March 4, 2016
Whoa
Notes: please make this iconic.
"Her wide eyes glow a bright blue and bright blue sparks of overflowing energy are rushing out of them. A huge WAVE OF FIRE splits around her and DISPERSES as if it’s hitting an INVISIBLE SHIELD, leaving her unharmed." Terese Nielsen takes us through her process in creating the art for an upcoming reprint of Force of Will (scroll down for story), one of Magic: The Gathering's most iconic cards. [more inside]
Theft of literary, academic, or cruciverbal work
The structure of a crossword puzzle can be broken down into several characteristic elements, the most distinctive of which are its theme and its grid. With numerous independent puzzles published daily in various periodicals and in syndication one might expect these elements to be repeated occasionally through circumstance, but a recent analysis of tens of thousands of individual puzzles found far more replication than chance would explain in the puzzles produced by Timothy Parker for USA Today and Universal Uclick.
Four Victorian Songs Analyzed by Joanna Swafford
Songs of the Victorians is a website about four songs composed in Victorian England. The history behind them reveals forgotten details of the era: Juanita was composed by Caroline Norton, a pioneering feminist; The Lost Chord was a poem by Adelaide Anne Procter first published in a feminist journal, then set to music by (yes that) Arthur Sullivan; a part of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Maud, which employs the cryptographical language of flowers, is set to music by Michael William Balfe and Sir Arthur Somervell, the former allowing performers to disguise or emphasize the disturbed emotions of the original, the latter makes the mental distress plain. The website was designed by digital humanities blogger and professor Joanna Swafford as a prototype for Augmented Notes, a system for highlighting sheet music visually while playing a sound file.
Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson eats about 821 pounds of cod a year as part of a 5,000-calorie per day bodybuilder's diet. What happens when a civilian tries to eat like The Rock for a month?
TFW you miss a Muton when u had a 96% hit chance
Procedural Snake Eyes is a blog post about varying outcomes and experiential feels in procedural generation, in particular in the tactical spycraft masterpiece Invisible, Inc. and the recently-released XCOM 2, by Rogue Process (gamejam demo!) developer Mike Cook.
A Virtual Cycloid Drawing Machine
Your device will probably die before the piece is complete.
4d6, drop the lowest
How do Strength ability scores in 1E AD&D translate into real life?
You can do it. I did it, so you can do it. Just follow my lead.
Venus Williams - Why I'm Going Back To Indian Wells - Where she will follow in Serena's footsteps. Background on the Williams sisters at Indian Wells.
Not computer graphics
Los Angeles news helicopter films a formation of V-22 Ospreys as they pass through the city [more inside]
So much of life happens in cars, so buy a good one.
Refereeing football/soccer. It's dangerous.
"Any kind of performance is valuable, because every person is valuable."
Gaelynn Lea is the winner of NPR Music's 2016 Tiny Desk Contest for her haunting composition, "Someday We'll Linger in the Sun" [more inside]
Why we post
“Why We Post” project has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London via
Dawn Porter's Trapped documentary opens today
Dawn Porter's Trapped documentary about the effect of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws opens in NYC, LA and DC today, more theaters around the US next week. [more inside]
Bud Collins, 1929-2016
"Chris Evert once stepped off Centre Court at Wimbledon after a tough defeat, and her first comment to Collins in the postmatch interview on NBC was, 'Nice pants, Bud.' The clothes did not make the man, though. With Collins, it was all about the words — spoken, printed or the interpretation in between."
Bud Collins died at his home today in Brookline, Massachusetts. [more inside]
The fabulous ruins of NASA
Remnants of the American space race, photographed from Florida to California. "There is a spiritual quality to Launch Complex 34. The launch pedestal with its large round opening to the sky gives it the look of some ancient astronomical archaeological ruin, something like Stonehenge."
From a new book.
From a new book.
Birds Pay Protection Money to Big Alligator
The gruesome price birds in the Everglades pay for using alligators as bodyguards.
Over time, a study released Wednesday says, egrets, herons, ibises and storks that nest on islands developed a strategy. They nestle on tree limbs near alligators, which chase and sometimes eat nest raiders. For that service, alligators demand a heavy price — some of the birds' offspring. That's right: child sacrifice.The study: Presence of Breeding Birds Improves Body Condition for a Crocodilian Nest Protector.
Giving overlooked books another chance at fame
Sometimes a good book comes out that doesn't receive the attention it merits. To give them a second chance, there's the Phoenix Award -- given to a children's book published twenty years previously. This year's winner is Frindle, by Andrew Clements, first published in 1996.
"Sonic was alive and breathing, and Sonic was our friend."
Sonic the Hedgehog's Long, Great, Rocky History by Blake Hester [Polygon]
Sonic the Hedgehog has stood as an institution for Sega for more than two decades, a cultural icon with mass marketing abilities. He has appeared in dozens of games, numerous action figures and hundreds of comics. He’s had five television series and even his own tubes of toothpaste and cans of spaghetti. To date, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has collectively sold over 140 million copies, with some games regarded as some of the best of all time and others some of the worst.[more inside]
'No one knows anything about the movie'
Comedy actor Thomas Lennon describes what it's like to play a cameo on elusive director Terrence Malick's latest film Knight of Cups.
"...one of the scariest things they saw as children."
Children of the Stones (previously) is the revolutionary 1977 British children's television drama telling the story of an astrophysicist and his son who arrive in the village of Milbury to study the giant Neolithic stones which surround it, and the community which is held in a strange captivity by the psychic forces generated by the stones. For BBC Radio, writer and comedian Stewart Lee explores the ground breaking television series and examines its special place in the memories of those children who watched it on its initial transmission in a state of excitement and terror. [more inside]
Ask and it will be given to yinz; seek and yinz will find
Y'All Version: Now you can read the Bible using the English second person plural of your choice! Options include Southern (y'all), Western (you guys), NYC/Chicago (youse guys), and Pittsburgh (yinz).
The new media and the editorial wall
Vox, buzzfeed, Vice, even Cracked are part of a new ka-tet of internet journalism. Some showing success by doing both click-bait listicles and actual investigative journalism WashPost talks about problems between advertisers and what stories get covered at Vice (SlWashPo)
The 40 Greatest Emo Albums of All Time
UWP needs some friends these days
Remember when Valve founder Gabe Newell called Windows 8 and its Windows Store a "catastophe" for the industry? Now another founder of a hugely important PC software company has come out against the Windows Store in a Guardian op-ed. [more inside]
For it behoves us to guard a book much more carefully than a boot.
Cristian Ispir explores 14th-century bibliophile Richard de Bury's advice on how to take care of books — or rather, how not to.
Shiny
This feels too much like the late 80s/early 90s
Independent Lens documentary Wilhemina’s War [55m30s]: AIDS is one of the leading causes of death for black women in the rural South, where living with HIV is a grim reality. In Wilhemina’s War, Wilhemina Dixon, her daughter Toni, granddaughter Dayshal, and her 92 year-old mother, all the descendants of sharecroppers, live in South Carolina. Wilhemina cares for Dayshal, 19, who was born with HIV.
What's changed and changing about (American) politics?
The three party system - "There are three major political forces in contemporary politics in developed countries: tribalism, neoliberalism and leftism (defined in more detail below). Until recently, the party system involved competition between different versions of neoliberalism. Since the Global Financial Crisis, neoliberals have remained in power almost everywhere, but can no longer command the electoral support needed to marginalise both tribalists and leftists at the same time. So, we are seeing the emergence of a three-party system, which is inherently unstable because of the Condorcet problem and for other reasons." [more inside]
A new podcast, and now this…
Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’s 5-year old son Egypt has produced his first rap beat. It’s been used on track five of Kendrick Lamar’s new album untitled unmastered, which is out now after being teased earlier this week by Top Dawg Entertainment label head Anthony Tiffith. The record exec also told fans to thank LeBron James for encouraging the drop. Two of the album’s tracks were first performed on episodes of The Colbert Report and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Tracklist and lyrics.
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