August 18, 2015
99frames project
Keep a straight face for exactly five seconds, then krump. Like. Mad.
British electro-R&B singer/producer/director/choreographer/etc FKA Twigs has released a 16 minute video to promote her new LP, M3LL155X [NSFW]. The music is fantastic and the visuals are surreal. [more inside]
A different breakfast every day
Breakfast -- Eating the World Every Morning is a series of dispatches about breakfast around the world. [more inside]
"HUSH, Rod!"
Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse: Smashie and Nicey - The End Of An Era Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 (note: the very end edited out). [Previously: "Do you... do you like Tina Turner, Ted?"]
You're gonna need a bigger block.
♫“Do you want to CTRL|⌘+V a ☃?…”♫
Nick O’Neill gave us ».net, «.net, ›.net, ‹.net, ”.net, “.net, ’.net, and ‘.net.
Leo Wallentin gave us –.net, ≈.net, ≠.net, ·.net, ½….net, and →.net.
Alix Land gave us ←.net and copypastecharacter.com for building lists of all the characters you might want to copy and paste.
Leo Wallentin gave us –.net, ≈.net, ≠.net, ·.net, ½….net, and →.net.
Alix Land gave us ←.net and copypastecharacter.com for building lists of all the characters you might want to copy and paste.
The long and winding road
The Biloxi Shuckers are the AA affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers. Due to delays in building their stadium, they had to start the season with a bit of a road trip. A fifty-eight straight day road trip.
Welcome to a place you thought you've been to.
Swedish prog-rock band Dungen has a wildly mesmerizing new video for a new track called "Franks Kaktus." Join us, if you will, in Cafe Franks Kaktus
"I know this is my silence to break."
Today, respected medical medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine published a short, anonymous account called "Our Family Secrets" of two different sexual assaults (or, in the journal's words, situations with "overtones" of sexual assault) by surgeons on their unconscious patients. (trigger warning for sexual assault and misogyny) [more inside]
Here’s how we figured out that it's AT&T.
Investigative journalism lives. How some journalists proved empirically that AT&T has been in a decades-long spying relationship with the NSA, using the Snowden documents as a starting point.
Chimpanzees and monkeys have entered the Stone Age
We think of the Stone Age as something that early humans lived through. But we are not the only species that has invented it.
Ghosts at the Banquet
Martin Gusinde documented the life and rituals of the Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego, off the southern tip of South America from 1918-24. They had been nearly wiped out by a genocide led by Julius Popper, the Tyrant of Tierra del Fuego, their numbers reduced from an estimated four thousand to only a few hundred. Now a book has been published containing hundreds of Gusinde's photos. Forty-five photos are available on the National Library of Chile's website. The last native speaker of Selk'nam, Herminia Vera Illioyen, died in 2014. That same year, linguist Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia completed a
reference grammar of Selk'nam. His friend Joubert Yanten Gomez, a young Selk'nam, has taught himself the language. Selk'nam and efforts to preserve it are one of the languages profiled in Judith Thurman's A Loss for Words, an essay about whether dying languages can be saved.
They're taking the Hobbits to Isengard
Ten years ago today Erwin Beekveld unleashed a video on the internet. (youtube). During the filming of the Hobbit movies Peter Jackson went a little...meta. Erwin himself owns up to the earworm and his 5 minutes of fame.
Defining the Gothic
"So for my overarching statement I will say that in a Gothic, every single aspect of the text—language, plot, setting, characterization—is in service to the mood. And that mood is creepy."
For some reason he didn't use AskMe.
Today, Twitter saved noted comics writer Ryan North (previously, previously, more previously still, also he does some comic about dinosaurs) after he trapped himself and his dog in a hole.
Three Stars Mound
In 1986, workers in Sichuan province in China were digging for clay for bricks when they stumbled onto an archaeological treasure: a major site for a Bronze Age civilization previously only guessed at. The civilization, called Sanxingdui (wikipedia), had an art style unlike any other Chinese civilization previously encountered. Archaeologists had suspected there was a major city in the area since an early jade find in 1929 and a team went to work immediately, unearthing burial pits and gorgeous artifacts. (More history of the site.) An exhibit of treasures from Sanxingdui is on display in Houston until September; a permanent display can be found at a museum dedicated to the culture in Chengdu. Meanwhile, archaeologists continue to discover more of the city (warning: autoplay video) and even the remains of some of the inhabitants.
Wine, Conversation, & a Hike With The Scariest Guy in Black Metal
Gaahl is the former vocalist for Gorgoroth, Norwegin black metal powerhouse and satanic ideologues. In 2005 he was sentenced to 14 months in prison for beating and torturing an intruder in his home. In 2007 Vice went to the remote Norwegian hamlet of Espedal (named for/owned by Gaahl's family for generations) to talk music, philosophy, painting, and get some insights into True Norwegian Black Metal. [more inside]
Keepin' it real
SNL veterans Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader have teamed up for "Documentary Now!," a new IFC parody show premiering this Thursday with a send up of "Grey Gardens." IFC says: "Paying homage to everyone from the Maysles to Errol Morris, topics range from guerilla-style filmmakers who vastly underestimate the danger in exposing a drug cartel to a soft rock doc about a Chicago band's rise to fame with their hit album 'Catalina Breeze.'" Episode 2, a Vice parody, is free to watch online now.
The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
The Museu do Azulejo in Lisbon has an amazing panorama (video) of the city painted shortly before the historic earthquake of 1755 (image, here are some sections). Azulejo is a traditional form of Portuguese painted tiles -- the "azul" does NOT come from the blue color, a fairly recent development, but from the much older Arabic word "zellige" meaning "polished stones". This panorama comes from an age before photography and provides a look at the old city in a characteristic Portuguese art form, providing a fascinating glimpse into the old city before it was virtually destroyed. [more inside]
Trekking to the Indonesian Chicken Church, a dove-shaped house of prayer
1.6 miles (2.56 km) west of the famous Borobudur, or Barabudur, Mahayana Buddhist Temple in Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia is a building in the shape of a giant bird with a crown (warning: unnecessary music). Though widely referred to as the Chicken Church ("gereja ayam" in Indonesian), the builder, Daniel Alamsjah designed it to be a dove-shaped house of prayer. [more inside]
"Torture good, videogames bad" -- APA
In 2013, 230 researchers signed an open letter condemning the American Psychological Association's public stance on video game violence, which they say ignores all the evidence against claims that video game violence causes real violence. (Via RPS) [more inside]
mitti attar: earth's perfume
"Along with their ancient perfumery, the villagers of Kannauj have inherited a remarkable skill: They can capture the scent of rain." [more inside]
Inflatable Space Elevator to 20 kilometers
The Internet of Poops
How Ted Benson hacked Amazon Dash (the $5 WiFi enabled single product order button) to track baby data.
First Female Rangers Set to Graduate
The U.S. Army's Ranger School is one of the toughest courses in the world. Over nine weeks, students are subjected to tests of their ability to perform under pressure, with little food, in austere and grueling environments. Graduates include Wesley Clark, Colin Powell, Kris Kristofferson, and -- for the first time ever -- two women. [more inside]
What it says on the Tintin
Tintin au Congo à poil (Tintin in the Congo, naked) (full archive) is a subverted version of the classic Tintin au Congo comic, where the titular character is literally stripped of its colonial clothes (before | after) (links NSFW due to Tintin's penis). [more inside]
♫ Corn Wars/if they should scorn wars/please let these Corn Wars stay ♫
Corn Wars: The farm-by-farm fight between China and the United States to dominate the global food supply. The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI now contend, in effect, that the theft of genetically modified corn technology is as credible a threat to national security as the spread to nation-states of the technology necessary to deliver and detonate nuclear warheads. Disturbingly, they may be right. As the global population continues to climb and climate change makes arable soil and water for irrigation ever more scarce, the world’s next superpower will be determined not just by which country has the most military might but also, and more importantly, by its mastery of the technology required to produce large quantities of food.
When BLM met HRC.
Video of Hillary Clinton's meeting with Black Lives Matter has been released. (YouTube playlist) Surprisingly intelligent, unscripted, and revealing.
The case for legalizing prostitution
Vox presents a case for legalizing prostitution. In other news, Amnesty International recently announced they were developing global policy proposals advocating for the decriminalization of prostitution as well. Previously
Man Trying to Figure Out What Just Dropped on Him
"When you see an image of smiling people on an ad or a website, there's a pretty good chance it's a stock photo — a generic picture of some situation, like "Woman Laughing Alone with Salad." There are easily millions of stock photos online for download, usually for a price. But the WNYC Data News Team is adding a few more: photos illustrating quintessential NYC situation"
A love letter to the Internet of old
Cameron's World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009). (music autoplays)
Blackhat 2015 Keynote
End of the Internet Dream? - by Jennifer Granick
This field should be in the lead in evolving a race, class, age, and religiously open society, but it hasn’t been. We could conscientiously try to do this better. We could, and in my opinion should, commit to cultivating talent in unconventional places.
Today, the physical design and the business models that fund the communications networks we use have changed in ways that facilitate rather than defeat censorship and control.
Today, the physical design and the business models that fund the communications networks we use have changed in ways that facilitate rather than defeat censorship and control.
Bay Gold: the brand appropriate to a junior vice-president of GT
Big Pot: the California Democratic party added marijuana legalisation to its party platform - "Earlier this year Founders Fund, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, led a $75m investment round into Privateer, a private equity group focused on cannabis. It is the biggest single investment in the US cannabis industry to date: 'What Privateer is doing is looking like a Procter & Gamble or a Coca-Cola approach. The real value in the market is going to be having the Coke-calibre brand...' Meanwhile, a distinctly California-style backlash is already growing [and] the US has become an exporter of illegal cannabis to Mexico, as cultivation in the US has increased." [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »