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Gretchen McCulloch points out that "...we're in thesis defense season and not everyone has seen the snake fight thesis defense fanfiction." [more inside]
posted by signal at 7:05 PM PST - 17 comments

I've posted before about kaninhoppning (here, previously, previouslier), but since it's the world's cutest sport, I thought that revisiting it was in order. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 5:00 PM PST - 3 comments

But there’s no take-backs in life. Rock stars, like the rest of us, have to live with the consequences of their actions forever. In this list, we look back at the long history of rock stars’ fuckups and call out the 50 biggest ones. To be clear, we limited this largely to professional decisions that impacted careers. Many rock stars have done horribly destructive things when it comes to drugs or their treatment of women, but that’s a whole other list. The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History [Rolling Stone; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:41 PM PST - 174 comments

Cat Park. A 15-minute game that boosts your defense against disinformation. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 1:42 PM PST - 18 comments

“Four-Byte Burger” is a mellow video by Stuart Brown (@XboxAhoy on Youtube, but going by the shorter “Ahoy”) about his favorite piece of pixel art (“Four-Byte Burger” by Jack Haeger), how the original image file is “lost”, and his process for creating a “copy”.
(Haeger is still alive and was working for American Pinball as of 2021. The video doesn’t mention this, and he may have the original.)
posted by Going To Maine at 1:20 PM PST - 9 comments

A mysterious man, known to some as Steven Meyers, lies at the heart of the world's largest database of virus genomes.
posted by lemoncake at 5:53 AM PST - 24 comments

Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it. Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.

—The Angel's Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life by Australian writer Gerald Murnane.
posted by Kattullus at 3:37 AM PST - 17 comments

Soleil Ho: We’re in Asian America’s peak media moment. But ‘Beef’ has poisoned the well

So it behooves us all the more to pause and ask if separating this art from its artists is something that would truly benefit the “community” or something that would solely benefit Choe and his enablers, who cast him in a major production despite the highly public controversy over the podcast clip when it first came out almost a decade ago. They could have cast any of the many Asian American actors in that role but instead opted for someone whose entire media persona is based on a misogynist and racist reaction to the model minority myth.

I see it this way: To uncritically embrace “Beef” for what it gives to the Asian American community shows that we’re on board with rape culture and with misogyny, especially against Black women. To embrace it shows that we’re willing to let others pay the price for our feelings of validation and belonging.

[more inside]
posted by Pachylad at 1:33 AM PST - 78 comments