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In astrophotography, the longer your camera's shutter is open, the more light you get. Five amateur astrophotographers challenged themselves to capture a world-record exposure. Result: The 1060-hour Large Magellanic Cloud [more inside]
posted by flug at 9:44 PM PST - 45 comments

Ten years after the debut of Homestuck, and 3 years after the end of Homestuck, The Homestuck Epilogues begin - following the core team as jaded young adults making sense of canon, relevance, and the aftermath of their mission. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 7:18 PM PST - 35 comments

I wanna see how his bald head shines
How the light reflects on his moustache
Did you ever see Mr Holland's Opus?
God Richard Dreyfuss, he fucking crushed that [more inside]
posted by stinkfoot at 5:34 PM PST - 11 comments

Today is Tax Day in America. The IRS is intentionally starved for resources, forced to make filing taxes as complicated as possible so a predatory industry can make even higher profits, focuses its audits on poor and black people, and can't recover the billions owed by the very wealthy people who push for its gutting. But if there could be a worst of all in this dismal maelstrom, it is this: American workers effectively pay some of the highest taxes in the world but don't get much in return. [more inside]
posted by Ouverture at 3:50 PM PST - 63 comments

Notre-Dame de Paris, the French Gothic cathedral on the Île de la Cité in Paris, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, has burned in a conflagration unrivalled since at least WWII, started accidentally, perhaps in the renovation work. But "spira, spera" -- breathe, and hope -- there has been no loss of life, only one reported injury, and the shell of the building appears (at this hour) to have been saved. "Cette cathédrale, nous la rebâtirons," declares Emmanuel Macron. ("The Cathedral, we will rebuild it.") [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:37 PM PST - 297 comments

A tattoo is a decision you have to live with for the rest of your life. But what about after that? [more inside]
posted by jacquilynne at 1:20 PM PST - 41 comments

When Saturday Comes is an independent football magazine focused on giving fans a voice. And on the 30th anniversary of Hillsborough, it's worth going back and reading their original editorial on the disaster. [more inside]
posted by kendrak at 11:33 AM PST - 6 comments

Jonathan Frakes telling you you're wrong for 47 seconds (SLYT, perfection)
posted by duffell at 10:21 AM PST - 49 comments

“The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).” The social ideology of the motorcar - André Gorez, 1973. (Uneven Earth)
posted by The Whelk at 9:56 AM PST - 55 comments

Gene Rodman Wolfe, 1931-2019. A titan of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and American literature has passed. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 9:39 AM PST - 116 comments

Counting Your Calories? It Might Not Be The Best Way To Track Nutrition
Death of the Calorie [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:07 AM PST - 31 comments

I was also in the middle of a divorce, and receiving a barrage of emails from my ex-husband telling me in no uncertain terms how horrible I was. That season, I read the news, the emails, the pieces for my job. I couldn’t escape the constant torrent. A Greek chorus of women across America spoke with a single voice. “Men are bad. Men are trash,” the women said. And yet, all I wanted to do was touch men, taste them—I craved them.

I Wanted to Fall in Love With Men. I Also Wanted Men to Leave Me the Hell Alone.
posted by griphus at 8:45 AM PST - 42 comments

... there's a point at which empathy doesn't even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others. The End of Empathy is part of NPR's Civility Wars series, in which NPR has been traveling the United States to explore how people are grappling with the idea of civility in polarizing times. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:34 AM PST - 32 comments

Pasha Omelekhin experimented with the Berlin Transit Map Design. A detailed case study shows which considerations went into the new design.
posted by katta at 5:55 AM PST - 29 comments

Andy Anderson wears a helmet. Andy Anderson goes up and down stairs.
posted by clawsoon at 5:38 AM PST - 9 comments

A Cancelled Board Game Revealed How Colonialism Inspires and Haunts Games [Waypoint] “On April 7th, prominent publisher of board wargames GMT Games released a statement announcing that they’d pulled a game from their pre-order list: Scramble for Africa. The game, portraying the eponymous invasion of the African continent by European powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seemed like one that portrayed the colonial period in Africa in a simplistic way, ultimately rewarding players for being the best at recreating a piece of history that included genocide in Namibia and mass enslavement in the Belgian Congo Free State. It had come under heavy critique from board gamers for, in the words of GMT’s own statement, “both topic and treatment” of its colonialist historical setting. ” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:18 AM PST - 62 comments

No Measure of Health profiles Kyle Magee, an anti-advertising activist from Melbourne, Australia, who for the past 10 years has been going out into public spaces and covering over for-profit advertising in various ways. Recently, he painted over the advertising video screens at Melbourne Central station with a modified fire extinguisher.
posted by bashism at 4:37 AM PST - 16 comments

Neural network generating technical death metal, via livestream 24/7 to infinity. [more inside]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:11 AM PST - 25 comments

We had this very Scandinavian-looking child, and for the first time in my life what I now call the fiction of race was thrust into my consciousness. It’s an experience that most people, black or white, don’t have to have because most people don’t live on the racial margins and don’t see how ridiculous it is to say something like, “My father is black, and my daughter is white, but they have the same smile.” And my daughter is blond-haired and has blue eyes and white skin, but she’s of 20 percent West African descent. Most people don’t actually have these kinds of contradictions. So, her birth really set me down this path. An interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams in the LA Review of Books [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:08 AM PST - 24 comments