It's not easy being green: a brief history of orcs in video games [Eurogamer] “Like giants, fairies, or dragons. I'd fought them in HeroQuest, all protruding lower canines and piercing red eyes, brandishing meat cleavers and falchions above their heads. I'd defended castles from them in the Dungeons & Dragons board game DragonStrike. I'd even controlled orcish warriors and catapults and giant snapping turtles in Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. I didn't have the language for it at the time, but I'd placed orcs in the realm of folklore, a part of our collective storytelling public domain. That is, until my Year Five teacher jokingly called a story I'd written a 'Tolkien rip-off' and lent me her personal, faded hardcover of The Hobbit. It was, I thought at the time, even cooler than C.S Lewis. It had bigger battles. Dragons. Gollum. And a lot more orcs. Orcs. Evil. Disposable. Generally up for a party but will probably end up killing each other. Disposable. Bad at tactics but too numerous for it to really matter. Disposable. Just good enough at fighting to make our heroes look cool, but never good enough to pose a real threat. Disposable. This isn't what makes them endearing, and enduring, though. [...] we might look at orcs as the fantasy genre's counterculture. Perpetual outsiders, misunderstood by the haughty, self-righteous realms of men.”
posted by Fizz at 11:13 AM PST - 41 comments

My Cat's Reaction When His Bed Is Taken Away By My Dog with bonus cute and funny sleeping moments compilation at the end. Meet MilkyBoki* a very fluffy Samoyed/polar bear and his pal GB (Gwangbok), a very fluffy cat, along with their human companion. Adorable entertainment with gentle music, silly sound effects and the occasional laugh track. Subtitled in Korean and English. [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 10:46 AM PST - 32 comments

The Seattle Police Department, found by the DOJ in 2012 to have a “pattern or practice” of violating the constitutional rights of citizens (especially people of color), accepted a consent decree in 2012 to avoid a federal lawsuit. Since then officers have chafed at the new oversight, and the police department has again fallen out of compliance with the consent decree. This month, the Seattle Police Officers Guild (the police union) has recently elected in a landslide a new hardline head whose campaign ad appears to celebrate police brutality. [more inside]
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:03 AM PST - 21 comments

The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. The Republican A great long read on the state of disinformation in the US (also touches on such campaigns elsewhere). [more inside]
posted by dbmcd at 9:59 AM PST - 39 comments

Porn plots: They ain’t great. Be it horny schoolteachers, suspiciously sexy pool cleaners, or conveniently biologically unrelated step-siblings, it’s always really just been a means to a generally messy end. This latter subgenre—often referred to as “fauxcest” (get it?)—is particular having its “moment” within the industry, as they say. It’s a particularly ridiculous premise, so it’s somewhat comforting that at least some porn people behind the scenes realize this. How else would you explain a sing-along music video for “A Step Away,” the uncomfortably good single about step-sibling love affairs courtesy of Brazzers? As one YouTube commenter pointed out—it’s somehow already a better musical than Cats. [more inside]
posted by Carillon at 9:42 AM PST - 28 comments

"People spend a lot of time and money adjusting themselves so that they can sit and be positioned for maximum comfort and effectiveness in their power wheelchairs. If we can transfer that energy into their gaming set up, why not? Instead of having to figure out new positions with pillows and anything else that someone might need to be comfortable and play games, this would give them the option to enjoy these virtual worlds with the comforts they have already figured out. " The XBox Adaptive controller (previously and previouslier) can now be paired with the free Freedom Wing Adapter to turn a power wheelchair into a game controller. [more inside]
posted by Stacey at 8:35 AM PST - 11 comments

A Yiddish translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone has just been published, translated by Arun Viswanath, an Orthodox Jewish American with heritage from India and roots in the Catskills, and partly financed by the government of Sweden (where Yiddish is an officially recognised minority language). Faced with the challenge of how to simultaneously stay true to the original material whilst imparting a Yiddish feel to it, Viswanath was judicious with his changes. [more inside]
posted by acb at 8:27 AM PST - 15 comments

The company grew from a scrappy startup to a digital media player. Now it’s clinging to life after mass layoffs. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:55 AM PST - 13 comments

America’s sky-high health-care costs are so far above what people pay in other countries (Peter G. Peterson Foundation) that they are the equivalent of a hefty tax, Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton say. They are surprised Americans aren’t revolting against these taxes. Every American family basically pays an $8,000 ‘poll tax’ (per-head tax) under the U.S. health system, top economists say (Washington Post, Jan. 7, 2020) It Looks Like Health Insurance, but It’s Not. ‘Just Trust God,’ Buyers Are Told. Some state regulators are scrutinizing nonprofit Christian cost-sharing ministries that enroll Americans struggling to pay for medical care, but aren’t legally bound to cover their members’ claims. (New York Times, Jan. 2, 2020; archived link)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:28 AM PST - 28 comments

(video) “And mine will contain more complete sentences,” Porter advised.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 2:34 AM PST - 7 comments

"Consider these demographics, and one starts to understand why the people of Las Vegas get overlooked... I have often wondered whether the general ignorance about Las Vegas is born of laziness, snobbery, or an altogether more insidious impulse. Las Vegas was, of course, déclassé and embarrassing from the start: founded by the Mafia, the first “unaristocratic” Americans, as Tom Wolfe wrote, “to have enough money to build a monument to their style of life.”
It’s frequently said that Las Vegas has no culture, but that’s not true. My Italian relatives from Illinois—my aunts with their Carmela Soprano hairdos and long acrylic nails—love it for a reason. They love playing the slots downtown at the Golden Nugget and going out for martini dinners at old-school Italian places. (At one of these, I heard Pia Zadora breathily sing about her “accidents and arrests.”) They love Cirque du Soleil shows, where you can sit and watch first-class acrobats fly across the stage while you sip from a plastic cup of beer. Las Vegas is vernacular culture—“prole,” Wolfe called it—and thus, he notes, “it gets ignored, except on the most sensational level.”
Those who think of themselves as cultured and educated look down on Las Vegas as garish and brazen. But concern about “good taste” is often just socially palatable code for classism and racism. This is a working-class town that’s nearly 33 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black, and 7 percent Asian. It has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the country, and the eighth-highest rate of homelessness."
posted by growabrain at 12:22 AM PST - 27 comments