July 3, 2017
How could someone have planted such an item there? And why?
They looked closer, and an inscription on the surface came into focus. What they saw astonished them. It was a memorial. In honor of Nazi spies. On U.S. government property.
This is not a furphy
OK so it doesn't know what a blue-nosed gopher is and it's slow as buggery (I guess it's has to travel across the country via the singing string) but this is not a furphy: Access to the Australian National Dictionary online is free now thanks to OUP.
Previously.
A Semi-Autobiographical SF/F Mystery Novella
"And Then There Were (N - One)" by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017): "... Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort hotel lobby swarming with ..." Q&A with the author. [more inside]
Let's imagine our own Intel 486 version of the SNES Classic.
What games would you put on a Classic PC? [PC Gamer] “It's a fun thought exercise, but it also gets tough as you sit down to do it. How do you define where an era of PC gaming begins and ends? Doing it by calendar year is arbitrary. Distinctions between operating systems are murky. Pre-internet? Pre-CD-ROM? Pre-accelerated graphics? Does the jump to VGA represent a new generation? After a lot of discussion, we felt that Intel's 486 processor represented one of the clearest PC gaming tree rings. Looking backward from the 486, you've got the golden age of the adventure genre, as well as the introduction of some of PC gaming's biggest franchises. After the 486, Intel's first Pentium processor kicked off an explosion of 3D games in 1996 (Quake, Tomb Raider), as well as the emergence of internet-connected games (Diablo, StarCraft, Ultima Online). So, our criterion for this 'build' is games that ran on a 486 or earlier architecture, as identified by the original system requirements.”
tl;dw
Chrys K. is a screencapper/recapper whose "particular brand of bizarre and critical" got started (and blew up) with Game Of Thrones [more inside]
Dance spotlighting modern issues
Have You Seen Me? Is the latest dance film from dancer/director Jon Boogz and was created to bring attention to the topic of missing children. It follows Am I a Man, which highlights mass incarceration. Previous films include That Vegas Get Down, and the wonderful Color of Reality.
America’s Future Is Texas SL New Yorker
PALEOMAP Project: Mapping the movement of the earth, past and future
The PALEOMAP project produces paleogreographic maps illustrating the Earth's
plate tectonic, paleogeographic, climatic, oceanographic and biogeographic
development from the Precambrian to the Modern World, then projecting what the world might look like millions of years into the future. The website is a bit dated, and some of the links have broken over the years, but you can dig into Archive.org and find free stuff and other old materials. Oh, and there are the videos on YouTube, which includes an animation of the plate tectonic movement, past and future, and paleomagnetic poles through time. [more inside]
Be More Dog
I am sitting under a rough wood shelter, in the midst of a Virginia thunderstorm, surrounded by three-legged dogs, watching the lightning flash ever closer. Frankie, the coonhound, starts howling. Adelaide, the husky, joins in. "It's fine," says Jim Nelson, co-founder and president of the Tripawds Foundation. "If anything, it's going to hit that transformer over there." He waves vaguely behind me. At his feet, his dog Wyatt Ray (three legs, face covered by a fabric calming cap to distract him from the storm) seems unperturbed. How the hell did I wind up here?[more inside]
Judge it by the cover?
O'Reilly books have a long and storied career; they were the technical guidebooks to the evolving internet, and were an incredibly important part of how developers learned how to get things done. Due to their high standards and strong editorial requirements, it was always difficult to get signed as one of their authors. Today, this has all changed. With the publication of the O RLY Book Cover Generator , anyone can create their own animal cover book... cover.
"[T]here are very few people who will swing the bat."
In what has to be an announcement coming out of deep left field, Adult Swim and Production I.G. have released a
trailer (Japanese version) for not one, but two new sequels to the legendary and surreal anime series FLCL, slated for release in 2018. [more inside]
East St. Louis Race Riot 100 years Later
"In less than 48 hours—from the evening of July 1, 1917, to midday on July 3, 1917—East St. Louis descended into one of the deadliest race riots in U.S. history. As many as 200 African Americans were killed, hundreds more were left homeless, and large sections of the city were ruined. The national response ranks among the foundational moments of the modern civil rights movement, but like much so of our region’s civil rights history, the East St. Louis race riot's legacy has faded outside of museums and history textbooks." [more inside]
See everything ain't all about causes and effects
You gots to suffer, sacrifice then resurrect (resurrect) resurrect (assume all links NSFW) So back in 1995-1997, back when there was a West-East coast rivalry in hip-hop and Biggie and Tupac died because gangsta rappers carry guns, while A Tribe Called Quest and their ilk were being called the intelligent alternative, in Queens there was born a duo called Darc Mind. They were, according to critics who came later, timeless and timely, in the mid-aughts. Originally label-mates of Wu-Tang on Loud Records, which promptly fell apart and damned them to obscurity, they later found and were re-released on Anticon in 2006, 2007, and 2013, home of goofy, cerebral alt-rap like Doseone and Daedelus, with whom they have almost nothing and everything and what in common. [more inside]
Malevolent... or Hungry
Humanity has the capability to beam messages to other stars, greeting alien civilizations and introducing ourselves to the universal community. Or possibly alerting them to potential competitors and inviting them to feast on our tender, gooey brains. The New York Times Magazine reports on the debate over whether we should be more careful about what we send into the heavens in "Greetings, E.T. (Please Don't Murder Us)".
(Excess Chinese) capital drives (CO₂) trade
As Chinese state-owned, influential, Big Coal mega-firms face declining domestic demand for new coal-fired power plants, they must export their excess capital elsewhere. [NYT] [more inside]
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