MetaFilter

Political PBF: The seminal webcomic twisted into terrible political cartoons. It was something that just had to be.
posted by The Devil Tesla at 9:23 PM PST - 35 comments

Many writers are using software to fight what they call Internet Addiction that is interfering with their work. Zadie Smith thanked the programs, Freedom and Self Control, in the acknowledgements of her new novel,NW, which has a character who is addicted to online message boards. Other writers, including Booker short lister Will Self, prefer to use typewriters instead of being tempted by the Web's lures. Scientists have recently linked internet addiction with a nicotine addiction gene, although there is no consensus on whether it is addiction or habituation.
posted by Isadorady at 8:55 PM PST - 84 comments

Wiki Loves Monuments: "World's largest photo contest" seeks to create a visual record of world monuments and historic sites on the Wikimedia Commons. The USA version focuses on sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Canadian version here. If you don't see your country among the 30 participating so far, you can volunteer!
posted by Miko at 8:05 PM PST - 7 comments

Jean Genet meets the Black Panthers In an excerpt from Edmund White's biography of Jean Genet, the French writer visits the US and encounters Black Panthers, Jane Fonda, Ken Kesey on acid, and Jessica Mitford.
posted by larrybob at 5:01 PM PST - 10 comments

City Symphonies – The future sound of traffic by Mark McKeague
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:51 PM PST - 2 comments

The world has ended many times - a supercut of apocalyptic visions.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:13 PM PST - 55 comments

Police Log Comics is a webcomic adapted from the police log of the Carmel Pine Cone.
posted by brundlefly at 3:52 PM PST - 28 comments

The Undercities of Karachi
posted by Cloud King at 3:30 PM PST - 9 comments

Life and death in Aleppo. GlobalPost correspondent Tracey Shelton was filming a feature on the daily life of Syrian opposition fighters when a mundane chore for the men turned into a bloodbath... (Warning: Graphic.) [more inside]
posted by yeoz at 3:24 PM PST - 63 comments

I have no idea how these people got wedged into their scanners, or why. Oh wait, I do. Artist Enrico Nagel, in his series "Behind the Glass", makes portraits that way.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:10 PM PST - 10 comments

You're going to love this sweater! Bill Cosby tweets about sweaters. [more inside]
posted by ssmug at 3:01 PM PST - 23 comments

So, uh, apparently Jet Boards are a thing. Maybe you knew this? I did not. At first I just thought that video was kinda neat, and the idea was interesting. Then I looked at their website and found a ton of amazing photos, a lot more SCIENCE! explanations of stuff than I would have expected, and finally this promovideo which features both an endearingly cheesy original themesong, as well as lightning and explosions (GIF!). Soooooooooo yeah. Jet Boards. Apparently invented as early as 1965. Pretty sweet.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:45 PM PST - 24 comments

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, one of the NFL's few vocal advocates for legalization of gay marriage, donates two tickets to his team's season opener to a Marylanders for Marriage Equality fundraiser. Maryland state delegate Emmet C. Burns writes a letter asking Ravens management to silence Ayanbadejo. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe responds with epic smackdown.
posted by googly at 1:49 PM PST - 175 comments

How to build a Dyson sphere in five (relatively) easy steps.
posted by Egg Shen at 1:03 PM PST - 80 comments

The Screaming Sheep (SLYT).
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:55 PM PST - 30 comments

What if New Who had Target Novelisations just like the old Doctor Who?
posted by Artw at 12:08 PM PST - 58 comments

An “Infinite Jest” atlas. The Infinite Atlas Project is an independent research and art project seeking to identify, place and describe every possible location in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The project includes: Infinite Map- a cartographic infographic poster identifying 250 of the most interesting locations from the novel. Infinite Boston-a ruminative travelogue and photographic tour of key locations in and around Boston, Massachusetts. [Previously]
posted by Fizz at 11:52 AM PST - 29 comments

"Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or 'Ground Truth,' actually works."
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:32 AM PST - 46 comments

Dear Wikipedia, I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 11:08 AM PST - 113 comments

Creative cards is a deck of 54 playing cards, each card by a different artists. The cards are framed in the same way with the same typography for the suits, but the art has no over-riding theme.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:00 AM PST - 17 comments

Gif Sound is a mashup site that allows you to combine gifs and youtube audio in a manner similar to YTMND. Gif Sound The Video is a compilation (NSFW language) of the top rated videos from r/GifSounds
posted by The Whelk at 9:22 AM PST - 29 comments

I am the very model of an amateur grammarian.
I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian
But I make no apology for being doctrinarian
We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian...
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:20 AM PST - 48 comments

Die Anderen Art a mid nineties movement bridging into the unknown unknowns of gender, speciesism and phantasm. Welcome to the sidejacked reality of the Otherkind.
posted by xcasex at 9:13 AM PST - 26 comments

Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, in which Napoleon's armies met Russian troops 75 miles east of Moscow on 7 September 1812. The huge battle, involving quarter of a million troops, was the strongest stand the Imperial Russian Army made against Napoleon's forces, and it resulted in heavy casualties on both sides. Although the Russian army withdrew, the French tactical victory in the Battle of Borodino was a Pyrrhic one, and Napoleon ultimately left Russia in defeat. The battle was reenacted at Borodino last weekend, as is done annually. A cultural symbol of Russian national courage, the Battle of Borodino has been famously commemorated in Russian literature, music, art, and poetry. [more inside]
posted by Westringia F. at 7:56 AM PST - 26 comments

The Wire, summarized, as an 8-bit videogame. Does what it says in pixelated graphics.
posted by PapaLobo at 7:34 AM PST - 42 comments

"Once universally praised for founder Brad Fitzpatrick’s open-source platform and commitment to a free userbase—he once vowed that LiveJournal would always have basic (non-paying or ad-supported) accounts—LiveJournal is known these days mostly for being popular in Russia (the Russian name for blogging is “LJ.”) and Singapore, and for housing gossip blog Oh No They Didn’t."

What happened?
posted by rollick at 7:33 AM PST - 147 comments

PLEASE STOP RUNNING [more inside]
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:24 AM PST - 12 comments

The OUYA (OOH-yuh) is games industry veteran Julie Uhrman's (AMA, NY Post) dream of a $99 Android-based video game console. And the dream is coming true. The $950,000 Kickstarter was funded in a record eight hours and then nine times over. Some big names are expressing interest. But speculation abounds and Kickstarter talks about accountability. Meanwhile, Forbes asks if we're in a crowdfunding bubble due for a crash.
posted by griphus at 7:01 AM PST - 92 comments

Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, a magazine by Electric Literature, publishes one story a week, each chosen by today’s best authors or editors. [more inside]
posted by gladly at 6:57 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure: poignant tales of the justly obscure. The entry on Hans Kafka is a good starting point.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:41 AM PST - 11 comments

[The Yale University School of Art] website is a wiki. All School of Art grad students, faculty, staff, and alums have the ability to change most of this site’s content (with some exceptions); and to add new content and pages.
posted by HeroZero at 6:41 AM PST - 22 comments

So the infamous deep fried mars bar has reignited debates about Glasgow as the unhealthiest city in the UK. The Economist has also weighed in with their view on life expectancy in Glasgow, touching on the city's industrial history. The issue of Glasgow as the unhealthiest and most dangerous city seems to be at odds with Glasgow as a friendly city, and despite continued efforts to improve its reputation, Glasgow still seems to be afflicted by negative evaluations.
posted by Scottie_Bob at 6:34 AM PST - 51 comments

This is a big deal because one of the main ways that people are socialized is through using, observing and contemplating material objects. The idea that people learn their places in society by engaging with the physical stuff around them has a long history in anthropology, but it was finally cemented into the theoretical mainstream in 1972 when Pierre Bourdieu published his Outline of a Theory of Practice. Bourdieu makes the case that we come to internalize the expectations of our particular social group by analogy with categories, orders and relations of things. Spatial arrangements of objects in the home, for example, or the use of different farming tools at different times of year, come to stand for intangible relationships between genders, social strata and the like, thereby anchoring abstract ideas about social organization to the physical world. ~ Designing Culture by Colin McSwiggen
posted by infini at 6:22 AM PST - 22 comments

Spheric Dialogues
posted by davidjmcgee at 4:00 AM PST - 15 comments

Exploring the audible world:

• How Music Works: Melody, Rhythm, Harmony and Bass. (3 hr. UK Channel 4 documentary).
• The Macaulay Library, the world's largest and oldest library of nature recordings.
• The creative process of industrial sound design and 11 sounds threatened with extinction. The technical challenges of broadcasting the sound of sport and the surprises of “real” sound.
• The woman behind the voice of 200 airports.

[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:35 AM PST - 12 comments