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Listen. In the beginning, there was mutura.
Ireland has black pudding, France has boudin noir, South Korea has soondae, and Spain has morcilla. Kenya has mutura. Sometimes translated into English as "African blood sausage" in that mannerless way we have of translating non-English things into English, mutura is richer than its European relatives, as it’s packed with a powerful blend of spices. Mutura will have ginger; it will have garlic; it will have scallions, cilantro, and chile so fine and wonderful a person weeps for joy while eating it. Nothing else matters. Carey Baraka for Serious Eats
So, two Shoggoths walk into an opticians…
In Cultist Simulator, Death Is Only The Beginning [Kotaku]
“The most fun thing to do in Cultist Simulator is die. Cultist Simulator is a new game about running a cult, interpreted as a virtual card-based board game. There are no instructions for what to do, really, so you begin picking up cards, putting them in different slots, and hoping for the best. Sooner or later, you’ll die—usually as a sacrifice. Then the game opens up. You play the game by putting cards in slots and then waiting for them to resolve.” [YouTube][Trailer]
It's small but it loves it the most!
Little puppies sliding down a stair's steps divider (SLTwitterVideo)
"Collusion is not a legal term."
Your lede: President Trump today confessed that his son, son-in-law, and campaign chair met in June 2016 with Russian agents in hope of obtaining Russian intelligence to sway the 2016 election. Trump - who denies advance knowledge of the meeting - defends it as "totally legal."
Trying to defeat the Culture would be like trying to eradicate a meme.
Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks by Joseph Heath, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
“In Thailand, they have this thing called the Dog. You see the Dog wherever you go, hanging around by the side of the road, skulking around markets. The thing is, it’s not a breed, it’s more like the universal dog. You could take any dog, of any breed, release it into the streets, and within a couple of generations it will have reverted to the Dog. That’s what the Culture is, it’s like the evolutionary winner of the contest between all cultures, the ultimate basin of attraction.” “I’m in,” I said.
Pope Francis and his enemies.
The War Against Pope Francis.
With more than a billion followers, the Catholic church is the largest global organisation the world has ever seen, and many of its followers are divorced, or unmarried parents. To carry out its work all over the world, it depends on voluntary labour. If the ordinary worshippers stop believing in what they are doing, the whole thing collapses. Francis knows this. If he cannot reconcile theory and practice, the church might be emptied out everywhere. His opponents also believe the church faces a crisis, but their prescription is the opposite. For them, the gap between theory and practice is exactly what gives the church worth and meaning. If all the church offers people is something they can manage without, Francis’s opponents believe, then it will surely collapse.Oh, and did you know that Steve Bannon is trying to take over the Church too? (Single link, longread Guardian.)
"Never has empty space been so full"
Guge rose to prominence in the tenth century following the collapse of the early Tibetan empire ruled from central Tibet. Tibetans speak of a “second diffusion” (chidar) of Buddhism to the high mountain plateaus under the patronage of the Guge kings, who developed a distinctive form of political organization: one of the royal princes would assume what might be called secular power, while his brothers and nephews would take monastic vows; among them, one became abbot of the Tholing monastery and thus emerged as the religious leader of the entire Guge region. Our modern categories should not, however, mislead us.David Shulman reviews "Peter van Ham’s astonishing new book, Guge: Ages of Gold."
Living together hints?
Tips for a couple moving in together? What do you wish you had known when taking this step?
Moving in with an S.O. - General advice
Moving in with your significant other: Please tell me your stories and general advice. Good, bad, things you wish you'd talked about ahead of time, things you'd do differently. How long had you been together? Do you wish you'd moved in sooner, or later, or not at all? What can one do to make things go smoothly? What changes should I expect?
Music from Melbourne: the sounds of Wondercore Island
Wondercore Island is a Melbourne-based label/ artist management and PR company label that supports a range of future soul, alternative and hip-hop acts, including Clever Austin, Ainslie Wills, Jaala, Oscar Key Sung, Vulture St. Tape Gang, Hiatus Kaiyote, and Sampa the Great, to name a few groups and artists. You can check out more from this umbrella group/ thing on Vimeo, YouTube, Soundcloud and perhaps most conveniently on Bandcamp, where they have a number of mixtapes and other musical collections available to stream and download for free.
Best digital piano for an adult wanting to learn?
What's the best keyboard / digital piano for a relative "newbie"?
May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month
Time to celebrate Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America! You can start here, a joint venture by several agencies, and continue below the fold.
"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)
"I’ll be 25. I can’t rent my first car as a virgin. They’ll know."
The Atlantic: On "Late"-in-Life Virginity Loss. Vice's predictably Vice-ier take. Meanwhile, Dr. Nerdlove and Gawker's After Hours have advice.
Help me read more horror fiction!
I don't typically read horror and I want to read more. Specific tastes inside.
How Photography Was Optimized For White Skin
"the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera got your likeness right.”
"In film photography, color balance has a lot to do with the chemical composition of the film. For many decades, color film in the United States was calibrated to highlight Caucasian skin tones. This was the most fundamental problem. With an unusual degree of skill and attention, a photographer could compensate for the biases in most stages of production. But there was nothing they could do about the film’s color balance. When the famous New Wave filmmaker Jean Luc Godard was commissioned to make a film about Mozambique, he reportedly refused to use Kodachrome film -- the most popular color film at the time. He complained the film, developed for a predominantly white market, was 'racist.'"
What Terry Pratchett book should I read first?
What Terry Pratchett book should I read first?
Elegance and an endless curiosity
The Question is the Question:
Dilip D'Souza on the competitive sport of 'Quizzing' in India.
"Quizzers branch out like fractals, into the minutiae, looking for questions in the interstices of knowledge.”
RIP Borderland Books
Borderlands Books, a Science Fiction specialty bookstore located in San Francisco's Mission District, will be closing in March. The reason? SF's recent law increasing the minimum wage to $15/hr makes the business nonviable.
So many subtle ways to be human, and so many subtle ways to be wrong.
Tor.com presents Max Gladstone's A Kiss With Teeth, in which an ancient evil settles down and tries out middle-class married life.
Syria's First Responders
Whoever saves a life -
In a war with many villains, these are the good guys. Earlier this month Khaled Hajjo and the majority of the Hanano team were briefly arrested by a rebel brigade in the city, and then forced to flee to Turkey.
From Shanghai to John Wayne: Fairbairn and his knives
Possibly the most loved and used fighting knife in the world, the Fairbain-Sykes Fighting Knife is a stilletto daggar designed and produced during WWII for commando troops and still used to this day. The knife was designed for a precise grip and a long thin blade that could go through a Soviet Army greatcoat to the ribs and slice, rather than tear, for faster death.
The knife's history is
worth a small book alone, but the two men who invented it also helped invent modern police fighting and close combat, and probably inspired Q from James Bond.
Drowning World
Photographer Gideon Mendel's stunning portraits of flood victims in the UK, India, Haiti, Pakistan, Australia, and Thailand. (via)
The Good, Racist People
Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses the good, racist people.
112 lb newborn photos
The face is angelic, the lighting soft and the subject is napping peacefully – just the way a newborn photo shoot should look. It took 13 years, but Latrell Higgins finally has his baby photos.
A Hermit Over His Head
In the wake of Pope Benedict's resignation yesterday, the world has become re-aquainted with a more famous papal resignation; that of Celestine V, a hermit who proved wildly incompetent as pope and never wanted the job in the first place – but was canonized nevertheless, and received special acclaim from Pope Benedict just three years ago.
Is Everything About Italy Felliniesque?
A slight traffic jam in Naples, Italy.
Another Hard Day of Trying to Stay Alive
Almost as soon as we got back to Dash-e Towp, I overheard some U.S. officers loudly complaining about the inability of Afghan soldiers to make appointments on time. Afghan soldiers do have difficulty making appointments on time, it’s true. They also don’t like to stand in straight lines or dress according to regulation or march in step or do so many of the things intrinsic to a Western notion of professional soldiering. When a lieutenant calls a formation of Afghan privates to attention, they will inevitably resemble, as my drill sergeant used to say, “a soup sandwich.” But they will also accept a much higher level of risk than any coalition force ever has. Their ranks are filled with tough and brave men who run toward the fight without body armor or helmets or armored vehicles and sleep on the frozen ground without sleeping bags and dig up I.E.D.’s with a pickax and often go hungry and seldom complain. - A week in the life of an Afghan National Army battalion, on its own in the wilderness. (NYTimes)
Sing us a Song to Keep us Warm, There's Such a Chill
In the wake of their grunge-y breakout hit "Creep" and the success of sophomore record The Bends, Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead were under pressure to deliver once more.
So they shut themselves away inside the echoing halls of a secluded 16th century manor and got to work.
What emerged from that crumbling Elizabethan castle fifteen years ago today was a shockingly ambitious masterpiece of progressive rock, a visionary concept album that explored the "fridge buzz" of modernity -- alienation, social disconnection, existential dread, the impersonal hum of technology -- through a mosaic of challenging, innovative, eerily beautiful music unlike anything else at the time.
Tentatively called Ones and Zeroes, then Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments, the band finally settled on OK Computer, an appropriately enigmatic title for this acclaimed harbinger of millennial angst. For more, you can watch the retrospective OK Computer: A Classic Album Under Review for a track-by-track rundown, or the unsettling documentary Meeting People is Easy for a look at how the album's whirlwind tour nearly gave Yorke a nervous breakdown. Or look inside for more details and cool interpretations of all the tracks -- including an upcoming MeFi Music Challenge!
Songs in the key of H
Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and Peter F. Hamilton discuss their books with fans (video). The Hydrogen Sonata, the 10th of Bank's Culture books, will be released October 12th,
read the first chapter here. Meanwhile it's 20 years since Reynolds first started work on Revelation Space.
No to the brigades!
"Fierce fighting broke out on Friday night after crowds trying to storm the Benghazi base of a militia blamed for the death of US ambassador Chris Stevens came under fire", reports Chris Stephen in The Guardian.
Something well-designed to get me well organized
Tell me of the most beautifully designed, paper-based gtd / organizers / planners in the land! I want nice typography, attractive materials and maximum usability in one package. Is this possible?
An Empire of Stars
A cold autumn day was dawning as the German soldiers of the Altenwalde Versuchskommando prepared their V2 rocket for launch. They'd done this a hundred times before, but when the V2 finally roared up into the sky over the North Sea, the men of the AVKO couldn't help but smile and cheer. Soon the rest of the soldiers and officers around the launchpad were cheering as well. British officers and soldiers. Because this was Operation Backfire, the beginning of something that most people don't even know existed - the British Space Programme.
Sex Game
Psychotherapist and Game Designer Nicolau Chaud talks to Kotaku about his RPG Polymorphous Perversity.
He has chronicled his experiences creating the game on his blog He has given earlier interviews here and here. Chaud is also the designer behind the controversial Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer. (All links NSFW).
Methods to achieve better tactical and strategic thinking?
Lately I have been playing many strategy board games and not winning that much. I feel I need to become a more adept strategic / tactical thinker. What books, mental exercises or other things could help me?
Which protein powder is right for me?
Protein powders, help me navigate the vast selection.
Life After Death
"The best way I can describe our predicament to someone outside our culture
is to call up the sensation of orgasm. You lose control of your destiny, and you are grateful for the loss. Time dissolves. Nothing that came before matters. You lose all sense of consequences and would sacrifice anything to safeguard the moment.
Then, just seconds later, the blighted past and an uncertain future rush back in to drown you."
Michael Harris writes in Walrus Magazine about coming of age in the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic. via utne.
Apollo 15, The notable and not so notable firsts
Designed as "an expeditionary force for a geologic assault1" on the Moon’s Hadley Rille, Apollo 15 was a groundbreaking lunar mission. Designed to be devoted entirely to scientific exploration, it included a number of notable firsts: first to land outside of the lunar mare; first 3 day stay on the moon; first use of the Lunar Rover by Commander David Scott and Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin; first use of the Scientific Instrument Module, used by Command Module Pilot Al Worden to study the moon from lunar orbit; and first launch of a subsatellite, used to map the plasma, particle and magnetic fields of the moon. On top of that, Scott gave a visual proof of Galileo's theory of objects in gravity fields in a vacuum, showing gravity acts equally on all objects regardless of their mass. Scott and Irwin also discovered of the Genesis Rock, a piece the moon's primordial crust, formed only 100 million years after the solar system itself.
The mission was a spectacular success, publicly called "One of the most brilliant missions in space science ever flown". The crew was lauded and their future with NASA seemed assured.
Then the stamps hit the fan and Apollo 15 became the first US space crew that was ever fired.
The mission was a spectacular success, publicly called "One of the most brilliant missions in space science ever flown". The crew was lauded and their future with NASA seemed assured.
Then the stamps hit the fan and Apollo 15 became the first US space crew that was ever fired.
Help me learn to speak better
How can I most practically improve my speaking voice? In everyday conversation I often mumble, slur words or speak too fast. I am not looking on ways to become a better public speaker, but to improve the articulation and speech patterns of everyday conversation.
Beyond Thievery Corporation?
My musical odyssey continues. Deep into Thievery Corporation currently. Who else would I like?
Booty shakin' lessons!
My girlfriend wants to know how to go about shaking her booty.
What happened in Blindsight?
What the hell happens at the end of Peter Watts' entertainingly grittygrim space vampire novel Blindsight? (spoilers expected and obligatory, naturally)
Not a sensitive man.
Genital sensitivity filter.
Angry Jane Doe
Angry Jane Doe:
"I have started to sleep around. I sleep with men I am not dating. I sleep with men and refuse to date them, actually. I come to their houses, fuck them, say thank you for a nice time, and don't let the door hit me on the ass on the way out. You might think this is a pretty good deal, but it is not. Because I fuck and tell. Because I'm pissed." (NSFW.)
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