July 16, 2021
All hands on Deck!
Valve has announced the Steam Deck, a handheld PC that will not only be able to play games from Steam, but also anything a computer can normally do. It is due out in December of this year and the base model will sell for $399. Here's a hands on preview from IGN.
I literally said OMG at least once watching this
Ride With Juno As It Flies Past the Solar System’s Biggest Moon and Jupiter [JPL/NASA article, embedded video] "Using the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager, the mission team has put together this animation to provide a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby." Juno Flies Past the Moon Ganymede and Jupiter, With Music by Vangelis [4m, direct link to video on YouTube]
It's Who I Am
Why Name Signs Matter in ASL Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, five women joined forces with a mission: assigning Vice President-elect Kamala Harris a name sign, the equivalent of a person’s name in American Sign Language.
Ms. Gooden, one of the five women who came together for Ms. Harris’s name, said that as the conversation around a possible name sign for the vice president started taking shape on social media, non-Black and non-Indian deaf individuals — mostly men — were leading the dialogue.
For the women involved, it was key that Black and Indian deaf women were part of the process, given Ms. Harris’s background. (NYTimes article available from Internet Archive) [more inside]
Biz Markie (1964 - 2021)
What Do You Know About Cabbage?
Goodbye, Cornfield County
The Weird History of Hillbilly TV. "There is the South. But there is also“the South” — the version of our region conjured by television executives. Today, Gabe Bullard takes a hard look at the weird history of hillbilly TV, from Andy Griffith to “Duck Dynasty.”"
From The bitter southerner. [more inside]
All mountains are old, but the Appalachians are incomprehensibly old
Yes, all mountains are old, but the Appalachian mountains are incomprehensibly old. Have you ever wondered why we don’t find fossils in the Appalachian mountains?
The truth is, we do, they’re just not the kind of fossils you might think of—there are no mammals, no dinosaurs, no reptiles. There’s something else entirely. (Single link twitter thread) (threadreader)
the national treasure that happened to reside within her
Why America embraced Whitney Houston, and how it destroyed her. What happens when you stop being America's sweetheart? And who does your voice belong to? Constance Grady for Vox's The Purity Chronicles. [more inside]
The Need for a New Garden City Movement
In the early 1900s, a strange and wonderful planning fad caught on. It can still help us think about building livable places.
Mystery seeds
The truth behind the Amazon mystery seeds “ If someone had wanted to invent a surreal provocation designed to unnerve Americans in the summer of 2020, it’s difficult to conceive of a better one than a deluge of unsolicited Chinese seeds.”
When I fold clothes I think of when I waited to be arrested at night
Kamil had received a phone call; by the end of it, he looked ashen. He left the office in an agitated state and headed downstairs. His colleagues ..saw three men load Kamil into a car and drive off...Two days later, three police officers drove Kamil home..They emerged with Kamil and his laptop, and drove off. Munire returned home to find their apartment turned upside down... Kamil’s books and papers lay scattered everywhere. China has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs, along with thousands of individuals from other Muslim minority groups, and undertaken a campaign of forced sterilization against Uyghur women. The U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands have officially recognized the crisis as a genocide.
OV ER LO AD
After 2 years and 9 months, Eric Kleptone's tetraptych is finally available in full. Clocking in at 8 hours, 18 minutes the combined OV ER LO AD is a mashup magnum opus that will be difficult to beat. [more inside]
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