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Watch how this twelve year old wins the $50,000 2024 US National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling, among many other insanely difficult words, ‘aposiopesis’. When they interview his father he says, ‘I have no words’ but then, instead of an ellipsis or an em-dash, produces a veritable flood of them.
posted by toycamera at 10:10 PM PST - 12 comments

"Machinery will tend to lose its sensational glamour and appear in its true subsidiary order in human life as use and continual poetical allusion subdue its novelty. For, contrary to general prejudice, the wonderment experienced in watching nose dives is of less immediate creative promise to poetry than the familiar gesture of a motorist in the modest act of shifting gears." 'Hart Crane and the Machine Age'. 1933.
posted by clavdivs at 7:05 PM PST - 7 comments

Extinct mountain jewel plant returned to wild in secret location. (BBC) A plant picked for its beautiful flowers then wiped out in the UK mainland makes a return.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:03 PM PST - 7 comments

States that passed unilateral divorce laws saw total female suicide decline by around 20 percent in the long run. Study.
posted by clawsoon at 3:37 PM PST - 17 comments

The Garden of Time is a 1962 short story by J. G. Ballard [archive] which was the theme of this year’s Met Gala. Partly because of that incongruous fact, Thomas Jones, who wrote about Ballard back in 2008 [archive], and Edmund Gordon, whose piece on Ballard appeared last week [archive], had a discussion about Ballard on the London Review of Books podcast.
posted by Kattullus at 2:22 PM PST - 16 comments

US District Judge permits copyright suit to continue in the case that alleges the beat that largely defines the Raggaeton genre has been used by 100s in infringement of copyright.
posted by rubatan at 1:00 PM PST - 17 comments

given the current discussions around ai and its impact on artistry and authorship, creating a film reliant on the technology is a controversial but inevitable move. however, the software that hustwit and dawes have built may just hit the sweet spot where human meets machine; where the algorithm works to respect the material and facilitate an artistic vision. from B–1 and the first generative feature film. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:33 PM PST - 9 comments

Leaked Documents Reveal How Google Search Gatekeeps the Internet This week, a 2,500-page leak, first reported by search engine optimization (SEO) veteran Rand Fishkin, gave the world an insight into the 26-year-old mystery of Google Search.
posted by heyitsgogi at 11:43 AM PST - 29 comments

One of those rare videos from The Dodo that isn't unapologetically sappy. This one is more Far Side, I think. Watch This Fish "Drive" To His Mom To Get Treats [3m] is about university researchers who have set goldfish free to drive on land.
posted by hippybear at 11:39 AM PST - 13 comments

In the summer of 2023, Ursula Vernon (aka T. Kingfisher, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously) was diagnosed with breast cancer. Thus began The Saga of Cancer Bob. [more inside]
posted by cosmic owl at 11:15 AM PST - 6 comments

Magnolia wood is great for building, as it resists splitting and glues well. It's so good that Japan built the LignoSat probe out of the wood, which will be better for Earth when the satellite inevitably reenters the atmosphere.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:12 AM PST - 36 comments

Could my desire to be rag-dolled by a big, strong man be a symptom of some sort of patriarchal Disney brain virus contracted during childhood? Do I want to be romantically rescued by a man? Saved by love? Yeah, unfortunately. Like honestly, that sounds fucking great. Is that gross? Sure. Okay, let’s sit with that for a minute. It’s not like I want to be a trad wife or anything, but there’s a reason a bunch 20-something TikTokers are singing the virtues of baking all day. Life is hard. Jobs are hard. I could never give up my sense of self-worth for the trade-off of being a large adult dependent, but maybe that’s what the fantasy is really about — having a brief moment where someone else is responsible for me again. from Pick Me Up by Lauren Bans [The Cut; ungated] [via The Morning News]
posted by chavenet at 1:32 AM PST - 57 comments

They were Black veterans of World War II and Korea who had fought for freedoms abroad that they were denied at home. They were champions for LGBTQ rights at a time when each of those initials stood for moral corruption and political subversion. They were feminist activists in the left wing, some in the U.S. Communist Party, who confronted sexism, racism, and class prejudice as inseparable wrongs and barriers to solidarity, which prepared the way for a feminism beyond the Second Wave. And there were scientists prepared to denounce their colleagues’ ingenious new biological, chemical, and military technologies as potential threats to the natural world, including humanity itself. [James R. Gaines, The Fifties] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 1:06 AM PST - 5 comments

More than a dozen locations bear this racist term and relic of colonial oppression. It's time to change the place names. There is a small sign in Western Victoria — one of 15 locations around the country, from creeks and waterholes to bores and mountains — that is a racist slur in plain sight.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:21 PM PST - 27 comments

Last summer, the California coast had an unusual threat for surfers in the form of Otter 841, who had a passion for stealing surfboards while evading the authorities. With the start of the 2024 season, Otter 841 is back, and just as ready to cause havok as she was last year.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:19 PM PST - 22 comments

The 24 Universal Melodic Figures [of Western music] "Have you ever found yourself humming along to a song that you’d never heard before? How is this even possible? Could it be that you possess some musical superpower? You may indeed be an extraordinary person, but this particular skill is unexceptional. Every melody you know—plus every melody you don’t yet know—draws from just 24 melodic patterns or “figures.” You see, there are just so many ways to arrange the notes in a major or minor key into patterns that “make sense”—that “sound like music.”"
posted by storybored at 9:20 PM PST - 16 comments

Australian scientists have developed a method of brewing coffee by blasting ground beans with sound waves – and it produces a powerful cup "The ultrasonic method sends lots of tiny bubbles into the water and coffee. When they implode, they make mini shockwaves that can pierce the inside of the coffee grinds in a phenomenon called acoustic cavitation. According to Trujillo’s 2020 research, this method extracts more flavour and caffeine from the coffee." [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:45 PM PST - 35 comments

Hundreds of Beavers is an indie film made in six weeks for $150,000. It's like a modern combination of 20s and 30s slapstick films and live-action Looney Tunes. It's currently available on Apple and Amazon streaming platforms. A 19th century trapper battles nature and wildlife (depicted by people wearing mascot costumes) to win the hand of a furrier's daughter. It's filled with hundreds of gags. Here's the trailer, the opening, and a clip showing the costumes.
posted by JHarris at 4:31 PM PST - 23 comments

The jury has reached a verdict and is currently filling out paperwork until about 5:15 Eastern. Trump was looking cheerful and relaxed, sharing smiles and laughs with his lawyers, as they prepared to leave for the day. As soon as the judge announced that instead we had a verdict, his demeanor changes dramatically. He crossed his arms and knitted his brows. He continued to whisper with attorney Todd Blanche, but no longer cheerfully. [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 1:52 PM PST - 694 comments

If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

So stated an anonymous 2019 thread on 4chan's /x/ imageboard -- a potent encapsulation of liminal-space horror that gave rise to a complex mythos, exploratory video games, and an acclaimed web series (previously; soon to become a major motion picture from A24!). In the five years since, the evolving "Backrooms" fandom has canonized a number of other dreamlike settings, from CGI creations like The Poolrooms and a darkened suburb with wrong stars to real places like the interior atrium of Heathrow's Terminal 4 Holliday Inn and a shuttered Borders bookstore. But the image that inspired the founding text -- an anonymous photo of a vaguely unnerving yellow room -- remained a mystery... until now. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:30 PM PST - 22 comments

Atlanta police surveil people opposing Cop City. Police have been carrying out continuous surveillance and harassment of protestors, their families, and neighborhoods for months now.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 1:08 PM PST - 16 comments

The IRS announces that "Direct File will be a permanent, free tax filing option." Despite years of lobbying from the likes of Intuit and H&R Block, the IRS ran a successful pilot program of its Direct File program with 12 states. Today, they announced that the program will be permanent and invited all states to participate.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:04 PM PST - 22 comments

The FBI and Interpol announce Operation Endgame, the "largest ever operation against botnets". And they made some animated videos to go with it!
posted by chavenet at 12:27 PM PST - 11 comments

Regional property owners turning unusable land into money through solar energy leases. With upheavals in the agriculture industry making some farms unviable, a landowner in South Australia is encouraging others to consider repurposing their properties for renewable energy projects.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:04 PM PST - 4 comments

The 20 country, 55 match tournament is hosted through June 2024 by the West Indies and the USA. Guardian: “Khan’s first delivery back bowled Shakib off his inside edge. His fourth was a yorker, which pinned the new batsman lbw. His 10th, delivered in the final over, was edged and caught by the wicketkeeper. The three wickets cost 11 runs and USA won the game by six. “It was a big achievement to take down a top ten T20 side,” Khan says, two days later. But he believes there are even bigger ones ahead. The T20 World Cup starts with their [USA] opening match against Canada in Grand Prairie, Texas, this Saturday.” Official World Cup website, Wikipedia page. Scorecard for USA vs Canada from 23rd September 1844.
posted by Wordshore at 11:40 AM PST - 13 comments

The Bobcat Comics series features collaborations between artists and UC Merced scholars. The comics explore research on colonial Alta California, how Latinas use "journey" rather than "war" metaphors when talking about breast cancer, unruly patriarchs and failed women and more. One stand-out is How to Read an Aztec "Comic": Indigenous Knowledge, Mothers' Bodies, and Tamales in the Pot, a collaboration by artist Jordan Collver and Chicana Studies scholar Felicia Rhapsody Lopez about women's representation in the ancient Mesoamerican text, Codex Borgia/Yoalli Ehēcatl. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:09 AM PST - 1 comment

James loves working on vehicles but hates spending money. Watch him repair, resurrect, and reimagine old vehicles and machinery with a delightful combination of dry wit, patience, and an impressive collection of junk. Welcome to Low-Buck Garage.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:47 AM PST - 3 comments

(2014) WaPo (archive) article about Gregg Deal's performance art piece in which he dresses up in stereotypical costume in public. Last spring, Deal came up with his own performance concept in which he’d dress up in a brash getup to physically embody what he believes many non-indigenous people envision when they think of a Native American. The mostly prefabricated outfit is a costume, not authentic regalia; is intentionally over-the-top; and holds no personal significance for Deal. (...) Suspicion is (...) displayed by a security officer at Potomac Mills mall who demands to know what Deal is doing (Deal’s response of “Shopping” irking the officer all the more). [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:47 AM PST - 15 comments

Bill Pruitt's NDA, that is, from his time 20 years ago creating the entertainment show featuring Donald Trump, known as The Apprentice. Pruitt explains what he saw and what he let happen in a piece for Slate.
posted by k3ninho at 7:50 AM PST - 45 comments

B's Music Shop has announced the Meowdulator ($199.99) which is a guitar effects pedal that meows and purrs (0:24 Instagram video). [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 6:47 AM PST - 18 comments

After days of testimony and a marathon closing argument from the prosecution, the jury for the Trump hush-money trial begins its second day of deliberations. They have requested a replay of not only some of the crucial testimony, but at least a portion of the hour-long instructions Justice Merchan provided. The specific crime Trump is charged with turns out to be fairly complex, and Lawfare has an explainer.
posted by mittens at 5:15 AM PST - 145 comments

A list with descriptions of selected Native restaurants in the U.S.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:57 AM PST - 21 comments

The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks. from Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi [The New Yorker; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:19 AM PST - 21 comments

Vulcan loses planet status
posted by sardonyx at 7:33 PM PST - 27 comments

"In the life of a poet, of course, there is no Election Day to distinguish the visionaries from the also-rans. So Stevens’s response, when it came, trickled down in dribs and drabs. Scholars argue over this: some see him as returning, defensively, to conservatism, particularly since in a 1940 letter he declared that “Communism is just the new romanticism,” and referred to “my rightism.”" 'What Mitt Romney Might Learn From Wallace Stevens' [archive link]
posted by clavdivs at 6:14 PM PST - 4 comments

Good Samaritans joined by green sea turtle for unexpected outback road trip. After spotting a request for help on social media, Emily and Callum helped Squirt the turtle make the 600-kilometre (372.8 miles) journey from Port Hedland to Broome.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:32 PM PST - 4 comments

Analyzing my text messages with my ex-boyfriend by Teresa Ibarra
posted by chavenet at 1:10 PM PST - 21 comments

As reported previously on the Blue, the the Reykjanes peninsula had an eruption in the proximity of the town of Grindavík several months back, however the emergence had settled down after about a week of activity...until a new emergence opened up in the Sundhnuk crater. (SLYT live feed)
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:55 PM PST - 10 comments

The Town of McClellanville, South Carolina revolves around seafood: Shrimp, Fish, Oysters, Crabs, and Clams. Shrimp are the bread-and-butter of the industry. Each year they celebrate the Blessing of the Fleet, with it's own underground anthem referenced in the post title ([4m14s], Some NFSW Lyrics) Vimeo or YT. The industry is threatened by more than imported shrimp (previously, previously): the owner of the fish house is ready to retire, with no one in line to take over. [more inside]
posted by ElGuapo at 12:23 PM PST - 1 comment

Interview with Tracey Emin in the Guardian. Emin talks about art, social class, cancer, her philanthropy, love, her film Why I never became a dancer (previously), politics, her stoma and urostomy, the establishment's unacceptable treatment of her as a younger woman, her exhibition at the Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, her cat Teacup, her work being dismissed as "moaning", the different phases of her life ...
posted by paduasoy at 11:43 AM PST - 6 comments

[CW: So much penis] The Cut: As Bustamante injects five vials first into the sides of the shaft, then six more around the glans (if you’re picturing a mushroom as the head of a penis, that’s the glans, and he is injecting around the base rim of the dome), he sweeps the needle slightly from side to side, then uses his thumbs to massage out any filler lumps, sculpting through what he calls “transitional zones” like a potter smoothing an edge of clay. “It goes beyond just filling up a penis,” Bustamante says. “I really do think that there is an artistry to it, to making it look good: aesthetically pleasing, no lumps, smooth, consistent, looks natural, feels natural - all those things.” [Previously: post title] [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 11:04 AM PST - 61 comments

Young voters despairing over US politics "49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7% disagreed."
posted by mecran01 at 10:20 AM PST - 315 comments

Confronting Another Axis? History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking . A long historical essay by Philip Zelikow, describing the perspectives of past and present US adversaries. "Zelikow warns that the United States faces an exceptionally volatile time in global politics and that the period of maximum danger might be in the next one to three years. Adversaries can miscalculate and recalculate, and it can be difficult to fully understand internal divisions within an adversary’s government, how rival states draw their own lessons from different interpretations of history, and how they might quickly react to a new event that appears to shift power dynamics." Via Noah Smith.
posted by russilwvong at 9:49 AM PST - 2 comments

In late 1987, Sierra On-line released Space Quest II: Chapter II: Vohaul's Revenge, sequel to the previous year's very popular Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. Written using their Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine, SQ2 would go on to sell over 100,000 copies, earning an SPA Gold Medal and seating itself as 4th in Sierra's top 5 best sellers. [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 9:28 AM PST - 11 comments

Utopia Must Fall is a browser game (for mobile too) that evokes the days of 1970s and 80s vector scan arcade games. There are nods to Asteroids, Gravitar, Tac-Scan, Space Fury and other more modern titles like Geometry Wars, with gameplay reminiscent of Missile Command but with a research and upgrade upgrade system. The password is CEASEFIRE if it asks.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 7:35 AM PST - 38 comments

nothing, except everything. - "filmed throughout my last year of high school — to nothing and everything we feel."[1,2] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:55 AM PST - 5 comments

The best music, the happiest families, the best fashion, movies, television, even the best cuisine--when did America peak? Whenever it was that you were a kid, a new poll shows.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:29 AM PST - 97 comments

The world's oldest culture is embracing high-tech vertical farming. Vertical farms grow plants quickly, using less water and land than traditional farming. One newcomer to the industry hopes it can put native herbs into supermarkets.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Alchemy, specifically the Paracelsian brand of alchemy-medicine, was prominent in the sixteenth and early years of the seventeenth century, not only in esoteric collections, but also in the “news” of the day. In 1600, the London College of Physicians examined a certain Frances Anthony who was suspected of prescribing and selling aurum portable (elixir). He was forbidden to continue his practice, a prohibition he repeatedly ignored in spite of fines and imprisonment. Three years later, in 1603, the controversy erupted between the Paracelsists and the medical faculty of Paris. Paul Kocher, historian, suggests that the theories of Paracelsus stirred up such a storm of controversy that, between 1590 and 1600, every educated person in England must have been aware of his works.[escholarshare, pdf] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 3:45 AM PST - 11 comments

One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.” Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” from Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures [WSJ; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:07 AM PST - 22 comments

Mark Gormley has passed away. Not many recognize the name. And because this is the internet, he was constantly mocked and ridiculed. But he wrote good songs, fine ones that stand on their own. An overview from a couple years ago. [more inside]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:21 PM PST - 13 comments

Indian Shrimp: The True Price of a Cheap Appetizer. "IN JANUARY, Farinella finally decided to go public with what he knew about the plant and contacted a journalist. “I think it is likely that I was hired not to manage the facility, but to be the American face that provides the appearance of legitimacy,” he said. For a plant with so many problems, he added, “I’m afraid I can’t be that face.”"
posted by storybored at 10:12 PM PST - 10 comments

Attempting to Install NetBSD 10 to a 25Mhz MicroVAX (w/ VO) [7 hrs.] [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:38 PM PST - 11 comments

Immunologist Dr. Andrea Love does quick Q&A addressing a variety of pseudoscience claims as part of the Wired Tech Support series. [more inside]
posted by 2N2222 at 8:02 PM PST - 7 comments

Chapter One of The Mercy of Gods - the new space opera by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, AKA Expanse writer James S. A. Corey
posted by Artw at 4:26 PM PST - 16 comments

Saving the American Chestnut continues to be difficult. A breakthrough in genetic engineering was intended to bring them back and transform the science of species restoration while potentially netting its inventors millions of dollars and wide acclaim. Instead, a mix-up in the lab has sparked a veritable civil war in the niche conservation community.
posted by emjaybee at 3:16 PM PST - 19 comments

"One deadly menu": The food mission to bring First Nations cuisine to all of Australia. At her local supermarket, Evelyn Billy looked around and saw food from all cultures — except hers. (Aboriginal Australian people use "Deadly" to mean excellent/amazing/really good.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:06 PM PST - 14 comments

We walk into the smoking area next door, which is as peaceful and quiet as a library, if it was a library where you can borrow bongs, which you actually can. Most of the tables are full. A lot of people are on laptops. A TV above plays YouTube cat videos on a loop. Sure. We grab a booth and spark up. Immediately, I’m both thirsty and hungry, which provides irrefutable evidence that weed cafes are a good idea. from I got high in an SF weed lounge and these should be everywhere mannnnn by Drew Magary
posted by chavenet at 1:01 PM PST - 48 comments

Independent: Mr. Connor recently announced plans to take a submersible to the Atlantic seabed in an effort to prove that safe, manned trips to the wreckage of the Titanic are possible. Metro: Connor told the Wall Street Journal: ‘I want to show people worldwide that while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way.’ Forbes: “Obviously he’s got a significant ego and really believes in his own abilities,” Roger Lipson, a longtime partner of Connor, told Forbes this year. @colorlessgrey.bsky.social: I don't know what about being a billionaire leads people to develop feelings about the Titanic that border on religiosity, but I do think taxation is the cure. [Previously]
posted by Wordshore at 10:53 AM PST - 93 comments

This post started as a single video of veteran musicmaker Leonard Solomon performing Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" on a homemade "Squijeeblion." That led to discovering his YouTube channel @Bellowphone, full of similarly whimsical covers on a collection of bespoke instruments hand-built in his Wimmelbildian workshop, from the Emphatic Chromatic Callioforte to the Oomphalapompatronium to the original Majestic Bellowphone. Searching for more videos led to his performance in the Lonesome Pine One-Man Band Extravaganza special from 1991, where he co-starred with whizbang vaudevillians like Hokum W. Jeebs and Professor Gizmo. But what was Lonesome Pine? Just an extraordinary, award-winning concert series by the Kentucky Center for the Arts that ran for 16 years on public radio and television -- an "all things considered" showcase for "new artists, underappreciated veterans and those with unique new voices" featuring such luminaries as Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Koko Taylor, and hundreds more. You can get a broad overview of this televisual marvel from this excellent half-hour retrospective, see a supercut of director Clark Santee's favorite moments, browse the program directory from the Smithsonian exhibit, or watch select shows in their entirety: Lonesome Pine Blues - All-star Bluegrass Band - Nashville All-stars - Bass Instincts - Zydeco Rockers - Walter "Wolfman" Washington - Mark O'Connor - Alison Krauss & Union Station - Sam Bush & John Cowan - Maura O'Connell - Nanci Griffith - A Musical Visit from Africa [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 9:16 AM PST - 9 comments

“You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.” An investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call details an almost decade-long secret “war” against the International Criminal Court.
posted by clawsoon at 8:32 AM PST - 39 comments

Originally introduced as a feature of Windows 95, the RTF-compatabile word processor Microsoft WordPad will be removed in the version 24H2 release of Windows 11, due later this year. The app will be missed, along with AI agent Cortana and help directory Tips, but will be survived by its older sibling, Microsoft NotePad.
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:14 AM PST - 83 comments

The Money In Menopause Supplements I created Dr. Jen's Menopause Taming Turmeric Supplements to find out just how much. As influencers and podcasters all suddenly have their own menopause supplements, OBGYN Dr. Jen Gunter went through the steps of getting quotes to do the math on just how profitable selling a cheap turmeric pill with good marketing and no science can be. (Please note: She is not a crook. She is not selling anything. She just did the math.) [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 3:54 AM PST - 51 comments

Kado is one of only three speakers of Ngalia. He designed an app to pass down his knowledge to the next generation. The remote town of Leonora, more than 800 kilometres from Perth, is an unlikely technology hub, but its only school has been chosen to launch a new app aimed at preserving language and culture.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:50 AM PST - 2 comments

Once upon a time, Google would have encouraged users to verify its AI's claims with a quick Google search. Ironically, this now only works if users click through results to check information against primary sources—the exact practice Google is trying to shift users away from. [extremetech]
posted by HearHere at 2:03 AM PST - 22 comments

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, it’s not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? That’s probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking. from Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [BigThink] [CW: Not Safe for Breakfast]
posted by chavenet at 2:01 AM PST - 29 comments

Jen Psaki with Dan Pfeiffer: Lessons from the White House [1h6m, Commonwealth Club] is a great conversation about being White House Press Secretary between that Press Secretary and Obama's Communications Director. They're both really personable and full of anecdotes; it's a great talk.
posted by hippybear at 6:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Charly Bliss' new single/video, "Nineteen" From their upcoming album "Forever". It's your weekly free thread! Come on in, put on some tunes, kick up your heels and tell us what's up with you!
posted by Gorgik at 5:02 PM PST - 68 comments

Meet the echidnapus: Fossils discovered in museum drawer may point to Australian age of monotremes. The "echidnapus" is one of the newly described ancient monotremes from a fossil hotspot in NSW that could give us more clues about an era when egg-laying mammals diversified. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:44 PM PST - 6 comments

Another book roundup (previously; previouslier). [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 9:12 AM PST - 7 comments

How Kid Rock Went From America’s Favorite Hard-Partying Rock Star to a MAGA Mouthpiece A deep look into a very dark heart. [more inside]
posted by cybrcamper at 8:52 AM PST - 76 comments

Quit arguing about the Apple Music albums list. From Slate music guy Carl Wilson on his Substack.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:55 AM PST - 19 comments

"All this leads to the inevitable question, which one – perceived randomness or true randomness – should a GM aim to use in his [sic] games? After careful consideration, I don’t think there is any one right answer to this question; depending on the circumstances, either could be correct." A neat previously featuring random maps.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:40 AM PST - 19 comments

Here’s Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever is an investigation by food writer Brian Reinhart as to why jalapeño peppers are milder than they used to be. Willa Paskin of Slate turned the article into an episode of her podcast The Decoder Ring and went further.
posted by Kattullus at 5:29 AM PST - 42 comments

it is, at best, very good at only one third of the game [lesswrong] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 3:48 AM PST - 17 comments

Palaeontology while using a power wheelchair. Eleanor Beidatsch recently graduated with first-class honours in geoscience at the University of New England (UNE). Eleanor has spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1 and has never had use of her legs. Her arm movement is also limited. "I cannot move myself around at all," she said. "When I'm in the wheelchair I can move, thanks to the wonders of technology." The disease, which affects her respiration as well as her mobility, was generally considered fatal by doctors when Eleanor was born. "I'm more of a lab rat than a field mouse," she said. "Palaeontology is very physical, but only if you're out digging. [Information about fossils] essentially then gets put online, that is then accessible for people to do lab work, and you don't need to be able bodied [for that]."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:06 AM PST - 7 comments

All this matters because the interfaces in question do the job of the dictator and the censor, and we embrace it. More than being infuriating, they train us to accept gross restrictions in return for trifling or non-existent ease of use, or are a fig leaf covering what is actually going on. from The accidental tyranny of user interfaces by Oliver Meredith Cox
posted by chavenet at 1:09 AM PST - 57 comments

The village of Snettisham, who play in the Kevin Grimmer Division of the Norfolk Sunday Cricket League, is allegedly 'plagued' by nocturnal chickens. Guardian: Dwellers in Snettisham, Norfolk, have said their life is being made “hell” as the chickens swarm in from a nearby wood. Mirror: But not everyone shares this anger and some even defend the chickens, insisting the animals contribute to the village's appeal. Graeme McQuade, 43, said: "I have no issues with the chickens whatsoever. Before we moved here, we didn't know chickens get up at 4am, but it gives character to the place. (Bluesky) Mrs Schwarzski: Is Snettisham the Florida of England? Derelict Geodesic Dome, MA: Have you seen Snettisham? It’s /insane/ that a town that small has a church that looks like that.
posted by Wordshore at 1:02 AM PST - 15 comments

'Paul Williams shows up in his Planet of the Apes costume and performs "Here's That Rainy Day"'. (slyt.9:49)
posted by clavdivs at 7:42 PM PST - 9 comments

The Problem with Behavioral Nudges. "When we gave participants one website as a default—in other words, we nudged them to choose it—70% opted for it, compared with 48% who chose the same one when it wasn’t preselected. That’s typically how default nudges work: People are much more inclined to pick the default, which presumably will be the one that is best for them or society. Next came the important part. We waited..." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 7:03 PM PST - 24 comments

Art world mourns death of superstar Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon. Tributes are flowing from friends and the art world for a trailblazing contemporary Aboriginal Australian artist. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:52 PM PST - 8 comments

It’s Monday night at the National Guard Armory in northeast Minneapolis, which means it’s time for Hmong Cornhole. A few dozen folks throw little bean bags into holes in rows of glossy wooden boards. They chat and fist bump and update scores on digital tablets. Kids occasionally run weaving through the boards, sometimes squirreling away bags from their parents.
posted by ShooBoo at 1:14 PM PST - 14 comments

"The influence of pareidolia has often been anecdotally observed in examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, where topographic features of cave walls were incorporated into images. As part of a wider investigation into the visual psychology of the earliest known art, we explored three hypotheses relating to pareidolia in cases of Late Upper Palaeolithic art in Las Monedas and La Pasiega Caves (Cantabria, Spain)." [SLPDF] Pareidolia previously, back in '03. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:29 AM PST - 17 comments

There’s no reason or evidence for a modern structure to have been built underwater at this site, says team member Marcel Bradtmöller, an archaeologist at the University of Rostock, Germany. Nor can the team think of any natural process that could create such a structure. [doi] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 4:01 AM PST - 16 comments

The personal anguish underlying Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," perhaps the greatest song in Motown history, is starkly evident in the recording's haunting isolated vocal track (SLYT). [more inside]
posted by How the runs scored at 3:44 AM PST - 12 comments

Cameras reveal wombat burrows can be safe havens after fire and waterholes after rain (The Conversation.) And here is a cartoon about it: A wombat burrow is the food court of nature – and so much more. It is like an Airbnb combined with an Aldi. (First Dog on the Moon).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:18 AM PST - 6 comments

The convention seemed endless. We wandered into Hall J. Everywhere, people clamored to shake the Palm Tree Wholesaler’s hand, either nervously introducing themselves or trying to hide their dismay as they reminded him of their names. I asked if he had a booth at the conference, if he was here to sell trees, and he said, “I’m on the board of the association. I’m the keynote speaker this year.” from The Smoke of the Land Went Up a short story by Andrew Cominelli [Guernica]
posted by chavenet at 1:56 AM PST - 4 comments

10,000 Aboriginal households in the Northern Territory go without power. Prepaid meters leaving households disconnected For around 10,000 Aboriginal households in the Northern Territory, mostly in remote areas, getting power and keeping it on can be a difficult task. [more inside]
posted by gusset at 9:03 PM PST - 5 comments

Researchers found raw cow’s milk infected lab mice with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1). They demonstrated both mammal to mammal transmission and that the milk remained infectious for weeks when stored at refrigerator temperatures. [more inside]
posted by zenon at 6:20 PM PST - 47 comments

Unless you knew modern Chinese history well, you probably have no idea what I am talking about. Most people only knew that "after Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists, or KMT, was defeated by Mao Tse-tung Communists, Chiang took his army to Taiwan and settled there and turned it into an economic powerhouse..." What most people do not know is that a portion of the KMT Eight Army, under General Li Mi, comprised of KMT 26th and 93rd Divisions, actually remained in Yunnan after after Chiang's retreat, and in order to grow their support, they, with permission from Chiang, allied themselves with the the Karen National Defense Organization and tried to help them take over Myanmar / Burma. Those of you who watched Rambo (2008) may recognize "Karen", as in the Karen Rebels. Yes, it's the same people, still fighting the Myanmar government decades later. And there are a lot more involvement of the Lost Army... [more inside]
posted by kschang at 3:44 PM PST - 8 comments

Not All Propaganda Is Art is a nine episode series of the podcast Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. In it, Walker tells the story of the CIA’s cultural Cold War propaganda operations in the 1950s as reflected in the lives of three men, cultural theorist Dwight Macdonald, theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and novelist Richard Wright. The show notes are also full of interesting links and images. If you’re not sure you want spend nine hours in the paranoid fifties, Sarah Larson gives a very good overview in the New Yorker [archive].
posted by Kattullus at 12:46 PM PST - 7 comments

We interviewed three people whose holiday habits seem precision-engineered to wind up people on Twitter and TikTok. The adult Disney fanatic who’s been on more than 70 Disney-themed holidays. A private landlord who flies first class while leaving his kids (and their nanny) to slum it in economy. And what about a 47-year-old who still stays in hostels? Do these people deserve their pariah status? Or might we have something to learn from listening to their perspectives? from Three Maligned Modern Tourists Defend Themselves [Vice]
posted by chavenet at 12:31 PM PST - 48 comments

Sort the Court is a charmingly addictive "kingdombuilder" of sorts that's perfect for a lazy Saturday. Designed and written by Graeme Borland in just 72 hours for Ludum Dare 34, the game casts you as a new monarch who must judiciously grow your realm's wealth, population, and happiness with an eye toward joining the illustrious Council of Crowns... all by giving flat yes-or-no answers to an endless parade of requests from dozens of whimsical subjects. It's possible to lose, and the more common asks can get a bit repetitive, but with hundreds of scenarios and a number of longer-term storylines, the game can be won in an hour or two while remaining funny and fresh. See the forum or the wiki for help, enjoy the original art of Amy "amymja" Gerardy and the soundtrack by Bogdan Rybak, or check out some other fantasy decisionmaking games in this vein: Borland's spiritual prequel A Crown of My Own - the somewhat darker card-based REIGNS - the more expansive and story-driven pixel drama Yes, Your Grace (reviews), which has a sequel due out this year
posted by Rhaomi at 11:56 AM PST - 18 comments

long-lost branch of the Nile that ran by the pyramids: Geological survey reveals the remains of a major waterway that ancient Egyptian builders could have used to transport materials (Freda Kreier for Nature). Satellite images and geological data now confirm that a tributary of the Nile — which researchers have named the Ahramat Branch — used to run near many of the major sites in the region several thousand years ago. The discovery, reported on 16 May in Communications Earth and Environment1, could help to explain why ancient Egyptians chose this area to build the pyramids (see ‘Ancient river’). [more inside]
posted by bq at 8:53 AM PST - 26 comments

There has been 1 arrest since counterprotesters violently attacked the UCLA pro-Palestinian encampment on April 30. Archive.is. UCLA Chancellor Gene Block testified before the House committee on the protests, where he admitted that he thought he should have removed the encampment sooner to prevent violence. Other universities also participated in the hearing, where the focus was mostly on how/whether the protests were antisemitic and should have been shut down earlier. Over 1000 people walked out of the Harvard commencement to protest Harvard denying 13 student protesters from participating. Encampments and student protests have spread to Australia, England, Germany, Italy, and more. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 8:46 AM PST - 43 comments

[CW: eugenics, racism, violent child abuse incident] Guardian: “His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.” [Previously: November 2022, You say 'Eugenics' like it's a bad thing (it is)]
posted by Wordshore at 8:29 AM PST - 105 comments

I didn't really know what to expect going into watch Katey Sagal | Full Q&A | Comic-Con Liverpool 2024 [40m] but what I found was really delightful, honest, human interview that left me feeling really good. If you've ever enjoyed Married With Children or Futurama or Sons Of Anarchy or any of her other projects, you should check this out.
posted by hippybear at 6:03 AM PST - 8 comments

1,180 drawings of plant root systems. A variety of strategies for collecting water and nutrients into the plant. [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 5:55 AM PST - 13 comments

"Stories about a submerged land named Lyonesse abound in culture traditions of Southwest Britain and plausibly derive from memories of land loss within the Scilly Isles. We review Lyonesse stories, their links to Arthurian romances and Greek/Roman accounts of the Cassiterides, and trace their divergent evolution. From this region’s history of land-sea movements and human occupation, we propose Lyonesse stories originated more than 4000 years ago when rising sea level divided a single inhabited island in the Scilly group." Lyonesse previously. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:52 AM PST - 9 comments

Wrapped up in the thrill of discovering this new, delightful art and securing versions of it to gaze at while stirring tea in the morning, my dark, skeptical, spidey-senses failed to engage. High on consumer dopamine and browsing picture frames, I forgot, for an important moment, that we recently crossed over into a different sort of world. The sort of world where it is trivial to prompt a neural network to create an image that pulls on the traditional patterns, subject matter, and motifs of William Morris, but layered with the hyper-realistic, high-definition, pixel-perfect asethetics of the modern web; dramatic lighting and sweeping landscapes ripped from ArtStation, meticulously art-directed details from Wes Anderson film stills, the two-tone color overlays and soft glow effects popularised on Instagram and Pinterest. A system trained on everything we've clicked like on, priming us to like what it makes. from Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
posted by chavenet at 1:30 AM PST - 34 comments

More Than 1000 Fossils, Including Rare Dinosaurs, Given to Brazil’s National Museum Following Fire. (Smithsonian Magazine.) The massive donation was made by Burkhard Pohl, a Swiss-German collector, as the museum works to replenish its collections after a devastating blaze in September 2018. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:50 AM PST - 3 comments

Otoboke Beaver: A quartet from Kyoto with an unusually complex and original stye of punk rock, played with great precision, energy, and attitude. Their songs tend to stop, start, and change tempo unpredictably, but they make it look deceptively easy and natural. [more inside]
posted by mikeand1 at 5:27 PM PST - 25 comments

Morgan Spurlock, ‘Super Size Me’ documentary director, dies at 53. Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker whose Oscar-nominated “Super Size Me” chronicled a month of watching his body swell and health decline while eating only McDonald’s meals, launching a highflying career that later imploded after he acknowledged past incidents of sexual assault and harassment, died May 23 at a hospital in New York City. He was 53. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 4:13 PM PST - 39 comments

25 Essential Stephen King Short Stories
posted by Artw at 3:38 PM PST - 43 comments

The world needs more Leroy and Leroy [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 2:43 PM PST - 2 comments

This leads us straight back to the original conversation about “Man or Bear,” which has nothing to do with bears. (Sorry, bears!) “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” is just another way of asking, “Are you afraid of men?” It’s the same question I’ve been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler. It’s the same question that hovers over women all the time as we move through the world. And it’s a question that’s always been difficult for me to answer. from A Woman Who Left Society to Live With Bears Weighs in on “Man or Bear” by Laura Killingbeck [Bikepacking]
posted by chavenet at 1:18 PM PST - 42 comments

The Tennessee Attorney General is investigating the mysterious investment company that attempted to have Graceland, the late Elvis Presley's mansion that is one of America's most successful tourist attractions, sold at a foreclosure sale. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:37 PM PST - 9 comments

After Brain Injuries, Doctors and Families Should Take More Time With Life Support Decisions, Research Finds. (Smithsonian Magazine.) A small study suggests some severe traumatic brain injury patients can later recover a level of independence or return to their pre-injury lives. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:00 PM PST - 40 comments

"There’s a vague, deliberately unexamined idea that the goodness of art and literature will transcend the complicity of the structures art ‘has to’ use to reach people. And sometimes they can transcend; sometimes they can destabilize culture generatively, even using corporate-owned pathways. But more often, of course, challenging work is not going to make it through those pathways. It’s going to be excluded, and readers are not going to encounter it and be changed by it. This is a political problem." From Small Press Economies: A Dialogue by Hilary Plum and Matvei Yankelevich. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 11:44 AM PST - 3 comments

Nelly Furtado Tiny Desk May 24, 2024 [22m]
posted by hippybear at 11:02 AM PST - 8 comments

A Furious, Forgotten Slave Narrative Resurfaces (NYT gift link) John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 9:04 AM PST - 5 comments

A very old ham finally got the funeral it deserved. Ellen Klages, during her intro on a recent episode of "Jeopardy!" mentioned an old, scary ham, and encouraged people to learn more about it. The tale of the "heirloom ham" does not disappoint. [more inside]
posted by davidmsc at 8:44 AM PST - 48 comments

Facing the potential of a ruinous $20B decision against them in the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit, the NCAA and the major conferences are coming to a settlement that will see college athletes recieve revenue sharing, as well as former athletes being eligible to recieve damages for payments wrongly withheld. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:20 AM PST - 35 comments

100 Best Albums (a list from Apple Music (Wikipedia, 1-100 list that should work with most browsers)) [more inside]
posted by box at 8:18 AM PST - 50 comments

John Sell Cotman was known for his paintings and drawings, especially watercolor. Wikipedia has the bio and suggested further readings, as well as information about others in his artistically-inclined family. Likely most people who know the name "Cotman" know it in the context of watercolor paints available from Winsor & Newton, which have appeared previously a number of times in discussion on Ask.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:22 AM PST - 3 comments

窓からは柔らかな光が射し込み、
[Soft light streamed through the window]
窓の外では鳥たちが歌う美しい朝に、
[Outside, birds were singing on a beautiful morning]
私に撫でられながら眠るようにそっと逝きました。
[As I petted her, she passed away gently, as if falling asleep]
長い間かぼちゃんを愛して下さったみなさま、本当にありがとうございました。
[To everyone who has loved Kabo-chan for a long time, thank you very much]
かぼちゃんは世界一幸せな犬だったと思います。そして私は世界一幸せな飼い主でした。
[I believe Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world, and I was the happiest owner]

Kabosu, the beloved Shiba-Inu behind the globally popular Doge meme, has passed away peacefully at home today at the age of 18. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:00 AM PST - 60 comments

“Right now in Hollywood, certain actors are having intimacy coordinators baked into their contracts, which I think is awesome,” says Jasmine. “For us in the adult industry, that might look like performers saying, ‘I’m going to bring my friend with me for support’, but, instead of taking two people but paying for one, it would be really great if [there was an industry standard, so every studio] could say, ‘Our budget includes an intimacy coordinator, as well as mental health support before, during, and after’.” from Meet the Trailblazers Changing the Face of Porn [Huck] [NSFW]
posted by chavenet at 12:37 AM PST - 3 comments

A once-enslaved man’s music was hidden for centuries is an article by Diane Orson about Sawney Freeman, who published a book of his violin compositions in 1801 in New Haven, Connecticut. That work is lost, but in 1817, Gurdon Trumbull copied down many of Freeman’s tunes, and that manuscript survived. His music was arranged for a quintet by Anthony Padolfe Jr. and is available online. My favorite is the haunting New Death March, but all 15 compositions are lovely. Connecticut Public Television also made a video based on Orson’s article, part of a series on Connecticut’s history of slavery.
posted by Kattullus at 12:24 AM PST - 3 comments

Corman imbued his version of the MCU with the 80s/90s feel it so richly deserved. The classic Silver Age Marvel comics didn't suffer from being low-budget productions, and from what I've seen of this so far (only 15 minutes—it's late) this Corman film didn't either. Too bad the embedded ads are the usual short-term rental and learn-AI things and not pitches for sea monkeys and a travelogue of Palisades Park.
posted by morspin at 11:36 PM PST - 19 comments

Man finds huge 30,000-year-old mammoth bones in his wine cellar. The Austrian Academy of Sciences described the remains of at least three Stone Age mammoths in Gobelsburg as "the most significant find ... in more than 100 years."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:10 PM PST - 10 comments

Please enjoy “My Shot” from Hamilton in Japanese, translated and performed by actor and musical translator Gen Parton-Shin (辛 源). [more inside]
posted by mbrubeck at 8:26 PM PST - 13 comments

Brendan O'Brien Interview: The Unsung Hero Of Rock Music "In his first ever full length interview, producer/engineer/mixer (and multi-instrumentalist) Brendan O'Brien talks about his contributions to many of the most significant records of the past generation." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:51 PM PST - 16 comments

Grima Wormtongue uses DEI to convince God to let devils do a great replacement. Think about the thought process that went into this strip. [...] Grima Wormtongue, assistant to GOD, is called in front of the uh heaven senate (i assume?) to account for the great replacement of heaven, but his parents survived the HOBBIT HOLOCAUST. there is so much going on here

Back in 2022, we discussed a viral tweetstorm from "genderfluid transvestite goblin" @BitterKarella (and an accompanying write-up from Garbage Day) which recapped (with wry commentary) the bizarre history of Tatsuya Ishida's long-running webcomic Sinfest, tracing its evolution from an edgy gag-a-day strip to playful satire with colorful characters to sudden radfem agitprop to virulently transphobic screed -- an unusual insight into the TERF-to-alt-right pipeline. Two years later, she is back (on Bluesky) with an update -- and reader, it gets *so* much worse [CW: unrolled 534-post thread discussing Sinfest's hamfisted pop culture references, 4chan memes, cartoonish transphobia, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and Esoteric Nazism (!)]. Karella also featured on the Haus of Decline podcast (90min) with recently-out trans host Alex Hood; they lament Sinfest's fall from webcomics stardom and dunk on its baffling symbology, but by the end reach a genuinely heartbreaking realization (with some evidence) that Tats may be an "egg" (or trans woman in denial) who fell in with a toxic crowd before being able to come to terms with some very deep-seated gender dysphoria. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:31 PM PST - 83 comments

Blog/Column: Humans and Technology [via mefi projects]
posted by schmudde at 12:47 PM PST - 1 comment

Carson the baby opossum has died. Again. And again. [more inside]
posted by cmyk at 10:24 AM PST - 27 comments

What Should You Do with Your Stuff before You Die? (slTheWalrus)
posted by Kitteh at 7:46 AM PST - 91 comments

Scientists document remarkable sperm whale phonetic alphabet. A new analysis of years of vocalizations by sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean has found that their system of communication is more sophisticated than previously known.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:57 AM PST - 19 comments

Hired Gun: The Untold Stories Of Your Favorite Musicians [1h40m] is the "Twenty Feet From Stardom" for the guitarists, bassists, drummers... the hired guns. You've heard them on albums and tours, but probably don't know their faces or names. Well, now they're speaking out.
posted by hippybear at 5:42 AM PST - 18 comments

"We present the results of a meta-analysis of all empirical studies on the effects of these warnings. Overall, we found that warnings had no effect on affective responses to negative material or on educational outcomes. However, warnings reliably increased anticipatory affect. Findings on avoidance were mixed, suggesting either that warnings have no effect on engagement with material or that they increased engagement with negative material under specific circumstances." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:34 AM PST - 75 comments

Yesterday was the seventh National Numeracy Day in the UK. You can take the numeracy challenge (email sign-up, throw-away should work). Research in 2019 reported that 56% of adults in the UK have numeracy levels which are those expected of a primary-school child (Entry Level 3 or lower). National Numeracy (Wikipedia article), which organises the day, has reported on the role of confidence and the gender divide in maths. A Parliamentary Research Briefing describes government initiatives to improve numeracy, including the delayed Multiply programme for adults, maths hubs and an advisory committee. The Impact Report for National Numeracy Day 2023 says that "103,280 people took action on the National Numeracy Challenge" last year. [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 3:23 AM PST - 51 comments

One of the most unusual heists in America seems to be unfolding at Taco Bell
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:23 AM PST - 35 comments

The partnership with Christopher Kane ended up being just the start, as Crocs began to release frequent collabs with major brands and celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Post Malone, McDonald’s, and recently Pringles (yes, the brand you’re thinking of). Arguably most important of all, was when Crocs teamed up with avant-garde fashion house Balenciaga — and so began a collaboration that took the humble Crocs into the world of high-fashion, with a series of rain boots, platform clogs, stilettos, and more. Many of the collabs are easy to laugh at (do you want a pair of 7-Eleven Crocs?), but the amount of money Crocs is making is no joke, as Gen Z has learned to love the brand. from How Crocs became a clog-selling profit machine [Sherwood] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:02 AM PST - 20 comments

All is not lost! Fortunately. All over the world, artists, indigenous communities, activists, foragers, designers are devising creative strategies to help us co-evolve in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with the oldest and most important -in terms of biomass- inhabitants of this planet. [wemakemoneynotart]
posted by HearHere at 10:44 PM PST - 4 comments

Adam Reader interviews Johnny Mathis. (16m slyt) [more inside]
posted by 2N2222 at 6:45 PM PST - 11 comments

AI is an idea that began as a subfield of computer science, until it was so distorted that it popped, detaching itself from reality. Now, this orphaned concept has grown to a life of its own, as our discussion of AI eclipses any meaningful definition of it as a real, definable thing.
posted by signsofrain at 6:18 PM PST - 87 comments

"The four young women wore military helmets and dead-serious expressions. Their fingers, sheathed in tailored white gloves, wiggled on loose wrists. Over a beat of hard-driving taiko drums, they scurried and bounced around the soundstage, scream-singing lyrics that, per the closed caption translation, described a domestic dystopia: 'Dad’s stuck in the grind, the job’s grip is appalling / Mom’s escaping reality, addicted to idols.' It was the explosive U.S. television debut of Atarashii Gakko!, and if you caught it on Jimmy Kimmel Live! late last year, you might have asked yourself: Where did these women come from?" Atarashii Gakko! Are Singularly, Unapologetically Themselves [more inside]
posted by jomato at 5:03 PM PST - 9 comments

Turtle travels nearly 2000km to nest on Queensland coast for first time. An endangered olive ridley turtle may have travelled close to 2000 kilometres to nest on Queensland's east coast in a find described by renowned researcher Col Limpus as quite a phenomenon.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:33 PM PST - 4 comments

Whoopi Goldberg in Conversation with Adriana Trigiani: Bits and Pieces [1h, 92nd Street Y] Recorded May 6, 2024. Whoopi sits and chats about stories from her life. A refreshing mode to find her in.
posted by hippybear at 1:29 PM PST - 18 comments

On May 15th Google released a new "Web" filter that removes "AI Overview" and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set "Google Web" as your default search engine. If you want to give people easy access to an AI-free Google search, send them to [udm14.com]. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 1:01 PM PST - 66 comments

Drawn to a Hare Krishna ashram for its yoga, meditation and vegan meals, she’s still figuring out what went wrong. Ms. Payton didn’t think of herself as part of a larger story about the popularity of alternative spiritual practices in the splintering religious landscape of 21st-century America. She hadn’t yet parsed the borderlines separating willing self-abnegation, mental illness and abuse. She craved transcendence, and like an increasing number of Americans, she didn’t find it in Christianity or another historic monotheistic religion. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 12:15 PM PST - 11 comments

"In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether." As Insurers Around the U.S. Bleed Cash From Climate Shocks, Homeowners Lose (NYT; archive) [more inside]
posted by mittens at 12:03 PM PST - 46 comments

Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it. B. Pladek's new short fantasy story "The Spindle of Necessity" (published in the May 20th, 2024 issue of Strange Horizons) is a captivating, closely-observed story of longing, literary connection, insecurity, queer community, and how we make use of the past. I think this will resonate with a lot of readers who wrestle with questions about representation and what used to be called #OwnVoices in fiction, and mixed feelings about art we love. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 10:59 AM PST - 12 comments

4Most, the smalltown band that inspired Summer of '69, is reuniting.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:07 AM PST - 16 comments

BBC News link Here we go - it's election time! [more inside]
posted by YoungStencil at 8:52 AM PST - 140 comments

"I think my first impact with horror images could be traced back to my childhood. I was used to leaf through my father’s art books, I saw that Giotto as well as many other painters, flemish and Reinassance painters, often painted Hell, demons, obscure atmospheres, where death and popular beliefs shroud their magnificent paintings." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:13 AM PST - 6 comments

A new musical regarding the life and works of Tom Lehrer (still alive - previously, an extremely comprehensive post by filthy light thief) debuts in London next week. It is sold out, but the playwright Francis Beckett writes about the effect Lehrer has had on his life and his unsuccessful attempts to contact him while doing research - ultimately indirectly providing the musical's title.
posted by atlantica at 4:09 AM PST - 36 comments

Renee is only 24, but her fashion designs are about to hit the runway for the third time. Blending traditional Indigenous techniques with cutting-edge production methods, Wiradjuri designer Renee Henderson creates stunning designs inspired by Aboriginal art and culture.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:54 AM PST - 3 comments

What makes urushi so different from any other tree resin or in fact plastic? While it would be overly ambitious to try and offer a full insight into the role of lacquer in the spiritual lives of the Japanese people, this article can point out some elements which may lead to a better understanding of the cultural context in which appreciation for this curious resin developed. Despite the fact that urushi arguably has many drawbacks in both use and production, this ancient tradition has—seemingly against all odds—managed to survive into modern times. Still, the use of lacquer is showing a continued decline in Japan, and its manufacture and use have nearly died out in countries like Korea and Thailand. By offering some understanding about its importance as a bearer of cultural heritage, it is my hope that urushi lacquer will receive more recognition as a unique art form that is deserving of more appreciation and support. from Following the Lacquer God [Garland Magazine]
posted by chavenet at 1:45 AM PST - 17 comments

We ranked it. It's #6, so you know - somewhere between Musk and Uber. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 7:22 PM PST - 114 comments

Inside New College of Florida’s Counter-Commencement
posted by Artw at 3:54 PM PST - 11 comments

Probe all the nuances, niceties, and subtle shades of meaning your little heart desires. from A Hairsplitter’s Odyssey by Eli Burnstein [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:55 PM PST - 13 comments

Las Vegas City Hall's television channel KCLV has been putting out documentaries on the history of Las Vegas. The first one was five years ago, "The City Of Las Vegas: The Early Years" which covers 1905 to 1920 [1h15m]. The most recent from a few days ago is The City of Las Vegas: The Sixties [1h15m]. They aren't releasing these quickly, but there are seven total in the playlist as of now.
posted by hippybear at 12:07 PM PST - 10 comments

Coxy.official is a creative comedy cover artist on IG (and youtube) in which ‘talent’ sings for a ‘microphone’. Oh, and he (and his junior) are the only talent.
posted by kfholy at 11:52 AM PST - 1 comment

Life is not a continuous line from the cradle to the grave. Rather, it is many short lines, each ending in a choice, and branching right and left to other choices, like a bunch of seaweed or a genealogical table. No sooner is one problem solved than you face another growing out of the first. You are to decide the course of action of first Helen, then Jed, then Saunders, at each crisis in their lives. Give your first thought, without pausing to ponder.

Consider the Consequences!, a 1930 gamebook co-written by author Doris Webster and crusading journalist Mary Alden Hopkins, is the earliest known example of a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) text, offering players a series of forking narratives for three interconnected characters with 43 distinct endings, fifty years before the format was popularized (and trademarked). Just a few years ago this pioneering work was at risk of falling into near-total obscurity. But thanks to the efforts of jjsonick on IntFiction.org, you can now read the book on the Internet Archive (complete with nifty graphs of all possible storylines), or -- courtesy of itch.io developer geetheriot -- play the game online in an interactive fiction format powered by the Twine engine. More in the mood for radio drama? Listen to Audio Adventure Radio Hour's 2018 dramatic reading of the book (based on listener suggestions), and wrap it up with a delightful retro-review by librarian pals Peter and Abby on the Choose Your Own Book Club podcast. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:09 AM PST - 16 comments

Food for Fish is an underpants-infused game you can play in your browser thanks to WebGPU, so try it in Chrome, Edge, or Safari Technology Preview. [via waxy.org]
posted by churl at 9:43 AM PST - 6 comments

The Apprentice is a 2024 movie about Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, directed by Ali Abbasi and starring Sebastian Stan (CW, discussion of rape). [more inside]
posted by box at 6:40 AM PST - 63 comments

Meet Patricia Piccinini. She's the mother of Skywhale and a much-loved artist. The artist shares why her work is driven by a fascination for the frontiers of science and its potential — and her fears of what we're doing to the world.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:39 AM PST - 6 comments

"Simon’s paintings are figurative but not photographic. Semi-abstract, they are a blend of abstraction in the shapes – rectangles, curves, circles – and identifiable features. The colour palette is muted; he says he is more interested in tone and texture than colour." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:27 AM PST - 11 comments

This opera has everything. Murder, intrigue,eunuchs, David Hockney designed sets, forced perspective, And who doesn't love Nessun Dorma? I've never wanted to be in Los Angeles more than right now. Puccini's "Turindot" playing as we speak..
posted by Czjewel at 3:40 AM PST - 28 comments

Even in a labyrinth with terrifying tall walls, where the ocean is no longer visible, a minotaur still needs a hummingbird, essential company in the endless journey through dead-ends, restarts, and new beginnings – as well as a reminder of the beauty of the world, the power of the sun, the rain, love, and life, all packed inside the body of a creature that weighs less than an ounce. A sign that within the smallest detail, the whole world is present, and just as the gravity and magnificence of life is present in the mountains, oceans, stars, and everything larger than life, it is also brilliantly present in its smallest bird. from Hummingbirds Are Wondrous by Zito Madu [Plough]
posted by chavenet at 1:49 AM PST - 10 comments

Autonomous car racing is a bit of a mess. A slightly sarcastic overview of the first ever Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League event (previously)
posted by Stark at 1:06 AM PST - 12 comments

Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe Reporting by Sharon Lerner for ProPublica.
posted by biogeo at 7:57 PM PST - 25 comments

Prince - Sign O’ The Times (Live at Paisley Park 12/31/87) [2h12m, Vimeo]. Setlist and band member list from PrinceVault. Miles Davis guests on trumpet for the encore.
posted by hippybear at 7:15 PM PST - 4 comments

Midsommar - The Complete Guide (Everything Explained) from Youtuber Novum. (slyt 7hr vid) Deep dive into Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film, Midsommar.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:14 PM PST - 25 comments

Bill Mitchell was "responsible for creating or influencing the design of over 72.5 million automobiles produced by GM, Mitchell spent the entirety of his 42-year career in automobile design at General Motors". Bill Mitchell’s Silver Arrow I. In 1957, coming back from the Turin Auto Show Mitchell faced "Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA) had forbidden American automakers from participating in any performance or motorsports activities—which included the building, selling, or advertising of performance-oriented products." Studio X: The Story of Bill Mitchell's Secret Styling Studio at General Motors.
posted by clavdivs at 2:25 PM PST - 7 comments

The story of the 1967 Ferguson Super Sport, the product of a Canadian couple's years of obsessive planning and labour. [Mod Note: if access is denied, try refreshing, opening a second time, or opening in new window]
posted by gamera at 12:26 PM PST - 24 comments

A favorite moment of perfect comedic timing from The Muppets' Seven Deadly Sins/ Sex and Violence. it's safe for work. [more inside]
posted by theora55 at 12:22 PM PST - 104 comments

Microsoft held a live event today showcasing their vision of the future of the home PC (or "Copilot+ PC"), boasting longer battery life, better-standardized ARM processors, and (predictably) a whole host of new AI features built on dedicated hardware, from real-time translation to in-system assistant prompts to custom-guided image creation. Perhaps most interesting is the new "Recall" feature that records all on-screen activity securely on-device, allowing natural-language recall of all articles read, text written, and videos seen. It's just the first foray into a new era of AI PCs -- and Apple is expected to join the push with an expected partnership with OpenAI debuting at WWDC next month. In a tech world that has lately been defined by the smartphone, can AI make the PC cool again?
posted by Rhaomi at 12:11 PM PST - 122 comments

The most common four-digit pin numbers [information is beautiful]
posted by chavenet at 12:08 PM PST - 38 comments

Want to spend an evening at Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge [venue website] in Madison, TN? I have just the night for you: June 9, 2023 [3h10m, main link, subsequent links are to individual segments of this main video]. Sally Jaye will open up with some great storytelling songs for about a half hour, and then the main artist's old friend David Matthew Dorne plays for maybe a bit longer than needed, and finally Brian Wright And The Sneakups take the stage. If you're the type to check out the music in a bar, why not check this out? Brian Wright And The Sneakups previously. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:13 AM PST - 6 comments

Intrepid reporter embarks on a quest to pet every breed in the Westminster Dog Show. (SL Washington Post article; gift link, no subscription required.)
posted by yankeefog at 5:30 AM PST - 21 comments

A New Centrism is Rising in Washington (NYT gift)
posted by box at 4:31 AM PST - 114 comments

Carolina wrens have expanded their range northward over the past century. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:24 AM PST - 20 comments

Like old-school technology? The last typewriter shop in the Boston area is for sale.
posted by JanetLand at 4:09 AM PST - 10 comments

“When you first start out playing Magic, when you're playing with kids in the schoolyard or around the kitchen table with cards that your older brother played with, that is the way it works. Your friend will have a card you don't have. But when you enter the store system, then that's no longer the way it works, you just get many, many more cards, to the point where the magical aspect of having unique cards which nobody else has goes away.” from The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong [Defector; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:02 AM PST - 48 comments

In a forest in Melbourne's east, Daisy is drawn to the smell of something barely bigger than a grain of rice. Daisy is thought to be the only dog in the world using her nose to save a critically endangered mushroom.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:04 PM PST - 7 comments

"Individually an audience might be comprised of idiots, collectively they are never wrong." The New Yorker interviews Academy Award-winning director George Miller [ungated] about filmmaking, editing, and working with his wife and collaborator Margaret Sixel on Furiosa.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:06 PM PST - 7 comments

What Game of Thrones means to today’s television-makers, 5 years after the finale - includes writers from Shogun, Wheel of Time, BSG (and DS9) and more.
posted by Artw at 5:59 PM PST - 62 comments

Spacey Unmasked [Wikipedia] is a Channel 4 documentary about Kevin Spacey's sexual misconduct allegations presented in two parts: Spacey Unmasked Episode 1 of 2 [55m], Spacey Unmasked Episode 2 of 2 [51m]
posted by hippybear at 5:52 PM PST - 29 comments

Some Conservative Christians Are Stepping Away From the Gender Wars [SLNYT] (archive link)
posted by clawsoon at 5:18 PM PST - 31 comments

A stolen Willem de Kooning painting was found in the home of Rita and Jerry Alter after they died (a very worth reading previously). New evidence suggests that's not all they stole. [more inside]
posted by OrangeDisk at 3:27 PM PST - 8 comments

Suspected Meteor Turns Sky Over Portugal an Astonishing Neon Blue [The Daily Beast] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:10 PM PST - 21 comments

Reports hitting the wires of a ‘hard landing’ of helicopter involving Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian
posted by numberstation at 12:30 PM PST - 80 comments

Ed Dwight, (born September 9, 1933 wikipedia) the first black astronaut, goes to space sixty-three years after Kennedy had made him part of the NASA team.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:19 PM PST - 10 comments

Parallel cinema maestro Shyam Benegal's acclaimed film Manthan was crowdfunded by half a million small dairy farmers putting in ₹2 each. Nearly a half century later, a newly mastered copy is premiering at Cannes. It tells a fictionalized account of the real-life story of dairy collectivization among poor and exploited small dairy farmers, the story of the famous Amul cooperative. [more inside]
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:36 AM PST - 1 comment

Jesse Welles is a singer/songwriter in the protest tradition: War Isn’t Murder; Cancer; Fentanyl; The Olympics; Whistle Boeing; Payola; Happy Mother’s Day; Fat; God, Abraham, and Xanax.
posted by scruss at 11:32 AM PST - 5 comments

The Criterion Collection, a revered distributor of classic and arthouse cinema, built a vast library of 3,500+ films over the last 40 years. It can be overwhelming, even for cinephiles. Want a savvy friend to guide you? Enter Criterion's Closet Picks, a lo-fi YouTube series which invites top filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other artists into the vault to freely sample while musing about core influences, all-time favorites, and hidden gems. Highlights: Willem Dafoe - Maya + Ethan Hawke - The Daniels (EEAAO) - Richard Ayoade - Comic Patton Oswalt - Yo La Tengo - Cinematographers Roger + James Deakins - Charlie Day - Nathan Lane - John Waters - VG designer Hideo Kojima - Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) - Dan Levy (Schitt's Creek) - Cauleen Smith (Drylongso) - Animator Floyd Norman - Jane Schoenbrun - Paul Giamatti - Marc Maron - Wim Wenders - Cate Blanchett + Todd Field - Hari Nef - Photographer Tyler Mitchell - Molly Ringwald - Peter Sarsgaard - Udo Kier - Gael García Bernal - Pixar's Lee Unkrich - Singer St. Vincent - Critic Elvis Mitchell - Anna Karina - Bong Joon Ho (Parasite) - Flying Lotus - Agnès Varda - Alfonso Cuarón + Paweł Pawlikowski - Mary Harron - Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman - Carl Franklin - Roger Corman - Michael K. Williams - SNL's Bill Hader // Watch the full playlist, or see this cool database of picks (info), including the most popular.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:07 AM PST - 33 comments

The Guardian: Like the fictional pamphlet from Bridgerton, Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot, published in 1746 (here in archive.org) , has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work. A prolific anti-racist, proto-feminist writer, Haywood used her transgressive newsletter to expose 18th-century hypocrisies about race and gender. It was published weekly over nine issues. [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 10:51 AM PST - 1 comment

Some say that lying non-player characters can motivate player characters, at the cost of paranoia. Some say that characters in crime fiction may be justified in their dishonesty. Marvel comic books are full of liars. Psychology experts have advice for you about how to spot liars. Some recent research has addressed factors associated with designing video games with falsehoods. A relevant previous Ask. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:20 AM PST - 33 comments

"Orchestra Harlow's answer to the Who's Tommy -- Hommy, A Latin Opera [YT playlist], and one of the few concept albums we know from the New York Latin scene of the time! [Dusty Groove] The tracks are fairly short, and they're separated by short "interludes" throughout the album that feature some cool spoken bits that trace the story of the record...although Orchestra Harlow borrow the name of the Who's album, the work here is all original -- not covers -- two long "acts", spread out over the sides of the record with a sophisticated approach that shows the Harlow group moving into much deeper territory at the time." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:52 AM PST - 3 comments

Jenny Nicholson's latest video is live, it's a 4 hour review retrospective of Disney's Star Wars Hotel.
posted by Pendragon at 3:30 AM PST - 192 comments

In this sense, the archival violence inflicted by Artificial Intelligence differs from that of a typical archive because the information stored within an AI system is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. It’s an archive built for a particular purpose, but inherently never meant to be seen—it is the apotheosis of information-as-exchange-value, the final untethering of reality from sense. The opaqueness of this archive returns us to the initial question of capitalism without humans, of an archive without a reader, of form without content. When we are gone, is it this form of control that will remain our record of existence? from An Archive at the End of the World
posted by chavenet at 1:52 AM PST - 3 comments

Little is known about the dingoes living in the Australian Capital Territory, but one researcher is trying to change that. Concerns have been raised over the current assumptions about the ACT's dingoes, and its hoped more understanding can help the animals coexist with humans and other species.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:01 AM PST - 4 comments

The simplest, most foolproof way to extend life is to do so backward, by adding years in reverse. [New Yorker / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:46 PM PST - 23 comments

YouTube channel Radical Planning recently posted Third Place vs. Right to the City [50m] which digs into the theory of cities mostly from a Marxist point of view. Ray Oldenberg, the founder of Third Place Theory, is discussed, and dissed, and then Right To The City as a concept is introduced and discussed. I found it to be informative and interesting and well-sourced.
posted by hippybear at 2:40 PM PST - 7 comments

Nerd John Siracusa reminisced about a certain National Geographic book from his childhood and the reactions flooded in. Siracusa says the cover image is “burned in his brain,” more than 40 years later. Nearly everyone who responded also had fond memories of the book. One respondent said he had written a blog post about in 2009. [more inside]
posted by fruitslinger at 2:34 PM PST - 21 comments

Faith No More was one of the most influential bands in the 1990s. The song and video for Epic was a hit in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Like many songs, it was about sexual frustration. They weren't the first to mix rap and metal, but they are the ones who have to apologize for it. But about that fish ... [more inside]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 1:18 PM PST - 37 comments

On average, marriages around the world don’t last terribly long. The average is eight years in the United States. Ten years in Singapore. Five years in France. And the key reasons couples cite for divorcing are always the same: extramarital affairs. Lack of intimacy. Lack of commitment. Add to that the stresses of work. Especially if your work is having sex with other people. From RIP Jose and Daniele Duval: Enduring, Forever Love [The Rialto Report] (NSFW photos and text)
posted by chavenet at 12:17 PM PST - 13 comments

In 1586, Jacques Bellot published one of the earliest printed phrasebooks for refugees, the Familiar Dialogues: For the Instruction of The[m], That Be Desirous to Learne to Speake English, and Perfectlye to Pronou[n]ce the Same. [...] The book, in 16mo, is laid out in three parallel columns: English, French, and a quasi-phonetic transcription of the sounds of the English text. [...] Bellot says “I have written the English not onely so as the inhibaters of the country do write it: But also, as it is, and must be pronoun[n]ced”. [...] While men had contact with the local community through their work and would have developed enough spoken English to get by, their wives and other family members who were mostly at home had limited opportunities to learn the local language. At this time, there was significant local hostility to foreigners in England, and [...] “a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering” [...] The content of the Familiar Dialogues belies its audience in that it caters to the immediate language needs of refugees and deals with everyday interactions. These include going to school, shopping and eating a meal [...] Indeed , this little book, with its focus on domestic situations rather than travel/touristic situations, anticipates the refugee phrasebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Jacques Bellot’s Familiar Dialogues: An Early Modern Refugee Phrasebook // Read the book on Project Gutenberg // The history of Huguenot refugees in England // Linguist Simon Roper has a neat video exploring (and re-enacting) the book's practical "Street English"
posted by Rhaomi at 11:19 AM PST - 9 comments

Podcast (2:42:24) with transcript. Christopher Brown is a professor at Columbia specializing in the slave trade and abolition. He argues that abolition, though obvious in retrospect, was not inevitable and relied on a particular set of circumstances that could have been disrupted at many points. He has also written about Arming Slaves and has an interesting review of Capitalism and Slavery at LRB.
posted by hermanubis at 9:08 AM PST - 5 comments

NPR reporting that actor Dabney Coleman is dead at 92. Dabney Coleman was practically ubiquitous in the early to mid 80’s by appearing in films like 9 to 5, Tootsie, Cloak and Dagger, On Golden Pond, and War Games. [more inside]
posted by zooropa at 8:47 AM PST - 48 comments

Mr. Samuel's Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults is a short film in 4 parts by Yara Asmar, a musician, puppeteer, and filmmaker from Beirut. The creator describes it so: "In a wonky universe set within the fake walls of an old abandoned children’s TV show, Mr Samuel and his friends -peculiar, ugly puppets navigating the strange thing that is time- attempt to make sense of it all through stories, songs and arduous loops of nonsensical chores." [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:53 AM PST - 3 comments

"This research introduces Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI (PANGeA), a structured approach for leveraging large language models (LLMs), guided by a game designer's high-level criteria, to generate narrative content for turn-based role-playing video games (RPGs)." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:32 AM PST - 25 comments

How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder. Class, nativism and gender stereotypes all played a role in Borden’s acquittal for the 1892 killings of her father and stepmother. (Smithsonian magazine.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:10 AM PST - 22 comments

He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man’s fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:04 AM PST - 9 comments

The song Our Toanga by the Sea has been produced by the children and wider community of Hampden [map link], and it's simply a nice look at a rural New Zealand South Island coastal settlement (on Highway 1 just North of Dunedin). I think this has come out at the right time as (most of) the people of NZ are very worried about the new government. We need to remind ourselves of what we have so we can move forward again - this song I think will help. Toanga in the song name is Māori for treasure Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand. The online Māori Dictionary is an extraordinary resource with a nice format, all about the words of our place.
posted by unearthed at 9:56 PM PST - 4 comments

Over 15 years ago, Microsoft released Photosynth [previously], a nifty tool that could correlate dozens of photos of the same place from different angles in order to make a sort of virtual tour using photogrammetry, a technique that went on to influence Google Earth's 3D landscapes and virtual reality environments. But what if you tried the same thing with cartoons? Enter Toon3D, a novel approach to applying photogrammetry principles to hand-drawn animation. The results are imperfect due to the inherent inconsistency of drawn environments, but it's still rather impressive to see a virtual camera moving around glitched-out versions of the Krusty Krab, Bojack Horseman's living room, or the train car from Spirited Away. Interestingly, the same approach works about as well on paintings or even AI-generated video; see also the similar technique of neural radiance fields (NERFs) for creating realistic high-fidelity virtual recreations of real (and unreal) environments.
posted by Rhaomi at 4:36 PM PST - 17 comments

Stephen Malinowski is a YouTuber who makes animated scores, usually of Bach's music, but today I discovered something completely different: his spectacular score for Teruna Jaya, a classic of Balinese gamelan music (12 min.). [more inside]
posted by mpark at 4:21 PM PST - 10 comments

The beauty of concrete. "Why are buildings today drab and simple, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor." A long article by Samuel Hughes describing the history of how ornamentation is produced.
posted by russilwvong at 12:14 PM PST - 49 comments

These details emerged in 2010, when the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, was investigating the killings. The CBI charged Shah with kidnapping, extortion and murder. It alleged that the officers who killed Sheikh and his wife were working on Shah’s orders... Today, Amit Shah isn’t home minister for Gujarat, but all of India. From the heart of power in Delhi, he is in charge of domestic policy, commands the capital city’s police force, and oversees the Indian state’s intelligence apparatus. He is, simply put, the second-most powerful man in the country. How Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, runs India.
posted by splitpeasoup at 12:00 PM PST - 5 comments

"Designing a chair is a very constrained exercise: the general dimensions and angles are very much fixed," Yovanovitch said. "Designing a shoe is even more constrained and technical." from Christian Louboutin and Pierre Yovanovitch perch chairs on legs informed by "iconic women"
posted by chavenet at 11:56 AM PST - 17 comments

Young schoolchildren from County Cork, working with a non-profit children's music & creative space, have created a piece called 'The Spark" for Cruinniú na nÓg, which is the national free day of creativity for young people, run by the Creative Ireland Programme’s Youth Plan. [cw: strobe transition effect on first link]

Take a moment to imagine what you think it might sound like, before you click the link and enjoy 'The Spark'.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 9:03 AM PST - 15 comments

"I’m bored of that conversation and I don’t want it to be the only thing I’m known for." Kathleen Hanna interviewed about her newly released memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (archive link here)
posted by Kitteh at 8:31 AM PST - 14 comments

Conscious Ants and Human Hives by Peter Watts has an entertaining take on Neuralink. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 5:39 AM PST - 19 comments

A scratched wooden door found by chance at the top of a medieval turret has been revealed to be an “astonishing” graffiti-covered relic from the French revolutionary wars, including a carving that could be a fantasy of Napoleon Bonaparte being hanged. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:18 AM PST - 6 comments

Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated (‘perfed’) and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and ’90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD’s spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as ‘commercial tokens’. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:43 AM PST - 39 comments

Old and improved, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew recently released a lovely tree of life of... well, plants [pdf]. [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 8:56 PM PST - 3 comments

Joshua Charow is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in NYC. He spent the past couple years ringing doorbells to find and interview over 30 artists who are living under the protection of the Loft Law to create his first photography book, 'Loft Law. The Last of New York City's Original Artist Lofts'. [more inside]
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:56 PM PST - 7 comments

Last week, General Motors announced that it would end production of the Chevrolet Malibu, which the company first introduced in 1964. Although not exactly a head turner (the Malibu was “so uncool, it was cool,” declared the New York Times), the sedan has become an American fixture, even an icon [...] Over the past 60 years, GM produced some 10 million of them. With a price starting at a (relatively) affordable $25,100, Malibu sales exceeded 130,000 vehicles last year, a 13% annual increase and enough to rank as the #3 Chevy model [...] Still, that wasn’t enough to keep the car off GM’s chopping block. [...] In that regard, it will have plenty of company. Ford stopped producing sedans for the U.S. market in 2018. And it was Sergio Marchionne, the former head of Stellantis, who triggered the headlong retreat in 2016 when he declared that Dodge and Chrysler would stop making sedans. [...] As recently as 2009, U.S. passenger cars [...] outsold light trucks (SUVs, pickups, and minivans), but today they’re less then 20% of new car purchases. The death of the Malibu is confirmation, if anyone still needs it, that the Big Three are done building sedans. That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers—and it may ultimately come around to bite Detroit.

Detroit Killed the Sedan. We May All Live to Regret It [Fast Company]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:35 PM PST - 119 comments

Neighbors and neighborhoods near Midway Airport. I loved these photos, seeing them is like biking around in these neighborhoods. It's so easy to take photos now, but ordinary life with good composition and good light is still an unexpected pleasure.
posted by lwxxyyzz at 1:44 PM PST - 19 comments

The Ugly Muppet Toy Pageant 2024.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:48 PM PST - 10 comments

Let’s go back to December 1942, to the corner of Wabash and Ohio, to a small abandoned basement tavern that was also once a pizzeria named the Pelican Tap. The new tenants living directly above the abandoned tavern are a recently married couple with their newborn daughter. The 39-year-old father is the painter and restaurateur Richard Riccardo, owner of the famous Riccardo’s Studio Restaurant on Rush Street. from The Secret History of the Original Deep-Dish Crust [Chicago]
posted by chavenet at 12:42 PM PST - 41 comments

The New Yorker takes on the dubious evidence that led to Letby's conviction and the bizarre UK media restrictions that governed coverage of the case. [CW: infanticide] Rachel Aviv's article paints a picture of a neonatal intensive care unit undergoing the same catastrophic deterioration as the rest of the National Health Service—a topic the magazine has covered recently—and how an especially competent and determined nurse might just end up at the scene of several patients' deaths because she was called in to help on virtually all difficult cases. [more inside]
posted by TheProfessor at 10:13 AM PST - 65 comments

Sock It To Me, Baby! was one of blue-eyed soul singer Mitch Ryder's top-ten hits, from early 1967. The expression is possibly best-remembered today from when a presidential candidate uttered it: In 1968, when Nixon said 'Sock It To Me' on "Laugh-In," TV Was Never Quite the Same Again. (Smithsonian magazine, 2018) [more inside]
posted by Rash at 9:47 AM PST - 6 comments

How did Ghostbusters II create the talking Vigo the Carpathian painting? Glen Eytchison was deep in the planning stages of his next theatrical production when he got a phone call from Industrial Light & Magic. It was early 1989, and employees at George Lucas’s famed visual effects house needed to create a painting of a 16th-century Carpathian warlord that could come to life for director Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters sequel. They had to do it fast: The movie was due to come out in June. Could Eytchison help them? [more inside]
posted by Servo5678 at 7:07 AM PST - 10 comments

There was allure beyond negation. Branson’s geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O’Neill has termed Primordial America, the “buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve.” “Wherever they hail from,” 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer went on, “they feel they are the Heartland.” No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:38 AM PST - 45 comments

As previously mentioned, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is an exhaustive exploration of that music genre, starting before it existed and currently up to 1966. It is notable for the extensive research that goes into each episode (the detailed exploration of where Johnny Cash drew inspiration from is particularly striking), so much so that another podcaster (not linked to here for obvious reasons) has apparently been plagiarising entire episodes.
posted by Grinder at 12:34 AM PST - 19 comments

The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson) has posted about finding art made by a woman, Laura Perea, who was in a psychiatric hospital from the 1940s. She describes what she has discovered about Laura Perea's life and family, and reproduces her art, in three posts: Help me solve a haunting art mystery?; Art mystery possibly solved?; Uncovering the mystery of L. Perea and trying to erase the stigma of mental illness. Content warning: death by suicide of one of Laura Perea's family members. [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 11:57 PM PST - 10 comments

30,000 rare oysters are being reintroduced to Firth of Forth. (The Firth of Forth is in Scotland, it is a body of water just North of Edinburgh.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:20 PM PST - 13 comments

'Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there'.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:52 PM PST - 23 comments

From Donald Glover: Childish Gambino - Little Foot Big Foot (Official Video) ft. Young Nudy [6m] Genius lyrics page.
posted by hippybear at 1:53 PM PST - 29 comments

Greatest human alive today, Bobby Fingers, has released another video, researching and creating a diorama of the 1999 incident where heartthrob Fabio came back bloodied after participating in the inaugural ride of the "Apollo's Chariot" roller coaster at Busch Gardens. [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 1:39 PM PST - 33 comments

Slovakia’s populist prime minister shot in assassination attempt, shocking Europe before elections [AP] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:35 PM PST - 36 comments

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. - Her fellow Republicans were not relieved to hear this news.
posted by Artw at 11:55 AM PST - 56 comments

Remnants of a Legendary Typeface Have Been Rescued From the River Thames
posted by jacquilynne at 11:50 AM PST - 16 comments

"The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which means some lose, like, 5 years and some lose like 25. You don't know which one will be you." Smoking is Awesome by Kurzgesagt and How "Anti-Vaping" Ads Trick You Into Vaping by Maggie Mae Fish are two sides of a coin: Maggie Mae Fish explains the media literacy needed to determine what makes effective anti-smoking ads and how tobacco (and now vaping) companies direct policy towards ineffective anti-smoking ads. Kurzgesagt has an informative and effective anti-smoking video.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:39 AM PST - 105 comments

Buckingham Palace has revealed King Charles III's first official post-coronation portrait, and the work by artist Jonathan Yeo has proven to be...divisive in its design. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:20 AM PST - 100 comments

Perhaps Donald John Trump will have only one criminal trial this year. The prosecution's case in his state trial for using hush money to pay off a porn star to illegally influence his election is finishing with ex-fixer Michael Cohen testifying. [more inside]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:09 AM PST - 75 comments

Can sustainable farming and land use practices really scale to meet the challenges of our planet - or are they just niche hobby projects? Learn about how acquifers work and are recharged. Find out how the Pani Foundation water cup inspired Indian farmers to compete in building water retention structures for their villages. Learn about a Mesoamerican farming technology originally scaled up by the Aztecs. Hear American regenerative agriculture pioneer Gabe Brown, telling his story to the farmers who supply a major British supermarket chain as they move towards regenerative practices. Learn how a British city council responded to a major flood event by investing in beautiful sustainable urban drainage across the city and its suburbs (a presenter's connection drops out near the start of their video but it's worth skipping past it!)
posted by quacks like a duck at 7:08 AM PST - 2 comments

"The ice cream had a nice toothsomeness to it, with enough structure to hold everything together. For our absolute favorite chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich, you’ll have to head to your corner store."
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:57 AM PST - 55 comments

Alice Munro, master of short stories, wove intense tales of human drama from small-town life is the Globe and Mail obituary [archive] for the Canadian literary giant who passed away Monday night. She received the Nobel in literature in 2013 among countless other prizes. She also cofounded Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia, who posted a remembrance on Instagram. The New Yorker, where many of her stories first appeared, has a section with links to her short fiction, as well as personal essays, appraisals and an interview and an obituary [archive]. The 1978 classic Moons of Jupiter was recently featured on their fiction podcast, and it is also available as text.
posted by Kattullus at 3:29 AM PST - 44 comments

At 14, Ned stumbled upon a perfect jungle. He didn't know he would spend the next two years fighting to save it. When a teenager uncovered a critical refuge for endangered species, it marked the start of a journey that eventually saw the parcel of land named after him.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:53 AM PST - 3 comments

In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is comprised of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin’s inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million. from Time Is Running Out in the Hunt for Rare Bitcoin [Wired; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:27 AM PST - 42 comments

Indiana judge rules tacos, burritos are sandwiches
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:27 PM PST - 82 comments

Simple Rules for Better Sandwiches [11m30s] is part of the Technique with Lan Lam series from America's Test Kitchen. From suggestions for contrasting ingredients to techniques like pressing, and other ways to examine the ways that sandwiches could be improved. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:46 PM PST - 50 comments

Words About War. "From George Orwell’s critique of the language of totalitarian regimes to today, discussions of war and foreign policy have been full of dehumanizing euphemisms, bloodless jargon, little-known government acronyms, and troubling metaphors that hide warfare’s damage. This guide aims to help people write and talk about war and foreign policy more accurately, more honestly, and in ways people outside the elite Washington, DC foreign policy “blob” can understand." Link to the PDF. [more inside]
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:47 PM PST - 28 comments

The Desktop Cat Cursor (not free but really cheap) , from Samperson, turns your computer's pointer into a big cat's paw extending onto the screen. Currently only for Windows 10 and 11 but a Mac version is in the works. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:05 PM PST - 22 comments

In her essay ‘The Double Standard [PDF] of Aging,’ Susan Sontag explores how a “visceral horror felt at aging female flesh” is entrenched in our visual culture, manifested in caricatures of viragos and witches. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power,” she wrote, “the revulsion against aging in women is the cutting edge of a whole set of oppressive structures (often masked as gallantries) that keep women in their place.” Reclaiming elderly sexuality is an act of defiance, a rebellion against a youth-obsessed culture, fuelled by misogynistic gender norms. from The Untold Lives of Mature OnlyFans Performers [Huck] CW: NSFW language, it's about OnlyFans and has pictures of women in lingerie.
posted by chavenet at 11:22 AM PST - 12 comments

Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you’re sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can’t quite remember… Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time, with a palette of 4096 possible colours, pushing the limits of these 80’s era machines memory, these early graphic artists and hackers alike have left an indelible mark on the world of digital art and internet culture, only to be forgotten in the passing of time. But what made this boring business computer from Japan so special?

The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer [contains some NSFW pixel art] / More striking imagery: Incredible pictures from an era of games we never got to experience [CW: flashing lights] - Tumblr: High quality [SFW] pixel art from PC-98 games - Pixelation.org: The Art of PC98 - Amino: The world of PC-98 Pixel Art - Galleries from @noirlac, @item, and @densetsu.ch [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:10 AM PST - 7 comments

What happens when you're an amazing young musical talent who's discovered while busking and then signed to a record label deal but things go terribly wrong and you lose it all. In this case, you spend 8 years searching for a way to not die and then proceed to produce a distinctive track upholding a promise to advocate and support the Millions Missing who are thusly forsaken. This may be the first time any song that brings a story about M.E. and Lyme Disease hits the top 40 of the official charts; brought to us by an independent artist who has been unable to tour. [more inside]
posted by mightshould at 9:22 AM PST - 20 comments

Coal is more than a commodity. It is 300-million-year-old life matter transformed into carbon. It performs a vital function – storing carbon underground. It is rich with meaning and portent, and it deserves our attention. Human lives are ephemeral, yet our actions in the here-and-now shape an unseen future. Through its dynamic materiality, coal connects us to Deep Time and Nature. It reminds us of our own Earth origins and helps us re-vision how to live on a fragile and finite planet.
posted by sepviva at 8:53 AM PST - 13 comments

You kind of just have to click through to experience the madness. It's literally the worst. All the worst "features" combined into the worst interface of all time - so far.
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:01 AM PST - 28 comments

Internet use linked to higher wellbeing, global study suggests.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:13 AM PST - 37 comments

Edward Burne-Jones was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Frank Cadogan Cowper was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Christiana Herringham was so late in the game, she was more of a Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance painter. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:24 AM PST - 6 comments

All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests. Public spending becomes profligate, debt burdens become intolerable, inflation spirals out of control. All of which is to say that the state is subsidizing marginal lives more than it is subsidizing capital. from Extravagances of Neoliberalism, a conversation with Melinda Cooper [The Baffler; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:19 AM PST - 53 comments

Target to Cut LGBTQ Pride Month Products From Some Stores After Backlash (Bloomberg, archive.is) [more inside]
posted by box at 3:18 PM PST - 68 comments

I cannot tell you how or why, but at some point a few years back I discovered that Instagram Stories not only allows you unlimited emojis, it ALSO allows you to enlarge them to an apparently infinite degree. And so, may I present: FAMOUS PAINTINGS RECREATED USING ONLY EMOJIS! All on one page: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Klimt's The Kiss, Wood's American Gothic, Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam and more, all moulded from shaded yellow spheres. [more inside]
posted by ambrosen at 1:19 PM PST - 27 comments

OpenAI unveils GPT-4o, a new flagship "omnimodel" capable of processing text, audio, and video. While it delivers big improvements in speed, cost, and reasoning ability, perhaps the most impressive is its new voice mode -- while the old version was a clunky speech --> text --> speech approach with tons of latency, the new model takes in audio directly and responds in kind, enabling real-time conversations with an eerily realistic voice, one that can recognize multiple speakers and even respond with sarcasm, laughter, and other emotional content of speech. Rumor has it Apple has neared a deal with the company to revamp an aging Siri, while the advance has clear implications for customer service, translation, education, and even virtual companions (or perhaps "lovers", as the allusions to Spike Jonze's Her, the Samantha-esque demo voice, and opening the door to mature content imply). Meanwhile, the offloading of most premium ChatGPT features to the free tier suggests something bigger coming down the pike.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:14 PM PST - 150 comments

(CW for talk of suicide) A short film (on X) made by Wolverhampton Wanderers FC. The club's Head 4 Health initiative.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 12:10 PM PST - 4 comments

Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general ‘we’ who have ‘forgotten’ these women are also the ‘we’ who were not taught them in the first place. Such generalisations risk shifting the focus, and the responsibility, away from the agents of our ignorance: the historians and philosophers who made a world in which certain texts were deemed unworthy of preservation and the history of women’s thought was kept to the margins.

– A Comet that Bodes Mischief by Sophie Smith. She discussed women in philosophy on the LRB Podcast.
posted by Kattullus at 12:02 PM PST - 4 comments

Universidad Santo Tomás (Saint Thomas Aquinas) is the oldest (founded: 1580) university in Colombia. The music on some of their promotional videos e.g. Admisión 2022, 2011 micro-drama, another 2011 video, evening study, and a cover, may sound familiar to listeners of a reclusive Scottish electronic music duo, with an overanalytical fanbase, who have NOT RELEASED AN ALBUM IN 11 YEARS sorry about that. The original, the lyrics, and a meta-nostalgic fan video for 50+ Brits. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 10:45 AM PST - 12 comments

Mostly I just saw two links about pie in the face and here they are. Ask A Manager is asked whether or not a manager HAS to have pie thrown in their face at work. "Under no reasonable definition does it fall within “other duties as assigned.” Judge John Hodgman was also asked in the NYT if someone has to keep pie-ing her husband in the face when he loves it, she doesn't. "Shoving a pie in someone’s face is assault, and you should not do it unless you are certain your partner is into it. Unfortunately, it turns out your husband is really into that pie, and he has unfairly transformed your revenge into his kink." [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:18 AM PST - 114 comments

After departing the BlueSky board of directors, Block Head and social media mogul Jack Dorsey gave an interview with venture capitalist Mike Solana in which he explained that Twitter rejecting advertisers is a blow for free speech and BlueSky is repeating the mistakes of Twitter, like moderation. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:44 AM PST - 63 comments

The USDA has updated their plant hardiness zone maps. The 2012 USDA hardiness zones were calculated using the average lowest winter temperature for the observation period of 1976-2005. The new zones are calculated using the years 1991-2020. These two observation windows overlap. Colors show the difference between the two 30-year averages for each place on the map. Choose a city or region to see what's changed over 44 years.
posted by fader at 9:12 AM PST - 19 comments

I'm not quite sure what there is to say about Silverback is very happy to make up with his son.｜Shabani Group [11m25s] other than there's a lot of behavior on display here that feels relatable, and also some that is really alien. I don't know how much others might engage with this, but I found it interesting enough to share.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 AM PST - 7 comments

“I knew we were right. I knew we had done our work. I knew the case was iron tight.” (slTorontoStar) (archived link here) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:28 AM PST - 23 comments

A comedian’s only responsibility is to make the audience laugh. If you’re not making the audience laugh, then you’re failing at your job. You want to speak truth to power, you want to make a political statement, you want to be confessional—none of that is more or less valid than doing ventriloquism or doing an impression of Christopher Walken. They’re all equal, so long as they make people laugh. If it’s more important to you to do something that doesn’t make the audience laugh, fine, but it’s not comedy. It’s something else. from Two Guys Walk into a Bar: Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy [The Sun Magazine]
posted by chavenet at 1:29 AM PST - 30 comments

There have been a few posts here on the blue in recent years celebrating some rising young music stars, Yoyoka Soma and Ellen Alaverdyan, to name two. Often, when we see talented young people like that, our first thought is "Hey, they should collaborate!". Well, our wish has been granted. [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 10:30 PM PST - 6 comments

Here's the 1999 Broadway production of Oklahoma [3h], directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Hugh Jackman, Maureen Lipman, and Josefine Gabrille. It's a great production of the classic version of the story. More modern productions have been more subversive, but this is a more traditional presentation of this quite old musical.
posted by hippybear at 7:31 PM PST - 17 comments

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere — Even at the UN’s “Plastic Free” Conference. From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center. Their message? Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. "These plastics deliver water" on an ad depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:26 PM PST - 32 comments

A tour of a 300 year old business that makes pastels in nearly 2000 colors [youtube - 2024/05/12 Business Insider] [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 5:30 PM PST - 8 comments

A Northland island (in Aotearoa/New Zealand) has a very unusual (but good) problem...too many kiwi. Residents on Moturoa, in Ipipiri, have been forced to relocate the reclusive birds after their population swelled into the hundreds. (This was the result of a local program to control feral predators like cats and foxes - in most parts of New Zealand, kiwi are under threat.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:55 PM PST - 13 comments

Quadradius is back, baby! (Note that it is still in development mode and has not yet gathered many players, so arranging your own matches may be necessary). Previously.
posted by prefpara at 1:48 PM PST - 5 comments

Lest you believe that interest in studying the habits of unstudied coolness was limited to the world of food and drink, recall the concurrent obsession with “off-duty” beauty and style, a concept that lost its novelty with the advent of Instagram. These days, fascination with figures in the culinary world seems to be very “on-duty”—the tools they use, the shoes and jackets they wear. Today, few may remember that copas de balón were first embraced by lauded chefs rather than marketers at beverage companies ... But the allure of a choice that’s more utilitarian than aesthetic has helped the copa de balón endure. It’s unexpected and delightful, like a fancy sandwich served on a quarter sheet tray. from The Balloon Effect
posted by chavenet at 1:21 PM PST - 17 comments

[B]ooks in the public domain—books anyone with a digital file, a printer, and a dream can produce and sell—can be a sweet side hustle for people looking to make a quick buck, and they are free to make their own choices when it comes to the cover art they select, but this one cracked me up because it is not even close to representing the contents or the tone of the book. I decided to do a deep dive into the world of public domain publishing, to see what else was out there… (Karen T. Brissette) Bonus: 50 Very Bad Book Covers for Literary Classics (LitHub)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:12 PM PST - 40 comments

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a ubiquitous markup language for describing the layout and design of a webpage separate from the content, typically specifying things like text formatting, background color, page alignment, etc. But as with emoticons and ASCII art before it, CSS can be repurposed to become the content. Enter CSS drawing, an intricate art form that uses the conventions of the language to create illustrations and even animation using only standard design elements. Some standout examples from around the web: A Single Div, where every new illustration is contained within one <div> tag; designer Lynn Fisher also has a previous version along with a whole catalog of "weird websites, niche data projects, and CSS experiments" - Another collection of single-div projects - Start a digital bonfire - The Simpsons (animated!) in CSS - 173 CSS drawings on Dribble - How I started drawing CSS Images - css-doodle, a web component for drawing patterns with CSS - Creating Realistic Art with CSS - The CSS Zen Garden, a collection of beautiful CSS stylesheets - CSS previously on MeFi
posted by Rhaomi at 12:35 PM PST - 15 comments

Chatbot vs Chatbot The Chatbot Arena will randomly load two chatbots in answer to your prompt. You mark which one gives the better answer. The Arena uses these human responses to rank the top LLM chatbots on an ongoing basis. Over 1,000,000 prompts have been submitted and scored. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:49 AM PST - 36 comments

Does what it says on the tin
posted by Gorgik at 8:28 AM PST - 6 comments

YouTube is shoving animal videos at me, and so here are some animal videos! Here are 10 minutes of above-average cat videos; it's a compilation; it has annoying narration. Here are four minutes of owl videos with music that is not totally awful. Here is two minutes of an adorable rhinoceros calf getting acquainted with a zookeeper while mom looks on. And finally 3m30s of the most dramatic husky with their thoughts interpreted for the viewer.* [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:59 AM PST - 11 comments

Liza sings a song while signing. This is new to me. A beautiful Charles Aznavour song. 1992 Radio City Music Hall.
posted by Czjewel at 3:37 AM PST - 2 comments

Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more. from I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help. [Mother Jones; ungated] [CW: Elon Musk]
posted by chavenet at 2:19 AM PST - 163 comments

Slate: [W]e spoke to Maggie McCart, an administrative assistant at an Illinois university, who suffers from an extremely rare disease called prosopometamorphopsia, which inflicts patients with a variety of wild hallucinations when they look at someone’s face. (archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 12:55 AM PST - 20 comments

Astronomers detect Milky Way black hole with mass 33 times that of the Sun. Astronomers have discovered the second-largest black hole known to be in the Milky Way, and it's located just 2000 light-years from Earth.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:10 PM PST - 26 comments

Roger Corman has left us. The ‘Movies’ as we knew them wouldn’t have reached their heights without him. He jump/kick-started the careers of Coppola, Nicholson, Cameron, Demme, Scorsese and so, so many more. With his passing it feels as if cinema, as we knew it…and perhaps the analog 20th century has truly passed. He also directed Teenage Caveman.
posted by jettloe at 8:33 PM PST - 75 comments

I don't know why YouTube is serving me all these concerts right now, but I'm not complaining. Here's Soundgarden - Hyde Park - Hard Rock Calling 7-13-2012 - Pro Shot (HQ) Full Show [1h54m], arguably the band at the height of their career after taking a break and reforming. This concert is shortly before the release of their final album King Animal. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:29 PM PST - 12 comments

30 years ago, a set of paintings for a showing in Sweden painted by Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi went missing. They have been found and returned to her. From an online biography: "In her work, Mmakgabo Sebidi traverses mental and physical landscapes with an eye trained on the dangerous, the discomfiting, the traumatic and the ecstatic in human experience. She is deeply grounded in her rural upbringing and traditions but also finely attuned to the rhythms of the city in which she has spent much of her adult life. Sebidi brings together these two worlds in works of great visionary and prophetic power. Her themes are wide-ranging: her cultural roots, the wisdom of the ancestors, the ravages of the modern world on the human psyche, the loss of tradition, the potential of human creativity to build relationships and restore the past." Helen Sebidi to exhibit rediscovered work after 30 years. (SLYT)
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 5:44 PM PST - 3 comments

Thomas Jefferson University apologizes after commencement presenter flubs names. Unfortunately for the hapless presenter, the name cards used the International Phonetic Alphabet, a technical rendering used mainly by linguists. kænt rid ðɪs? Don't let it happen to you! Learn how to pronounce IPA spelling today, test your skills, or just entertain yourself with the world's most unintentionally hilarious soundboards.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:54 PM PST - 24 comments

WaPo gift link: Inside the surreal world of $20,000 pet portraits THIS GETS EXTREMELY WEIRD, features Alan Tudyk getting ESPECIALLY weird with his choice of pet portraits. (Disclaimer: gory descriptions within.) [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:05 PM PST - 30 comments

WHAT YOUR FAVORITE ’90s BAND SAYS ABOUT THE KIND OF BORED SUBURBAN MOM YOU ARE TODAY [more inside]
posted by supermedusa at 12:35 PM PST - 75 comments

A synthesizer game.
posted by chavenet at 12:16 PM PST - 10 comments

The Guardian (2021): "Mother charged with deepfake plot against daughter's cheerleading rivals". The Guardian (2024): "She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all"
posted by ShooBoo at 11:42 AM PST - 21 comments

This is a live feed (complete with screechy babies) of the successful return of Peregrins to Alcatraz. The mom is Larry (Lawrencium) from a nest on the UC Berkeley Campanile tower in 2018.
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Since this post has been taken down because the video has been taken down, I have since found three versions of Madonna - Live From Copacabana, Río de Janeiro, Brasil (The Celebration Tour 2024) [2h15m], of which this is the most recent. This is essentially a game of whack-a-mole, but it keeps getting reposted. Just search for "Madonna Celebration Rio" to find the newest version. Enjoy!
posted by hippybear at 8:25 AM PST - 12 comments

Well illustrated and weird as hell in a way I find really enjoyable.
posted by Shepherd at 5:24 AM PST - 9 comments

In a state with prolonged bouts of drought and unquenching thirst, stolen water is an indelible part of California lore. But this was not Los Angeles’ brazen gambit to take water from the Owens Valley. Or San Francisco’s ploy to flood part of Yosemite National Park for a reservoir. The water grab described in a federal indictment allegedly happened cat burglar-style, siphoned through a secret pipe, often after hours, to avoid detection. from Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood [LA Times; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:15 AM PST - 23 comments

Good morning Europe! The Grand Final of the 68th Eurovision Song Contest 2024 will take place today in Malmö, Sweden (detailed previously on the Blue). At least, it's supposed to. [more inside]
posted by fight or flight at 1:12 AM PST - 44 comments

This Is What Being in Your Twenties Was Like in 18th-Century London. A newly restored collection of letters describes a 27-year-old’s office job, social life and financial concerns beginning in 1719.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:42 PM PST - 10 comments

So, Jeff Daniels recently visited the Kelly Clarkson Show [13m]. It was an entirely lovely and kind visit full of humanity. But the real surprise is his confession of the love of playing guitar, having written a zillion original songs, and his performance of a song about how the guitar is his best friend and he moves Clarkson to tears with his performance. It's entirely unexpected, and I'm sorry to have spoiled it for you, but how else could I have gotten you to watch this interview? [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:56 PM PST - 13 comments

AI has fostered a lot of mash-ups in various styles. Some guy named demonflyingfox has been turning popular animated and live-action series into colorized versions from the fifties. I'm not really doing it justice so check out Friends, The Simpsons, and SpongBob SquarePants among many others. [more inside]
posted by bbrown at 4:07 PM PST - 50 comments

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, an English comedian with an interest in geography and a former geography teacher who's also very funny, are the Map Men ("...Map Men, Map Map Map Men Men" 🎵 ), whose highly entertaining YouTube channel is chock full of educational cartographic goodness. Try any of their (27) videos at random, or all of them—even the ads are worth watching. Their recent episodes on undersea internet cables and country codes wouldn't be a bad place to start for the extremely online. [more inside]
posted by rory at 1:28 PM PST - 20 comments

Context: Cheese Award Controversy. Cheese Professor: “In the US food-selling world, there is a term called Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS). For our store, and most natural foods stores, buyers won’t buy foods with ingredients that are not GRAS I looked at the Climax Blue ingredient list and there was something I didn’t recognize: kokum butter. I looked it up and, while approved for cosmetics and for one specific confection, it was not on the GRAS list. So we rejected it.” Elsewhere: Reddit, Plant based News, AgFunderNews.
posted by Wordshore at 12:39 PM PST - 42 comments

They Made A Crypto Shark Tank. It's Hilariously Bad.
posted by chavenet at 12:20 PM PST - 27 comments

This conference was only a minor part of the significant and apparently well-resourced campaign to elevate Karl to sainthood.
posted by bq at 10:19 AM PST - 26 comments

Haidee Chu writes about Manhattan's Flower District for The City - its history, its shop cats, and its remaining vendors' opinions on which is the better holiday for florists, Mothers Day or Valentines Day. With photos by Ben Fractenberg. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 9:41 AM PST - 4 comments

What should an artist in academia look like? Not like me, I've learned. By Jenny Irish.
posted by JanetLand at 9:30 AM PST - 70 comments

On Thursday, May 9, 2024, the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch -- its first since January 2005. Coinciding with a new moon, aurorae should be visible (weather permitting) much further than typical. The Northern/Western-specific current predictions from NOAO show the view line extending below 40 degrees Northern latitude. [more inside]
posted by miguelcervantes at 6:51 AM PST - 55 comments

The Waning Reign of the Wetland Architect We Barely Know (Hint: Not a Beaver) Little-appreciated, semiaquatic, and cute-as-hell, muskrats can survive almost anywhere. So where are they? (Brandon Keim for Hakai Magazine) [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 3:41 AM PST - 21 comments

In the dreamworld of the arts, every inanimate thing is animate, every object contains the entire world, millions of years of history and future and feeling. As she writes her story, which is ultimately her life, it can look like anything she wants. The more she thinks about it, the greater the possibilities. The more she’s cast out, the more she must innovate. The more she will be unique, the more her voice will be untamed. Whatever she is, whoever. She has lived for literature from the beginning and so literature will be her; her indomitable will shall make it so. Our young writer, still unpublished, is the essence of the word itself. Any of her books that may, that will come, be published, read—a footnote. from Every Ship Is a Passenger Too: On Publishing Today by Chris Molnar [LARB]
posted by chavenet at 1:15 AM PST - 13 comments

Rare handfish population returned to wild after riding out marine heatwave in tank. They've been gently coaxed out of the plastic bag and into the big, bad underwater world where they are exposed to the elements. Now, researchers have big hopes this small group of red handfish will not only survive, but thrive — the species is depending on it.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:09 AM PST - 5 comments

"High Math by Ma And Pa Kettle' (slyt. 3:23)
posted by clavdivs at 10:15 PM PST - 10 comments

Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism, goes on a deep, deep dive into AdVon, a fine purveyor of content slurry.
posted by ursus_comiter at 4:29 PM PST - 48 comments

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. [...] If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. [...] Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda.

The New Propaganda War: Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world. [SLAtlantic]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:26 PM PST - 171 comments

Zoom in on God's Hand [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:01 PM PST - 13 comments

The Ringer- Greatest Diss Tracks of All Time, Ranked As the Kendrick Lamar/ Drake feud continues (apparently won by Kendrick at this point), the Ringer looks over their listing of great diss tracks in hip-hop. At the Root, Noah McGee provides a different list. Alex Petridis also weighs in on the subject at the Grauniad.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 1:59 PM PST - 21 comments

David Bowie Live | 1983 | Sydney | Serious Moonlight Tour | Pro shot | Complete Concert [1h50m] "On the 20th November 1983, David Bowie performed his final Australian concert of the Serious Moonlight tour. This Betamax recording was taken from a sight screen feed made at that time. The first couple of numbers, plus the end have some artefacts but, as it hasn't been viewed in nearly 40 years, the quality overall has held up well. The audio was in mono and has been remastered to bring it out more." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:03 PM PST - 16 comments

Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us. [more inside]
posted by greta simone at 11:36 AM PST - 81 comments

Osaka trains derailed by giant cats [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:20 AM PST - 13 comments

Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad [more inside]
posted by signal at 9:49 AM PST - 214 comments

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only will only find one thread. Short fiction by Caroline M Yoachim.
posted by Artw at 8:39 AM PST - 5 comments

“the conclusions of this paper were disseminated to over 5 million people and less than 0.02% of them actually read the full text or the retraction notice. The result is roughly 5 million misinformed people”. What is ‘evidence-based’? [more inside]
posted by bq at 7:04 AM PST - 28 comments

"Tims is always going to be able to lean on the ordinary Canadians thing in their advertising. It is a habit.” [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:26 AM PST - 49 comments

How did Creed, the most hated band of the 1990s, become so beloved—and even cool? [Luke Winkie] sailed the seas with thousands of fellow lunatics to find out. [more inside]
posted by uncleozzy at 4:51 AM PST - 103 comments

Set to the music of recent Hawaiian artists, The Edge of Paradise (SLYT) is a quiet, contemplative documentary on Taylor Camp, a treehouse community of war veterans and hippies that thrived on a jungle-backed beach on Kaua'i in the 1960s and 1970s (cw: black and white archival stills of unclothed community members, oral recollections of police actions against the community).
posted by Gordion Knott at 3:57 AM PST - 4 comments

So please, remember: there are a very wide variety of ways to care about making sure that advanced AIs don’t kill everyone. Fundamentalist Christians can care about this; deep ecologists can care about this; solipsists can care about this; people who have no interest in philosophy at all can care about this. Indeed, in many respects, these essays aren’t centrally about AI risk in the sense of “let’s make sure that the AIs don’t kill everyone” (i.e., “AInotkilleveryoneism”) – rather, they’re about a set of broader questions about otherness and control that arise in the context of trying to ensure that the future goes well more generally. from Otherness and control in the age of AGI by Joe Carlsmith [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:31 AM PST - 12 comments

How King’s College Added 438 Solar Panels to a 500-Year-Old Chapel. The project sparked debate over how to decrease carbon emissions while preserving the historic structure’s architectural beauty.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:08 PM PST - 35 comments

I believe this is from 2007. The Seinfeld Roundtable [1h] has the core cast plus Larry David sitting around talking about the show. Michael Richards doesn't speak much. I enjoyed it enough to share.
posted by hippybear at 2:13 PM PST - 4 comments

f-off, Cartoonist K.C. Green's cathartic single-panel gag comics.
posted by MetaFilter World Peace at 12:18 PM PST - 19 comments

Steve Albini, lengendary producer (engineer) and musician has died of a heart attack at age 61. He worked with everyone from Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Nirvana, Pixies and The Breeders.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 11:15 AM PST - 143 comments

Eccentric conspiracist and Presidential candidate RFK, Jr. had brainworms. NYT: R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain. "The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain." [more inside]
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:58 AM PST - 118 comments

A rare archaeological object – thought to be the only one of its type in the former Roman Empire – has been discovered in Carlisle, England. The remnants of the Roman bathhouse at the Carlisle Cricket Club have revealed an extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple dye, the first of its kind ever discovered in northern Europe and possibly the entire Roman Empire. [...] Known as “imperial purple,” tyrian purple was an extremely valuable dye in ancient Rome because of its rich, vivid color, which denoted imperial authority, wealth, and status. It took a lot of resources and labor-intensive procedures to produce even small amounts, as it was made from thousands of crushed sea snails (Bolinus brandaris) from the Mediterranean. This rarity and exclusivity meant that it was more valuable than gold, sometimes up to three times as much by weight.

Fun fact: If a buyer wanted to know if there was something fishy about their exquisite dye, they could always see if it passed the smell test -- read the straight poop inside. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 9:58 AM PST - 16 comments

A solution that is only a solution for the people who can afford to be a part of the solution is not a solution A hour long video about cooking, food, race, gender, class and capitalism.
posted by Gorgik at 8:16 AM PST - 33 comments

Guardian: World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target. “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed. Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.” [Daily sea surface temperature]
posted by Wordshore at 8:07 AM PST - 97 comments

Zoey Alexandria, voice actor, singer, and instructor for transgender voices, has passed away at the age of 29. She spent much of her adult life dedicated to helping other trans people navigate their way through finding new voices and addressing vocal dysphoria. Her YouTube channel is a valuable resource for others during and after transition. [more inside]
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 8:01 AM PST - 36 comments

Perhaps you have heard of or watched the popular Netflix series You Are What You Eat: A Twin Study that launched earlier this year. The docuseries follows some participants in the Stanford Twin Nutrition Study (TwiNS): Vegan VS. Omnivore run by Dr. Christopher Gardner in which 22 pairs of twins ate an omnivorous or vegan diet for eight weeks. The results indicated improved metabolic health and received wide media coverage. [more inside]
posted by bq at 7:20 AM PST - 29 comments

North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs. A local authority has announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems. North Yorkshire Council is to ditch the problematic punctuation point as it says it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of previous use.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:42 AM PST - 97 comments

360 Video: NASA Simulation Plunges into a Black Hole answers the question of what it would look like to fall into a black hole. If you’d rather not, NASA also released 360 Video: NASA Simulation Shows a Flight Around a Black Hole. They also released videos explaining what is going on in the visualizations for the dive into the black hole as well as the flight around it. The press release has more information.
posted by Kattullus at 3:44 AM PST - 9 comments

Europeans have more time, and Americans more money. It is a cop-out to say which you prefer is a matter of taste. There are three fairly objective measures of a good society: how long people live, how happy they are and whether they can afford the things they need. A society must also be sustainable, as measured by its carbon emissions, collective debt and level of innovation. So which side does it better? [Financial Times; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:35 AM PST - 61 comments

Hamas accepted ceasefire Arms pause [more inside]
posted by human ecologist at 11:45 PM PST - 523 comments

The Chair is a 24-minute NSFW short horror film with a strong sense of the uncanny which begins when a man picks up a chair from the street. [more inside]
posted by whir at 9:13 PM PST - 4 comments

NYT: Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity California draws more electricity from the sun than any other state. It also has a timing problem: Solar power is plentiful during the day but disappears by evening, just as people get home from work and electricity demand spikes. To fill the gap, power companies typically burn more fossil fuels like natural gas. That’s now changing. Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark. [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:06 PM PST - 51 comments

Dashing around the course on a single wheel at speeds that seem very unwise, taking hairpin turns while trying to maintain position, driver camera footage as well as drone footage... I have never seen anything quite like Monocycle Mayhem: Epic Battles Unleashed | 12 Thrilling Laps on Spanish Asphalt | Electric Unicycles [10m] It feels a bit chaotic at the start but by the midpoint I found it much easier to follow the narrative of the race. It's quite a thing to witness!
posted by hippybear at 6:59 PM PST - 8 comments

Koala briefly runs through a triathlon. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:51 PM PST - 12 comments

A friend shared this on Facebook. I am so blown away: Whales saving Whales

How cool is this? indeed
posted by y2karl at 3:04 PM PST - 14 comments

Originally published in 1979, 'The Akhenaten Temple Project and Karnak Excavations' is a nice shapshot of the projects overview. "Akhenaten built the Gem-pa-Aten in the third year of his reign to celebrate his jubilee festival (the heb-sed). By year six of his reign, however, Akhenaten had moved the court and royal palace to a new city in Middle Egypt, modern Tell el-Amarna. The extent to which the Gem-pa-Aten and the other structures dedicated to the Aten at Thebes functioned during the king’s hiatus is unknown." from Digital Karnak, A nice index for the history and archeology in Karnak. (Digital Karnak previously)
posted by clavdivs at 2:44 PM PST - 2 comments

a video review by Patrick Boyle Well, what it says on the tin...
posted by mumimor at 12:57 PM PST - 44 comments

I used resume spammers to apply for 120 jobs. Chaos ensued. (ungated, archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 10:51 AM PST - 44 comments

BARABAR, THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE OF THE FUTURE [2h] "2,300 years ago, in India, 5 chambers were carved inside enormous granite rocks. According to rudimentary inscriptions engraved at their entrances, they were purportedly offered by a king to serve as monsoon shelters against rain for a sect. WELCOME TO THE HEART OF ANCIENT INDIA, IN A FORGOTTEN CHAPTER OF ITS PAST... THAT COULD VERY WELL CHANGE HISTORY." [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:09 AM PST - 25 comments

At an incredible 461 feet (140.53 meters), the baguette baked on Sunday, May 5 has officially exceeded the previous record held by Italy. The municipality of Suresnes now holds the Guinness World Record. (SLNYT)
posted by donut_princess at 6:50 AM PST - 29 comments

Wherever the blame lies, at the heart of the story are humans operating, ruptured, in an institutional machine. Many of the 42 are still ‘deeply injured’ by the incident, said Simon, who acts as their unofficial spokesperson. As the whole affair unravelled, the diocese was already under immense strain. The COVID lockdowns set clergy against their bishops, with many priests livid at having to close their churches. Others were angered by moves to invest millions in a new wave of informal congregations meeting in pubs, coffee shops and cinemas. And throughout it all there was division and tension over the church-wide culture war about gay blessings. ‘There’s so little trust at the moment,’ Roger reflected. ‘And in London, all the anger and the issues have a face: that face is Martin Sargeant.’ from In the Shadow of St Paul’s [The Fence; ungated] [CW: suicide, misogyny, homophobia.]
posted by chavenet at 2:19 AM PST - 13 comments

"The term might be unsettling, but we believe it is appropriate. Pick up any business textbook and you will never see the history of the past thirty years described this way. A title like Thomas Davenport’s Big Data at Work spends more than two hundred pages celebrating the continuous extraction of data from every aspect of the contemporary workplace, without once mentioning the implications for those workers. EdTech platforms and the tech giants like Microsoft that service them talk endlessly about the personalisation of the educational experience, without ever noting the huge informational power that accrues to them in the process." (Today’s colonial “data grab” is deepening global inequalities, LSE) [more inside]
posted by kmt at 1:26 AM PST - 25 comments

A little activity from a Common Kestrel nest near Windsbach, Germany.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:44 PM PST - 3 comments

Rare oceanic phenomenon brought on by heavy rainfall. When Terry Dixon took his usual walk around the Tathra headland on the New South Wales far south coast, he encountered a rare phenomenon brought on by heavy rainfall.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:19 PM PST - 13 comments

The process of making a mirror ball. The last remaining mirror ball manufacturing factory in Japan. [14m30s] Depicts making a mirror ball. Actually pretty interesting.
posted by hippybear at 5:39 PM PST - 33 comments

Who Has the Right to “Disrupt” the University? Perhaps the most egregious example of the administrator-as-disruptor is Gordon Gee, currently the president of West Virginia University (WVU), whose administration pushed through extraordinarily deep cuts to the institution’s academic offerings last fall. During a meeting of the faculty senate, Gee said “I want to be very clear that the university is not dismantling higher education. We are disrupting it . . . And many of you know I am a firm believer in disruption.” [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:38 PM PST - 25 comments

Variety obituary. Part of a stunt-work family, Epper started stunt work herself at age 9. She was Lynda Carter's stunt double for the Wonder Woman television show in the 1970s, and did stunt work in many iconic films.
posted by humbug at 12:55 PM PST - 15 comments

Tom Walker tries desperately, with halting success, to complete some very basic missions in Grand Theft Auto 4 while all the cars on the map lose their fucking minds. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Come for the comedy car deaths, stay for the slow evolution of a "this is a horror stealth game" playstyle that makes it at all possible to make progress.
posted by cortex at 9:37 AM PST - 26 comments

Motown Junkies is a blog where Steve Devereux is reviewing the entire Motown singles discography in sequential order from the beginning. You can also browse tracks by songwriter, label and artist. He’s currently up to 1966, though he’s been on hiatus for a few years. He also used to present Discovering Motown on Radio Cardiff, and the archive is on Mixcloud.
posted by Kattullus at 9:05 AM PST - 23 comments

Chris Biggs' shorts on 80s classics - oh the memory of cigarettes and Strawberry Shortcake!
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:55 AM PST - 31 comments

It's strangely entrancing and quite fascinating, but here's time-lapse photography of mealworms eating various things -- apple, cherry, reddish sprouts, cheeseburger, even a Carolina Reaper pepper. CAROLINA REAPER VS MEALWORMS [8m] I didn't expect this would be so interesting, but it really is. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:10 AM PST - 28 comments

I was playing TimeGuessr the other day (a game where you try to ID a random photo in time and space -- thanks, Klipspringer!). Often you can tell the city from context, but not necessarily where in the city, so I try to drop a pin right in the middle to up my odds. But this made me wonder -- how does *Google Maps* pinpoint where a city is, exactly? They have to put the label somewhere. You'd think it would be the exact center, or maybe city hall, but it seems to vary -- in New York it's City Hall, but in London it's Charing Cross. Rome is the Piazza Venezia, Cairo is Tahrir Square, and Tokyo is Tokyo Station. My own hometown isn't city hall, or even the football stadium (roll tide), but literally the main entrance to an Embassy Suites, which is nice-looking but not exactly the crossroads of the city. So if you're comfortable sharing the city you're from (or in, or would like to be), where does Google think it really is? Does that place seem like a good, representative choice, or would you pick elsewhere? If you closed your eyes and wished yourself to the "heart" of your favorite city, where would you end up and why? Discuss these geographical quandaries and more in your weekly Free Thread! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 4:48 AM PST - 109 comments

From a certain angle, the review feels less like a piece of music criticism and more like a Dada-ist joke on what music criticism even is. Or at the very least like a shitpost that was prophetic in its use of the visual, flippant language people would soon be employing en masse to post about art online. Squint, and it’s a masterpiece … of some kind. But it goes down in the stats sheet as an actual review—and in that sense, it wasn’t really fair to Jet. from The Ballad of Ray Suzuki: The Secret Life of Early Pitchfork and the Most Notorious Review Ever “Written” [The Ringer]
posted by chavenet at 2:14 AM PST - 12 comments

On a patch of earth big as a Bunnings car park, renters get to join in on the solar boom. A five-hour drive from Sydney, a community garden of sorts has sprouted. But instead of sharing tomatoes or lettuce, "gardeners" harvest solar energy. And it's already a hit with people otherwise excluded from the rooftop solar boom.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:22 PM PST - 16 comments

'Lost Sheep'. A paper stop motion film by Lukas Rooney. (slyt. 7:16)
posted by clavdivs at 6:35 PM PST - 12 comments

What happens if a US presidential candidate dies? Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the two oldest candidates in US history. If either needs to be replaced, what next? from the Guardian [more inside]
posted by lalochezia at 3:25 PM PST - 128 comments

Because of that decision made in Mountain View, we now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past. Awkward flirtations, drunken rants, earnest pleas; friendships fraying or rekindled, personae tried on and discarded, good jokes and bad decisions; every dumb or brilliant or anguished thing we wrote below the subject line — we have an instantly searchable record of it all. To mark the anniversary of this revolution, the editors of New York asked some of our favorite writers to excavate their individual archives and tell us — with dismay or pride or chagrin — what they saw. from How Gmail Became Our Diary [Intelligencer; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:01 PM PST - 27 comments

Finding Lillian: The lost patients of Washington’s abandoned mental hospital [25m, Seattle Times] "He uncovered 200 headstones. She was searching for remnants about her great-grandmother’s life. This documentary follows two people's consuming quest to unearth the truth about Northern State Hospital and revive the stories of its forgotten patients." Companion longread article, The Lost Patients Of Washington's Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital [Seattle Times]
posted by hippybear at 1:26 PM PST - 3 comments

Edgar Allan Poe's The Pingu, by author Adam Roberts ( wiki).
posted by rollick at 11:54 AM PST - 13 comments

It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting! Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.

Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers / After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale. [Previously]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:45 AM PST - 67 comments

Turnip28 is a miniatures war game by Max Fitzgerald about Napoleonic tubers. An endless war has reduced the world to mud and muck, and a giant mutant root vegetable has spread ceaselessly throughout the land. Misshapen soldiers emerge and sink into the swamps with rusty bayonets and pole arms seemingly supplied by the root stock itself. It is deliciously weird. [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 9:24 AM PST - 9 comments

How we heal. "First out was a rust-red calf, legs unsure against the solid ground of a Rocky Mountains meadow. Then in an instant a whole herd of shaggy bison surged, hooves flashing, tails up, eyes wide, a long-awaited storm of buffalo power thundering into the wild... the first free-roaming bison ever to be unleashed onto the North American prairie by a sovereign Tribal government."
More on tribal/federal collaborations and tensions from National Parks magazine: an innovative archaeological field school; freeing the lands between Badger Creek and the Two Medicine River from oil leases; a Blackfeet-run tour company in Glacier National Park, over a century after Native Americans were displaced to create the park. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:38 AM PST - 2 comments

Kendrick Lamar and Drake (aka Aubrey Graham), two of the biggest active hip hop artists and former collaborators, are seriously beefing in a major way that hasn't been seen since Tupac vs Biggie. Last October, Drake dropped a track, First Person Shooter, where his collaborator J Cole named the two of them and Kendrick as "the big three". Kendrick, who has a competitive streak, took umbrage at being put on the same level as the other two and replied in Like That "it's just big me". What might've started as a somewhat professional competition has rapidly gone nuclear since Kendrick took shots at Drake's Blackness, fitness as a parent, and masculinity in his track titled "euphoria" and Drake responded with allegations of domestic abuse, infidelity, and cuckoldry in Family Matters. As of the latest, Kendrick has accused Drake of hiding a 2nd child and being a sexual predator of underaged girls. [more inside]
posted by ndr at 7:07 AM PST - 102 comments

Thucydides intimates that the careful art of drawing fitting analogies, honed as it may be through the diligent study of political history, will assist some to think more clearly about the present. But mastering this art should not be confused with political mastery. The power of ‘great’ events will remain too easily harnessed, and too hard to control, to serve only those who are clear-headed and well-intentioned. Specious analogies will remain a danger for as long as people stand to benefit from them, and their emotional pull will continue to knock even the most astute off balance. And yet, if there’s little chance that political life will ever be freed from distortive thinking, it may still prove less hazardous for those who look toward history as something more than a sourcebook of convenient parallels. from What would Thucydides say? [Aeon] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:40 AM PST - 6 comments

Tasmanian devil tooth found during archaeological dig 1000 kilometres north of Perth. The tooth could provide further historical evidence of inter-community trading in Western Australia and was unearthed in Juukan Gorge, which made headlines in 2020 when its rock shelters were damaged by Rio Tinto blasts. "There is no physical evidence that [Tasmanian devils] ever lived in the Pilbara, and the last evidence of devils living in Western Australia was in the South West around 3000 years ago," he said.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:42 PM PST - 2 comments

Ships rolling in the sea. Just for fun. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 7:44 PM PST - 24 comments

Three days after her husband's death, Yulia Navalnaya announced publicly that she would continue his work and take over the management of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Three days after her husband's death, Yulia Navalnaya announced publicly that she would continue his work and take over the management of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). She also accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of killing Alexei Navalny, and announced that an investigation into the exact details was underway. [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 7:05 PM PST - 5 comments

The Cornish Pilot Gig is a coxed 6-oar, clinker built rowing boat, originally built to take pilots out to sailing ships to pilot them into harbour. Since the first pilot to get to a ship got the job, speed became essential to anyone who wanted to get paid, requiring strong arms, stamina and innovations in boat design. While this trade is long gone, most Cornish harbours continue to support a gig club who race competitively, purely for fun and glory. [more inside]
posted by biffa at 4:39 PM PST - 6 comments

the internet has produced many things, but its driving force is cowardice. it's there in the collective failure to conceptualize how the things one does online manifest themselves in the larger world. it's there in the lionization of an almost spiritual level of intellectual laziness in the need to endlessly double down on whatever your personal brand becomes. it's there in the desire to tear down anyone who might attempt to shine a light on your own personal failures and limitations, in either your work or your larger perspective on the world. the internet is a refuge for the bad faith. Let's play life, a long post about "let's plays", internet culture and youtube by Liz Ryerson (previously)
posted by simmering octagon at 4:00 PM PST - 26 comments

From YouTube channel Legends Of Soapbox Racing, I present to you London's BEST CRASHES EVER #redbullsoapboxrace #londoncrashes [28m]. It's a cavalcade of hilarious car designs and amusing sudden ends. Despite the crashing, there don't appear to be any real injuries.
posted by hippybear at 2:46 PM PST - 11 comments

In this video ad, the Hero Wars mascot Galahad finds himself in dire straits as but a human plough-horse upon the field. His captor, half-cow, half-human woman, brands him on the buttock with what looks like our old friend the purple devil emoji—rather a “naugty” [sic] act. Suddenly set upon by wolves, the cow lady is compromised—and Galahad steps up to become white knight, fending the beasts off with his axe. The cow lady and her new hero Galahad elope to her encampment, where she carries him around like a baby, and spots him for sit-ups. Needless to say, the episode of the bovine damsel does not occur in-game. from The Weird World of Hero Wars Ads: Sex Sells [Splice Today] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:29 PM PST - 18 comments

"Megalopolis has always been a film dedicated to my dear wife Eleanor. I really had hoped to celebrate her birthday together this May 4th. But sadly that was not to be, so let me share with everyone a gift on her behalf." Weeks after the loss of his wife, the legendary Francis Ford Coppola reveals a first look at his magnum opus more than 40 years in the making, which has finally found a distributor after the director spent $120 million of his own funds on the project. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:54 AM PST - 19 comments

Ottawa International Food and Book Expo definitely did not do what it says on the tin.
posted by Kitteh at 10:35 AM PST - 20 comments

How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab . By Brian Potter of Construction Physics.
posted by russilwvong at 8:57 AM PST - 8 comments

Ralph Nader is loyal to one pen: the Papermate Flair. But Nader claims that the pens are drying out quicker then they used to. He reached out to Wirecutter (a NYT property) and they investigated. Archive.is link: https://archive.is/54jtw [more inside]
posted by kimberussell at 8:17 AM PST - 62 comments

Archaeologists reveal reconstructed face of 75,000yo Neanderthal woman. The Neanderthal woman's skull was discovered in 2018 in a cave in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:56 AM PST - 7 comments

The great Howard DaSilva performs the showstopping number "Little Tin Box" Fiorello! is a musical about New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a reform Republican, which debuted on Broadway in 1959, and tells the story of how La Guardia took on the Tammany Hall political machine. The book is by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott, drawn substantially from the 1955 volume Life with Fiorello by Ernest Cuneo, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock. [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 2:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Shakespeare toys with numerous European languages throughout his work, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Often, these are spoken in thick accents, with comedic pronunciation. The same holds true for his use of the various British dialects—Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish—heard in scruffy taverns or high courts. In Henry V, soldiers fracture the King’s English while the king himself and a French princess descend into a comical Franglais courtship. Yet, no matter how garbled the speech, playgoers can usually identify distinct languages and dialects—that is, until they bump up against what scholars have called the “invented language,” “unintelligible gabble,” and “‘Boskos thromuldo boskos’ mumbo-jumbo” in his comedy "All’s Well That Ends Well." from I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare’s Gibberish [LARB]
posted by chavenet at 1:08 AM PST - 14 comments

An interview with the Japanese comedian about the upcoming documentary (NYT gift link) on Hulu, The Contestant. Previously on Metafilter, "Staying alive became my full-time occupation" we were introduced to the strange tale of the 1998 Japanese reality show Susunu! Denpa Shonen which was famous for taking an aspiring comedian, placing him naked in a room, and telling him that he needed to acquire 1 million yen worth of items via sweepstakes. Now, there is a Hulu documentary (YT trailer link) coming out about how the Eggplant is doing.
posted by Word_Salad at 5:22 PM PST - 8 comments

By leveraging a unique large dataset and new techniques for exploring this dataset, our paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life, and helps to build a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience. from A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas, in which Philosophers are studying Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” [Vox]
posted by chavenet at 1:41 PM PST - 45 comments

For many people, the first time they tried to take control of a computer centered around learning to program in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), a simple, interpreted programming language designed around easily-understandable keywords and syntax. BASIC turned 60 a couple of days ago, so find one of the many online BASIC interpreters and write yourself a little bit of history.
posted by hanov3r at 9:25 AM PST - 98 comments

In 1963, a clean-cut Frank Zappa appeared live on the Steve Allen show playing a musical composition on bicycles. The entire 16:28 is worthwhile to watch for the conversation and interaction between the two, but the performance with the show's orchestra starts at 11:56. The show's talent coordinator Jerry Hopkins discusses how the young musician's debut performance came about. [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 7:57 AM PST - 15 comments

“It wasn’t the second helping on all-you-can-eat, but the third“ an executive explained. After losing $3.3 million in seven weeks during a 2003 all you can eat crab leg offer, Red Lobster makes the same mistake in 2024. By turning $20 all-you-can-eat shrimp into a permanent menu item, the chain suffers a further $11 million loss. “We have to be more careful,” an executive noted.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:37 AM PST - 99 comments

The Media Matters study of tradwife influencers and the rabbit hole to far right conspiracies.
posted by Kitteh at 7:24 AM PST - 53 comments

The blogging platform Cohost (previously) has launched a new section: Artist Alley, where members pay to advertise their podcasts, zines, art, games, and other creations (many of which are free to enjoy). Or sometimes members advertise just to play around - the "#doing a bit" tag is replete with Rickrolling, "Hey check out this picture of a pileated woodpecker I took", a silly survey, etc. Artist Alley is "a take on user-to-user ads we feel good about — a dedicated space which users can access to see promotions from other users, like an artist alley at a convention" and "a revenue product" for Cohost, which had a poor financial forecast in March which has since improved.
posted by brainwane at 6:30 AM PST - 6 comments

🎥 "That Summer" 🎥 Peter Beard (and his then girlfriend Lee Radziwill) was the impetus for the June 1972 meeting of the Beales and the Maysles - culminating in Grey Gardens the documentary the impetus for the June 1972 meeting of the Beales and the Maysles - culminating in Grey Gardens the documentary (and later the musical and film). In 2007, a film lab accidentally returned a rough cut of 1972 Maysles footage of The Beales to Peter using an old label on a film cannister. It was part of the Maysles Films archives digitization project and was supposed to be returned to Maysles directly, but had been paid for by Peter and Lee in 1972 and had Peter's still-current address on it. [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 3:32 AM PST - 14 comments

Why have philosophers had so little to say about Descartes’s stove, and so much to say about his dreams, his resolve, and his conception of analytic geography on that winter’s night? Suppressing the agency of the stove makes it easier to tell a simple story about the agency of the individual thinker. But it has made it that much harder to discern the subtle yet powerful ways in which modern air conditioning technologies condition thought, culture, and social experience. from Descartes’s Stove by the author of Air Conditioning, Hsuan L. Hsu
posted by chavenet at 2:09 AM PST - 21 comments

Sumatran orangutan becomes first wild animal seen using medicinal plant to treat wound. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:42 AM PST - 26 comments

Buttonwood Zoo (in Massachusetts, USA) has a Red Panda Cam.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:47 PM PST - 5 comments

What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers? In Louisiana in 2000, 2-year-old James Leininger would wake screaming, repeating the same phrases to his baffled and disturbed parents: “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following year, a story unspooled in memories and drawings: He was a World War II pilot whose plane took off from a boat, and he died when he was shot down by Japanese forces. James offered names of people and places, and his account would ultimately become one of the most prominent and thoroughly documented “cases of the reincarnation type,” or CORT, ever recorded.
posted by Toddles at 8:05 PM PST - 133 comments

Patrick Gill discusses Helldivers 2, Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, and satire. And how satire of fascism can be missed by viewers, undermined by its medium, or embraced by genuine fascists.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 5:49 PM PST - 43 comments

Menswear writer Derek Guy compares UK TV personality Piers Moron's fashion style with that of Kermit the Frog. That is all. [a thread on X]
posted by chavenet at 3:08 PM PST - 26 comments

The only thing that can be improved under self-evacuation is the flow of information towards people in emergency. This leaves us with eyesight and hearing to work with. Visual aids are greatly more flexible and easy to work with. However their huge drawback is their usefulness expires quickly once the smoke sets in. 2500 dense Lisp programming words from Eugene Zaikonnikov via lobste.rs, whence this YouTube ad.
posted by cgc373 at 1:34 PM PST - 11 comments

Slippery Slope: How Private Equity Shapes a Ski Town (Nick Bowlin for Harper's)
posted by box at 1:25 PM PST - 9 comments

Dad Baby is an episode from season two of Bluey, the Australian children’s cartoon, which Disney has refused to make available for streaming, has been uploaded in full to the official Bluey YouTube channel. If you are unfamiliar with the hijinks of the Heeler family, you can watch a selection of episodes on YouTube, either as one long compilation or individually: [more inside]
posted by Kattullus at 12:08 PM PST - 39 comments

Waluigi sings "Rainbow Connection." It'll consume two minutes and 44 seconds of your day, but no more than that. That's all. That's enough. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:46 AM PST - 14 comments

77,000 Young Salmon Were Dumped Into the Wrong Creek After a Truck Crashed in Oregon. The spring Chinook salmon smolts should still be able to find their way to the Pacific Ocean and help boost the threatened population of the fish, officials say, though another 25,000 salmon died in the accident.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:54 AM PST - 22 comments

Boston Dynamics two latest bangers All New Atlas and Sparkles. For once, sort by “top” and definitely read the YouTube comments. [more inside]
posted by lalochezia at 5:20 AM PST - 71 comments

People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. (Noema sl) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:19 AM PST - 54 comments

A bookshop in East Sussex has launched an early morning initiative to help writers. Kemptown Bookshop, in St George's Rd, Brighton, opens its doors at 05:00 BST on the first Wednesday of every month for a silent writing session. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 3:40 AM PST - 6 comments

In this episode we'll look at how production notes flat out lie about the making of a film, we'll look at two different sides of Gran Turismo, and we'll check out the history of CGI and why it fell from grace. We'll bust some common misconceptions about CGI, and we'll look at the most notorious "no CGI" project that I know of. the 4th and final episode of "NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:23 AM PST - 14 comments

What the heck bro! Here are 16 videos of avalanches (no audio needed). Just for fun. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 9:26 PM PST - 23 comments

Skeleton of famous whale-hunting Orca "Old Tom" reassembled for new museum display. The orca known for working alongside human whalers has been given a new exhibit that museum curators hope pays better homage to its legacy.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:19 PM PST - 10 comments

Nathan Heller on the secretive Order of the Third Bird: There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally considered valuable because it was capable of bestowing value. “By paying attention to something as if it’s interesting, you make it interesting. By evaluating it, you valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a mere market currency, he thought, was to undersell what it could do.
posted by jshttnbm at 5:39 PM PST - 14 comments

His Book Was Repeatedly Banned. Fighting For It Shaped His Life. (Robert Cormier and The Chocolate War, NYT gift)
posted by box at 5:21 PM PST - 10 comments

Biden administration forgives $6.1 billion in student debt for 317,000 former Art Institute students [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:26 PM PST - 33 comments

You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone. There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?

Today marks 25 years since the original broadcast of "Help Wanted" -- the pilot episode of marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg's educational comic that became a delightful romp of "relentless optimism and fundamental sweetness", a hothouse flower of inventive and absurdist imagination, a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, and one of the most iconic and beloved animated franchises of the 21st century. Are you ready, kids? [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:55 PM PST - 23 comments

Remember back in 2017-2020 when everyone was aglow with the warmth and camaraderie of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen? And then, well, Milkshake Duck happened. But not all is lost.... [more inside]
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:06 PM PST - 16 comments

Palm OS and the devices that ran it - a retrospective on the popular PDA and precursor to the smartphone.
posted by Stark at 12:54 PM PST - 38 comments

Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. [NY Times; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:22 PM PST - 33 comments

As part of Secret Base's Patreon based restructuring, Internet video troubadour and oddity explainer Jon Bois has ressurected his long defunct Pretty Good series with a three part video on the rise and fall of Henry Ross Perot's political party/personal vehicle - the Reform Party. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:14 AM PST - 24 comments

Part 1: From the S Dynasty to the Chin Dynasty. Part 2: From the Chu-Han contention, through the first Chinese golden age of the Han dynasty, to the Warring States, and the Northern and Southern dynasties. To clarify, this YouTube series is NOT about the actual history, but how Chinese history is interpreted through Chinese cinema. This is a continuing series from Accented Cinema. Previously from AccentedCinema. For those interested in the actual history, he recommends Cool History Bros.
posted by toastyk at 8:40 AM PST - 8 comments

Endangered Ocelots May Be Expanding Their Range in Texas. DNA testing of an ocelot killed in 2021 raises the possibility that the creatures may be roaming outside their established South Texas territory, which is currently their only stronghold in the country.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:15 AM PST - 22 comments

At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:20 AM PST - 8 comments