As part of the events for this year's fundraising we'll have an Ask the Mods Anything Podcast. Come check out the post with the deets on how to submit your questions! - 1 comments

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age is an essay by author Thea Lim in the Walrus on what happens to your self worth when everything you do, from work to leisure to hobbies becomes something measured by someone, something you can, perhaps have to, monetize.
If you find yourself asking "why am I doing this?" this is worth your time to read. - 1 comments

“My priesthood, rooted in the discipline of a spiritual path, tends to be explicit in its ethical demands. But the facts of queer life also unquestionably demand a lived ethical response. What may come as a surprise—what surprises me—is that the ethical demands placed on me by my identity as a queer person & by my involvement in the LGBTQ{+} community tend to be far clearer and more rigorous than those placed on me by my ordination to holy orders.” Reverend Liz Edman’s Queer Virtue [g] - 0 comments

Excavator operators are bringing joy to the world, one two-year-old at a time. - 6 comments

We know that denial plays two roles in human life: the positive force that allows a person to rebound from a disabling loss, and the negative force that buries the truth in order—or so we believe—to make life livable. In addition to accommodating the family’s longstanding and hard-won reliance upon denial, the challenge for me was to finally understand my own relationship to denial. I was unable to judge others without first admitting to myself that each of my attempts to write The Child Widow as fiction had failed because I still always included the possibility that maybe the suicide wasn’t entirely deliberate. I knew better—I was right there in the next room—but I still found it possible to deflect. from Rejecting Denial and Embracing Sorrow: On Writing the Story of a Husband’s Suicide by Alexandra Marshall [LitHub] CW: suicide - 0 comments

It was a known dairy barn axiom that cows are the better temperament for the singing. Milking a female animal,... was an inherently sensual act. More pointedly with the likelihood of being a romance. There never was a right-thinking cow who would milk easily and with earnest devotion if her attendant did not sing to her as he conducted the chore. Worse yet if his hands are cold." - 5 comments

No creator has put more LGBTQ characters on TV than Ryan Murphy. His Aaron Hernandez show raises the question of why so many are killers. - 3 comments

Vibrant peacock spiders likened to famous artworks delight photographers. Akin to the famous Van Gogh painting, the starry night peacock spider highlights the rare species' beauty. But some people are concerned not enough is being done to protect the arachnids. - 4 comments

Tamsyn Muir -- creator of a queer gothic necromantic space dystopia/paradise from which only she is personally barred -- has nonetheless invited the rest of us back to her world in a new short story. The multi-genre script that is the story occurs midway through Nona the Ninth inside a nested set of souls and also a graduate seminar and also a British country house murder mystery. (Previously and previously). - 42 comments

Famed musical writers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken have an abandoned song that I'd never heard of before. Aria For A Cow was made into an animated short several years ago, and it's delightful. 7m - 2 comments

Ten children drew their favourite sea creatures. Then Australia’s leading artists responded. Ken Done, Jonathan Zawada, Blak Douglas and others created companion pieces to children’s works celebrating sharks and rays. They’re now on display at the Australian Museum. - 10 comments

Tishani Doshi (Aeon, 09/16/2024), "Tender, yet creepy": "Tom sits in his box, one blue eye blinkered shut. I reach for him, and I am a girl again, gently rattling his head so his eye can become unstuck." Topics include Freud's "The Uncanny" [PDF], Baudelaire's "The Philosophy of Toys" (a.k.a. "Morale du joujou" and its excerpt "The Plaything of the Poor"), Rilke's "The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls" (a.k.a. "Puppen" with illustrations by Lotte Pritzel related to her dolls, etc., etc.), Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Mahasweta Devi's Urvashi and Johnny. See also Tishani Doshi's entry at the Poetry Foundation. - 1 comments

On Thursday afternoon, (Shohei) Ohtani’s legend continued to grow as he wrote the next chapter of one of the best individual offensive seasons in Major League history with arguably the best single-game performance the sport has ever seen. In an otherworldly game in which he stole two bases and went 6-for-6 with a career-high three homers and 10 RBIs, Ohtani proved he’s in a class of his own once again, becoming the first player to hit 50 or more homers and steal 50 or more bases in a single season in Major League history. from Otherworldly Ohtani creates 50-50 club in a 6-for-6 game for the ages [MLB] - 47 comments

It’s Friday, so it’s a good time to try to Guess the (video/computer) game! Or to go back into the archives and try to guess some of the 859 previous games. (hat tip to Buried Treasure.) - 8 comments

Which is More Difficult - Violin or Piano? (SLYT) - 28 comments

New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi placed on leave after disclosing RFK relationship Nuzzi disclosed that she “had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.” While the magazine did not identify the subject, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that the relationship was with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who ran for president as an independent candidate and recently endorsed Donald Trump. The person said the relationship was emotional and digital in nature, not physical. A Kennedy spokesperson told CNN, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.” - 61 comments

Cards Against Humanity is suing Elon Musk for $15 million dollars - 26 comments