MetaFilter

The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more? A long-form essay from the San Francisco Chronicle. [more inside]
posted by subversiveasset at 7:35 PM PST - 29 comments

Don't trust Bigipedia (previously)? Want something more trustworthy and less physically possible? Look no further than The Museum of Everything, the eighteen-episode comedy audio sketch series with a dash of magical realism - so don't sweat the impossibility of a provincial museum just off the M3 that's curated by Tom Waits and contains literally everything (except maybe Badgerland (animated episode 3)). Well, not until you get to the... GIFT SHOP. (aaahhh...)
posted by BiggerJ at 6:09 PM PST - 3 comments

Jerusalem Demsas on progressive obstructionism which prevents Democratic-run states like California from building infrastructure and housing, making them outrageously expensive. "I thought that I was going to ride the Purple Line [a project that's been delayed for 20 years] when I was in high school. And that never happened. And people are really mad. So you have a situation here, where a very few people have managed to proffer up a bunch of facially neutral, race neutral, class neutral, explanations for why it’s a bad idea to build a public works project. And at the end of the day, the people who have suffered the most are domestic workers who are taking multiple bus lines, or having to figure out other ways to get to work every single day. And they’re bearing the cost of all of that." [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 5:23 PM PST - 21 comments

After Hand Tool Rescue restored a "grip anything" fractal vise, everybody got into it. Nebraska-based artist Steve Lindsay has been working on a modern metal one for six years. You can put a downpayment on one for yourself, but he doesn't know how much it'll cost when it's done.
posted by clawsoon at 4:44 PM PST - 27 comments

Did You See What the Liberian Olympic Team is Wearing? [SLNTY] "Mr. Clemens is a Liberian American designer who founded his own company in 2004 with the motto, “Not for you, for everyone.” He was creating deconstructed unisex basics aimed at subcultures long rejected or neglected by the establishment fashion world long before diversity was an imperative and gender fluidity a movement, and has always been more interested in building a modern community than catering to the status quo. [more inside]
posted by duien at 2:56 PM PST - 12 comments

Joan Macdonald has not always looked like a bodybuilder. At 71, she weighed 90kg (14st 4lb), and had rising blood pressure and kidney troubles. She was also on medication for cholesterol and acid reflux, and her doctor wanted to double the dose. Her daughter, Michelle, expressed Macdonald’s dilemma bluntly. “You’re going to end up like your mother did in a nursing home!” she told Macdonald. “And people are going to have to look after you. Do you want that?” “Of course I didn’t want it,” Macdonald says now. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.” A Guardian short profile of a woman who started lifting weights at 71. (Content warning: seems not great about health at any size.)
posted by Bella Donna at 1:49 PM PST - 21 comments

Desert Center, CA is that line on I-10 signs that you never exited to see. From the highway, it's abandoned buildings and oddly-arranged palm trees. There's a lot more to its history and the founder was quite a character.
posted by bbrown at 1:47 PM PST - 7 comments

Tom Jackson’s Postcard From the Past Twitter feed features old British postcards with captions taken from the messages written on the back. A lot of the cards are very funny but I’m not laughing at anyone but myself. It’s our own lives that are written on these cards … It strikes me that the past is funny and odd and serious and heart-breaking and packed full of people who feel a lot like us. Jackson also hosts Podcast From the Past, “the weekly podcast where we discover the memories, mysteries and stories held by postcards that for some reason we never threw away. Each time, host Tom Jackson – the creator of the Postcard From The Past twitter feed and book – welcomes two guests to the studio to share their cards and tell their stories.”
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Looking at soil life on its own terms: adding tiny structures to soil to capture processes that rely on the physics of small. Great stuff for seeing something that surrounds us but is impossible to see unaided. There's a lot of soil research that has started with taking samples of the top 15cm and shaking it up in water, which is the only way to reliably grow *some* things, but we know kills others. How to see how others really live?
posted by clew at 10:58 AM PST - 12 comments

And in this round of the Professional Sports Teams With Racist Names Choose New Names Draft, for the 2022 season and onward, the Cleveland baseball team selects "The Guardians." Atlanta, you are on the clock.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:23 AM PST - 97 comments

Silly book cover spoofs.
posted by chavenet at 7:58 AM PST - 11 comments

"You saw that headline and thought: “This can’t possibly be real.” Alas, it is very much a real thing that’s really happening in America in 2021. The asteroid cannot come swiftly enough."
posted by Slinga at 7:44 AM PST - 28 comments

Emulation is a fascinating area of software engineering... Whilst the rest of world moves onto cloud first, massively distributed architectures, emulation is still stuck firmly in the 20th century writing single threaded C++ of all things. This project was born out of a desire to bring the best of modern design back to the the future of ancient computing history. [more inside]
posted by antiwiggle at 6:39 AM PST - 25 comments

"The FTC’s endorsement of the rules is not a surprise outcome; the issue of Right to Repair has been a remarkably bipartisan one, and the FTC itself issued a lengthy report in May that blasted manufacturers for restricting repairs. But the 5 to 0 vote signals the commission’s commitment to enforce both federal antitrust laws and a key law around consumer warranties - the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act - when it comes to personal device repairs."
posted by mhoye at 6:35 AM PST - 35 comments

Did you realize you could have a whammy bar for your Clavinet? After stumbling across Lachy Doley's cover of Voodo Child on such a contraption, I found a little bit of information about it (more music links on that page) and Doley's own look inside his instrument.
posted by Harald74 at 3:59 AM PST - 21 comments