Arcade asteroids game powered by real-time Wikipedia edits. Every Wikipedia edit produces a new asteroid. Game is by Kevin Payravi. His article describes installing the game in a Wikipedia-themed arcade cabinet, and links to other Wiki games and visualisations. Via The Signpost at the English Wikipedia.

As both farmers and processors—all of Bear Creek Farm’s cattle and pigs are processed, or “harvested,” at Cherry Meat Co.—the Cherry family manages the entire conception-to-carcass journey. “From birth and conception until it goes to somebody’s hands to cook,” said Bill. Within an industry often vast, cruel, and secretive, they have built the opposite: an intimate form of vertical integration, from conception to harvest, loving stewards over it all. from Know Your Burger [Oxford American]

On the weekend of March 29, 2025, the Cherry Blossom Regional Open Circuit, a fencing tournament that is a qualifier for the Summer Nationals, was held at the University of Maryland. This year's would be very different. In a match between a Wagner College fencer named Red Sullivan, and a Philadelphia fencer named Stephanie Turner, Turner chose to take a knee and be disqualified from the tournament, specifically because Sullivan is a transgender woman. [more inside]

4chan, the internet's most infamous forum, is down following an alleged hack : "According to screenshots shared on Imgur (NSFW warning), it appears a hacker gained shell access to 4chan's hosting server. They then went on to post images of the site's phpmyadmin page, and appear to have doxed the entire moderation team alongside many of the site's registered users. While it seems some users took steps to protect their identities, many appear to have used their primary email address to register for the forum, with .edu and even .gov addresses reportedly appearing in the list leaked emails." More coverage via TechMeme, @zappit.bsky.social bsky thread

Scientist and former NASA engineer join first all-female crew in space since 1963 (Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew a solo mission on the Vostok 6 and orbited Earth 48 times). [more inside]

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? If you ever thought that AI company logos look like buttholes, you're not alone.

Meet Ron Hawkins, Toronto's most prolific prickly political rock star. Painter, activist, and of course, world class musician, Ron Hawkins has always done it his way (more or less.) [more inside]

"She’s holding up a fabric sample, deep green embroidered with gold. I wore green at my adoption too. I’ll wear black to be abandoned." The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For is a science fiction novelette by Cameron Reed, published this month in Reactor, described as: "In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement." Interview with the author. This is Reed's first new published science fiction since the 1990s (she wrote The Fortunate Fall and "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation"). [more inside]

New York City’s municipal steam system is an iconic anachronism: a fascinating part of the city’s daily life and visual language, a foundational part of its history, and a system that has been exported and refined worldwide. It was an essential technology for its time as the buildings of Manhattan began to reach up and nudge the sky even higher. from Steam Networks [Works in Progress]

Sudanese Paramilitaries Kill Entire Clinic Staff in Famine-Struck Camp This week marks two years since fighting erupted on April 15, 2023, between the RSF and the Sudanese military, resulting in thousands of deaths, the displacement of nearly 13 million people, and a severe hunger crisis in regions across Sudan. [more inside]

After Columbia University capitulated to Trump Administration demands, only to see $400 million in federal research grants remain suspended, the Ivy League may be finding its spine. Today, Harvard University replied (WaPo gift) to the administration's five pages of demands to cave on DEI, admissions policy and academic freedom in general -- or lose $9 billion in research money -- by saying, essentially, hell no. And other Ivies are signalling that they too will fight back. [more inside]

Australian academics refuse to attend US conferences for fear of being detained. "When academics fear travelling or partnering with US institutions, the impacts ripple through the entire global knowledge ecosystem," one says.

People have been fighting back against machine learning for a while. CV Dazzle (previously) is facial-recognition camouflage. Glaze encodes visual works to prevent ML systems from mimicking them, and Nightshade actively poisons ML systems that attempt to train on images encoded by it. Now Benn Jordan (previouslies) discusses Poisonify, software for encoding audio files to corrupt ML music generators trained on them. In his typical style, this video is long, fast-moving, and covers a lot of ground.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author and Nobel literature laureate, dies at 89 [more inside]

Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds. [more inside]

This Song Meant A beautifully simple idea: pick a song and (anonymously) post a description of what it means to you. [more inside]

The Gross National Happiness index was indeed a brainstorm from Bhutan. However, all is not rainbows and unicorns in The Land of the Thunder Dragon. The Lhotshampa people were ruthlessly cleansed from Bhutan in the 80s/90s, and Bhutan, recently ranked at 95 out of 157 countries, has slipped off the World Happiness Report due to a lack of data. It's no Shangri-La.

On Passover, the IDF bombed al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, one of the last functional hospitals in Gaza, drawing widespread condemnation. It was the second time the IDF bombed the hospital. Al-Jazeera has posted a timeline of IDF attacks on hospitals over the past year and a half. A new potential ceasefire deal is on the table. Again. DropSiteNews indicates there is nothing new. Houthis strike Ben Gurion Airport, military base in Israel. Trump backs Israel pushing deeper into Gaza while also pushing for a hostage deal. Hamas slams Israel's ban on Palestinian Christians celebrating Palm Sunday in Jerusalem. [more inside]

Once I held mountains in the palm of my hand...

August 31st, 1969 -- Bob Dylan and The Band at the Isle of Wight [more inside]

Deep sea photos reveal the otherworldly creatures of Bass Canyon. Four kilometres (2.4 miles) below the Southern Ocean surface is a strange world inhabited by even stranger creatures. In its autumn voyage, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO's) Research Vessel Investigator took a closer look.

What are the chances? That a lapsed luck philosopher meets an unluckiness magnet on Tinder and falls for her? That she falls for him? That she gets diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis? That they lose their accommodations over a coffee-pod dispute? It was the question Whittington the philosopher was initially pushing against. from Does Luck Exist? [Intelligencer; ungated]

All this week is Pesach, one of the most important holidays of the year! What does this timeless narrative of striving for freedom mean to you today? Which is your favorite plague? Which of the Haggadah's four children are you? Or if you want a fight, how would you rank the songs in Prince of Egypt? Obviously "Playing With the Big Boys" is much too high. Brukhim Ha-Bo’im; it's your weekly Free Thread

Someone hacked the crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and Redwood City. Simulated Musk, Zuckerberg voices are speaking from hacked crosswalk buttons. (archive link)

Crows can consistent detect outlier shapes Crows "could still continue to find the outlier, even though .. perceptually very similar to the other five regular shapes," So what's the next step? - an ordered array of crows ready to peck-select the odd shape out in reCAPTCHAs?

There's a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. "Small house"—that's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for "Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things?

I think of this as an archive of nearly all written/online pieces on anarcha-feminism and lots of radical pieces on other related topics that are marginalized because of their relationship to gender (adding news items to this blog would compound my work load, although i haven't ruled it out). Not all anarchist feminists agree on various subjects such as sex work, gender, what justice means, etc. I try to include most of it without letting my bias interfere. You will therefore find contradictory opinions, some which you may not like. from Anarcha Library

“ This month saw the publication of two books containing explosive reporting on Biden’s downfall, and coming months will bring two more: so far the picture emerging is a damning one for Biden, his top aides and the Democratic party. The books have detailed a president increasingly unfit for the task of taking on Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election and his top aides in denial about it, or actively seeking to cover it up, even as the administration warned about the existential threat Trump posed to American democracy.“ [more inside]

The inside story of the boom in luxury food heists. Guardian article by Will Coldwell.

Crack That Tank (13 minutes) is a World War II training film. A tank commander, played by Dick Purcell, explains to infantry soldiers (the film's audience) what to do when they find 25 tons of rolling metal death bearing down on them on the battlefield. [more inside]

Spring has sprung in the northern hemisphere, which is great time to consider the 50 most romantic movies of all time!

From the New Yorker. "We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of the Trump Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three. There are some proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes—a provisional guide for finding courage in Trump’s age of authoritarian fear."

Despite the prevailing skepticism toward non-fungible tokens, the world isn’t becoming any less digital and blockchain remains the foundation of digital art’s brave new market. It is right to acknowledge the seismic impact of NFTs on contemporary art even while they continue to enrage and inflame. The old world might be putting up resistance to the on-chain economy, but this story is far from over. from Whatever Happened to NFTs? [Right Click Save]

Stonefish toxin could be new weapon against parasitic worms in livestock: a recently discovered stonefish toxin has enormous promise, according to researchers in Far North Queensland. The compounds have been shown to kill helminths or parasitic gastrointestinal worms while leaving mammal cells unharmed, said Danica Lennox-Bulow, a PhD candidate at James Cook University. Ms Lennox-Bulow said the toxin was different from the one stonefish were usually known for, which comes from the fish's venom glands in its spines. "This toxin is completely different from the venom in both its composition and its function, and it's secreted from these wart-like nodules that span the animals skin," she said.

Steve Mould takes on the question... Treadmill vs. Real Hill: Which is harder to run - YouTube. Good arguments, good experiments, conclusion. Right or Wrong? Pick sides.

Sometimes you just gotta go but it can’t hurt to know your options. Bathrooms at home [more inside]

Our friends at Kurzgesagt explain why South Korea is over.

That band, OK Go, has another video out. Shot in a Budapest train station, a single four minute shot, it’s a kaleidoscope of live imagery, created via an insane choreography of people and machines. And for the curious, they also show how it was done. Enjoy!

“We hit all of the surfaces of the cheese, and from the sound of the hammer against the surface we can imagine in our mind an Xray of the wheel and how it is internally. For a perfect wheel with no defects, the paste is completely compact, no empty space. If there are structural defects, such as little fissures or cavities, we can hear that the sound of the hammer is different,” explained Stocchi. from Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

"Thousands of gallons of ill-aimed pee could be spared from lavatory floors thanks to a new urinal design, scientists say. Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S. thanks to current urinal shapes[...]. But now, in a new study published Tuesday (April 8) in the journal PNAS Nexus, scientists have proposed a new urinal design that could significantly reduce this spillage[...]." — LiveScience, April 11 Yes reader, there is a picture. [more inside]

The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can’t feel shame. As it was never alive, you can’t kill it, and if you can’t kill it, neither can you bury it. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they’re not. Your loved ones are dead. I’m sorry. [more inside]

This (gift) link is to a letter to the editor in today's New York Times from Stan Mack. Mack is probably best known for Real Life Funnies, which ran in the Village Voice for more than 20 years.

”Sex, Memoir, and the Women of the Beat Generation: On Diane di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik” [more inside]

"Cecilia Glispy zoomed in her camera to examine the contents of a glass butcher case at Faidley’s Seafood. To the left, two skinned muskrats, their gray reptilian tails poking out from plastic wrap. To the right, a single, skinned, intact raccoon, also wrapped in plastic, resting on a bed of ice." [from the Baltimore Banner] [more inside]

Humble Strut by Scary Goldings, featuring the great Robben Ford on guitar. Just some groovy organ funk for your Saturday. [more inside]

The annual rowing race between Cambridge University Boat Club and Oxford University Boat Club takes place on the 4.2 mile river Thames course tomorrow. Beginning in 1829 and annual since 1856, Cambridge lead 87-81 (with one dead heat) in the men's race and lead 47-30 in the women's race. Amongst various quirks and antiquities, each team can object to rowers in the other; this year Oxford have objected to 3 Cambridge students on academic courses below degree level. This year's spare race has been cancelled as the Oxbridge fisticuffs deepens; lawyers are benefiting. A complication is the poor water quality as England's rivers are full of shit and/or chemicals. [previous drama]

There’s a feeling that we have now but not later, that beauty is fragile and fleeting, and that what happens to us is a portent of what’s to come for everyone. Dreaming that the world is melting has graduated from private concern, and metaphor, to here and now. from Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage by Rachel Kushner, the foreword to a forthcoming edition of Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis [The Paris Review; ungated]

Plan to remove all hedgehogs from Hebridean isles (islands off the coast of Scotland). A conservation project has secured nearly £100,000 towards removing every hedgehog from a group of islands in the Western Isles. The animals are not native to the Hebrides and are blamed for eating the eggs of ground-nesting birds, causing severe declines of several species. The hedgehogs will be trapped and relocated to the mainland, after first being given a health check and then tagged.

Dan Gelbart (previously) has some tips for the sort of people who'd enjoy tips from Dan Gelbart.

TimeOut magazine ranks the 100 best horror movies At GenjiandProust's request, I bring you the 100 best horror movies list, for your fighty delectation! [more inside]

If you're anything like me you're going to accidentally lose several hours to simple sliding tile matching game Exponentile, which will remind some folks of iOS classic Threes and the raft of thematically similar web-based games of which 2048 was a standout example.